It's an Exciting World

It has been a while since I’ve posted, so I’m just going to cover all the boards games I’ve played here.  a few Thursdays ago I played a decent game of Lords of Vegas, and it was  fun time.  I ran up the price on Chris a number of times and he blocked me out a few times.  We both ended up losing pretty badly because of that, but it was fun.

I also got to play some Mage Knight.  This time it was actually with Steph.  She took all the advice I gave her, and she ran things pretty smoothly after that.  I took one shortcut in the game, I’ll admit so that I could get out of someone’s way that wanted to go to the village.  It would have been better for me to stay, but I moved out into a fight that technically couldn’t have happened the way it did.

We got to do a magic draft of the remaining Battle for Zendikar.  I had a pretty decent ally deck, but it wasn’t quite reliable enough to do really well.  The three color deck worked well when it hit, but many times it didn’t hit at all.  I had a great time playing it.

I got to play my first game of diplomacy.  Chris was England, Adam was Germany, Bryan was Austria/Hungary, Erik was Turkey, Wit was France, Cynthia was Russia, and I was Italy.  I didn’t get any good outs early game, but was able to inform on Bryan in mid game when he was about to stab Erik.  Erik and I then joined forces and he was nice enough to not stab me since I had informed him about Bryan.  He could have easily destroyed me, but I was holding the line against Wit and Chris.  The game drew to a close when Adam offered to let us take over all his territory for a joint victory of the three of us.  We decided it was fine, and we managed to corner wit in the Med at which point he and Chris surrendered.  Had the game gone on much longer it could easily have ended with a total victory for Turkey.  Below is a gif of the entire game.

For book club we read “The God Delusion” and “Reason for God.”

We all felt like the books were a little poorly supported, with too many anecdotes for the subject matter they were discussing.  The discussion was really good and Debby is going to send me some follow up material to look over in response to http://bibviz.com/.  This is an area I’d love to dive more into, but it requires discussion with people on multiple sides, since I’m pretty agnostic.

Friday night we met up at Bon Chon in Sunnyvale, but the wait was well over an hour and a half.  The food was good, but certainly not worth that long of a wait.  One of the most annoying parts is that the group ahead of us was just talking at the table for 20 minutes after they had payed, and we were all soooo hungry.  After food we went back to George’s place and played some of the You don’t know Jack game pack.  I really enjoy the Drawful game, but got the strangest phrase I’ve seen yet, ‘Counting Crows Guy Farts Arrows.’  How is one supposed to draw something like that?  The night was pretty calm overall, and Steph was at the Beachhead house party for all of those who had lived at Beachhead at some point.  I caught a Lyft home and got right to sleep since I was pretty tired.

I really enjoyed last Wednesday when we went to Karaoke with Steph’s coworkers.  She did a few of the songs that she likes the chorus of and wants me to sing the rapping parts, but not as many as the previous Wednesday.  I also got to sing more of the songs that I got to put in.  I really liked the selections made by Mark, as they were the fun songs I typically would pick, and great singalongs.  He also liked the songs I picked.  I’ve really enjoyed hanging out with Hai and Mark.  Perhaps we can invite them to some more things.

We went over to George’s place for a going away party for Lindsay.  It was pretty good including some fun Karaoke.  We’re going to try to go and see her while she is in India, and I think it should work out just fine.

Stephanie put in a lot of songs that she likes the chorus of, and then there is a fast rap component to them that she likes me to do.  I need to get better at the rapping parts of those songs.

Steph and I had planned on a lazy Saturday morning, and it was exactly as hoped.  We stopped by Milk Pail, Target, and then went to the park to play some tennis.  She wasn’t as good as I had expected so we played some in the small square.  After that we played some modified wall ball tennis, which was interesting.  It worked surprisingly well, and we could get some pretty good volleys going, even thought I was hitting it kinda hard.

We went back and had a long soak in the hot tub.  It was a windy day and one of the pool umbrellas had been knocked into the deep end of the pool.  I went in and managed to get it out, but it just blew back into the shallow end, where I left it.

That evening went to Lee’s birthday part and played a great game called Drawful.  I really enjoyed it, and it was very similar to what I had been trying to do with the Jovios system.

Steph and I went to Andrew’s place for some Steak and Poker.  The steak was really tasty, and the company was fantastic.

After that we started playing some poker, and I just couldn’t get any good hands.  I hit a decent hand a few times, but had others come over the top with amazing hands.  The end of the night saw me down about $22, which wasn’t bad overall for the table that night.  Leyan was the big winner, with some monstrous hands, a few of which hit on the river.

Steph was nice enough to join me for a cookout at Niko’s on Saturday.  She met most everyone in the company, and got to chat with them about her robot.  I got to say hi to Mike who is started today.  I’m really looking forward to working with him.

Steph and I went to Rong’s place for a BBQ.  We made some misir wot, and Rong had a ton of really tasty food.  I stayed and talked, while Steph, Nick, and Sarah went down to the hot tub.  It was a really good time, but we had to head out to go to dinner with her parents at Patxi’s