I haven't been very active on here lately in either writing or reading. It's not exactly that things are going badly, but there's a lot of transition. When it's good, it's quite good and when it's bad, it's pretty damn bad. The problem is that the situation changes at a drop of a hat. That means that I don't tend to plan as much and end up doing more spur of the moment things. Certainly I've put off the gencon recap for weeks now for the very reason that I'm not sure I could finish them if I started it and then the whole thing would hang over my head like a sword.

I should also mention that this past Sunday was Bernie and Karen's birthday party and it was pretty spiffy. We ran through yet another game of Agricola, which I won this time though I'm still not sure exactly how. I just don't know what to think about the game. It leaves me in a state of bewilderment each time I play it. There's just never enough time to do everything you want and you feel like you're constantly trying to keep ahead of the mudslide that's about to consume you. Maybe that's really part of the appeal for me. I can't pin down one single strategy or figure out how everything is supposed to work. That's why I keep wanting to play it again and again as if it were some sort of complex machine I could break down and understand if I just see it running enough times.

Anyway, back to the party. A lot of people ended up showing and we all got to meet Karen's sister who was a barrel of monkeys. She's preggers so everyone made sure to share with her all the intestines popping out and anus explosion stories they had about births. I couldn't figure out what all the shrieking was about at first. I had been in the kitchen at the time leaning on a kitchen stool waiting for my second round of meds to kick in.

When things had mostly died down that night and many people had left, I got to play a final game with Lori, Randy, and Karen which was nice. I don't get the chance to see Randy all that often since he's usually MIA at the panera events and some of the Bills' parties as well. The same usually goes for Lori and I haven't attended one of the meetups since around half a year ago. It's just too much of a price to pay in pain and discomfort for an experience I might not even enjoy. Plenty of people at the meetup are great, but it doesn't take too many shortbus-riding spazzcases to ruin the event.

I <3 cupcakes more than life itself. This reflects not only my love for cupcakes, but also my general dissatisfaction with life in general. Still, on a morning where I'm getting to scarf cupcakes, things don't seem all that bad. Surely it could be worse.

Despite my love of cupcakes, I don't actually get the opportunity to eat them very often. The only reason I have some now is due to a mini quirk of fate that started yesterday. It was another generic gameday at the Panera and I made the trek over hoping to give Agricola another whirl. It turns out that the Bills were hosting a birthday party for Andrea at their place that night but had forgotten to send out the evite invitations. That meant that everyone would\e cutting out of the gameday around 5:30 or so and there wouldn't be enough time to run through the game. Brian had also invited me over to his place that night but the lure of getting another Agricola runthrough at the Bills won out. When I went to call him to let him know, I discovered that I not only had forgotten my cell phone as well but my bottle of pills as well. The latter didn't turn out to be as much as a problem as I feared as the patches were working okay supplemented with some borrowed advil.

The party went over pretty well. I spent a good chunk of the evening getting that second play of Agricola and got my ass handed to me. We had a small rules snafu in the beginning that just ended up domino'ing into a disaster for me. Andrea had made a big mess of cupcakes as well and normally I would have been all over them but my stomach felt a bit off. I ended up snagging some and bringing them home with me and it ended up being a good decision. I'm not sure exactly what was the cause, be it medication or lack of sleep or something else but I was feeling nauseous and ill on the drive home. I didn't eat much at the party, only trying Bill's somosas as I was heading out the door and I ended up distributing it all over the street outside when I got home. I ended up with a stabbing headache interspersed with more nausea until I finally dozed off.

Still, all's well that ends well. I woke up feeling better and I have a plateful of cupcakes to eat. I just have to remember to give Brian a ring sometime today and apologize for last night's snafu. Karen and Bernie are holding a joint birthday party at their place today and if I'm lucky, there might be more cupcakes.

I ended up experiencing my first side-effect/overdose senario yesterday with the fentanyl patches. It wasn't intentional definitely caught me off guard. The fact of the matter is that the patches are supposed to last 3 days. The problem, from my perspective, is that it takes between 12-24 hours for a new patch to hit peak efficiency. That means that I often leave the old one on for at least an extra 12 hours or so after I apply the new. This hasn't been a problem so far, and I'd like to believe that overlapping in this fashion has saved me some unnecessary agony from breakout pain. I also don't like the idea of 'wasting' any of the meds that might be left in the patch so I figure there's no reason not to leave it on until every last drop is gone. The problem is that the time of day I apply the patches varies. It just so happened that I had applied the previous one very late in the day and the new one yesterday early. I figure I must've spent at least a handful of hours getting much more of the fentanyl on board than I should have.

Yesterday was a game day at the Panera and I really wanted to make it there because a new game order had come in a few days ago and contained Agricola. It's the new 'hottest game' with the most buzz and excitement. People have actually been quite rabid in defending its merits. You'd think that the cure for cancer was included free in every box.

