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.
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
As we were finishing the game,
After that, it was fairly late, so we took our leave and went home.
Saturday, May 19
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. :)