sleepy halloween

There was a Halloween party (really a board games day) at my house today.

I woke up with a splitting headache and it was pretty awful. DJ was the first person to show up at 2:30 or so anyway. We worked on decorating stuff for a bit longer and then started games.

In attendance were:
Me (dressed as a pirate), Brian (dressed as a female vampire), Drew (dressed as the monk of canon), Mike (dressed as a karate kid), Edgars (dressed as something medieval-ish), Edgars's Megan (with fangs), Cory (with a spider on his head), Heidi (with a mask), Josh, Megan, Eli, Justin, Deb, DJ, Jarrett, Lahut, Casey, Jack, Kevin B, and Kevin's Michelle. I think that's it. Oh, right, Brian Y showed up with his friends Susie and John, except John turned out to be Safety Monkey from Penny Arcade, and boy is he rude. Yeah.

I played some Carcassonne, and some Great Dalmuti, and some Ricochet Robot, but other than that I stayed out of games, due to wanting to be hostess-twinkie-like. Josh ran a whole bunch of Halloween-themed games he brought. Puerto Rico was played on the floor at one point, and Starfarers of Catan, and Settlers, and Go, and Maul of America, and various other games I honestly lost track of.

We had Pagliacci's pizza for dinner. It's really good. It's the closest thing to New York pizza I've had in Seattle. I'd had it once before but I honestly forgot.

I made people eat pumpkin pie. And there were snacks and stuff, and I also sent everyone home with candy because hey, Halloween party, must have candy. I gave the prizes for best costume to Brian and Drew. Brian got the vampire puppet and Drew got the talking pumpkin head. We took a whole bunch of pictures of people and stuff. So I should have a pirate picture at some point. It was fun to yell "YARRR!" a lot and have people think "oh how cute, she's in character" not "what a freak."

thoughts in no particular order:

I really, really like hanging out with Casey. Wish I saw him more.

Drew and I have to go to Cheesecake Factory sometime.

Jack lives a lot closer now! We're hoping to find a brass band to play in sometime, since neither of us want to go back to Olympia for drum corps.

I'm really happy for Edgars... he has a girlfriend AND he seems to have a lot better handle on what the heck he's doing with school and life than last time I talked to him.

I got really burned out trying not to tell Safety Monkey to get the fuck out of my house. I mean, he was just picking on EVERYTHING in my house... I'm sorry, you don't get to pretend you're a gamer nerd AND make fun of games like you're some sort of non-gamer-nerd. And *nobody* disses my Japanese PHB and gets away with it. (Brian claims that it was his way of being impressed with my nerdy godliness, but I think there are a lot better ways to do so.)

Spider webs are hard to put up. They look cool with devil ducks in them. Go Eli! We're gonna leave the big plastic spider dude up for a few days I think.

Kevin Babbitt's girlfriend Michelle is way cool, and I'm hoping to catch the two of them some other time, maybe next time Brian and Dave and I do dinner circle or something.

I wish I felt more charged by people, like I used to. I just feel so totally burnt out by everything, and I don't know why, or what's wrong with me.

All in all though, it was a pretty successful party. We need more chairs.

I love daylight savings, but it's totally time for sleep. I have to go to work tomorrow, sigh.

There are worse things than staring at the mountain on a Sunday

sometimes it is really nice to come to work on a Sunday.

especially when someone left a present for you!

A guy was getting rid of vinyl records on our for-sale list a week or so ago, and I said I'd love to buy the TMBG stuff off him since I've been a fan for 13+ years and have a decent collection already. He said he'd give them to me for free, but wasn't sure when he'd make it up to my building. But! Sitting on my chair today was the original 12" vinyl singles of They'll Need a Crane and (She Was A) Hotel Detective. Covers are slightly warped, but WOW! So neat! I've got some other vinyl TMBG stuff... now if only I had a record player out here :) I should bring the rest of my vinyl back from Philly and then scour yard sales for a record player sometime. Yar.

Also, I can see Mt. Rainier from my office, it's really nice out.

the only bad part was when I brought in a ton of soda cans and dropped the bag and a bunch of them rolled out on the ground. It was embarrassing in front of the security guards, not to mention that I got Pepsi all over my arms 'cause one of the cans exploded. But the rest seems to have survived just fine, and my group's gonna love me when they come in on Monday and see a bowl of candy on the desk and a fridge full of soda!

I guess as long as I'm detailing today, I'll also mention that I went over to the cap hill house with Eli, and we saw Sean and Jane and Rachael and Olivia and some of their friends. And before that we went Sunday Bowling With The Loewens, except there was a notorious lack of Loewens besides Cory and Mike, and was basically just our group of friends. I'm starting to get the hang of bowling again; I bowled like a 78, a 106, and a 159. My last game I even got 5 strikes, and a turkey (three in a row). It'd be nice if I felt like I could really claim my 130 average again, though.

So I hear the Marlins won the World Series... who cares. Hawks and Tigers are at 3-3, the last game is tonight, how exciting! I really like reading Japanese baseball box scores a lot better, you can really tell how the game went a lot better than with american box scores. Yay.

OK, so I went to IZ to try out ITG

Yeah, so I was at work and I caught up on email from Friday, answered some stuff, did a quick fix to a web page, and then I headed to Illusionz for an hour or so to try out the new dance game.

( It occurs to me that most people don't want to read me babbling about an arcade trip. )

After an hour at IZ I called it quits and headed back here to work. (IZ is only 15 mins from work... sigh... need my own car...) I did see animegothgrrl playing DDR on my way out of IZ though! Her blue hair braids look really fucking cool. It was good to see her, but I was just getting IZ-apathetic. Going to IZ makes me miss Mark (rkane), oddly enough. Good thing I'll see him and everyone at CMU in a few weeks :)