| Alaska |
[May. 25th, 2012|04:09 pm] |
So! ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) kung_fu_monkey and I have been in Alaska for the past week! ( Arctic tales behind the cut )
So yeah, all in all, it's been a very successful vacation. I would recommend it.
Now we're packed up, and this evening we're off to Kenai to fly across the inlet for our red-eye home tonight. I predict a lot of napping tomorrow. |
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| Arctic Ho |
[May. 19th, 2012|02:19 pm] |
Today I have packed up and run to the bank and got all my hairs cut, and shortly we will be off to catch the bus to the airport and thence a plane to Alaska.
My mom & step-dad have been living in Ninilchik, on the Kenai peninsula for the last few years, and we figured we ought to go visit before they leave later this year. (It's much more feasible with two than it was when there were more of us.)
We're staying at a hotel in Anchorage tonight, and then tomorrow morning we'll do the 3.5 hour drive (which is apparently quite scenic) down to meet them and drop off the rental car at the airport in Kenai. (Seasonal demand made it cheaper for my parents to do that than the gas to drive up and pick us up would have been.)
I was excited because we'll be positioned to get about 70% on tomorrow's eclipse, but then I checked the weather report and realized... oh, yeah, while there will be plenty of hours of daylight, we may well not see the sun the entire time we're there. Hurrah for vitamin D pills... |
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| Farming |
[May. 16th, 2012|04:54 pm] |
Sunday Jerry & I drove up to Nick & Jackie's new place, outside Ft. Lupton. Which is a farm. Like, a for-really one. With goats and chickens and turkeys and geese and rabbits and dogs and cats and possibly other critters, but those are the ones I noted.
We got a tour around, and then we helped plant stuff. We dug holes and put fruit trees in along one end of the plowed field, and then started staking out plots for vegetables at the other end. I got to exercise my geometry/logistics skills, but it's pretty hard to keep your rectangles square when everything is being measured in terms of "okay, so this rectangle starts 3 feet from the end of that one, and then we go 5 feet past the end of this other one", and by the end of it we had about six feet less than we were supposed to. (I don't think it helped that the field wasn't particularly square and was missing a corner.) But, as Jackie put it, "the nice thing about veggies is you can just squish 'em a little closer together," so I guess it'll all work out in the end.
It was fun! (Other than whatever I did to my right hamstring. Ow.) I hadn't realized how many farm critters don't need to be fenced in to keep them at home; with all the birds, the fencing is much more about keeping other critters *out*.
The male turkeys are funny, because they'll puff themselves up and stalk about trying to impress you, but if they get too pushy you can just pick them up and give them a hug and literally deflate them, and then they go sulk for a bit.
Jerry got a lovely sunburn on his neck. I got some pink on my nose & face.
Also, there's lots of poop on a farm. |
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| GMing |
[May. 13th, 2012|01:23 am] |
Second Star Wars gaming session tonight.
After a full day of prep, we sat down and went through only the first layer of what I had ready. Which is exciting! Because now next time I've already got a bunch of stuff ready, and I can just work on cleaning it up and making it a little deeper, rather than needing to come up with lots and lots of completely new encounter concepts.
Home base has been established. Plots were thickened and mysteries exposed. Also, following the Gumshoe model / Alexandrian method, I didn't make the PCs roll to find clues, I just had them find everything that was there to be found by looking. This works REALLY WELL. I recommend it. |
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| Wood for Sheep |
[May. 11th, 2012|12:48 am] |
Now I remember why I stopped playing Settlers of Catan...
Second Thursday Games Night at Chris's tonight. We played a round of 7 Wonders, and then I was in the game of Cash & Guns which *Rose* also played in, which was pretty awesome, and then finished off with a game of Settlers. Now, I did have fun, don't get me wrong, but about halfway through I started getting a familiar feeling from it, and I was finally able to identify what I don't like about it. (Other than "playing with insanely overcompetitive people", which is thankfully no longer a factor.) Basically, the structure of the game has lots of points of frustration in it: resource scarcity due to tile placement, getting your development blocked by other players, dice not rolling the numbers you need, finally rolling what you need but getting nothing because of the robber, and so on and so on. The way they add up makes the game feel, to me, like a long string of not quite being able to make a good play, so I spend the whole game feeling like I'm playing poorly and being frustrated over and over. Which really brings out the worst in me as a player, and I don't like being the poor sport that it threatens to turn me into. So I'm gonna work on remembering that in the future... |
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| Avengers |
[May. 8th, 2012|10:01 pm] |
So Saturday, Jerry & I met up with Jason & Gideon to have dinner at an excellent middle-eastern place down by DU, where we were joined by their roommate Mythica and her girlfriend, after which we zipped over to the Continental to sit on the stairs for a long time so we could get really good seats to see The Avengers in 3-D IMAX.
