Today is projected to be a 100+ day with LOTS OF YUMMY humidity. I'm currently sitting in a beach condo in Carolina Beach, NC where it's currently 80 degrees (at 9a) with 80% humidity.

It's one of those moments that I feel very conflicted because holy OMG I'm at THE BEACH and there's an amazing view of the ocean and it's beautiful out, but it's frickin going to be 100 degrees + 80% humidity, and basically, that is an equation for death. A deathquation if you will.

And yet, I am drinking hot coffee (lolz) and pondering going out and picking up a dozen donuts from a famous donut shop (http://www.carolinabeach.net/britts1.html) just a mile away. I'm betting they would be pretty melted by the time I got them back though... hrrrm.

God I am so jealous of said condo owners amazing condo on the beach. I told Charlie that I want to get one one day and he said, "Well maybe if you stopped buying new cars every 2 years, you could." He does have a point, lol.

Things are just phenomenal right now.

I really couldn't ask for a better life. Got a promotion yesterday (from associate producer to Producer), and a big decision ahead of me. Birthday is tomorrow, 27 years old! SO OLD. I can still remember yesterday when I was a 19 yo kid skipping class in order to go to the arcade. Funny though, I don't really feel that different inside. Maybe a bit older/wiser and all of that, but still feel like an eternal kid. Wearing my University of WA Tshirt to work today and a blue hoodie with jeans and adidas (black and pink) superstars. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever grow out of that. I feel like it's so apart of me and just who I am, but I'm sure by the time I get into my 30s, it'll look out of place or something.

A friend at work offered up his beach condo to Char and I this weekend since it's my birthday and all of that. How could we say no!? Sounds like a great time - sitting on the beach, catching up on my comic books and regular books (I've got In the Woods and A Good Earth (again) to finish). There's also dive trips going on this weekend, so may be a perfect opportunity to rent gear and go out there since this weekends' dive is off of Wilmington, and we're staying just south of Wilmington.

Cats are great, Char is great - he got a new job a few weeks ago and seems to be having a great time of it. It's a super small company with tons of potential to become even more amazing. :) Can't really ask for any better!

The front page of our local newspaper contains damn near 100% sports stories. Yeah, I know, blahblah March Madness blahblahblah. In NC, this is a big deal because of Wake Forest, Duke, and UNC all having uber basketball teams etcetcetc. But wtf - trying to even imply that this shit deserves such prime real estate when there are many other things going on news-wise seems ridic. I'm not a fan.

Lately I've been on a shopping binge. I kinda went nuts last week and bought a car... and I've spent WAY too much money on clothes but have returned like 90% of it. I have plenty of justification, but admittedly not being the most responsible with our money right now. I figure as long as we have savings, then it's OK, right? :D

Next week is GDC, and it's going to be madness. Literally sessions packed in hour to hour. If I'm not in sessions, I'm holding down the fort at our Unreal Technologies booth. My talk practice has been going really well, I'm really excited about giving a talk like this in front of my peers, but also a little nervous. I'm sure it'll be fine, but also scared of the worst potentially happening. I'm very excited to be in SF after having not been there for years. I can't wait, it's going to be crazy.

God, I have to charge my zune and load it with some new music! Too much to do...

Diet's been going fairly well... hit a major milestone this week. I'm definitely feeling strong, and willpower continues to be high on exercise, but it's lowering in the food department. My 1400 calorie resolve is slowly lowering. God, tonight I probably ate just that much for dinner lol. I figure it's always good to have one bad day a week to get it out of your system, but then I also calculate that into my overall 'potential loss' for the week and then just get sad. The next month isn't about balance so much as just getting ready for the wedding and being in good shape for Hawaii (we want to do lots and lots of active stuff!). We'll see... anyways, hope everyone is doing well!

And extoll my hatred while it's still fresh inside of me. Unfortunately, such hate requires a bit of information to fully involve the reader in the hatred.

