Sell! Sell!

Last Friday we had a session of the GURPS Neverwhere game, on schedule. I didn't get around to writing it up until now, because I spent the weekend with family. Which I'll go into later.

The session was kind of short anyway... I'll try to write down what I remember.

( game summary )

Holiday Weekend, Day 1

I spent the weekend with family. I didn't travel to meet them -- well, I traveled across the city -- but they took up the entire weekend regardless. Somehow, my mother's learned to stay up until midnight, when visiting her kids...

As always, we didn't get all that much done. It isn't quite as cumbersome to get Stevie (Anna's kid) ready to move as it was when he was an infant, but it's still a pretty slow process, and we're pretty slow to move as a group even without considering that.

The first day, we spent most of the day setting up a ( christmas tree )

After that, we headed out to ( see the city... )

And then we opened a few presents. I got a bag of goodies -- some lego stuff, some little plastic animals, etc. Anna and Alex got the Bone brick from me (a last minute gift picked up at Wonderworld, where I'd stopped on the way over to pick up my weekly comic order), and a high-tech egg-beater from mom. Mom got an I-Pod, which all of us had gone in together on. She loaded it up with songs from Alex's mac -- which she'd lose as soon as she synced it to her own machine, of course, but that was okay. The plan was to give her a DVD with the songs she'd like for her to take home with her. She was excited about the present, and listened to it a lot (even though we were just inside the house talking, and she's *already* hard of hearing), but then discovered that it was broken -- the fast forward button didn't work!

And so we'll begin day 2.

Holiday Weekend, Day 2

I got home from Day 1 at 1am, and stumbled into bed. My head was splitting from a horrible neck ache just like the one I'd had a couple weeks ago, which had made the last few hours with the family unbearable. My mom had tried to give me a neckrub to make it feel better, but... well...

In the morning, I felt better, although again my neck was still giving warning twinges. This time, though, I noticed that my neck flared up *especially* bad when I hung the old-style headphones around my neck, like I'd been doing ALL DAY the previous day... and all day the other day, two weeks ago, when I'd had similar symptoms. Mystery solved? I hope so, because that's something I can easily stop doing.

I was up fairly early, but I spent some time playing KotOR 2 before heading over. I knew that once I got there I'd be trapped forever, so I needed to have a little alone time, especially considering that I was going back to work Monday and Tuesday.

When I got there, we left fairly quickly ( to get mom's I-POD fixed )

Before leaving the mall, we stopped at the ferry-playground to let Stevie run around and grin cheerily at the other kids -- Anna was worried that he'd be shy, like her, and mom, and me, and all our family, but he's not. We also stopped at the lego store, so that the nominal grownups could ooh and ahh at all the little displays, and buy a few toys to put together later...

By that time, it was 3pm. Mom wanted to buy me a cell phone -- she really liked her Virgin Mobile pre-pay, and thought that it was crazy that I didn't have one myself. There was a drug store across the street, a Bartells, which would have them. We had two hours until our dinner reservations. Would we have time to cross the street, buy the phone, and make the fifteen minute drive to the restaurant?

Yes, we actually seriously discussed whether we'd have time, and decided to take the risk.

The answer was 'yes, but just barely'. And only because our reservation hadn't gone through, and we had to re-reserve a table for six instead. I swear, I don't know what it IS with my family, but when I'm in there presence, time flows differently. I shudder to think what'll happen if Anna and Alex have more kids -- we'll all get together for thanksgiving or something, tear a hole in the fabric of space and time, and unleash a hoard of zombie ghosts on the world!

The restaurant we went to was ( a family italian place )

We had plenty of leftovers, so we ordered dessert to go (a tiramisu, soaked in rum -- not something Alex wanted to eat before driving) and headed home to... well, to talk about politics.

It wasn't a very productive discussion -- we all agreed on pretty much everything. Eventually, we stopped, put the baby to bed, and mom went to choose which music she'd actually steal. To Alex's dismay, she chose pretty much everything -- even things we knew she'd hate, like Nine Inch Nails and Beck. "You were supposed to pick out the things you recognized, and then we'd add stuff we thought you'd like!" he wailed, and then went to work culling her list, while mom and Anna went to sleep, because it was already midnight.

When I headed home, he was still at 6.15 gigs, trying to get it down to a single DVD.

I'm glad this is a short week at work -- I need a vacation.