Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008

Engagement parties and video games

I had an engagement party this weekend, which was really quite a new experience. I didn't know parties like that existed - though they seem to have parties for every occasion nowadays.

My parents put on quite the spread, with grilled salmon my father had caught the week before. My grandma made real scalloped potatoes, which I've always loved. I don't care about carbs - I love any spud.

My aunt shared a tradition I had no clue about. My mother's mother collected tea cups and had all these interesting designs, but they never came in a pair. So whenever a family member gets married, my aunt gives a tea cup to them in order to share a part of our grandmother's memory. It's a nice gesture, though I'm terrible with keeping delicate things in tact. I'm notorious at losing/breaking things.

Despite us not even having set a date, my mother is light-years ahead. As an early present, she gave Mr. Big and I our wedding flutes - by Vera Wang. They were silver flutes and man were they heavy suckers!

I had promised Mr. Big that I wouldn't start going all Bridezilla on him and begin planning our wedding, thus embarking on that stressful road - but I couldn't help myself. I busted out the pamphlets and fliers my mother collected from the latest bridal bizarre and started looking things up online.

He was a good sport about it, though. As he played the new SOCOM on the PS3, I would ask him if he liked this color or whether he wanted these plates... Distraction is key.

Speaking of video games, I get my reserved copy of Little Big Planet today! I was so excited when I listened to my voicemail last night, informing me my copy was ready. I can't wait to try it out and start designing my sackboy. If only I could unlock the Kratos and Nariko codes...

One of the game developer's mothers knitted an actual sackboy. How cute is that? If only Sony was smart enough to have made toy sackboys for people to order along with the game - then they would have made a fortune. Oh well - who cares if a multi-billion dollar company loses a couple million in sales. Their loss.

A major selling point Sony is trying to market is the fact that you can edit practically anything in the game and then share with your friends. So if you build a level or planet, you can upload it online and have other people download it onto their PS3 and play it. If only weddings were as easy to plan as that.

I fell in love with this one winery called Hedges Family Estate in Benton City, but they no longer host private events. My heart shattered when I was told this after I had looked around the property. The French-villa-style, the balconies, the large dark wooden doors...I loved it all. It was like being dumped before the relationship even started. Sad.

On a side note, I revealed something to Mr. Big the other night. I finally showed him the piece of lead that had been lodged in my right palm since I was little. I had been balancing my mechanical pencil and as it was about to tip over, my hand came down on the top of it, pricking my palm and forever leaving me with a black dot. He examined my hand for a moment, then said he had one, too and that many of his friends had them. Really? I asked. He shrugged it off as if it were nothing.

That led me to looking it up online. Was this common? An ex had told me this was dangerous and I could get poisoning in the future and that I was weird for not getting it checked out. Mind you, this was the same ex who thought he had tongue cancer because he had a cold sore and complained as he sat in the ER on a Saturday night because other people (who were seizuring or bleeding) were getting to see the doctor before him.

I found a lot of sites where people shared their stories of how they got lead in their bodies. The most common postings explained that pencils don't have lead...they have graphite, which is carbon. Since we are a carbon based life form, our body accepts the pencil "lead" as a part of you and heals up around it. This is why it stays in your body since your body doesn't know it needs to get rid of it and just leaves it alone. Crazy, huh?

I'm sure there are some sort of health concerns for having graphite in your body for so long, but probably nothing life-threatening. If it was, it probably would have happened already...