Stress and disease, what fun!

I totally got shingles a couple weeks ago!  Yeah!  : )  Actually, it was pretty lame.

I started out thing it was just a rash cuz I had this itch on my side and it was red.  Well, the next day I noticed that there were some bumps there.  My wife looked at it and immediately started freaking out because she thought it was shingles.  She’s the biggest spaz in the world though, so I didn’t really take it seriously.  It got a little worse so by the 2nd day I promised her I would make a doctor appt.  My doctor takes one look at it and goes, “Yep, that’s shingles!”

Truth be told, it really wasn’t that bad.  It didn’t even start hurting excruciatingly bad like I heard they are supposed to.  It just itched and was uncomfortable.  My belief was that even if it did start hurting really bad, I was pretty sure I could handle it.  After having kidney stones a year ago I’m quite positive I can handle ANY fucking pain in the world.  If anyone reading this has ever had them before you totallyl know what I’m talking about.

The worst part of it was the damn medicine.  See, shingles is just the street name for this particular ailment, most likely invented because it sounds less gross than the medical term.  Its actually a strain of herpes, and as such the treatment is Valtrex.  That’s right, the herpes medication.  So not only did I have to publicly purchase said herpes medicine (which was just awesome), but it also cost me A HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS!  With insurance!  That comes out to about $5 apiece for every single big blue horse pill.  In my mind I’m trying to maintain the illusion that the reason it was so expensive is that I hadn’t met my prescription deductible yet for ‘08.  I say illusion because I’m afraid of checking my insurance paperwork and finding out that this is not the case.  One night I actually dropped a pill in the sink and was freaking out because I was afraid it went down the drain.  At $5 each, you better believe I pulled every damn dish out of that sink to retrieve it!  In retrospect, the stuff was probably worth the dough because it worked great.  10 days of pills and they’re gone, only two weeks after they showed up.

My doctor said that nobody really knows the exact cause of them, but its widely believed that stress is a big factor.  Gee, I guess its not that much of a surprise considering everything that’s been going on lately.  Once I realized this, I started taking a relatively resigned attitude to things.  My view was “Whatever.  We’ll just deal with it and whatever we have to do we’ll do it.”  I pretty much gave up on continuing to live in Lakewood (and buying a house all together) and just decided to give myself to whatever would be best for Devon’s happiness, and thusly, my own sanity.  Now that she is willing to give Lakewood another shot and go through with buying the Edwards house (partly because we don’t have much of a choice anymore), we have something to work for and (hopefully) keep our spirits up.

And with my birthday coming up, hopefully we’ll have some good times ahead.

The Force Unleashed

Is anybody else as excited about this game as I am???  I’m tellin ya, this is the most stoked I’ve been about a Star Wars game in a helluva long time.  The graphics look incredible, the fact that you play as Darth Vader’s apprentice in the time between Episode III and Episode IV is just awesome, and the videos and trailers look fantastic!

It’s being described as God of War meets Star Wars.  Well, if that turns out to be accurate then this game will in my opinion be the mose awesome Star Wars game ever made.  If you haven’t checked it out yet and are interested in either Star Wars or action games in general, I highly encourage you to check it out.

There is hope

Even though my dad screwed us out of renting his house, we are going to try and buy it from him.  Not to help him out at all, just for our own benefit.

When I first brought it up, Devon didn’t want to do it because she was so mad at him and didn’t want to spend any more time in Lakewood than she had to.  That sort of changed when we had to use all of our tax refund to pay her remaining debt from the University of Akron that we didn’t even know she had.  With no tax refund to pay for a new security deposit or a truck rental, we don’t really have the money to move all the way to the other end of town anymore.  Also, her parents helped me convince her what a great thing this could be for us to own a home.  My dad will sell us the place for only the amount he still owes on it.  I’m talking $100k for a house thats worth about $150k!

I contacted a mortgage broker that was recommended to me when I went to a credit and bankruptcy seminar and sent them a bunch of info on us (income, assets, debt, etc).  Unfortunately, Devon’s credit took quite a dive since we last checked it in november and we can’t qualify until we get her credit score back up.  They even tried to do the deal using just me on the loan but I need her income to qualify.  I have them sending me a copy of the credit report they pulled so we know what to work on.

