All posts by jenipurr

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W is for Wishful Thinking

When I first found the plans for our house online I fell in love with them. And there were so very many things about those plans to love. The master bedroom is huge. The front porch is lovely. There are three huge bay windows, and a skylight in the bathroom, and plenty of light in the house. The plans seemed, somehow, to be perfect.

But as with anything else, once the house was built I could see why the plans weren’t exactly as perfect as I had thought. The ceilings are only 8 feet, which may be nice for heating costs, but makes the downstairs feel a little cramped. The layout of the kitchen and the laundry room makes no sense, and if I’d had any concept of what it was going to look like I would have had them do a complete redesign of that entire area. The access to the attic is a tiny little hole in a closet that makes it next to impossible to get up there, and if I’d had half a brain I would have insisted they put in a pull-down staircase in the hallway, where we could actually make use of that 8 square feet of plywood flooring we had them install three years ago when they built this house – flooring we’ve never had occasion to use because getting up there is just next to impossible.

Most of the time those things just aren’t that big a deal. After all, there’s a lot to love about the house, not the least of which is the simple fact that it is ours. But every once in a while I look around and add one more thing to the list of changes I would make to this house if we ever built it again.

I like to look at model homes. I’ve always liked looking at them, even when I was in no position to buy, and even now that we own a house and really have no intention of selling it and moving anywhere else, I still like looking at model homes for the decorating ideas. It’s fun to see what the designer has done – where they put things, how big (or tiny) they made the bedrooms. It’s fun to compare things in new homes to things in ours.

So on the way home today I saw a sign for a few new developments in our area, and we took a detour to go check them out. There were two sets of models, and we started with what turned out to be the smaller of the two – four houses in each set. We wandered through single and two-story house, winced at the size of the closets they call bedrooms, agreed that we really liked the color one of the master bedrooms was painted, and then set off to wander through the second set.

That was probably a very big mistake. In fact, we figured that out after we got into the first house, but it got worse as we kept on moving down the line. And it all culminated the minute we walked into the final house in the set. There was a formal dining room, and a formal living room, and a staircase, followed by the type of kitchen I have dreamed of having, and a huge and comfortable family room, and then, oh then, just around the corner from the kitchen, the office – bigger than the one we have at home, and across the hall a little low-ceilinged closet underneath the stairs that would be just the perfect spot to house things like servers and routers and other equipment that one might want to keep safe from cats.

We walked up the stairs and everywhere we turned there was something else wonderful to find. Three bedrooms – all decent sized – a master bedroom with a huge bathroom and walk-in closet and lots of space in the bedroom itself for a little reading nook, and then to top it off, there was a huge bonus room with two little window seat cubbies, open to the entire house, that screamed out ‘library’.

Naturally, we realize that this house is all wrong for us. The yard – while a larger lot than you usually see in new developments – is certainly not as large or as nice as ours is right now, even still as incomplete as it is. The price is a heck of a lot higher than anything we could hope to afford, even with the equity I know we’ve got in this house from all the work we’ve put into it. Most importantly, the house is almost double the size of the one we own – a ridiculously huge amount of space for two people, even if we do come with seven cats. We would rattle around in it and never see each other. But knowing all those things didn’t change the fact that we both fell head over heels in love.

I know that when I built this house, my intentions were for it to be the place where I would stay, permanently. I did not want to buy just a ‘starter’ home and then work my way up – I wanted to start with a house where I could really believe that it would be my home, for as long as I needed to be there. I realize, of course, that things change; life changes, jobs change. A lot of things can happen during the course of ‘forever’. We might decide to move. One or both of us could lose our jobs again and *have* to move. A lot of things can happen.

Despite the fact that we both really liked that house, we realize that it would be silly to even think about making it a reality, and not just because it’s ridiculously huge, or far more house than we really could afford. We do realize, however, that maybe there are things we could be doing to this house we’re in right now. I know there are things on that list of changes that will never be possible – after all, raising the downstairs ceiling a foot is kind of hard to do in a two-story home – but there are other things that might be a bit closer to our grasp.

