Friday, April 06, 2007

Old Man, Praying Mantis

I'm pretty sure I walked around for 90 minutes earlier today with my fly open.

It was not an achievement in Pants Hero, in case you're wondering.

In my defense, I was close to numb. I swam in our neighborhood pool for the first time this spring. Water temperature: 65 degrees. I made it through 1600 yards--barely--but my body temperature was lower than normal for quite a while afterwards. Even after I came out of a boiling hot shower, I was still cold. So my brain wasn't working normally [insert your punch line here].

And now, here is the e-mail I'll be receiving from Canada:
My brother got married in Thunder Bay in a swimming pool and the water temperature was 4 Celcius (39 Fahrenheit). At the reception, we ate cheesburgers made out of snow.

I love Canada. It's my favorite country, and I'm not joking.

I've been having a problem with my swimming goggles the last week or so because they've been leaking. If you swim regularly, you know that nothing ruins a workout faster than leaky goggles. And this is the same pair of goggles I've been using for almost three years because they don't leak. I finally had to admit, after four or five terrible swims in a row, that these goggles were end of life.

So I ordered a new pair, and they're huge. They're not a facemask, but they're the biggest goggles I've ever seen. Wearing them, I look like the unholy combination of an old man wearing black sunglasses with side shields and a praying mantis.

These goggles are so big that I was able to look in the rear-view mirror and position them properly--they cover up so much of my face that I could tell how I needed to adjust them. How I looked walking from my car to the pool already wearing a swimming cap and goggles is another story entirely, one that I will not be telling.

My friend John Harwood, who is an excellent Guitar Hero player (still in the top 1% on the career score leaderboard), came over to play some co-op this afternoon. We were looking forward to finding out where we ranked on the co-op leaderboards after playing a few songs, but apparently there aren't co-op leaderboards, unless we were missing something. That seems like such a natural feature that I'm amazed it isn't in the game.

Unless, if course, it is in the game and somehow we just weren't seeing it.

I think we knocked off all the co-op achievements except 800k and 1000K, and we would have gotten 800k if I'd been able to play as well as he did. John said (laughingly) when he first walked in, "We're not playing Heart-Shaped Box on Easy just so you can get the 100% achievement." Getting that one hadn't even crossed my mind, because I figured I'd screw up at least one note at some point, but the last song we played was Strutter on Hard, and we did it.

Co-op is an absolute blast to play, so if you haven't tried it out yet, find a friend and start rocking.

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