Grand Theft Time

As Easter fast approaches the job list gets longer and the jobs more 'urgent' (and by that I mean I have to rescue people from a lack of planning... "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine" or words to that effect... but I do try to keep everyone happy).

Unfortunately, as the stress levels rise at work my energy and the desire to do anything meaningful once I get home tends to drop... affectionately referred to as "End-of-term-itess". On top of that, poor K is rushed off her feet at work as well due to the impending inspection of her office... if the cats didn't insist on keeping us going so that they have someone to open packets of food for them I suspect we'd probably just get through the door and go straight to sleep... lol.

That said, it is almost over. K has now passed the deadline by which all of the documentation for the inspection needed to be sent off (which was one of her biggest jobs) and the Easter holidays are now just a few days away. And while I might not get the three weeks off over Easter that my teaching colleagues do, I am hoping to take a week off somewhere in the middle.

Gaming, while taking a back seat to maintaining my sanity, has drifted very much back into the 'GTA Zone'. With the release of GTA4 (on Xbox 360 at least) fast approaching and some excellent articles in almost every magazine getting the hype engine up to speed, I found myself with the desire to fire up GTA San Andreas again. So much so that I didn't even bother looking for my old saved game... I just started again.

It's all pretty amazing... despite the fact the graphics aren't much to look at and it has a nasty habit of waiting until I've just completed a tough mission (or I've been playing for a while and forgotten to save) before crashing. It's the silly little things I find the most fun... the incidental missions that you can stumble across like the delivery mission for a local shop, only found by jumping on the bicycle parked outside or the pimp missions that become available if you jump in a particular car. And the jumps... oh how I love the jumps... whizzing along on a motorbike and just noticing a piece of fencing that seems to have been conveniently left resting against a wall that, when used, trigger a cool slo-mo shot of you flying through the air to success/doom (delete as applicable)... something Burnout Paradise also does well I might add.

I do have another drain on my time at the moment... but until the NDA is lifted, I'm afraid I'll be keeping quiet ;)