Another Weekend in the Books

Gwen was out of town this weekend, leaving me a full 48+ hours of time to myself. Without beating around the bush, I'll go ahead and say that I colossally wasted nearly every hour of it.

Here's my Friday Night.

Got home from work. I stopped off at Best Buy on the way home at about 5 pm to let the traffic could die down. I walked around the store, fought the urge to buy everything in site (and yet did NO X-mas shopping), and wasted some time playing with Mike Vick and the Falcons on the display Madden 2005 game.

Got home about 7 pm. I heated up some leftovers, then went to town, playing 4 online Madden games (2 wins, 1 loss, 1 internet cut-out), a game of online chess (I didn't realize it was a 3-minute per side timed game and hence I lost rather quickly) and then 2 hours of Counter Strike. Not a bad waste of a Friday night by ANY stretch.

Saturday

I got up and drove out to suburban Redmond (15 minutes NE of Seattle) and met some of John boy's work boys out for some pick up touch football for the second weekend in a row. Despite John boy actually NOT being there this weekend (he had a playoff soccer game), it was the highlight of my weekend. A crisp beautiful clear day, some muddy football, and all was well. Pick up football may be the most fun thing ever.

There's kind of a funny dynamic at this particular game. A couple of peeps come together for 3 on 3 or 4 on 4 and there is definitely some competitiveness there that I think arises in the office. Two guys in particular, were going at it all day long. When the guy on MY team got beat by his rival for a sweet TD catch, he came running back to the huddle saying things like "Man what a PERFECT throw - I was SO on him!" He couldn't accept he had been bested (even on a SINGLE play in a pick-up football game) and sort of demanded validation from everyone else with his remarks. This sort of thing went on all day - totally blaming everything besides himself in a classic, Hurtado-esque sort of way. Fun stuff.

Saturday night, I played another Madden game online and won. After that, I foolishly started toiling with the "Create a player" mode where I wound up spending most of my weekend. Needless to say, the WCD will be back in semi-short order. There is so much intricacy to designing a team and players - it took me hours. In fact, I wasted many hours on that exact task Saturday night.

At 10:30 pm, (feeling guilty about wasting 4 straight hours on create-a-player in Madden - most of is spent giggling while I adjusted everyone's stats and laughed about it) I walked downtown solo-style and caught a showing of "Oceans 12" at the local AMC 12. The movie was visually appealing (look, movies stars!) and intellectually annoying. More on Mick Flicks soon - maybe. I got back and then tweaked with more Madden stuff until 3 am. Essentially another sweet use of a weekend night.

Sunday

I woke up, got breakfast, and then wasted the ENTIRE day doing nothing except watching football, checking stat tracker, and tweaking with the WCD Madden team. I did absolutely nothing else (except for a portion of the Seattle Times Sunday crossword). At 7 pm I walked a block and got some pizza. A total waste of day. And here I am.

Things I wanted to do this weekend but didn't get done:

-Buy Gwen's birthday presents (Dec 19)
-Buy everyone's X-mas presents online (Dec 25)
-Pay bills
-Buy my new snowboard with that sweet Proform
-Do at least 2-3 hours of medicine reading
-More exercise

Oh well, at least I played football. All in all, not a bad weekend, but I'm definitely feeling some guilt over wasting so much time on seemingly menial tasks.

I will also say that now that Gwen and I are together, I feel no pressure to be super social. When I stop and think about that, that thought actually seems a little odd and even a little sad. I'm pretty sure that the only reason I'd want to go to a bar NOW would be to meet up with someone I hadn't seen in a while and get a few drinks and talk. But the good old "getting a few drinks with the guys from work" routine is sort of over - at least while I'm seeing somebody. There's just no point to it, for some reason. I'd rather stay home and read a book, catch up on my Netflix rentals ("Barry Lyndon" has been in my house for months - it came with me from the old apartment for Pete's (taint's) sake), or simply completely waste time on video games. I'll have to think about this some more. It all seems a little wrong to me...to be continued I guess.

Anyway, bedtime - Monday approaches.