Tuesday I had Richard drop me off at Raley field again and I rode to work, but this time on the way home I decided to try to ride another few miles, and make it all the way to the beginning of the causeway. Of course, this was all planned before we realized just how windy it was going to be. I’ll admit that I very nearly called Richard as I was setting off from the office to have him pick me up at the usual spot, but instead I hunched over my handlebars and pressed onwards. He found me along the route, since he knows how much I hate wind, and this time the wimpy part of me won out and I took him up on his offer for an earlier pick-up.

We were going to do the same routine on Thursday as well, except that this Thursday was the last day for one of my coworkers, so we closed down the office early and headed off to the local bowling alley. We all proved to each other just how much we all *don’t* know about how to bowl. There silly trophies handed out for the funniest bowler, and I think half the group managed to tweak a finger or yank a muscle in arms or legs during the process – all of us with bowling injuries. As it turns out, by the time we were done the timing would have been perfect for me to hop on my bike and pedal down to the end of the road, which was only a few miles from where Richard would have picked me up normally. But ah well – perhaps next week.

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Richard went off to do library commissioner type things Saturday and was gone for most of the afternoon. So the friend and I spent most of the day at home – or rather, I spent it at home knitting, while she spent it on our futon, catching up on her sleep. I made her get up long enough to drive out to Davis for lunch. It was Picnic Day at UC Davis, so we met my parents for the traditional barbeque lunch at the Lutheran church there in town. I’m not sure when the last time was that I actually *went* to Picnic Day, since the novelty wore off long ago. But the barbeque is always nice, and even when the inevitable rain started, they’d thoughtfully erected huge tents so we could eat our homemade pie in peace.

Since Richard had access to these two old friends (the one sleeping on our futon and the saxophone player), and since they were also old gamers from way back, he incorporated some of their old characters into the game he ran on Saturday night. We ordered an obscene amount of Chinese food and sat around the table rolling dice and inhaling various stir-fries and noodle concoctions. I knew we’d been playing a very long time when we took a break, hours later, for a second round of dinner. Both of them fit in wonderfully with the campaign Richard’s running and it was as boisterous a game as it usually is with the smaller group.