D&D changed my life

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In response to a post on GeekDad, I posted the following reflection:

D&D changed my life, too, though it has had a more profound effect on me as an adult and father.

When I was a kid, I had the basic set, then the expert set, then the AD&D books. The fact that I had no one to play with didn’t keep me from spending lots of time making dungeons and characters.

I finally got to play D&D with some friends in college. We had great fun for a few weeks, and then we stopped.

Life happened; jobs, marriage, a child. Every couple of years — during a cleaning spree, usually — I would find some of my old books and leaf through them. Then back into the box of other child treasures they would go.

About three years ago, I saw the 3.5 basic set in Barnes & Noble and brought it home to my then eight-year-old. I ran a session for him and my good-sport wife, and he was hooked. That same evening, he decided to run a session for us, which he managed pretty well.

Since then, he’s committed most of the Players Handbook and DM’s Guide to memory, and we’ve played together in several different groups and in one-on-one games. I even ran a campaign for kids at the local library.

Now my son is eleven, and when he first read the 4th Edition announcement, he was upset. “Oh no! I bet they’ll get rid of the grapple rules. I love the grapple rules!”

I have also joined several adult gaming groups over the past couple years, and made a bunch of new friends. My wife is still a great sport, since discussion of D&D topics happens daily. And though she’s not a RPG fan, she loves card and board games.
Here’s to Dungeons & Dragons!

I’m still kind of in awe of how much D&D has meant to me and to us. I should also thank my parents, who got me that purple box set way back when.

Wet shaving

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I may have gone off the deep end, but

When I first headed off to college, I took with me a Remmington electric shaver. It had a screen that covered an array of blades — arranged like fins on a radiator — the vibrated back and forth. I gave me a quick shave but did a heck of a number to my face.

Toward the end of my overly-long college career, I went back to shaving with foam and disposables. I also read somewhere about shaving with the grain and finishing with a rinse of cold water to close of my pores. This advice and the various Gillette Sensor models have been the mainstay of my shaving kit for fifteen years or more.

The old kit: shaving lotion and Gillette Sensor Excel

I’ve been plagued, however, with in-grown whiskers, and I have been looking for possible problems with my technique. I while back, I caught the Queer Eye suggestion about “double-stroking.” But making a single pass hasn’t made the problem go away.

Then I found Corey Greenberg’s Shaveblog; funny, sometimes bawdy, and very helpful. [note: I’d rate it PG-13]. So I took a leap and got Corey’s recommended shave kit (mostly).

The new kit

I got a Merkur double-edged razor, proraso cream, Wee Scott brush, and some blades that were available at Lee’s Safety Razors. I’ve been using the rig for a little over a week, and I really like it. I’ve found that I’m looking forward to shaving, ’cause I get to use all my toys. I’m a little unsure about the blades. I thought they were supposed to last for a week’s worth of shaving. But I’ve been getting maybe four days before they start to feel harsh. They have numbers on both surfaces, so I tried flipping the blade and giving it another go, but it didn’t help.

As an after shave moisturizer, I’ve been using a combination of Rosehip and Almond oil, with a few drops of tee tree and lavender essential oils. Beloved Wife loves it for her legs, too. I think I’ll put some of the other products that Corey recommends on my Solstice wish-list. It’s always nice to have options.

Recent gaming, Burning Wheel gets rolling

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A little over a week ago, I got together with TheaterGeek and Hyulf96 for some roleplaying in a Faery Tale game system developed by TheaterGeek called In Mortality. We had a good time and there was lots of good storytelling and cool character moments. I’m looking forward to continuing our tale.

Hyulf96, who happens to manage the local gaming shop, ordered Jungle Speed for me. I’d heard about it from several places, including Sons of Kryos and Have Games, Will Travel. I played it with Beloved Wife and NatureBoy, and we couldn’t stop giggling. We’ve played it several more times, since, including yesterday when the power went out unexpectedly.

And at long last, our three-person Burning Wheel group made it through an entire session. The GM has great color and detail, and I think we players have some great characters, with Beliefs, Instinct and Traits that are sure to get us into trouble.

In addition, the other player has gotten a friend of his interested in trying Burning Wheel. And this friend turns out to be a guy who lived next door to me when we were little kids. I’ve bumped into him a few times since I got back into gaming. But it’s very cool to think that I’ll be playing an RPG with a guy whose sandbox I’d play back in the day.

We’ll be getting together again this week. I’m really looking forward to it.

Nice productivity tools

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Lifehacker linked to a simple Excel Gantt Chart template. It’s a clean, simple design that doesn’t do any calculations or magic.