Anyway, I wanted a chance to run through it and I was actually very happy with the results. Hell, I can't remember the last time I was this favorably inclined toward a board game. It took us around 4 hours to run through it from start to finish, not bad considering that I was trying to read the rules as we went along. The problem was that halfway through I started to get nauseous. I wasn't especially sleep deprived, so I knew it was likely due to the medication. I tried to just ignore and ride through it, but that was a no go. I ended up nearly puking all over the place a couple times and that convinced me to yank the new patch off. That seemed to sort things out eventually and the rest of the day ran much more smoothly.

All in all, it was an interesting experience. I had always wondered how much patch would be too much for me. I had no negative reactions at all when I first started taking it and with the more than occasional presence of pain, I figured I was actually taking less than I really should. Now I know that double the dose is way too much. That might come in handy when I finally get to see the pain specialist on the 19th. I'm just hoping that the guy doesn't end up being a wankjob.

I really have to wonder if the current pain patch I'm wearing is somehow defective. I've had to pop a hell of a lot of codeine today, more than I've taken on any day since starting up the patches. It's usually only taken a pop here or there to keep me pain free but I've been having quite a few issues. I'm probably at or exceeding the amount I'd have taken in a single day before I started using the patches. That's a bit deceptive since I'm not feeling nearly as crummy as I would have back then, but it's like seeing an unwelcome sight just when you had hoped you might have gotten rid of it, if only temporarily. Suffice to say, I have no clue what the hell is going on.

I should mention that today was Bill S's 40th birthday and I spent a chunk of time at their place and also out to dinner with the gang. I had been planning to get there right around noon, but lack of sleep from the previous night combined with other distractions delayed me. Those crazy-ass hippies are persuing wild rumors that Sarah Palin didn't really give birth to her 5th child this past April. The nutjobs claim that it's really her 16 year old daughter's baby and that she faked a pregnancy to cover for her. To 'prove' that this is true, they have some really fucked up photographic 'evidence' where they basically claim the kid has a 'baby bump' in the picture. Of course, what hasn't yet started to filter through to those assholes yet is that at least one of the picture they're using to show this was republished this year, but was actually taken back in '06. Not that there really needs to be much to feed this sort of insanity. If you're curious you can take a look for yourself.

Frankly, I'm cheering these wankers on. A couple of mainstream people have already bit on the rumor including Andrew Sullivan who is now demanding medical records to prove that Palin really was pregnant. It's doesn't get much better than this. I only hope that the storm continues rolling until it hits a crescendo. At that point, I'd love to see Palin come out for a press conference where she says something along the lines of this is what change means under Barack Obama, that his campaign's supporters will attack a teenage girl and try to destroy her just in the hopes they can damage her mom. Man, that would be wonderful. I think the backlash will get across even without the explicit dig, but I figure the dig would score major points.

Anyway, following the tales of the crazy made me even later and I didn't get over there until around 4 pm. I mostly hung around chitchatting with various people while others finished up various board games they were playing. I got to see Matt and Joyce's kid for the first time. He was pretty well-behaved considering that he's only two months old. I remember Madeline doing a lot of screaming at that age. Maybe it is true what they say about boy infants being easier or maybe he's just better tempered in general.

For dinner we went to a Irish pub in downtown Rahway. It was nothing spectacular, but nice general English cuisine. Most people either had the bangers and mash, the fish and chips, or the shepard's pie. I went for the latter and liked it well enough. After dinner was a Carvel ice cream cake, which is always spiffy. Not a cookie puss, I'm sorry to say, but you can't have everything.

After dinner we headed back to the Bill's place and I played a game of Oasis with Randy, Bill S, and girl whose name I can't remember for some reason. Bill edged me out in the last round and I finished a semi-close second. Everyone more or less gathered up to go home after that.

Feeling sorta crappy lately, but notta new there. Everything's sort of plodding along. I went to the game day at the Panera this past Saturday and it was a pretty laid back affair. Nothing all that exciting and I held up pretty well. I think I've really hit on something that helps out a lot. If I just don't sit, I don't have as many inflammation problems. At least that's the way it seems at the moment. It's hard to tell since everything goes in cycles and it's incredibly hard to figure out if things are getting better, worse, or just fluxuating up and down.

I've spent the past few days watching Deadliest Catch. I've caught a buncha episodes here and there but I've never had the oppertunity before to see complete seasons in order. For instance, I never knew that each season covers both King crab and Opilio. I had always figured that it was one or the other. The only thing slowing me down is the rate of the download. It started at a fairly good clip but ever since the third season, it's been inching along at a crawl. It'll likely be at least another day before the files all finish and I can see the last season.

