Still recovering somewhat from yesterday's New Year's Eve party at Markie's: champagne and I do not get along. Ugh.

Also, I resolve in 2009 not to play King's Cup as anything other than a pre-party drinking game. That is its only rightful purpose.

Since my last post the situation at my workplace has deteriorated a bit, with everyone being forced to take 80 hours of time off, either unpaid or covered by as much vacation time as we could muster. I was one of the lucky ones with almost a week's worth of "real" vacation saved up, so last week was covered but this week is like college winter break all over again.

For better or worse, Fallout 3 has been a great time-sink; I've logged more than 100 hours and I think I'll finally go and complete the final mission either today or tomorrow. I don't think I should have to defend single-player videogames from the charge that they're a "waste of time," but I'm guessing I might have read a bit more this past week if I hadn't had the Capital Wasteland to explore.

Ben is back for the holidays, so yesterday and the day before we played through some of the Left 4 Dead campaigns, killing zombies in co-op. That and fancy dark beer more than sufficed as a pre-party yesterday, but we also hit up the Flat Earth Brewery for the last day of Porterfest.

This probably sounds more exciting than it is: with Jess gone and Ben returning to Florida this weekend, I'm doing more drinking than usual in preparation for the drier days ahead.

Which is kind of fine, because I need to save up some more money starting... now.

(Barry rented season five of The Wire — as I said last night, it's the one show I like that I've never had to apologize for, and I insist that you check out season one — and I'm looking forward to being extremely entertained on the cheap this month.)

I think I've told you before that I'm not a big fan of public New Year's resolutions, so there's not much I can say here to mark the date, January 1st, 2009, the current big deal.

I will note that I've had some mediocre years but 2008 wasn't one of them: I think I did pretty well, life-wise, and if I'm not exactly who or where I want to be yet, I nonetheless think that I'm getting there.

It's not exactly a resolution, but blogging/writing more is part of what I need to do this year, so expect a post every week, at the very least a "Five" on Wednesdays. My Christmas was fairly epic (and it's not quite over!) so I'll have to write something about that too once the dust settles.