I’ve had an especially hard time concentrating on anything these past few days. I’m not sure if it’s just the weather, me, or both. Probably a little bit of everything, lately I’ve been finding myself spacing out about various things, fictional and non-fictional. I’m pretty low on the motivation pole, but occasionally I can find enough to do things. This week, not so much.

Most of the core plans for the wedding have been made for next May already. We’ve settled on Wickham Park for the ceremony, and Georgina’s in Bolton for the reception and dinner. We’ve met with the owner twice and looked at the room, it’s very nice, and they seem very friendly and receptive to what we, or she rather, wants to happen. I say she mostly because I’m a pretty plain and boring person, I could realistically be happy with a small wedding in a nice backyard with a couple dozen people and a cook-out for little cost. She wants something larger and more memorable, and I can’t really blame her. Most girls want a wedding that they can experience and never forget. Thankfully she isn’t interested in spending a hojillion dollars on extravagant everything, which makes this process easier, but even I find moments when I feel a bit nervous about how this is going to go down. I am a person of few outward emotions and especially not receptive of getting up in front of a lot of people and looking silly. But I’ll try to manage. Love is a silly thing.

I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately, thanks to a twitterbro mentioning a reliable repo and reader for stuff scan groups post, and I’ve taken the opportunity to blow through three series of available chapters already. People read books to lose themselves in a different world, maybe not as themselves, but experience that world as if they were someone in it, viewing it, absorbing it. As cheesy as that sounds, anime and manga has always been that way for me, especially the series that really make an impact in terms of creating a vivid environment with characters that are as close to as real as possible. One that especially dragged me through the “dawwwwwww” was Usagi Drop, a series about a thirty-year old bachelor who adopts a six-year old girl thought to be his grandfather’s illegitimate child. The series splits its time dealing with the two of them and company at age six, and then the same cast at age sixteen. It’s a perfect example of an age-old notion I’ve tried to explain to people who aren’t into anime or manga, that there are series that aren’t about robots, girls with big tits, magic, and spaceships. On occasion, they make things about everyday life, trials and tribulations, love, family, and everything in-between. It’s really no different from reading a book, and in many ways, if you removed the pictures and word bubbles and made it into a written book, your mind would interpret it roughly the same, though perhaps not always with the same images in mind. I found myself wondering what I would have done if I was in the same situation, hell, I’ve always thought about what I would have done had I ended up with kids over the past ten years. It was completely possible during that time, and yet I managed to hold to my principle of attempting to be married and have some kind of stable income before raising kids. That has worked so far, but you never forget all the things you did or sacrificed to get there.

I’m afraid I have been largely quiet on the vidya front lately. I was hardcore on Disgaea 2 and 3 for awhile, but haven’t come back to play in about a week or so just being kinda burned out, and catching up on animes. I’ll probably try to get back on that this weekend if I care, or sometime I imagine. Valve also released a Portal 2 chamber builder, which appears to be a much simpler way to construct levels outside of Hammer, which I could not grasp very well when I tried. I might give that a spin this weekend as well to see what magic can be made of that.

I started a SQL class a few weeks ago online for work, and the first half of the course went by pretty fast, and without too much trouble. Things are starting to get a little hotter though in the last half, as they start doing sub-queries and joins and such. I’m finding myself having some trouble keeping up with all of the syntax and terms on things, and a little trouble translating her assignment questions into statements. I probably have to give it more thought and go back over some of the previous chapter stuff better before I get too much farther forward, as it won’t do me much good to get to the end and not understand half of what was given to me.

I ran out of things to say. So until weeks from now, get lost. But I will humble you with more Oka-ness from Mysterious Girlfriend X, and you may hit up the animu blog for more, when I get to posting that eventually.