The show's pretty amazing really and it's a pity that they weren't able to capture more of the rally style of the old days. When it was the days of every boat for itself, I'm sure captains made all sorts of sketchy decisions in trying to maximize their gain. No wonder so many people have croaked at this profession. That's not to say there haven't been deaths since they've moved to a quota system, but at least now the captains know they can hide out from a storm or take a break without risking their income. Not that they do much of the latter now, but at least they know that the crab is still theirs, even if it takes a little longer.

It's impossible to watch this show without wishing for a seafood dinner. I'd love a mess of snow crab legs and I don't think I've ever even had king crab. I'm pretty sure I've never even seen a crab in person that's been anywhere near the size of some of the monsters they pull up.

Oh, I made another political icon btw. I chopped bits from the most recent JibJab animation and spliced it together. Not exactly the easiest thing to do working with nothing but MS paint. One of these days, I've really got to learn how to use photoshop.

Well, more or less on the spur of the moment, almost the entire family has decided to take my grandmother down to Washington DC for a little mini vacation. I'm not sure exactly what they're going to be doing down there but the prospect of the trip seems to have made grandma happy, which is the entire point after all. It also means that I'll have to watch over the dogs for the weekend. It's not usually a horrible chore exactly, but they do tend to be poop machines and you can't really depend on them to wait till you let them out no matter how often you do it. At the moment, I can hear the Bassett hound downstairs raising a fucking ruckus. He's been barking almost non-stop for half a hour now. I have no clue what his malfunction is other than he doesn't like Cutie, the peekingnese. Cutie freaks him out, mostly because he tried to bite him a few times and is always sleeping on his bed. That said, you'd think he'd just shut up and avoid him already. The yard is huge and there are plenty of places where they can frolic out of sight of one another.

The Bills are having a get together at their place today and I had planned to go before the whole Washington trip popped up. Now I'm not sure if maybe I should just stay home and make sure the dogs don't destroy the place. I just can't believe that Max is still barking. You'd think he'd get a sore throat and stop after a while. Feh.

Missed the gameday today, which isn't all that surprising really. Woke up this morning in a state of blinding agony and I pretty much knew I wasn't going to be trekking anywhere. I haven't stepped out of the house since the Bills' Memorial Day party and I don't think I'm going to manage any other pleasure jaunts for a while. I've told myself that I'm going to actually make an appointment with a doctor on Monday in the hopes that at least some short term solution can be found. I'm supposed to go to Origins in a week and right now, I'm just completely fucked up. I can only hope that taking the steroids will provide a limited reversal. I've held off on taking any at all and I'm hoping that means I'll get more bang for the buck when I finally do pop them. If they don't work, then this Origins trip is going to be a freaking nightmare. I'm not exactly a free agent this time around, having promised to run events for playroom. If I'm as gimpy there as I have been at home, then it'll be a rigged roulette table as to how functional I am.

The other thing I'm concerned about is doctors in general. I've always tried to avoid doctors so I'm not sure exactly how it all works. What I'd like to do is find a pain specialist but I have no clue if I need a referral or I can just flip through the yellow pages looking for Dr Prescribes-a-lot. Hell, I'm not even sure how the whole thing works with Medicaid. Does every doctor take it? Can they opt out? Is there a list somewhere? Feh. If only it worked with those sketchy online pharmacies. Then I could just order one of everything and see what works best without needing a doctor in the first place.

So, the party at the Bills went over pretty well though there were a few notable downsides. For one thing, I was feeling a little subpar due to some stomach upset. The night before the party I had eaten some leftover pizza upon getting home and it didn't agree with me. I'm not sure why but that seems to be a common response for me and pizza lately. Maybe it was just all the oil or something but it was not a pleasant morning. By the time I left for the party, I thought it had cleared itself up and snacking on chips and vegetables saw no problems. Having a hotdog and a sausage though brought on a lingering series of mild abdominal pain and a vague sense of nausea. It may have had something to do with taking my meds on an empty stomach as well. I do that all the time but in this case, I was already feeling a bit bleh to begin with. Really, the only real net effect is I didn't want to eat anything else for several hours after that and just wanted to have a nice restful sit down.

I ended up playing a lot more games at this party than most of the previous. A lot of that was due to the not feeling well. Usually I tend to move around chatting with people but this time I just planted myself downstairs on the couch and games sprang up more or less organically. I must've played 8 or more games of Cash 'n Guns last night. There were also a couple of rounds of Pow-Wow and then a final game of Ra. Other activites included watching a really whacky Dr Who parody on youtube through the Wii's Opera browser, seeing bits and pieces of Return of the Jedi on tv, and I also got to spent a lot of time chatting with Bob. Him and Randy just got back from a trip to Barcelona and France and they were telling me about the trip. I didn't see much of Randy after that since he got himself entangled in a 5 and a half hour game of Through the Ages.

That was pretty much it. I held up pretty well on the whole pain front, mostly due to the fact I popped some steroids in the morning. Things were really starting to go downhill by the time I left though and the drive home wasn't pleasant. It took hours for the inflammation to die down and the accompanying issues. I don't think I actually got to sleep until around 4 or 5 am and then got up again way too early. What I really need right now is a good nap. I'm going to see if I can find one.

