It's an Exciting World

Adam invited us over for a nice dinner and games night.  I made some hard boiled eggs beforehand and gathered the small artichokes from the garden.  We had a great time cooking and eating together.  George and I made some deviled eggs and we tried many different things on top.  The best was probably the pickled garlic, which has turned out well.

We then played a round of Imperial Settlers where I got an absurd synergy, and ran away with the game.  The game ended up being pretty slow since most of us weren’t very familiar with the game.

George hosted the first episode of Game of Thrones, and had a small ceremony to inaugurate the final season.

I had organized a dead pool on the characters that had survived until the last season.  There were about 40 that we put on the list and people got to guess if they lived or died.  They could also guess what episode the character died in and get an extra point for getting that right.  The episode was great and getting to chat with everyone there was a treat.  I spent most of the day before that playing Feast for Odin with Tim and Adam.

Sunday morning Steph and I headed to the Game Kastle in Mountain View.  We met up with Chris, Brian, George, and Tina.  George and I headed to Milk Pail, while the others sold and bought some games at the flea market at Game Kastle.

Afterwards we went to George’s where he cooked some great carbonara.

We ended up playing three rounds of Gloomhaven and won all three.  We even pushed up the difficulty to 6 and won pretty nicely.  I took a few too many hits in one scenario, but it worked out.  We are all set up to do the final scenario next time everyone is together.

I filled in on a game of Betrayal Legacy with Steph, Michael, Michelle, and Justin.  The game was the same scenario as last time, but this time the traitor lost.  Steph still died, and the conversation with the group was pretty good.  I enjoyed it and would love to hang out with them more.

I joined a lot of people for a fun night of karaoke.  I sang mostly Disney singalongs.   I had a great time doing ‘A Whole New World’ with George; I took Jasmine’s part.

We went to a challenging Paint Nite with Michelle and Michael.  The painting was a lighthouse and had a lot more advanced technique and more precise painting required than many of the previous Paint nites we had been to.  Everyone had a good time, and the results were quite good.

We read the book Inferior for book club and had a very good discussion around it.  The book had some pretty major holes and obviously had an agenda.  The history part of the book was probably the most well done part, and the part the book was truly trying to describe well.  I think the science for the final argument the author was trying to make was a bit lacking, but a major point in the book is that lack of evidence is a major problem in the field of gender studies.  There is also the nature vs. nurture problem, which was covered a little as well.  We got into a lot more personal impacts than we had with previous books, and the discussion format I think helped with that.  The sunflower conch allows for people to take the time to really compose their thoughts and express things that would be steamrolled otherwise.

George had us over for some omurice cooking, and then we played Gloomhaven with Adam as well.  The omurice was tasty, and we mostly got the consistency right, but we couldn’t get the pocket right.  There is supposed to be a great moment when you have the egg on top of the rice, and then you slice the egg open.  The slice didn’t work, so it just split in two.  Despite that not working the dish was still very tasty.

We got closer to the end of the game, and I got some truly crazy item combos.  I’m having a lot of fun with the Quartermaster.  We failed the first time, as Adam rushed a little too much, but the second time things went pretty well.

We met Ricardo and Irene at Rancho San Antonio and did the Wildcat Loop.  It was late in the day, but still was really nice.  Parking was more of a nightmare than usual, and we didn’t start until 45 minutes after the planned start time.  We got to see some humming birds, turkeys, and deer.  The high meadows had a lot of deer close to the trail, but they were plenty used to people and didn’t mind us taking pictures close to them.  I’ll post those pictures if I can get them from the others.