Always Coming, Never Here

I won't be hosting a gaming night on Monday - Tom may or may not be around, I suppose he'd like company but he doesn't seem to be interested in playing games much these days! (pansy!)

I'll be up in Waltham reading script for an audiodrama. Woo!

I'll be in the city sometime in the early evening... not sure what the plans are exactly - only that I'll be in Milk Bar by the evening. Show up and surprise me! :)

Who would like to come with me to my sister in law's 30th birthday party in NYC? They're having it at the Korova Milk Bar. It'll be on Friday, March 28th. I'm not sure if I'll be staying overnight or not...

Also, it can stop snowing any time now.

Gaming night this Tuesday, 6:30 pm until 1 am. Definitely going to try "You Need Drew's Truck" and "Trailer Park Gods".

Maybe I'll break out my "Mob War" game and see if people get into that...

I woke up at around 1:15 pm today. I woke up pretty early on Saturday and had a damn full day - I was expecting guests for breakfast, but didn't receive any. I had roused at about 7 am in order to clean up the house and get the kitchen ready for some cooking; I frantically cleaned the kitchen, dining, and living rooms. When no one had arrived by about 10:30 am, I figured I wouldn't see anyone for a while, so I started cleaning the shelves in my pantry (to make space for dishes and pans and such that were all over the counters).

I got the kitchen into a pretty nice state - it's really solid now, all the appliances are in the right places, and I've made some good prep areas, and I cleaned off the little shelf between the windows and put spices, oils, and hot sauces on it. Around 1:30 pm I decided to make breakfast for myself... I made a ham and cheese omlette on my brand new electric griddle, and I slowly cooked a pound of bacon in my cast iron pan on the stove (I didn't eat it all of course - I'll have a nice BLT or two for lunch this week). The round table against the windows is now a little breakfast nook - coffee machine, hot pot, toaster, sandwich press, and the big griddle when I want to set it up.

On the opposite side of the kitchen, I have my Kitchenaid mixer, the microwave, and the nice stainless steel scale I got for my housewarming. I can also set up the bread machine on that table if I don't need it for prep area.

The pantry is about halfway ready. All the open shelves are clean, but I have to finish cleaning up the cabinets. Once I finish washing more pots and pans, I can put those away on the shelves...

I'm really starting to like living in my apartment now. I'm at the point where I can just kind of sit around and feel good about the way things look. I'm getting comfy. It feels very, very nice.

Oh, and since I completely digressed... the other portion of my day was the Gweepnet tenth anniversary party. From 6pm to 2am, I hung out with 80 of the folks on gweep.net and had a great, great time. Lots of people I haven't seen in person in a long while. I was so damn tired when I got home though... just slept for eleven freaking hours.

And I hear tomorrow is supposed to be another foot of snow. Freaking a... at least there won't be any drought this year.

This past Tuesday Android, Zss, and Creatrixx participated in game night. We played "Phantoms of the Ice", an Alan Moon / White Wind game left to me by Chris J., and as Android brought his satchel o' gaming doom, we played "Shaufenster".

"Phantoms" was great - I won! Woo! It's a hockey game with forwards, defenders, and goalies; they are valued from 0 to 11 and when you play a game against someone else's team, you play them off of one another kind of like war. The idea is to win nine games, and then have a multi-game playoff with the second highest scoring team to determine the champion. You also get to draft new players by pulling them off of replacement decks or trade with other teams by randomly taking cards from other people's hands. It's a fun little game.

I also won at "Shaufenster"... it was a good night for me! The idea of Shaufenster (or "shop window", in German) is to collect sets of cheesy jewelry and cash them in for money. The objective is to get the most money, of course. You collect sets of jewelry in your safe, and then put jewelry up for sale in your shop window. Every turn, people get to choose whether or not they will add to their safe or whether to pick up the "purchase turn" card which determines his or her priority in purchasing from shop windows. It takes a little bit to really figure out good strategies for this game, as the value of your collection changes according to what you have in your safe (more incomplete collections devalues items) and selling to other people also nets you money... it's a little difficult to explain without demonstrating with the cards.

Anyhow, much fun was had by all. Are you coming next Tuesday??

Game Night went great! We had a small group, but that was perfectly cool. We played Halo for a while, then we played Survive! (a fun little board game from MB) and Cathedral and Igel Agern (a.k.a. Humping Humping Hedgehogs)!

Next game night, next Tuesday - same bat-time, same bat-channel.

Hot water is coming on Monday. Running water should be coming tomorrow. Parents might be coming on Sunday. New computer is coming some time next week. A new year is coming. I should be making my final moving arrangements for Monday, as long as there is hot water and a working toilet.

Things seem to be doing the opposite of falling apart. For a change.

I would like to announce that there will be a housewarming in January. More details on this later, but it will be a combination housewarming / super bowl party, so it will be taking place on the day of January 26th, 2003. Save the date if you want to come!

Journal update time! Lots and lots of good things happening.

