Twilight Imperium

Yesterday morning I woke up early to get a good start on my work, since I only had the morning to do it in. I wrote about 2/3 a draft for the Harvard Divinity Statement of Purpose and sent it to Ben, whose feedback I need to continue. Since he hasn't e-mailed me yet, I'm forced to do other, less fun work today.

At about 11:45 I made lunch, since I wasn't going to get a substantial meal in the afternoon. Then at 12:45 lopaanre and I went to nerdx111's house to play Twilight Imperium!

I had never played before, and it was a complex game. I had skimmed the online rulebooks (regular and expansion pack rules) before coming over, but I learn mmuch better by seeing and doing, and I couldn't comprehend everything and remember it all. Even with experienced players the game takes 1/2 hour to set up and 8+ hours to play.

There were 7 of us, out of a possible 8 that the expansion would allow.

The game is pretty indescribable, other than its amazingness. Think Puerto Rico, Settlers, Axis and Allies, Command and Conquer Red Alert, and some other games combined, and you've got this. There's building economies,technology, trading, bribery, politics, and battles! And the game does cool things like if you attack someone who you have a trade agreement with, the agreement gets cancelled. Which makes sense. It's a very smart game.

Our game ended up lasting about 9 hours (including setup). There was a break in the middle for pizza, but since I was the only kosher-keeping one there, it was regular non-kosher pizza. Not that we could have even ordered kosher pizza! If it had been a longer break I could have theoretically ran home and grabbed something. But I subsisted on the fortunately kosher chocolate, chips, and soda.

I also got a lot of knitting done in between my moves.

So it was a good afternoon, well worth the break from work.

The only downside is that it led to my weird nightmare last night of playing a version of the game where you played dead races and tried to bring them back to life, without them having a home planet. And there was this whole thing about zombies- first a dream that one of Teatron's one-acts was about zombies, and then part of this weird non-twilight imperium game having an obective where you win a battle against zombies in the enemy army.

I need to get out more.

cleaning

I just spent 1.5 hours cleaning my room. I have all these old things to go through and either throw out, keep, donate, or put in the geniza (give to Chabad to put in the geniza.) The geniza pile is on my chair, with 3 binders (1 giant and 2 more medium) and a folder full of sheets of paper and a spiral bound book from a NFTY* institute. Back in the day when I thought I was going to be a Reform rabbi, I saved all of my services, so that I would have tons of readings to choose from if I wanted to write a service. I also made a second binder that I had intended to give to my youth group, so that the next RCVP** would also have tons of services to use. But my guess is that BCTY*** isn't so active anyways.

I did a lot of sorting on my bed, where Mittens was curled up in a ball, sleeping. Surprisingly he slept through most of me throwing stuff around, although at one point he flipped over and stretched, and then curled up again.

I went through a bunch of books, and some of the random papers on my desk. I found an envelope from Hillel, and lo and behold, it contained a mashing check for $72. From May. And 2 meal tickets. Unfortunately, these checks are void after 90 days. Hopefully I can go to the office, give them the check, explain how it got lost within all my papers, and ask if I can get a new one. $72 would be nice, considering how much I've been spending lately.

There was also a lot of change in my random purses that I rarely use...and then I found $5! Yes, I actually found $5.

And I stopped cleaning because I only need to do 1/2 hour a day (and this was me making up for 2 days, plus today) and because my stomach started hurting. I should probably go eat.

*NFTY= National Federation of Temple Youth, the Reform youth movement.
**RCVP= Religious and Cultural Vice President. They do all the services and religious stuff.
***BCTY= Bristol County Temple Youth. My Temple youth group (TYG).

Yes, the Reform movement has tons of acronyms.