I feel, as the British say, like a tit for posting the above but someone did make the nice icon and I figured, what the hell. I'm sure most of you have no clue what it means, no should you. It's just a discworld reference and only comprehended by those who have delved a little too deep into the pit that's known as fandom.

A lot of the people on a discworld community I watch went one step further and were all agog over a commemorative pin put out just for this occasion with the proceeds to go to Alzheimer's research. Now, I love the discworld novels as much as the next person, but I just can't see spending 50 dollars to buy something that I know I would never wear and even if I did, no one would get. I imagine there must be more Pratchett fans in the UK so if you picked up something like this you could at least exchange knowing smiles with people on the street and the occasional enthusiastic high-5. After all, what's the point of sending out a message that no one will ever receive and understand. It's like throwing a party for 1 in your closet.

Anyway, for those of you who are discworld fans, happy lilac day. For those of you that aren't, you probably weren't missing anything all that interesting anyway. It also just happens to be mock26's birthday. I should try to remind myself to give him a call sometime today.

It's just about time that I should set off to the Bill's for their memorial day party. I'm thinking about stopping at some stores on the way there. There are some pretty unbelievable deals on video games that start today and if I could actually find any in stock, I could easily flip them on ebay for some small amount of filthy lucre.

I'd much rather be in bed right now. Well, actually, let me rephrase that since I am in bed right now. I'd rather be sleeping in bed right now. I was exhausted by 1am or so and fell asleep only to springboard back up 2 hours later. Pain issues have since kept me from being able to try to sleep again and so I've just been puttering around online, looking for something with which to occupy my time. It's amazing just how many hours of my life is taken up in this sort of activity. After running out of things to read, I figured I might as well update the LJ.

Yesterday was another game day at the Panera. In general, the usual suspects showed up though Lori missed this one due to prior commitments. I hear she was busy shaking her money maker somewhere upstate. I had been hoping to at least pass her the copies of Runebound expansions since prismcat didn't show either.

It ended up being a fairly light game day overall. I brought along a buncha small games and we ended up running through around a half dozen games of No Thanks, a couple of King's Breakfast, and then one of Through the Desert. I also tortuously sat through a game of Puerto Rico. The only options were that or Settlers, which is to say a rock and a hard place. Things didn't end up running as long as usual since the Bill's wanted to get home early in order to clean the house before their Memorial Day party today. According to them, Randy's RSVP'ed which is good to hear. I haven't seen him in ages.

I got back from the gameday at the Panera a couple hours ago a complete mess. I'll spare you any descriptions but suffice to say that you'd probably be horrified if I didn't. It shouldn't have been completely unexpected. Even with my drugs, there's just a limited amount of time I can be out and about like a normal person. Going to game days in general is pushing it when I spent 6-7 hours there. Today was simply worse because my day started earlier. Since my mom is going to be working at the restaurant tomorrow, my sisters and I went with her and my grandmother out to eat for mother's day. We went to the Bennigan's out near Middlesex mall and it was pretty spiffy overall. Business can't be very good at these sort of places lately given the state of the economy and it shows. There were some pretty incredible deals including a 7-day a week lunch special consisting of an entree and drink for only $6 or you could get an appetizer, entree, and dessert for $11.99. Even with those promotions going, the place was like a ghost town with only a few tables occupied while we were there. Food prices up, patronage down. It can't be a happy time.

Connie brought Madeline along with her and it's the first time I've seen her in around a month. She looks absolutely huge to me though I'm sure a lot of that is perception rather than reality. Connie did say that she's in the 95th percentile for head size so she's inherited our family's giant melon head. She's also a lot more behaved in general. What I remember most about my previous encounters was that it was almost impossible to see her both awake and not screaming. There was usually only a 10-15 minute window after she woke up or was fed or was changed before she would start to cry and had to sleep, eat, or be changed again. She's actually starting to develop a personality and would break into a huge smile whenever she looked at my mom or grandmother. Her brows would furrow in a puzzled/slightly disturbed expression whenever she glanced my way, though that's better than her reaction to my father which is to immediately break into tears. I'm sure a lot of it is just familiarity.

Madeline was well behaved enough that there weren't any real disturbances with the meal. For the most part, my sisters just passed her back and forth as the other would eat. The meal itself was very good for the price. I ended up having a cheese burger with fried mushrooms as an appetizer. When it's piping hot and done right, I just <3 batter-dipped fried vegetables. I did end up scalding my mouth at one point though.

