Wednesday - Nykkel's birthday and idiot PvP

Wednesday was nykkel's birthday. He invited a bunch of us to go with him to Todai at Pacific Place, since they give a free meal ON your birthday (rather than a coupon for next time). That is, of course, where I went on my birthday this year too, although since I had an important Yankees-Mariners game to go to that evening, I went for lunch.

Anyway, it was actually pretty super-fun. I saw a bunch of people I hadn't seen in ages -- kieferskunk was there with his girlfriend Elaine/Fire/whatever who I hadn't met before. She seems really nice and a great match for him and I'm happy for them. metroid23 and megami were also there, and I really *should* see them more... I'll have to remember to be inspired to call them some evening after work while I'm out here on the east side anyway. And best of all mwinzi showed up! I hadn't seen him since before MY birthday, as far as we can tell, since he says he still has something ducky for me from then. Oops.

Despite Kiefer's failed attempt at drinking sake, and a heartbreaking game where the Yankees beat the Twins on TV (though I suppose it's not that bad for me since it goes with my predictions), and a lack of jello (so we couldn't make Nykkel eat jello with chopsticks on his birthday), it was pretty good to see everyone and hang out and eat too much food. Yay for Nykkel's birthday. Afterwards I hung out for a while chatting with Nykkel and Mwinzi at Pacific Place, and I stopped by Barnes and Noble, where out of nowhere I found something I've wanted for ages -- a book about Walter Johnson and the 1924 Washington Senators. You'd think that there'd be more books about one of the greatest pitchers of all time, y'know?

Afterwards I came home and played a bit of PP. I was moving a ship back to Turtle, and in the middle of the Jorvik-Luthien leg, while expecting to be intercepted by red brigands, I got intercepted repeatedly by a player ship (cutter) - it was blue to me, then green as they called on a fourth person. Two yellows, two greenies, four swabbies on their ship, and just me and three swabbies on mine, and here's the transcript. I've cut out most things like ordering swabbies and hearties logging in:

( Puzzle Pirates PvP log cut for most people's sanity )

Thursday, D&D

The downside to Thursday at work is that I decided to do some more hardware testing on my box and apparently in the meantime someone broke the code tree so as a result, I couldn't boot the software on my Moxi box and I couldn't listen to the NLDS baseball games! The horror! (I told this to Ficus when I showed up at J&M's house later and it turns out he actually knew some of the Moxi folks down in Palo Alto. Weird.)

Anyway, we had D&D. We thought our first encounter for the night would be with a big 20-foot spider, and it was, but it turned out to actually be with 10 drow elves instead. Fortunately we totally wasted them (though not before taking some significant damage ourselves, and Josh was even dropped to -7). I finally got to cast Ice Storm, and Improved Invis, and some other stuff. Spell Resistance sucks, and I may have to go take Greater Spell Penetration as my next feat, although in reality what I have to do is tell Justin my proposal for a custom feat, which I'll mention here if he approves it.

Unfortunately after the fight I kind of conked out and fell asleep. Oops.

I went home and played PP since I had a ship to move back. Rome invited me to come pillage after that so I hung out with him until I pretty much fell asleep there too. I had another big nasty fight with Chernabog on Wednesday and who knows if/when he's going to log in again. I wonder if maybe I should stop caring so much about getting involved in the flag. I'm really not sure I like our flag's system of government. I suppose I'll just hope they give me a position at the tailor on Luthien, and hope to find some other good shopkeeping opportunity in the meantime. I wonder whether my apoth stall on Turtle will continue to be worth running... I sure hope so... I had hoped to buy a real apoth shop by now, and I guess it's just not happening. Bleh.