And maybe, just maybe, the next time I see a sign for model homes, we should just drive on by and not go looking. Sometimes it’s better not to know what else is out there. Sometimes it’s better just to keep to things just the way they are.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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P is for (Harry) Potter

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Yesterday we were both supposed to go down to the Scottish Games in Campbell. However, when I woke up yesterday my sinuses were hopelessly clogged, my head was throbbing from the pressure, and I was exhausted from spending the entire night trying desperately to find some position in which I could sleep without my sinuses draining down the back of my throat and making me try to cough my lungs out. So I curled up on the love seat downstairs with a box of tissues and a mug of coffee and waved Richard goodbye. He went off by himself to spend the day with his family, amid bagpipers and burly men in kilts, and I spent the day home by myself. I decided that the only way to get over this current bout of sinus infection hell was to just let myself relax. I took a short nap after lunch, once my sinuses decided they were going to play nicely for a change, and poked around online, and did a bunch of knitting, and eventually decided that I felt well enough to take myself out for dinner (because everyone should treat themselves to fries and a chocolate shake now and then). I also spent most of the morning reading.

After we saw the third Harry Potter movie two weeks ago I immediately read Prisoner of Azkaban again. I try very hard to not read books immediately before I see any movie based on them because I do not want to how the movie director saw fit to make any changes. Obviously there will always be changes, since (with the possible exception of The Princess Bride), movies based on books will never be exactly the same because there is no way that any human can ever translate the things we imagine from words on a page into what we can see on a big screen. And yes, as I read through the third Harry Potter book, I could see the things that had been changed – some of which I agreed with and some of which I didn’t – but I deliberately waited until after the movie because I knew this way I would enjoy both more.

Today, since I had nothing else to do, I decided to read the next two books in the series again – if only to remind myself of what happens next. I poured through Goblet of Fire and then I made myself peanut butter and cottage cheese on toast (trust me, it’s good) and devoured Order of the Phoenix once more. And I reminded myself all over again just why I love these books so very much, and why I – like most of the rest of the world – is so impatient for the next one to be published.

They are not great literature – although I have my own opinions on the books that the snooty set considers ‘great literature’ (it often translates into ‘great bore’, in my opinion) – and they may not be the best examples of perfect writing. But what I think a lot of people forget, when they are looking at a book and tut-tutting over how well sentences are structured or whether or not the editor should have really let the author get away with those extra few hundred pages, is that the whole point of a book – especially a book for children – is to entertain. And the Harry Potter books are certainly entertaining. They are entertaining, not only for the kids for whom they were originally written, but for their parents too. They get the whole family reading the books together. They give everyone something to talk about. And most of all, they are fun.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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I is for Ill (or Ick)

Last week one of my coworkers flew off to a conference on the other side of the country. When he returned, he brought with him a cold. He came into the office the day after he was back, since it hadn’t quite hit him by that point, but the next day or two he was out sick. The rest of us weren’t concerned, since he did try to be really good about staying away from us so as to not infect anyone else. But then Friday a second coworker was feeling really tired, and Monday while the first coworker was home sick, the second one ended up going home early because he wasn’t feeling too good, and by the end of the day I was starting to feel a bit under the weather as well. Yesterday I made it into the office for the first half of the day because there were some things I needed to finish, and I knew that since my desk is off in a separate corner from everyone else at least I wouldn’t be exposing anyone. But by lunchtime I’d just about had it. I gave up and went home, with only a brief detour by the Nissan place to have my car serviced, and then I came home and crashed.

Today has been a day spent home in bed. Richard, who has been fighting this same thing on and off now for almost two weeks (since it has been making the rounds and taking out coworkers at his office as well), had a meeting that he had to go to in Davis, but after his meeting he came right back home, pale and exhausted, and went immediately to his nebulizer. We have been a lovely pair these past few days, lolling around listlessly, me coughing and sniffling and him wheezing and short of breath. As an asthmatic, everything he gets eventually settles in his lungs, while everything I get eventually settles in my sinuses.

