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sniffnoyHey, I actually have some free time once again! Time to write stuff down.
So a few weeks ago was spring break here and I went down to Rolla to visit Heidi and the rest of Spotty Thorpe[0]. (Well, OK, the only people still in Spotty Thorpe from when I was last there are Heidi and Maggie.) And stuff happened and I didn't write any of it down till now and hopefully I can remember it.
So um general stuff. The house is now inhabited by Heidi, Maggie, Mark, Andrew, Brian, and also maybe Megan? Well, whatever -- the names don't mean anything without context, anyway. Of the dogs that used to live there, Xqqqey (pronounced "Zoey") still does (she's Maggie's, I think?) and Lily lives in Considerate House with Kasih. But now there also cats! Heidi has 3 cats and there used to be others but now there are not because it's been a long time since I was last there. They are Bartholomew (generally abbreviated to "Barth", but I kept wanting to call him "Barfy" for some reason), who was very friendly, Spotty, who was less so at first but only took a few days to mostly get used to me, and Zelda, who Heidi always describes as "so weird!". (I describe her as "skitty kitty skitty kitty skitty kitty"!) The cats purr so much! I was not used to this.
The walls are covered in strange pictures made largely from magazine clippings glued together. One sequence appears to deal with a (covert?) war between turkeys and bees.
I thought I'd have a lot of time to just sort of hang out and so to actually get work done but actually Heidi had me doing stuff the whole time. Oh well. Now I finally have free time. Of course, right now I'm using it to write this rather than to work, but...
There was no Weird-Ass Fucking Pasta.
Um let's see. Specific things worth writing about.
Sunday! I arrived in St. Louis. There was Heidi and Kasih and Andrew and we met up with a cousin (sort of) of Kasih's named Katie at this pizza place where Heidi was shocked to learn that I don't really like pizza. At the last minute Katie asks "Hey can I bring along Terry?" (her father) and uh sure why not? Not like any of us knew him (Katie's not exactly Kasih's cousin, as mentioned). As it turned out Terry was just really obnoxious the whole time. So here I am sitting with my face buried in my hands just trying to ignore anything. Heidi nudges me and asks if I want to leave. I nod. And then she actually grabbed me (not literally) and left! I explained that I hadn't meant to actually suggest leaving as an actual course of action -- I just meant, I wanted to be out of there, I didn't want to pay the cost of potentially causing a scene. Fortunately, apparently, there wasn't one. And so Heidi and I got to avoid Terry and just walk around for a bit before we returned to Spotty Thorpe.
Tuesday! The journey southward. So unfortunately it happened that around the time I was visiting, something had happened to Heidi's grandfather he'd been hospitalized, and so Heidi went to go visit him on Tuesday. Heidi asked me if I wanted to come along; at first my response was that this sounded kind of awkward but eventually I decided to go along with it.
The place was in West Plains, a several-hour drive to the south. First we stopped by some other relatives of Heidi's to see if they wanted to come along but most of them were out at the time. They live on a farm with horses and llamas and uh maybe also things that are neither horses nor llamas. (Like, a lot of unnamed barn cats. Who apparently you actually have to feed? I just assumed the subsisted on the various pests they ate.) And uh also two dogs named Kiki and Gwenny (who barks a lot). A cousin of Heidi's was around and took the time to show me the horses, but I did not get to see the llamas.
(I did not realizes horses used their lips to feel things! Going by Heidi's reaction I guess this is something I should have known? The last time I was actually around horses was when -- at Jeffrey's[3] bar mitzvah when I was like 3? OK, that probably wasn't the last time, but I'm having trouble remembering any others. I don't know. I thought the thing with the lips was really funny. As we will see there is a lot I don't know about animals and thus find really funny.)
Anyway we continued on our way southeast. And, we continued on our way southeast. And, we continued on our way southeast. Eventually Heidi realized we had probably gone too far, considering how long this was taking compared to how long it was supposed to take. (Which at this point I was kind of annoyed about -- I had a headache and was a bit nauseous, so I was kind of cranky.) We stopped and called Kasih who pulled up a map on her computer and confirmed that yes, we had gone too far by about half an hour.
