::A Geek in Korea::

My wife went downtown to do her bead art for the day. She takes hours to complete something, so there is nothing for me to do if I wait for her. She told me to meet her downtown at 6:00 PM, then we would hang out and do something. I lounged around the house, returned the DVD, walked the dog. The usual.

When it was time to leave, I got my gear ready and left Yoshi to “protect” the house. I knew I wasn’t going to be in and out of the bead shop on time. Never has her estimate about time been accurate when it comes to completing something at the shop. I encoded some stuff to watch, brought my Nintendo DS, and headed downtown.

I got to the shop, and sure enough, she was still working. I ended up waiting an hour for her to finish a butterfly for a necklace she was making. That’s why I’m always prepared with lots of other stuff. Eventually she got her stuff done and we headed out to wander the downtown streets.

The downtown experience is punctuated by pure waste. There are so many neon lights it’s like the sun never sets. There are so many advertisements on the ground that you can barely see the streets. Night clubs pollute with loud, obnoxious advertisements that seemed designed to annoy someone into going into their club.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa-Ezsja6ts[/video]

 We ended up in one of the few arcades left downtown. It was my wife’s idea! She played an arcade game called “Catch the Mouse” based on a television show that’s been running a few years. She wasn’t very good at it, despite my help.

She moved over to her standby game, Puzzle Bobble. Now, we have played some head to head Frozen Bubble but she was doing particularly well at the game today. I let her use the change instead of running around trying different things in the arcade like I usually do. There wasn’t much I wanted to play, but I was really proud of how well she was doing. I was happy being her cheerleader.

We eventually moved over to a Puzzle Bobble 2 machine with head to head multiplayer and she totally kicked my ass. She works downtown, so she might have been practicing in secret instead of doing the beads like she claimed. She doesn’t play anything else, but it’s a start.

After our long month of teaching morning classes, we were given two days off this week. Since my wife isn’t as lucky, I’m home alone and just hanging out until the weekend where we can actually go do something together.  I spent yesterday catching up on sleep, but today I wanted to get some things done.

My wife and I prepared a shopping list for me. I managed to get everything at the grocery store back to the house, even with all the bottled water and liquid goods we wanted for the week. After that, a brief nap. It was my day off, I might as well enjoy it. If that’s all I would have accomplished in the day it would have been a success. My dog and I are professional nappers.

Later, I finally beat the easy campaign of Advanced Wars Dual Strike. I had put the game down, more than a year ago, because of my disgust with a certain missions victory requirements. After consulting a guide, I quickly beat the mission I was stuck on. With a few more peeks at the guide, I eventually beat the entire campaign. Now I’ve got some unlocking, and possibly some leveling to do as I work through the maps available to get more characters.

Truth be told, I had burnt out on the Advanced Wars franchise because of Advanced Wars by Web. While AWbW retains most of the gameplay of Advanced Wars, and can be played by friends all over the world, the web interface isn’t that well done. There is no “undo”, and you have to wait for each move to load, which turns the game into a chore.  After getting my butt kicked online repeatedly with web interface and balance issues, I swore off the series for a while. Now, my turn based strategy lust is returning viciously. I’m still not as obsessed as I was at the height of my AWbW playing days, but that’s a good thing. The game has a ton of replay value, and I haven’t even scratched some of the modes yet despite owning it for years. It’s almost scary.

After I got my game on, my wife sent me a message. How about a DVD for the evening? Nothing was in the new release bin, so we picked up “Memoirs of a Geisha”. This was a movie 145 minutes long, which no one alerted me to when I gave the go ahead for the rental. Women dress! They gossip! They are treated as objects by rich men, and they love it! Ugh. While the story was really freaking long to get to the point, the costumes and scenery was beautiful. My wife said the book was better. Whatever.

I got some stuff done, and I’ve got nothing to worry about for the next two days either while I can relax on my long weekend too.