This evening we were both antsy to get up and do *something*, no matter how cruddy we felt. So I snagged the shopping list off the fridge and we made a brief foray out to the grocery store to stock up on things like cottage cheese and vegetables and milk. And then we gave up and came back home because even that was just too tiring.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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Z is for Zucchini

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This past week I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for months. I redid the Cats Page, a task which necessitated going through all my archive files for this journal and the photolog to track down every picture I’ve taken of the cats since I started this journal. Once that fairly monumental task was accomplished then it was just a simple matter of tossing up a few more html pages. The whole thing took me barely an hour to accomplish, and the majority of that time was spent looking at non-cat pictures anyway. Do you think I’ll learn anything from this little lesson and maybe procrastinate less? I didn’t think so either.

During this process I quickly figured out which cats tend to be more photogenic in this house. Allegra is, of course, impossibly photogenic, with her coloring and her fluff. Rebecca and Sebastian have more pictures by virtue of the fact that they’ve been here longest. Tangerine is very good at posing pretty for the camera. Rosie, however, is not such a fan of having her picture taken, and Azzie, while adorably cute (as the resident Perpetual Kitten should be), tends not to photograph well because he is solid black, and a picture of a solid black long-haired cat tends to look less cute and cuddly and more like a large black fuzzy blur with maybe some glowing eyes in the middle if he was being cooperative.

Zucchini, however, has only one picture – only one picture in the entire time I have had this website. This is because Zucchini is convinced that the entire world is out to get him, and despite the fact that he has lived with me since he was three weeks of age and not once have I ever hurt him, he has spent his entire life acting as if he is sure that I am only biding my time until I grab him and tear him into little pieces. So taking that one, solitary picture was a chore in itself which involved huge amounts of catnip all over the floor and me lying on my stomach in extremely uncomfortable positions for several hours until the darn cat was finally high enough on the nip to not immediately run in terror every time I blinked. Even so, the one picture I have of him is a bit blurry, so you don’t get the true sense of dread in his eyes as he realizes that I am pointing what is obviously an evil Ray of Death in his general direction.

Lately, however, things have started to get a little better. Ever since that little incident a few months ago – the week where he ate most of the stuffing out of a cat toy and got to go for daily x-rays and test and poking and prodding and nearly went under the knife before he finally puked it out on his own – I have seen very steady improvement. . During that entire time I spent hours with him each day, holding him, forcing food and medicine down his throat, taking him to and from the vet. I guess all that attention meant that something finally trickled through the mixed up chemistry in his brain that I’m really not so bad after all.

So the cat who usually lurks underneath the bed and only comes out at night when we are lying down and thus apparently (according to his strange little feline brain) incapable of inflicting horror unimaginable on him has, in the past month or two, actually not only *not* run away when I get the food bowls out in the morning, but stood close enough to me that I could reach down and pet him on the head! To make matters even more amazing, he has also taken to lurking in the computer room. Granted, he tended to lurk before, but usually his version of lurking was to hide out underneath the desks until we sat down, at which point he would erupt forth in sheer terror and bolt out, usually doing his best to trip one or both of us. There is a similar version of this ‘game’, which would take place at random intervals when we happened to go into the bathroom where the linen closet is kept. An innocent stroll into that room to get batteries can turn quickly into near heart attacks on the part of human and cat as Zucchini shot out of the linen closet and nearly tore off a limb of the unsuspecting person who might possibly be standing in his way. So ‘lurking’ is a different concept for Zucchini. The other cats lurk by hanging out at our feet, or perhaps jumping into our laps with absolutely no warning whatsoever before you are faced with a lap full of purring fuzz which sees no reason why you should be allowed to actually *use* your keyboard or mouse. Or in Sebastian’s case, lurking involves weaving around my feet until I dangle one hand over the side of the chair so he can rub his face on it and lick it to death.

After over eight years of watching the other cats lurk in this oh-so-dangerous manner and still survive without any injury whatsoever, Zucchini is starting to catch on that maybe he could give it a try too. Lately he’s been right there alongside Sebastian, shoving his head against my fingers. Just this past week I’ve been able to very slowly turn my chair around to face him and lean down to actually pet him, without him running away. Oh, there is still a look in his eyes that tells me that it wouldn’t take much for him to revert back to his wanna-be feral ways, but with this cat I tend to take whatever progress I can get.

