Transit Puzzler
So, my project is almost finished, but not quite. My contract ends shortly after when my project is declared finished. This could happen tomorrow, or it could happen on September 29th. There’s no way to know.
All this raises an interesting question: Should I buy a month-long transit pass for September, or get by on a week-to-week basis?
(Four weekly passes cost more than a monthly pass, just so you know.)
Any suggestions?
Update: I bought the pass after lunch and, four hours later, learned that tomorrow is my last day. Oh well! At least the Tories are going to give me a tax credit.
Happy Birthday, Naomi!
You are 10 months old today, and you’ll climb over anything to get what you want, because there’s no stopping you!
Murder in the Snow
As part of my ongoing Greg Rucka reading binge (no, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be reading OMAC, Wonder Woman or Checkmate anytime soon. Gotham Central is about as mainstream as I’ll go with him.), I picked up both Whiteout trades. In fact, I almost picked the first trade up five years ago, when the Frank Miller-drawn cover just lept off the shelf.
I dodged, and grabbed Mark Gruenwald’s ash-strewn Squadron Supreme instead. I don’t regret the decision, because I’m glad I left Whiteout for now.
There’s no reason why you should wait, though. Check out Oni Press’ Free Comics page for the first sampler issue of Whiteout. Here are the direct links: Whiteout #1 – Part 1 & Whiteout #1 – Part 2.
Whiteout TPB #1
Carrie Stetko is the only US Marshall stationed in Antarctica, and she’s investigating a muder on the ice. Along with a prototype Tara Chace, Carrie searches the coldest inhabitable place in the world for a killer who is, nonetheless, less dangerous than the wind and the ice and the cold.
Whiteout TPB #2: Melt
An adventure rather than a mystery. Carrie returns to Antarctica to investigate the destruction of a Russian science station and secret illegal weapons depot. She races across the polar cap with a Russian agent to retrieve the stolen weapons from ex-Spetsnaz commandos. Her advantage: the soldiers don’t understand the ice.
Weekend Challenges
This was a challenging weekend. It was busy and fun and tiring and frustrating and enjoyable. Dina and I were in constant motion every waking moment, and, though we took care of everything we wanted/needed to do, there were times when it seemed we wouldn’t.
Friday was a languid evening. I barbecued a pair of steaks for dinner, Ben ate well, and Naomi devoured every bit of food placed in front of her. The kids had their baths and fell asleep pretty early in the evening: Ben first, and then Naomi as she snuggled up to me on the couch.
Dina was engrossed in her book, so I had the television to myself. I watched the season premiere of Prison Break thanks to the magic of digital video recording, and then wondered what to watch next. I could have watched Casshern, the Japanese sci-fi movie about robot fighting after the apocalypse, but decided to go in another direction.
I watched The Office Christmas Special. You know, the real Ricky Gervais Office, not the officially-licensed Steve Carrel version, which is occasionally fine, but still runs over the same territory as the original (though I am curious about how they’re going to approach the pseudo-Tim/pseudo-Dawn romance now that pseudo-Dawn has finally accepted pseudo-Tim’s advances.)
I chose this show because I mistakenly believed it only lasted an hour. I was wrong, but I didn’t care because the Special makes for some very satisfying viewing. The documentary extras also kept me up well past my bedtime.
Saturday was a day of cleaning, waiting and gaming. Two events were scheduled: the delivery of our new fridge, and the bimonthly Three-Game Night, where friends come over to help me play through my collection of unplayed games.
To prepare for the fridge, I had to empty the freezer and keep some empty boxes on hand to store the fridge contents and stand ready to clear the stairwell and the hallway for the delivery guys. The delivery was scheduled for any time between 10 and 2.
To prepare for the game night, I had to clear out the dining room, which meant clearing out and re-stocking the spare room so I’d have space for all the stuff from the dining room.
Needless to say, I was busy in the morning, but then, there was nothing to do but wait. There were errands to run and a beautiful park to play in, but we couldn’t do anything because we had to wait for the delivery truck.
So we waited, and tried to keep the kids distracted as best we could. We hoped that they’d enjoy their naps, but they refused to nap. They had too much energy to burn.
The delivery truck arrived at 3. The movers were pros, who knew how to handle a massive twenty-year-old household appliances that contained actual metal in their construction. While I cleared obstacles from their path, Dina quickly emptied the fridge into boxes, and then we waited for the movers to haul away our old fridge and return with the new fridge.
