Santa Plans & Miscellaneous Notes
Dec. 23rd, 2003 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaI'm driving down to North Carolina on Wednesday to spend Wednesday evening, all day Thursday, and Friday morning and afternoon with my parents and my sister and her beloved (who are flying down). Friday night I will spend with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sarah_ovenall and her beloved; Saturday, I return to New York.
Not completely coincidentally, I've seen my sister and her beloved more in the past week than in the previous two months, because I'm carrying presents down to NC to spare them the trouble of going throughCode Orange BOOGA BOOGA meaningless bullshit airport security; in fact, I drove my sister from her office in Midtown to her apartment in Brooklyn this very evening, in between dropping off nellorat and picking her up on the Upper West Side. I'm just a drivin' fool.
We just bought a new cage for the boy rats in my study; it's a monster, three feet tall by two feet wide, and the boys seem very happy in it. No, nellorat, it doesn't seem too large for them; they seem very happy. Wilbur, the more active of the two youngsters, just tried to assert domination over Dr. Butch by flipping Butch on his back and grooming his belly. Dr. Butch was caught off-guard, but, heck, he weighs about four times what Wilbur does, and once he woke up, he shook Wilbur off and the groomed became the groomer. Take that, pipsqueak!
I wanted to print some CD labels for discs I'm bringing down to NC, but I can't find my label-making kit. This means that I packed it into one of the boxes of crap obscuring the 32 sorted boxes of my comics collection. I've taken to calling this layer of crap "the meringue", and I really really really need to get rid of as much of it as possible. Some of it is games to sort, reorganize, catalog, and triage; most of the rest is just boxes of papers I've accumulated over the years, both personal and work-related. Sigh.
No word from Marvel, but I wasn't actually expecting to hear back from them before the holidays.
I did venture into a shopping mall once this season. It was last Thursday; I had to take the newer car in for some routine maintenance, which we get done at the dealer's up in Rockland County (in New York, but across the Hudson--about a 40 minute drive if traffic is good, which it often is). Since this took me as far north as White Plains, I decided to go to one of the big malls there to pick up an item for my family, and was sharply reminded of why I stopped going to malls. There was a traffic jam on the highway, a traffic jam in the parking lot, and a traffic jam in the store. It took me over ninety minutes to run in and run out. But I got the item, so I guess it's a happy ending. Fume.
Gaming last week: I got to play Martin Wallace's new game, Princes of the Renaissance. It's really good--a blend of familiar and innovative mechanisms, somewhat on the heavy and long side (by my modern standards, which means three hours for our first game, probably two hours for follow-up games). I can identify several major blunders I made, and I came in last. Can't wait to play again. Probably the best new game I've played since Wallace's Age of Steam, which also left me hungry to play again.
Beware of Pogo Games's Tetris-derivative Squelchies. Terribly silly and terribly addictive.
We just had the front and back door locks on our house replaced for complicated reasons--well, not that complicated; one of them broke outright, and the other had been breaking slowly for a year and it was only a matter of time before it broke completely. This was surprisingly expensive, because the front door lock is a "decorative" design. The wholesale price of the model we got was $200; the other models available through our locksmith started at twice that much and went up. Still, I'm glad to have done it; now I can lay to rest my dread improbable fantasies that the thugs who mugged me in 2000 managed to hang on to my house keys and were waiting to be released from prison to slip into my house and knife me in my sleep.
Happy Santanalia to all of you and yours. Be kind.
sarah_ovenall and her beloved; Saturday, I return to New York.Not completely coincidentally, I've seen my sister and her beloved more in the past week than in the previous two months, because I'm carrying presents down to NC to spare them the trouble of going through
nellorat and picking her up on the Upper West Side. I'm just a drivin' fool.We just bought a new cage for the boy rats in my study; it's a monster, three feet tall by two feet wide, and the boys seem very happy in it. No, nellorat, it doesn't seem too large for them; they seem very happy. Wilbur, the more active of the two youngsters, just tried to assert domination over Dr. Butch by flipping Butch on his back and grooming his belly. Dr. Butch was caught off-guard, but, heck, he weighs about four times what Wilbur does, and once he woke up, he shook Wilbur off and the groomed became the groomer. Take that, pipsqueak!
I wanted to print some CD labels for discs I'm bringing down to NC, but I can't find my label-making kit. This means that I packed it into one of the boxes of crap obscuring the 32 sorted boxes of my comics collection. I've taken to calling this layer of crap "the meringue", and I really really really need to get rid of as much of it as possible. Some of it is games to sort, reorganize, catalog, and triage; most of the rest is just boxes of papers I've accumulated over the years, both personal and work-related. Sigh.
No word from Marvel, but I wasn't actually expecting to hear back from them before the holidays.
I did venture into a shopping mall once this season. It was last Thursday; I had to take the newer car in for some routine maintenance, which we get done at the dealer's up in Rockland County (in New York, but across the Hudson--about a 40 minute drive if traffic is good, which it often is). Since this took me as far north as White Plains, I decided to go to one of the big malls there to pick up an item for my family, and was sharply reminded of why I stopped going to malls. There was a traffic jam on the highway, a traffic jam in the parking lot, and a traffic jam in the store. It took me over ninety minutes to run in and run out. But I got the item, so I guess it's a happy ending. Fume.
Gaming last week: I got to play Martin Wallace's new game, Princes of the Renaissance. It's really good--a blend of familiar and innovative mechanisms, somewhat on the heavy and long side (by my modern standards, which means three hours for our first game, probably two hours for follow-up games). I can identify several major blunders I made, and I came in last. Can't wait to play again. Probably the best new game I've played since Wallace's Age of Steam, which also left me hungry to play again.
Beware of Pogo Games's Tetris-derivative Squelchies. Terribly silly and terribly addictive.
We just had the front and back door locks on our house replaced for complicated reasons--well, not that complicated; one of them broke outright, and the other had been breaking slowly for a year and it was only a matter of time before it broke completely. This was surprisingly expensive, because the front door lock is a "decorative" design. The wholesale price of the model we got was $200; the other models available through our locksmith started at twice that much and went up. Still, I'm glad to have done it; now I can lay to rest my dread improbable fantasies that the thugs who mugged me in 2000 managed to hang on to my house keys and were waiting to be released from prison to slip into my house and knife me in my sleep.
Happy Santanalia to all of you and yours. Be kind.