Lately, I've been eating extremely healthfully... low number of calories, relatively balanced nutrition, etc. In order to meet my life goals, I need to burn appx. 500 calories a day in some respect (either via exercise or not eating), so I choose to do a combination of both.

Based on this, I have had my metabolic resting rate measured, and I know that I burn 1270 calories doing nothing. If I were to lose 1 lb a week without exercise, that means I could only consume about 820 calories a day. For those who consider that startlingly low, well, it is! So this is where exercise comes in. On a daily basis, I attempt to burn 500 calories a day in exercise, bringing my allowable eating total to 1320 calories a day IF I remain completely sedentary outside of exercise (which is pretty much garaunteed given my job).

I round that up to 1400 calories a day total spread over 5 or 6 meals because I'm not so concerned with losing 1 lb/week, and I would like a balance of losing some amount of weight over time (until I'm at my appropriate body fat %) with not feeling constant hunger.

I've also had my caloric burn rate measured and I know that if I keep my heart rate between 173 and 184 BPM for about 40 mins with a 10 minute warm up and a 10 minute cool down, I will achieve the 500 calorie burn (at my current metabolic burn rate). If you add time for getting ready, driving to the gym, taking a shower, and driving back, it's about a 2.5 hour daily investment all said and done. I know this works because I've lost 4% body fat + 3 lbs in four weeks. Science is marvelous.

So, long story short, in order for me to lose less than a pound a week, I make a HUGE time and tracking investment because my metabolism sucks balls.

This brings me full circle to my burning hatred. As part of a lunch meeting today, I was given a sandwich shop 'boxed lunch', which contains a turkey sandwich (which only contains TURKEY, BREAD, LETTUCE, MAYO, AND TOMATO), a chocolate cookie, and a bag of chips. OK, so obviously the cookie and bag of chips are bad (momma didn't raise no fool). But imagine my surprise when I get back to my desk only to find out that the oh so innocent turkey sandwich was 970 calories and 57 grams of fat. You know, that total boxed lunch was more than I can eat a day in calories - all in all, it was 1630 calories and 104 grams of fat.

This should be illegal. No one in the united states of america should ever consume that much calories or fat in one meal. The fact that it's even offered offends me as a human being. Yes, people have a choice to eat whatever we want, but what the fuck. What about those of us who actually want to be healthy? I ate HALF of that sandwich and no chips or cookie and still screwed my daily meal plan. How was I supposed to know that a sandwich WITH NO CHEESE ON IT could possibly be so bad for me?! It did have nice fat bread on it, but how can bread even hold that much badness? It boggles my mind! I didn't just consume a double whopper or a big mac, I ate half of a turkey sandwich for the love of god.

It makes me want to boycott restaurants altogether. Sure, you want to make money by making the tastiest thing possible, but what about a committment to some sort of common sense? How about requiring nutrition labels on all of this crap? How about requiring that no "value meal" be allowed to exceed 1000 calories? Is that really so much to ask? It seems pretty straightforward to me.

OK, time to get back to work lol.

Cha took them today. She's a cutie pie. :)

I started out making this entry once again about how blahblah happy I am blahblah and life is so amazing etcetc. And then I stopped and deleted it because really truly, there's a lot of bad shit going down in this world. The economy is sitting in a giant pile of poo and Charlie's company was shut down due to lack of funding.

However, that being said, there are many things to be happy and excited for... we can just hope that the economy will pick back up within the next few years or else I may be making a very different blog post heh. Anyways, fun stuffs!

- Going to SanFran in a month, gonna see KEEVON, and do a talk at the Game Developers Conference

- Charlie and I are having our honest to goodness wedding in May and I'm so excited about everything involved with it, it's pretty much going to be the best time ever. I found the most perfect amazing dress a few months ago and found some pretty OK shoes to go with the dress, but it's hard to find purple (hehe) sandal flats that one can wear with a wedding dress. :)

- We're honeymooning in Barcelona, Spain for four days in November, followed by a Western Mediterranean cruise to Naples, Pisa, Rome, Nice, and Marseilles. This is really an extravagance afforded by the fact that I got an amazing deal on the trip, and Charlie has never left the country, so may as well visit as many countries as possible once we've crossed the ocean!*

*I do feel somewhat bad for buying this given our money situation... however, as long as we don't have to go into debt to afford it, I feel pretty OK about going for it. I'm getting old, and I've wasted too much time before this point not traveling!

