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The Gaming Days
Dec. 27th, 2021 09:23 pmOur Air B&B is a classic little apartment that reminds me of our Berkeley house. Radiant heater. A strange misshapen hallway. Weird nooks. Weird crannies. Light switches that appear to do nothing. Plugs that don't work. Don't get me wrong: I like it. Great windows, set back from the street, but nicely central to Rockridge. Well upkept.
Well, the physical building is well upkept. There's all kinds of weird stuff that I don't know why the host leaves in a rental. Like 12 bottles of booze, including a nice, big bottle of rum out. Intended as a visitor gift? Hard to say, since there's so much more.
And I didn't sleep that well because the bed wildly rocketed around whenever someone turned over. Kimberly didn't seem to notice. But I similarly had some of my best sleep of the year at my mom's house, while Kimberly found the (new) mattress too hard. So it goes.
Last night Kimberly was planning to get together with a friend (ultimately cancelled), so I scheduled with the current Thursday night group: MA, MB, E., and S. They were all fortunately able to get together. We grabbed dinner at the refurbished Smoke House (which was closed my last year in Berkeley due to a fire), and the chicken sandwich was superb and the fries were NO LONGER GREASY. Yowsa. So even better than before the fire.
We ate that dinner over at MB's place, and he said it was the first time he'd had anyone inside since the start of the pandemic. (They'd apparently planned to start playing there again at some point, and then yet another variant hit.) Wow, still a pandemic. Things have loosened up a lot more than that in Hawaii.
Here, people have also constantly been talking about testing negative recently, often right before a get-together. Should I be getting tested amidst all these get togethers, I wondered.
We played Bohnanza and Boomerang: Australia, the latter of which I brought from Hawaii (and will be returning BA-DUM-DUM). E. headed out after the first game, because it was as much seeing people in person as he could take amidst a pandemic.
It was great seeing everyone in person, but sad to see how much COVID is still affecting everything out here.
I had the early part of today free, so I took an Uber with Kimberly to near the Claremont (where she was going to Rick & Ann's to meet people for brunch) and hiked up on the fire trails over Clark Kerr.
Yay! One of my favorite hikes that I probably did 100s of times while living here. Today I went up Stonewall, across behind Rattlesnake Canyon, up the hill to Panoramic Hill, across it, and then down the steps. Lots of beautiful views of the Bay. Some mud, but not too bad. I ate half my lunch at the bench at Stonewall, started getting rained on, and then finished off on the other side of Rattlesnake Canyon.
It was great and nostalgic, and I was excited to see there were two new benches and a few new steps built since last I was there.
Afterward I toured Berkeley and after hearing it was so different in the last year, found it largely the same. Very few businesses had closed. But there was a surprising amount of new construction that got done. The hideous Moorish-Tudor building on Telegraph (see https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/02/24/a-moorish-tudor-fever-dream-is-unveiled-on-telegraph-avenue). The building that replaced The Village. A new skyscraper in Downtown Berkeley. I was shocked to see it all done after two years of Pandemic.
There was also some nice renovation to the Downtown Berkeley library. A great looking new Teen Room (that is Teen-only 2-6) and a really neat looking Mystery Room, neat mainly because it was full of comfy chairs.
I also checked out the house. I was pleased to see the landscaping that we got done to improve the sale price of the house has survived. I was pleased to see the two trees out front that I lavished care on for their first year also are going strong. There was a huge (fake) spiderweb in a front window, presumably left over from Halloween. And there was a carton from beer thrown next to the trash can. Bud Lite.
So the house endures. Even if it's now home to Bud Light drinkers.
I eventually made my way to Downtown Berkeley BART, so I could get to today's gaming at EV's house, which we'd scheduled again because Kimberly had plans.
The ride was mostly better than yesterday, which I expected given the stations I was traversing (Downtown Berkeley to MacArthur to Pleasant Hill).
But the scheduling was even more messed up than when I was last in the Bay Area (when the BART schedules, which were reliable for decades, were increasingly faltering).
Today, they had so many trains out of service that they were cancelling every fourth train or so. I have never seen BART officially cancel trains before, in 30 years of using the service. And this is after they've been buying huge numbers of new trains.
I got to MacArthur fine, and met up with S., who was also joining us for gaming. And then we found our transfer train to Pleasant Hill was cancelled.
And then the next train got delayed by 10 minutes due to "police action at Embarcadero" (increasing numbers of police actions were one of the things that were messing with BART schedules before I left; the other was mechanical failures).
We eventually made it out to Pleasant Hill, with just a few nose-mask scofflaws spotted and not all of the other problems I saw last time, when we went through the rest of Oakland.
Gaming was great today. EV was very kind to set things up on a weekday and it was great to see S. and C. also there, who I frequently game with on Wednesdays.
We played an old favorite, Jump Drive.
We played Eric's next release, First Empires, which I'd enjoyed through what Eric says was 8 years of playtesting in different forms (since 2012) and so I'm thrilled to see coming out. (Even better, it allows me to write a review; I've had another of his games waiting a review for a year, but it's been difficult to get a group together for a final review play).
We also played two fun new games, Fantastic Factories and Wild Space, both of which I enjoyed enough to want to get my own copies of (especially the first), in the dream that I'll be able to play eurogames in person in Hawaii someday.
