Another year has passed, and I’m now 27 years old. Because of the date of my wedding being my birthday, I’ve also been married for two years now. Neither event was that big of a deal this year with the busy life I/we lead. Jenn and I were not blessed with a week in Cali this time around (Last year we went to Disneyland for our anniversary), but rather a stressful week of study and homework.

This year my father came in to send the day with us on my birthday. We spent the day talking, and playing Wii. Dad seemed to take a shine to the Wii, and had a good time. I also spoke with my brother for an hour or so, and got a chance to catch up with my sister and my mother. Later in the evening we went out for dinner before my father left to head back.

School

School is going the same as it ever was. I’m taking summer session classes, which means that I’m cramming sixteen weeks of class into six short weeks. It’s not exactly something I’m loving. Currently I’m taking Intro to East Asian Culture, which is interesting, but not enjoyable at this speed.

With regard to my general academic progress, I’m still fairly tired of school. I’m still not convinced that it’s worth the time and potential professional sacrifices. I’m going to keep at it until there’s an avenue to the bay area open to me, but this bullshit is getting so taxing. I can’t take two more years of insipid undergrads. The other day I actually overheard some girl on her phone say: “.. and like, then I noticed that, like, I didn’t have underwear on! … I know!” /sigh

I still haven’t decided for sure what I’m planning to do, but… yea… I’m pretty done with this part of the country.

Photography

The photography is going well, I think. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback, and Jenn stopped complaining about me wasting my money on the camera a while ago. It’s annoying that I’ve not had a lot of spare time to go hunting interesting pictures, but a lot of my initiative is eaten up by school and work. I’m looking forward to going on my trip to Japan and getting a lot of good photos. I’m planning on getting a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF-S VR DX Zoom lens before the trip, which is a compact and versatile, albeit slow, zoom lens. Should prove useful, and with that purchase I will have officially spent more on lenses than I did on my camera.

I’m planning on trying to take a photography trip this weekend if the weather isn’t crappy, maybe I’ll get some pics at the cascades or something. Last weekend we went to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, and I got some nice shots. The cats are amazing, and the trip is well worth it.

Here’s one of the cats, a really sweet white tiger that they have there:

Video Games

I’ve quit wow fairly cold turkey. It just wasn’t worth the time investment to play with a bunch of folks I didn’t know, and working on content I’ve already beaten. I felt bad about flaking out of my guild, who were about to make me a class leader and an officer, but I think it’s for the best.

I’ve taken up playing GH3 and Smash Brothers with a couple friends every week, and I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 with Tim. I wish I could play more varied games, but with my Warcraft singularity it was easy to slack off on hardware upgrades. RIght now I’m looking at about $1200 or so to get my computers to the place I want them, and I won’t have that scratch till after Japan. Once I upgrade I have a list of games I hope to play; Bioshock, C&C3, Age of Conan, Supream Commander, crysis, the list goes on and on…

I’ve also been playing a lot with Rupture, which is a kind of cross platform gaming aggregation platform thing I’ve talked about before. THey’ve made some big strides, and it’s starting to shape up really nice. They also got picked up by EA this week, so congrats to the team on that one, you guys deserve it!

Japan

As I mentioned a couple times in this post, I’m heading to Japan this summer finally! Brett (old roommate, good friend) and I are heading to Japan for two weeks in August. We’ve not set things hard in stone yet, so if you have any strong suggestions on places we should plan on making a priority (that aren’t on my Japan List ) let me know!

I’m really excited for the trip to Japan, it’s going to be the first trip I’ve made outside the country that wasn’t contained within the sterile walls of some sort of resort. We’re planning on getting train passes, and seeing a lot of varied places.

So the rest of the summer should be very taxing, but will end in a large amount of awesome. I can deal with that.