Connor went to preschool today as the Witch King of Angmar...

...entirely on his own initiative (he was originally going to be Edward Teach).  Sure, he looks more like a hobbit, but you can imagine how proud we are of him.  :-)

We've been reading pieces of the Lord of the Rings to him, and he likes the Black Riders. This was after two consecutive years of Max, King of the Wild Things. In 2005, he was Sunny Baudelaire (Sarah was Violet and I was Klaus) disguised as Chabo the Wolf Baby. That, I think, was even geekier than the Witch King, but being Lord of the Nazgul was his idea.

Kitty lost & found

Monday evening, we couldn't find Kitty (Connor's lovey) at bedtime, and we realized we hadn't seen Kitty in a while -- we didn't think Kitty had gone to school that morning, and the last time we were sure we'd seen Kitty was Saturday afternoon when we took a walk to the gazebo in the park. Tuesday, while Connor is at school, we look all over the house and can't find Kitty. That afternoon I walk to the gazebo (it had been raining all day) and can't find Kitty. We ask Connor if he's seen Kitty, and he says Calico can hear Kitty crying. Sarah is starting to get upset, and spends Wednesday walking along our path to the park, going to every place we went to over the weekend (Borders, the library, the farmer's market), called Parks & Recreation, and sent a message to the neighborhood e-mail forum. I tell Connor that Kitty has gone to visit Calico for a while. By this afternoon, we're pretty sure we're not going to see Kitty again, but it hasn't really hit Connor yet. And then... we set Connor up watch some Planet Earth, and we leave the room for a couple of minutes, and when Sarah checks in on him, Kitty is sitting in his lap. We ask, "Where did you find Kitty?" "Calico brought him back." "Was he under the couch?" "Yeah, Calico brought him back." Wait a minute, we looked under the couch. "Was he in that box?" "Yeah." Oh, okay, we're not getting a straight answer on this one. We're just happy Kitty's back.

The Sisters Mortland (Beauman, Sally) 2005

Sarahmac recommended this one, and she got it recommended from Chinaberry. I can't exactly call it an enjoyable read because it's so depressing, but the plot is engaging (it was hard to put down) and the characters are vivid.  

<> 

Unfortunately, it requires two suspensions of disbelief on Dan's doorstep.  The first is when Julia accuses Dan of seducing her daughter.  I'm really supposed to believe that Julia, the intelligent and rational Julia, believes that if Dan were up to no good, he would have answered the door that morning, much less had a protracted conversation?  Maybe I'll buy that one.  Later on, however, I'm supposed to believe that Dan, even in his current state of mind, is so bent on getting himself killed that he's not even slightly curious as to why Julia would bring his beloved godson Tom to his neighborhood?  Sorry, that I can't swallow.

Battle for Wesnoth (v1.4.5)

[posted 3/26/9, backdated to 10/21/8 because that's when I jotted down all the notes for the post, and I haven't played Wesnoth since then]

The Battle for Wesnoth is essentially a free, updated Warlords.  I loved the original Warlords in college (played a few all-night games when exams were done) and enjoyed Darklords Rising.  Wesnoth carries on the tradition beautifully.

The good:

• it's free
• the GUI is fairly intuitive so that you can get started playing pretty quickly, and it does an especially good job on things like clearly showing you where a selected unit can reach on the board, or when you don't have a unit selected, when you mouse over an enemy unit's square, you can see which squares are reachable by that unit.  /Extremely/ useful in many scenarios for timing your charge.