Which we did. (We were the second group in line. It was a long wait. I was glad I put a copy of Space Fluxx in my pocket.)
Anyway, the movie! I liked it. A lot. And I want to talk about what I liked in spoileriffic detail, so all the rest of this is ( behind the cut. )
I'm sure there are more things, but yeah. I liked it, is what I'm saying. It was really good.
My last note is that I think I'm over 3-D. They did a good job with it, but still I spent as much time being distracted by it as I did feeling it was an enhancement, so I think from now on I'll just see the 2-D versions, thankyouverymuch. |
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| Playing A Scientist On TV |
[May. 4th, 2012|08:07 pm] |
So it turns out I don't totally loathe the sound of my own voice when it's not being recorded on an answering machine. (Dunno what the phone lines do to my voice, but I *HAAAAATE* to listen to myself on phone messages.) Recorded with a for-real lavalier mike? It's fine. (I mean, it doesn't sound like me, but it's not horrid and loathsome.)
Three weeks ago I gave a 2.5-hour seminar on using data from my project. It was webcast to a couple dozen viewers, and it also got recorded.
I watched the whole thing last week and was generally pleased. I say "um" a lot, and I do some weird things with my hands from time to time, but overall I'm happy with it.
Which is good, because just today I finished adding it to our website for all the world of future users to see, and it would really suck to have to have it up there if I hated it... |
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| Leftovers |
[May. 3rd, 2012|10:48 pm] |
So we had a party on Saturday and there was so. much. FOOD.
We're mostly out of things that just need to be eaten as-is, but we've still got plenty of things to use as ingredients. (Bits of cheese log, for instance, make nice omelet filling in the morning.)
Last night I made quiche for the first time.
...Mostly because I was able to use up some of the crackers by turning them into pie crust. |
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| Tunicates |
[May. 1st, 2012|05:01 pm] |
Holy crap, tunicates! Have you heard of these critters? Primitive little filter-feeder jelly-blobs that live in the ocean. Except they are WEIRD.
Sea squirts digest their own brains when switching from larval to sessile forms.
Pyrosomes are bioluminescent colonial organisms.
Larvacea shed their skeletons every four hours.
Salps have two forms that alternate generations. The solitary form reproduces asexually by spawning a chain of hundreds of sequential hermaphrodites (female at first, male later on) that are all attached together. The hermaprodites release little embryos that grow up into solitary asexuals.
And Doliolida have the craziest life cycle I've ever heard of, where you basically get a "factory" form (complete with conveyor-belt organs!) that attaches some of its offspring to itself, to grow into feeder forms; some to its stalks, where they grow into "carrier ships"; and then some offspring to the carriers, which carry them far away and release them to reproduce sexually and generate more factories.
Nature is CRAZY, y'all. |
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| Birthday |
[Apr. 30th, 2012|11:37 pm] |
My birthday was actually a week ago, but Monday is a lousy day for parties, and we didn't really have our act together early enough to do anything the day before. So we had the party on Saturday.
I knew there was going to be a party, but Jerry managed to keep any other details from me. All I knew was that there would be people.
Wow, were there people! I will not attempt to summarize, but will defer to my super-awesome sweetie's super writeup and just say that it was amazing and wonderful and exactly what I wanted. Lots and lots of friends, yay!
I feel super-lucky and super-loved. Thank you all so much!
It's funny, but turning 40 doesn't feel much like a milestone. (Maybe because it was stretched out by a week.) But it does feel awesome to have so many good friends.
Oh, and before I forget, on Friday I got to meet up with thetarnishedowl and have dinner with him & his sister & her family. Then I showed Bruce the Mesa Lab (he used to be an architect) and we hung out for a couple hours. So that was pretty keen, too. |
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