- Work is going great, lots of exciting projects... none of which I can talk about haha. Well, there was the free expansion pack that we released for UT3 a few days ago! I worked on that a bit :) Basically what I do at Epic is ensure that the team will ship on time. That is a really nebulous job description, I should say! I've been working on a mini-project based solely on a new method of tracking time and tasks and workflow pipelines (fun stuff, eh!?), and the experiment that I've been trying that had been naysayed and hohummed is now gaining major traction. I've already started implementing it into our next big title, and I think it should really make a difference when we use it in a full fledged fashion!

- Since the New Year (not a resolution, mind you - just a wedding pressing down on me!), I've been eating relatively well, keeping a food journal, and exercising 6 times a week. I do 2 days a week of bikram yoga, 2 days a week of strength training, and 2 days a week of standard cardio. I've never had such success or stuck with a workout regimen (sans DDR) as well as with this. Doing 2 days a week of bikram yoga really breaks up the routine, and helps stretch out sore muscles from strength training. Doing 2 days a week of running on a treadmill or elliptical is actually manageable - doing it 4 days a week is not (I get bored quickly :P). I combine that with a steady diet of 1400 - 1500 calories of food over 5 - 6 meals a day. Last meal (or 3p meal) is always an "eat whatever tanya wants under 150 calories meal," so if I'm craving chocolate or ice cream (well, frozen yogurt haha), I use that token for it so I never feel like I'm on an unmanageable "diet." Really enjoying it so far.

- I've never been one to believe in the traditional definition of soul mates. I've always thought that life is far too complex to say that there is that "perfect" person for each of us, and to honestly believe that is just ignorance and naivety of what love truly is. I do believe that each of us has a gut instinct when we start the courting process, and if we were to redefine a soul mate as 'someone who complements us at an instinctual level,' then I would say that Charlie is that for me. From the moment we met, it was instant chemistry and passion that was undeniable, and over the years (almost 6.5 of them!), we have so perfectly fit into each others lives, helping to shape and grow each other into the people that we are today. I love this man and am so excited for what the future has to offer - us and our FOUR cats.

- We now have four cats lol. We rescued a fourth last week named Lucky! She's 8 years old, so it felt a bit unfair to rename her, but she's a long haired cat, all grey with white paws and green eyes. I figure this makes us crazy cat people, but I don't care. Having four is very similar to having three except more poo to scoop (which char does), and one more bowl in the food line. Lucky is the sweetest thing ever... doesn't seem to have a care in the world and is rather independent, which is a breath of fresh air considering our other three are the largest attention whores in the universe. Pix will be forthcoming. :)

Bleh all I want to do these days is sleep... sleeeep... it sounds so nice. :(

I've got this crazy sore throat and illness that was suddenly thrust onto me last night. Since multiple other people I hung out with over the weekend are also sick today, it surely doesn't surprise me.

However, it remains that being sick sucks.

We've been watching Arrested Development lately and the show is just... really just too good. I think I would have to put it up there with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Rome as my favorite series' of all time. I had seen Arrested Development before, but never in order, and so now perhaps because of that or because my tastes have matured (or something), it's just too good. I think my favorite moment is when Buster realizes that Oscar is his father because he offers him popcorn called "Pop-Secret." I mean COME ON!

I really wish the show was still on the air, however, I'm guessing it would've gotten lame like The Office did.

It's supposed to snow tonight - 3 - 5", they say! That's pretty cool (snow cool!) :D.

