Last week:

Monday: Wumpskate

I left work a little "early" (around 8 or 8:15 i think) to stop by the store to pick up some cupcakes for the potluck and some cans of vegetables for the food drive. I got to Wumpskate just after 9. There seemed to be an unusually high number of cute girls with glasses there this month :) I skated for about an hour and then gave shelleycat a call and talked with her for a bit. After that they were starting the potluck so i grabbed some food and probably had way too much to eat =P I did a lot better at skating backwards this month, right before closing i was able to skate backwards constantly for two whole songs. I'm still not particularly graceful at it though =P

Thursday: Games

Usual gaming on thursday. We played a game of San Juan, in which one person ran away with the game and kicked the rest of our asses, and a game of Ra where the same person managed to just barely edge out shelleycat for the lead while i was trailing in back. I managed to recover for an excellent game of Thurn and Taxis(sp), excellent for me in any case :) I started out with a six or seven length route and had a lot of luck with collecting tokens. There was definitely a lot of luck with the cards two, at least three of us took multiple gambles with trying to continue routes that they didn't have the cards for. I managed to get the cards i needed and they didn't and lost the routes. The last turn of the game i managed to snag a card during another player's turn using tiles (the first time i've ever used tiles for that) that i needed to complete a four route, which let me put down my last three houses and win the game, _and_ get me the completion bonus for three different regions at once _and_ gave me the third tile i needed to trade in for an extra bonus point at the end of the game :) I don't remember the exact point margins, but i was ahead of everyone else by something in the double digits i believe :)

Of course such a spectacular success used up all my luck for the day. We played a game of Catan after that in which i did abysmally. I was next to both one of the 8s and one of the 6s. Actually one 8 had two of us around it, and one 6 had three of us around it, and the other 8 was on the other side of the map with nobody near it. The player who had a monopoly on the second 6 managed to get the robber early on and put it on our 6, and then everyone started rolling 6es =P 8 came up about three times during the entire game. Ironically it wasn't the person who had the 6 all to himself that ended up winning. Somebody else managed to come from behind, mainly due to a long streak of _11_s being rolled! =P

Anyways, after gaming shelleycat and i went back to her place and watched an episode of NCIS that she'd tivoed on my insistence before we went to bed.


Friday: Ruin

So i had a plan last week that i was going to go have tacos at Chipotle before heading off to Ruin. Unfortunately i didn't think about closing times very well. I got there at about 10:15 and they'd closed at 10 =P I then figured that In-n-Out would make a good backup plan, but when i went over there i found a huge crowd of high school age people outside it and it looked packed. I think the usual theory in that case is that there was a prom or something, but in any case i didn't want to deal with the crowd. So i ended up going through the drive-through at the Carl's Jr near the freeway and got a couple of the new roast beef sandwiches which they've been advertising. Which i probably would have enjoyed more if A: they didn't turn out to have a big slice of pepper in the middle and B: i hadn't had to wait until i'd actually arrived at Ruin and found a parking space, by which time the sandwiches were kind of luke-warm and the cheese had congealed =P And while i was sitting in my car eating i also got to watch a random pair of kids wander by and tag a building on the corner =P

I think i forgot to mention that the previous week when i went to Ruin they didn't check my ID at all. There were two people standing vaguely near the entrance talking to each other, but they didn't pay any attention to me when i walked up, looked around, and walked in. This time there was guy at the door, but when i pulled my ID out and started to hand it to them he just waved me on in. Not sure what's up with that, besides lazy door checkers i guess.

Not much to say about Ruin itself except that i spent a lot of time dancing :) The back room had the same two performers that were there last week. There were some of the same cute girls there are the previous week and some new cute girls. And did i mention lots of dancing?

Weekend: Shopping

I went rollerblading saturday "morning," or rather early afternoon, while it was still fairly sunny and warm out. (Which also meant lots of volleyball players out, including several cute female ones =) I went about 14 miles before deciding i needed to get back home and get ready to go over to shelleycat's place. For the last bit i did some backwards skating and kinda managed to fall over. I realized that i was getting unstable so i leaned over and put my hands on the ground in a planned maneuver, which worked great and all except that i still had the wheels on the ground and my feet kept going, so i ended up dragging my hands an inch or two along the asphalt =P

I had been planning on getting over to shelleycat's place early so we could go shopping for work clothes for me, but between rollerblading and cleaning up afterward it was 6 by the time i got there, and neither one of us felt like going out that late for shopping, especially not when it was already dark out =P Ironically we ended up going to the mall anyways in order to go to Daphne's Greek place for dinner. I also snagged a PinkBerry yogurt for myself. (Have i mentioned how amazingly good on calories those are? =) Afterwards we went by Cocoa's to get a Harvest Pie... which they didn't have. So then we went over to another Cocoa's on Brookhurst, and they were also out. So finally we ended up getting a Kahlua pie at Marie Callender's.