Still, I am excited.  We now have specific things that we can do and we know what to do to make this work.  Once we’re in better shape and we some credit cards off a little we can go back in about 3-4 months and try again.  I know this will work, I just know it.  Then, when we eventually buy the place and the housing market gets better (once that fool George W. is gone) we can sell it and make some real money and buy an even better place on the east side of town so she can be close to her family again.  I know thats what she really wants so we are going to do it once we are financially comfortable and not scraping by anymore.

In other news, we had a small electrical fire yesterday.  No flames or anything, but Devon did have to call 911 and have the fire dept come to the house.  I guess the power strip that we had the computer plugged into was old and it had just rotted out and kind of blew from the inside out.  Jeez.  Let that be a lesson: Always replace your power strips once they get old, no matter how good they still look!  I’m just glad no one was hurt and there was no damage to the house.  I think we just have to clean off some soot that got on the wall and carpet.  I just hope the computer isn’t wasted.  There’s a lot of stuff on there that we really don’t want to lose.  Maybe if the cpu is busted we can still salvage the hard drive or something.  Once I buy a new plug strip I’ll plug it in and find out.

Mii is gettin married!

     I saw this and thought it was the most awesome thing ever!  I wish I would’ve thought of doing this with our invites, but chances are I wouldn’t have been able to convince Devon to let me do it anyway : )

Congratulations Kevin, and good job getting such a cool fiance!

Easter weekend 08

Well, I was right.  Eventually my PS3 controller just died and lost all of its power.  When I saw that the little sync light had gone out I plugged it into the console and hoped for the best.  It fired right up and started working again!  I left it plugged in and left the system on all night to ensure it would charge fully before I played it again.  Big relief for me.

My easter was pretty cool.  Went over to the in-law’s house for dinner.  There were a bunch of people there and some that we hadn’t seen since the wedding, so it was good to see them again.  Good food and good times were had by all.

When I got home I beat Resistance Fall of Man finally.  Damn good game in my opinion.  I am tempted to keep playing it because of the enhanced weapons you unlock.  I didn’t know about those, but I got a couple and they’re really cool!  I finally beat God of War 2 last week too.  GODDAMN what an amazing frickin game!!!  I swear the God of War games are my favorite games I’ve ever played in my life.  The ending was awesome and it sets the tone perfectly for the 3rd game.  God of War 3 is going to be incredible, I can’t even wait!  The only thing that frustrated me was the very last context sensitive button presses at the very end of the game.  I kept dying because you have almost no margin for error.  And if you stop and play again later you have to start all the way back at your save point and fight Zeus all over again so I had to keep starting out from the checkpoint right after you beat him.  It took me like 10 tries.  It was all worth it.

Now that I’ve finished those two, I am finally starting to play Call of Duty 4 and No More Heroes.  I have to say that my initial assesment of Call of Duty 4 was rather mixed.  It may have been because I started playing it almost immediately after playing through Resistance and I wasn’t used to it.  I intend to give it a fair chance to grow on me, but there are a few things that I don’t really like.  Its hard for me to tell who to shoot at because the enemies look the same as the guys on my team.  There seems to be very little direction also, as I wasn’t really sure where to go a lot of the time.  Dont get me wrong, the graphics and presentation are excellent!  I am hoping that once I play it a little more and I get a little better at it I will start enjoying it more.  We shall see.

Ultimate peep show

This is fucking hilarious!!!  Happy Easter to all!

I Can Has Wii?

Ok, tell me this isnt the cutest damn thing you’ve ever seen!  Not only that, but I felt this same way many times as a kid growing up and wanting to do nothing else but play games.  Hell, I still want to do nothing else but play games.  But you know how it goes, the whole being a grown up and having responsibility thing.  Gross.

The fam

One of my wife’s friends made this.  Its pretty kick ass I must say : )

Awwww!!!!!

I must admit I’ve always had a big soft spot for bunnies.  They’re just so frickin cute!  I used to have one but he died when my dad went out of town and my brother forgot to feed him all weekend.  Yeah, I was pretty pissed.

Nice goin dummy!

I can see both of my cats getting in this situation.  The little kitty because she’s just that dumb, and Gizmo like to always play with the blinds so I swear its going to happen one of these days.