Magic Mirror at the End of Time
Half a day remaining in 2006, and at the pace the time's been keeping through this holiday stretch it almost wouldn't feel out of line to start getting ready for work Tuesday right now. Ugh.
This past Thursday Crypt Leak and Abbygal were kind enough to host another gaming session, for which I was the least prepared of any of them so far. This saw me hauling a huge number of clix with me, and not even doing that efficiently.
While I generally think of myself as empathetic (though more often I simply drop the first syllable), I often confront myself anywhere from minutes to days to months or worse later with the same scene from a different perspective. So it was with part of this past Thursday.
See, I was mostly irritated with myself for lack of preparation. This was made worse because I'd believed I'd brought the majority of my Marvel clix -- at least the majority of the ones that were on my list of figures to go on the 300 point teams already worked up, along with the ones most likely to be pulled together as improvised teams. As it turns out I was mistaken, though I didn't know that for sure until the following morning when I came home and saw that I had left behind two boxes.
Thursday, however, I was ticked at myself and impatient with any help that was being offered in the search. Jason & Eric were each attempting to help, and otherwise looking through the boxes at what was there. I was becoming childishly peevish and advancing on petulance. It had become one of those tasks that at the moment I felt was best accomplished solo, so being unable to draw on boxes that other people were looking through was bothering more than it should. I soon moved on to dumping them a box at a time out on the rug I was lying on, so that I could sort through them.
I suggested the four of them get in a game or two of Guillotine, a fun card game based on the French Revolution, so that got everyone else up off the floor and into something more entertaining so that I could move on to the realization that some key pieces I was looking for weren't there, and then on to improvising two teams for each of the five of us -- at this stage we weren't going to get beyond two games.
Now, keep in mind that I'm used to having cats around, and while cats make it nearly impossible to play a board game out on the floor, they're fairly easily waved off, and while CL & A have two cats, only one of them is mad enough to venture downstairs during the majority of our visit, and while talkative he was easily occupied elsewhere. However, they also have two curious, gregarious dogs.
At the moment, I was too focused on looking for the relief of finding a completing cache of figures in one of the containers I'd brought to really see what I was doing from the outside.
Fortunately, the dogs only came over to survey the scene of chaos a couple times each, as much as anything to see what I was up to and in their way to see if they could help (ie they showed up with their attentions focused on me, not on the pieces on the floor) probably catching the cues that this overblown bit of man-child spread out on their rug was in some tiny distress. Stepping through the Chinese rubble to make eye contact and tacitly ask, "You okay, man?"
Good dogs, both of them.
Still, it wasn't until later that it struck me that here I was, dumping out hundreds of tiny pieces at a time into an area a couple feet square, probably giving my friends a growing apprehension that one of the animals might end up choking on some piece of plastic. Both dogs are wonderfully well-behaved, by a mixture of breed temperament and training, but they're dogs nonetheless, and we're supposed to be smart enough to meet them halfway on the whole safety thing, and I was falling down on my side of that deal.
It all worked out okay, and while we didn't get the time issue addressed anywhere near as well as we'd hoped, we ultimately did play two games -- the second being sans A, who had said her goodnights and gone off to bed. I will definitely be far more organized the next time we do that -- back to the ziplock bags of pre-built teams I'd done during the earlier games.
Demonstrating that I'm not the only one seemingly resistant to learning something helpful, CL & A have invited us back for New Year's Eve. (At the moment - having heard back from Eric but not Jason - it appears I may be the sole repeat guest.)
I'll be headed over there late afternoon, and my current plan is to light out around 10 or 11, both because any drinking I'm going to do will be early on -- I'm not going to be doing any while I'm out anywhere near 12 -- and because I believe I want to be back home for the actual tip-point into the new year. The cops will be out in force, many of them with twin chips on their shoulders - one a departmental one where they feel the pressure to demonstrate what they've prevented from happening, the other being a personal one since most of them would prefer to be off and having fun, too. We're expecting rain to move into the area before midnight, which will only worsen the drive. Besides, the later I stay the more likely it'll be that Monday will be spent in a torpor, and as much as I don't want to spend the first day of the new year that way I even moreso don't want to spend the last day of the Christmas/New Year vacation sleeping it off.
I have a huge amount to do in the next two and one half hours, so I'm off to do it.