I now have a Sony Clie, which has a little camera built in, just perfect for close-ups. It does not have a flash, and only makes a very unassuming little click when I press the button. In fact, it also comes with a little strap which can be dangled enticingly in a cat’s general direction, just enough to make him look up at me and hold still long enough to press the button.

So here he is, folks. The invisible cat, live, and in color. Let’s see, that makes two pictures in more than twice as many years. Maybe it won’t take nearly as long until I can catch him in the lens again. We’ll see.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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H is for Hands

I don’t know when I first heard about Habitat for Humanity. All I know is that it has been years since I first saw those words and found out what it was all about. It’s an organization dedicated to providing affordable housing for people who couldn’t otherwise afford a place of their own. This isn’t government-subsidized apartments – these are houses – houses built by volunteers and the people who are lucky enough to own them. They are not given away – the people who get the house must put in something like 500 hours of their own work on either their house or other houses, and they do have to pay a mortgage. But because the mortgage is interest free, and because so much of the work of building that house is done through donated materials and volunteer work, the house ends up a much less expensive property than it otherwise might be. Habitat is a pretty amazing organization, and it’s something I’ve wanted to get involved with for a very long time. But things keep getting in the way. First I did too much traveling. Then I couldn’t find a Habitat group building in my area. Then I did too much traveling again, and then I just plain got busy.

It looked like things might change when, a few years ago, a Habitat chapter was started in our town. I didn’t want to volunteer to be on any of the committees because frankly, after the SPCA, I was sick of being on committees, and also I knew I wouldn’t have the time. But I put my name down on the list to be a volunteer, and anxiously awaited word on their progress as they started down the long road of finding a site, finding a recipient, and all the other little things that have to be done before an actual house can be built. There’s a lot of us who’ve been in the same boat for quite a while now, asking around, trying to find out just what was up and how we could help and hitting dead ends at every turn.

But suddenly, opportunity presented itself. One of the members of our church has been a general contractor for years – the type of wonderfully gentle man who works marvelously with volunteers. On a whim he applied for a job he saw advertised, which turned out to be working as a site manager for the Habitat in Sacramento. As an added plus, he happens to be the dad of one of my coworkers – a coworker at an office full of people who have all also expressed interest in getting involved in Habitat themselves.

A few phone calls later we had a date. As a matter of fact, somehow we ended up with two dates – one this month and one the next. We weren’t sure what we would be doing, and we all had extremely different levels of skill (from ‘lots’ to ‘next to none’), but we were assured that wouldn’t matter. All we had to do was show up and be ready to work.

So show up we did, this morning, bright and early, at the designated site in Sacramento. It’s an existing house that is getting some significant remodeling done due to damage from weather and neglect. Our jobs today were to pour the back patio, finish up some of the interior wiring, and lay the french drain in the back yard.

Remember how very much fun Richard and I had last summer when we filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with rocks and dirt and carted them to our backyard, over and over and over? Guess what I did for several hours this morning! Yep, that’s right. I filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with extremely heavy wet gloppy cement and carted it to the backyard to dump it into untidy heaps in the designated area, so two other volunteers could smooth it out and transform it into a perfectly smooth patio. And then this afternoon I dumped shovel after shovel full of pea gravel into wheelbarrows, which were then carted into the backyard and poured into a very long and deep ditch, into which we had just positioned a very long length of flexible piping full of evenly spaced holes, which was to become a french drain.

In the middle of the heaving and the shoveling and the carting, there was a brief stint inside the house, where I got to go around and check every single beam to see if the holes for the wires and pipes were far enough away from the outer edge. If they were not I got to pound spiky nail stops into the beams so that when the drywall installers came they would not accidentally pierce a pipe or electrical cord and cause all manner of problems later down the line. I got to do this because I am a huge wimp and do not do well on things that require being on top of a ladder, and so everyone else stood on ladders and installed flooring in the attic around the heating and air conditioning unit, or stood on ladders and did electrical kits for all the light fixtures.

