This & That on the Weekend

Auction! Saturday was the Endgame auction, and I stopped in there for about an hour. As someone said while I was there, there's something fun about watching people bid for games (and occasionally exchanging comments with friends while doing so). I did myself bid on a Liberte (which I didn't get) and a To Court the King (which I did). The latter went for all of $6, pointing out how much of a buyer's market the Endgame auction is ... but many of us sellers also find it sufficiently convenient that it's worth lower prices. I saw about $100 of my own games sell in that hour. I do have some concerns if all of my stuff sold because there was a huge glut of games, as Robert brought in 300-450 from his collection(!). Nonetheless, Aaron cleared somewhere between 60 and 90 games in the hour I was there, which looked like a good start. (Just glanced at the Twitter feed, and it said 5 hours, 500+ games, so he apparently maintained or improved upon that rate. Wow!)

(I'll find out when I go in on Wednesday, but I'll bring my panniers just in case I have stuff to go back home ... and if I do have unsold games, it won't be a big deal like it would have been in previous years, because we'll soon be using our garage for storage, pending the floor being smoothed out and Bob building us some shelves.)

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Gaming! I only stayed at the auction for an hour because I had my normal KingMaker game later on Saturday, which was run from my home. Munchkin tormented the cat-allergic people for a while, but other than that the game was pretty normative. We stopped just short of the final battle for book one of the adventure path. Overall, I'm pleased that I decided to run this campaign at a slower speed, else I think it would have just blinked past us (given that we're looking at 60-75 session based on the current speed things are going).

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A Bit of Biking. We had some late rain on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. When I went out to lunch on Sunday I was hoping that it'd clear up enough that I could bike a bit before returning home. And, 'lo and behold, it did. I'd been considering riding the Ohlone Greenway, which I'd been wanted to do for weeks. Ultimately, I decided that I didn't want to spend that much of my Sunday biking, as my freetime still feels very valuable. I did bike through the hills of north Berkeley up to Solano Avenue and back, though, which was a very nice ride on a surprisingly nice day.

Last rain of the (water) year??

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About that Free Time ... I've been relaxing pretty well since I finished work on the RPG history book. In fact, I've be astounded by the amount of free time I have in evenings and weekends (especially with RPGing biweekly or so at the moment).

I've had so much free time that as of last week I was ... starting to get a little bored. Only so many books you can read, eh? So I think I'm going to be starting on my next freetime project in a week or two, which will be an iPhone adaptation of my friend Eric's Armorica game (and something which I'd actually started last year before the RPG history book ate my mind).

Berkeley Bowl II

After work, Kimberly and I biked down to the new Berkeley Bowl West. She wanted to see their British Food section. I wanted to see the work being down on the 9th Street bike corridor.

She seemed to like the British selections. I saw that the work on the 9th Street bike corridor was almost (but not quite) done. Very shortly, one should be able to bike 9th Street all throughout Berkeley, straight into Emeryville. There's still some jigging and jogging around the Berkeley Bowl that may or may not be what's planned for when it's done. There was also one bit of recently laid bikeway south of Ashby that's still closed off. All said and done, it may be a better way to get over to the colo when they open it all up, sometime next month. Yay to still have bike work being done, despite the Repugs in congress trying to kill all public works.

K. and I also went on a snipe hunt for dinner. She'd found some Mediterranean restaurant in West Berkeley that she was excited about. But when we got there they had a big sign up that said "No Dinner" and redirected us to their other location, right by our house. So we went there and it was totally closed. Pfeh. We ate at home.