Every Day an Adventure

After trying to deny all week that my nose was getting stuffy and sniffly, I think I might as well just admit it -- I have a mild cold. Yuck. Right now it's just the sniffles, I hope it doesn't get much worse. Explains the braindeadness, though.

This morning started off with me waking up with a huge stuffy headache, as the phone was ringing. It was a recruiter from Nintendo trying to tell me about a 6-month contract job doing Japanese-English localization of C++ SDK documentation (which pretty much fits all of my skillsets). I stuffily, sleepily, and oh so professionally replied, "I'm sowwy, bud youwe cawing aboud fibe munts doo lade, I habba job now," as I politely wormed out of the conversation so I could find some Tylenol. Anyway, why do people only call you with great job opportunities once you *have* a job? Sheesh.

There was some major traffic mishap today around rush hour, and all the buses got messed up. My original plan for the evening involved taking the 355 home at 6pm, grabbing my car, driving back downtown to meet up with nykkel and his girlfriend Pam at Todai for Nyk's birthday dinner, then going to West Seattle to see the Astros-Braves game with oren. Unfortunately, when I checked the bus availabilities, my bus was going to be 20 minutes late, and any other bus going my way was going to be similarly backed up. So I ditched going home, and hung out downtown for another hour. I went to the 5th Ave Theater to inquire about tickets for The King And I, and ended up with a 6th row center seat for tomorrow night's performance.

Then I went to Pacific Place; wasted time in Barnes & Noble for a little while. On a whim, I decided to go check out the science fiction section to see if they had ketsugami's book. They DID! Man, you have no idea how weird it is to be standing in a bookstore and see a novel written by your former D&D DM... I was going to hold off buying it until I was in Pittsburgh and make him sign it, but I decided to get it today, so maybe I'll actually read it before then. We'll see. By the way, Django, it was pretty funny, because the bar code didn't actually work when the cashier scanned the book, and she had to enter it manually. But, they did have three copies on the shelf at B&N here in Seattle. Just thought you might like to know :)

Anyway, dinner was fun, and it was good to catch up. I hadn't seen Nykkel in like... umm... *thinks* since May, or so, I think? Geez. Funny how that happens when your friends go off and get girlfriends. It was nice to meet Pam at last, too.

Afterwards, I did go over to Oren's, where we heckled the Clemens-Smoltz matchup. And the Braves kicked butt. I feel horrendously guilty rooting for the Braves, I do, but man, the Phillies were so damn close this year, if it weren't for those meddling Astros. It's funny, Clemens has been a great pitcher this year, but I swear, he's failed in a lot of clutch games. It's sort of odd. Anyway, I had the following impressions from the game:

1. John Smoltz looks just like captain_squid.
2. Marcus Giles looks just like my friend Dave Kowalski, who I haven't seen in way too long. I wonder if he's still in Fukushima...
3. It's really appropriate to hear them playing "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" by John Denver during the seventh inning stretch in a game between a Georgia team and a Texas team.
4. Half of the guys playing on the Braves are young enough that I could have babysat them when I was in high school.

Also, today Mariners Morsels gave my baseball blog a shout-out in a "Three totally sweet Mariners blogs you should read" post:

Deanna has totally established herself as the M's version of Batgirl. You'll find a wide variety of things to entertain you, including Song Parodies, In-depth Game Reports (from someone who was actually *there* most of the time!), and even pictures. We'll forgive her for being a Phillies fan (not that there's really anything wrong with that -- though my favorite NL team is the Cardinals), but it's totally cool having the male-dominated M's blogosphere represented from the female perspective, and from a self-professed Nerd (of which I totally can relate).

Whee. That made my day. :)

Went down to Tacoma today. Had dinner at Rock Pasta for theonlymegumegu's birthday thingy. There were a whole ton of people there, most of whom I recognized, many of whom I don't know the names of. I ended up at the "quiet" end of the table, and shared a pizza with Wooko and played Icehouse games with him and Stuph, we played two games of Volcano. Afterwards, we filtered out people at the Game Matrix, and then everyone converged on Eric's basement, where half the people played San Juan, and half played Settlers. I was in the Settlers game. I won. I think I'm too much of a gamer, it frustrates me when people make completely random and not-even-remotely-optimal moves, but I am getting a lot better at not expressing that at all. Half the group went to Seattle to see Izo as part of the SIFF, and the rest of us (at this point Wooko, Stuph, Ro, Brien, me, and the guy whose name I never caught) ended up at Jeff and Wooko's place, and played Betrayal At The House On The Hill. Nameless-Guy was the traitor, but the rest of us won, so it's all good. Then we played a game of Ninja Burger, which was utterly frustrating for me because d6's are my nemesis, but on the other hand I think I've figured out an important game mechanic for something else, so it's all good.

Drove home. Tacoma is far. Jeff has a beard. It looks weird.

Seattle is going through an odd thing right now where it's scaldingly hot during the day and horrendously cold at night. Makes it weird to sleep.