My weekend
Saturday morning we got up early to go hiking. I had promised Eli for his birthday that I would go with him for something outdoorsy since usually he hikes with other people, I'm not much for it. But since I don't know much about the trails here, I enlisted Megan's help, and we got a whole big group to go hiking! We all met up at Justin's house (our group was me, Eli, Megan, Josh, Cory, Heidi, and Justin (Colleen is away this weekend or something)), and then drove up to Granite Falls in two cars. We got really really lost for a little while there... the map was weird, and it looked like the road ended (it says "pavement ends"), and we turned around, then turned around again... the pavement ends for like 500 feet. Ugh. Eventually we find the place, drive around the parking lots, and we find Heidi and Cory and Justin waiting for us. Yay.
So we set off on the trail. We went to the Big Four Ice Caves. The trail is listed as being "almost wheelchair-friendly". They're really not kidding - the trail itself is not too bad at all, and it's even mostly paved/planked. We saw tons of families, kids, dogs, etc walking this trail. It has some uphill and downhill but it's overall even and clear. Eventually there's a little rockiness and then... there are ice caves! It's so weird, it's like there's this big chunk of snow/ice on the side of a hill and it's all melting, and there are these caves formed out of the ice. You walk along the rocks and it's all warm and suddenly WHAM! It's all cold and there's freezing air coming out of the caves... it's like an air-conditioned trail. You can't actually go into the caves (they had all these signs saying that people DIED IN THERE in an avalanche August 2 1998) but you can go in a little way, plus you can go up to another ice cave entrance with a waterfall, and it's all really pretty and we took a whole lot of pictures of it. (And of course since my whole D&D group was with me I was like "You approach the entrance to the Ice Caves. You see a 10-foot wide path leading inwards, and you hear a waterfall above you. You feel cold. What does the party do?" "I cast magic missile into the darkness." "DOH!")
So anyway, we walked around there and then looked for the first geocache, the Ice Cave Cache. We tried to follow a "trail" into the woods but this is where it got REALLY difficult - TONS of bushwhacking and climbing and stuff. I was not having a good time of it because I'm still mildly freaked out about the poison ivy or whatever I reacted to a few weeks ago that resulted in my torn up right arm around the end of June. There were a ton of bugs and a ton of plans and not much of a real trail... eventually we got up onto a big rock, and stopped to eat some apples and snacks and check the GPS again. It seemed like we were near the cache but we couldn't see an easy way there at all... and we weren't REALLY enjoying pushing our way through the thick plants and thorns and whatnot... so we eventually just found our way back to the main trail and gave up on it. We went back to the ice cave itself to cool off for a while, and then hit the road.
Cory and I had a funny discussion on the trail on the way back about how much this was kinda like D&D in itself... we had a party marching order, and Heidi was like our party druid since she can immediately identify tons of plants and tell us whether berries are edible and whatnot... and I was thinking about the notion of dexterity. If I had to give myself a DEX I would probably say like 15 or so because I'm really good with my hands. I can juggle several objects, type extremely fast, play many instruments, videogames, etc. But in reality I have very little real balance. I'm a total klutz. I have a tough time climbing and stuff because I can't keep footholds. It's weird.
Anyway, so we decided to try the Coal Lake Road geocache after that. This was a really easy geocache for the most part. We pretty much drove up Coal Lake road... all the way because we passed the cache the first time... got up to the top and turned around. The road was kinda scary actually because it was fairly thin, no guard rails, and on the side of a VERY STEEP CLIFF. But it was really pretty up there. On the way back we stopped at the outlook and Cory found the geocache box. Eli took one of the thingies because it was his birthday trip and all. I left a Canadian dollar in there. We hung out there for a while looking at rocks and stuff and then decided to call it quits.
After hiking, we went to Josh and Megan's house, ordered pizza, and watched Office Space since Justin had never seen it before. Good times. I got home around 10:30 and saw that Franklin and the Mariners had rocked the Whitesox 10-0, and Olerud got a 3-run homerun and a grand slam. He's so awesome :)
Sunday I woke up around noon to go to Cory's for D&D.
We've decided to port our characters to D&D 3.5. The implications of this are wacky. Before this, I was the one that knew the system the best of anyone in the group because I've been playing 3rd edition for 3 years since it came out in August 2000. Now I keep having to second-guess myself because they changed lots of random miniscule details. It's interesting but at the same time it kind of sucks. I really need to just sit down and read through the book. Maybe I'll do that on my plane trips to/from California?
Anyway, the good parts are that listen and spot are class skills for me now, and the animal companion can actually level up a little, and they have a few new cool spells, although they took away Animal Friendship, also the Animal Empathy skill is now just a ranger/druid class ability (wild empathy). They put in a lot of the stuff from the various handbooks, too. And there are a TON of feats that just give you +2 to two skills. I'm debating whether I care for those anymore. I was allowed to rearrange my feats and now I have Track and Dodge instead of Dodge and Alertness because I don't need the latter now that Spot/Listen are class skills for me. Shrug.