Shortly after we turned around and began our way back, I noticed a "Missouri Welcomes You" sign. Yup, we had accidentally ended up in Arkansas. (We also decided to stop in a town to get something for my headache, and while there Heidi asked someone working in the store, "Hey, what state is that? <points>" Yup, Arkansas. Not that there was really any other plausible answer. I mean we hadn't crossed the Mississipi or anything. Also, I did not realize Missouri bordered so many other states.)
Unfortunately that was not the end of our navigational troubles, but the rest of that story is not as interesting and would be easier explained with a diagram, so I think I'll skip it. Ultimately we called Kasih again who pulled up a map again and the problem was solved. (And then there was a third problem and we asked some people in a building, but this is getting dumb now.)
Anyway despite my complaining earlier, Heidi's family was pretty cool and eventually my headache went away so actually I had a good time.
After that most of Spotty Thorpe went and watched Being There -- Kasih had to watch it for a class, I think; I remember Lily was there. I instead went and read stuff on the internet for a bit because I was feeling desynchronized. :P Funny -- I'd only heard good things about the movie, but everyone there hated it, saying it was terribly boring and nothing happened. I came in near the end and it didn't seem like that, but that might be a thing where sheer length of time matters...
Thursday! Heidi wanted me to come to some topology seminars but I couldn't find the first one and then Heidi got a little sick and decided to skip the second one. Later, Andrew, Mark, Heidi, and I played Seasons, which Heidi and I were new to. My overall reaction is basically "Eh, I think I'd rather just play Dominion or something." (Or Tzolk'in! I've talked about Tzolk'in, right?[4]) Worth playing a second time to get more of a feel for it maybe -- now at least I have a little better idea what to do -- but, eh. It was a lot of "You have a bunch of resources to manage, one of which is victory points, and you have cards that do stuff, and things have different values/rarities at different times." Not boring, just nothing really special. Also it kind of dragged, though a lot of that might have just been Mark taking a long time to decide on everything. But also a lot of that was the "multiplayer solitaire" problem, and while that's not necessarily fatal, well, I'm just not sure the game is good enough to overcome it.
I definitely feel like the game could have used more unique cards -- there just wasn't a whole lot of variety to the effects. But then, we left out the "advanced" cards. I think if I played again I'd want to play with those in. The game is simple enough that there doesn't seem to be much reason to leave them out. Like, if the game were much quicker it would make sense to leave out advanced stuff the first time, but it isn't quick, so may as well go for it, right?
Part of the game is that at the beginning you draft cards that will you slowly draw throughout the game -- so you have to have some idea what you're doing right out of the gate. Heidi just picked randomly, which unsurprisingly did not go well for her. I took a bunch of accelerants but neglected to get much of anything to accelerate into. (As soon as we had to sort our cards into piles determining when in the game we would get them, I realized I had picked pretty much only early-game cards. Or at least, that's how I assessed it. My assessment may not mean very much.) Late in the game I managed to get a little bit of an engine going, but it did so little it may not have even been worth it. Andrew (I think?) beat Mark by a small margin, with Heidi and I way behind.
Also Heidi made chili and it was good.
I think it was that night that the incident with the cats occurred. See, Heidi's cats stay in the basement (where Heidi's room is), while Xqqqey stays upstairs. Unfortunately the door on the staircase has no doorknob, so instead there's a little locking mechanism with a pin on the basement side, and the top half of the door is like this widely-spaced grid of twine, so if you're on the upstairs side, you can still stick your hand through to lock or unlock it.
Anyway after Heidi had gone to bed I was heading upstairs and I noticed the door was wide open. Uh-oh, I thought, better close it. Except, of course, the cats were already upstairs. The first one I encountered was Spotty. He spooked upon seeing me, and ran straight for the door, which I had locked. So of course he climbed up and tried to fit through the gaps in the twine grid, which he couldn't. I figured, guess I'd better go unlock it then. But then here's me, this big lumbering human coming right towards him so of course he jumps the hell off of there and runs away again (trampling right over my foot with his claws out) and hides.
