So Jones and I did some gaming at Adventures Underground again tonight. Tuesday is Chess Club day. Those folks seem a little dull. Didn’t talk much. What’s the point of playing chess in person if you’re not going to chat during the game? Why not just play it online?

Anyway, we started to pull out Mwahahaha! but sort of hit a wall when I declared I wouldn’t be serving my usual role as designated-rules-explainer. One look at the forty-page rulebook and I knew I didn’t have the patience or focus for that. Not tonight. No one else seemed to either, so we played Kill the Hippies. Mechanics-wise, not a bad game. But kind of offensive in general. Not really something I’d want to play with new acquaintances… one card, for example, requires you to discard a number of cards based on how long it’s been since you were physically intimate with someone. But that’s a minor issue compared to the horribly written rules. They don’t even tell you how to lay out the hippie cards — you have to infer it from the text on other cards!

We also played a few games of Blokus. Interesting thing about Blokus: It makes you hate your friends. Okay, not really, but it does get a little frustrating to play even when you’re doing fairly well. Maybe it’s because it really forces you into direct confrontation with the other players. And the ever-shrinking open space creates this sense of desperation. It’s like being on a sinking boat in piranha-infested waters with three other people and you’re all constantly trying to climb on top each other to avoid getting et.

We were going to play Manhattan too, but Logan’s (rightly) afraid to play with me. I dominate that game. Twice we’ve played matches where my point marker’s gone off the scoring track. That is, I ruled so awesomely that the game could no longer adequately measure my brilliance on a scale of one to eighty.

In other news, I signed a change order to have a gas range installed in my new house. Originally, I was just going to use the default electric and have gas lines run so I could upgrade in the future. But the construction company changed their policy this past weekend and made it “official” and way more expensive (since I could no longer deal with the contractor directly). The upside of that was that it gave me a good excuse to change my appliance package. Since the lines would have then run $525, it made the $850 range install downright reasonable — I’d effectively be getting a $550 range for $325. I’m pretty psyched about being able to cook with gas. Can’t wait till June.

TotD (French): I love French. If you want to sound pompous, say it in French! That’s why so much cooking terminology is French: Chefs are ultra-pompous. “Au contraire,” you say, “France was the birthplace of many culinary techniques…” But that’s just a story made up to justify the pomposity. Je ne sais pas, quelle que soit.

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