The designer, David Seah, has a lot of interesting tools that he’s put together, as well as thoughtful posts on his site. I find the Emergent Task Planner a very cool thing. I’ll have to give it a try. I hope he makes the current version available as a PDF. Here, David discusses of an earlier version, with usage suggestions.

Weekend update: healing, friends, and play

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So it turned out that BW had an infection. After a day of antibiotics, she was almost back to her self, again. Thank goodness. We were really missing our chipper, wise-crackin’ CraftyMomma.

On Saturday evening, we hosted our friends, LadyHeron and TheaterGeek. We had a little cookout, and then attempted to play a 5-player game of Settlers of Catan. Now, I really like Settlers, but with the expansion, it moves kind of slowly. LadyHeron and BW bailed after giving it a good effort, and even NatureBoy dropped out after a couple more turns.

Then we guys chatted and the women-folk chatted, and NB bounced between us. I then offered to show TG an episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender, which he hadn’t seen. We ended-up seeing two episodes, with the whole party watching most of the second. What can I say? It’s a great show.

On Sunday, bright and early, NB and I played a game of Stratego, which BW had snagged at a yard sale recently. It came right down to the last handful of pieces on either side, but I managed to prevail even with just one cup of tea. (I said it was early. I’m lucky I got to pee, first!)

BW and I ran a couple quick errands, then NB and I played a game of Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game.

Now I picked up this book on sale at the friendly local gaming store a couple years ago because it has some decent instructions for painting miniatures and creating terrain. NatureBoy decided he wanted to try the game itself, though.

Since we didn’t have any of the minis, we made do with some quick paper tokens. Here you can see my Men of Gondor hopelessly outnumbered.

And here’s a Giant Eagle’s eye view of the Battlefield. That’s a folded green wool blanket with some encyclopedias tucked underneath, and some nicely weatheres pop tart box ruins.

It was nice to play a miniatures game without a grid. Most of my miniatures gaming has been with D&D minis. And the system was pretty straight-forward; we skipped the advanced rules for this first skirmish. We’ll have to see if the interest continues.

While we played, BW was busy assembling piles of provisions. She and NB are in Maine visiting her sister for the week. So I have the place all to my self. Well, except for the three cats. …and four guinea pigs. …and fish.

A (very) little Burning Wheel

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Last night, I got together with couple of friends to play Burning Wheel. I’ve been meeting one of them since January or February, developing a character, running through examples of the conflict resolution systems, and then playing other games like Lunch Money, the game of schoolyard violence. We even played a one-on-one session with my character.

However, my friend finally recruited another player, and he’s developed a character very different from mine (yay conflict!). Last night we finished the final tweaks to his character, and then he was getting an introductory scene. My character ws going to get involved a little later.

Then my pager went off; Beloved Wife needed me to come home. She was in tears when I called because her cheek hurt so much. I raced (carefully) home, passing a red fox on my way. When I got home, she was readying to take half a Vicodin. Now BW hadn’t needed Vicodin right after she had her wisdom teeth out, just ibuprofen. But I’m glad we had them. After we all got to bed, and I started to rub BW’s back, she felt extra warm. I grabbed a thermometer, and she had a temp just over 100. Poor girl!

Fortunately, she got decent sleep and isn’t in so much pain this morning. She’s got her one week follow-up appointment with the oral surgeon today, and asked me to go with her. Hopefully we’ll get her fixed-up. This has been more of an ordeal than we were anticipating.

And I’m looking forward to getting together with my friends in a couple weeks for another session of Burning Wheel.

In other news

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Since we’ve been anchored here at home while BW is recovering, NatureBoy and I have had some time to play together. And we’ve had time to ourselves. NB has been banging through some Super Mario Sunshine, and I finally finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 🙂

NatureBoy had known that BW was going to be out of commission for a while, and that I would be home on Friday. So he spent time during the week developing a D&D session for us to play. When we got back from the surgery, he had the dining table all ready. We got to play for several hours in between attending to BW’s needs.

I had planned on gaming on Sunday afternoon, but my friend’s daughter had a stomach bug. Instead, NatureBoy pulled out RoboRally, which we hadn’t played in months. He decided we should play a deathmatch with each of us running two robots. It was fun, indeed, and NB pulled out a victory in the end. Here’s the game laid out..
Roborally on the dining table

and here’s a close-up of the robots we were using.
Roborally pieces

What else… we got in a little boffer sword fun on Sunday evening, and today we played another game of Settlers of Catan.

We’re just sorry BW wasn’t up to joining any of the fun. Get well soon!