April has been a funny month. Not hilarious, or oddly peculiar. In fact, now I think about it there's nothing particularly funny about April at all. Forget I mentioned it.
The schools being closed for a fortnight over Easter gave me some precious time with the fruit of my loin, which in addition to her bicycle escapades also saw her attempt golf for the first time, complete with a solid five foot put. Already aspects of her game are superior to mine. She'll be five next month so will naturally be turning pro.
Days in the park, basketball and football were fun, though did highlight my ever expanding waist and my need to step up my weight loss and fitness regime. Time to fish a dusty Wii Fit board out from under the TV unit. Firing it up I discovered that it had been over three hundred days since my last workout, giving my beloved and ever supportive wife yet another opportunity to assert her correctness. Looking at the figures from last year I was genuinely surprised to see that I had been losing weight at a nice steady pace, so I started to wonder why I'd stopped using it. Some uncomfortable memories of my former employer followed. Extra work, additional hours, integrating new people following another acquisition, re-routing the fleet, and the regional manager suggesting that I should tell the disruptive elements of the workforce that I masturbate regularly, as a way to endear myself to them. I'm still not sure how that was supposed to work. Perhaps the thought was that once informed they'd invite me to their masturbation parties.
As I no longer have those excuses, I mean reasons, I'm back on the fitness trail. This is where it gets difficult though. I know why I'm fat. I eat too much and exercise too little. I eat because I'm hungry, because I'm unhappy, because I'm happy, and because I like food. I don't exercise enough because I'd rather be eating. Particularly crisps. In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to eat.
As I'm being healthy I had a large bowl of Bran Flakes, with a Cheerios chaser.
Getting back to exercise, the idea is to burn off more calories than you take in, only, the exercise makes me hungry. So I eat. I learned that lesson early, which is why I stopped using the treadmill after breakfast while watching The Wright Stuff and switched to watching Stargate SG1 before lunch. Whether this fresh impetus will work is solely down to me, and I think that's the main problem with weight loss and exercise. The only people who can effect change are the people whose lack of discipline got themselves into that state in the first place.
On the game front I finished Far Cry 2 (PC) and found the whole experience somewhat lacking. For all it's free form pretensions I found it to be little more than a series of fetch quests through familiar terrain and endlessly spawning enemies with Steve Austin-O-Vision. That's not to say it wasn't fun. It was. The weapons and vehicles were well realised. The environment was suitably varied, if a little ecodome-esque, and graphically it was stunning. Game breakers for me were the likes of destroying a checkpoint, including blowing up the gas cylinders and fuel storage and killing everybody on site, only to return a short while later and find the thing rebuilt and fully manned. It's all well and good having great fire effects and showing them off as the fire rages and spreads across the grass, but when that grass grows back into a lush carpet within the day, the suspension of disbelief puts on it's coat, gets into it's jet powered rocket copter, and trundles off back to Jelly Tot Land.
On a happier note I corrected a grievous error on my part and finally played Knights of the Old Republic (PC). When it was released back in 2003 I had a quick go on a friend's X-Box, and I didn't take to it. Since then I couldn't help but notice the reverence with which it and its sequel have been held by the PC community at large. There is a fear with such things that nostalgia does have a habit of painting things much more vibrantly than they may appear to the naked eye, so when I installed it and it proceeded to crash to desktop on a regular basis I was in danger of letting my frustration cloud my judgement and dismiss the game. Obviously the issue is down to the game being so old and Windows, despite what Microsoft may say and what we PC gamers may extol about our wealth of a back catalogue, doesn't play well with it's older siblings. Thankfully the issues brought about by Vista and in particular 64bit Vista are not uncommon and I found a number of fixes, none of which work fully but that between them made the game playable. As long as I saved my progress frequently I was able to make it through to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. At some point I will return to it and play through again, allowing the dark side to rule. For now I remain a child of the light. A fat man-child of the light casting a grotesque shadow, but a child of the light all the same.
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