The somewhat frustrating:

• despite the intuitive interface, there's a lot to keep track of.  Every unit is individualized with two special traits; while this is kindof neat, it means that you need to remember, among members of the same type of unit, which guy is the "strong" one, which is the "fast" one, and so on.  Moreover, there are all sorts of other interactions, from the terrain you're standing on, to what time of day it is, to I have no idea what.  The time of day thing really kills because just when you start to get your units on a roll... oops, it's night time and now you have to regroup and wait out the night for a "safer" time to go on the attack.  All this is difficult to make intuitive in the GUI, so you have to go read the doc (boooooring!  and yes, I know, SPSS pays me to write documentation) which is not really complete in terms of understanding how certain things are calculated.
• Leveling up your characters should be fun, but it actually causes problems because you can get through the first few scenarios because you're smarter than the AI, but eventually you're overwhelmed by superior firepower because you didn't level your guys up enough, or bought the "wrong" improvements or the "wrong" guys. I actually think this was a major problem in Warlords campaigns, too.   This was a problem in Wizardry 8 (and Oblivion, too, and in all sorts of other games), actually, because certain areas are "leveled" to be challenging for your character level, but if you didn't maximize your character development, you were in trouble later.

The "I'm not so sure"

• I sortof like the turn limit on scenarios in Wesnoth.  There were a few scenarios in Warlords where the strategy was to simply hold against the first few waves of high-level enemy troops and then strike back at the mid-level troops.  Booooring.  A problem in Wesnoth is that your leader has to sit on his duff in your home base to recruit/recall, and if you haven't played the map before you don't necessarily know whether it's a map on which you need to do 1, 2, or more recruitments to get through the enemies, and generally you (a) run out of time if you guess too few and have to go back, or (b) might not have enough money going into the next scenario if you guess too many. Really, I feel like I need to go back to the start of the campaign and build up a few true "heroes" who go through the campaign with me.
• There's a delicate balance between finishing "too early" and not getting enough XP for your guys, and finishing "too late" and not having enough money to carry over because you don't get the early finish bonus.  Again, if you haven't played the map before, you can't really know what to do.

"but you better throw out the rest of that soap, just in case"

Last week I got a bad case of poison ivy on my lower legs, and over the weekend, started getting hives all over my ankles and torso. Sarahmac had had a similar rash in August, which the doctor put down to "mysterious allergenic reaction", put her on mega-antihistimes, and it eventually cleared up. On the way to the doctor's office, she pointed out that I had just started a new bar of soap -- one of those bars that I used to collect from hotels, and had finally decided to get rid of by using up -- and given her past experience with rashes from nasty hotel soap, perhaps that was the culprit. I tell my doctor about the soap, she looks at how the rash on my ankles surrounds the worst of the poison ivy and notes that sometimes a bad case of poison ivy will cause a more systemic reaction, and then she says, "but you better throw out the rest of that soap, just in case." Oh, yeah.

Changing Places (Lodge, David) 1975

I'm reading the Penguin paperback, which has the following quote from the Sunday Times of London:

Not since Lucky Jim has such a funny book about academic life come my way.

And for the first 100-odd pages I thought the 60's and 70's must have been a tragic era indeed if this was the best that the "comic academia" genre had to offer.  Then, chapter (section?) 3. Corresponding begins, and I see that Lodge's genius is vested in letter-writing.  Finally I was laughing out loud and reading sections to Sarah (who generously sometimes even pays attention when I interrupt her in the middle of her own book).  My final opinion, in fact, is that one could simply dispense with the first two chapters (sections?) and start with the third.  The final sections are necessary to know how it all turns out, but the letters in Corresponding tell you just about all you need to know from the first half of the book.

Kill Doctor Lucky gets Sold Out

I really like Cheapass Games, and big part of that is because of their philosophy that games cost too much because of the generic parts that game companies sell to you over and over again.  Kill Doctor Lucky might be my favorite Cheapass game, and so I was naturally shocked and ashamed to discover that you can no longer buy the Cheapass version of the game new; you must buy the "high quality deluxe edition" that comes with:

• Full-color board of the Lucky Mansion
• 96 full-color cards
• 8 pawns
• 30 spite tokens
• Full-color rules sheet

... basically, all the crap that the founding philosophy said we could do without!  Now that's irony for you.

Now, I'm not opposed to the existence of a high quality deluxe edition, but I would really like to be able to buy the original Cheapass version.