Life, games, TV shows

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Life goes. Rather busily, in fact. It hadn’t occurred to me how busily until Chloe asked about dinner plans last Sunday and I had to stop before automatically responding that I was free “any evening”. My schedule now consists of climbing two evenings a week, board games one evening a week, and Tartan on Monday afternoons and all day Sunday, in addition to other random things that come up (like dinner plans, impromptu board gaming, or parties).

The benefit of all of this, at least, is that I now am guaranteed to leave the house at least once every 48 hour period. It’s a big change from a few months ago where I would often not even change out of pajamas most days, but really nice. (Yeah, yeah… working from home makes you lazy. :P)

For Christmas, we acquired the new board games Ticket to Ride, Yspahan, Hey That’s My Fish, Bananagrams, and Word-A-Round. Euphoria also arrived recently. Each of these (except for the new Euphoria) have been played many, many times. Yay for new board games.
(There was a mishap with The Agents where I both entered the wrong shipping address, and the package also didn’t arrive at the wrong address… so I need to figure out whether it’s worth my time and money to hunt down a new copy of the game. Le sigh.)

I received the first three seasons of The Walking Dead for Christmas and have watched through the first season and half of the second. It’s a really, really well done show, and I can see why it gets all of the acclaim it does. It provides a really character-centric focus on the zombie apocalypse (much like World War Z [the book] provides a global view of the disaster). I’ve also finished through season 4 of Supernatural and should start season 5 at some point. At least all of these DVDs are getting some use. :)

The hunt for houses has begun. It’s looking like houses with our constraints in the neighborhoods we want are going to run between $350,000 and $450,000… a bit more than I had expected. It’s not like we can’t afford that, but it just feels weird to be spending so much on a house. We went to two open houses last weekend on the opposite ends of the spectrum (a modern 4-bedroom house by CMU at ~$470k and a townhouse in Squirrel Hill at ~$280k), so we’re getting a better idea of what we can get for the money, at least. At some point we should figure out financing and find an actual agent to work with. Argh I wish buying a house was easier.

Work… has been work. In general, I tend to come back from breaks feeling like I want to quit my job and just travel, rather than feeling refreshed. This was particularly true coming back from this Christmas break, and it feels like I still haven’t gotten back into the swing of things three weeks in. I’m stressing out about really minor things, irrationally irritated at bugs, and generally feel like I’m getting less done than I should be doing. Sigh.

Life, Christmas, New Year’s

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Well, we’re back. It was a fun break with trips to Ohio and Toronto. Life has been updated, with both stats and photo journal updates.

Haven’t done a photo dump in a while.









Toronto photos can be found at photos.

Happy new year, everyone! :D

Climbing, board games, TV shows, card games

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Life has been pretty uneventful lately.

I recently celebrated 80 months of companionship and love and awesome. I guess in some ways it’s silly that we still track months together, but it’s also nice. So yay relationships.

There was a Thanksgiving. There was lots of tasty food and lots of fun games.

I’ve started climbing again after Groupon had a $70-for-a-three-month-membership deal. I actually haven’t gotten too much worse (finished a couple V2s yesterday), which is nice. A gallery of December climbing photos will be posted in about a week (since I batch together all related photos from a month).


There has also been copious board gaming, which is always fun and awesome. Eight Minute Empire Legends recently arrived, and it was played, and it’s a really nice filler game. For some reason, all of the recent Kickstarters I backed seem to have all finished production early November, so they’re all shipping around Christmas time. I’m expecting the Machine of Death card game and The Agents card game soon (or, I guess, when I get back from Christmas break), and Euphoria is arriving in January (but only because I used the “delay shipment” option, since it would otherwise arrive Christmas week).
(More board gaming photos will likewise be posted in about a week.)

I’ve become re-addicted to the show Supernatural, after Amazon had it on sale for Black Friday and I bought the seasons I was missing (7 and 8). Watched through season 2 in a few days and started on season 3… and I don’t know why I ever stopped watching. Yay awesome TV shows.
Also bought the last two seasons of Smallville that I was missing (9 and 10), as well as the first three seasons of The Walking Dead. Have a lot of TV to watch now. Maybe at some point I’ll get re-motivated to work on the Investigations card game. I’m thinking of making a tweak to the game where every deck card has a “conspicuousness” value, and every character provides conspicuousness, and exceeding a random conspicuousness value makes you automatically fail the investigation. (Would provide another value to tinker with on cards, and some more strategy in deck building to get good abilities with low conspicuousness cards or worse cards but be able to throw more characters at things.)

