Chillin'

Sunday - circa 6:02 pm

I'm awaiting kickoff of NFL Sunday. Gwen and I went out and bought an AFN (Armed Forces Network) decoder yesterday. After hooking it all up this morning, we've learned that it takes 24 hours for it to be "activated" in the system. This would have been nice to know earlier (and reminds me that the clerk at the PowerZone on the Air Force Base was an IDIOT) - now we are left scrambling for a place to watch the games. Luckily there is such a place - the Landstuhl community club. So Gwen and I will be rolling over there in a little bit to catch the "morning" games at 7 pm.

Ideally, and by next week, we'll be able to chill out and watch up to 3 games in Gwen's apartment. (And someday, when I'm all set up - my apartment).

In other news, my furniture arrived in full this past Friday. I spent several hours waiting in an empty house, but by noon a duo of surly stone-faced German mover guys arrived and started off-loading my stuff. One guy spoke some broken english and the other guy, who reminded me of Ivan Drago, spoke no English and merely stared at me stolidly every time he showed up with a box (this was his way of asking me where the box went in the house). I'd point to a room, and he'd saunter off carrying away my stuff.

The move only took about 2 hours - these Germans were hard working if nothing else. I offered them some "Vasser" which they took as they were working up quite a sweat. I also had to suppress chuckles at times when they were moving something heavy up stairs and they would begin bantering at each other in angry and gutteral German while straining with an akward bookcase or entertainment center. I imagined the older, broken-english guy to be some sort of German Papa Stup-esque mover, ordering the other guy around in stern and obvious ways. "Michael...SCNELL!"

The rest of this weekend was spent organizing my place to some extent and also just relaxing. Last weekend Gwen and I took off to a spa town called Baden Baden which was pretty sweet. More on that with a few pics in a different post.

I have lots of catching up to do on this site - I started writing a long piece about the field training but I walked away from it a little while ago and haven't finished it yet. And there's Iraq, my new job, and the rest of it. Stay tuned for more updates.

One other thing I must add is that I've been spending a lot of time playing video games lately. I haven't been this unabashedly guiltless about playing video games like this since my fourth year of medical school when I was waiting to go off to Seattle. Since the boards, I have no other work pressures - I merely go to work, do my job, and then come home. I'm now a (more or less) fully trained internist, and there's no further need to worry about studying this or that at home. All the long years of schooling and training appear finally done for the most part. So I'm finally at a level where work is work and home is home. It's a good feeling - and it's been a while since I felt like that - make no mistake.

The games I've been playing (for those interested) are these:

Rome Total War - AWESOME Real time strategy game involving all things Roman era - world domination, battle, and civilizations style game. Great stuff. Haven't played a game in this genre in years.

Madden 2006 - My yearly foray into Madden. The new "Vision Cone" is taking some getting used to. Other than that, it's another year and another spectacular Madden game.

The Incredible Hulk - Ultimate Destruction - This game, for the PS2, is a fucking blast. I bought it on a whim one day after seeing a good review for it over at IGN.com. It's basically a story-based game where you more less go on missions as the Hulk and beat the shit out of all kinds of stuff in fully destructible environments. The missions in the game are more complicated than you might think, but if you want to waste eons of time destroying everything in site as the raging Hulk either during or in between missions, the game lets you do that, which I respect. Overall, good fun.

Anyway - that's all for now. Time to get ready for my beloved NFL. Once my place is more set up and more wired I can go back to posting more pics and keeping this thing on more of a roll.

Peace.