finally

Part 1: After over a year of planning, I *finally* got to play Halo 3 by visiting Mike for the weekend. It was worth the 860 miles driven in a three day span. The campaign mode is a little short but still lots of fun to play. I became very confused by the "Believe" commercials, though, because the battle portrayed therein was not part of the campaign. When the game ended, I was expecting one last level that would look like "Believe" - some sort of final show down between humans and the covenant where the Chief gets captured before doing something with a plasma grenade. But I guess not. I think the multiplayer is the best of the trilogy. The one flaw of the original was that the pistol was far superior to every other weapon, the flaw of the second was that winning depended too much on duel-wielding. Here I think a happy medium was perfectly found. Duel-wielding, grenading, meleeing, or assault-rifling are all about equally effective. Also the plasma pistol doesn't home-in anymore, so using it with a Battle Rifle isn't such an annoyingly dominating strategy. From Friday night to early Sunday morning Mike and I played about 16 hours total.

Part 2: The Red Sox *finally* won the AL East!!! When the division lead went down to two with about two weeks left I really started to worry. Especially with the Yankees finishing the season with Tampa Bay and Baltimore. But those crazy bottom feeders didn't roll over and helped a refusing-to-implode Boston team clinch the division with two games left in the season. Phew!