Ev and Sam
September 30th 2002 -
Ev and Sam
On Friday night we started tidying up the place for Ev and Sam’s arrival, but went to sleep early… and so Saturday morning was *rather busy*. I don’t really think Ev or Sam would have minded too much if it was messier, but hey, sometimes you need an excuse to get things tidy. I’d been trying to put together a best-of-all-time song collection for Ev in response to his best-of-all-time collection for me. I had spent a fair amount of time agonising over it and getting all my CDs burned onto the computer and chopping and changing.
Anyway, they arrived at lunchtime Saturday and we went to town and wandered around and then made dinner together and talked and drank and had a good time… a great build-up for Dave and Fiona’s wedding next week. And yesterday was much the same, except we played a couple of board games.
Cranium
I keep meaning to put something up on otherleg with reviews of the various board-games that I’ve played… anyway, we played “Cranium”, a game that mixes charades, trivia, pictionary, and play-dough sculpture. Ev and I lined up against Anna and Sam, who had made friends easily and quickly, and proceeded to be slaughtered. It doesn’t really help that the only sub-game type that I really enjoy is charades, and I’m lousy at it. It may be just because I lost, but I really didn’t like that one at all – the team who is setting the question get to laugh at the other team’s ridiculous efforts, and I’m no good at being laughed at. Even in harmless fun.
Zendo
Then we tried out “Zendo”, which was rather good fun. You build sculptures out of little plastic pyramids and the zen master tells you whether they have buddha-nature or not. You have to figure out the buddha-nature rule. Anyway, a lot of fun and not nearly as competitive as Cranium – I started with the rule of “Must contain at least one piece that is lying down”, then Ev did “Must have an even number of pieces” and Sam did the particularly tricky “must contain two pieces of complementary colours (and any number of other pieces)”.
Red Faction
In the spare time Ev and I played “Red Faction”, which I found cheap on Saturday – a good fun first-person perspective shoot-em-up. I found that I didn’t miss the mouse nearly as much as I was expecting – you can’t turn around particularly quickly, but since your opponent is in the same boat, it isn’t too bad. Still, I think you can actually move around a stationary object faster than you can turn, so someone can have circles run around them without ever seeing the opponent.