In From The Outside
This weekend I actually have a house guest! (When has this happened before? Not in this apartment, during the three years I've lived here.) Mark Dykeman is a member of APA Centauri who hails from New Brunswick, Canada. His company is sending him to Chicago for several stints this fall to work with their people there, and since Chicago is less than three hours from Madison, he drove up for a couple of days.
One thing this prompted is my doing a whole bunch more cleaning this morning in a big flurry, mostly in the bathroom. Although the temperatures here have dropped to the 50s and low 60s, it was still fairly hot work.
When Mark arrived, we chatted for a while, and then went out to the Wisconsin State Capital and walked down State Street to do some shopping. Madison has some great used book and CD stores, and an outstanding gaming store, and Mark soon decided we had to cut the trip short for the sake of his wallet. I bought several books, including some books by SF author Iain Banks, about whom I've heard almost uniformly good things.
I also picked up the game Robo-Rally (published by the ubiquitous Wizards of the Coast), which looks like it should be good, goofy fun. My gaming guy says if I like it I should buy the expansion sets soon, because they're apparently in danger of going out-of-print. Why? Because WotC wants them to, I guess.
Mark is also a comic book fan. I myself tend more towards basic super-hero entertainment than does your typical late-20s comics fan, but Mark enjoys that stuff even more than I do these days. It's been fun talking to him about this stuff. He's also been perusing my deluxe hardcover collection of DC's Kingdom Come comic, which is a very nice package. (I rarely buy hardcover comics collections - even my Sandman collections are paperback - but I made an exception for this one.) I'm going to show him my comics for sale list tomorrow, bwah-hah-hah!
Late in the afternoon I dropped my APAzine off with the OE (Official Editor); his family recently acquired a fifth cat, an absolutely gorgeous siamese, who they say actually has a wonderful personality. I'm a sucker for cats with deep blue eyes, and he also has a lovely layered coat of brown fur, and was all-too-happy to be picked up. They name all their cats starting with the letter 'K': Kit, Kif, Kzin, Koko, and the new one is Kang. (Do we sense a science fiction theme here? Yes, I believe we do.)
This evening I invited some friends over so Mark and I could play WotC's infamous card game Magic with them. Zoe, a guy I work with and who I've never played Magic with before, has some really high-powered cards, and some of his decks just mashed us into the ground. However, we did manage to win a few victories (I have a couple of decks which I basically never play unless I'm desperate to win a game, because they rarely lose). A good time was had by all, and I consumed some yummy hard cider that one guy brought over.
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