Also, Cory gave us the option at 2nd level to either take a stat point or to take a special power. Mike and I decided to take Darkvision (30 feet) as our special power... it's kinda cool I think.
As far as roleplaying today, we basically played through starting off the adventure for the spider venom. Apparently her lair is the Forge of Fury... I wish I could remember if I'd played through that. I THINK Tal actually did have us play through that as a REALLY early session when Grundar was still driving our plot, in the second Greyhawk group. But I'm really not sure. And Justin says he wants to run the Deserts of Desolation trilogy next. I can only laugh at that because, well, the summer after my freshman year, I played through that module... Aaron Teske ran it, and me,![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
msde, angelbob, Dave White, Eric Stein, Cliff Wood, and I forget who else all played in it (I came in to take over for cheerfulchaotic's character. "The gnome waves the wand of wonder and suddenly... there's uh, a female elven archer standing there?" "Hi. I'm Janthina.") Anyway, that campaign was MAJOR fun but the modules themselves are kinda hellish in a lot of ways. So we'll see what happens. Justin claims it's been ported to D&D 3E. It would be fun to play again I think, though.
Oh but today's highlights were: Josh's wimpy bard taking on the turncoat guy whose life we saved (Kass: I'm gonna steal your stuff and go Josh: Uhhh, no. Kass:*swings axe* Josh:*casts Sleep* Cory: Oh, so Josh says some of his magic magic stuff, and then Kass says... *rolls a 3 for the saving throw* Justin: ....ZZZZZZ....) And my fun with the spider goblins attacking us from the trees... You know, a well-placed Entangle is worth a thousand words. Nothing like goblins jumping out of trees to avoid the Entangle and subsequently killing themselves from the fall ;)
Of course the other highlight was hearing the baseball game wherein Meche and the Mariners pounded the White Sox again! Yay for Meche and his 12th win. I had this awesome vision of what would happen if the Phillies and Royals faced off in the World Series again this year, though.
After D&D I came home and was about to start laundry when I got the brilliant idea to go to Sunset to play a game or two of DDR. I got 6 on Happy Wedding Heavy :) I guess that's good because Joelle and Stephen got married this weekend. I've really only played DDR like 4 times in July and it shows because I get winded after easy songs. Bleh. I'll have to play more in August, I guess. Anyway, I got my laundry kinda done, except the part where I forgot about it, so even though it's 2am my stuff just went into the dryer :( I'll have to pick it up in the morning. And I think that's my weekend. Good stuff.
So we set off on the trail. We went to the Big Four Ice Caves. The trail is listed as being "almost wheelchair-friendly". They're really not kidding - the trail itself is not too bad at all, and it's even mostly paved/planked. We saw tons of families, kids, dogs, etc walking this trail. It has some uphill and downhill but it's overall even and clear. Eventually there's a little rockiness and then... there are ice caves! It's so weird, it's like there's this big chunk of snow/ice on the side of a hill and it's all melting, and there are these caves formed out of the ice. You walk along the rocks and it's all warm and suddenly WHAM! It's all cold and there's freezing air coming out of the caves... it's like an air-conditioned trail. You can't actually go into the caves (they had all these signs saying that people DIED IN THERE in an avalanche August 2 1998) but you can go in a little way, plus you can go up to another ice cave entrance with a waterfall, and it's all really pretty and we took a whole lot of pictures of it. (And of course since my whole D&D group was with me I was like "You approach the entrance to the Ice Caves. You see a 10-foot wide path leading inwards, and you hear a waterfall above you. You feel cold. What does the party do?" "I cast magic missile into the darkness." "DOH!")
So anyway, we walked around there and then looked for the first geocache, the Ice Cave Cache. We tried to follow a "trail" into the woods but this is where it got REALLY difficult - TONS of bushwhacking and climbing and stuff. I was not having a good time of it because I'm still mildly freaked out about the poison ivy or whatever I reacted to a few weeks ago that resulted in my torn up right arm around the end of June. There were a ton of bugs and a ton of plans and not much of a real trail... eventually we got up onto a big rock, and stopped to eat some apples and snacks and check the GPS again. It seemed like we were near the cache but we couldn't see an easy way there at all... and we weren't REALLY enjoying pushing our way through the thick plants and thorns and whatnot... so we eventually just found our way back to the main trail and gave up on it. We went back to the ice cave itself to cool off for a while, and then hit the road.