It was hard work, mostly (except for installing the nail protectors because how hard is it, really, to smack a spiky metal plate into a wall with a large hammer?), and physically tiring. It didn’t help that by the afternoon it was getting pretty hot and there was a lot of dust and grime and pea gravel and bits of wood, but somehow it was still fun. I learned something new today about how to ensure proper drainage in a yard, and how much skill laying cement really can require (a lot more than I ever want to possess). When we were finally done I was tired and sore and impossibly grungy and yet somehow I felt a little bit exhilarated by it nonetheless, because I know that it was all to benefit some stranger who I will never meet. And I also cannot wait until next month when my coworkers and our spouses and friends and anyone else we can scrounge up and I will don our grungiest shirts and jeans and baseball caps and arm ourselves with determination and as many bottles of water as we can carry, and go do this again.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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S is for Standoff

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Since we live on the very edge of a town that is surrounded on all sides by large amounts of rural farm area, it is not uncommon to be driving along the back roads to work and be suddenly confronted with some manner of livestock. Usually it is chickens, which, while they may not be the brightest birds there are, have enough sense to skedaddle out of the road the instant they sense a car is coming. Every once in a very long time it is sheep, when one of them figures out that there is a hole in a fence and maybe things might be a bit more exciting if they wandered out to check out all those strange objects that whiz by at such high speeds. And lately, at least in this town, the livestock in question is a peacock. An either very stupid or incredibly brave (or perhaps both) peacock who has not yet figured out that standing in the middle of the road facing down oncoming traffic is not the smartest place in the world for a bird to be. Best of all, this particular peacock is convinced that he is incapable of being harmed, and is, in fact, far mightier than those oncoming cars, because lately he has taken to standing in the middle of the road in full defiant stance – tail feathers splayed out, neck extended, no doubt hissing for all he’s worth.

I am continually amazed, each time I am confronted with this stupid peacock and am forced to inch my way slowly around him because he refuses to get out of the way, that he has not yet been splattered all over the road by some oncoming car whose driver was not paying attention and couldn’t stop in time when suddenly faced with a full grown peacock in all his feathery glory. I am certainly not stupid enough to get out of the car and go chase the damn bird off the road because I have tangled with a peacock before and thus have been shown in no uncertain terms why there is a reason that people used to keep birds like peacocks and geese as guard animals. I would like to point out, for those of you who are now wondering just why I thought it a good idea to tangle with a peacock in the first place, that it wasn’t exactly my idea, and that my ‘crime’ in that previous encounter had been nothing more than walking down a path minding my own business when the peacock stormed out of the bushes and promptly pecked me for all it was worth in the leg. I would also like to point out that a pissed off peacock has a very strong and painful beak, especially when applied to the calf of a young elementary school child who was stupid enough to be wearing shorts at the time.

But I digress. We are discussing the current peacock encounter, and so far, no beaks have met skin – at least skin that I might happen to be wearing at the time. And in the meantime I continue to ease my car around the bird and watch other drivers do the same while cursing at the bird from the safety of their cars and vans and farm vehicles, and once even a large tractor trailer, and think that perhaps I am not the only one who knows the wisdom of staying far away from an aggressive fowl. And I wait, like everyone else, for the day when it either gives up on this little game, or else it ends up, one morning on a day when someone didn’t have their morning coffee and is maybe running a little late to work, a bit flatter than it was meant to be.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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F is for Feathered

I may have mentioned at some point last year (although I am not going to bother looking up any relevant entry links) that one of the reasons why I like my current job is because of the birds. Oh, there are certainly downsides to where we are located – most notably the noise problem due to lack of insulation in the walls and ceiling/floor between the various offices. But one of the major upsides is the birds.

It’s not just that we are located right on the river, although that certainly does help. My boss keeps a pair of binoculars on the desk and at any moment during a conversation about some paper or presentation we are working on, he might suddenly cut short what he is saying, get up, and stroll to the window with his binoculars trained on something he’s spotted on the opposite side of the river. We’ve seen herons of every variety. We’ve seen some kind of swan. There are huge black and white magpies that swoop up onto the balcony outside our front door and twitter incessantly in the tree below us. There are swallows (or perhaps they are starlings – I can never keep the two names separate) who nest in the opening at the base of the balcony outside our back door, where balcony floor meets supporting beam, and who occasionally swoop by, low across the water. There are sometimes ducks – singles and clusters and sometimes babies if it’s that time of year – wandering around on the docks or in the water below. And then there are the birds whose soft cry is the one I love the most – the mourning doves – who nest in the eaves right outside our back door.