Anyway, I reopen the door. I find Barth, and manage to herd him downstairs (Barth is really friendly, as I've said), but I can't find Spotty or Zelda. I tell Brian about this; he thinks Zelda probably just didn't go upstairs in the first place. Ultimately we just have to go get Heidi out of bed, and she finds Spotty and Zelda hiding under couches and manages to get them downstairs. (Xqqqey, meanwhile, just kind of barked at them, but only when she could see them.)
Friday! Heidi and Andrew and I went to Spring Creek Gap, a local conservation area. There is, in fact, a creek there, and there happened to be water in it at the time. (Is it actually a water gap? I, uh, guess so?) As soon as we got there and got out of the car we found a dog just sitting there in the little parking lot. It had a collar but no tags. There was also one other car in the lot, a pickup truck.
I should perhaps give some context here -- something like this has happened once before. Only, that was Heidi by herself; and she was on a bike, not in a car; and that dog had no collar at all, and it was also starving; and it followed her 17 miles to the nearest town where she left it at a shelter; and that dog is the dog who is now known as "Lily" and is Kasih's.
Well, as soon as we got out of the car the dog came to greet us -- or maybe it was only when we approached him? I forget. Regardless, he was very friendly -- and as soon as we started down the trail he started following us. So immediately there was this worry that, uh-oh, this is going to end up with us having another dog. We even made a plan -- if we didn't encounter the dog's owner by the time we got back, we'd just leave the dog there for now, then come back later (since we needed to pass by that way anyway), and if he was still there, then we'd take him to a shelter.
The dog followed us around the whole time -- not necessarily closely, he ranged around quite a bit, and he wasn't always within sight; but he always seemed to know where we were and find a way back to us eventually, especially when we hollered for him. (We'd just holler "dog", of course. I still have no idea what the dog's name might have been.) Eventually we headed back, and it was when we were nearly back to the parking lot that the dog vanished and didn't come back. We hollered "Dog!" over and over, but no, he was gone. Fortunately when we got back we found the pickup truck heading out with the dog sitting in the back -- apparently this was the dog's owner and he'd been waiting here for him. So, yay, that turned out OK.
Also we saw some tadpoles in a pond there!
Later that day we returned to St. Louis so I could return to Ann Arbor the following day. We stayed with Kasish's family who lives a bit outside the city. (There were like 3 houses between their house and the Mississipi.) Worth noting: Kasih's mom knows a lot about birds. And there were 4 cats! Gandalf and Baloo and Lucy and Fluffy (Fluffy's really shy though). And a giant albino bunny! An Angora rabbit, to be specific. At one point he kind of tried to bite me? Like, not seriously, just like he was testing if I was food or something. I thought this was so funny I got him to do it several more times. But apparently this is just something rabbits do. Oh well.
And we went to the City Museum and it was amazing but I don't have a lot to say about it. And I was introduced to toasted ravioli which was neat but I don't have much to say about that either.
I think that is all I have to say for now.
-Harry
[0]The house where she lives.
[3]My second cousin, Jeffrey Beals. Some second cousins of mine live on a farm. I'm not too clear on the details -- I've never really gotten a good handle on the outlying branches of the family, to be honest...
[4]Holy crap, no I haven't. In fact I never wrote about my and Mickey's trip down to Philadelphia (to see Nick) during winter break at all! Man, I've really let this thing go to rot, haven't I?[5] Short version: I missed a bus, we got there anyway, it was fun, I was introduced to Wawa, we walked on an abandoned elevated train line and encountered someone who lives there, a downed (but deactivated) power line was used to help climb down, there was much Tzolk'in and Space Alert, and then the russian inventor's device made the ship came alive but it sank and everybody died! Hm I think that last bit is missing some context. Oh well. This is not that entry, because that entry doesn't exist.
[5]And there certainly hasn't been anything here about my work for quite a while, but there's a good reason for that. I intend to write more about that before too long, though...