After the meal, it was still around 45 minutes before the gameday would start and I made the mistake of just going there early and waiting in the car. What I should have done is just gone home and 'reset the clock' on my issues and arrived late. Instead I sat around listening to NPR until everyone else arrived. I spent most of the game day playing Through the Ages again. No doubt that was part of the problem. The game must've run at least 5-6 hours where I just sat there without moving. By the time I was finally forced to get up to make my bladder gladder, everything had just snowballed into a real cockup. Inflammation issues are like that. You can take anti-inflammatories or other drugs but time works against you. All you can do is slow the issues, but there's always a piper to pay at some point. I managed to limp my way back to finish the game because I didn't want to just abandon it so close to the end. As soon as it was over I made my way to the car and came home.

Situations like this always make me worried when it comes to cons and other sorts of situations where I'm stuck out for extended periods. It's no wonder why things like that have become less appealing over the years as things have gotten worse.

Well, today was a mixed sort of day for sure. It started out fine enough but I soon ran into a couple of snafu's. On the plus side, I got to snag breakfast this morning, which is always a plus. I was back home and loafing about when Bill S called and asked if I could swing by the Panera for the gameday a bit early. He had decided to buy a car on the spur of the moment after seeing it in stock and wanted to make sure that someone was there to hold down the fort. I had been planning to be late like normal, but since I wasn't doing anything anyway, it wasn't really an imposition.

The first fuckup happened soon after I arrived. I found, that unbeknownst to me, my mom had shuffled around the games I kept in the back of the car the last time she had swapped vehicles with me. For some inconceivable reason, she decided to pile all of them, tight to the gills, right behind and under the driver's seat. This mean that when I went to move the chair back with the electric motor whozit, it crushed a bunch of my games into smithereens. The boxes actually ruptured and rent all over the place. I ended up losing the box to Pow Wow and Cash n' Guns completely. There was also more minor damage to El Grande and Die Macher. On top of that, as I was hoping up and down in an incandescent rage I found out that she had also at some point moved some of my games into the god damn trunk. A trunk that we all know leaks when it rains and had acutally destroyed a previous board game she did the same thing to. Now a couple of games have water damage too.

When I got to the Panera, my first throught upon finding this was to launch into a tirade. Lucky me, I had forgotten to bring my cell phone. I ended up having to borrow George's phone so I could call her and ask what in the frak had she been thinking. Her response? Well, why would you want to move the chair back in the first place? WTF?! Why would I want to move the chair back? WTF?!? It's not like she dosen't know about my issues or anything. She also claimed that it was me who must've put the games in the trunk at some point which is simply insane. I more or less hung up at that point and went back into the Panera to silently fume to myself.

The game day itself started out fine but had one incredibly pissy part to it. I had been listening to the radio on the way over and Avril Lavigne's song girlfriend had been playing. Catchy songs get into my head really easily and while waiting for someone else to return to the room so we could start a new game, I started to whistle the tune. People at the other tables began complaining about it, citing it as 'annoying'. My first thought was that they should fuck off. It's not like I was whistling really loudly or anything and certainly it wasn't any louder then their assorted game chatter. I really don't get what the fuck is with people who think they can just order others around. I blew my top at that point. I eventually recovered my composure but just thinking about it still irks me.

Other than that, the game lineup consisted of Bonanza, Race for the Galaxy (which I still don't really get), and an epic 5 hour plus attempt at Through the Ages. The game isn't bad at all but the production value is god awful. I don't think they could have made the game any cheaper than they did. It didn't help that there were dozens of little itty, bitty wooden pieces, all of which have a tendency to roll and aren't exactly fun to manipulate with sausage fingers. I spent most of the game dead last by orders of magnitude. I think I had something like 15 victory points when other people were rounding 100. I had a late game strategy, that probably ended up just being a little too late. I ended up closing the gap but even if we had finished the game it would have been a foregone conclusion.

Anyway, I got home a few hours ago and only just got sorted out. Being out and sitting for long periods is never good for me. I'm a bloody mess by the end of it. Not to mention I usually have to then wait around for the inflammation to die down before getting the rest. I probably end up losing a half dozen tablespoons of blood after every single one of these events. No wonder I don't go out much.

So yesterday was the Smirk and Dagger Tournament at the Meetup. Things were a bit rocky at times, but in the end we got through it without any blood being spilled. There were a few conflicts and issues between some of the players and I had my hands full trying to keep everything running. At times, it was just a little ball of tightly rolled insanity. I think around 12 people participated from start to finish in the end. A few more of the late arrivers jumped in on a couple of games here and there, but weren't actually in the running.

The really disapointing part of all of this is that the prize support from Smirk and Dagger never arrived. I had sent emails to Curt about it early on and he seemed enthusiastic about the idea and providing some sort of prizes. I emailed him recently to let him know how the training day went and things were still all spiffy. I then asked about what he would be sending for support and I haven't heard from him since. I ended up having to use a few of my own games as prizes, including a sealed copy of Run for your life Candyman I had picked up last year at a con. Luckily, I also had some of the promo items I could give away from the game that I snagged at the same time. I didn't have any other Smirk and Dagger games to give as prizes for 2nd and 3rd so I ended up just rumaging through the game closet and looking for whatever was still sealed in plastic. What I came up with was Relationship Tightrope and Fishing for Terrorists. Ya, I know, but you make do with what you've got. I told the people that Curt might still come through in the end and there could be additional items if prize support actually arrives. Heck, if nothing else, I wouldn't mind getting my copy of Candyman back.



