I loved the first Overlord game. It’s one of the few games that have a sort of Dungeon Keeper flavor…twisted, silly humor that turns the usual ‘good vs. evil’ in games on it’s head. Plus, it was one of the few games that my husband and I played together, or at least enjoyed hanging out/watching while the other played. So I was happy to hear that a sequel was being made. The demo was released this week and I tried it - it seems like more of the same awesome evil-cute and simple, but enjoyable, gameplay. The demo did its job and made me want more.

Supposedly it should be in stores tomorrow (24th) so I’m ready to get up semi-early and dash over to Best Buy and/or Gamestop to see if they have a copy. Please be there. Please please please. I want to send my little minions out to pillage and plunder and hear their gleeful cheers. It’s so much fun.

…to what lengths I will go to in order to avoid reformatting my hard drive. I used to do it once every year at the least, but once I realized how much more stable WinXP was over it’s predecessors, I started slacking. The last time I think I did a reformat was…um…three or four years ago. Point is, I need to reformat/reinstall XP, but I keep putting it off. Tweak the registry here and there, defrag constantly, and so on. It works…but no matter what you do, the system becomes more and more unstable. And the longer you go without, the more stuff you have to remember in order to reorganize the computing system back to the way you prefer it. I’m not talking about just backing up your “important files,” either. That’s easy. It’s more…

“Which settings did I tweak in Firefox, again?”
“Which things did I tweak in XP and how to do it, again?”
“What mods/patches did I use with that program/save game files/whatever again?”

…BLAH.

Of course, the other bottom line in my case is that I also really need to build a new computer altogether. I keep almost doing it, but each time something (or my husband) convinces me it’s better to wait (more bang for your buck later). But frankly, there’s always a reason to wait…it really only, and always, boils down to “do I feel like spending money on that right now?” And unless you’re rich or a tech trend geek, the answer is usually “not really.”

….BLAH.

Penny vs. Sabathia. Didn’t seem like a level pitching match up. I think a lot of us fans weren’t truly expecting to win last night. Hoping, but not sure if we believed in Penny enough.
But then Penny pitched a gem of a game. A quality start and more. And Ortiz blasted another homer, causing fans everywhere to scream in joyful delight for the long-slumping Big Papi, who seems to have finally found at least part of his groove again. His home run gave the Red Sox a slim one run lead, which held for quite some time.

Then the Yankees scored some runs, pulling ahead in the 7th. Red Sox Nation groaned, wondering if the streak of wins against the Yankees was going to end. We had time to get it back, it’s not over, our guys can do it. We held our breath, we hollered at our screens, we pounded fists on tables, we wrote furious notes back and forth via whatever internet social network we had chosen to express ourselves.

Then Rocco Baldelli made a fantastic catch in center field in the top of the 8th, and along with relief pitcher Saito’s strikeouts, that helped keep the Yankee lead from growing.
And then in the bottom of the 8th, Nick Green hit a single. And Pedroia toughed out an amazing 10 pitch at bat to finally wear out Sabathia and gain base via a walk.
Then JD Drew got a hit and Green scored. Jason Bay hit and scored Pedroia. Mike Lowell managed a sacrifice that scored Drew. Suddenly Boston was ahead again, 4-3. Red Sox were making another bid for a comeback win, and as always it felt tingly-dramatic.

Then Jonathan Papelbon, the star closer, walked to the mound at the top of the 9th.
He got some help from Nick Green, who made a stunning, superb grab/spin/toss of a hard liner, stealing a base hit away from Yankee lead-off batter Derek Jeter.
Two more Yankees came to the plate - and two more Yankees were gone.

Red Sox beat the Yankees to sweep the 3 game series. More importantly, the Red Sox have played the Yankees eight times so far in this season, and they’ve beat them eight times. It’s a grand feeling, beating an “arch nemesis” like that. We can feel smug, we can revel in the emotion of being First. Oh, we all know it cannot and will not last…the Yankees have too many good players, and they must win against Boston someday. But the Red Sox/Yankees don’t play against each other again for a couple months - and in the meantime, it is glorious.

This weekend we finally bought an outdoor gas grill. We’ve talked about it before, but have been deterred either by price or by the fact we haven’t done much BBQing in ages. Oh sure, we used to BBQ a lot on the ol’ round charcoal Weber’s when we were in our early 20’s. First we had the Smokey Joe…a common staple among young adults who have little space and even less money…and later we bought the much larger ‘normal size’ Weber. Don’t ask me what normal size actually was, I have no idea. Probably a 22-inch grill diameter or something. But charcoal BBQ’s are dirty, and you have to deal with waiting for charcoal to reach the proper cooking state. Thus once our household income soared, our Weber became a black metal yard ornament which the squirrels and birds like to perch on.

Anyway…I hate cooking in the kitchen in summer. It’s often too hot and icky to be slaving over a hot stove. In the past, we’d get around this by ordering take-out food. A lot. We had a little more money to blow back then. Now our bills are bigger, the economy tighter, and our age is such that we’re more concerned about what we eat…so we’re trying to stop doing that. Problem: I still don’t like to cook in the summer. So…outdoor grill. Perfect solution, right? Perhaps. We shall see.

