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Let's see. I'm getting extraordinarily bad at updating LJ. I'm really not sure why.
First, weekend. We spent Saturday over at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mygrane's place for a board games thing. But since there were exactly 6 people, what ended up happening is we played a game of Power Grid (the English version, which I'd played like, once, a few years ago). But everyone else was a relative newbie too. I quickly figured out exactly what a decent strategy was -- namely to pull an Adam on everyone, that is, where I accidentally surged out ahead at first because I got a good power plant, then purposefully tanked myself to get into 6th place for 2 turns around when everyone else was triggering 6 cities to start Stage 2... and saved up the money so that basically I could all of a sudden buy 5 cities on one turn, 3 the next, 3 the next, and I'd won a few key auctions for power factories so that I seriously could power 16 cities (with 14 being the ending condition). Wham! Only downside to that was that basically, I spent a lot of time being bored between rounds -- either, I'd have gone first and passed and was waiting for everyone else to do stuff, or I'd be going last and still had to wait for everyone else to do stuff. Either way I basically always had to wait for everyone else to do things and just make sure my strategy was still going to work and go ahead and do whatever. And it was like a 5-hour game, with 6 people!
On the other hand, I met two people I hadn't before (Joey and Julia -- I'd met Paul before), and they were interesting, so I consider that to also be a success for the day.
The other thing about Saturday is that I got a package in the mail from my JHS in Japan with 46 cards from my 7th-graders, 99% of which were in English. So that leads into...
Sunday, we spent the afternoon on the waterfront in Seattle. I shopped for postcards in various stores, basically looking for "I want to spend 25 cents or less per postcard" and "I don't want them to be pieces of crap". Eventually, after looking in like 5 stores at postcards and other random stuff, I decided to go to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and get the postcards there. I ended up getting 48 postcards there. The lady at the counter was kinda like "...you must be a teacher, huh?" and I'm like "Yeah, these are for students, but how did you know?" Mike and I snacked on touristy food at the waterfront, I had clam chowder at Ivar's and he had a hotdog from the Frankfurter stand.
Then we went up to Ballard and met up with Carl. The three of us drove over to Greenlake and walked around the lake. We started after 5pm, so it was past sundown by the time we got all 3 miles around it, but we were still able to see well enough to find the car. I suggested we get dinner somewhere around Ballard, and basically offered either Chinook's or Pasta Bella, and we decided on Chinook's. It was pretty crowded at 6:30pm on a Sunday, BUT the bar area turned out to be pretty much empty then, so we just took a table there rather than waiting for one in the main dining room. The only downer was that they'd sold out of sole (no, not a joke), so I got salmon cakes, which used to be like $12 in the old days and are now $17! Not sure why the raise in price since they're the exact same size and everything as before.
Back at the Ballard house, I went through some more of my stuff, carted a few boxes of things out of the upstairs closet of my crap, and I also sorted board games into Things I Want and Things I Don't Want. Does anyone want any of my board games? (Probly for sale, but super cheap) I'll post a list separately. Carl and Mike played Brawl while I went through stuff. I found some things like an entire semester of Fiction Workshop comments... the bad thing is that it was Dennis's class, where I loved my class but wrote absolute shit. I wrote much better stuff in Sharon's class but was terrified of half my classmates. I ended up keeping some of the comment pages but overall tossing out most of the story pages. Tossed a whole bunch of other papers too. Really, stuff is so annoying... and hard to part with.
Actually, another thing I found was an entire set of Animaniacs figures, which I'd be happy to just give away to someone. Maybe I DO need to get myself a Freecycle account.
So that was the weekend, I guess.
Monday wasn't too much. Mike and I went to Blazin' Bagels for lunch! I had a fantastic lox and cream cheese bagel, and took home a cinnamon raisin one and a pretzel one for later. (The pretzel one turned out to be AWESOME, it tasted like a big soft pretzel, but it was a bagel! I added some mustard and it was really great.)
I did some "homework" I had for a job interview thingy, and then I went for a walk/jog for a bit, and ate the other bagels... I heard some interesting news at 5pm or so, and then at 5:30 headed off towards the Issaquah Community Center, where I had decided to try out their open gym pickup volleyball game.
So I got there shortly after 6pm... paid $4 at the desk, came in, and it basically looked like a normal volleyball pickup, but the age range was HUGE -- I saw kids who were clearly upper teens and I also saw people who were clearly in their 50's or 60's. I'm actually not sure how many people were in the middle of that like me. BUT, what's crazy is, the first guy I talked to when I got there was a Japanese guy. I ended up on his team... with him and four other Japanese people. WTF.