The people who own these buildings at some point put down rows of something slightly spiky along the interior part of the eaves which is supposed to keep the birds from nesting there. However, they failed to tell the mourning doves that this was supposed to be a bird deterrent, because it is, if one is a mourning dove, apparently actually the perfect place to build a nest and raise a family. Last year we had one nest, tucked into the furthermost corner of the eaves, so far in that we could not see her unless we went outside and stood on our toes as high as we could. We could certainly *hear* her and her mate cooing to each other on and off over the course of several weeks last year, and we would see them swooping by, occasionally landing on the narrow little sill that lines the window right beside my desk. But we never actually saw the babies because the nest was so well secluded.

This year, however, she returned – or if not her, another one just like her – and decided to build her nest in a slightly more open location. This year we can see her seated in her nest, her soft gray head just visible over a few scraggly bits of nest, and this year we were a bit startled, after a morning of a lot more cooing than normal, to discover that she had company. Two babies sat in the nest with her – large enough to flutter down and then back, although she was still feeding them as we stood there and watched.

The doves had grown used to us last year coming outside to peer at them, so this year I decided to try to get a picture, especially now that there were babies, and she was in a much more accessible spot. I dragged the stepstool outside, climbed to the top step, and took the shot below – a perfect picture of mom and two juvenile mourning doves seated in the nest. None of those birds even blinked an eye, nor did the flash bother them at all. But I nearly fell off the stepstool when I heard a coo from that secluded corner further back down the eaves. Turns out this year there wasn’t just one nest – there were two. I couldn’t get close enough to see if that nest had babies as well, and I didn’t want to upset either mother any more than I already had, but I did find it pretty amusing. All that hard work putting in that bird repellant, and this year there’s twice as many nests to show for it.

Anyway, here they are – momma and her babies. Aren’t they just beautiful?

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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A is for Accident

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Yesterday afternoon we went to see a movie with friends. As we drove around the movie theater parking lot, we first spotted a group of women climbing into a car, and then immediately spotted an open spot directly across from them. Naturally, the open spot won, so Richard started to pull in, only to realize that the person in the car next to that spot had yet to close their door. So he stopped, halfway into the spot, waiting for the door to shut, when suddenly there was a substantial jolt in our car.

At first I thought Richard had hit the brakes really hard, but then I realized that no, we’d actually been hit. By this time the car door was shut by what turned out to be the very friends we were supposed to meet for the movie, so Richard pulled completely into the spot, and we got out to inspect the damage. The driver of the car we’d seen earlier, with all the women climbing in, apparently did not look first before she pulled out, or else Richard’s car was just in her blind spot, but she’d managed to smash the right side of her bumper into the left side of his.

Luckily they weren’t going very fast at all, so no one was hurt, and aside from a bit of an adrenalin rush on the part of most of us involved, everyone was very good natured about the whole thing. Richard and the driver exchanged insurance information, and I and one of the passengers of the other vehicle whipped out our digital cameras and took pictures of both cars to chronicle the damage. Ah, the wonder of modern technology that I now carry that thing with me at all times! And then once we’d all laughed about it there was nothing left to do but for them to go on their way and for us to go off to see our movie.

Accidents are never fun, but really, there are so many worse ways for them to happen. If the car *does* have to collect a new ding or dent, I’d much rather it happened this way – with slow moving cars and no injuries – than on the road where someone could be hurt, or worse.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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M is for Movies

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Friday night we were supposed to go see Chronicles of Riddick with a friend. But schedules and busy lives being what they normally are, it was postponed until this afternoon. So instead we went to see the latest Harry Potter film.

We went to the latest showing on Friday night, which was chosen despite the fact that as I get older I have a harder time staying awake that late, because Friday was my dad’s birthday and I wanted to make sure we would have time for that as well. So Friday night we wrapped up my dad’s birthday present (an odometer for his bicycle, because he’s been bit with the bicycling bug almost as bad as we were!) and headed over to my parents’ house for dinner and birthday cake and unwrapping of presents.

