A pox upon me

The past week has not been very eventful. Last Tuesday (not yesterday) I woke up itchy, with what appeared to be bug-bites littered around my body. I looked at myself and thought, wow, I know the weather turned warmer recently but I didn't think bugs would have hatched that quickly. I didn't think much of it and just tried to avoid scratching. The next day at school, I overheard a kid mention how he'd been absent for chickenpox. And I thought, oh, damn.

Sure enough, I had contracted the 'pox. I had supposedly been immunized against it when I was younger, but it's evidently not a 100% thing. I was fortunate in that I got it very mildly. Benedryl helped a whole lot with the itchiness, Tylenol helped with the feverishness and headaches, so I really just had to deal with feeling really tired and generally kind of gross. Today will be the first time I've left the property in a week. Luckily it's spring break so I haven't missed much school.

I passed the majority of the time watching movies, playing video games (really just Soul Calibur III), and reading. So here's a few movie micro-reviews.

• Lethal Weapons 1 & 2 - Mediocre. Maybe I would have liked them better if I had watched less Law & Order as a lad and wasn't taking a law class in school. So little respect for protocol or due process, to such an unbelievable extent.
• Total Recall - The best, and only, movie I've watched with a main character named Doug. That made it kind of weird for me when I was watching it. I enjoyed it though, really decent sfx given when it came out.
• Office Space - A classic. The third time I've seen it, and it's just as good.
• Andy Barker, P.I. - Not actually a movie, but a new TV show. It's good though. I like Andy Richter and Tony Hale, the actors are good, and the writing is too.

I have also listened enough to the new Modest Mouse album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, to pass judgment upon it. I don't like it as much as their last two albums, but it's still pretty good, and I think it's worth picking up if you like them. I don't find the melodies in it as compelling, and the vocal style is more often of the kind that I disliked in their older stuff, but that's really a taste thing. Of any song on it, I'd recommend "Missed the Boat" to listen to.

On Monday Rachel came by and dropped off some headphones I had left by accident at her house last time I was over. We walked around a bit before she had to go. Then yesterday she came over again for a little bit. We would have gone out, but there were circumstances preventing me (I wasn't feeling very good and it was part of my punishment from last week). It was a nice day so we sat outside on my balcony and talked. It was last week or the week before but she asked me to escort her to her prom this year and I agreed. So I've got that to look forward to.

Monday night my mom, sister, and I attempted to have a Passover Seder. It wasn't flawless, but we tried. We got the food more or less right, we did what of the readings we could, and although the whole thing was pretty jerry-rigged, it was a nice night. If any of us had taken it more seriously, there would have been some serious disappointment and/or offense taken. But we didn't, so it was good.

I've also spent a lot of time working on my iBook, which I finally had fixed and got back after it broke in whatever, December. I backed up the hard drive, properly this time, wiped it, and tried to reinstall Mac OS 10.4. Unfortunately, at some point my install DVD got scratched up and so I kept getting errors during install. I bought a disk repair kit, and used it repeatedly, but it didn't help. I eventually managed to get it to work by only choosing to install the absolute basics. I'm still working on getting all of my applications and settings and such on it. It's running really nicely, especially given it's going on six years old.

I've also been working on going through and adding labels to some posts. Given the 200+ posts on this blog, I can't imagine I'll finish that task for quite some time. I'm just waiting until I find myself with a hunk of time, nothing better to do, and I'm in a nice, OCD mood.