What have I been doing? I ask that because I’ve been poking around friends’ blogs/journals/whatever, and have been thinking to myself, what is it that I do, when I’m not at work, when I have free time? I haven’t read a book in about a month.

But I guess I have been doing stuff. Cooking, some – made some shallow-fried chicken last week that was pretty tasty, and easy enough to do that it could be a “regular” recipe, as well as braised some baby back ribs that turned out well, but could have been better with some tweaking to the sauce. Both were Alton Brown recipes, and both were easy enough that it reminds me why I like cooking, and why I like home-cooked food. It’s fun, essentially, assembling food and turning it into something else, and even more fulfilling when you can make changes to it that you feel improve things, and get other people to enjoy it, as well. The sad thing is, though, that both those recipes take planning, and though frying the chicken only takes about an hour of actual time, that puts dinner back to something like 8:30pm if I try to cook on a *regular* night back from work. The ribs were a four and a half hour process – most of which was sitting there while the oven did its thing, but the point being, I can’t make that recipe, except on the weekends, ever. Which sucks.

Other’n that, been brainstorming on design ideas for work, despite the fact that my input counts as much as any other schmuck peon – still, might as well have *good* schmuck-peon input as anything else. And working on the art assets for a GBA game I’m developing with some of my peeps, for a contest whose deadline’s in December.

Also been playing Halo 2 – despite a lot of derision over the single-player campaign, I’m enjoying it as much, if not more than I thought I would, and the multiplayer is absolutely phenomenal. It introduces a whole new paradigm to online play – one that I think will be adopted by the Live service in general – where the “party” is the central unit around which games are created, and not individual players. There’s also an excellent ranking system and matchmaking service, that provides almost uniformly well-matched, and challenging opponents for a wide variety of game types. It’s great stuff, extremely high quality, addictive, and really goddamn fun to boot.

Oh – and in case anyone’s wondering – the Roomba is awesome. It’s not a particularly powerful vacuum, but the ability to run it when you’re not at home, and for it to run for two hours solid lets it clean up the house, passively, much better than I’d have expected it to. I used to sit there and ball up little bits of Mobius’ shed fur, but all I need to do now is run the Roomba, and it’ll pick up 90% of it for me passively. To get the *real* dirt out of the rug will require a vacuuming with a real vacuum, but the contribution the Roomba makes to our quality of life was definitely worth the $140 it cost.