It's interesting, Charlie and I have more recently "discovered" "going out." What does that mean, you ask? Just the process of meeting up with friends in downtown Raleigh and eating at some glorious food place and then going to a bar or club. There's a few decent places downtown, and while I HATE clubs with a fervor that cannot be quelled... it's fun being with Cha and dancing and hanging out.

Bought new appliances for the house - now THAT was a chore. I figured out that when I'm indecisive on house stuff it's because what I really want is too expensive and I'm not willing to pay as much for it. Due to that, I end up not getting anything, which is lame. That changed on Saturday when I found an open box GE Profile bottom freezer stainless steel fridge for $900 BOO YAH... ended up buying replacements for all of my appliances lols. So long money, I barely knew thee!

Happy 2009! This year has been crazy, let's see - time for a recap!

- Bought a house (and LOVE our house!)
- Traveled (Seattle X2, Paris, Prague, Poland, and Russia)
- Married my favorite person in the whole universe
- Planned a wedding (well, it's almost entirely done ;)) and bought a wedding dress!
- Worked my ass off
- Shipped a game (Gears2 baby)
- Lost 15 lbs
- Spent WAYYY too much money (it sickens me!!)
- Made a few new friends
- Hopefully rekindled a few old friendships
- Lost a very good friend (RIP Melissa)
- Lost a grandfather (RIP Grandpa Don)
- Got class accepted for GDC
- Learned that having a yard is hard work
- Played Rockband in front of a live audience (as part of a competition)
- Started Vocal Lessons as a result of rockband lol
- Died my hair brown, then died it blonde again
- Rekindled my love for reading (Read about a book a month or so)
- Found a new love for tea
- Made a fool out of myself at one of my favorite restaurants (alas, I can no longer return..)
- Lost a lot of money in retirement accounts

Overall, 2008 was 80% amazing, 20% suck. There were quite a few hard times, but many memorable moments that I'll never forget. Here's to hoping that 2009 is better for us as well as all of our loved ones who may be going through rough times.

So Charlie said that if I got this awesome camera, I'd only take pictures of the cats. Well I sure do love proving him wrong, but...

Without further ado, may I present pictures of Zuki!!
:D


She's getting ready to lick my face D:

( Read more... )

So Charlie and I are supposed to go to Seattle on the 23rd. Taking a look at the weather revealed that it's supposed to be snowing relatively continuously until then. Bleh. All of the various factors do not add up to goodness - Flying in at midnight, crappy rental car, contintental feeling crash happy this season (srsly TWO continental mishaps in one day?)... maybe it'd be better just to stay home and sleep in a warm cozy bed with the kitties. :P

Lately I've been obsessed with a domestic agenda. About 1/2 of the bottom floor of my house is completely empty and I'd really like to turn it into a library/study of some sort. The problem is that the room's dimensions aren't really suited to lots of bookshelves. Also, furniture is expensive... so I keep figuring out what I want, then looking at the prices of the stuff and just feeling so bad about it that I go back to square one. Part of the problem is that my house has one too many common areas lol. I have essentially 3 living room type places and the one that is empty is the "formal" one. I could move a living room that's upstairs to the downstairs, but the floorplans just don't work out all that great unless I split my sectional sofa. And THEN what - we have this bonus room on the top floor which would be totally empty then. I've toyed around with the idea of making it my "creative" room, but what that really means is that it'd probably go unused lol. Anyways... blah.

Charlie got me a new camera that I've been drooling over for a while after realizing I wanted to get a DSLR. It's the Canon Rebel XSi :O~~~~~~. It arrives tomorrow with a 16 gig (!!!) flash memory card, and a ton of neato goodies with it. I'm so freaking excited. I've always loved photography, but never really thought my picture taking skills were any good. However, lately I've been getting quite a few comments on my photos, so I'd like to take the time to learn the art of it and hopefully become much better. Especially since I have a little bit of opportunities to travel, it'd almost be negligent not to capture as much as I can!

