Last week was a busy one, both in and out of my home.

Homecoming weekend took up a lot of time and resources at work, and everyone in the department had to stay until 7 PM to help get the last pieces of the information packets ready for all of the alumni. It seems to have paid off, as I’m told that this year’s event had the highest attendance out of any event we’ve had so far. If only I didn’t have a driving lesson to attend on Saturday, I might have been able to see this thing play out to the end.

All throughout April, I learned that Microsoft was holding an Xbox Rewards program for dedicated Xbox Live Arcade players. Playing 20 hours of Arcade games during the month earns you a special avatar item (which I don’t really care about), buy four new Arcade games worth at least $5 gets you an additional month’s subscription to Xbox Live Gold, and spending $40 worth of Microsoft Points gives you another $10 at the end of the month. The last two were easy, but I really had to grind over the weekend to get the first one, and I didn’t know that I’d actually completed the task because the website updates would run a day or two late.

With all three of those “punchcard” tasks completed, I’m now eligible to appear in a “VIP Exclusive”, whatever that is. I’ll have to keep my eye on my MSN e-mail account to see what this reward actually is.

Now that that’s done, I can start focusing on playing games on my other systems, like Neverwinter on PC. I don’t know what it is about my computer and Cryptic Studios games (City of Heroes/Villains, Champions Online, and Star Trek Online), but the character models are always extremely pixellated on my screen. Still, I was able to get enough out of the game to do a quick livestream. I made a Half-Elf Trickster Rogue named Tripp Goldcoin, whose specialty is throwing knives at his enemies. I hope that once I get past level 5, my character will actually be able to pickpocket enemies and lay down traps…