Yeah, we've moved. Almost two weeks ago, in fact (first Thursday in December was the move in date); all over save the unpacking now. Himself seems to have most of the networking problems sorted out (for a while there we had two out of three of internet, working wireless network, and working gateway) so while I don't yet have a desk (it's on the list of furniture to purchase at some stage) I'm able to turn a corner of the dining table into my computer space.

The new place has a lot of good features about it, but one of the negative ones is there's approximately one-third the storage space of the old place. On the positive side, it has a bedroom more than the old place, so we've turned the final bedroom into a storeroom. It's also holding my chest of drawers, since the bedroom I've chosen turns out to be just large enough to hold my bed (queen size) and that's about it. The main bedroom of the house has been turned into Himself's den, so he's in another of the secondary bedrooms for sleeping. The secondary bedrooms all pretty much face east, so I get a nice early wake-up in the morning (as you'll probably have figured out by the posting time of this update).

At present we're still learning what's available where (neither of us have lived down in the extreme south of Perth before - Himself was based in the western suburbs, I'm from the south-eastern corridor) and sort of finding our feet. Our local shopping centre is reasonably comprehensive - two major supermarkets, two discount/seconds/reject shops (no regular stock listing, but lots of weird and wonderful variety, all of it cheap), a greengrocer and a butcher, plus a bookstore which immediately won my approval by having a range of merchandise including one of the Twilight/Buffy crossover t-shirts ("Then Buffy staked Edward. The end."), along with a chemist, a discount shoe shop, and a pawnbroker. This last is confirmation we're in social security recipient heartland. The nearest regional centre (Rockingham) has a larger mall which I visited yesterday to find out what was available, and the main cinemas are just across the road from the mall.

Since I haven't had the opportunity to start putting books up onto bookshelves, I've been filling in time by playing games on the Xbox. Mostly "The Last Remnant" - I've discovered if I sit a bit closer to the screen, I can make out enough of the text to get a reasonably good idea of what the words are. So I've restarted playing through (I'm up to the first runthrough in the Catacombs, but I'm busy doing a stroll through all the other areas I've opened up first... have I mentioned I over-grind something 'orrible? Battle level 60, and counting) and I'm doing my usual note-taking and such (I'm now up to about a dozen different pieces of paper, each covering different things). It's a good game to be fiddling about with - nice bishounen heroes, easy battle system, standard Squeenix battle frequency (walk walk attack), and it keeps my brain busy enough to get through the hottest hours of the day.

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Current Mood: peaceful

Well, after a weekend spent getting at least some use out of my new XBox 360, I have the following to report:

1) Their wireless controllers appear to have a small design glitch, which means occasionally the batteries slip out of contact with the contacts, such that one has to stop every so often to get the wretched thing to reconnect to the system. This generally involves either pushing the battery cartridge up or tapping it a couple of times to ensure everything falls into place.
2) The Last Remnant is designed for people with a large, flatscreen TV. As a result, the majority of the text on my normal sized little CRT telly is so small as to be unreadable. Given this includes things like descriptions of items, battle commands etc, this is clearly a Bad Thing, and means my next purchase from fairy money is going to have to be a new TV.
3) Squeenix have clearly decided their party structure from FFX and FFXII is the ideal one, since I can clearly identify the main character of The Last Remnant as a clueless nitwit who has no idea about polite behaviour (if you've ever met either Tidus or Vaan, you'll know what I mean); there's a grumpy older female character (Lulu or Fran); and I'm sure the plucky younger female character would have shown up within about another ten or so minutes (Rikku, Penelo). So, we just need to find the strong, silent male character (Kimahri, Basch, Auron), the snarkier male contemporary of the hero (Balthier, Wakka) and the serious third female contemporary of the hero who's actually the focus of the plotline (Yuna, Ashe). I've no doubt they're in there somewhere, but I couldn't handle the amount of squinting I was going to have to do in order to keep playing the game.
4) Assassin's Creed has one serious deficiency which I find annoying: there don't appear to be subtitles available (plus it's designed for people who have the larger screen TVs as well... this appears to be a regular thing with XBox games). Given I need either clear mouth movements or subtitles (preferably subtitles) to make sense of dialogue when I'm faced with a tangle of syllables and noises which could be words but which aren't particularly clear. The other alternative is raising the volume to levels where the neighbours are being disturbed, which isn't my preferred one.
5) Tales of Symphonia is a very good game, with an interestingly complex morality woven through it. Bad things happen to good people, the world isn't just "good guys" and "bad guys", and the problems the protagonists are attempting to resolve are believably complex. I like.

