Labor Day is a Very Laborious Day

So, every year on Labor Day weekend, there's a...semi-local event that my family and I go to.  It is, essentially a large flea market held out in some field, where vendors from wherever you want to imagine come to peddle their wares.  From guns and other sorts of weapons to the plastic toys you get in Happy Meals to paperback books to knock-off purses, if you go to this event, you'll likely find something you want, even if you go in not wanting anything.  Well, in most cases; I'm pretty shackled into at least buying a couple things every year almost completely out of habit, but not totally, as I do enjoy them, but...I'll get to that in a moment.

To give you an idea of the sheer size of this event, we got to the location before 9 AM and didn't leave until Noon.  In that whole time, we only took one break, around the 11:30 mark to eat lunch and then we looked at a few more rows of vendors before we decided to leave since, well, we had finally traversed the course completely.  My Poke'walker, which I solely use as a pedometer nowadays, read 10,811 steps when I checked it on the car ride home.  I am a bit speculative on that number, but still, that's some number right there.  Not mentioning that it was also very, very muddy all throughout, being in a field and all directly after it rained for a whole day.  It didn't rain while we were there, nor did it at all today, which was welcome and the cooldown yesterday's rains provided was most enjoyable.

Regardless, it was a good time, and my 'unplanned' purchase was, simply, three Rule Books for Vampire:  The Masquerade, more or less solely because of Helloween's LP of VtM: Bloodlines (Posted the link to the first video since there's no playlist for it yet.), since it really got me interested into the mechanics of the game the video game was based off of.  I got the Core rulebook (pictured above), Kindred of the East (which I assume covers Kuei-Jin and, more or less all things Oriental/Asian in the Vampire universe), and The Dark Ages, which....well, I'll be honest and say I don't know what the hell it entails.  Vampire:  The Masquerade more or less is foreign to me yet, despite watching the entire Bloodlines playthrough.

As far as what I usually get year in and year out and, in fact, continued to do so, I picked up some T-shirts with some fairly neat designs on them, and some Venison sticks.  Nothing all that interesting, I'm sure, but I wanted to mention them anyways because, well, I really enjoy venison.  Especially in stick form.  Especially especially when it's spicy as well, which half of what I purchased are.  While other vendors had movies and games that I looked through, there wasn't really anything that I wanted nor needed, so it was sort of a bust on that front, but at the very least, I got some new reading material.  That is, of course, if I ever read the books, which is...well, it's possible that it won't happen.  I'm fickle with my books like that.

When I got home, since the temperature has dropped significantly, I turned to my PS3 for entertainment and, by that, I mean I played Yakuza 4 for a number of hours.  And by "I played Yakuza 4 for a number of hours", I mean, "I took Akiyama to the bar, got him drunk, got into fights, and repeated that for hours".  It is fairly hilarious how Yakuza 4 encourages you to have your character sloshed 24/7 as there's really no downside to it, and in fact, there's a good upside to it:  When drunk, your Heat gauge fills faster.  Not to mention, you can buy Akiyama an innate ability that raises his overall attack power while he's drunk.  So by this combination, I became the Bane of Kamurocho Street Punks and Yakuza in no time flat, laying waste to any and all who stood in my way.

It was....quite fulfilling.

So, that was my Labor Day.  The trek and a few other things I did here and there made it sort of a rough day, but Yakuza 4 more than smoothed it over to make it a pretty great day overall.  Here's hoping your day was equally as good!