My older sister and her family were down for the occasion and were planning on spending the night. So once the two little nephews were put to bed, Richard and I talked them into going out to see the movie with us. A movie without kids? It didn’t take much convincing.

The movie was marvelous – so very much better than the first two that it was almost amazing at the difference. It helped that the third book in the series is perhaps the best one (although I think it might tie with the fifth book on this). The dementors were deliciously horrible. Professor Lupin looked just as I pictured him – tired and gaunt and still somehow calm in the midst of everything. Gary Oldman did a marvelous job of playing Sirius Black, and Emma Thompson was almost unrecognizable as Professor Trelawney, so perfectly did she take over that role.

This afternoon we met the friends to see Chronicles of Riddick, which was perhaps even cheesier than any of us were prepared for. We’d seen the first movie – Pitch Black, which was actually a rather enjoyable horror film despite itself. So naturally we knew we had to see this one, even though we were fully prepared for it to be a rather substantial ‘B’ film. And it was, oh how it was. The special effects were amazing, of course, since one can do literal magic with computers these days, but oh the cheese of the horribly contrived dialog, the implausible plot, and the fact that harsh prison life still leaves a young girl’s hair and skin in perfect condition, even when racing through brutal terrain against the onslaught of the burning sun. Still, if there’s a third movie in this series I have no doubt we’ll all be there in the theater, cheering on Vin Diesel and his eye-rolling one-liners. There’s something to be said for good cheese, and his films certainly have it in abundance.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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R is for RPG

Richard has been running an ongoing Dungeons and Dragons game now for nearly two years, with the same group of players. It’s always lots of fun, but it’s been hard sometimes getting the group together and sometimes there have been weeks or months that go by before we can continue. So for some reason he decided that he wanted to run a one-shot game – something that we could all do with just one session of game time instead of trying to gather everyone together time and time again. And to make it even more fun, he decided it was time to return to the D&D genre of old, and make it a dungeon crawl. Or in other words, we were actually going to be playing our characters through a real dungeon, instead of traveling from town to town, or fighting monsters in taverns and dark alleys and castles like D&D usually is.

He’s spent weeks preparing for this, poring over his gaming books at nights while I worked on my pretty purple sweater, mapping out his maze of caves and tunnels and figuring out the plot. He put out a call to everyone he knows to see who was interested, and we ended up with six people in the game. Since I had no preference what type of character I would play I told him to just figure out what the party needed once he was done collecting the information from everyone else and tell me what I would be. Hence, I got to play a cleric for the very first time in my life.

Everyone came over this afternoon, and gaming started at about 2pm. We gamed. We talked. We ate food (Richard made amazing stuffed peppers for the two of us since we’ve been back on the Quick Start program for Weight Watchers). We gamed and gamed and gamed some more. And when it was all over and people were starting to nod off at the table we realized that it was almost midnight and we were only halfway through what was supposed to be a one-shot game.

But it was so much fun we’ve extended the one-shot to a two-shot, and scheduled a follow-up game to finish it all off the first Saturday in July. It’s been a very long time since any of us have spent an entire day gaming like that, and it was a bit startling to realize that we’d been at it for over ten hours straight. It certainly didn’t feel like it had been that long.

I know that for a majority of people, role-playing games make absolutely no sense, and they cannot even begin to imagine why anyone would bother spending an entire day hunched over a table, rolling dice and referring only to numbers on a sheet of paper to invoke a world of fantasy so very different from our own. And I realize that some people will never really ‘get’ it, just like I am never going to get why on earth anyone would find watching a bunch of grown men run around a field chasing funny-shaped balls, or swatting at tiny balls with sticks, or smacking each other in the face while wearing ridiculous costumes, remotely amusing. To each his or her own.

It’s this sort of thing that reminds me why I love role-playing games like this so much. To get a group of friends together who are all interested in playing a fairly intricate game of ‘lets pretend’ – who all have that vested interest in suspending belief in the real world long enough to create characters who interact with each other, and have personality quirks that we players do not, and to make it all, somehow, work.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.