Hope everyone's holidays turn out well, fingers crossed we're still alive when we get to my parents house! :)

So basically this week was utterly nuts. It was like crunch again... I was working 9a - midnight most everyday of the week (save 1). I am feeeeling like the next two weeks won't be nearly as bad, but I kind of doubt it.

So, due to that, and the fact that we had a Christmas party on Friday, I basically became a slug for the weekend.

Our Christmas party was all nice n stuff, and then Charlie and I went out to downtown Raleigh to party. However, I don't remember it too well (yay alcohol kills brain cells!), other than losing my money at some point (oops). Went to two or three different club type places, probably said some stupid stuff, and ended up at a friends' house around 3 or 4a. Overall, it was pretty fun, definitely something nice to do maybe 3 or 4 times a year ;D.

On Saturday, woke up around 2p, pretty much did nothing until 2a. Well, that nothing involved watching a ton of TV and movies. :)

TODAY however, I was on a mission. I was going to buy holiday decorations and put up some lights... maybe a snowman in the yard or something. I mean, I'm an atheist who loves the holidays, what can I say? For what it's worth, Christmas was never about "the birth of christ" for me, or any of that malarky... I just love the season - cold weather, hot cocoa, blinking lights, warm fireplaces, giving presents/making people happy, etc. Yeah, it's probably a bit weird haha. Anywhoo, I went out and realized one thing... it's damned expensive to decorate a house for Christmas! I saw ugly wreaths for $40, cheesy snowmen for $80, I mean, wtf! In order to demonstrate my sociological programming, I have to pay an arm and a leg???...Yeah, I get it too. :)

Oh well! Ultimately realized I'd rather spend that money on presents for the kitties or something. So in the end, bought some stockings for the kitties to hang on the fireplace, some good books, and Prince of Persia... yep! That makes up about the money it would've cost to put up a snowman /shakes fist.

Eh well, here's to hoping this next week mellows out a bit and that maybe Marshall's will have some cheap holiday stuffs :). I like cheap holiday stuffs... much preferred over the expensive variety...

So for Thanksgiving, Charlie had the great idea of going snowboarding since we hadn't gone in so long (like 3 years!). I did a bit of research and found out that there's a decent resort about 6 hours away called Snowshoe (http://www.snowshoemtn.com/index.htm). We're in the Appalachian mountain range, and this is the tallest peak in WV. The resort itself was built backwards, meaning that all of the lodging is at the top of the mountain, you snowboard down, and then take lifts up to get back.

Cut for giant pick plus meanderings about boarding... ( Read more... )

Other life stuffs have been me de-crunchifying my brain and playing tons of video games. Fable 2 was fantastic, and Fallout 3 is just SO.GOOD. If you liked Oblivion and you like the post-apoc stuff, you need to play it NOW. I really enjoyed oblivion but didn't care at all about the story or world. With Fallout3, I love it all. Really, the most annoying thing is the combat (at first), but everything else is great. I'm only about 25 hours in or so, and I can tell I've still got a long way to go to finishing it haha.

So yeah, with that - we need to pack up and get ready for the 6 hour drive. Thankfully I've got Chrono Trigger DS and Mad Men on DVD to keep me satisfied while Charlie gets to drive (muahaha, I love that man). Hope everyone had a great (and filling!) Turkey Day!

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2039776920081120

"OTTAWA, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Obese people have the right to two seats for the price of one on flights within Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Thursday.

The high court declined to hear an appeal by Canadian airlines of a decision by the Canadian Transportation Agency that people who are "functionally disabled by obesity" deserve to have two seats for one fare.

The airlines had lost an appeal at the Federal Court of Appeal in May and had sought to launch a fresh appeal at the Supreme Court. The court's decision not to hear a new appeal means the one-person-one-fare policy stands.

The appeal had been launched by Air Canada (ACa.TO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Air Canada Jazz (JAZ_u.TO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and WestJet (WJA.TO: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). (Reporting by Randall Palmer)"

This makes no sense to me... These aren't buses where other people can just stand if an extra seat isn't available. This removes a seat that would be available to other travelers while forcing the airlines to absorb the cost. >:(

So today, I was supposed to have landed at Raleigh airport at 7p. Instead, I'm here... still in Moscow... watching CNN and trying to keep entertained until it's time for sleep. I did make it to the airport, and I did take off in the plane, but we had to turn around and do an emergency landing in Moscow, leaving us all stranded here for another day.