I made a bunch of new friends and connected with another new-ish friend. I had such a busy weekend - had a night on the town on Friday, then spent the day doing house stuff on Saturday, then in the evening went out to have a fantastic gift certificate subsidized meal at the 111 Chop House (a wonderful gift from a wonderful friend). After that scrumptious dinner, I made my way to a comfort food pot luck gathering of friends and family and had a very amusing and silly time shooting nerf darts at people for several hours. Several of them made very funny noises! hee.

I should have stayed over though. I regret wussing out. Breakfast would have been a great way to start Sunday, especially if telkella were cooking! Alas, it was not in the cards for me... instead I had to manage a bit of a financial crisis for most of the day on Sunday. But I put my time to good use, filing away all my bills and records and finishing up some consulting work that had to be done.

It was a karma thing, I'm sure of it. So many good things happened all at once, something had to come along and balance it out a little. But the cool thing is that I am turning negative things into positive ones. I think I've almost figured that trick out now.

I found out today that I have really good credit. It's not utterly spectacular, but a couple of small steps like closing out an unused credit card account and paying down my balance a little will in fact make it utterly spectacular (in the category of 98% good risk in the eyes of lenders).

Oh, and also today I helped make fireworks a little bit safer by participating in a non-profit research study. Someone will watch me on videotape and use the data to make safer fireworks. Yay!

And I finally had a chance to get some good chinese food at lunch today. Golden treasure and sesame chicken! Woo hoo!

That is all.

So, for those not aware - Big Blue turned 30 on 9/10/2002. I took it upon myself to help him celebrate his birthday in grand style, and we had a day of delight throughout the city of Boston this past Friday.

Tom showed up at my place a little after Noon; after I downed my lunch, we set off for Waltham and hit Danger Planet, a rather nice little game store off Moody Street. Tom dropped off his car, and we carpooled into Beantown.

After parking near a Mormon church off Brattle Street, we made our way towards the Adrenaline Zone, a PC arcade establishment. MickD caught up with us a little while after we arrived, and the three of us got to blow each other up a lot a lot. Much fun... Tom got to snipe my head into little bits, and I got to blow him and a lot of bots into a bunch of luscious gibs.

Moving on, we found ourselves at the L.A. Burdick's cafe right up the street. The sign advertised "Iced Chocolate", so we stepped up to the counter and ordered two of those, and two slices of chocolate mousse cake. We were served, and Tom sampled his sweets... and declared that he no longer needed women in his life, as long as he had his precious, precious mousse cake. The drinks and cakes were exceedingly scrumptious (but maybe not quite that scrumptious).

Our next stop was The Garage in Harvard Square, where we hit Pandemonium and Tokyo Kid, as well as another new Japanese toy store and the "All Your Game" retro video game mini-store in the stairwell. At this point, our good buddy Jski hooked up with us, and we continued onward.

We walked to the extreme end of Harvard all the way down to The Games People Play (are you seeing a theme yet?) and chatted with Joseph, one of the merchants, about various games and their pros and cons. Jski bought 1870, and I bought Humping Humping Hedgehogs! Okay, that's not really the name, but I can't remember the name because it's a German game. On the way back, we hit the Harvard Coop bookstore and Wordsworth... and at wordsworth, I bought Tom his own copy of "I'm Just Here For The Food", Alton Brown's (host of Good Eats) new book. Tom has trouble boiling water - but I believe Alton's book will be Tom's introduction to the wonderful and exciting world of food preparation.

We next went by car out to Copely Square and hit The Compleat Strategist. On the way, Jski ran into one of the three people he knows in Boston - Agthorr's sister. She's a real cutie, a very sweet girl... but she sadly couldn't come along, as she had frozen chicken and ice cream in her shopping bags. At the game store, Jski and I bought Tom a bunch of game books he really wanted. We next went by T to dinner...

Which was had at the wonderful Sunset Grill & Tap. I ran into Jen Johnson as we entered; she was just leaving with some co-workers, but we got a quick hug in before we parted ways.

That evening, the Sunset had 112 beers on tap... but the clear winner at our table was the Kopparberg Pear Cider, a Product of Sweden. Tom's got a taste for sweet drinks, and the Kopparberg was his own find - but Jski and I both loved it, and when Drak and Lee joined us later at night, they too found themselves ensorceled by the bodacious brew. Drak ended up drinking a yard of beer, and I had a couple of nice Beertails (chocolate covered cherry and fruit cocktail). Dinner was awesome... Tom and Jski hadn't eaten much all day, between the three of us, we packed away a full basket of sour cream and chive fries and fried calamari; I had a delicious tuna melt, Tom had a salmon dinner, and Jski had a mondo half pound burger (Drak and Lee had their own food when they joined later, but I can only remember that Lee got the Mahi Mahi).

All in all, a very exhausting day out on the town. But we had a very happy Tom at the end of it all! 30 years down - and many, many more to go, huzzah!