Had time to breath at work today, which was a nice change of pace.

Amanda made dinner for Michael’s birthday today.  His birthday is actually Friday, but he’s going to Richlands for that.  She made steak and chicken (I think with soy sauce) and rice.  It was quite yummy.

Tomorrow is Rick Titus’s birthday.  Happy birthday, Rick!

I’m still a bit stuffy, but I don’t feel too bad overall.

So Michael stuck around after dinner and we all played Rock Band.  He played the drums, I was on guitar and Amanda sang.  We switched for the last set of songs that we did- I was on drums, Amanda on guitar and Michael on vocals.  After that he flipped between the Carolina-Miami and Lakers games.  I heard Carolina eventually won, and the Lakers lost.

Meanwhile, Amanda watched American Idol.  I ostensibly watched it with her.  After that a new show called Moment of Truth premiered.  It’s the newest thing to cause strife in marriages!  A person answers questions while hooked up to a lie detector before the show, then during the show, with their loved one and friends sitting in front of them, they answer questions, and if the answer doesn’t match up with the lie detector results they lose.  I’ll admit that it was intriguing in that lowest common denominator sense, but there was one thing that really annoyed me.  At least since Who Wants to be a Millionaire game it’s become exceedingly popular for shows to have had long pauses between the beginning of sentences and the final word that tells you whether or not you are right or not.  That’s fine, I understand it builds suspense.  But on this show it’s taken to an obnoxious degree.  I mean I think I counted ten seconds one time.  That doesn’t sound like a lot, but for dead air on TV, that’s nearly an hour.  It got so Amanda would actually fast forward the break between words on the DVR just because it was so excessive.

Anyhoo, I put up some clothes when Amanda went to bed then got on Call of Duty 4.  A while back Michael and Chris Flowers (before he got rid of his Xbox) started a clan called RUMP on CoD4 just for the hell of it.  Naturally I joined, along with several other people we play online with pretty often.  We’ve picked up a number of friends of friends and random people who were playing alongside of us.  I just mention it because, as we like to tell people, we’re a pretty big deal.  (We’re not, actually, but I think people have started to recognize the RUMP tag.)

So I played a bit of Call of Duty 4 and I actually did okay tonight.  One guy we play with a lot, X26, is consistently the top scorer, followed by Michael.  They usually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 20+ kills.  I averaged somewhere between seven and eight tonight, which usually made me third place.  We lost a bunch of games when I got on (they had been doing well before, and I warned them that now that I was on that would change) but we ended up the night with a number of wins.

Zach Dotsey