*tap* *tap* Is this thing on?

Apologies. I knew blog updates might be a little scarce while we performed the Big Move, but I didn't mean to go quite this long without updating.

We're back in Birmingham, for better or worse. As much as I missed our friends and the city life (well, parts of it), our time in Huntsville sort of made us realize that our "hometown" had grown a little culture of its own. After living in rural Idaho for a year and a half, it's taking some time to re-adjust to actual traffic and having (gasp) things to do.

Our distractions haven't changed much in the last few months. We're still enjoying the hell out of Lost (which was slow at the beginning of the season, but it's starting to get nice and creepy again), and we're slowly catching up on the second half of the Battlestar Galactica season.

The World of Warcraft expansion turned out to be pretty good, so I've been playing again with a passion. Dungeon raiding is a lot more intimate now (at most, 25-person groups rather than the old 40-person affairs), and individual effort counts for a lot more than it used to. That's how it should be, really -- before, it was possible for a few people to not pay attention and "slide by" because the rest of us were picking up the slack. Now? If you decide to look away from the screen during a boss encounter, expect to be walking back to your corpse shortly.

I'm also loving Guitar Hero 2, which I passed over on the PS2 in favor of waiting to play it in full HDTV widescreen glory. I wasn't disappointed. By the game, that is -- our TV turns out to have a fair amount of input lag even with component video, so I had to tweak the game quite a bit to get it playable (close enough for me to five-star Freebird -- Ronnie Van Zant is rolling in his grave). Supposedly there are going to be frequent downloadable songs (possibly weekly?), so I'm really looking forward to that. I miss a lot of the old GH1 songs, especially SRV's "Texas Flood", which I could play nonstop for hours. You just can't go wrong with a tune where the entire thing is a guitar solo.

Anyway, we're getting settled in, and I'm looking forward to seeing all of our Birmingham friends again. I promise I'll update more. =)