As you can tell in the photo above, we chose a cheap unit that didn’t have a side-shelf on both sides…which makes the thing smaller, something I liked. It does have the side gas burner tho, just in case you wanted to heat a small pot of chili while grilling hamburgers. Frankly, I’d heat the chili in the microwave and doubt I’d ever use that burner, but whatever. Overall what we bought seems fairly sturdy, although for the macho-inclined, the $700-$1200 Weber’s were quite the showpieces. We weren’t ready to spend that much on what amounts to a flimsy-ish file-cabinet-like metal box with a propane tank attached to it, so we opted for a $270ish unit we found at Lowes. That still seems outrageously expensive for what it is, but that’s just the times we live in, eh?

So far we’ve cooked hotdogs and steaks. They were both all right, but the flavor just isn’t the same as charcoal BBQ’ing. I mean, essentially you’re cooking on a gas range/oven. Not much different than what’s in the house. Broiling a steak in the gas oven would taste about the same. However, I did notice that once there was enough heat in the gas grill to cause meat drippings to smoke, it improved the flavor. Smoke - and keeping the lid closed - is the key I guess. There is no leaping, high, open flame to char things over, so closed-lid/high heat charring is the method of gas grilling. At least if you want smoky flavor. Either that or buy those wood chips I guess. At any rate…it’s fun to try out I suppose. Whether it will actually save us money or keep us from ordering take-out remains to be seen.

And tomorrow, it’s chicken.

After another long hiatus, I’ve decided to come back to the blog. Let’s see if I can keep up with it on at least a semi-regular basis again.

Since Spring, there has been one thing that I’ve been predominantly obsessing over, and that is baseball. It’s been a long time since I’ve followed baseball with any kind of regularity. I remember watching when I was younger…particularly the play-offs and World Series. I didn’t try to watch every single game of any team back then, probably because I never had much interest in my local teams - Oakland A’s, SF Giants and in a roundabout way, the LA Dodgers. Those were the teams that local TV stations were usually broadcasting. I’d watch other team games such as Yankees, Boston etc. when local teams played them or when networks deemed such games profitable enough to broadcast here…but it’s hard to become an obsessive fan from a distance. I remember liking Boston and trying to follow them a bit, but there was no internet or live streaming feeds in those days. There were newspapers and sports columns. So if you liked a distant team, you’d follow them mostly through box scores & out-of-state papers at the library. Not very exciting, with a lot of disconnect.

Then came my mid-teenage years and boyfriends, whereby my interest in baseball largely evaporated. None of my paramours, including my husband-to-be, had any interest in baseball, which didn’t help matters. I still watched the play-offs and WS when I remembered to, but not every year. Boston’s WS’s wins were pleasing to see, but it wasn’t for me the event that it was for people who have been highly active, dedicated fans of Boston for years or decades…and when the playoffs/WS would end I’d mostly forget about baseball again, until I randomly happened to surf to a game at some point late in the season. It’s a strange relationship to have with the sport, for so long.

Last year towards the end of the play-offs I finally became frustrated by the fact that I’d get so excited/happy watching the few Boston regular season games I could & the post-season games if applicable, but then have to ‘turn it off’ the rest of the time because I couldn’t watch them all season long. I wanted to be more than a long distance and post-season fan. I wanted to be a baseball fan again. I knew about cabletv sports packages, but had never investigated them…once I did, I also discovered that for the past few years MLB had been offering live streaming of almost all non-local games over the internet. It was a revelation. There were four main things that convinced me to try this service. One, it offered HD-quality streaming, while the cabletv baseball package where I live (Comcast) is relegated to the non-HD channels and looks rather fuzzy on the 50″ TV. Two, since I can watch games on the computer, I don’t have to hog up the TV all the time. Three, MLB.tv is about a hundred bucks cheaper than the cabletv package. And four, my favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, is nowhere near where I live and it’s the only way I can see nearly all of their games live. NESN broadcasting does not exist on the West Coast. Also, when I wish to, I can connect a computer to the 50″ tv and use it to watch the internet feed on…and it looks fairly good too. Certainly better than Comcast’s non-HD baseball broadcasts.

Thus, this year I have been completely obsessed with baseball, and more specifically, the Red Sox. I check game times and I watch every game that isn’t blacked out in my area (occasionally happens), I read sports news, blogs & histories - so I’m at least not a complete dunderhead about some stuff - and I’ve found a few internet communities to share live game chats with. It’s cool. The strangest thing about picking up my interest in baseball again, after so many years, is how different the game has become. It’s like becoming a fan of the sport all over again, with many things seeming brand spanking new.

I’m not quite sure what my husband thinks of all this, when for so long he believed my interest in baseball/sports was extremely casual, heheh. He’s watched enough of the games with me to be casually familiar with the current Red Sox roster, but he’s definitely not a baseball ‘fan.’ Myself…well, mostly I just love watching the games. The debates about trades etc. are background noise…I’m a fan of the gameplay itself, not stats or the managerial/business aspects, if that makes sense. I’m not the manager and I wouldn’t want to be, so I’m not very interested in thinking about what I’d do if I was one. I understand why many do, tho. :)

I like several teams to varying degrees and try to keep tabs on them…but my heart is for the Red Sox. I may not be one of the true long suffering Boston fans, but I have been an odd, distant fan for many years…and it’s very nice to finally be able to watch and follow them enough for my fandom to become a more permanent fixture in my life.

Go Boston.