So a few weeks ago was spring break here and I went down to Rolla to visit Heidi and the rest of Spotty Thorpe[0]. (Well, OK, the only people still in Spotty Thorpe from when I was last there are Heidi and Maggie.) And stuff happened and I didn't write any of it down till now and hopefully I can remember it.
So um general stuff. The house is now inhabited by Heidi, Maggie, Mark, Andrew, Brian, and also maybe Megan? Well, whatever -- the names don't mean anything without context, anyway. Of the dogs that used to live there, Xqqqey (pronounced "Zoey") still does (she's Maggie's, I think?) and Lily lives in Considerate House with Kasih. But now there also cats! Heidi has 3 cats and there used to be others but now there are not because it's been a long time since I was last there. They are Bartholomew (generally abbreviated to "Barth", but I kept wanting to call him "Barfy" for some reason), who was very friendly, Spotty, who was less so at first but only took a few days to mostly get used to me, and Zelda, who Heidi always describes as "so weird!". (I describe her as "skitty kitty skitty kitty skitty kitty"!) The cats purr so much! I was not used to this.
The walls are covered in strange pictures made largely from magazine clippings glued together. One sequence appears to deal with a (covert?) war between turkeys and bees.
I thought I'd have a lot of time to just sort of hang out and so to actually get work done but actually Heidi had me doing stuff the whole time. Oh well. Now I finally have free time. Of course, right now I'm using it to write this rather than to work, but...
There was no Weird-Ass Fucking Pasta.
Um let's see. Specific things worth writing about.
Sunday! I arrived in St. Louis. There was Heidi and Kasih and Andrew and we met up with a cousin (sort of) of Kasih's named Katie at this pizza place where Heidi was shocked to learn that I don't really like pizza. At the last minute Katie asks "Hey can I bring along Terry?" (her father) and uh sure why not? Not like any of us knew him (Katie's not exactly Kasih's cousin, as mentioned). As it turned out Terry was just really obnoxious the whole time. So here I am sitting with my face buried in my hands just trying to ignore anything. Heidi nudges me and asks if I want to leave. I nod. And then she actually grabbed me (not literally) and left! I explained that I hadn't meant to actually suggest leaving as an actual course of action -- I just meant, I wanted to be out of there, I didn't want to pay the cost of potentially causing a scene. Fortunately, apparently, there wasn't one. And so Heidi and I got to avoid Terry and just walk around for a bit before we returned to Spotty Thorpe.
Tuesday! The journey southward. So unfortunately it happened that around the time I was visiting, something had happened to Heidi's grandfather he'd been hospitalized, and so Heidi went to go visit him on Tuesday. Heidi asked me if I wanted to come along; at first my response was that this sounded kind of awkward but eventually I decided to go along with it.
The place was in West Plains, a several-hour drive to the south. First we stopped by some other relatives of Heidi's to see if they wanted to come along but most of them were out at the time. They live on a farm with horses and llamas and uh maybe also things that are neither horses nor llamas. (Like, a lot of unnamed barn cats. Who apparently you actually have to feed? I just assumed the subsisted on the various pests they ate.) And uh also two dogs named Kiki and Gwenny (who barks a lot). A cousin of Heidi's was around and took the time to show me the horses, but I did not get to see the llamas.
(I did not realizes horses used their lips to feel things! Going by Heidi's reaction I guess this is something I should have known? The last time I was actually around horses was when -- at Jeffrey's[3] bar mitzvah when I was like 3? OK, that probably wasn't the last time, but I'm having trouble remembering any others. I don't know. I thought the thing with the lips was really funny. As we will see there is a lot I don't know about animals and thus find really funny.)
Anyway we continued on our way southeast. And, we continued on our way southeast. And, we continued on our way southeast. Eventually Heidi realized we had probably gone too far, considering how long this was taking compared to how long it was supposed to take. (Which at this point I was kind of annoyed about -- I had a headache and was a bit nauseous, so I was kind of cranky.) We stopped and called Kasih who pulled up a map on her computer and confirmed that yes, we had gone too far by about half an hour.