Cory and I had a funny discussion on the trail on the way back about how much this was kinda like D&D in itself... we had a party marching order, and Heidi was like our party druid since she can immediately identify tons of plants and tell us whether berries are edible and whatnot... and I was thinking about the notion of dexterity. If I had to give myself a DEX I would probably say like 15 or so because I'm really good with my hands. I can juggle several objects, type extremely fast, play many instruments, videogames, etc. But in reality I have very little real balance. I'm a total klutz. I have a tough time climbing and stuff because I can't keep footholds. It's weird.
Anyway, so we decided to try the Coal Lake Road geocache after that. This was a really easy geocache for the most part. We pretty much drove up Coal Lake road... all the way because we passed the cache the first time... got up to the top and turned around. The road was kinda scary actually because it was fairly thin, no guard rails, and on the side of a VERY STEEP CLIFF. But it was really pretty up there. On the way back we stopped at the outlook and Cory found the geocache box. Eli took one of the thingies because it was his birthday trip and all. I left a Canadian dollar in there. We hung out there for a while looking at rocks and stuff and then decided to call it quits.
After hiking, we went to Josh and Megan's house, ordered pizza, and watched Office Space since Justin had never seen it before. Good times. I got home around 10:30 and saw that Franklin and the Mariners had rocked the Whitesox 10-0, and Olerud got a 3-run homerun and a grand slam. He's so awesome :)
Sunday I woke up around noon to go to Cory's for D&D.
We've decided to port our characters to D&D 3.5. The implications of this are wacky. Before this, I was the one that knew the system the best of anyone in the group because I've been playing 3rd edition for 3 years since it came out in August 2000. Now I keep having to second-guess myself because they changed lots of random miniscule details. It's interesting but at the same time it kind of sucks. I really need to just sit down and read through the book. Maybe I'll do that on my plane trips to/from California?
Anyway, the good parts are that listen and spot are class skills for me now, and the animal companion can actually level up a little, and they have a few new cool spells, although they took away Animal Friendship, also the Animal Empathy skill is now just a ranger/druid class ability (wild empathy). They put in a lot of the stuff from the various handbooks, too. And there are a TON of feats that just give you +2 to two skills. I'm debating whether I care for those anymore. I was allowed to rearrange my feats and now I have Track and Dodge instead of Dodge and Alertness because I don't need the latter now that Spot/Listen are class skills for me. Shrug.
Also, Cory gave us the option at 2nd level to either take a stat point or to take a special power. Mike and I decided to take Darkvision (30 feet) as our special power... it's kinda cool I think.
As far as roleplaying today, we basically played through starting off the adventure for the spider venom. Apparently her lair is the Forge of Fury... I wish I could remember if I'd played through that. I THINK Tal actually did have us play through that as a REALLY early session when Grundar was still driving our plot, in the second Greyhawk group. But I'm really not sure. And Justin says he wants to run the Deserts of Desolation trilogy next. I can only laugh at that because, well, the summer after my freshman year, I played through that module... Aaron Teske ran it, and me,
msde, angelbob, Dave White, Eric Stein, Cliff Wood, and I forget who else all played in it (I came in to take over for cheerfulchaotic's character. "The gnome waves the wand of wonder and suddenly... there's uh, a female elven archer standing there?" "Hi. I'm Janthina.") Anyway, that campaign was MAJOR fun but the modules themselves are kinda hellish in a lot of ways. So we'll see what happens. Justin claims it's been ported to D&D 3E. It would be fun to play again I think, though. Oh but today's highlights were: Josh's wimpy bard taking on the turncoat guy whose life we saved (Kass: I'm gonna steal your stuff and go Josh: Uhhh, no. Kass:*swings axe* Josh:*casts Sleep* Cory: Oh, so Josh says some of his magic magic stuff, and then Kass says... *rolls a 3 for the saving throw* Justin: ....ZZZZZZ....) And my fun with the spider goblins attacking us from the trees... You know, a well-placed Entangle is worth a thousand words. Nothing like goblins jumping out of trees to avoid the Entangle and subsequently killing themselves from the fall ;)
Of course the other highlight was hearing the baseball game wherein Meche and the Mariners pounded the White Sox again! Yay for Meche and his 12th win. I had this awesome vision of what would happen if the Phillies and Royals faced off in the World Series again this year, though.
After D&D I came home and was about to start laundry when I got the brilliant idea to go to Sunset to play a game or two of DDR. I got 6 on Happy Wedding Heavy :) I guess that's good because Joelle and Stephen got married this weekend. I've really only played DDR like 4 times in July and it shows because I get winded after easy songs. Bleh. I'll have to play more in August, I guess. Anyway, I got my laundry kinda done, except the part where I forgot about it, so even though it's 2am my stuff just went into the dryer :( I'll have to pick it up in the morning. And I think that's my weekend. Good stuff.
:O!!