Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Someone else's post about how much they'd done yesterday reminded me to note this:

I played Boggle and hung around for low-key conversation over Zoom with cattitude, quility, and some of Quility's Minneapolis friends for a little over an hour yesterday. Then I went and read my book, while they played for another hour+. I bailed because I was yawning, and we'd reached a sensible pause. (I warned everyone up front that I probably wasn't up for two and a half hours of Zoom gaming, and asked to play something where one game ends relatively quickly. Two weeks ago they gamed without me and spent three hours on a single game--which isn't flawed, but if they'd wanted to do that I'd excused myself rather than half to drop out mid-game when it might be inconvenient.

We had dinner at a Persian restaurant this evening. I was looking over the menu, got to #32, and happily said "fesenjan!" I hadn't had it in years; I used to get it now and then at an Afghan restaurant on St. Marks Place.

I made it sound like a good enough idea that A. also ordered it, though that may have had a lot to do with her general fondness for pomegranate. Persian fesenjan isn't quite like Afghani, based on both my own taste-memory and what the server said; I had expected something a little sharper than this, and maybe a bit less nutty. But it was good, as was the basmati rice (and the soup that came with it, which I didn't finish because I wanted to be sure to have room for the fesenjan). papersky also liked it; rysmiel agreed, but thought that while a little was nice, they wouldn't want a whole meal of it. (On the other hand, one taste of rysmiel's beef kebab convinced me that while it was a perfectly nice kebab, it really wasn't what I wanted.)

That was dinner; brunch was dim sum at Kam Fung, where I ate too much, with rysmiel, Papersky, zorinth (who was also at dinner), plus rezendi and his girlfriend S.

In between, we drank tea and then played a game called something like "Aye, Dark Overlord," which is a story-improv game which, rather than defining a winning condition, defines a losing one: the Dark Overlord gives Withering Looks to minions whose excuses/blame-shifting aren't good enough, and the first player to get three loses the round. (The "Overlord" can also assign a withering glance for offenses including two players sniping at each other rather than tossing the story at everyone, not in turn, but a reasonable amount of the time.Overlordship then passes to another player. I am told we have maviscruet to thank for the recommendation. Mavis, if you're reading this, thanks.

I've recently run across several references on LJ to "strip $game", from Scrabble to Candyland, and I'm just bemused. Especially here on a hot August afternoon, I can't wrap my mind around the idea that being naked constitutes losing.

It seems that we didn't do much other than hang out and talk and eat good food, much of it cooked by papersky. ("We" being her, me, rysmiel, zorinth, and fivemack, with occasional appearances by other people.)

The trip up was longer than it should have been—long enough to inconvenience the friends who were waiting for me—in part because instead of changing engines at Albany, we changed trains. But I had window seats on the east side of the train both ways, and spent lots of time looking at Lake Champlain. The highlight was what I'm fairly sure was a trio of bald eagles, flying low over the frozen surface, on my way home yesterday; on the way up I saw herons and goldeneyes [a kind of duck].

My old boots leaked, despite being freshly sprayed with the waterproofing stuff; I have abandoned them, after several days of slow dampness, and will be boot-shopping in the next day or two. The problem wasn't snow, it was slush, because we had unseasonably warm weather (highs a degree or three above freezing, lows slightly below freezing) for most of my stay.

Even when one of the party speaks Mandarin fluently, it is possible to wind up with dim sum that none of you know the ingredients of. It all tasted good, though. I was startled to find that nobody else had eaten taro before, but they liked it. For New Year's, we went to Marche Atwater and got a goose, which Papersky roasted, with many other good things, for New Year's Eve dinner; there was enough left to make a superior goose pie the next day.

I was glad to meet denizsarikaya and somecanuckchick, and have them for additional company at the Biodome and an early supper. There's only one beaver at the Biodome right now, but it was active and we enjoyed watching it. The problem with going to zoos during school holidays is that everyone had the same idea, but we got a good long look at everything.

Rysmiel gives excellent, thorough backrubs: I felt much better for it.

I have now played Settlers of Catan, and won my first game; I played (and lost at) Monopoly for the first time in many years. We also played Scrabble, Credo, Fluxx, and a card-trading and -collecting game whose name I keep forgetting. Tyson (WINOLJ), Zorinth's friend who lives downstairs, joined us for about half of these.

The Science Museum was fun, though after a while the exhibits get to looking familiar: a lot of the good science museum exhibits are replicated in numerous places. Also, I lost an earring there, one of a pair of Landsat Earth beads; I have hopes of replacing it, since it's a commercially available earring, not a one-of-a-kind made by elisem.

I'm glad to be home with cattitude, but was sorry to leave Montreal and my friends there so soon.