See, what was dumb is, they'd all talk to each other in Japanese during the game, describing plays or whatnot, you know, the "oh man I think that was mine," or "that was scary, that dude is really tall", or "I think middle back should be playing forward". Then they'd repeat themselves in English to me. Except like, during play, they'd be yelling out calls in Japanese, like "hai hai!" for "I got it", or "kita!" for "It's over (on our side)", or "kaba!" instead of "help!" ("kaba" being Japanese "cover"). So I basically got confused and started calling everything in Japanese too and replying to them in Japanese too. Between games I'm eventually just like "あのう。。。実は３年間ぐらい日本に住んでいました。" ("Uhh... actually I lived in Japan for 3 years.") So the two women in the team, they were just fine to talk to me in Japanese, one of them was even like "Oh good, that saves us time if you can understand us. Where'd you live in Japan?" and so on. But the guys... the first guy, Shingo, he reminded me of my friend Shinozawa, very uh, the best way I can describe him is "oyaji gyagu", he made a lot of really silly jokes in Japanese. Like when the score was 1-1, he barked like a dog. ("wan-wan" is the onomotopoeia for a dog barking in Japanese.) So he was silly enough to talk to me, but the other two guys (older, 40sish?) basically refused to acknowledge that I actually was capable of speaking in the language they were all talking in and basically wouldn't reply to me when I tried to talk to them in either language. So it was a little awkward and annoying. A few games in we acquired another non-Japanese guy and they were even weirder after that.
It reminded me of how insular Japanese people really are. I was surprised to encounter that same feeling here in Issaquah. I think the guys on the team we were playing against for most of the night were friendlier (one dude's even like "You're lefty, aren't you? Cool! We could use more around here.")
Either way, I did play for 3 hours and once I got warmed up I even played pretty well. So that was good. But now I'm really sore! I guess I could consider going back there sometime, if Mondays are still an option. The playing level seemed varied as usual, some very good players but also I could hold my own as well. And the floor is carpeted which means that I find all the people wearing kneepads kind of silly (I notice that the better players generally DON'T wear them).
And then Tuesday was today. But it's already 1am and I've been trying to get this entry together for like 3 days. Why is it so hard for me to update? I also know I'm leaving things out, which sucks when I try to go back and look at periods of my life later on.
First, weekend. We spent Saturday over at
mygrane's place for a board games thing. But since there were exactly 6 people, what ended up happening is we played a game of Power Grid (the English version, which I'd played like, once, a few years ago). But everyone else was a relative newbie too. I quickly figured out exactly what a decent strategy was -- namely to pull an Adam on everyone, that is, where I accidentally surged out ahead at first because I got a good power plant, then purposefully tanked myself to get into 6th place for 2 turns around when everyone else was triggering 6 cities to start Stage 2... and saved up the money so that basically I could all of a sudden buy 5 cities on one turn, 3 the next, 3 the next, and I'd won a few key auctions for power factories so that I seriously could power 16 cities (with 14 being the ending condition). Wham! Only downside to that was that basically, I spent a lot of time being bored between rounds -- either, I'd have gone first and passed and was waiting for everyone else to do stuff, or I'd be going last and still had to wait for everyone else to do stuff. Either way I basically always had to wait for everyone else to do things and just make sure my strategy was still going to work and go ahead and do whatever. And it was like a 5-hour game, with 6 people!On the other hand, I met two people I hadn't before (Joey and Julia -- I'd met Paul before), and they were interesting, so I consider that to also be a success for the day.
The other thing about Saturday is that I got a package in the mail from my JHS in Japan with 46 cards from my 7th-graders, 99% of which were in English. So that leads into...
Sunday, we spent the afternoon on the waterfront in Seattle. I shopped for postcards in various stores, basically looking for "I want to spend 25 cents or less per postcard" and "I don't want them to be pieces of crap". Eventually, after looking in like 5 stores at postcards and other random stuff, I decided to go to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and get the postcards there. I ended up getting 48 postcards there. The lady at the counter was kinda like "...you must be a teacher, huh?" and I'm like "Yeah, these are for students, but how did you know?" Mike and I snacked on touristy food at the waterfront, I had clam chowder at Ivar's and he had a hotdog from the Frankfurter stand.