We were sorry to see the old fridge go, because it was huge and sturdy and held a lot of groceries. Sure, it wasn’t the most energy-efficient thing in the world, but that didn’t matter to us. Unfortunately, it was on its last legs, and we were informed that it would be cheaper to buy a new fridge than repair the old one.
So, Dina did her research. She found a fridge that fit our available space and that actually had greater storage capacity. There was some debate over buying a traditional freezer-on-top unit versus the new-fangled freezer-on-bottom variety, but the safety and price factors swayed in favour of the traditional model. For one, I don’t want Ben or Naomi wandering up to the freezer and opening it whenever they feel like (ice cream should always feel out of reach…gives you something to strive for). For another, the price difference was $400, which is a lot of money to pay for a novelty design feature.
We let the fridge sit for an hour before leveling it and plugging it in. Jon arrived for the Game Night just in time to help with the fridge – he tilted it against the wall while I lowered the feet. Then, Jon and I took Ben to the grocery store to pick up some gaming night supplies while Dina set about restocking the fridge.
Shopping went well, except for the display stand of Jello that I knocked over (oops!)
When we returned home and unpacked the car, Dina revealed an awful truth – the fridge was too small.
Well, not exactly. I’m sure the interior and exterior dimensions were just as advertised. Unfortunately, the fridge is designed stupidly, so a lot of that space is inaccessible. Modular door shelving is a great idea on paper, but when you look at how much horizontal space is lost to the thick plastic walls of each modular shelf piece, it doesn’t look like that good an idea at all.
Another problem is the freezer, which is taller than the old freezer, and which used space better-allocated to the fridge. As for the fridge, the fruit and vegetable crispers look nice and tall, but they only have half the depth of the fridge, which means they hold less than the old crispers, because the cooling system takes up the back corner of the fridge.
It would have been smarter to have all the cooling system in a flat rectangle at the bottom of the fridge, thereby lifting everything up to a manageable height. Have I mentioned that the fridge is awfully low to the ground?
It’s safe to say that we were disappointed in the new fridge, especially because Dina had looked at a floor model in the store and didn’t see any of these design flaws before the order. The flaws only became apparent when we started using the fridge.
Our friend Dave was right: When fridge shopping, you should bring your food to the store and give everything a trial run.
I’m sure we’ll get used to the new fridge, but the transition promises to be…challenging.
Three-Game Night was a rousing success. Jon and I played Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, a two-player board game by Reiner Knizia. This is basically LotR-themed Stratego, with a couple of interesting twists: sure, the characters are hidden behind panels and revealed during combat, but the characters can only move forward, each character has its own special power, and players play support cards to enhance the combat status of each characters.
Each player controls nine good or evil characters. The good player wins by having Frodo reach Mordor. The evil player wins by having three characters reach the Shire, or by killing Frodo.
The game went well, until we reached a resolution where blind chance determined the outcome: Jon played evil, and only had two characters left. Frodo was fighting the Flying Nazgul. Jon and I each had a full hand of cards. If I played my Retreat card, he could play his Cancel card and defeat me. If I played my highest strength card and Jon played his highest strength card, he’d win. My only hope or survival was that he played his Cancel card and I played my highest strength card.
So, we each laid our two possible cards, and we picked from each other’s hand and compared. I lost, which was no surprise.
Despite the outcome, I think there’s some interesting potential to the game. This would make for a nice change of pace during a CCG night.
The next game Jon, Dave and I played was Whipped!, a satirical card game about men preserving their friendships from the encroachments of girlfriends and wives. The game was designed by some ex-pat Canadians living in Japan, and they approached me and offered to send me a copy of the game in exchange for a review. Never being one to refuse a free game or an opportunity to write a review, I accepted.
(This isn’t my full review, by the way. It’s just a list of impressions.)
The game is a light-hearted look at slow breakup of a gaming/buddy group. When everyone is single, everyone has time for monster truck rallies and all-night LAN parties. When the guys start getting involved in relationships, there’s less time for the guy stuff and more time for antiquing, experimental theatre and cancelled men’s magazine subscriptions. If you’ve ever seen a sitcom, or been to a stand-up comedy show, you can pretty much see where the jokes are going, but the creators clearly had fun coming up with the card names and abilities.
