Anyone for a swim?

Bad night last night to leave your car windows open.

The wind was so violent that you frequently couldn't hear the thunder. The rain lashed the roof of my apartment building so heavily that it woke up more than once, and Midori, unsurprisingly, stayed pretty close the whole evening. (She didn't like it either that Starr was spending a night with her mom last night.) I peeked out the front of the building during a laundry run to see visible waves and sheets in the torrent. The fresh mulch that the groundskeepers had spread Monday was all over the sidewalk and parking lot this morning.

It was the sort of night where I was utterly grateful for 21st-century shelter. It was also a good night to finish two more levels of my "yes I will beat the Terran Starcraft missions before Starcraft II comes out" campaign. I started fresh a few days ago, to get back into the rhythms, and I won Mission 8 last night - two more to go. The funny things is that I have a strategy guide, but always end up doing it my own way. This is, by the way, part of the awesomeness of Starcraft - it can support multiple play styles.

The sky is crystal clear this morning. Shame we're losing those soothing high-60s temperatures.

Three decades of playing roles

I'm pretty sure I began playing Dungeons & Dragons around 1978 - after Star Wars but before Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I vaguely recall hearing about it from school friends, but have a clear memory of sitting in a sickbed opening the box my mom had purchased for me. The game came with cardboard chits you were supposed to shake in a cup for random rolls, but there was a dice accessory available that she got me soon after: 5 Platonic solids of very very cheap plastic. The 20-sided die was marked 1-10 (0, really) twice: you had to mark half the faces with a colored Sharpie to know which ones were 11-20.

( And thus began a minor addiction... )

30 years.

Awesome :)