Mortaine’s Blog

Thanksgiving was pleasant, if a bit, uh, loud. I’m not entirely sure what the plan for media was at my brother’s friends’ house, but one of the residents put on Casino, which is a 4 hour mobster movie with a lot of gratuitous violence and bloodshed (uh, why?), and then periodically my brother would come in and co-opt the stereo system to play some music.

Like, Diana Ross. Um. Cheesy 70’s love songs playing over gratuitious graphic bloodshed…. why?

Not to mention the fact that the house was set up very nicely for being completely immersed in the audio experience. Which means the speakers were right next to the sides of the sofa. So through the entire evening, I had unescapable sound– either movie sound or music– blaring into my eardrums. I kept asking if they could turn it down (since the stereo goes through some kind of soundboard a la DJing equipment), and every time they did, the sound would go fractionally lower (like the difference between 10 and 9 on your stereo), and within a half hour, someone would come in and turn it back up again eventually.

In the midst of this, we decided to play some of the games I’d brought. So we had 7 people playing Apples to Apples, with blaring Diana Ross or Al Pacino in the background.

*sigh* But seeing my brother was nice, and it was good food and I didn’t overeat, though I think the turkey didn’t set right with my stomach.

And Friday was cool– nice party with nice people. Ran the Looney Labs mini experiment and gave away flowers and Star cards, which was OK. I learned to play Zendo, which is a neat, Zen-like pyramid guessing game– I think it’s one that and would like.

Saturday was a day off, so I wrote and chilled and slept. I slept a lot. First I slept in on Saturday morning, and in the afternoon I slept for about 3 hours to get rid of the migraine I was getting and because I was just really exhausted.

Yesterday at the write-in, I reached my 50,000th word, and stopped right there. I added 95 words last night, and another 40 this morning, but I left the laptop at home today for a much-needed break.

I had my D&D game in the afternoon– we defeated a 400+ hit point scorpion (yay), but I lost nearly all my hit points, and most of my strength. Ew. I think if we can heal up the fighters, and don’t have any massively huge challenges like that ahead of us, we could still face the death knight on our way out. But I don’t know.

And Hammer has a big nasty infected wound on his toe. I think the nail’s going to fall off, and I’m worried about a mole that’s grown to big nasty size recently that I found on his leg.