A Loon-y Trip

My cousin Ian works as a mechanic for Southwest Airlines. This job comes with certain perks -- free airline tickets among them. He was kind enough to share some with us on Monday, when we headed up to New Hampshire for the day to go skiing.

Yes, for the day. The only other time I flew anywhere for the day (and as people who know me know, I fly a lot) was 1993, when I flew from San Francisco to San Diego (ironically, on Southwest) for the day. The only other thing I can compare this to is when I was visiting my parents in England in 1994 and had a train pass. So I had a free place to stay, but only if I got back home for the evening. I spent a lot of time riding trains.

Anyway, we left home at 5:15 in the morning, met Ian at the airport, and flew off to Manchester, New Hampshire. We rented a car and drove an hour and a half north to Loon Mountain.

While the Pennsylvania resorts we usually frequent are desperately trying to keep their snow from melting, Loon Mountain had great conditions. Well, actually, Ian said they weren't as good as what he had seen on past visits. But it matched the best conditions I've seen in the mid-Atlantic. We had a fantastic time, and made it back home by around 10 pm. Forthwith, some pictures of our skiing adventure.

Subscription Drive

Last fall, I mentioned that I had created an option to subscribe to the Android's Dungeon, so you could get e-mail notification when I actually get around to updating this weblog. Since my posting is sometimes sporadic, I thought it would be a convenient feature so people wouldn't need to check back all the time. Unfortunately (for me or for you?), only 4 people have signed up. 2 of those are Christina, and 1 is me. So I thought I'd do more to advertise this option. To that end, I've put a "subscribe box" at the bottom of all these pages.

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So I encourage you to subscribe. I won't be heartbroken if you don't (since, after all, I don't know who is reading this), but I think it's a useful thing.

Game Playin' Weekend

I played a lot of board games this weekend. Yesterday, George, Doug, Ben and I played a number of games. The complete list (for all of January, actually) is available here at boardgamegeek.com. After George headed off to par-tay, Doug, Ben and I ended up with a particularly devlish game of Robo Rally (using a board from the Armed & Dangerous Expansion). Robo Rally aficiandos will realize the painful strategy needed to complete this game:


I made a wrong turn after touching flag 4 and lost my last life. Doug touched flag 5 and was very close to touching flag 6 (and winning), when Ben killed him and won the game.

Unfortunately, Ben's mechanic had not properly re-attached his front left wheel, so he stayed over until he could figure out how to tighten the lugnuts. So he was still here today, and ready for some board gaming. We spent some time punching out and sorting the pieces to "Sid Meier's Civilization -- The Board Game".



After that work, we didn't have enough time to play the actual game (well, maybe we did, but we perceived that we didn't), so we had a nice game of Puerto Rico.