I finally picked up GTA IV for my Xbox 360 last Friday and have been playing it all weekend. First impressions are good. The opening cutscenes right away impressed me and lifted my expectations that GTA IV is going to have a better story with better characters than its previous incarnations.

So, this weekend we finally started landscaping our backyard. When Jenny and I first bought our house the backyard was just dirt, and it's been nothing but dirt for the past year (unless it rains, in which case it turns to a nice, thick mud). But we finally got some money to start landscaping, so we first bought gravel to put in its place. It was a lot of work but it was well worth it.