After the tournament ended, I rocketed out of the meetup like a bat out of hell along with Lori and some others. It had been a long day and everyone else had already gathered at the Panera for the regular game day. It was nice just to sit around, chat, and unwind.

It was a pretty messed up day. I haven't used an alarm clock in years. There are a variety of reasons for this but most of them circle around the reason that I don't really need one. I mean, where the heck do I really have to go? Most of the things I do have to do nowadays are pretty freeform. If I miss it, it's not like it's a big deal.

This lack of an alarm, makes those times when time is of the essence sort of obnoxious. I had spoken with Lori the night before and it was agreed that we would visit Bill S in the hospital. Since I had no idea when she would want to go exactly, I wanted to be up at a relatively early hour in order to be able to call her and find out. By the time it hits a certain hour at night, you just decide it would be better to just stay up and not sleep at all. I figured I could ring her at a little past 9, we could make the trip, and then I could come home and fall unconscious.

Things didn't quite work out like I expected. It turns out she had some work to take care of it and it stretched out longer and longer. Since I didn't want to run the risk of going to sleep and missing her call, I just kept staying up and watching highlander eps and twiddling my thumbs. In the end, she wasn't ready to go until a little after 3pm and by then I was exhausted. I had also been popping codeine all day in prep for a journey out so I had a nice little synergy with the dizziness and nausea I usually get from lack of sleep and the dizziness and nausea that comes from the meds.

The visit to the hospital was actually sort of fun. We bought Bill S a giant teddy bear balloon fro the gift shop. I had been hoping to get him one of those obnoxious singing balloons that would play crappy music nonstop, but the only balloons of that type available were It's a Girl and Happy Birthday. Neither seemed exactly fitting under the circumstances. When we got to the room, Bill S looked like death warmed over. Sunken eyes, glazed expression, the works. It turns out his appendix wasn't where it was supposed to be, and so a laproscopic operation wasn't possible. The doctor had to cut and then root around in there until he found it hiding behind the liver. The resulted in more damage to the general area and it looks like he's going to be in the hospital for at least a couple more days.

It turns out that they also hadn't let him have any food or water since the operation either and he was practically begging for some jello. I offered to scope out the floor and see if anyone had died and maybe I could swipe their dinner jello since they obviously wouldn't be needing it, but that was ruled unwise and macabre. Bill M, Lori, and I popped down to the cafeteria at one point where I picked up a $3 'salad' made of frozen yogurt. The only other thing I guess I should mention is that it's apparently a bad thing to make Bill S laugh at the moment. An unthinking Jew-joke sent him into minor spasms of agony and after that, we tried our best to keep the jockularity to a minimum.

Lori and I headed back soon after that and I more or less fell unconscious as soon as I got home.

So, things actually went pretty at the smirk and dagger day. By the end, I was more than a little tired of running the games over and over and there were a couple other minor issues, but that was about it. I guess I should just list the downside first.

Well, first and foremost, Sue Ellen was a major pain in the ass today. I have no clue if she's just gotten more whiney and obnoxious over the months I haven't been around or she was just being more of a bitch than normal. I've just about had it though. I've told Lori already that the next time she spends an entire game whining at me, I'm going to slap the stupid out of her. It's one of the most annoying and rude personality traits I've ever seen in my life, and coming from me, that should mean something. Hell, if I call someone else rude, they must really be fucked up. Anyway, I endured two sessions this time around and I simply refuse to do it again.

Other than that, I had some drug issues. I hadn't eaten anything all day other than a little bit of pasta that Bernie didn't want and I think that's what caused the nausea and dizziness. Just the normal sort of side-effects I get when I pop too much of the codeine. It wasn't dehabilitating and I was able to work through it.

All in all, around 20 or so people participated and we ran 3 games of Candy Man, 2 of Hex-Hex, and 1 of Cutthroat Caverns. Those who played seemed to have a good time (with the exception of Sue Ellen) and I hope at least a few of them decide to show up for the tourney. I was surprised to discover that I scheduled the thing for the day before Easter, and that Easter falls on my birthday this year. I don't think I can ever recall an Easter coming so early. I've always thought of it as an April holiday. That proximity may be helping to drive down registrations and turnout.

