Vacation

Vacation

Today is the first day of vacation. This is going to be appreciated; this summer has been nothing short of insane. We have had fewer people than we needed and between the inevitable vacations and miscellaneous other absences, and people getting pulled off for other projects, we've been feeling the pinch.

I am in vacation mode already. Aaaaah.

Thailand

Today, Serdic, Foran Object, my lovely wife and I went out for lunch. Our destination was a Thai place right around the corner from the Ranch, our lovely chateau. One of the benefits of my lovely wife's self employment (one benefit of many) is that she is often now in town, and thus able to meet up for lunch. This was not an option in the past, and we are exploiting it for all that it is worth.

We had spicy chicken and not-so-spicy shrimp. Both were amazing, although the spicy chicken took its toll on me. Foran object, who also got the spicy chicken, had a very hard time of it but managed to manfully clear his plate, with the assistance of a plate of sliced cucumber courtesy of a quick-thinking Serdic.

Mmmm, Thai food.

Accident

There was a fairly serious accident right near the site of our Thai lunch, which we ran across on our way back from Kung Fu.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of the story.

Kung Fu

I went to Kung Fu tonight. The first class was actually kinda easy, although it was a decent light workout. The second bit, the basic sparring bit, was harder. We covered Covering, which involves getting hit with focus gloves, a lot. We ended up with everybody in a circle with each person in the circle getting 30 seconds to beat the hell out of you with said focus gloves.

I lost a contact. My arms were a pretty shade of cherry red. I am going to be bruised.

I was expecting to be a little anxious about my turn in the circle, but it didn't bother me. It was actually kind of fun, in the "I don't really want to do that again right away" sense of the word.

Accident

Right. On the way back from Kung Fu we had to detour because the road going past Sobey's was blocked off (both directions). Multiple fire trucks, ambulances, police cruisers, the whole shebang. No idea what happened but it didn't look pretty.

I hope nobody got hurt, but given the hardware on site, that doesn't seem likely.

Dinner

My lovely wife is making a Soft Taco Bake for dinner. Mmmmm.

What a Co-inkee-dink

I'm writing this blog post on my laptop, in the living room, while my lovely wife reads and dinner cooks. I just finished thinking to myself, it's a good thing I'm writing this on a laptop, you know, just in case the power fails. I wouldn't want to lose my blog post.

Not fifteen seconds later, the power fails. We sit in the dark for a few seconds and then it comes back. My PC comes back on, noisily.

Good thing I'm writing this on a laptop.

Huh

Twice in that power outage thing, I wrote 'think' instead of 'thing'. I noticed that I did it, but I did it twice.

Apparently my inner monologue is composing this blog entry as a Yakov Smirnov impression.

Magic

I've been re-arranging my magic collection. I normally keep it in a set of binders, with the cards in 8.5 x 11 sheets, nine cards per sheet. I have 5,044 cards, split between cards I collected in high school and college, cards I bought from my brother, and new cards I've acquired since I started playing again. Once my two packages arrive, that number will increase by 2,260. That's a significant increase.

I've gone through and expanded the number of binders I'm using from five to twelve. Each colour, old and new, now has a binder all to itself. In addition there is a binder for new land/multicolour/artifacts, and for old ones.

This should allow me to expand my collection comfortably and still be able to find things.

I will, of course, require a large number of plastic cover sleeve sheets. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that the local game store, which supplied me happily for some time, closed its doors abruptly a few months ago. The new, not-quite-so-local store which I've reluctantly begun to migrate to, doesn't appear to have the exact same sheets I've been using. From a quality point of view, this doesn't matter much; a sheet is a sheet. But I'm concerned that the price will go up, and when you're talking about the volumes I'm talking about, I'm likely to notice.

Of course, I have to go through and put all 2,260 of those new cards into my inventory spreadsheet, which takes time, so I wouldn't describe this as a pressing issue.

Hungry

I'm hungry. That taco bake is sounding mighty fine right about now.