Sports? injury.

How in the world did I pull a muscle in my back playing the DDR clone Pump It Up?

A bunch of the old Gators headed up to the Dave and Buster's in Marietta last night, and after a quick bite, we played a bunch of video games. The cool thing is that I spent just about ten dollars (and that was just for the meal) and had an entire evening of play, but Dave and Buster's is sorely lacking in a few departments.

1. No Soul Calibur II this game has been out for like two years now, and while they have Tekken 4 and Virtua Fighter 4, SCII is nowhere to be seen.
   
2. No recent version of NFL Blitz. I think the last arcade version was 2002 or so, and they're still running two 2000 machines.
   
3. An overabundance of skee-ball/basketball free-throw games. Now, I can certainly see the appeal of having a few of these machines, but they don't really get as much traffic as some of the other ticket-dispensing games, and they take up way too much space.
   
   They also had two Time Crisis 3 units, which take up about as much square footage as a medium-sized pickup truck. You could fit about four Soul Calibur II units in the space that one of the TC3 links took up.
   

There were a few cool things that I got to see, though--the latest House of the Dead shooter (number 3) has pump-action boomsticks, instead of your usual handguns or machine guns, and I always enjoy killing terrorists with head-shots in Silent Scope EX.

But how, oh, how did I manage to tweak my back?

A gift of sorts...

I've had my welcome mat for a while.

I bought it some time in '99 or so. It has four Chinese Characters on it, fú zé wú jiā

Roughly translated, it means "bless our home," or, more appropriately, "enrich our home."

Arriving home from work today, I noticed there was something slipped under my door knocker. I get a lot of things slipped under the door knocker--package notices, condo association newsletters--so I didn't think much of it. But when I drew it out, I found a slip of paper, rough around the edges, with the characters written out, their Anglicizations underneath, and their individual translations under that:

"happiness radiance our home"

It's neat that someone took the time to look up the meaning of my welcome mat, print it out, and let me know.

Hopefully, she's cute.


On another note, I think my back is worse than I initially suspected.