So we’re watching Austin’s apartment over the summer while he’s gone, and as I am alone for a couple weeks, it falls to me to make sure things haven’t exploded and to move his car a bit so it isn’t unhappy.

So I go to do that today, notice his kitchen sink is smelling a little funky again, and run some water down it and run the disposal to clean it out. And… water everywhere! (I guess the drain pipe somewhere under the sink leaks…?)
Which would be bad enough on its own, except there’s apparently some water sensor under his kitchen cabinetry that started going off. Loudly. Loud enough to hear from the elevators with his door closed. So that was clearly not going to work.
Of course, given that Austin is currently in Japan, calling him was not an option. (Called Max and asked him to poke Austin on IM for me, but no luck there either. Sorry for waking you, Max. D:) Checked downstairs in case there was a maintenance dude or some office or something, but no luck there.
I tried finding the source for a while, and unplugging every plug I could see in case that helped. No luck, so I started tripping his circuit breaker circuits to see if that would do anything. Still no luck.
I managed to isolate the sound to a specific area of the cabinets, which happened to have a little access panel cut out, so I went to ask a neighbor for a screwdriver, got it open, and found the alarm. (And dried it off to shut it up.)

So that was my morning, which was rather “fun” for some sense of the word. I’m just glad Austin wasn’t super upset about it… apparently it’s done this before to him, and he was never able to identify why. But I guess I’m not running the kitchen sink again. (He gets back in a week and a half anyway, so that’s not an issue.)

Anyway, in entirely unrelated news, I figured photo stats needed more people I interact with regularly, so here’s photo firsts of four new peoples. Stats has been updated with them as well.

First photo of Maja: July 26, 2013 at the climbing wall, with Michael.

First photo of Russell: September 5, 2013 at Max and Yubin’s (for board games).

First photo of Ryan: September 24, 2013 at our apartment (for board games), with Austin.

First photo of Kartik: December 6, 2013 at the climbing wall.

In other other news, I’ve started some preliminary work on the next People Wars expansion: Juxtapositions. (It’s getting weird to come up with good expansion names for letters…)
The expansion is themed around “Dream” cards, which play for free (with no limit) and act like characters once in play, but are discarded at the end of the turn. They’re intended as powerful one-shot things, with more powerful attacks and more traits, with the tradeoff of taking up deck and hand space for a single turn’s benefit. Of course, there are effects that let them stay around and such too.
(Conceptually, they’re supposed to be alternate universe versions of people, if they had gone on entirely different career paths, taken different paths through life, or generally had different personalities.)

Here’s a sample card. Since it’s a new template (for a new card type), let me know if you have any opinions on it.