Then we went up to Ballard and met up with Carl. The three of us drove over to Greenlake and walked around the lake. We started after 5pm, so it was past sundown by the time we got all 3 miles around it, but we were still able to see well enough to find the car. I suggested we get dinner somewhere around Ballard, and basically offered either Chinook's or Pasta Bella, and we decided on Chinook's. It was pretty crowded at 6:30pm on a Sunday, BUT the bar area turned out to be pretty much empty then, so we just took a table there rather than waiting for one in the main dining room. The only downer was that they'd sold out of sole (no, not a joke), so I got salmon cakes, which used to be like $12 in the old days and are now $17! Not sure why the raise in price since they're the exact same size and everything as before.
Back at the Ballard house, I went through some more of my stuff, carted a few boxes of things out of the upstairs closet of my crap, and I also sorted board games into Things I Want and Things I Don't Want. Does anyone want any of my board games? (Probly for sale, but super cheap) I'll post a list separately. Carl and Mike played Brawl while I went through stuff. I found some things like an entire semester of Fiction Workshop comments... the bad thing is that it was Dennis's class, where I loved my class but wrote absolute shit. I wrote much better stuff in Sharon's class but was terrified of half my classmates. I ended up keeping some of the comment pages but overall tossing out most of the story pages. Tossed a whole bunch of other papers too. Really, stuff is so annoying... and hard to part with.
Actually, another thing I found was an entire set of Animaniacs figures, which I'd be happy to just give away to someone. Maybe I DO need to get myself a Freecycle account.
So that was the weekend, I guess.
Monday wasn't too much. Mike and I went to Blazin' Bagels for lunch! I had a fantastic lox and cream cheese bagel, and took home a cinnamon raisin one and a pretzel one for later. (The pretzel one turned out to be AWESOME, it tasted like a big soft pretzel, but it was a bagel! I added some mustard and it was really great.)
I did some "homework" I had for a job interview thingy, and then I went for a walk/jog for a bit, and ate the other bagels... I heard some interesting news at 5pm or so, and then at 5:30 headed off towards the Issaquah Community Center, where I had decided to try out their open gym pickup volleyball game.
So I got there shortly after 6pm... paid $4 at the desk, came in, and it basically looked like a normal volleyball pickup, but the age range was HUGE -- I saw kids who were clearly upper teens and I also saw people who were clearly in their 50's or 60's. I'm actually not sure how many people were in the middle of that like me. BUT, what's crazy is, the first guy I talked to when I got there was a Japanese guy. I ended up on his team... with him and four other Japanese people. WTF.
See, what was dumb is, they'd all talk to each other in Japanese during the game, describing plays or whatnot, you know, the "oh man I think that was mine," or "that was scary, that dude is really tall", or "I think middle back should be playing forward". Then they'd repeat themselves in English to me. Except like, during play, they'd be yelling out calls in Japanese, like "hai hai!" for "I got it", or "kita!" for "It's over (on our side)", or "kaba!" instead of "help!" ("kaba" being Japanese "cover"). So I basically got confused and started calling everything in Japanese too and replying to them in Japanese too. Between games I'm eventually just like "あのう。。。実は３年間ぐらい日本に住んでいました。" ("Uhh... actually I lived in Japan for 3 years.") So the two women in the team, they were just fine to talk to me in Japanese, one of them was even like "Oh good, that saves us time if you can understand us. Where'd you live in Japan?" and so on. But the guys... the first guy, Shingo, he reminded me of my friend Shinozawa, very uh, the best way I can describe him is "oyaji gyagu", he made a lot of really silly jokes in Japanese. Like when the score was 1-1, he barked like a dog. ("wan-wan" is the onomotopoeia for a dog barking in Japanese.) So he was silly enough to talk to me, but the other two guys (older, 40sish?) basically refused to acknowledge that I actually was capable of speaking in the language they were all talking in and basically wouldn't reply to me when I tried to talk to them in either language. So it was a little awkward and annoying. A few games in we acquired another non-Japanese guy and they were even weirder after that.
It reminded me of how insular Japanese people really are. I was surprised to encounter that same feeling here in Issaquah. I think the guys on the team we were playing against for most of the night were friendlier (one dude's even like "You're lefty, aren't you? Cool! We could use more around here.")
Either way, I did play for 3 hours and once I got warmed up I even played pretty well. So that was good. But now I'm really sore! I guess I could consider going back there sometime, if Mondays are still an option. The playing level seemed varied as usual, some very good players but also I could hold my own as well. And the floor is carpeted which means that I find all the people wearing kneepads kind of silly (I notice that the better players generally DON'T wear them).
And then Tuesday was today. But it's already 1am and I've been trying to get this entry together for like 3 days. Why is it so hard for me to update? I also know I'm leaving things out, which sucks when I try to go back and look at periods of my life later on.
