Long weekend. Somewhere around Thursday Jackie and I decided we were going to leave Sunday as “nothing to do” day.

Didn’t work out that way.

Friday was a Greyhawk catch up. I’m not thrilled with the way we’ve been running these things, but the module we played was a lot of fun and the people we played it with were also, of course. Still, the night started and ran later than expected, which led to some miscommunication later in the evening that then messed up our Sunday plans. The only really surprising thing about that is that it doesn’t happen more often.

Saturday morning a friend from Jackie’s job came by and helped me taught me how to put in a replacement water heater. Ours isn’t completely useless but it occassaionally leaks right now — normally, we might have put it off a bit longer but we had a vision of the thing hemmoraging water out over the washroom floor while we were in England and it was only Randy, Justin and the animals in the house to deal with it. Not good, so we took care of it. The whole thing went swimmingly — so well, in fact, that the both of us ruefully commented that we’d feel better if something had gone wrong during the installation — it just didn’t seem natural.

Saturday afternoon was errands and then the Cry Havoc people came over. Jackie and I made a big roast thing for the group — never have I put so much effort into a food dish that I couldn’t eat. Ahh well. During the dishing out of food I found out that two of the guys from the group had already taken the white chili recipe I made for them a few weeks ago and made it themselves for other groups of friends, where second and third helpings were the norm. Cool.

Sunday morning was the reffing job for the Rec soccer league. The first adult game was fine, but the second one, which of course involved the highly fractious, very emotional and unfortunately also very good team that I had problems with last week ended up with something like 15 minutes of time penalties in the first 25 minute half. My ‘boss’ was playing in the first game on the Rec Leagues ‘office’ team, and stayed to watch the second game (or walked back in to witness the verbal fracass) and told me he would have handled it exactly the same way. The other teams said the same thing, even those that also got a fair share of penalties, and the fractious team’s captain told me he was all for what I was doing, so I guess my stress was for nothing.

After the adults it was the kids games, which totally make the whole thing worth it. The only problem I had was that one of Justin’s competitive league teammate’s little brothers plays on one of the teams, and I know him and he’s a great kid. He was playing goalie. Afterwards, his dad and I were talking.

His Dad: Hey, was Christian doing something wrong in the net earlier? I noticed that when he was stopping the ball you looked like you wanted to stop and say something or blow the whistle or something.
Me: Ummm… No. The problem is that I’m so used to cheering for your kids that I had to keep stopping myself from clapping when he stopped a shot.

After that, it was off to the Consortium to do the 1930’s Pulp Adventure thing. Good stuff, fun genre, and a great group to play it with (even when half the table would break in impromptu song in the middle of various things). More on that later on my much-neglected games page.

More later. Time to hit the shower.