my mental sieve...
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| Evil Wayne my mental sieve... |
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Friday, September 29, 2006 80 Miles My "Check Engine" light has been on. I'd say it's probably been on since... June? Okay, I'm a procrastinator. Part of my problem is the damn inconvenience of getting the car to the mechanic and doing a jittery-jig of then getting a ride to work. Of course the counter-argument is you'll be doing more than a jittery-jig when the car implodes. Luckily, that hasn't happened. However, my inspection sticker expires at the end of the month (that would be tomorrow). I figure Check Engine probably will get me a big, fat, letter R and I do the jig and get the car to the shop. He gives it a tune up, replaces the plugs and runs a diagnostic to find its this little part that he doesn't have (now that I think of it, I have no idea what it actually does). Although, it doesn't impede driving, he resets the computer and it should be okay. I tell him thanks and he says, "Oh, you have to drive it eighty miles." "What?" I say, because I figure that's an odd thing to say after getting a tune-up. "You're sticker is up. You have to drive it eighty miles before you can get a new sticker." "Huh?" Then he explains that it's to keep people from resetting the computer and then getting a sticker without fixing the underlying problem. "You know, so you can't cheat the system." "Okay," I say and start thinking about how I can clock 80 miles before tomorrow morning. When I get back in the car, I reset the trip odometer and start thinking of taking the long way back home. When I get there, I look down and it's a whopping 5.3 miles. So I'm not going with my original plan of getting a sticker Friday morning. *Sigh.* This morning I drove Kelly to school and took the longest way to work I could think of: 35.4 miles (5.3 + 30.1 = 35.4). Yeah! At lunch I think I might drive over to a game store in Waltham. GoogleMaps puts it at 14.5 miles so there and back should be 29.00. That should get me to 64.3 [(14.5 + 14.5) + 35.4 = 64.4]. Now if I take the long way back home, it should be close enough to 30 miles to put me over the top (64.4 + 30.0 = ~94.4). As long as it doesn't start down pouring at lunch, I might be okay to get up early tomorrow and stand in the inevitable long lines for a sticker. posted by Evil Wayne | 10:08 AM 0 comments Thursday, September 28, 2006 Posting Drought Yeah, I'm completely out of the loop lately. It's a combination of things; work is busy, home is busy, stuff is going on that I'd rather not post about at this time (if ever) and The Chimpinator is still in office. I hope that things will be more loose in the coming weeks, but I make no promises (not that you were asking for one). It's too bad that things are the way they are; this is the most wonderful time of the year--screw Christmas. Late September through the end of October is my time, baby. And I'm just not able to extract any joy from it as of yet. posted by Evil Wayne | 11:17 AM 1 comments Monday, September 18, 2006 MassiveAssBoardGameDay Saturday we finally got to our MABGD. Me, DaveE, Shaun, and Dan got together at Joe's in swanky NH. We got 4 games in (and yes, apparently 4 qualifies as "massive") and had a blast. Outdoor Survival  Where you're stuck in the wilderness and you can't always travel the way you want (e.g., towards food/water). Your own food and water is just about non-existent. You pretty much win by dying last... I think Joe won. I know I died first, but I believe I got the farthest from the starting cabin. Shaun on the other hand managed to circle the cabin, never venturing farther than a handful of hexes. He died about 2 hexes from the starting point. Puerto Rico  DaveE is, hands down, the best gaming instructor. He managed to explain the game from top to bottom in the most straightforward, logical way that was both clear and concise as I've ever seen. I like this game a lot. There's a lot of options as the turns come round and I freely admit that most of the "jobs" I choose were random, without any real sense of what I was doing. In fact, only once did I specifically take something -Crafting- on my turn to hopefully generate some profit down the line. A Game of Thrones  I did not really want to play this one. Mostly because it's based on a series of books that appear to turn readers into R. R. Martian-worshiping, pod-people. But it didn't really look that interesting on top of that. Once it got going, I found I liked it more and more. A randomness of cards dictated what major events would happen each turn. You couldn't muster troops until the card came up, so each turn you were stuck with what you had before and so forth. The best part of this game is the simultaneous planning of orders. Tokens representing orders are place in territories with units, then revealed all at once. This was rather neat, because the orders were somewhat generic. Marching/Attacking could mean that unit attacks any of the adjoining territories. Likewise Support