Shortly after we turned around and began our way back, I noticed a "Missouri Welcomes You" sign. Yup, we had accidentally ended up in Arkansas. (We also decided to stop in a town to get something for my headache, and while there Heidi asked someone working in the store, "Hey, what state is that? <points>" Yup, Arkansas. Not that there was really any other plausible answer. I mean we hadn't crossed the Mississipi or anything. Also, I did not realize Missouri bordered so many other states.)
Unfortunately that was not the end of our navigational troubles, but the rest of that story is not as interesting and would be easier explained with a diagram, so I think I'll skip it. Ultimately we called Kasih again who pulled up a map again and the problem was solved. (And then there was a third problem and we asked some people in a building, but this is getting dumb now.)
Anyway despite my complaining earlier, Heidi's family was pretty cool and eventually my headache went away so actually I had a good time.
After that most of Spotty Thorpe went and watched Being There -- Kasih had to watch it for a class, I think; I remember Lily was there. I instead went and read stuff on the internet for a bit because I was feeling desynchronized. :P Funny -- I'd only heard good things about the movie, but everyone there hated it, saying it was terribly boring and nothing happened. I came in near the end and it didn't seem like that, but that might be a thing where sheer length of time matters...
Thursday! Heidi wanted me to come to some topology seminars but I couldn't find the first one and then Heidi got a little sick and decided to skip the second one. Later, Andrew, Mark, Heidi, and I played Seasons, which Heidi and I were new to. My overall reaction is basically "Eh, I think I'd rather just play Dominion or something." (Or Tzolk'in! I've talked about Tzolk'in, right?[4]) Worth playing a second time to get more of a feel for it maybe -- now at least I have a little better idea what to do -- but, eh. It was a lot of "You have a bunch of resources to manage, one of which is victory points, and you have cards that do stuff, and things have different values/rarities at different times." Not boring, just nothing really special. Also it kind of dragged, though a lot of that might have just been Mark taking a long time to decide on everything. But also a lot of that was the "multiplayer solitaire" problem, and while that's not necessarily fatal, well, I'm just not sure the game is good enough to overcome it.
I definitely feel like the game could have used more unique cards -- there just wasn't a whole lot of variety to the effects. But then, we left out the "advanced" cards. I think if I played again I'd want to play with those in. The game is simple enough that there doesn't seem to be much reason to leave them out. Like, if the game were much quicker it would make sense to leave out advanced stuff the first time, but it isn't quick, so may as well go for it, right?
Part of the game is that at the beginning you draft cards that will you slowly draw throughout the game -- so you have to have some idea what you're doing right out of the gate. Heidi just picked randomly, which unsurprisingly did not go well for her. I took a bunch of accelerants but neglected to get much of anything to accelerate into. (As soon as we had to sort our cards into piles determining when in the game we would get them, I realized I had picked pretty much only early-game cards. Or at least, that's how I assessed it. My assessment may not mean very much.) Late in the game I managed to get a little bit of an engine going, but it did so little it may not have even been worth it. Andrew (I think?) beat Mark by a small margin, with Heidi and I way behind.
Also Heidi made chili and it was good.
I think it was that night that the incident with the cats occurred. See, Heidi's cats stay in the basement (where Heidi's room is), while Xqqqey stays upstairs. Unfortunately the door on the staircase has no doorknob, so instead there's a little locking mechanism with a pin on the basement side, and the top half of the door is like this widely-spaced grid of twine, so if you're on the upstairs side, you can still stick your hand through to lock or unlock it.
Anyway after Heidi had gone to bed I was heading upstairs and I noticed the door was wide open. Uh-oh, I thought, better close it. Except, of course, the cats were already upstairs. The first one I encountered was Spotty. He spooked upon seeing me, and ran straight for the door, which I had locked. So of course he climbed up and tried to fit through the gaps in the twine grid, which he couldn't. I figured, guess I'd better go unlock it then. But then here's me, this big lumbering human coming right towards him so of course he jumps the hell off of there and runs away again (trampling right over my foot with his claws out) and hides.