Each player has three Friend cards that they can lose to Whip cards, which represent all the “feminine intrusions” such as trips to the museum. Players can preserve their Friends from Whips by playing Bond cards, which represent all the male-bonding activities. A player can discard a Bond card from a Friend when a Whip is played, thereby keeping the Friend. Of course, Bonds make friends vulnerable to Uber-Whips, which immediately discard a Friend with a specific type of Bond (such as “She Throws Out Your Guitar” is an Uber-Whip for a friend with the “Garage Band” Bond). Otherwise, Uber-Whips are treated just as normal Whips.
To add some variety, there are Special cards that redirect whips, allow players to draw new cards, force players to play all their Whips on their own friends, etc.
The last player with a Friend card wins the game.
The gameplay is fast – about 10 minutes is all you need for a game. In fact, our first game lasted only five minutes, as we all drew Whips and Specials and no Bonds. The second game lasted a while longer, and there was a flurry of Special cards used to cause wild swings the game tempo. All that furious action left Jon and I in stitches.
It seems like there are too many Whip cards in the game compared to the Bonds and extra Friends in the deck. The Uber-Whips are multi-purpose, and should suffice.
In tone, the game feels a lot like something from Steve Jackson’s Chez Geek line crossed with Fluxx, the card game with changing rules and victory conditions. The art, unfortunately, is not very good at all, but you won’t be spending a lot of time looking at the cards. You’ll be too busy playing them.
It’s a light beer-and-pretzels game to play with friends between other events.
After that game, Francois popped by for an hour-long chat. He couldn’t stay for the rest of Three-Game Night, but we talked about games and parenthood and had a good time.
The final game that we played was Dork Tower, another Steve Jackson published/John Kovalic-drawn game. Unlike all the other Steve Jackson games of that kind I’ve played, this is a board game rather than a card game.
The game has two terribly geeky/cool inspirations: First, each player represents one of the RPG characters portrayed by the characters in the long-running Dork Tower comic strip – not the characters themselves, but the characters played by the characters. Not Igor, but his character, Sir Topdeck. How very metatextual.
Second, the game design is an homage to one of the first electronic fantasy games in existence: Dark Tower (link goes to an excellent Flash emulator).
Dark Tower is a medieval-style adventure game where you played a knight gathering strength of arms to challenge the brigands at the Dark Tower looming at the center of the boardgame. You needed to collect items and keys before the challenge, and you had to manage your food and gold resources. As you crossed from region to region, the Dark Tower would tell you if you moved successfully, encountered Brigands or Dragons, got lost or suffered a plague.
The Dark Tower itself contained a micro-processor that managed all the game events, such as combat. You could watch the combat unfold through a series of illuminated pictures and messages. A picture of Brigands and a number told you the enemy’s strength; a picture of soldiers and an army told you your strength. The pictures would alternate and the numbers would count down to represent the losses on both sides. I remember my brother and I would huddle together and look at the Tower and fret about the outcome of the current skirmish.
Dork Tower takes up the same concept, minus the micro-processor. Each player has a character and sets out on a series of quests and encounters on the map. At the end of a player’s movement, encounter tiles are drawn. The tiles are usually monsters, each with their own strength. Players compare their strength against the monsters’ combined strength, consult a handy Combat Chart, and then try to roll over the designated number.
If the player wins, loot and experience are collected. For each monster, the player flips over the tile and rolls to see what the reward will be: gold, a magic scroll, or a magic item, and collects the indicated experience points.
If the player loses, the player retreats to safe square, if able, or is killed horribly and starts over at their home city; only experience points are kept. The monster stack remains on the board until defeated.
It’s a pretty simple game, but it’s a lot of silly fun. Experience points can be spent to improve the character, to affect die rolls, or to allow you to see more cards when you go shopping in the city spaces.
When the player feels ready, they can attack the Tower. This usually ends badly.
There’s very little player interaction, although some Scroll cards can be played to hinder opponents, and experience points can be spent on random curses. Blah. Not very interesting.
Spending experience points for effects is a nice touch, because players gain enough experience to level-up their characters very quickly. One of the options is a bit of an exploit, though: you can spend 4 XP to set one of the two dice rolled in combat to a 6, which means removing an element of chance. When both the characters and monsters in the monster stack are sufficiently powerful, the player can earn more experience than they spent fixing the dice!
