D&D

We had a fun D&D game this afternoon. I particularly enjoyed the way in which the GM revealed something interesting about my character that I didn't know.

We had journeyed to the land of the elves, and when the one who came to meet us greeted us, he addressed each character in turn with a descriptive (e.g. the wizard who does scrying was something like "Far-Seer", and the character who had been blessed by a unicorn was "Unicorn-Touched", and so on). I was last, and he addressed my character as "Dragon-Blooded".

I should mention that this character is, so far as I know, 100% human. And that there is a strong dragon motif in this game world. One character who died reincarnated as a half-dragon half-human (which puzzles all the high-level characters in the game world who know about it), and a dragon was integral to the founding of the empire and may still be strongly linked to it.

So I don't know what my character has to do with any of this, but it came as quite a surprise. My jaw dropped, and the GM seemed pleased by this. Eventually maybe I'll find out what it all means. :-)

This will be fun to write up in ralph_dnd.

short takes

Friday night my rabbi gave a wonderful sermon. At the oneg I told him he should put it on the web site so it could be shared more widely (he does this very occasionally), and he said he had done it all from notes, not a written copy. Drat!

My torah portion (for the Shabbat after next) is in pretty good shape. I was able to do the whole thing, with some hesitation but no non-recoverable errors, from the unpointed text tonight. Not cold, though; I practiced for a while before doing that. I'm meeting my rabbi for study on Wednesday and I'll chant it for him then (he asked to hear all of us).

A new vegetarian restaurant called Zen Garden opened yesterday a few blocks from home. Unfortunately, while they're usually open until 11 on Saturdays, last night they closed early due to some logistics stuff. (They got a lot more people than they expected, they said.) So we'll have to check it out some other time. Soon, I hope; I picked up a menu and it looks pretty good. And an all-vegetarian restaurant means I don't have to worry about cross-contamination in the kitchen; I can eat there and be confident of kashrut issues.

Tonight we watched two more episodes of Babylon 5. We've now covered up through "A Distant Star". There have been many episodes that I'm enjoying more on the re-watch (actually re-re-watch, and sometimes re-re-re-watch) than I did before. Some of it's time (been a few years); some of it's picking up subtleties that I missed before; some of it's probably the absence of commercial breaks.

My scanner is acting up. It might be time to bite the bullet and just acknowledge that scanner technology has improved significantly in the last, um, six or seven years. :-)