Well I've been long overdue an update here and kept thinking of random little things to blog about, but it is only now that I have a few to collate together that I've actually bothered to get round to it, hence I shall now commence with rambling.

Firstly I would like to thank anyone who left me one of the lovely comments on my previous blog, your well-wishes were very gratefully received, and helped me out at an extremely unpleasant time. There's not much else to report on that front so I shan't go into it any more here, but this needed to be said, you guys are the sh!z.

Onto the more cheerful topic of gaming. I have been doing very little of this until recently, for various reasons including workloads and a fun spell of hospitalisation, but during some very appreciated time off work I have been thoroughly enjoying myself playing through the campaigns of the Battlefield: Bad Company games.

I've yet to complete BC2 so I shall resist commenting on that game for now, but I must say I was pleasantly surprised with the general squaddy feel of BC1, and in a strange way I found the storyline more engaging than your average shoot-em-up. For online gaming I have still found myself sticking with good ol'Killzone 2 though, I suppose I like the comfy and familiar in life, plus a friend of my just picked a copy up cheap and we've been having a merry levelling-up race with new profiles.

Unusually for me I have my eye on several new games glistening on the shop shelves as we speak, generally I find there are plenty of older (thus cheaper) games to keep my interest, but Uncharted 3 is calling my name as is Battlefield 3 after my recent exploration into the franchise. Also, with all the talk going round, its hard to resist the the call of Skyrim if only to see what all the fuss is about. Consequently, with the added plus of a Christmas bonus, I hope to get off of - or rather on to - my ass and start partaking in the current market trends.

Other than this there has been very little of any consequence going on with me since my last quarterly newsletter. There was the start, middle and end of a relationship in there somewhere, plus I did a 1000 piece puzzle all by myself in a day. I have been decidedly unimpressed with most of the books I've been reading, sadly, but I did re-read through xkcd's entire archive and fell a little bit in love with him all over again.

Now it's just a half-excited, half-weary skipping lurch towards Christmas, and I am making my list. Checkin it twice and all that.

A busy week lies directly ahead of me, though, as I shall be packing up my travelling case and heading off to forn parts once more. My itchy feet have got the better of me again, so I am off for a brief sojourn with my cousin in London Town, before jetting off to Germany for some continental culture with my sister.

Delighted as I am to be escaping daily drudgery for a time I can't help feeling that, as usual, my precise timing could have been slightly better. While I could have wondered off for weeks before now, and not missed anything out of the ordinary, my arrangements instead happen to coincide with the recent announcement of changes occurring of an interesting nature.

I shall be back before the Second Phase announcement in the first week of December, so I'm sure there will be plenty of intriguing things to be read then, still part of me is loathed to not have one narrowed eye on things at such a time. I shall of course be adopting my usual philosophy of 'let's wait and see what happens', but while I'm away, I hope it's not too ugly for the rest of you.

For now, à bientôt, beautiful people.