along the journey

In this post I’ll talk about my recent gaming, dollardudes, and gaming.

Tuesday night, Amy and I put the kids down and sat down at the dinner table to flesh out a disagreement of sorts. I really wanted to learn to play Settlers of Catan, the card game. And Amy wasn’t real excited. She was excited to spend some quality time with me though, so she gave in. This was the third Settlers game Amy and I had played in less than 2 weeks. I wrote about our game of Canaan, and then last Saturday Amy and I trudged through Settlers of Catan with our good friends Susan and Will (neither of them had ever played a Settlers game before). After a marathon game of 3 hours or so, with many interruptions (putting kids to bed, dishing out apple-crisp and icecream), Susan won. She and Amy were neck and neck for the longest road, which was the winning move. Early in the game Amy blocked the only ore that any of us were getting, and Will and I were unable to recover.

So back to the card game. Neither of us had played the card game, and had to learn from the rules, which always seems more complicated to me than learning from someone who knows the game. Anyway, after a rough start, we were able to figure out the mechanics, and play it through to completion. I really just wanted to figure out the mechanics, but once we got started Amy was intent on beating me. Which she did. The only thing we seem to have done incorrectly is randomly placing the region cards around our cities/settlements, as well as early in the game we may have put some red development cards on settlements, and I think we played that settlements could have two green developments. In the end, I let Amy win.

One of my favorite gaming companies is the local, Looney Labs. Looney Labs, is run by Andy Looney, and his wife and family of friends. My friend Mike and I have been playing a game called Homeworlds developed using the Looney’s Icehouse pieces. The looneys also have a weekly “webzine”, called The Wunderland Weekly News that comes out once a week, they aim for Thursdays. In this weeks issue Andy links to an ingenious improv event….I love it.

One last bit of gaming news… Nov 17 through the 20th, Games Club of Maryland will be hosting a gaming convention, EuroQuest. I’m interested in going, I’d love to have some friends accompany me. There is a Settlers tournament as well as a Carcasonne tournament. I’d be more than happy to teach either of these games in the next few weeks if anyone is interested.

This past Saturday Amy and I went out to eat at a local restaurant called Kibbys. It’s been around a long time, it’s not fast food, so we rarely ever eat there, and if we eat somewhere where we have to sit, it’s usually in Columbia. About 2 weeks ago I got a spam message from restaurant.com in which they were offering a 50% of coupon. If you aren’t aware, Restaurant.com sells gift certificates for restaurants in their program. Generally they’re $25 certs, that cost you $10. Sometimes there’s restrictions such that you can only go after 5, or with a party of 4 or more, othertimes there are no restrictions at all. It had been years since the last time I used it, but checked it out again thanks to the 50% off code, I ended up with 4- $25 Gift Certificates for $20. I had told a few folks about it then, but they were unable to get logged on at the time and take advantage of the coupon code. Then last week I got another email from them - 60% off now. I think they’re trying to pump up their marketing leading up to the holidays.

So here’s the deal. I’ll share the coupon code with whoever wants it, but they’ll give me $5 for each person I refer, I hate to just drop folks email addresses into forms like that, but if you leave me your email address, I’ll refer you through their site, and I’ll send you the email with the coupon code.

To sum up- you get $25 gift certs with the 60% off coupon for $4. I get $5 for you spending the $4. The coupon code is only good through the end of the month.

Tourists take to shelters as Wilma hits Yucatan

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I‘m testing out Flock….  the bloggin feature and all

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For my birthday I got a new board game, The Settlers of Canaan.. After going to get the game my wife and I enjoyed a nice dinner at Outback. My birthday was back in March. We just played the game for the first time tonight.

After work this evening we were sitting around trying to decide what we were doing, I told Amy that I was going to invite our friends Mike and Caroline over for dinner, we were gonna order subs, so I just called them up and asked. Didn’t give Amy time to think about it and decide that she’d rather not. Anyway, they came over and we enjoyed our subs. Apparently the sub joint that we get subs from won Best of Baltimore 2005 for their slice of pizza. Anyway, I wonder if the City Paper tried their subs. I think they have one of the best cheese-steak subs in the area too.

Anyway, After dinner we were able to get the three kids in bed, our two and theirs, and decided we’d play games. Mike and I have been playing Homeworlds over on Superdupergames, so Mike wanted to get the pyramids out, but I suggested we play a game we’d all be able to play, I’m fairly certain the girls wouldn’t want to play Homeworlds. So we broke out the Settlers game. After a slow start, it had been a while since I read the rules, and either Amy or I had played a Settlers game, as well as explaing the rules to two people who had never played a settlers game before. But we were able to get going and by the end of the game we had all had a good time. I was really happy to get a chance to play, and really glad that Mike and Caroline enjoyed the game. I forget the score, but I do know that Mike pulled out a win by snagging the longest road, and building a settlement on his last turn. I’m a poor game-blogger, I know.

as always, click the pics for bigger views

During the ride we spent time reading and praying. I also attempted to reach my dad, both of us with questionable reception on our cell phones as we switch between reliable towers and unreliable, as we were lucky to get through at all with all of the outgoing calls being made, certainly more of a priority than ours. Scared, wet, homeless, hungry people trying to make contact with someone, anyone, to let them know they were alright. One such call was that of the hotel owners relative, and another from the hotel owner to Denny, letting us know that she’s alright. I was also able to pass on the address to my dad and the 5 others that were with him. I also reassured him that he should be able to get gas as he got closer.

We stopped outside Mobile at what would be our last opportunity for fuel both diesel and food for what could be a few meals. The gas station had diesel, but not regular gas. There were lines of people stranded, there was police tape cordoning off the station across the street. Obvious wind damage brought down the flashing from around the station too. I tried frantically to get back in touch with Dad. I could stand in one spot and get it to ring, but an inch left or right and the call would fail. We filled up our tanks and our bellies as we took the Arby’s to go. As we neared Gulfport the sunset and the darkening landscape became littered with debris and fallen signs.

Landfall + 2 (a phrase Pastor Ron has been using to describe the Katrina timeline) started out in Chatanooga, TN. Still without a destination. As we drove south the landscape flattened. Denny started a radio interview with some station out of St. Louis, and he ended it 20 minutes later after parking the semi on a Sam’s Club parking lot, while some of the crew went in to spend the $200 that was given to us for water. Earlier that morning the hotel owner told us of her sister/mother/daughter/neice (I can’t remember now, and frankly it’s not important to the story) who had only moved to New Orleans from India a few weeks ago. She had not made contact with her relative since Katrina moved through and was very upset about it. This lady, a muslim and knowing Who we represent, asked us to pray for her relative. We did, and comforted her. She gave us this check. We spent it all. It’s amazing how much bottled water $200 can buy. We also stocked up on some spices and other condiments and loaded up the trailer and moved on. Sometime during the afternoon we had finalized our destination, Gulfport, MS. Gulfport was the city where the angry lady made landfall.

I wanna write. I really do. I even know what I want to write about…. I’ll try to get to it today.