So that was two days of gaming in COVID, my only in-person gaming since COVID started, other than familial games. Hopefully we're all safe enough with full vaccination and (mostly) boosters.
It was great seeing everyone in person. It was great engaging in our old pasttime. It was great playing games not available online.
Well, the physical building is well upkept. There's all kinds of weird stuff that I don't know why the host leaves in a rental. Like 12 bottles of booze, including a nice, big bottle of rum out. Intended as a visitor gift? Hard to say, since there's so much more.
And I didn't sleep that well because the bed wildly rocketed around whenever someone turned over. Kimberly didn't seem to notice. But I similarly had some of my best sleep of the year at my mom's house, while Kimberly found the (new) mattress too hard. So it goes.
Last night Kimberly was planning to get together with a friend (ultimately cancelled), so I scheduled with the current Thursday night group: MA, MB, E., and S. They were all fortunately able to get together. We grabbed dinner at the refurbished Smoke House (which was closed my last year in Berkeley due to a fire), and the chicken sandwich was superb and the fries were NO LONGER GREASY. Yowsa. So even better than before the fire.
We ate that dinner over at MB's place, and he said it was the first time he'd had anyone inside since the start of the pandemic. (They'd apparently planned to start playing there again at some point, and then yet another variant hit.) Wow, still a pandemic. Things have loosened up a lot more than that in Hawaii.
Here, people have also constantly been talking about testing negative recently, often right before a get-together. Should I be getting tested amidst all these get togethers, I wondered.
We played Bohnanza and Boomerang: Australia, the latter of which I brought from Hawaii (and will be returning BA-DUM-DUM). E. headed out after the first game, because it was as much seeing people in person as he could take amidst a pandemic.
It was great seeing everyone in person, but sad to see how much COVID is still affecting everything out here.
I had the early part of today free, so I took an Uber with Kimberly to near the Claremont (where she was going to Rick & Ann's to meet people for brunch) and hiked up on the fire trails over Clark Kerr.
Yay! One of my favorite hikes that I probably did 100s of times while living here. Today I went up Stonewall, across behind Rattlesnake Canyon, up the hill to Panoramic Hill, across it, and then down the steps. Lots of beautiful views of the Bay. Some mud, but not too bad. I ate half my lunch at the bench at Stonewall, started getting rained on, and then finished off on the other side of Rattlesnake Canyon.
It was great and nostalgic, and I was excited to see there were two new benches and a few new steps built since last I was there.
Afterward I toured Berkeley and after hearing it was so different in the last year, found it largely the same. Very few businesses had closed. But there was a surprising amount of new construction that got done. The hideous Moorish-Tudor building on Telegraph (see https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/02/24/a-moorish-tudor-fever-dream-is-unveiled-on-telegraph-avenue). The building that replaced The Village. A new skyscraper in Downtown Berkeley. I was shocked to see it all done after two years of Pandemic.
There was also some nice renovation to the Downtown Berkeley library. A great looking new Teen Room (that is Teen-only 2-6) and a really neat looking Mystery Room, neat mainly because it was full of comfy chairs.
I also checked out the house. I was pleased to see the landscaping that we got done to improve the sale price of the house has survived. I was pleased to see the two trees out front that I lavished care on for their first year also are going strong. There was a huge (fake) spiderweb in a front window, presumably left over from Halloween. And there was a carton from beer thrown next to the trash can. Bud Lite.
So the house endures. Even if it's now home to Bud Light drinkers.
I eventually made my way to Downtown Berkeley BART, so I could get to today's gaming at EV's house, which we'd scheduled again because Kimberly had plans.
The ride was mostly better than yesterday, which I expected given the stations I was traversing (Downtown Berkeley to MacArthur to Pleasant Hill).
But the scheduling was even more messed up than when I was last in the Bay Area (when the BART schedules, which were reliable for decades, were increasingly faltering).
Today, they had so many trains out of service that they were cancelling every fourth train or so. I have never seen BART officially cancel trains before, in 30 years of using the service. And this is after they've been buying huge numbers of new trains.
I got to MacArthur fine, and met up with S., who was also joining us for gaming. And then we found our transfer train to Pleasant Hill was cancelled.
And then the next train got delayed by 10 minutes due to "police action at Embarcadero" (increasing numbers of police actions were one of the things that were messing with BART schedules before I left; the other was mechanical failures).
We eventually made it out to Pleasant Hill, with just a few nose-mask scofflaws spotted and not all of the other problems I saw last time, when we went through the rest of Oakland.
Gaming was great today. EV was very kind to set things up on a weekday and it was great to see S. and C. also there, who I frequently game with on Wednesdays.
We played an old favorite, Jump Drive.
We played Eric's next release, First Empires, which I'd enjoyed through what Eric says was 8 years of playtesting in different forms (since 2012) and so I'm thrilled to see coming out. (Even better, it allows me to write a review; I've had another of his games waiting a review for a year, but it's been difficult to get a group together for a final review play).
We also played two fun new games, Fantastic Factories and Wild Space, both of which I enjoyed enough to want to get my own copies of (especially the first), in the dream that I'll be able to play eurogames in person in Hawaii someday.
So that was two days of gaming in COVID, my only in-person gaming since COVID started, other than familial games. Hopefully we're all safe enough with full vaccination and (mostly) boosters.
It was great seeing everyone in person. It was great engaging in our old pasttime. It was great playing games not available online.