Yesterday, for fun, I timed my Friday night D&D group during combat. They wanted a copy of the numbers, so I dropped ‘em into Excel and here they are (15.4 KB). There’s a second sheet with charts, so mind the tabs at the bottom.

Keep in mind that Matt was DMing, so his times aren’t representative of his speed as a player.

Yeah, yeah, I haven’t blogged in a while. Don’t worry, you haven’t missed much. Here are the highlights from the past two months:

• Became a notary public.
• Ryan moved out and quit his job.
• Started two new 4th ed. D&D games (I GM one on Sundays and play in Matt’s game at Ed’s house on Fridays).
• Got some awesome stuff for Xmas — a whole bedroom set, an iPod ghettoblaster, a signed copy of the Top Chef cookbook.
• Had a ton of snow.
• Made a new year’s resolution to always dress professionally for work (been keeping it so far).
• Made a new year’s resolution to record every board game I play (also kept this one so far).
• Got new living room furniture (two leather sofas, replacing the old big one).
• Set up RAID 1 for my NAS.
• Turned the extra bedroom into a game room (cleaned it really thoroughly, bought a table and chairs off craigslist, moved in some shelves and bureaus, put up a bunch of posters).

That’s all I can think of at the moment. Part of the reason I haven’t been blogging lately is that I’m twittering. It’s way easier, so I do it more frequently. Plus the 140-character limit discourages rambling. Here’s a widget that displays my four most recent “tweets”:

Brett and I just ate at Bistro Jeanty in Yountville. We had an escargot appetizer, then Brett had a cassoulet of duck, bacon, beans, and sausage and I had the steak tartare with pommes frites. It was very good, though both dishes were much larger than we expected. Speaking of big things, I had the largest sandwich I’ve ever seen for lunch at Pea Soup Andersen’s in Santa Nella. Ham and turkey on rye.

Why are we in California? We had to pick up the clinic’s new (24 feet long!) custom-built vet truck. So we flew into San Diego yesterday morning, picked it up at the convention center, drove to Carlsbad, had lunch at a Friday’s, then drove and drove to San Fernando where we got a room. Now we’re staying at The Chateau Hotel in Napa. Tomorrow we’re going to have lunch at Bouchon Bistro, then drive north for as long as we can tolerate.

BTW, we crossed these hills this morning and the temperature change was radical — it was 67° on the Los Angeles side and 41° on the Avenal side. Crazy.

Some things I’ve learned: No one in CA uses turn signals, Hanwool was not exaggerating about L.A. traffic, Motel 6 gives you soap but not shampoo, Garmin GPS directions in SoCal suck, and there is such a thing as $4 toll bridges.

Buncha stuff’s happened since I blogged last, but I’m too tired to even try recapping. Will try to update when I get back to Pasco. Will also post Flickr pics.

I’m stuck at the clinic for twelve hours tonight while the floors get stripped and waxed. Apart from the sleep deprivation and ammonia fumes, it’s not bad. At least I’ve got wifi and a freshly downloaded Castlevania ROM in my NDS. Though tomorrow night (I get to do this again, yay) I’m bringing energy drinks. I’m barely awake and it’s only midnight.

Oregon was fun. Went to a lot of beaches, ate some good meals (oyster sandwiches, roast beef, crab pasta, sushi), heard a bunch of great stories from my grandpa about Korea, Vietnam, and his time in the merchant marines, debated religion with my grandma, and took lots of pictures. And the train ride on the Empire Builder 28 was very scenic. Here are some highlights:

The train ride:

Newport:

On Highway 101:

Coos Bay (and surrounding areas):

And some neat bugs, food, etc.:

‘Course there’s tons more in the 2008 Oregon Trip set.

After I got back some stuff happened, but I forget what cuz I didn’t bring my notebook with me. Haven’t uploaded those pictures yet. I do remember Hanwool came down again; that was a lot of fun. There was much board gaming and drinking. A new, ruinous form of Jenga was invented. Sadly he might not be back till spring due to pass conditions.

The house next door (this time on the west side) is getting built really quick. The neighbors in the other one are doing some landscaping and fence-building. Did I mention them? Older couple, very nice, moved in like three weeks ago. The guy has a couple brothers in the area, one lives just a few blocks away. Been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 (I’m obsessed with payload maps ATM). Beat World of Goo. Tried (and disliked) Spectraball.