In other news, I called Bill S tonight to see if he and the other Bill wanted to go for breakfast tommorrow morning like we had talked about. His mom ended up calling me back on his cell to tell me that he's in surgery at the hospital and that she and Bill M were waiting for him to regain consciousness. I immediately thought something truly catastrophic had happened. I mean, death or dismemberment, or something along those lines. Apparently he had an appendicitis attack the night before and they called 911 to get him to the hospital. Once there, an x-ray showed it was about to pop so they snicker-snacked it out of there. He should make a full recovery though he'll be in the hospital for another day or two. It's a good thing they got medical attention for him when they did. Hell, if it had been me, I probably would have just popped more codeine and spent the next day hoping it'd go away.

True Dungeon treasure tokens arrived today and I can't help but feel incredibly ambivalent about it. When I lift the package, it weighs a ton and I can't help but boggle at the fact that I payed a thousand dollars for it. Sometimes I think I must be clinically insane. I don't even want to open them up right now, though I am sort of curious if there's a Golden Ticket in there somewhere. That's about the only way I'd feel good about the purchase right now. The fact is that I simply have too many of these darn tokens. I really need to weed the numbers down to something more manageable. If I tried to drag the whole thing to Gencon with me this summer, I'd probably have to split them into two cases because they'd go over the weight limit. I'm never going to do anything with the large majority of them and at least when I was collecting magic cards, they were light.

Other than the tokens, I had the dubious pleasure of buying breast milk bags for the first time ever. I was going to Target to see if there was anything interesting in the video game section since I had both a gift card from Christmas and a $5 off $25 coupon. I checked with Connie and Shelley to see if they needed anything and it turns out that breast milk bags were on the shopping list. I can't help but look at the bags and think of them like those CapriSun juice containers. I don't imagine a lot of people jab a straw into a bag of breast milk and just start sucking away though. In the end, the video game selection was beyond pathetic and I wouldn't have bought anything there at half the price.

Lastly, (Though it's firstly in chronology) I went out the a Korean BBQ restaurant for lunch with my Mom, Grandmother, and Shelley. It ended up being a lot more tasty than I expected. It was a pretty pricey meal but fun was had by all and I gorged myself until I was ready to tip over. It's one of those places where the meal is about the experience as much as the food itself. Sort of like fondue restaurants or Beni Hana's. After we were finished, Shelley headed down to Atlantic City to meet friends and I began the breastmilk bag adventure and after that it was gameday at the Panera.

Lotsa fun overall, though I had some issues at one point with pain management. We spent a good chunk of time chatting about politics which I always find interesting. I'm almost always willing to join in on political debates no matter what. There was a lot of speculation about whether or not Hillary Clinton really is the devil and what will happen with the primaries and then the general election in the fall. I'm always a little surprised with how much some people on the Left loathe her. It's sort of sad really. I wonder if all that vitriol hurts her feelings sometimes. Well, if she had feelings.

I guess I should mention that yesterday was Bill M's birthday. Last Sunday we ended up all going to the resturant again just like last year and the year before that. It's become a yearly tradition of sorts and the event always end up playing about the same each time. The same people (for the most part) and the same sequence of events.

I ended up dropping the ball a bit with not really knowing what the heck to get Bill and so I ended up procrastinating until it was too late. Whatever I decide at this point, it'll have to be belated. As for everyone else, it was an interesting bevy of presents. My personal favorite was Arthur's gift, something titled 'Asian Mind Games'. Hilarious. It makes me want to grab a copy and then find someone with a crazy asian girlfriend to gift it to.

After the meal, everyone stuck around a bit to game a bit. Seeing as it was Superbowl Sunday, the resturant was practically a ghost town anyway so there wasn't an issue with lack of space. The only thing I ended up trying was the new Playroom Entertainment game Bull in a China Shop. It was pretty good, which was frankly sort of surprising. The small playroom games aren't exactly big on quality sometimes when it comes to gaming mechanics. They tend to depend a lot more on theme and the bits. That's not always a horrible thing when marketing games nowadays. I mean, where else can you get a dozen plus plastic figures of surfing cows or little green cthulhu's?

Alrighty, here are some of the pictures from the christmas party. I'll put it all behind a cut so it dosen't scroll out of control. Minorly annotated for your edification:

( Here we go )

So today was the day planned to go and redeem those "mystery" coupons from Houlihan's. In the end, it was the usual crowd of the Bills, Lori, Bernie, Karen, and myself. We had at least four of those coupons between us and I was dead set on trading mine in. I don't find Houlihan's all that appealing that I would want to make repeated trips just to trade in a coupon.

When I got there, everyone else had already been informed that the terms and conditions on the thing said only one could be used per table. My response to this was that we should all state we wanted to be seated at our own individual table so we could then each use one of the coupons. We could then yell conversations to one another and everything would be spiffy. When I suggested this perfect solution to the waiter, he said he would check on the idea and eventually sent the manager over. The manager didn't exactly strike down the idea but made some mention of how wouldn't we rather sit together and wouldn't that be better. Hmmmm....sit with everyone else...save up to $10...sit with everyone...$10...fuck that, I chose $10. I got up and moved maybe 3 feet to a nearby booth. Unsurprisingly, no one else followed suit and they all decided to stay where they were. Pansies.