could mean supporting any units in any adjacent territory. Overall, pretty neat. Betrayal at House on the Hill  Our last game, sans Shaun (l o s e r), was the haunted house game. Which I think takes a dedicated front to play. This is the second time I've played it and the second time we got it wrong. We used most of the tiles to uncover the whole house and Joe turned out to be the traitor, by letting loose the madman who opened windows to let specters in. We managed to banish 3 of them with exorcisms (which turns out to be incorrect, as we were supposed banish them all at once with a series of exorcisms). But in the end, Joe won by killing us all. He seemed to extract great joy in killing my little girl character. Overall it was a pretty good time. I was disappointed that we didn't get to play Pirates of the Spanish Main, but that probably needs a specific event, because there's multiple games to be had with it. I think A Game of Thrones took the longest, I'd guess about 4 hours. A good chunk of that was the learn-and-play ritual. Strangely, I think Outdoor Survival stayed with me the longest. I even went so far as to look on eBay for a copy. Weird, because the game appears to have only one outcome: You die. The excitement comes from not knowing exactly when and by what means. The rest of the pics are here. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:40 PM 0 comments Wednesday, September 13, 2006 Slag I've been meaning to post something over the last few days, but I keep getting hung up with work (the nerve!) and whatnot. I had a post of what I remembered from 9|11, but I only got about halfway through it before I had to stop. At this point, I don't feel like finishing it and retroposting it, so I'll just hold on to it for now. Frankly, the whole way in which the current administration has handled everything since then absolute sickens me. I'm afraid I'll start ranting if I write anymore. === We've got our Massive Ass Board Game Day (MABGD) come up this Saturday. An all-day event where we're just playing board games galore. It is composed of mostly neluggers and my first real chance to play board games with more adults than just Tine. As it stands right now, we have way too many games on the list of potentials at this point. I only have a few definites on my list, but I'm getting pretty psyched to play just about anything at this point. I'll try to post some pics of the fun and games thereafter. === I've uploaded my pics from Brickfest to my Brickshelf account. You can see them here. But they're 97% pics of the MOC. I'm not sure how exciting that is for the non-Lego crowd. (As if there were a "crowd"). === I'm hoping to start up the Myra story in a short while. Alfred sort of indirectly prompted me into putting more thought into it. It's been on my mind for the past while now and I'm feeling guilty that I spent most of the summer without an update. Originally, I had hoped to have something right after Labor Day, but it's been sort of hectic and I have been unwilling to ekk out the time. === Gearing up for Halloween and trying to get into the groove. This year we'll be doing a !!ZombiesII!! game is next month and we're going straight to the Dawn of the Dead this time, with a mall (probably small) and lots of undead. We're trying for a more concentrated, directed effort for the players. The free-ranging town idea was *too* open. Hopefully, this restricted environment will translate into a more exciting game. Plus, the ever-favorite secret goals! posted by Evil Wayne | 12:55 PM 0 comments Tuesday, September 05, 2006 Monster Migraine I got one of the worst migraines on Sunday morning. I woke up with it around 6 AM, which is always about twenty times worse than when it comes on during the day. I'm restless from having slept already, so falling back asleep --a key ingredient to seeking relief-- is so much harder to do at that point. Even when I start to pass out, any noise just wakes me right up. So I try to get up and move around and that just makes things worse. It feels like there are barbed, steel spikes being driven into my brain, ripped out and shoved back in, in time with my pulse. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. I downed a bunch of Tylenol and then some aspirin. I pass out at some point. Around noon, it's subsided enough that I can make it downstairs and have some coffee (before that headache decides to team up with the migraine and liquefy my brain). The rest of the day I spent trying not to aggravating my head. Which means doing a whole lot of nothing but watching TV (mostly Mythbusters). I've said before that migraines leave this minor aching buzz in my head after the fact. Sort of like an echo of the headache --scar tissue. All day Monday I could still feel it, lurking in the back of my head. Even today I can still feel it there, waiting for the right stimulus to kick it back up into high gear. Staring at this monitor ain't going over so well at the moment. posted by Evil Wayne | 10:09 AM 0 comments |
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