magic the gathering – Page 3

Die Bahn

Two things today: I put the finishing touches on the preparation for Friday night’s Magic: the Gathering event. Phew. It was a lot of work, but it’s good to have it completed. Now I just have to wait with eager anticipation for Friday night, when my friends and I get to play this tournament!

And secondly I did some preparation for my upcoming trip to Germany for ISO photography standards meetings. My wife is travelling with me. Unfortunately because of the way the dates work out and the time zone shift, we have to fly back home from Frankfurt on the evening of the day before our wedding anniversary, and we don’t get home until the morning of the day after our anniversary. Basically, we’re going to lose our anniversary this year. We end up spending a couple of hours waiting for a connecting flight at 3am in Dubai Airport, but that’s not exactly conducive to a romantic meal or anything. So I’ve booked a fancy restaurant in Cologne for the evening before we leave, two days early. It’s a place we’ve eaten at before, so we know it’ll be good.

I also booked our connecting train tickets today. Die Bahn is a great service, but gosh the tickets are expensive. We’re travelling from Frankfurt Airport to Essen, where we’re going to attend a day of the Spiel board gaming fair, and then we travel back to Cologne for my ISO meetings, before heading home. It’ll be a short trip, but should be fun!

New content today:

Comic batching

I still had three or four strips to write in the latest batch of Irregular Webcomic!, so I started on those first thing this morning. I powered through writing them in about an hour or so, and it was still early enough to get to work on photographing, so I did. I had to run down to the garage to retrieve my Lego Jabba the Hutt for one new comic. It would have been ideal to have the Lego Boushh figure as well, but I don’t have that so I had to improvise:

Now that I look at it, I realise this scene shouldn’t have Leia in the slave outfit next to Jabba… but, oh well. Anyway, building sets and taking photos for the comics took several hours, and I didn’t finish until a late lunch time.

After lunch I took Scully for a walk and dropped in at the small nearby supermarket to pick up some fruit. And this afternoon I starting putting the finishing touches on the Magic: the Gathering thing I’m preparing for Friday night. It’s nearly finished – hopefully I’ll be able to finish it off tomorrow so I can work on some other things later in the week.

New content today:

Lazy Sunday

The title pretty much sums it up. Slept in, took Scully for a couple of walks and plays in the park, and otherwise bummed around the house.

What I did was mostly sorting through old Magic: the Gathering cards. Over the years my friends and I have played dozens of booster draft tournaments as new sets were released, and I had dozens of old decks from these tournaments lying around. I decided to sort all the cards and put them into some proper storage. I haven’t completed the task… at the moment the dining table is covered in piles of cards. I’ll try and finish it tomorrow.

New content today:

One quarter of the way

Today I wrote another one of the 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe, number 25 out of the planned 100. A nice milestone! In fact, I have more than 100 planned… but it’s a quarter of the way to the nominal target.

In the afternoon I did more preparation for the Magic: the Gathering event I’m planning for my friends. I still have several hours worth of work to do, but I should have plenty of time before the date, which is still over 2 weeks away.

That’s kind of all I’ve done today – those two things together took up over 12 hours of work. Well, I also took Scully for a walk and cooked dinner (curried vegetables in pastry parcels) and other normal daily stuff. I’m a bit tired now…

New content today:

Magical Sunday

Most of today I spent doing more preparation for the Magic: the Gathering game night I’m organising for my friends. Not much more I can say about it at this stage, I’m afraid.

Apart from that, my wife and I went out for a late lunch at Balmoral Beach, which is a pleasant harbour beach about 15 minutes drive away. We had a pleasant lunch of beetroot and roast pumpkin salads on the promenade looking across at the beach and the water. The weather was still a little windy, but there were several people enjoying the sunshine and swimming in the water, though most of the people there were on the grass, having picnics, walking dogs, etc. Unfortunately I forgot to take my phone, so I couldn’t capture any photos of the beach to show you.

New content today:

Cleaning and creating

Housecleaning day! After dealing with the usual Saturday morning routines, I spent some time organising details for the special Magic: the Gathering games night I’m running for my friends in three weeks. I have still have quite a bit of prep to do, and will be devoting a few days to it in the coming week. No details yet, to avoid spoiling the surprise for my friends! I’m getting more excited about this every day though.