Work continues on People Wars: Gatherings. The theme of the set is “dual characters”, so I’m adding a bunch of dual characters along with abilities and skills that key off of them. Also, in an effort to make hybrid decks more feasable, I’m adding cards that reward working characters with kill counters as well as tasks that can provide items and attacks/skills. There’s also new abilities to help score tasks late game, and to help deal more damage early game. (Also notice the new “Climbing” and “Game Group” attributes, which I’ll flesh out in later expansions.)

Work has been super stressful lately. Not much to really say about that. I need to get better at separating work and life, and stopping work when it’s not work time. Hopefully that will come.

So yay for life, at least.

Philadelphia!

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My photo journal has gotten an update to bring it current. Not too much has happened in the past month, except for a trip!

Greg and I went to Philadelphia on the Amtrak last weekend. It was an excellent trip and we saw both the old city and historic sites, as well as the Western part of the city with parks and the university. Philadelphia is a rather beautiful city, and is very walkable too, which is nice.

We took the Amtrak last Thursday starting early in the morning, and it was uneventful. It’s funny how “reasonable” the Amtrak cafe car prices are to me now… $7.25 for a wrap is actually not an unfair price to pay. Maybe it means I’m used to eating better food, or am less concerned about food expenditures in general, now?

We spent the first full day in Philly (Friday) visiting the historic sites with the assumption that Saturday would be busier due to being a weekend. But apparently some schools were in town Friday for a trip (I guess Veteran’s Day weekend is a good time for those?), so everything ended up being super busy anyway, and it was fortunate that we got Independence Hall tour tickets before 9:30. (Literally right after we got ours, a huge swarm of students and teachers descended upon the ticket counter.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to take the city hall tour, because they sold out of tickets by the time we got there, so we instead wandered around and had cheesesteak for dinner. Apparently there are two “competing” places for cheesesteak in the city: Pat’s and Geno’s. Pat’s is the “original” cheesesteak, while Geno’s advertises itself as the “best”.


But, really, there was no competition. Geno’s meat tasted fatty and greasy while Pat’s was nice and meaty and flavorful. Pat’s fries were deliciously crisp and potato-y, while Geno’s tasted like eating crispy bits of nothing. Even the peppers were significantly better at Pat’s… their peppers were nice and flavorful and gave just right when you bit into them, while Geno’s seemed under-ripe and under-marinated. Geno’s wins barely for their bread, which doesn’t get as soggy with the meat juices, but it wasn’t enough to really matter. I didn’t dislike the bread at Pat’s anyway.


Still, at $9.50/sandwich and $4.50 for fries, it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be back to either place, even if I visit Philly again. Pat’s had a good sandwich, sure, but not $14 good.
Afterward, we got to do some nice night photography of the Eastern river.

On Saturday we wandered West from our hotel and explored the museum district and library and park and the river and UPenn. The library (at least the central branch) gives library tours as well as tours of its rare books section, and both are worth going to.

The leaves were also changing color, so it was an excellent time to wander the park and museum district.

The train back was on Sunday, and that was mostly uneventful as well (minus some signal trouble that took 40 minutes to resolve). We went to the Reading Terminal Market in the morning for breakfast (which was at a nice, but kind of overpriced, diner in the building), and I also had the unfortunate experience of wanting to buy food from a vendor, being offered a free sample from them, and deciding to walk away instead. Seriously, how do you manage to make such flavorless jambalaya? I was really looking forward to it too. :\

More photos are here.

In other things, work has been full of super stress lately. I guess in a lot of ways I’m the most senior person on the team now, and so a lot of stuff falls to me, and I kind of wish we had a more experienced or senior person directing everything. I don’t know. I’m kind of a terrible leader. :\ Bah.

I guess I’m doing reasonably at my job from a technical and productivity aspect, but I wish I was better at big picture and organizational things.

(I also wish people would stop filing us huge bugs and issues the week of feature freeze when we’re already scrambling to finish up everything for the release, but that’s not something I have control over.)

Also, as far as followup for CrashPlan seeding goes, it ended in great success. I sent back the drive, they received it and uploaded the data, I left my computer to sync up with the servers overnight, and voilà. My 1 TB of data is now online and able to be restored at my leisure. I’ve been syncing my photos and general updates since then every evening (since my personal laptop is not usually connected to the internet), and it seems to be working fine. Yay for online backups!