weekend bits and pieces

I heard a new word this weekend, referring to certain breeds of terrier: "verminator". It made me giggle, but I knew exactly what she meant -- which, I suppose, is the purpose of language. :-)

What is it with cats and plastic, anyway? All of my cats like to lick plastic. (They don't ingest it -- just lick.) Embla likes to rub against it. Huh?

Saturday I had lunch with the Orthodox (Chabad) family we visited once before. It was a pleasant afternoon. ( Read more... )

Yesterday we got together with other members of our Pennsic camping group to make some camp furniture. We have two problems to address: we need more seating, and we need places to put the miscellaneous clutter that accumulates on the tables. So we made chests, specifically sized to work well for seating at tables. Some people actually built them Saturday; Sunday was sanding and painting. Note for future: sawdust is, or behaves like, an allergen. Oops. We had fun, and the chests are very spiffy -- comfortable to sit on and good for storage. We made two "one-seaters" and one double (it's three feet long). The double will require two people to carry, but the singles are light enough to be moved by one person.

After dinner and the departure of most of the people, Dani and I stuck around for a while to play games with Alaric. The first game we played was Vinci (I forget who publishes it). It's a neat game, though I think it plays rather differently with three players than with the max of six. You play on an abstract map of Europe, and you play a civilization with two arbitrary characteristics (such as "extra points from grasslands" or "extra points from resource spaces" or "get extra temporary soldiers at the start of each turn"). On your turn you expand/attack, then score based on your position, then pass to the next person. Units that you lose due to conquest are not replaced, so over time your ability to score decreases. When you think you've reached the point where it's no longer worthwhile, you declare that you are going into decline and get a new civilization to play on your next turn. Your tokens from the previous civilization stick around, and score, until blown away by the other players. When someone reaches a certain score threshold you complete the turn and then high score wins. I ended up with civilizations that were fairly straightforward to play, and won by a few points. I would enjoy playing this game again with more people; I think more players would force faster turnover.

After that we played Carcassonne; I'm not very good at it, but it was fun. Sometimes I think I will never get a handle on the strategy for claiming fields. We played with an expansion that included some new tiles, all of the "double or nothing" variety. For example, by default, at the end of the game, a partially-completed city still scores some points; if it contains a cathedral tile then it scores more points if complete but none at all if incomplete. I haven't played enough to know if this actually adds anything, or if it's just needless complexity. I suppose it can work well if played hostily -- that is, play a cathedral into someone else's city that you think he won't be able to complete.

This weekend we watched more of B5 season four, specifically the end of the shadow war. This seemed abrupt in the first run; it seems even more abrupt now. I assume, but don't know, that if JMS had known he had a fifth season, he would have carried this war through this season and into the fifth, and focused more on the Earth and Minbari civil wars. That would have made a much better story, I think. We were both struck by how well the end of "Into the Fire" could have worked as the end of the series -- not that that's where he would (or should) have ended it, but in terms of the storytelling, it had "major wrap-up" written all over it.

Another show where watching the DVDs reinforces a past impression is West Wing. Watching season three on DVD so soon after the broadcast of season five emphasizes just how much better the show was in the prior season. I think season four might have been weaker than season three, but five was much much weaker than anything that came before. Sad.

yizkor and grandparents

Four times during the Jewish year it is customary to recite Yizkor, a prayer in memory of the dead, as part of morning sevices. It's traditional for people whose parents are both still alive to leave during this, but my congregation urges people to stay. I feel a little funny doing so (not clear why -- it's not like I have a traditional background that's at odds with my current synagogue), but I stay because my rabbi wants me to.

Mourning non-Jewish relatives is a little strange anyway. The practice that has evolved for me, though it's kind of odd I suppose, is that I say kaddish on the appropriate dates for the two grandparents who died since I became religious, but not for the other two. One of the other two turns out to have died three days (on the Jewish calendar) before one of the others, so I mentally include her at the same time. The fourth, my paternal grandfather, died when I was a child and I don't even know the date. And I liked him, and I feel funny about leaving him out of the "formal" observance completely.

This Shavuot during yizkor it struck me: I don't know the date, but I do know that he died in May, and Shavuot is usually in May (or early June), and I'm going to be there for yizkor anyway... so it seems logical that, for purposes of private observances (e.g. memorial candles), I should observe my grandfather's yahrzeit on Shavuot. That also creates some degree of parity -- each of the grandparents who died long ago is getting added onto something else, but no one is getting forgotten. (Not that I would forget them in any case -- but I mean formally.)