All in all, it's not like I was exiled to Siberia or something. The distance was close enough that I didn't even have to raise my voice to be heard or anything. Lori snapped a picture to document my cheap defiance and that was basically that. We spent a good chunk of time at the resturant just chatting about various things. The Bills are still thinking about making a trip to Amsterdam this summer, Lori's traveling to Florida to engage in debauchery, plans for Bill M's birthday at the resturant, and we made plans to go see Sweeny Todd in a couple of weeks. Almost everyone gone a free movie pass from Bernie and Karen for christmas and it'd be a good oppertunity to use them up. Besides, now that I have the soundtrack, thanks to Randy, I should go see the movie in order to better appreciate it.

I should have popped over to Brian's for a New Year's get together but he had called me the night before saying that it was canceled due to lack of interest. It seems that most people weren't up for the idea, no doubt spending the day recovering from their hangovers. Since there was notta else to do, I popped over to the Mall and burned up a coupon for Coldstone Creamery and I've now got dessert sitting in the freezer.

So last night was the annual holiday party at the casa de dos Bills. It's something they do every year and they go out of their way to have it catered which can't be an insignificant expense. The guest list seems to grow year from year and there are always new faces in one form or another.

This time around I got to meet a few more friends of the family (Bill S's) who included a little person, his little person wife, and their average-sized son. I'm putting average in italics because I have this tendancy to use the word 'normal' instead and actually did it once while talking to the guy about the genetics of little person-dom, something he quickly corrected. I'd never really had a huge amount of interest in the topic but was fasinated to discover that it's actually a dominant trait apparently. Only the heterozygous individuals survive so when any two little people have a kid, it's 2/3's likely to be a little person too and 1/3 likely to be average sized. I had always assumed because it was generally rare that it was a recessive trait. It turns out that a lot of them are also just spot mutations, which I guess only makes sense from the whole heterozygous thing.

As an aside, I find something incredibly belittling about the term 'little people'. I know it's what they apparently prefer and I guess it has to be better than dwarf or munchkin or leprechaun, but you'd think that they could come up with something better than little people. It makes them sound a bit like magical wee folk and you can't say that the world 'little' dosen't have an infantilizing ring to it. Maybe we could just call them short people or something.

Oh well, that whole thing aside, the only other thing I did was play Rock Band. I had realized at Matt and Joyce's Christmas get together that the drums were never going to be my thing. I tended to struggle even on easy. So this time around I gave the guitar a whirl and found I really liked it. I was competant enough to play on medium without getting boo'ed off the stage and usually managed a score in the high 80's. Not fantastic for sure, but not bad for a first night's try. There was something thrilling about playing the actual melody of a song, note for note. Of course, there were a few times I ended up flubbing those parts so badly that the song essentially had no melody for a bit. It always took a while for me to feel the beat of the song. As far as timing, I end up playing more on instinct than watching exactly when those colored bars hit bottom. In fact, when I had to rely just on the colored bars, that's when I usually ended up having issues.

We also ended up exchanging some christmas presents at the party. Frankly, this is part of the party that always causes me some amount of angst each year. I don't much like holiday shoping in general and I really don't like the fact that so many people end up showing up to this thing and there's this differing levels of friendship thing. It makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable when I see someone not get anything to get something and not give anything to someone or vice versa. I'm sure most other people don't even spend much time thinking about it, but it's something that I end up pondering. So this year, basically I just decided to load a pillow case with whozits. I bought a case of those bigass solid Hershey's kisses, a few tins of some fancy schmancy truffle whozits, and $75 worth of gift cards in $15 incredments. I then proceeded to toss the items about, hitting at the very least the major individuals and then anyone who didn't seem to have gotten much or anything. Lori ended up doing practically the same thing but went all gift cards. She was telling me she ended up picking up 15 of them from Target just to make sure that she had every possible person on the darn invite list covered. I have no clue what denomination is on the card, but that had to have been a pretty pricey endevor overall.

The only non-generic item I picked up was from Randy, who continued the tradition. This is the third christmas in a row where he's gotten me musical CD's. This time around it was Evita and the movie version of Sweeny Todd. I'm pretty excited about the later since it's one of those that I've always meant to get around to listening to. In fact, I'd love to get a group together to actually catch it in theaters. Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and a musical about killing people and baking them into pies. What is there not to like? Bob also came along with Randy and I got a chance to have a good talk with him as the night wore on. It's a shame that I don't get to see more of them in general, but Bob has no interest in gaming and generally avoids those events and even Randy dosen't pop down as often anymore. Shame really.

I ended up taking some pictures but they're still in the camera. I'll try to find some time to upload and resize them in the next day or two and pop them up.