Looks like the fellowship of the bowl has come upon hard times. It’s members scattered across the breath of this land while the darkness of Bush gains ascendance over the heart of this nation. In Oregonia, where the forces of Light still hold sway, one of the companions fills his simple days with sports, food, and leisure.

Mostly I’ve been coaching basketball and volleyball. I’m involved with one or the other 6 to 7 days a week. When I’m not doing prep work for my sports, I mostly spend my free time working on the house, cooking, reading and watching movies. I went to town with my new library card. You can keep DVDs for three weeks! I’ve got close to a gross of em sitting on the movie rack. Most recently, I’ve gotten into books on tape. It makes doing your chores soooo much nicer.

The Reed Basketball team is 1 and 5 right now but we’re much better than when we started. The group is an interesting mixture. 7 freshman and 4 seniors…none of which were starters.

The Reed Co-ed Volleyball team is doing considerably better. We’re playing in the city league. With the playoffs approaching, we pulled out from the middle of the pack to take the number two spot in our division.

Sadly the thing with Claire didn’t work out very well but thanks for all your help and input….really…thanks.

I hope you all have a nice thanksgiving. My housemate Mitch, invited me to thanksgiving at his ranch in Southern Oregon. We’re going to make a caramelized pecan cheesecake….with the pecans warm! I enthusiastically endorsed Mark and Robin’s thanksgiving duck idea but sadly it fell on traditionalist ears. Any other interesting food ideas for thanksgiving?

Hey, I do check out this site once in a while. Congrats Robin on your new job! hey Mark, is there any way to monitor who’s been logging on? i don’t see why gwu hasn’t been writing..he’s got all the time in the world and now he’s also got a cable connection.
ya, i wouldn’t say that this year’s election was all that fair. just google ‘ohio elections’ or something like that and i’m sure you’ll find tons of evidence saying other wise. remember..its the people who count the votes not the people who vote that have the power..haha.

OMFG, this is an awesome game! If you know me then you may know that I am super wary of MMORPGs. It goes back to my Reed days when I knew some Reedies who dropped out due to their excessive MUD playing. I felt like I might fall into that same trap (and if you ask Robin, I may finally have). I’ve played a few MMOGs, but never played any for longer than a month or two. They just don’t hold my interest that long because they tend to be either extremely repetitive and tedious after a while or extremely pointless, as in the world never changes and the fight never ends.

Somehow Blizzard got it right, though I should say that I’ve only played World of Warcraft for a week. (I’ve been doing the open beta.) It *feels* like a single-player RPG since all the quests are hard-coded and designed really well. I mean you still have the animal farming quests, but the quests aren’t randomly generated. Additionally, all the quests give much more XP and monetary rewards than if you just went out and killed a bunch of stuff. The quests really drive the game and it makes me feel like I’m actually doing something and the world is changing.

I do have to say, also, that a lot of why I like the game so much is that I’ve been playing with a group of 4 others who are all on a voice chat program. Our party dynamics and communication is top-notch and it is very fun creating characters to complement each other. This is the same group who were playing BG2 with me, but that game fell by the wayside…

I’ll put up some screenshots and a review if I have time… I keep saying that…

So, for the past two months, I’ve been playing a lot of board games. Carcassonne and Puerto Rico by Rio Grande are great games! Betrayal at the House on the Hill by Avalon Hill (which is owned by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, btw) isn’t as polished in terms of production quality nor is it as polished in terms of game mechanics but it is still a fun game too. The first two are pure thinking man’s strat games while the latter makes a good in-between game, part strat, part role-play, part family game. I would post photos and shit, but I don’t feel like it at the moment, since I’m trying to post prolifically… :) I’ll add photos and reviews when and if I get a chance.

Well, it looks like Washington is having a mini-repeat of the 2000 election. Our governor has not yet been decided and the vote is so close (yesterday there was a 19 count difference) that we have to do a recount. I feel this looming doom that the republican candidate will win and continue to mirror the 2000 US election…

WTF is wrong with our country? I am continually awed by how much people like standing behind a bully. Might makes right and all that.

I’ve been busy the past month getting used to a new schedule. i finally got a part-time job so i can slow down our descent into credit card debt.
as most of you know i’ve been holding out for four years trying to get my own business going. well that is so much more work than i expected since i decided to start a co-op right off the bat (www.chickcoop.com is an empty storefront so far) and i can’t seem to get past the product development stage and actually sell something. so at the beginning of this term when we couldn’t afford good health insurance (which we now need since i hurt my back last year) and had to swallow our pride and ask mark’s parents for cash, i once again considered the part-time job idea. surprise surprise! no panic attack this time. whee! i decided that if i was going to work after all this time i was going to do it somewhere that inspired my creativity rather than draining it. so i inquired at all the local craft-type stores. turns out the needle work, and paper craft stores are typically not profitable enough to hire employees outside the owners’ families. i thought the bead store would be the same story, but their business is booming. enough to open a new online store. so i got hired to help launch the website and now am doing “inventory prep” and customer service for www.fusionbeads.com. counting and packaging beads, basically. the people are great and it’s an all-woman staff of about 20 so i’ve met four new lesbians and have a couple possible new recruits for my co-op. i am forced to like two office dogs, but am coping. most of them smoke, but hey, at least they’re not republicans.

Are we all too depressed to post anything? I figure all of us have been busy the last month, getting the word out on who to vote for, right? :)

I’ll post something about some of the board games I’ve been playing soon…