SuburbanAdventure

I understand the utter irony of canceling a Klondike Derby due to inclement weather.  This arctic-themed event seems like it would be greatly enhanced by the 17 inches of snow received but as I was placing emails and calls about the event, I found that unit leaders were under one or more of the following impressions:

• Kids arrive via teleportation, without having to traverse unplowed roads.
• All parents will deliver their children as signed-up for the good of the sled and ignore the motherly instinct to protect.
• Every sled is delivered by a 4×4 Land Rover.
• All activities that depend on access to the ground can occur on top of a foot of snow and will require no clearing.
• The facilities at Tyler State Park are all heated meaning that the pavilion, bathrooms, and parking areas would require no snow removal to make usable.
• An emergency rescue team lives in the campfire area, available to pluck from the river children who didn’t realize the bridge was 10 feet behind them.

Now I have another week to kill before I begin my last minute preparations.  I love Scouting.

I tried walking without shoes again, (after giving my feet a day to recover) and this time had much more success. My feet were somewhat sore still but it didn’t seem to be a topical issue so I pushed on in operation: build callouses.  After about 15 minutes the area of the balls of my feet nearest the outside of my foot started hurting so I tilted my legs in so that the opposite side would hit first and my foot would kind of roll.  That started hurting so I tried landing on my toes and then rolling back.  That started hurting so I started striking with heels again, defeating the purpose of me trying to walk barefoot in the first place.  I’ve come to a conclusion: Humans were not designed to walk on their feet.

A local school received what I can only call a trove of glassware.  Reaction vessels, Erlenmeyer flasks, bubblers (which are profoundly expensive), and 40 pounds of filter paper would be the route to a fat rebate check when doing my 2009 taxes.  A month into 2010 I’ve received nothing so I contacted the liaison:

Me: Hey, can I get a tax letter?
Her: Sure, I’ll ask again.
Me: Would it help if I provided a list of what I gave them?
Her: Yes

Good job, Terry.  I have almost no idea what I gave her except from what the previous group I gave to didn’t use.  Idea!

–Call #2–
Me: Hey,  do you remember if you took all 12 50ml volumetric flasks?
Him: Yeah, I think so.
Me: How about the 200ml graduated cylinders?
Him:  I don’t know.
Me: How about…
Him: Are you going to ask me about everything you gave us?
Me: Maybe…
Him: I’m going to bed.

Damn, I’ll need to find another way to fabricate documentation for my tax return.  To the Fisher Scientific catalog!

Barefoot running seems to be all the rage, so I figured I’d give it a try in my obese turbo-wobble kind of way.  The advantage of a treadmill is not having to deal with glass shards and such so I went off at a steady pace sans shoes.  The first thing one realizes is how much traditional walking beats the shit out of one’s heels. So, I tried walking with my toes first which made me look like a fat drunken ninja or a recently sodomized duck.  It’s tough, but you get the hang of it eventually and I only looked like someone who’d recently stepped off a horse while wearing swim fins.  With some practice, I imagine I could vastly improve my capacity for stealth walking given appropriate foot gear.

All in all, I covered my standard two miles and I can already feel the balls of my feet thickening.  If I keep this up for a month, I think I’ll be able to stop bullets.

I was speaking with the OSR Program Director about some preparations for the upcoming program year.  I was following along until he said the following “oh, and I added a folder to the Network Drive that has all the stuff I use in it, everything was scattered all over the place”.  My heart jumped to a level of activity such that I lost my sense of hearing.  The network drive at camp as it currently stands represents three years of collaborative work among at least five people.  When I and two others arrived in the office, each person had a little fief on the drive and all the documents they used went in there.  So, it was perfectly possible to have three or four copies of a single file in multiple places being revised individually.  Additionally, works in progress were stored locally so nothing existed for public consumption until it was done.  The pinnacle of this idiocy was the following document tree contained on a specific computer:

User Name –> Desktop –> User Name –> Documents –> User Name and Year –> Documents (containing a shortcut to the desktop) –> Camp Stuff

This was barely outdone by another person who simply saved everything in a folder as sequentially named “document1.doc” “document2.doc”, etc.

Warring factions fighting over revisions, duplicitously recreated text generated long-hand from PDF output.  How do I present to him the fact that this choice leads to damnation and ruin?

Pre-releases are the second most grueling Magic tournaments behind GPs which are the modern judging analog to working in a coal mine.  I slept 9 hours the day before, arrived at the station early and well dressed and received odd stares from those seeing me a scion of the Romanovs with my ushanka, gloves, and dark slacks.  The Convention center was crawling with Autoshow people and I assumed my day was going to suck as multi-event security is best described as Kafkaesque.  There’s a single entrance to what would be three different events requiring Autoshow security to go at us each time. I landed in the security line, waiting for my chance to employ a combination of supplication and excuse fabrication I now incorrectly call bullshido to avoid a pat-down, when the clouds parted and something amazing happened: I was reviewed by a competent security person.

Him: Ticket please.
Me: I’m here for the Gray Matter Conventions event.
Him: Hm… So you don’t have an Autoshow Ticket.  How many of you are there going to be?
Me: A few hundred, but we’ll be going in and out a bit.
Him: Okay, go through… wait.  If I have to do this for everyone that’s going to your event, that could take ages.
Me: Yes, it could take a while.
Him: How about we unlock a door past the security station.  *shouting* If you’re here for the card jaun, come over here.

30 or 40 of my pasty white card-slinging brethren left the line, emancipated from the tyranny of mini-metal detectors.  My people were free.  Later when I met up with the rest of the staff we all shared the story of “Tyrell, the Competent Security Guard”.  He will be venerated in song.

The Worldwake Pre-release is tomorrow and the questions have started.  Most involved the new mechanic called “multi-kicker” and the seemingly odd wording of some cards.   Normally I walk the player through the thought process of how the mechanic works to help the player reach the appropriate conclusion.  This tends to be somewhat trying but the results save me many questions later.  I met my match tonight when a player having seen my normal method preempted my attempts at a guiding explanation with “I’m old, tell me how to play the card”.

Well then.

Boy Scout events invariably result in repeated trips to Wal-mart.  While waiting in line to purchase 30 pounds of rope I saw the following sign:

"40" vs. 18

The age eighteen is properly represented as 18 yet forty is represented as “40″.  I wonder if this a sop to women who’ve turned 29 11 times.

The shelf immediately to the right of my computer desk represents roughly 90% of my net worth.   With roughly 4 of every card printed from Alpha to Zendikar (that’s chronological not alphabetical) with some glaring exceptions of Arabian Nights, Torment, and Homelands, I’ve been filtering out some excesses that I could sell to buy some burn-time when I’m unemployed.   I purchased someone’s collection this past summer that I’m now dismantling and word of such has gotten around.  Today, I received a Facebook message of roughly the following:

“Hey, heard you’re unemployed and selling your collection for gas money.  I’ll cut you a break on buy prices.”

What?  I did some homework and it turns out the whisper-down-the-lane-style transfer went as such:

Me–>Person #1: I’m selling some cards I got from other people’s collections to fund a trip after I get unemployed.
Person #1–>Person #2: Terry’s selling some stuff from his collection to pay for gas for a trip after he’s unemployed.
Person #2–>Person #3: Terry’s selling his collection to pay for stuff when he’s unemployed.
Person #3–>Person #4: Terry’s unemployed and selling his collection.