Catching Up -- Cons, Farms, RPG revisions and Contractors

A lot has happened in our little corner of the world since my birthday party, which was my last post.

That weekend we had planned to go downtown to BrickCon, a lego convention, but when we got down there, we encountered a line of 8-12 year-olds around the block and decided that it would be too much for us. That evening Becca went to a birthday party.

The next day we drove north to the Skagit County Festival of Family Farms. Becca had said beforehand that she didn't want to go, but that morning she changed her mind and came with us and that made me very happy. She really seems to hate my new-found gardening/farming hobby, but sometimes it shines through that maybe she just enjoys being contrary.

We spent the day touring the farms and bought some really good cheese and egg nog from Golden Glen Creamery. We will certainly go back there. We hit some thrift stores on the way home, looking for a copy of CandyLand, because Charley's birthday party was the next weekend.

Becca had complained that her wrist hurt ever since the party so I wound up taking her to the doctor on Monday. After a long wait and having to witness a 40-something daughter badger and berate her elderly, not-all-that-with-it father for most of it, she got x-rays that were inconclusive. We got a brace and were told to go easy on it.

That week, I finished the writing of the hopefully-final Ellis edition (v. 1.7). I also went down to the local co-op and bought supplies for making cheese, because after getting the cheesemaking kit for my birthday, I was eager to start in on that.

In less fun news, we had roof issues. We have a rental house and it has, for several years, had a leaky section of the roof. Every year I go up, slather on some tar, and that gets it through the winter and the tenants don’t complain. This year, that didn’t cut it. When I looked at it from the inside, looking behind sheetrock and pushing away insulation, it was obvious why none of my efforts topside had helped.

The wood of the roof (this is on a section of flat roof) was rotted through and you could see the underside of the tar paper. How it had kept the water out was really the bigger question.

So I also spent much of that week calling roofing contractors and arranging for them to come out at look at the place and place bids. On guy, Evan from Jorve Roofing, even came out to the house on Wednesday night to go over everything and teach me everything I wanted to know about roofs.

Needless to say, this stressed me out immensely and still continues to, but more on that later.

Catching Up -- The Big Weekend and the Push to Have a Game Ready to Play

My big project for the weekend was the layout of Ellis. I didn’t really expect to get it done by the end of Sunday, but I had hopes to be close and absolutely had to be done by Wednesday. But the layout wound up taking forever, first because it was 250 pages, second because I wanted this edition to be a sample of the final layout, so I was actually laying it up similarly to the final, printed edition so that it would be a test of that layout, and finally, I made some bad decisions in how to handle large files within PageMaker, so by the time I was at page 80 or so, I started to see major computer slowdowns whenever I would edit images or change pages, which was insanely frustrating.

And there was more to do that weekend. Since I had bought the milk, and the less processed milk had a shorter lifespan in the fridge, I had to do the cheese or waste $20 of milk. So, with really less time available than I needed, I started the chessemaking process. I’m not going to go into the details here (I’ll do it in my medieval living blog), but something went wrong and the cheese curds never really solidified. So while there was no cheddar, I did get some really good ricotta out of it, that would up making fabulous tasting Libum.

That night the CandyLand birthday party was a lot of fun. The idea was that everyone had to bring a game designed using the pieces of a CandyLand set without adding any pieces. My entry was a Euro-game style design that was a sort of mash-up of Res Publica and Puerto Rico, using the candy trail as a scoring track. I hadn’t had time to playtest it, so it didn’t work perfectly and definitely needs work, but it wasn’t too bad. I think it was one of the best themings at least. Charley is supposed to eventually post them all on his website.

Sunday was layout in the morning and the World of Darkness game in the afternoon/evening. Becca and I got into a little bit of a fight on the drive home, but other than that it was good.

Monday and Tuesday were all about layout and by Tuesday night I had to come to the conclusion that either I could finish by Saturday, or I could stop where I was (having finished character creation and combat) and do all of the prep work I needed to do for the game I had already committed to running Saturday morning. So I choose the latter.

It was a good decision. I made six characters, finished the adventure that I had started to write a year ago, made up player handouts, etc. I was still typing these out two hours before the game.