That’s all I can think of for now. More later.

Some cool stuff I’ve found recently:

• Outlet Shirts > District Threads. District Threads is my absolute favorite brand for casual shirts and sweaters. Till now, I’d bought them from Andrew Christian via Amazon. But Andrew Christian sucks — they charge too much, don’t tell you what’s out of stock, delay shipments for weeks without explanation, and employ some people with poor English skills. Outlet Shirts, on the other hand, is cheap and responsive.
• Glukoza. Really great Russian singer. Listen to her Schweine song and tell me that’s not catchy. Everything on her Moskva album is pretty good.
• Cube Farm, Hamsterrolle, Polarity, Unexploded Cow, Jacob Marley Esq., Agricola, Treehouse. Some board games I picked up. Here’s a Flickr thumb of Cube Farm:

  

  Oh, and I started tracking my board game collection — see the new link under “Stuff” in the sidebar?

• World of Goo. Awesome game. They just released it on Steam today. It’s like a real-time version of Armadillo Run with Gish embellishment. Or if you’re not familiar with those, it’s like Loco Roco with bridge building. Right now I’m on the second level of Chapter 3 and my Goo Corp. tower is 17.5 meters tall. The music is great too, very Danny Elfman-y.
• Little Britain USA. Hilarious continuation of the BBC series. It’s on HBO — the third episode aired last night. They’ve had some neat cameos; Paul Rudd was on the last one.

I’m going to Coos Bay, OR for four days on Wednesday. My mom and I are taking a train to Portland (at 5:30 AM!), then switching to a rented car for the second half of the trip. I’ll take lots of pictures.

Heather made some really fantastic taquitos for dinner tonight. I’m not normally big on them, but these were excellent. Especially with the sour cream, lettuce, and guacamole. (Lettuce and guac? I never would’ve thought of combining those with taquitos, but turns out it’s very yum.) Also, my mom made some terrific turkey pot pie for lunch today so I ate especially well.

Oh! Hanwool came down the weekend before last! He moved to Redmond (from Los Angeles) cuz he got a job with Nintendo and he came to visit for a couple days. It was great. We played games pretty much nonstop and brunched at IHOP. He even played in our Saturday night D&D game (and picked up the 4th edition rules really quickly). A couple pics:

Also, Logan made me this amazing painting about a month ago. It took a while to get it framed, but now it’s hanging in the living room. He said he got the idea from my blog’s header art. Pretty great, right?

Speaking of art stuff, here’s a Venture Bros. commission I got from Stephen deStefano (art director/storyboard guy on the TV show):

And some random Jenga/my new desk pics, why not…

What else? Brett and I staked (guywired) all the trees because we were having some big winds a little bit ago. I really like making stuff with 3/32″ steel cable and ferrules. Did you know a bolt cutter works just as well as a swaging tool? The trick is to crimp with the metal stop. Alright, time for bed.

The sod is all in! Pics in the Landscaping the New House Flickr set. It was a lot of hard work. My parents and Brett helped a ton. Most of me still aches. But it’s done. Now I just have to finish the fence and a little brickwork and the exterior projects will be finished.

It’s a good thing we got it finished before the 7th. In the city of Pasco you have to meet certain landscaping requirements within 90 days of the start of occupancy. Pasco Municipal Code 25.75.050.4:

At least 50 percent of the required front yard area for all residential property including right-of-way but, excluding driveways, shall be treated with live vegetation.

I took some photos of a praying mantis today. Flickr thumbs:

Also, Jones, Heather, and I did some pumpkin carving.

Oh, and after three weeks (a month?) of delays, we’re finally resuming our Saturday night D&D game! I love 4th edition. For what D&D is supposed to be — easy, fun, single genre, and coarsely granular — it’s fantastic. Right now I’m running an 8th level human wizard (”Malfeasance”) in Jones’ Forgotten Realms game. The rest of the party is made up thusly: Logan’s a dragonborn warrior, Matt’s a human warlord, Heather’s an eladrin ranger, and Freddy’s a tiefling rogue. It’s been awesome so far. There were some minor issues with slow combat early on due to sloppy record-keeping, but we had those ironed out by session three.