Anyway, I reopen the door. I find Barth, and manage to herd him downstairs (Barth is really friendly, as I've said), but I can't find Spotty or Zelda. I tell Brian about this; he thinks Zelda probably just didn't go upstairs in the first place. Ultimately we just have to go get Heidi out of bed, and she finds Spotty and Zelda hiding under couches and manages to get them downstairs. (Xqqqey, meanwhile, just kind of barked at them, but only when she could see them.)
Friday! Heidi and Andrew and I went to Spring Creek Gap, a local conservation area. There is, in fact, a creek there, and there happened to be water in it at the time. (Is it actually a water gap? I, uh, guess so?) As soon as we got there and got out of the car we found a dog just sitting there in the little parking lot. It had a collar but no tags. There was also one other car in the lot, a pickup truck.
I should perhaps give some context here -- something like this has happened once before. Only, that was Heidi by herself; and she was on a bike, not in a car; and that dog had no collar at all, and it was also starving; and it followed her 17 miles to the nearest town where she left it at a shelter; and that dog is the dog who is now known as "Lily" and is Kasih's.
Well, as soon as we got out of the car the dog came to greet us -- or maybe it was only when we approached him? I forget. Regardless, he was very friendly -- and as soon as we started down the trail he started following us. So immediately there was this worry that, uh-oh, this is going to end up with us having another dog. We even made a plan -- if we didn't encounter the dog's owner by the time we got back, we'd just leave the dog there for now, then come back later (since we needed to pass by that way anyway), and if he was still there, then we'd take him to a shelter.
The dog followed us around the whole time -- not necessarily closely, he ranged around quite a bit, and he wasn't always within sight; but he always seemed to know where we were and find a way back to us eventually, especially when we hollered for him. (We'd just holler "dog", of course. I still have no idea what the dog's name might have been.) Eventually we headed back, and it was when we were nearly back to the parking lot that the dog vanished and didn't come back. We hollered "Dog!" over and over, but no, he was gone. Fortunately when we got back we found the pickup truck heading out with the dog sitting in the back -- apparently this was the dog's owner and he'd been waiting here for him. So, yay, that turned out OK.
Also we saw some tadpoles in a pond there!
Later that day we returned to St. Louis so I could return to Ann Arbor the following day. We stayed with Kasish's family who lives a bit outside the city. (There were like 3 houses between their house and the Mississipi.) Worth noting: Kasih's mom knows a lot about birds. And there were 4 cats! Gandalf and Baloo and Lucy and Fluffy (Fluffy's really shy though). And a giant albino bunny! An Angora rabbit, to be specific. At one point he kind of tried to bite me? Like, not seriously, just like he was testing if I was food or something. I thought this was so funny I got him to do it several more times. But apparently this is just something rabbits do. Oh well.
And we went to the City Museum and it was amazing but I don't have a lot to say about it. And I was introduced to toasted ravioli which was neat but I don't have much to say about that either.
I think that is all I have to say for now.
-Harry
[0]The house where she lives.
[3]My second cousin, Jeffrey Beals. Some second cousins of mine live on a farm. I'm not too clear on the details -- I've never really gotten a good handle on the outlying branches of the family, to be honest...
[4]Holy crap, no I haven't. In fact I never wrote about my and Mickey's trip down to Philadelphia (to see Nick) during winter break at all! Man, I've really let this thing go to rot, haven't I?[5] Short version: I missed a bus, we got there anyway, it was fun, I was introduced to Wawa, we walked on an abandoned elevated train line and encountered someone who lives there, a downed (but deactivated) power line was used to help climb down, there was much Tzolk'in and Space Alert, and then the russian inventor's device made the ship came alive but it sank and everybody died! Hm I think that last bit is missing some context. Oh well. This is not that entry, because that entry doesn't exist.
[5]And there certainly hasn't been anything here about my work for quite a while, but there's a good reason for that. I intend to write more about that before too long, though...
