Wouldn’t that be a great name for a terrible Sunday afternoon current events talk show?

Happy Mother’s Day, all you marvelous Moms out there! And what the hell, all the really shitty ones, too. Gonna give my Mom a call once this little missive is done, and hence, I am bracing myself for the usual mixture of pleasure, nostalgia, homesickness, and above all just plain missing her that talking with my mother usually entails. Overall, I am always very glad I have gotten to talk with my mother on the phone. It reminds me what a wonderful person she is, and how lucky I am to have such a weird, sweet, charming mother. But even more importantly, it reminds me that I come from somewhere, that I have roots and a family and a context, and giving how little contact I have with my far flung family, that’s something I need very badly.

I’m a poor correspondent, though I am getting better. She writes me letters, and I write a reply and send it back to her via my brother’s email address. I keep pestering her to get her own email address and join the new era and, most importantly, be able to get emails all the time from her beloved youngest (me!). But I guess she’s just a little too advanced in years to deal with all these newfangled Internet tubes. To her, the computer is for the little video games (Hello, PopCap) she likes, and that’s about it.

I keep telling her she should be one of those cool “hey look, an older person is using the Internet” people, but she’s not buying it.

Meanwhile, I am under more than the usual financial stress lately. I made a mistaken assumption when signing up for gameaccess.ca earlier this month and it has caused a minor cascade of humiliating slip ups in the tiny world of my personal finance that are stressing me out.

See, I knew that if I wanted to sign up for said service (a rent by mail Netflix style video game site), they would, quite understandably, want a deposit of fifty bucks. After all, without said deposit, they would be sending valuable video games to just anyone with a mailing address with no security at all, for free. There would be nothing to keep people from going “ha ha, free video game, suckers!”.

And I knew that once my ten day free trail was over, they would be charging me their usual $17.95 monthly fee for my first month’s service.

But somehow, quite illogically, I got the idea into my head that the monthly charge would come out of the deposit, and hence, did not put enough money on the old prepaid credit card to cover both. Hence, both the monthly charge and my precious Netflix charge have both bounced, insufficient funds, and I feel guilty and stupid for having messed up like that.

Oh well, it’s an easy enough mistake to make, I suppose. I will be fixing it tomorrow morning by stopping in to Money Mart (the issuer of said card) and putting more money on the card.

I am enjoying the game I current have rented from them anyhow. It’s Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii (natch) and it’s a lot of fun, although also quite difficult at times. You get to be a mighty monster hunter with a bigass sword (or hammer, or gun, or whatever) and hunt dangerous monsters and gather resources and in general play a highly stylized, JRPG type version of a monster hunter’s existence.

It’s got a lot of controls. It’s very much a Japanese style game, in that there’s a lot of options and menus and factors and so on. It all gets a little overwhelming at first, but I soon adjusted to the heavy level of player details and now I quite like it.

Also, it’s mission-oriented, and I really like that in games. I am an inherently goal oriented person, and so I am happiest when focusing my energies towards a well defined goal. “Sandbox” games do not appeal to me, and I am pretty comfortable with a game being completely linear, as long as it’s interesting.

Technically, I am an animal lover and hence should not enjoy the role of the hunter. But the makers of the game anticipated this, and all the monsters are very mean and ugly. They are all dinosaurs as well, or bugs, for the most part. And the ones that are non-aggressive, I leave alone.

Well, unless I am hired to hunt them.

Eh, it’s a living.