We went back to her place after that and watched some episodes of Engineering an Empire while eating pie.

Saturday we went to Costco, where i bought some Monster, some batteries, and a big bag of bacon bits on a whim :) Unfortunately they didn't seem to have any good clothes. So we went back to the mall and went to Mervyn's, which was having a going out of business sale which clearly had already cleaned out all the decent stuff. We went over to the Burlington Coat Factory after that, where we managed to find two button up shirts and one pair of pants. We were going to go to Kohl's next but stopped at REI on a whim and managed to find a good pair of pants there. At Kohl's we found a third pair of pants, as well as underwear and socks.

So i've now replaced every bit of work clothes i have that was over a year old except for one shirt. I'd also like to get another pair of pants to replace the ones i got last christmas which are now too large.

After that we stopped by In-n-Out to get food on the way back to her place and then watched a couple episodes of Battlestar Galactica and the new episode of TrueBlood before it was time for me to head back home.

This week:

definitely not as much happening this week. I got into work early most of the days. Monday was nothing much. Tuesday night was coraa's Changeling campaign. Wednesday was the crappy rollerblading, about 11.5 miles total i think.



It was an excellent gaming night, for me anyways :) We started out with a game of Agricola. I thought i had a mostly worthless set of occupation and improvement cards, the best of which were one that let me build get an extra family member and keep them on the card, and one that let me plow fields twice for three fields instead of one, so i decided to base my strategy around that. I had a couple other cards that worked well with it, in particular one that let me get two extra grain with every vegetable i picked up, ie enough to sow all six fields i was going to produce with just two vegetable pick-ups. One card that i thought might be useful, giving me a random chance of getting a farm animal at the start of each round, turned out to be less useful than i was hoping. Anyways by the end of the game i had every space covered, and although my house only had three rooms i had upgraded it to stone. Going down the list of point categories it wasn't until the 4th or 5th row that i got less than 4 points. The final score ended up being 45 to 29 to 29 to 22.

I then followed that up by winning a game of San Juan and then winning a game of Qwirkle. Very good night for me :) Between San Juan and Qwirkle we decided to order some pizza, unfortunately i only had enough calories for the day left to eat one slice =P

After gaming we went back to shelleycat's place but didn't feel like watching anything before crashing immediately.



I planned better for dinner this week. I'd originally though of going shipping for fun clothes and white hair spray before eating, but ended up deciding to do that with shelleycat later. So i left the apartment about 9:15 and got to Chipotle at 9:30. I ran into a fair bit of traffic around the 10 so id didn't get there until about 10:30. It was a very crowded night since they were doing one of the special things. There was an artwork display out on the patio and around 12:30 they did a performance thing. They also had at least two new people in the BDSM show in the back room. I spent most of my time dancing of course except for awhile spent talking to shelleycat on the phone. There's also a theoretical possibility that i might have smiled at a cute girl while on the dance floor, and there is also a theoretical possibility that she might have smiled back, but i'm not sure. They closed up later than normal, and since normal for Ruin is 2:30 it was almost 3 by the time i got out. I was very amused that one of the last songs they played after turning the lights up was Voltaire's "The Vampire Club." :) I got home around 3:30 or 3:45 and got to sleep at about 4:30 i think. It wasn't until i checked the LADead website to check on some stuff that i realized that the theme was in honor of the opening of "Twilight." I had realized it was an undead/vampire themed night, but despite having read iyindo's post about the movie right before heading off i hadn't picked up on the connection while i was there. Perhaps some people were actually wearing costumes specific to the books/movie, but since i haven't read/seen either of them i definitely didn't notice.

Oh yeah, i also had the bright idea of setting up one of my mp3 players to record and stuck it in my pocket all night, so i should be able to figure out some of my favorite songs with a little more accuracy now :) Unfortunately they didn't play the "tonight we dine in hell song" this time =P