a little more on hunt, some other stuff I guess...

Long periods of time go by and I don't update this. It bothers me not to have the updates, but I don't feel like writing a lot.

So yeah, there was Mystery Hunt. I went to Boston for the weekend and played with team Up Late, who had merged with the group that usually does a remote team in Redmond (but basically Mike and Matt and Robb and I were the only ones from the MSPH community to go to Boston). We had about 30 people there in Boston, maybe? Everyone was amazingly nice and smart and cool and funny and I really had a great time puzzling with them. And they had a great puzzler-friendly dog too (she seemed to sense when you were stuck on a puzzle and would come over and puppy-nudge you). The puzzles were very high-quality IMO, at least the ones I did significant work on. The events that I went to were fun too, especially that I got to basically sit there and play Wheel of Fortune Ricochet Robot for half an hour at one point. It was also super-cool to meet a lot of people or see old friends -- bizarrely the team across the hall from us had a bunch of assorted puzzlers I know from elsewhere.

I'm glad I went, aside from the silly downsides like only sleeping 11 hours in 3 days, or getting mild frostbite from the freezing weather, or eating approximately 8239482394832 pounds of chocolate over the weekend. I should probably go back next year when gwillen's team hosts, because he came out to Liboncatipu's puzzle hunt this fall :)

(If you also played through it, I'll just say that my two favorite puzzles were "Written Down" and "Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts")

Aside from Hunt, I did nothing in Boston. Matt and Mike and I got lunch/dinner from Legal Sea Foods by Kendall station that Sunday, and then caught the train/bus to the airport. I do have to admit that after I spent so long writing the Magical History Tour puzzle, it was funny to be going around on the T.

(I hope to add to this more after the 28th, if I remember to.)

splitting out from Hunt so maybe I can add more thoughts after the recast

Actually I didn't do very much last week that's worth writing about anyway, before hunt... Wednesday we had a mini-Loot meetup at Cats Head BBQ, where apparently Whitefire works now, so it was me and Pierut and Hermes and Lejerque and Lambda (heh it's funny to go by pirate names since we don't really in real life at all anymore) and we had good food and hung out talking, and I invited everyone over here afterwards and it was mostly just novel that I could be like "hey I live in the city and have a place people can come hang out and it's cool!"

This week, uh, on Monday, Mike D. came over and we "played" "softball"... we'd talked about playing catch sometime, so he brought a glove and bat. Phil and I went to Chow for lunch actually first, and to Safeway, and showed up home at the same time as Mike. So we got Phil to come with us too, and the three of us went to the high school across the street and used their field to play catch on. Basically we mostly just did a thing where one person hit, one person pitched, and one person chased balls. I was pretty pathetic at chasing and ran around a lot, and I wasn't that great at pitching either (though not terrible), but the amusing part was when I was hitting, Mike pitched, and I kept hitting the ball right to Phil (on purpose). That was pretty fun. At one point while I was pitching and Mike was hitting, he launched a ball over the wall and out of the field into someone's yard... which was highly fenced off... so, now I am down one softball. Oops :) anyway, it was fun, we figure we need about 3-4 more people and a few more gloves for it to be truly fun, though. Oh yeah, we got dinner at Thai 530 or whatever, which had a 4.5 rating on Yelp, but in truth wasn't really that totally aboard-whatever fantastic, so, I dunno.

Yesterday I watched TV for 3 hours with my housemates, which is a little uncharacteristic for me, but there was a lot of Jeopardy to catch up on as well as Glee. So, whee. Stayed up late talking to Jenny after that.

Tonight, we tried to start a D&D group at work. Like, 2 weeks ago a guy sent out an email trying to get people who were interested, and he got like 20 people to respond and sign up on a sheet. So it was sorted into 3 groups, Mon/Tue/Wed by availability. My group was supposed to be me, Chris S (from CMU), Curtis and Brian from games, a CE guy named Josh and then the organizer Jeff (also in CE) said he'd DM a ready-made module for us. The problem is... Jeff completely forgot about it and never showed up, and Josh also ducked out at the last minute. From talking to others it sounds like Tuesday's game had a similar problem and Monday didn't even meet because it was a day off. Anyway, I went to get Charlie (who sits sorta near the room we're meeting in and was supposed to be in Monday's group) just to ask if he knew what was going on... anyway, after a while of Charlie hanging out in the room with me, Chris, Curtis, and Brian, we decided why don't we just reconfigure the group to be that? Charlie will DM for the 4 of us on Wednesdays and everything should be just peachy!

Hopefully.

Anyway, we'll see how that works out.

Let's see, um... I dunno what else to mention. I've been doing a project this month where I wear a baseball shirt every day with the date on it. (but of course have been posting that one to Facebook.) I had to skip a few but it's mostly been amusing. Trying to come up with a similar thing to do in February.