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Current Mood: awake

This week I received my tax refund cheque. $600 dollars and change, being the sum total of all the income tax installments I paid to the Australian government in the 2008 - 2009 financial year. Yays, moneys. I could be a good girl, and use it to pay for all kinds of things, but I have a long-standing tradition of regarding tax refund cheques as "fairy money", which is reserved for treats.

So I went out and purchased myself an XBox360 Elite (the one with the 120GB hard drive), plus a few games. My rationale is that it appears Square Enix are moving across to this platform now as well as the Sony ones, so having an Xbox means I'll be able to enjoy their plots some more. I now have a new toy to play with, so blog posts may be a little light on the ground for a bit while I try it out.

The games I now have: Lego Batman, Pure (motocross, I think?), Forza 3 racing, Kameo (it was supposed to be a copy of Assassin's Creed, but while they had the box, they didn't have the disk, so I got to pick another to the same value), Last Remnant, Eternal Sonata, and Assassin's Creed. Lego Batman and Pure came with the console. The next two were part of a package deal at the place I bought the console (Target, for my Aussie readers - it was the cheapest there at $429 for the bundle). I got the other three games at EBGames, because I'd seen a copy of Last Remnant in there the day before.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to unpack my new toy, and start playing.

*boing!*

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Current Mood: glee

Okay, it's been three weeks since the major meltdown, one week from the mini-meltdown which was averted by immersing myself in FF:Dissidia to the point of obsession (I'm now dreaming Dissidia battles... time to cut the playing down a bit). I'm vaguely sane at present (which reminds me - meds!) and hoping to stay so, even though the universe appears to be trying to make me go completely bonkers. My give-a-damn still isn't, so I'm currently behind on cooking, cleaning and doing anything other than levelling up characters on the PSP.

Dissidia is ... interesting. I've managed to get one character up to level 100 (Cloud) and I'm working on my second (Squall). Discovered that the guy who's voicing Squall isn't the same guy who voiced him in Kingdom Hearts, which says a lot about my hearing, doesn't it? The story mode is sorta fun, although there's a limited amount of enjoyment I can get from it (mostly because I get bored by running through the same thing over and over) - so far I've found the best fun comes from running through story mode for each character once, then coming back and doing it again after they've levelled up a bit (I ran Cloud back through his on level 80 or so, which was a bit like swatting flies with a sledgehammer... for some reason I got a perfect score for section completion after that; Squall went back through at level 30). So far I've beaten Chaos once (he's a right whatsit to beat - three-stage boss, so you have to kill him three times rather than just the once) and seen the final little FMV cutscene, which is cute.

I think one of the things I like about Dissidia is they have the age balance right for Cloud and Squall. One of my pet peeves in KH fandom is that people tend to assume Squall is older than Cloud (probably because Squall has a deeper voice). In fact, it's t'other way round - Cloud starts his game at age 21, while Squall is a good four years younger at age 17 - and if you assume each game took 1 year to run that has Cloud ending up at age 22, with Squall coming in at age 18. Advent Children takes place 2 years after the initial Final Fantasy game, so in Advent Children, Cloud is at least 23. Dissidia Squall looks younger than Dissidia Cloud, which makes me feel all is right with the world again. And yes, I am a picky fangirl.

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Current Mood: okay

Gods, where to start? It's been a bit of a frantic week-and-a-bit. Let's see - how about I give a rundown of "good things and bad things" and then an expansion in TL;DR below.

Good things:

• Meds packaged in blister pack, Silver Chain stuff almost up and running.


• Purchased Dissidia on Tuesday, already 9/10ths of the way through the initial part of Story Mode


• Heard from my folks, they're coming back to Perth early

• Still depressed


• Court hearing on Tuesday resulted in an order to hand over the house


• Still unemployed

Current Mood: stressed