Things I Did Yesterday 25/11/08

How do you manage to keep up? Anyway, yesterday I:

- Trekked back from Greenwich, where Alex and I had spent the previous day as a special birthday surprise! It was really nice, actually, and it was only the buses that kept reminding me that we were, in fact, still in London.

- Lugged our new kitchen table back with us, which we picked up from a market for £35. Such a great find as it's perfect for the limited space we have, both as a 4-seater dining table and also as a work surface.

- Tidied and rearranged the lounge in time for Andrea to arrive, bearing the base for a laksa, which she then cooked in typically excellent style. We had a good catch-up and then walked down to Angel, where I bought a copy of Fallout 3 (after much deliberation) to go with my new Xbox 360 (£110 from ASDA).

- Got home, did some stuff, had a bath, read some comics (boy do I love Scalped) and caught up on my web reading.

- Once Alex's soaps had finished (9pm) I moved in on the lounge, popped Fallout in and started playing. That pretty much took me through until 1am, whereupon I died trying to kill a bunch of guys who were guarding the ruin of an old supermarket. I must say, I'm loving it. I was a big fan of the Fallout games way back when, and indeed Wasteland before them. The post-apocalyptic RPG thing always appealed to me and this new one does an excellent job of recapturing the feel of the earlier chapters. Okay, so it also feels a bit like a re-skinned Oblivion, but that's fine by me. I think it has been a bit mis-marketed though - the Gears of War crowd are going to be bleeding out their eyes with the amount of dialogue and reading material - but it's exactly what I hoped it might be. Good news for me, bad news for productivity.

- Though actually, it's not too bad. The fact that I have gone down the console route rather than upgrading my PC has a number of benefits. Firstly, it means I can play all the new games for far less than it would have cost me to do an upgrade. I'm at the point where a games-ready conversion is essentially going to be a rebuild, but really my PC is fine for 90% of what I need to do. Aside from the odd fan that needs replacing, it's still rock-solid. Secondly, to play a game I need access to the television, which means it can't monopolize my time every night. At least, these are the justifications I tell myself.

- Stumbled to bed, intending to get up early to make the most of this, my last day off of a 5 day stretch.