This will probably be long so I am going to try to break it up into parts so that if you get bored with one section you can skip to the next.
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Well I was at my parents for a week. Yes, I brought my PS2 and my Beatmania stuff.
The original plan was for Sara (my wife) to just go and work for her grandmother for 10 days. My sister ended up getting pregnant, so I used this oppertunity to go with my wife and visit her. Now this made my wife cut her time to work down a day or 2 and we left for Chicago via train on Saturday July 10th. My dad gave me a Toyota Camry 91 to drive back and use how I wanted, and we returned Sat. July 17th in it. Between then I was a combination of bored and rushed.

From about 9:30am (wake up) and 7pm I was bored. It was my sister and I sitting around playing video games waiting for my parents to get home. Then when Sara got done working (she worked roughly from 8am-8pm) she would try to grab me and drag me around. On top of all this my wife was trying to quit smoking (and still has not had a smoke since the 10th). Aside from spending time with family, about the only thing that I did was go to the Signature Lounge on the 96th floor of the John Hancock building. That was really cool.

On the drive back there was an amazing electrical storm that lasted for about 3.5 - 4 hours. White Zombie+Electrical Storm = Rawk! \m/
I found a new altoid — Ginger altoids are quite excellent.
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I got alot of Beatmania played. I moved up to 7Key mostly. I do not make a lot of progress with it, but I am pretty much working on 5* or lower. If I play any L7 stuff I am just going for score. I have seen my score improve in quite a few songs. I will probably work on a spread sheet for writing down scores for IIDX as VJarmy. If I had been going this all along then I would not have to do this, but going back and forth for 4 styles of games is a bit redundant, so I will make this up.

Now I know that this will probably be the most bizzar IIDX/Pop’n thing you will ever read. I got hypnotised to get better at Bemani. My mom is a hypnotist and offered to help my wife quit smoking through hypnosis. When it was all said and over Sara told me that I should try it “for anything, just try it.” So I decided to try it for Bemani (it was the only thing that came to my head). I basically said to my mom that I need to;not have a delay in my reaction from recognition of note pattern to hand movements, I need to focus lower on the screen and not let my eyes drift up, and also to pay attention to timing for improved score (not hitting the notes before they get to the line).

After I had been hypnotised I was hoping for some huge jump in improvement. I was really not at all too supprised when it did not happen. The other things that I had wanted to improve in, I did. It was weird. Now my focus is always very close to the line and my timing improved greatly. I no longer find my eyes drifting up to get a better handel on the patterns. Now it is not some huge jump that I was hoping for, but I really did not expect any of it to work, so I was happy with what I could get.

Now I have been craving Pop’n since like last wednsday, so I really want to play it tonight!

Off to work