wil and kris (and gracie and ava)

It may have seemed as though i’ve been missing lately. Kris took over the last five posts or so… and i just haven’t popped in to say hello. Well, i’m not sick, i’m not dead, and i’m not missing. There has been one thing that has been occupying my free time more than anything else, and that’s Desktop Tower Defense. It has consumed me, taken over my mind and forced me to contemplate and strategize deep into the night. This is not a bad thing, by the way

Desktop Tower Defense is one of the most incredible flash games ever created. It has a simple yet inviting design that places it perfectly between an overly-alienated, sci-fi action game and a cute and happy game with playful creatures. The bad guys (creeps) try to get from one end of the map to the other, and it’s your job to place towers in strategic locations to keep that from happening. Creeps come from the top and left and are forced to leave through the bottom and right respectively

The idea is to create a maze to keep the creeps on the map for the longest amount of time, while spending money to upgrade your towers to kill the higher level creeps. Once you start the game, you can’t keep them from coming… so get building!

Here are some of my favorite map layouts (click the photo for actual size):

This is a simple maze and it is designed to keep the creeps on the map for a long time. they each enter and leave at the opposite point with many towers throughout for maximum kills.

This maze is called a spiral and it is designed so that all the creeps pass through a central point. You can place towers at that point that damage multiple creeps at a time for maximum efficiency… plus it looks freakin’ sweet!

when we were at the bark park (where else?!) on sunday, we had a pleasant surprise. free samples of treats and pictures! i couldn’t say no to the chance of getting that silly girl into the side car. of course, she was scared to death to get into it and the poor man probably pulled a muscle or two dead weight lifting her into it…but she looks like she was pretty excited to go for a ride once she was in there!

i’m just now starting to realize that wil and i leave in a few weeks for our trip. where did the time go? i am also just starting to realize that we have a boatload of things to do in preparation…

luckily knowing beforehand i’d need to get a new passport, as my old one had expired and my name had changed, i was able to get the application in time to receive the new one before we left. phew! it came about a week or so ago. it’s arrival made me realize we’ll really be getting on the plane soon!

i was surprised to see how different the new passports are to the old ones…the covers are thicker (i believe they’re starting to embed electronic microchip-ma-bobbers in them), the paper is printed like colorful pieces of money with a different overly patriotic american scene on each page, and the pictures are no longer on the inside of the cover, but a few pages in. also, you won’t see me flaunting my picture around to everyone…the crazy woman at kinko’s told me if i smiled i couldn’t show my teeth (which i believed to be a new regulation until everyone i’ve told that to said that wasn’t true! arg!). not only do i have an awkward smile, but the way the picture was printed into the book, i’m orange and overexposed. don’t these people know i have to live with this for the next ten years?!?!

also, wil received a cool set of ‘learn italian in the car’ cds as a gift…but since he only drives about a mile back and forth every day, and i drive about an hour round trip, i snatched them up and popped them into my player. i’ve finished the first cd already! although i’ve learned phrases that won’t get me very far when we’re lost in the middle of the city- like “my car is ugly” (la mia machina e brutta) and “there is a small forest” (ce una foresta piccola)- i have gotten a good taste of the language to prepare me for the rest of the cds (which i believe are more conversational) and hopefully help us get around the country a bit.

paris/italy…here we come!

so i know i may have complained once or twice about how easy my science class has been…but in reality, although we’ve breezed assignment-wise through the semester, i’ve enjoyed learning a few little things here or there from my teacher.

but what’s more exciting than our lessons is hearing about different developments in space from his point of view…an astrobiologist highly involved with TSU & NASA. but until today, i didn’t realize the caliber of his background until he showed a recent news interview of himself and a recent discovery.

check out the little two minute interview (click on the picture…i couldn’t get the video to show on our page) and see my teacher and his discovery of water on a new planet outside of our solar system!!!

of course, he revealed to us that some of that information was skewed by the interviewer, but you and the public gets the idea. pretty cool!

oh, and for our final- we will be making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. : )

wil and i have had a great time with blockbuster online…we’ve watched a bunch of movies and undoubtedly saved a ton of money by not going to the movie theatre or having unending late fees (we are REALLY bad at returning movies on time). but i think blockbuster has made me a customer for life the past few weeks…

about a week ago, all the sudden we received a third movie, while we only pay for two movies at a time. woohoo! just a nice little bonus…

a few days later, we were pleasantly surprised to come home and find that gracie decided to have a snack…mmm…”in america” i guess was her delicacy of choice. she had pulled the dvd mailer envelope off the table, pulled the sleeve out, and made her way to the disk, crunching it to smitherings (the envelopes were mysteriously unharmed- who knows where she got those skills!). panicking on what the consequences would be for “my dog ate my dvd”, i quick got online, clicked a few buttons and all it asked me was “would you like us to resend you the same movie, or another title?” what? i can smash a dvd up, put it in the mail and they’ll send it right back without any penalty? no way. but yes…way… sure enough, we received another copy in our mailbox today.

and to top that… (remember i mentioned we are bad at returning real movies on time); last night i decided to swap our online movie with a new one at the store (fantastic feature by the way). pulling my debit card out in preparation of a past late fee, i was stopped midway when the clerk cleared me through without any need for money. was i dreaming about a late fee from a previous life? i glanced at my receipt and saw a charge for a few bucks that had been unknowingly cancelled out…

blockbuster’s giving us extra movies, freely forgiving eaten dvd’s and paying for our late fees?? what did we do to get into this secret red carpet club? i hope it continues!

you would think it’s pretty impossible to lose a large congregation of people, but today, wil and i did. stepping out the door, ready to visit an unknown church, we made our way to “the factory” (large artsy shopping center in reclaimed factory buildings)…after driving around the buildings a number of times, we were baffled at where this church could be meeting. the minutes continued to pass, after i asked someone at the front desk and we circled 3 or 4 more times, even if we discovered the nearly invisible church we’d have been too late to enjoy the service.

saddened at the idea of missing out on what could potentially have been a refreshing experience (and already bummed out from the cold rainy weather), wil and i both turned our thoughts towards our grumbling stomachs and thought that we might as well go out to eat to make this morning worthwhile.

a few streets down we pulled up to a tall old brick house, situated between a lot filled with a bunch of scrap metal and an old bus, and some sad, neglected houses. we’d heard one thing about this place: good breakfast.

stepping up through the door we were greeted with smiles and immediately seated at a huge table for 10…the table was covered with different colored plates, mugs that look like they’d been gathered from numerous cupboards and garage sales, and funky old pitchers filled with sweet tea and coffee. soon after learning that we sat ourselves down in a family style restaurant, another group joined us at our table. and then the food came.

basic, yummy breakfast foods like pancakes, eggs, and bacon began to appear every few minutes, as well as some southern staples like cheese grits, cinnamon apples, biscuits and gravy, corn pudding (’puddun’), and even fried chicken! the bowls and dishes of unending food circled around the table…wil and i kept filling our plates and eating ourselves into oblivion.

i can see why some people see food as a religious experience: the heaps of fried and baked goods on our plates were heavenly…so maybe missing church wasn’t that bad after all. : P

hope everyone is well and enjoying being with family today, celebrating christ’s resurrection.

we love you and miss those of you who are far away.