Awesome things I'm thankful for:
1 my God Jesus Christ
2 remission of my sins
3 the Holy Ghost
4 my wife Lynda
5 all of our little animals - Eli, Benson, Foxy, Princess, Norma, Sky Sky
6 my IPad
7 my Mazda
8 Lynda's van
9 that I'm relatively healthy
10 that Lynda has been healthy
11 my Job
12 food in the cupboard and fridge
13 my guitars - the little one, the big one, the acoustic one
14 my Xbox
15 our nice tv's
16 the house we are selling
17 the fact that I program for a living
18 a warm house
19 the desire I have to please God
20 the friends I've made on GWJ

As much as I fight it, spending just a few minutes each night on learning Ruby has proved invaluable. Whether I have an hour to burn, or just a few minutes, it's easy to jump in and just start sharpening my skills on anything from how to properly structure a class, to how to actually use Rspec.

To just keep moving forward is a blessing itself - it's not always easy to be putting the remote down.

It's the doldrums of summer and I've got nothing on the radar to purchase new until Gears 3 hits in late September. I've also foregone the Pile of Shame thread for this month, it's just been way too busy with company visiting for half of it. If you add in work keeping me extremely busy, you will understand what my summer has been like. I have taken the time to have some fun, though.

But, here's what I've been re/playing:

• Started a Final Fantasy 3 SNES playthrough last week and am loving every bit of it. Classic SNES controller, classic 16-bit graphics. This game is just awesome.
• Started a Mass Effect 1 Lady Shepard renegade Adept on Veteran and it's making me like the universe a bit more because I can apparently be a jerk-face to it and still get the job done.  Not sure if I'll attempt a Hardcore or Insane run before pushing on to ME2 with this character, but achievements are not the goal, so pfffft.
• Stopped playing Borderlands for now. It's fun, but I need more structure in my life.  I'll get back to it someday...
• Thinking about picking up Final Fantasy 2 SNES in August. Not buying much right now, but man, having a real, live, working SNES and quality games = AWESOME
• Misc iPad games. Some have been fun (Infinity Blade [beat], Coin Drop [beat]), some way too time consuming for me to want to fire them back up (Great Little War Game, Pocket Academy), and some have just not been that great at all (Back To The Future Episode 1).

At least the heat wave is keeping the lawn from growing much, but I could totally use some zombies to help me get it under control.  

Braaaaiinnnzzzzz....