We had a good time doing some Karaoke at George’s place on Friday. A good number of people showed up.
Steph and I sung a few songs together, and had a great time.
I joined Adam and Tina in a game of Mage Knight at Tina’s place. It was a fun scenario where we took a few modifications to make it more difficult: Volkaire as the last city and a Megapolis as the second to last city. I played the character that is good with units and got the best banner and my special unit upgrade early on. It made me run away with the game a little bit, but I didn’t win by all that much. The game was short for Mage Knight at only 5ish hours, despite the extra events we added.
We played two rounds of Gloomhaven last night. Tina couldn’t make it so I played her character, and it was interesting. I was playing support and tank both times, and generally succeeded in doing both. We had a few close calls, but both Adam and George were able to put lots of curses in the monster deck. Those curses came up just in time to save us from massive amounts of damage. We progressed the story a good bit, and I think we are getting close to the ending.
We also delivered some cucumbers and jalapeños to Adam. One of which we left on the vine too long:
I took Steph’s car to Shoreline lake, and got there a little after 10am. I had a long meeting with, then Tina and Irene showed up and we chatted while hanging out in the shade. Adam got there with his mother and we decided it was time for lunch. We got in line at the cafe and Jeremy joined just in time to order with us. We chatted for the better part of an hour before Adam had to leave, and then chatted for another hour before Jeremy and I decided to go kayaking in the lake. We hopped in and did one and a half times around. We got out and Tina joined us for some more chatting and helping to pack away my kayak. The photo below is partly obscured by the rubber band holding the phone.
That evening Steph and I had a nice date dinner at Pazzo, and Italian place nearby. We hadn’t been there before so I thought it would be nice to try it out. The food was tasty, but I found it to be a bit loud.
I went for a long solo kayak in my new Oru folding kayak. It went really well for the most part. I started at about 10am and ended a little after 1pm. I was able to get Lyfts both ways and it was pretty convenient. The route on the map is shorter than the real one because on the left side of the map where it goes through the middle of the wetlands I was lost. Navigating when everything looks like water from the surface, but you get close and it is mud bars just under the surface, its tricky.
There were also two choke points where the water was flowing rapidly. The first one was going the way I was going so I just rode it, but the second was going the other way and I had to portage around it. That proved tough, but since the kayak is so light it wasn’t too bad.
I saw a ton of birds, at the end there was a flock that was murmating. I also saw some harbor seals relaxing on the bank.
Andrew hosted a Hawaiian BBQ at Lost Colony that Steph and I attended. We first did a round of Gloomhaven with George and Tina, then all of us headed over to meet the people playing poker at Lost Colony. Andrew was cooking some kalua pork, and it turned out really well. I helped make the spam musubi, which was a lot of fun. Debby also got a shaved ice machine that she broke in for the get together. She also had made some really tasty syrups to pour over the ice. I had a really good time.
I got a group of 7 together to go kayak camping in tomales bay. Five of us got there on Friday around noon and got onto the water as quickly as possible. It was a 5.6 mile paddle to the beach we had been given, Tomales Beach.
We had a long stopover on Indian Beach, which was approximately the halfway point. There we pulled out the stove and cooked a bit of sausage. After everyone got some food we got back on the water and made the final push to our campsite. The fog was rolling in low and it was difficult to make out the far shore. We started up a nice fire pretty quickly and got everything nicely set up. A Prius showed up later from the service road and a few guys got out and set up a camp. I was pretty sure that they weren’t allowed to drive in. They looked like they were crabbing and fishing. We had a good fire that night and good food. Riley cooked up a storm, and had brought way too much food, but we weren’t complaining.
The next morning Riley cooked up a lot more great food, and I headed out to meet up with Tina and Amit, who were coming in a day late since Amit had to work on Friday. I got some good alone time on my paddle back, and made it to Inverness much faster than anticipated. It only took me 1:45 to paddle the 6 miles back. I got in early enough to have a nice meal and rest at the diner next door, where I got a huge veggie omelette.
Tina and Amit got in and we got onto the water pretty quickly. The wind didn’t gust as fast on the way out with them as it did on Friday, but there was a lot more consistent of a wind. We did a break at Indian Beach again, after which Amit took off and outpaced us by a large margin. We were paddling near a large group that was heading towards Marshall Beach. They were somewhat annoying, and had been slowly leaving behind their slow members. The fist ones they left behind I don’t think made it to the campground.
Once we got in Steph got the fire going again. She had a log with lots of sap on it, and once it started burning it put off a huge flame and lots of black smoke. I was pretty impressed. We had a great fire that night, as we had only gone through a third of the wood on Friday. The food was amazing again, with Riley providing asparagus and bacon, with Adam providing spit-forks to roast them on. We sat around the fire and talked for hours. Eventually we ran out of wood and went to bed. The next morning we had a long trek back, that was mostly uneventful. We grabbed lunch in Point Reyes Station and dropped by the Cowgirl Creamery. We got back and took care of the gear and vegged the rest of the day.
Michael and I had a fun day together, with a hike in Pacifica along the coast, then an evening where we went to Cupertino for Shakespeare in the Park of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was very well done, and the picnic with everyone was lovely. The show was much funnier than I was expecting and the acting was some of the best I’ve seen in any play. I brought some of the rosemary cider from Redwood Coast that was made with the rosemary from our yard.
Steph and I went over to Lost Colony for a cookout. There were a dozen or so other people there. The food was amazing, and Debby was nice enough to make mac ‘n’ cheese for Steph. The main draw of the cookout, the smoker, wasn’t ready and had to go for a few hours after everyone had left.
A few of us played a game of survivor that Debby had set up and Shareen was running. We did immunity challenges, the first of which was how well did you know Andrew, with Debby handily winning. I was the fist voted off, so I did a quickly confession to the camera to keep with the theme. The second challenge was memory, with George taking immunity. Adam S was the next to go, and that left only the asians. Shareen picked out a challenge of moving rice from a tupperware to a cup. Steph tried some alternate strategies that didn’t work out. George took immunity again and voted out Steph. The final two were Debby and George, and we had some invites to the others to take part in the final vote. Debby’s strategy fell apart when she kept the aggressive stance into the final round. Andrew voted for Debby, but the rest of the votes went to George. It was a good time had by all.
Debby made a compilation of the confessionals: pretty funny.
It's an Exciting World 