The hour neared midnight, so we called an end to the festivities. I gave Jon a lift home, and then put Dina straight to bed. I stayed up a little later than I should have to watch the big Black Mask fight from Kill Bill vol. 1 because I heard that it was well-done. No surprise, it was, but it was more stylish than it was exciting, compared to other action movies I’d seen. Maybe vol. 2 will be better. Kudos to Gogo and the ball-and-chain of death, though.
Sunday was cold and rainy and again, quite busy. Mom and Scott arrived for a visit, which was great fun. Naomi and Ben were, of course, thrilled to see them and compete for hugs and cuddles.
While they played, Dina and I took turns taking care of regular household chores in the background, such as laundry and the like. After a terrific lunch of BBQ chicken, I made a big pot of spaghetti sauce, and let that simmer happily all afternoon.
Mom and Dina took Naomi and went out to the mall in the afternoon to look at more fridges (just in case the perfect one was out there, waiting for us), Scott and I hung out and played with Ben. Every half hour or so, a timer would go off and interrupt the games. It was potty time.
Yup, that’s right. Potty time. I’ve become one of those parents who blog about toilet training. I’ll be as circumspect as possible, but feel free to skip ahead to the AND WE’RE BACK!. You can even mock me. I don’t mind.
The challenge with toilet training is twofold: first, you have to teach the child to associate the functions with a specific location, and then, to teach the child to anticipate the function and get to the location with all due haste. This process is made trickier for Ben, because he doesn’t yet have the words to understand what he’s supposed to do or what he needs to do.
So, we’re taking a recommended behaviouralist approach and trying to catch him in the act, so to speak. Every half hour on the half hour, we put him on the plastic seat for five minutes and hope something happens. If it does, we make a big deal about rewarding him. If not, we just wash his hands, and reset the timer.
We’ve been doing this for three weeks now. For the first week, the real challenge was getting him to sit still. I took to reading him stories, and that worked out. But he wouldn’t do anything. Then, we loaded him full of juice and milk and plunked him down at regular intervals, but Ben exerted tremendous self-control. Finally, we took to leaving him seated for longer periods of time. Sometimes, he’d sit patiently, and other times he wouldn’t.
On Sunday, Ben seemed to get the idea that he had to do something as soon as he was seated. Five minutes into each sitting, so to speak, he was done, and had his reward (we use applause and Smarties). He did so every time for the rest of the day. In fact, the only times he didn’t were the times when I was slow in directing him to the right location. Serves me right [grin].
Since then, Ben has maintained his productivity.
The next challenge is getting him to tell us when he needs to go, or at least teach him to run to the bathroom sooner rather than later.
AND WE’RE BACK!
The spaghetti sauce turned out very well, and we had a fine dinner. Mom and Scott returned home soon afterwards.
Once the kids were asleep, Dina and I pretty much collapsed on the couch and flipped between the Emmys and the Pirates of the Caribbean broadcast on CBC.
Sweet Silver Blues, by Glen Cook
Garrett is a tough-as-nails veteran and private investigator in a world of vampires and gnomes. Cook takes the standard fantasy environment, add a few grim twists and jokes, and produces a hard-boiled detective yarn. The plot is slight, and too much happens behind the scenes, but it’s a fun read.
Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His World, by H.R.F. Keating
There’s no way I understood anything in this book when I first read it at 13. The author reveals references to contemporaneous political/social/literary events to show how the stories reflect the concerns of the time: from defence of the Empire, to the rise of American power, to the threat of the Great War.
The Three Greatest Days in Montreal CCG History…
…or so I believe, were the Middle-Earth CCG World Championships I organized in 2001.
It was a week before my wedding, I treated it as a kind of giant bachelor party. Dina was very patient and understanding, especially when it turned out that two fine Frenchmen were boarding at our apartment. They tried to feed goldfish crackers to our cats in a fit of helpfulness, and how they rearranged our VCR/TV/Playstation system in an effort to play Gran Turismo, I’ll never understand, but they were good guys, and they left me a fully-functional Balrog deck as a thank-you gift.
Click the logo above to see the commemorative website, preserved in all its Blogger-era glory, and click here to read my original blog report on the event.
Making Waves
Here’s my answer to the Open Question about swimming and pools:
I took swimming lessons regularly between the ages of 5 and 10. I may have started earlier, but I don’t remember. Not only did the lessons give me a schedule and some structure during the summer (and a much-needed break for my mother), but the three pools where the lessons were held defined out the boundaries of my home town in my young imagination.
