My vacation plus geek

For those of you who don't know, I am recently returned from my vacation to MD for my father and sister's birthday week thing. They were both children of 7/7, so I was supposed to take some of the week off and ended up taking almost the entire week off. As the old knight said at the end of Last Crusade, I chose wisely. As I do have some odd streaks of sunburn here and there, I didn't necessarily pick the right sunscreen every day, but taking that time was nicely relaxing, so it was well worth some vacation days.

Sailing, of course, I managed to get in for a day. Floating around in the water generally doing nothing was accompilshed. Tossing my brother in law off a pier and attempting the same with his brother, also got done. There was enough beer pong to fill a standard kitchen trashcan. I played my new DS games, both of which were engaging and fun (FFIII and Puzzle Quest if you must know). I practiced Kung Fu and Taiji every single day. I got to eat a small fortune worth of crabs, which was delicious and smash happy as well. We watched movies new and old of which the only one really worth mentioning was Pixar's Cars and I have to admit that for all my resistance to wanting to go see the movie (my whole racing aversion of late) the movie was quite good. Got lots done. Not much writing, but that's ok.

Mostly, though, I got ping pong done. I am back on my game. I started out shaky, losing every game to anyone, mom, brother in law, father, who I might play, and by the end I was winning more than losing. I love ping pong. The problem is finding a way to play it without the drive to MD. We do have a table here at work, oddly enough, but it is constantly in use and there doesn't appear to be any way to schedule time on the table.

If not for that whole "may not have a job come December" thing dangling precariously over my head a la the Sword of Damocles, I would just buy a damn table and find a nice place to put it. Outdoor tables appear to be 2-3X the cost of an indoor table, so either cramming it in my basement or in my parents house would seem to be my only option. I suppose I could always replace my kitchen table with the pong table, but my kitchen is ill sized for ping pong. Guh. Someday...

Now the geek. If you don't like Dungeons and Dragons, I suggest you stop reading now.

I got myself into the GM's chair for the first time in a long time at my game on Sunday. I ran an encounter that, in my opinion, went quite well save for the combat. The basic idea was that my fellow pirates were approached by some well geared other pirates who stole one of our crew. Then they had to go get little Billy the squid (seriously) back. All in all I wanted to have some entertaining traps, annoying special skills, and naval combat, and I think I succeeded on those counts. Not so much on the on ship combat, since I really wasn't ready for half the crew to immediately storm into the area where they were supposed to be sneak attacked and SEE their damn attackers before the sneak attacks could come. Or for half the crew to just hop down into the ship instead of walking across the trap laden decks. That could have been done better. Aside from that, I was entertained and I hope I entertained everyone.

Ok, I'm done geeking out. I'm going to publish this before the über storm hits and wipes out our power and our backup generators. Whee!