It’s Monday and I’m back from a week off, which was spent driving to visit people and sleeping an incredibly large amount of time.

I have been spending some time trying to refresh my memory of a language I studied in college (german) for very little good reason other than I felt it was unfortunate to have absolutely no recollection of something I spent 3 semesters learning.

I got some sun, although much of the week was cold and/or rainy where I was.

I watched a hell of a lot of soccer in the past few weeks.  The UEFA Cup, the Champions League final, and the last week of the Premier League, with all the drama of relegation has really rekindled my love for the sport.  I thought it was remarkable that within the span of about 45 minutes, a week or so ago, I encountered three different people walking around campus with three different football kits on: Chelsea, Arsenal and Man U, plus I overheard a guy in line at Best Buy on the phone going on and on about how great a game FIFA 09 was (I didn’t find it quite that much fun, but soccer games never really did click with me).  I suppose it’s not just me who felt some football fever lately.

I picked up Fallout 3 on that trip to Best Buy, which I had not really read too much about, but I had heard it was a good game.  Within a couple minutes I realized this game was exactly Oblivion with a facelift.  Oblivion is a great game, which I spent countless hours and days playing when I first got my 360, so Fallout has a lot going for it already.  However it lost some of the charm of Oblivion.  Gone are the many various landscapes you find in the lands of Oblivion, replaced with a barren wasteland that stays barren.  The combat has the same frustrating and slow melee that was found in Oblivion (which Matt seemed to love, but I found aggravating), but adds to it with the interesting VATS slow motion combat system, and loads of guns and explosives.  I haven’t gone that far in the main story yet, but so far it’s at least had a much more varied vocal cast.  (Oblivion had like 4 people speaking for the hundreds of characters… it was distracting.)

But it’s back to the grind now, back to work and waking up early and going to bed at a reasonable time and all that.  It’s not so bad though, I can only stand doing nothing for so long.