terrycloth and various other friends. This weekend, I went to ConQuesT, and am now in danger of forgetting the Seattle trip if I don't write at least some of it down. Trip report time!Wednesday, May 16
Eight hour day at work. About nine hours door-to-door from leaving my house at around 5PM until arriving at Terry's apartment after midnight. I re-read Diana Wynne Jones' The Ogre Downstairs, which was even better than I remembered, on the plane. Once I arrived, mostly I just fell over.
Thursday, May 17
Terry and I spent much of morning playing game and lazing around the apartment. We tried Battleship: Space, a scenario-based miniatures wargame that I didn't much care for but was willing to try again later, and played Eminent Domain, which is Race-for-the-Galaxy-like but much simpler, and which I like almost as well as RftG. We hit the Crossroads mall food court for lunch, including an obligatory bubble tea for me and obligatory Starbucks coffee for Terry. We stopped by the Crossroads game store to poke at games, and I bought Onirim, a simple cooperative card game. We played it a couple of times but didn't even get around to including the "expansion" (included in the box I bought). Neither of us disliked it, but we weren't especially keen on it either.
chipuni had recommended that we go to the Norwegian Constitution Day parade in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. I don't particularly like parades, but I told Terry: "I'd like to go. I mean, when else am I going to get a Norwegian Constitution Day parade?" We left early to avoid the worst of Seattle's ZOMGAWFUL traffic, and to get parking. Parking was !fun but we eventually found a place to leave the car, and then wandered around Ballard to kill time before the parade. I bought a cute barrette at a jewelry store near the parade, which I wore several times over the course of the weekend. I have a giant chest full of jewelry that I don't wear. I am trying to get in the habit of wearing it more often, especially since I have some jewelry that I really like. We killed a little too much time before the parade, and ended up sitting with our backs to a prickly bush on the curb because all the good spots were taken, but it was fine and we had a good view. The parade was fun! When I was little I thought marching bands were the dullest part of parades, but I quite enjoyed listening to and watching the performers in this parade. I think the highlight would have to be the part with zillions of small children on unicycles. The children were remarkably adept and there were a lot of them -- several dozen at least. I would not have thought there were that many unicycles in the state, let alone people who could ride them without falling over. It was impressive!
We left before the parade was finished, as it started to get chilly and we'd had a couple of hours of parade by then, which was more-or-less our quota.
Friday, May 18
Game day! Terry and I spent most of the morning and afternoon playing games with just the two of us, and then went out to meet
quarrel and shaterri for MOAR GAMES. ♥ The Friday evening games were at the house of a friend of theirs, Jason. shatterstripes (Peggy) also attended, as did a gentleman whose name I've unfortunately forgotten. :( The first game of the evening was Seven Wonders, which neither I nor Shaterri had played before. As the game was nearing its conclusion, I thought, "This is a really good game. I have no idea who's winning, but I'm having fun building up my little array of stuff, and I don't care." Then the game finished, and I somehow turned out to be the winner. o.OAs we were finishing the game,
chipuni showed up, so we switched to a game that could handle eight people. Which Shaterri then sat out, so I am not entirely sure how that worked. I've forgotten the name of the game -- Rebellion or Revolt or Resistance, something like that, I think. It's one of the "who's the traitor?" games, where each player gets dealt a card that says whether they're loyal or treasonous to the cause, and then you try to figure out who's who. This was a little more interesting than the standard, because you did various things that would give you information on who was loyal or not. We played four games, and Peggy was saved from the title of "Worst Truth-teller Ever" in the last game, when Jason had every loyalist in the game convinced he was a traitor, even though he wasn't. After that, it was fairly late, so we took our leave and went home.
Saturday, May 19
chipuni and misseli invited us to attend the University fair in Seattle. This was pretty much in downtown Seattle, so Terry and I took the bus in to avoid the driving-and-parking hassles. After some initial confusion, we met up with them around midday and wandered around the fair and the nearby farmer's market, sampling food and drink and browsing eclectic wares. Eli had to go home to get ready for some DJing in Second Life around 2PM, but Terry, Chip and I stuck around to get lunch-like food at one of the fair's food areas. I had an African deep-fried-dough-around-vegetables thing that was extremely tasty. Quite by coincidence, while Terry was buying a sausage from one of the vendors, we ran into shatterstripes again. I tempted her into splitting a funnel cake topped with strawberry goop with me (Peggy: "That looks like a really bad idea. Let's get one!") Then the four of us browsed around the fair some more. Peggy had bought a t-shirt with an adorable cartoon cat in a kimono on it, which was so cute I decided I needed one of my own. Tragically, Terry's iPad fell out of his jacket pocket while we were ambling around, and the screen broke. D: I feel bad about it, because I know he was mainly carrying it around so we could play Ascension on the bus/while waiting for it. Blah. Hopefully, the screen is replaceable; the iPad itself still works. *sigh* As someone who's trashed three smartphones by dropping them, I gotta say that it'd be nice if the lovely high-tech phones and tablets were just a bit sturdier. Especially when my 6+ year old iPod has survived countless falls, several onto pavement.
After we'd spent several hours at the fair, Peggy was kind enough to invite us back to her apartment to hang out and Not Be Standing for a while. She also stopped by the drugstore, since her original reason for leaving the apartment four hours earlier had been 'go to farmer's market for some food and drugstore for a couple of items'. Jokes about sidequests ensued. "Of course we'll go with you to the drugstore. You did our quest with us and it was much longer." I picked up a copy of Peggy's newly-printed Tarot deck from her, because it was irresistable. We talked about art and books and stuff, and somehow it came up that Chip had written My Little Pony fanfic, so Terry pulled one of them up on his iPad. Peggy joked about doing a Dramatic Reading of it ... and then, since it was fairly short, Terry and I took turns reading it aloud. It was surprisingly entertaining. (Terry, first time reading the =***= symbols that marked section breaks, in robotic voice: "Equal sign asterisk asterisk asterisk equal sign". Reading same marks later in story: "Dun dun DUHHN!")
By then, it was after 8PM and we were all tired, so Peggy kicked us out and Terry checked the bus schedule. "We just missed the last bus, so we've got an hour wait to the next one."
"Oh, okay," I said. "Come to think of it, 'just missed' is better than 'the next bus is in 20 minutes, so RUN!'" It was about a mile back to the bus stop, and I think we played a little Ascension on the iPad despite the fractured screen while we waited. When we finally got back to the apartment, it was late enough that I went to bed shortly thereafter.
And we'll see if I get around to writing part two or not. :)
