Childhood dream fulfilled
Like many other eight year olds, I was caught up in the Ghostbusters craze some twenty years ago. I watched the movie so often I knew most of the script. As a fledgling roleplayer I had the Ghostbusters RPG. As an imaginative child I would procure many household items (vacuum cleaners, turntables, radios, hairdryers) for conversion into ghostbusting equipment, which (much to my parents chagrin) usually involved them being disassembled and the electronics coated in cooking oil to shield against ghosts.

I also had the Ghostbusters computer game, for the Commodore 64. It was a good game for its era, although its primary selling points were the song lyrics on the title screen, and two voice-synthesized phrases: Ghostbusters! and It slimed me!.

Despite hours of play of the Ghostbusters computer game, I never managed to complete it. The last scene involved sneaking two ghostbusters past the marshmallow man, and I could only ever get a single one past. I had heard tales of friends of friends who had done it, but nobody I had actually met in the flesh.

Yesterday, on a whim, I grabbed a copy of Ghostbusters for my emulator and tried my luck again. As fate would have it, I got past the marshmallow man on the very first game, with the very first two ghostbusters. My childhood dream was fulfilled.

Unfortunately, like many games of its era, the end-scene for the Ghostbusters C-64 game was rather uninspiring. A brief and unexciting animation, followed by some written text which amounts to a little more than Congratulations, you have won. Regardless of the poor ending, I still feel superior over my peers for having seen it.

Breakfast dreams shattered
Awoke rather early today in preparation for a long trip across town to visit an irregular client. With some excitement I realised that I woke early enough to allow me to comfortably make my favourite breakfast: soft-boiled eggs with soldiers and espresso coffee.

Unfortunately, we were out of bread, so this dream never came to fruition. In hindsight I probably could have walked to the corner store and picked up some bread rather than writing a journal entry about things I thought were cool when I was eight, and what I was planning to have for breakfast.