Life has been full of stuff recently. In roughly reverse order:

The ITG machine at the storage facility in the South Side exists, and it is awesomely full of charts I love. In the year-ish absence from ITG, it seems my reading has not suffered at all but my stamina is gone. I can’t even make it to the jacks in Perfect Cherry Storm anymore, and probably generally can no longer pass an 11 (although I didn’t try). The fact that the place is a small, enclosed space with no cooling other than fans probably doesn’t help either.
It’s good to have ITG machine access again, even if it means a bit more work than previously to access.

7 Wonders is one of my favorite board games, and it gets played around once a week. I already have the Leaders and Cities expansions, as well as the promo leaders, wonders expansion, and extra fan-made boards from board game geek (for a total of 23 wonder boards). We decided to try a variant of it last games night that Max affectionately titled “7 Blunders”. The goal is to get the lowest score possible, but you’re subject to the 2-player-style rules where you can’t sell a card unless you are forced to, cannot buy resources if you could make them yourself in some way, and must build for free if you can. It makes for a very interesting game, especially depending on whether your wonder gives you lots of points or not… do you save the wonder stages for burying large-point-value age 3 cards, or do you take care of them early so building is harder for you due to lack of resources?
We’ll certainly play it again and see how that goes.

Chris and Rob hosted a last-minute Memorial Day BBQ, and it was tasty.

In other other things, Keith’s kitchen is sad. His ceiling had been cracking (I guess one of the screws holding the ceiling up came out or something…?), so we spent a Saturday helping him remove his kitchen appliances and stripping the wallpaper from the room (which ended up being quite the experience due to the painted double layers of wallpaper, going as far as 4 layers deep at the top where there was trim). Apparently his ceiling came crashing down on Monday (which was the alternate day for wallpaper removal), so it was a good thing we did it when we did.

Also here’s us being crazy after midnight at IHOP, attempting to recreate various bad stock photo scenes.