Recovery
I haven't worked a full week of work in three weeks. November 29th - December 3rd will break the chain, and I'm kind of thankful for getting back to routine. A little.
Nov. 8th - Nov. 12th I was on vacation, and got sick. November 17th and 18th I took a pair of sick days because I just wasn't getting any healthier due to not getting any rest. I actually had to wake up early on Saturday the 13th to get to GameStop and pick up my copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops, as I was on the hook to write this review for Gamer Limit and wanted it published by the middle of the week. On Sunday the 14th I also sat down and wrote a feature for @Gamer magazine in addition to barreling through Black Ops. By the middle of that week I was just done. My cold had pwned me.
Then, on Saturday the 20th, I drove a rental car out to my parents' house to spend some time with them and my 2-year-old nephew who they were babysitting for a week while my sister and her husband celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary (I think). Drove back to Boston on Monday the 22nd, spent all day Tuesday cleaning the condo in preparation for the arrival of the in-laws on Wednesday the 24th, which kicked off five straight days of doing tourist stuff in Boston and eating out two or three times a day, which just gets too rich for me after a while. By Sunday night I wasn't eating anymore. I took one meal yesterday, and I still feel vaguely like a bloated tick.
So, today was my second full day back at the office, and I was glad for it. That's not to say I am glad to be back - I am already counting down the days until the extended Christmas holiday that college employees get to enjoy - but I AM glad to be back on a regular schedule.
I posted my first installment of a weekly column over on Bitmob last night. I feel a little silly about it, to tell you the truth. It's a community site, so anyone can post anything over there and I've tried to make sure it's clear that I'm writing the column as a community member and not through some official endorsement of the site. But I do want First Person taken seriously. My dream job specifically in the field of videogame journalism is to be a columnist. Time to start proving I'm dependable enough to write a weekly column somewhere. I could do so here on the blog, but there's a larger audience over on Bitmob, and like all writers, I am an attention whore. 
Adaptation
I am back from vacation, having spent most of the time sick with one of the worst colds I've had in a while, and not being able to properly rest on account of being with my wife and parents who wanted to go to Universal Studios and Disneyworld. I was lucky to get five hours of uninterrupted sleep per evening, didn't have much to do in the time that I was awake, made an ass of myself trying to interact with my professional game journos Google group on an iPhone while on cold medicines and apparently unable to think clearly. Good times.
I had to order up episode 2 of The Walking Dead, "Guts," on iTunes due to the lackluster cable channel selection at the first timeshare we stayed at. I honestly don't mind watching video on that small screen, though I've got a piece of dust in between the glass and the screen itself which is all I can see now, but I don't feel like paying the outrageous prices I'm reading about online to have it cleaned out.
I enjoyed "Guts," but episode 3 last night, "Tell It To The Frogs," has me a little concerned for the future of the series. The pacing is slow. Dead slow, no pun intended, and I'm beginning to wonder whether it's a matter of adaptation that I'm noticing. As a comic book, The Walking Dead keeps me hungry for more because the narrative arcs and character development are so dense. There's a lot going on in each issue. The comic also isn't saddled with transitions. Sometimes two weeks will go by within an issue with the flip of a page, and it works.
The television show, on the other hand, can't dispense with all of those transitions, and they're beginning to bog the episodes down. It's not that I expect the show to be action packed, because the comic book isn't, either; but I often find that what I get 20 minutes into an episode of The Walking Dead is what I wanted 5 minutes into the episode. I feel like we're mired in exposition all the time. Either people have bought in, or they haven't. AMC re-runs the earlier episodes. Let people get caught up then. We only get six episodes this season, so let's pack them full of juicy content!