There was the Roberval outdoor pool, which was in a nice shady wooded area at the bottom of a hill. At the top of the hill was my elementary school, so the area was familiar to me.
Then there was the Rabastaliere pool, which was nearby, but in the center of what passed for downtown. The pool was surrounded by other businesses and buildings, and was kind of a concrete wasteland and seemed busier and more inhospitable that I liked.
Finally, there was the indoor pool at the local Polyvalente (a high school in the French-language system in Quebec) where I took swimming lessons when it wasn’t summer.
I never went very far in swimming, and I was, honestly, not very good at it. I had bad form during the backstroke, and no real inclination to do anything fancy like a crawl or a breaststroke. I was pretty good at treading water, and I liked diving down to the bottom of the pool to retrieve rings, but I hated jumping off the diving board.
My most vivid memory of swimming lessons involved a diving board, a dog paddle and getting in trouble. During one of the summer classes, we were lined up to jump off the low board. We were supposed to jump, and swim to the ladder at the left.
Further away, at the opposite end of the pool, I could see another ladder. That was where I decided to go. I don’t know why I did, really. Maybe I was showing off, maybe I just wanted to prove something to myself. The childhood mind is capricious.
So I jumped, splashed, and started my dogged dog-paddle towards my distant goal. I heard the lifeguard and the teacher yelling at me, but I didn’t care. A surprisingly short while later, I found my destination, and climbed the ladder, but there was no one there to celebrate my victory. The teacher said “Don’t do that again,” and marched me to the back of the line.
The next time I jumped, I took the ladder on the left side.
I remained in deep, deep trouble for the rest of the day, but that didn’t quash my enthusiasm for the pool.
I don’t remember when I stopped taking lessons, but I knew that it was after my second or third attempt to qualify for a third-level badge (I believe that was the last of the basic swimming badges before you could start training to become a lifeguard). After that, my swimming was limited to the summer, where my brother and I would bike up to the Roberval pool nearly every day of the week for the free public swimming.
That lasted until I was fourteen or so, when a nasty spill off my bike kept me bruised and scabby and out of the pool for most of the summer (I had a scar on my elbow for years). After that, the only times I hit the water were at pool parties, apartment buildings or hotels.
Since I started staying at home with Ben, we went to the wading pool across the street nearly every day, and I’m looking forward to doing the same with Naomi. I’m happy that the kids like the water, and I’m enjoying my return to the pool.
Open Question: Pool Time
Ben has just finished one set of swimming lessons, and I’m about to register Naomi for her first. Add that to the fact that the city of Montreal has closed most of their outdoor pools, and it’s no suprise that the Open Question for August is about pools.
“Do you remember learning to swim? Did you take lessons at a pool, or did somebody throw you in the deep end of the lake? Where do you prefer to swim. What are your favourite aquatic activities?”
Leave your answers or links in the comments below. I’ll post my answers tomorrow.
Back to School Vibe
It’s late August, and change is in the air. I always think that change is in the air as the calendar nears the end of the eighth month and approaches the ninth: I used to call it the back to school vibe.
At this time of year, I think about buying new notebooks, pens and backpacks. I look at the restocked shelves at the university bookstores and think to myself: I wonder what they’re teaching this year.
‘Round about now, I’d be planning one final outing downtown. It used to be the requisite clothes shopping trip with Mom and Scott, and then it turned into just an outing with Scott: we’d hit the comics shops, music stores and book stores, grab some lunch, hit the arcades, and then see a movie before taking the long bus ride home.
Late August and early September always strikes me as a good time for travel (such as our trip to Vancouver and San Francisco in 2004), moving (such as my first apartment in 1995), for final summer hurrahs (such as the Middle-Earth CCG World Championship tournament I organized in 2001) and for changing jobs (such as when my contract at Pratt & Whitney ended in 2002, or right now, as my current contract comes to an end). This is a time when people start getting back to business – so any vacation you take feels more like a vacation, and, if you’re looking for something to do, you’re more likely to find it.
I’m usually pretty busy at this time of year.
And, of course, nearing the end of August always makes me think of September 1st, because that’s my wedding anniversary, which marks the most transformative event in my life. The only other dates that come close are July 18th and October 31st.
I think you can figure out why [grin].