white stuff

Whee. Snow. Looked like about 4 inches this morning and it's still coming down; I wonder what it'll be like for the evening commute. Gotta love the effect on the commute.... (I don't dislike snow in the abstract, but I'd rather admire it from the comfort of my living room, instead of being out on the roads.)

It appears that those out driving before 7:30am are a better class of snow-drivers than those out around 9am. (The latter is approximately when I left morning services/breakfast for work. Services were long because it's Chanukah and Rosh Chodesh, first of the new month. And we started late, because it took longer to get a minyan because of the snow.) At 7:30 people were sane and competent; at 9:00 I encountered the reckless, the over-cautious, and folks who were skidding all over the place.

Even the major roads like Boulevard of the Allies hadn't been plowed at 9am. The Birmingham Bridge was throughly encrusted with packed, slick snow. I would have thought that bridges would get priority, but I guess not.

I am pleased that by driving sensibly and knowing how to use a stick shift, I did not have problems stopping on the slippery roads (even though I was nervous about some of the people around me, including the one behind me who didn't understand following distance). I will remember this when Dani lobbies for me to get an automatic transmission in my next car so he can drive it. Bah. Manual transmission rocks! And I'm not especially skilled -- solidly average, I'd say. (It's certainly possible that brake technology has gotten good enough for this not to be a real issue, but I will test-drive an automatic in the worst of weather conditions before considering it.)

I really need to go grocery shopping this evening. I hope it's not a zoo.

D&D Smackdown

Tuesday night we had "D&D smackdown". I had a lot of fun. I don't know how much we learned, but it was fun. :-) Ralph wrote about the session, but I'm going to add some notes of my own.

For the evening we boosted the characters who were close up to the next level, so this could be a predictor of things going forward. We had Larissa (7th-level sorceror), Prolix (7th-level wizard), Liandra (7th-level druid), Turok ("4th-level" half-dragon fighter; functionally 6th, through a mechanism I don't understand), and Kyle (6th-level mostly rogue (1 level of ranger, I think)). Larissa has an owl familiar and Liandra has a wolf animal companion, but neither figured into the fighting much. We ran three fights against this party.

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