Half a day remaining in 2006, and at the pace the time's been keeping through this holiday stretch it almost wouldn't feel out of line to start getting ready for work Tuesday right now. Ugh.
This past Thursday Crypt Leak and Abbygal were kind enough to host another gaming session, for which I was the least prepared of any of them so far. This saw me hauling a huge number of clix with me, and not even doing that efficiently.
While I generally think of myself as empathetic (though more often I simply drop the first syllable), I often confront myself anywhere from minutes to days to months or worse later with the same scene from a different perspective. So it was with part of this past Thursday.
See, I was mostly irritated with myself for lack of preparation. This was made worse because I'd believed I'd brought the majority of my Marvel clix -- at least the majority of the ones that were on my list of figures to go on the 300 point teams already worked up, along with the ones most likely to be pulled together as improvised teams. As it turns out I was mistaken, though I didn't know that for sure until the following morning when I came home and saw that I had left behind two boxes.
Thursday, however, I was ticked at myself and impatient with any help that was being offered in the search. Jason & Eric were each attempting to help, and otherwise looking through the boxes at what was there. I was becoming childishly peevish and advancing on petulance. It had become one of those tasks that at the moment I felt was best accomplished solo, so being unable to draw on boxes that other people were looking through was bothering more than it should. I soon moved on to dumping them a box at a time out on the rug I was lying on, so that I could sort through them.
I suggested the four of them get in a game or two of Guillotine, a fun card game based on the French Revolution, so that got everyone else up off the floor and into something more entertaining so that I could move on to the realization that some key pieces I was looking for weren't there, and then on to improvising two teams for each of the five of us -- at this stage we weren't going to get beyond two games.
Now, keep in mind that I'm used to having cats around, and while cats make it nearly impossible to play a board game out on the floor, they're fairly easily waved off, and while CL & A have two cats, only one of them is mad enough to venture downstairs during the majority of our visit, and while talkative he was easily occupied elsewhere. However, they also have two curious, gregarious dogs.
At the moment, I was too focused on looking for the relief of finding a completing cache of figures in one of the containers I'd brought to really see what I was doing from the outside.
Fortunately, the dogs only came over to survey the scene of chaos a couple times each, as much as anything to see what I was up to and in their way to see if they could help (ie they showed up with their attentions focused on me, not on the pieces on the floor) probably catching the cues that this overblown bit of man-child spread out on their rug was in some tiny distress. Stepping through the Chinese rubble to make eye contact and tacitly ask, "You okay, man?"
Good dogs, both of them.
Still, it wasn't until later that it struck me that here I was, dumping out hundreds of tiny pieces at a time into an area a couple feet square, probably giving my friends a growing apprehension that one of the animals might end up choking on some piece of plastic. Both dogs are wonderfully well-behaved, by a mixture of breed temperament and training, but they're dogs nonetheless, and we're supposed to be smart enough to meet them halfway on the whole safety thing, and I was falling down on my side of that deal.
It all worked out okay, and while we didn't get the time issue addressed anywhere near as well as we'd hoped, we ultimately did play two games -- the second being sans A, who had said her goodnights and gone off to bed. I will definitely be far more organized the next time we do that -- back to the ziplock bags of pre-built teams I'd done during the earlier games.
Demonstrating that I'm not the only one seemingly resistant to learning something helpful, CL & A have invited us back for New Year's Eve. (At the moment - having heard back from Eric but not Jason - it appears I may be the sole repeat guest.)
I'll be headed over there late afternoon, and my current plan is to light out around 10 or 11, both because any drinking I'm going to do will be early on -- I'm not going to be doing any while I'm out anywhere near 12 -- and because I believe I want to be back home for the actual tip-point into the new year. The cops will be out in force, many of them with twin chips on their shoulders - one a departmental one where they feel the pressure to demonstrate what they've prevented from happening, the other being a personal one since most of them would prefer to be off and having fun, too. We're expecting rain to move into the area before midnight, which will only worsen the drive. Besides, the later I stay the more likely it'll be that Monday will be spent in a torpor, and as much as I don't want to spend the first day of the new year that way I even moreso don't want to spend the last day of the Christmas/New Year vacation sleeping it off.
I have a huge amount to do in the next two and one half hours, so I'm off to do it.
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