There goes my free time

Over the past couple of months I have been playing World of Warcraft and having a good time with it. I spent a decent amount of my free with on the game but I think it was a good balance between TV, sleeping and WoW. Last week I bought Galactic Civilizations 2, which is a game in the same vein as Master of Orion or Civilization. Basically you start out with your faction/race/group of similarly clothed people and scheme to take over the world/galaxy/the container that you live in.

This is somewhat of a problem. The first night I had the game I was up until 3am playing just 'one more turn'. So now I have a MMOG (massively multiplayer online game,) which people have such strong addictions to that it has caused deaths, divorces, and the tears of small children; and I have a turn-based conquest game that also have been known to eat away entire years of lives (most noticable offenders in the past are Master of Orion I/II and Civilization I/II.) The only thing of certainty that has come out of all of this is the fact that I've been getting a lot less sleep than I am used to.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do about this. But while we're talking about it, let me just say that Galactic Civilizations 2 is a fun game, if you're in the market for a way to burn your free time. The learning curve is steep becuase the game has a horrible user interface but the game itself is quite fun. Two of my friends have also bought the game and we discuss our successes and failures as we go along, as well as trading game play tips which are obfuscated by the aforementioned interface. So if you buy the game, drop me a line, we can trade tips for a more perfect genocide. :)

Yet Another One

Animal story number two:

There was a period of time during my middle school years when my mother was most perturbed by a certain gopher that took up residence in our backyard. Now this gopher didn't bother me at all, but because my mother had a problem with it, she made it my father's problem, which in turn became my problem. My father and I tried for months to either trap it, kill it, or offer it a room in the house so it would stop destroying my mother's garden. Not only was this gopher particularly stubborn, it was also fairly wiley so we were fruitless in our labors.

One summer day however, I was playing in the backyard and I suddenly see the gopher's head pop up out of one of his numerous holes. I was in all manners of luck that day as the gopher wasn't looking at me and the sun was in front of us, so my shadow wasn't being cast in his direction. I watched him for a few seconds, thinking he'd quickly pop back into his hole. This however, wasn't the case as he stayed perfectly still with his head above ground.

I quietly snuck to the garage, looking for something to trap him with. Obviously, throwing a box over his head would be useless, since he's in his hole. So the only other idea I had was to hit him with something. Knock him out, or knock him dead I guess. I'm not sure if I would have minded either result. I was looking for my baseball bat but I couldn't find that so in my hurry (remember, I don't know when the gopher will retreat back in its hole...) I grabbed the nearest long blunt object, a broom.

I quietly ran back to where the gopher was and there it was, still with its head out of its hole. I have no idea what it was looking for or doing but it certainly was concentrated on it. I gripped the broom and approached him. Then, when I was in range, I swing the broom down as hard as I could on top of the gopher, making sure to hit it with the plastic part holding the bristles and not the bristles themselves.

I anxiously looked under the broom, expecting the gopher to have either retreated quickly enough or simply to have been knocked back into the hole. I was wrong. It lay there, in the sun, with its head on the ground. I had gotten it! Not really knowing what to do next, and again under time pressure (I was sure the gopher would wake up any second..) I pulled it by its neck out of the hole then grabbed it by its tail purely by instinct. As soon as that happened it was suddenly awake and very angry. Trying mightly to snap my fingers off.

I ran. I ran with the gopher by its tail at arms length back to the garage and again, under more time pressure (because I felt sooner or later, the larger and larger parabolic arcs the gopher was taking would finally meet with my fingers,) I threw it in the first container I saw; an empty bucket.

I didn't know what to do with it, I mean, it's not like I rescued a dog off the streets. I felt sorry for it so I dug up some dirt and grass and threw it in his bucket. You know, to make it feel more at home... or something.
The poor thing died not too long afterwards due to, let's jsut say, gross negligence on my part. But that's not hte point of this story. The point of this story is I caught a gopher with nothing more than a broom and my bare hands!

Animals

A lot of people I know probably don't know this about me, but I have somewhat of an affinity with animals. I've also been around animals starting from when I was an infant, where my father would bring back turtles that he would encounter on the road, on his way home. (Yes, life is really that idyllic in Oklahoma. And yes, we always let them go after a day or so.)

This isn't to say I'm Dr. Doolittle, as a fair share of animals have definitely died in my care. In terms of actual pets, I've owned a parakeet, a chameleon, a ton of goldfish, a tortoise, a dog, and a couple of hamsters. My encounters with wild animals include a pigeon, a gopher, a pair of doves, and some lizards.

I'll share one particularly amazing story, one involving the pigeon. The scene is NYC in the fall of when I was about 4 years old. I was walking with my mother through the middle of a park, one hand holding my mother's. As we were walking along, we would of course disturb whatever pigeons were in our path and cause them to take flight. As one pigeon nearby to where I was walking started to fly away, for whatever reason, I reached out with my free hand and grasped at it. Imagine my surprise when the next thing I know, I have a pigeon's wing in my hands. My mother of course, goes crazy, yelling at me to let it go. Something about it being dirty, but I didn't care, this was my prize. I wasn't going to just let it go. That is until the pigeon (which, amazingly can stay aloft with just one wing flapping,) zoomed around (and remember, I'm still holding on to one of it wings, so it actually bent my arm,) and started to beat my face with its free wing. After a few seconds of that I let it go. Ahh pidgey, I hardly knew ye.

Yeah, so how many people can claim to have caught a bird in midflight? I can. :)