Mortal Kombat and Motor oil, Front row at the Phillies game, lingering lists

Last night after work I made a pit stop to get two very manly items, motor oil and Mortal Kombat.  I bought oil and filters to change out on both of the Toyotas, hopefully tomorrow.  Mortal Kombat for the 360 was a purchase spurred by numerous kick ass recommendations from various electronic sources.  Even though I still have two of my Xbox games in shrink wrap from Christmas, I was definitely going to give the new MK a try.

I used to play a lot of MK when it first came out in the 90’s although I was never a stellar player.  I knew a few moves on a few characters but I was never hard core enough to go much deeper than that.  To be truly good at the game requires both lighting quick reflexes and precise joystick control.

I opened up the game and looked for a manual to give me the basics on how to play this latest iteration.  I had only played the first two versions, there have been many subsequent MK games.  Well the manual is basically non-existent.  The closest thing I saw was a pamphlet that tells you how to play online. Luckily the game has a decent tutorial mode to help fill in the gaps.

I did some tutorials, including practicing the insanely gory finishing moves.  I quickly saw why this game was outlawed in Australia.  I don’t even know how someone could think up of some of these animations.

The game play is very fast paced and more or less what I remember.  The primitive players like me can get by, at least early on by using simple strategies which is good.  After trying a few different modes I settled in on playing the single player story line.  I found this rather fun as it mixed in real time combat with the Mortal Kombat plot.  You get to play many  different characters in this mode.

I stayed up until after 11 last night mashing buttons with my headphones on in bed. It was a good time.

Today will be an unusual Tuesday.  I am leaving mid-afternoon to head to the eastern part of the state to attend a cloud computing seminar.  Ugh, pretty boring right?  Yea I would agree normally but this event had a twist that sparked my interest.  The seminar is being held at Sun Life Stadium and after it is complete we get to enjoy dinner and watch the Marlins/Phillies game from a box suite!

It should be pretty damn cool and the best seats I ever have had to watch a MLB game.  The fact that they happened to be playing the Phillies made it a total no brainer.

I will be driving back across the alley late tonight.  To make things less tiresome on Wednesday I took the day off.

Ironically, although I am taking tomorrow off from work to supposedly recover, the reality will be I will be working, just at home.  I came up with a long list of things that could/should be addressed during my unusual mid-week respite from work.  Want to hear them? Sure you do.

1. Change oil/filter in the Camry and Tacoma
2. Clean up/organize the small shed
3. “”        ” the garage
4. Machete off a bunch of dead wood on several cabbage palms
5. Shoot a hard mode video for this month’s Bar-barian challenge
6. Shoot a squat set for Jeremy so he can critique my form
7. Pull off the mower deck, replace the blades and see if the rattling sound goes away
8. Plant some abandoned potted plants into the color garden
9. Set up the three additional raised beds in the garden

In addition to these possible items, our part time neighbors from Michigan who are down for a few days requested my help in picking up some furniture they bought.  I hope to get that out of the way first thing.

In addition to all of these items it would be nice to “relax” for at least a small portion of the day playing WoW/MK, watching Dexter episodes or The Event on Tivo.

Unfortunately, since I stopped creating physical lists of chores to do since they bothered Ali, many times something that popped into my head during the week as a “need to do” gets forgotten in the cobwebs of this 43 year old brain.  Believe it or not, I know there are a few more things that I earmarked as needing to get done that I can’t recall at this moment.

When Ali got home from work she said that maybe she could take tomorrow off as well so we could go take the dogs to the beach or something.  I told her I had an agenda in my head already but if she was really into it I could change directions.  She said it was no big deal.  We should have some free weekends coming up where we could do a dog day trip.  I’ll add it to the list.