What happened is that about 30 mins after takeoff, the pilot gets on and says a warning light in the cockpit came on and "just to be overly safe," they were going to turn around and go back to Moscow since we were still pretty close. That seemed illogical to me, but I didn't start getting nervous until they kept doing this thing where they'd pick up the PA and then set it down and pick it up again without saying anything (as if they were tryin to figure out what to say lol). They eventually start talking and say that the hydrolics are failing, but that they weren't expecting it to cause a crazy landing... and that we would be on the ground in about 30 minutes. After what seemed like a lifetime of the slowest descent ever, we touch down (and at this point, nothing was too crazy other than this really weird vibration that had started during the descent)... When we touch down, the plane wasn't slowing down at all and then suddenly it was as if someone slammed on the brakes (or pulled the E-brake), and we skidded forward.

Once we finally stopped, the pilot kept trying to move the plane but it kept doing the same thing... it'd move a bit and then the brakes would get pulled back and forth. Finally the captain comes on and says that we need to be towed into the gate, and to not be alarmed.

So as we're being towed, a pilot comes out and starts talking to us face to face. He looked really worried and said that he had been flying Moscow -> NYC route for 5 years at that point and never seen anything like that before. He said that on landing, 2 of the hydrolics failed and as soon as we came to a stop, all 4 failed, which is why we had to be towed. They said that it may be an easy fix, spent about 15 mins investigating and immediately came on to tell us the flight was cancelled.

I really really want to be home right now. :) Also, I was incredibly scared and all I could think about is how pissed I would be if I died over Russia hahaha. After being out here for about two weeks, I'm ready to go home!!!

Here's to hoping tomorrow is a better day that means me being in my bed safe and sound with Cha and the kitties.

So, I have tons of awesome Prague pictures. This is the type of city that is so photogenic, you just need some nice weather to make the pictures turn out amazing. So the biggest mystery photo I have is this:

From 2008-11-01 PraguePix

Look in the lower left hand corner. Keep in mind I was shooting with a canon PaS and I have lots of night time pics that didn't turn out like this (where either the background or foreground is blurry, but not THAT blurry). Also, I don't think the exposure was THAT long because I was holding it and if it were too long it would've definitely been more blurry (I was wearing heels)... so someone explain it to me!

Also, here are the rest of my pictures minus captions (no time!):
http://picasaweb.google.com/tancha/20081101PraguePix?authkey=d_37ckWoLvA#

I recommend viewing the slideshow that you see the full size. For some reason, picasa likes to gimp it when you click on it directly. :P

Anyways - enjoy!

Hello thar!

I'm typing from Prague, Czech Republic now in a way too nice hotel, looking at a red roofed old ass building next to me. I'm sitting here kind of bored because I'm waiting for my friend Dave to get here so that we can go sight seeing, so livejournal post time!

So basically, the trip here was easily one of the worst that I've had when flying international. It starts in Raleigh (warning - LONG):
( Read more... )

I've been late by ATC bullshit before with other airlines (Continental, numerous times) and they never had problems re-accomodating me. They've also never lost my luggage in those cases. So I don't know what's going on with Delta, but it's enough to make me decide to never fly it again.

Hopefully the rest of my trip turns out better...

MORE GEARS MEDIA BONANZA:

Gameplay trailer:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/42088.html

"Last Day" Trailer:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=10328588

"Rendezvous" Trailer:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/36219.html

BLARGH I leave for Prague on Thursday morning, am so incredibly nervous, have a ton of stuff to do, need to practice playing the game for demos and interviews, need to study the briefing book, need to not crash on the plane and die, need to PACK (omfg!), need to breeeathheeee!!