Tonight is day three in the new house, and things are going slowly but pretty smoothly so far. The best part of the new house is the finished basement with the new TV, XBox, and Wii. I played Star Ocean on there for nearly two hours and it was jaw dropping. The Wii is comparatively less impressive on a big screen, but at least I can play Wii Fir without needing to lean back a little and look down to see the screen clearly. Plus now I can run and jump and such since I'm on a first floor. Needless to say, I went out and bought the newest installment of Dance Dance Revolution.

I have to admit that I'm still going back towards 541 by my old house for all my shopping needs. The upside to the new place is that I'm closer to the swanky shopping on Route 1, but the immediate shopping near me is actually worse than Mt. Holly. We have a deli, a bakery with a deli in it, a Wawa, aaaaaand... that's about it.

The social structure of our evenings has changed. It used to be that my mom and I watched television on the first floor while my dad read or watched something upstairs. Now my parents watch television upstairs and I play/watch/etc. in the basement. During the week I'm going to try to go upstairs and join them because right now between all the forms of isolation, this is beginning to feel like some wacky divide and conquer plan.

You know, I really should update you on arguably the biggest thing going on in my life right now. I've done a horrible job of chronicling the move, but the thing is that I have little emotional connection to it because my parents do most of the work while I'm at ETS. We're actually less than a week from the move, so tonight is going to be my last Friday sleeping in the Westampton place. Right now, I should be living in the Florence house March 26, 2009.

I've loaded a lot of the smaller things, mostly books, into boxes this week, but most of the things I use regularly are still here. The most shocking thing for me is how little connection I have to most of these things. Our bookshelves and baskets were full of crap we're never going to use, and my dad has occupied way too many cabinets with multivitamins. I've been feeling particularly unsentimental and cut this sort of clutter by about two-thirds. It probably would be as much as three-fourths if my mom didn't stop me.

We have a moving van helping us with the big stuff like furniture and our ten-year-old deep-as-it-is-wide television during the week. Thankfully, doing things one step at a time did make life a lot easier.

...who forgot to feed Sirius Black!?

Sad news on the roleplaying front, the big game hasn't been canceled, but Kim and Dean made some point on Saturday to everyone about putting it off and focusing on smaller groups for now. Or something. I started zoning out when Dean, Kim, and Mrs. Lewis were discussing Whose Game Is It Anyway. It kind of reminded me of when the X-Men split up into the Blue and Gold teams in the 90s and one was totally cooler than the others (hint: the one with Wolverine on it!).

X-Men Blue (4th Ed.) "Stop doing that weird talky-thing. I wanna roll dice!"	X-Men Gray-Brown (3.5) "I'll show you to not psychically know to be a cleric and live vicariously through me in your first game!" "Can I be a lich at first level if I have max ranks in knowledge arcana?"
Zakk Jubilee Tersha Will Cricket Chris Sharpe	Dean Kim Josh Sean (invited, but not official) Friends of Josh

I realize this isn't the official splitting up of the gang and that in many ways having smaller groups would actually be beneficial, but I still find the concept disheartening. I enjoy playing Skeigh, and it was nice to have a single character and really try to work out his quirks and mindset instead of writing sheet after sheet of characters without ever really feeling it. Also, watching it grow from one person's masturbatory campaign to a reasonably equal group was actually pretty rewarding. Speaking of which, Dean has a tendency to ask what he can do, and sometimes it means "...to help?" and other times it means "...to make this more about me?". Part of me thinks his desire to place more focus on the more Josh-oriented game is the latter, as he can probably be Grand Poobah again there. Also, my experiences with Zakk (and by extension Tersha) behind the driver's wheel leave me afraid their hamhandedness is going to result in 4E falling onto the "Actually, it's a good game. We just didn't follow through with it." pile.

When we move into the new house, I think I'm going to buy a nice television and an X-Box 360. I learned a decent amount about the matter today at Best Buy, and then I learned that Matt's been looking into one of his own as well. Right now, this television has caught my eye. As someone who plays video games, LCD is better than Plasma because, despite improvements in recent years, Plasma has a tendency to leave a "burn in" image if there's something that's constantly onscreen like a health bar in a video game.

Okay, so the big news is that we're going to be moving some time in October. It's not a big move, just from Westampton to Florence which according to this map is a 12 mile difference. It's probably actually less than that due to the actual location of each house. Either way, I'm five miles further north on 295, for better and worse. Plus, I've pretty much been promised the furnished basement so I can have people there more than I can in Westampton.