Hey everyone just wanted to give a quick update to let you all know that I'm still alive. We have the wood stove running again and it's been better than ever thanks to the new hose and some corrected settings. The living room and dining room can get up to 70 degrees now though the rest of the house doesn't get that high, usually around the mid 60'ss at best. At least we don't have to worry about the pipes freezing up and bursting, plus we have enough fuel to last till Spring at least. Still haven't got the oil stove working but that will probably require a professional to clean and fix (since neither of us know enough about them to do it ourselves) but that will have to wait seeing as we are both scraping by right now. Marbs has been streaming a lot to get money for food money and I've been trying to stretch what cash I have by eating at home a lot more with what little we have in the pantry. A bunch of big bills are piling up on me at once so it's raman noodles and fast food value menus for me this month.

As much as I enjoy talking with friends online, lately I've just been feeling depressed and not really in the mood to chat much. Aside from dealing with a backlog of chores and making sure those bills get paid (especially the dental insurance) most of my time has been spent playing console and handheld games to take my mind off things. No Warcraft this month, cancelled the subscription to save the money, not that I mind taking a break since dealing with piss poor raid drops was starting to get on my nerves anyway.

Since we finally decided to bite the bullet and buy and Xbone last month (for review purposes only I swear) I've been playing through all the main Halo games with the MC Collection. While I still think the Xbone itself sucks (the interface is really annoying and poorly implemented, and don't get me started the Halo Channel app, dear god that is horrible!) the games are decent enough and the controller does feel nice. The Halo games are still quite good if slightly dated in some respects. The biggest complaint I have (aside from the game freezing up sometimes and the Halo app just not working usually) is that the visuals are so very inconsistent. While it is good to see Halo 2 get a visual update it makes playing through the entire series slightly jarring from a visual perspective. You start with Halo 1 that got remastered in 2011 with the anniversary edition, then you have Halo 2 with the latest models and such at the tail end of 2014, jump to Halo 3 which came out in 2007, and then finally Halo 4 which still looks good but came out in 2012. Lots of people would have probably complained if they hadn't done this but honestly I would have liked if they had just redone all four games with their most recent visuals so it would look more cohesive. That would have been a lot of work I'm sure, perhaps too much to be worth it. but I just couldn't help finding the weird fluctuation of quality/fidelity to really stand out playing them all in a row. They are still great games and worth playing even after all these years so that minor gripe aside is no reason not to get the collection if you already happen to own an Xbone.

Anyway that's all for now, just thought I'd let you all know I haven't turned into a wuff-cicle or something ^w^