In between I worked on some photos from my trip to Portugal in May, completing another day of the trip, which meant that I could complete my travel diary entry for the day.

I also did some Real Work type work, reading through a proposed ISO standard for photography and writing up comments on the draft. This is work that I started when I had a job at Canon (and got paid for it), and am now continuing in an independent expert (i.e. unemployed) capacity, because I believe in supporting the work and representing Australia’s interests in these international standards. The next face-to-face meeting of the ISO Photography committee is in Cologne, Germany, in the last week of October, and I am going to attend – I’ve booked my flights and hotels already. Standards Australia may provide me with funding, dependent on their budget and how important they think it is for me to attend this meeting – but I’ve already spent the money, so I’m going whether I get funded or not.

While in Germany, coincidentally the huge Spiel board gaming fair is on in Essen just days before my ISO meeting. And since Essen is less than an hour from Cologne, I’m taking the opportunity to visit and attend the fair – probably a once in a lifetime chance for me. So I’m pretty excited about that!

New content today:

Stranger Things!

Here are some photos as promised yesterday of the Stranger Things Lego set that I finished building.

It’s incredibly cool. The whole set can be turned upside down, to display either the real word or the Upside Down more prominently. And there’s a light that projects onto the Christmas Lights. There’s a whole lot of other wonderful detail that you probably can’t see very well in the photos. This is the definitely biggest and possibly the coolest Lego set that I’ve ever owned.

Today I spent most of the day writing another one of the 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe, this time about walking around the world in a straight line. And a bit of time doing more prep for my Very Special Magic Draft. Oh, and I decided to remove the “latest posts” thing in the sidebar of this blog and replace it with a tag cloud, now that I have an interesting number of tags that I use for posts.

New content today:

Sunday walking

Today was mostly a day spent with wife and Scully. We took a couple of long walks to exercise Scully, around the neighbourhood. The council has laid poison fox baits in one of the bushland areas that we like to walk through, so we gave that a wide berth, taking a detour up a very steep hill to avoid them. Here’s Scully at the marina this morning:

On the afternoon walk we want a different way. There’s a street lined with cherry blossom trees, and they’re all in flower at the moment, so it’s very pretty. It’s rather early in the year for this, but our winter has been so warm that the plants obviously think it’s spring already.

At home in between and then this evening, I’ve been shuffling between two thing: building the Stranger Things Lego set that I got the other day, and working some more on my secret Magic: the Gathering project. The date for the Magic draft event with my friends is set for Friday 27 September – it’s the earliest date that we can all make. So we have a bit over a month of anticipation. When it happens I’ll definitely report on it!

New content today:

Slow Saturday

Housework day! The bathroom is sparkling clean once more, groceries have been shopped, and… I finalised the sale of my old computer to a buyer through a local classifieds website. All very domestic.

In more fun activities, today saw the assembling of tomorrow’s Darths & Droids strip, which was written just last night at Games Night, as reported in my previous post. And I now have RSVPs from everyone I invited to my Very Special Magic: the Gathering Draft event Secret Project that I told you about on Wednesday. Even though I saw some of the guys last night at Games Night, we didn’t talk about it, so I don’t know what sort of thing they’re expecting. But the emailed RSVPs have expressed curiosity and intrigue.

To round out the day, wife, Scully, and myself went out for dinner at a nice restaurant a few suburbs away – from which we’ve just returned home this fine winter evening. It’s always nice to not have to cook! Their dessert menu had a “deconstructed cheesecake” on it, which I had to try because it reminds me of some of the things at mezzacotta Café. It was delicious, actually.

New content tonight:

Secret project

Wednesday is Ethics day! My class this morning was about half the normal size, 9 or 10 kids, down from 18, because of what they explained to me was a rehearsal for some sort of dance performance thing, which apparently lots of the students are involved in. It was the final lesson of the moral responsibility topic, so I had to do the sum up discussion with just half the class. The thing about this topic is that the kids were pretty much all agreed that people should help those most in need, rather than their own friends or family if their needs are less. So there weren’t a lot of opposing opinions to go through like there are on some other topics. Next week we start on stealing, which should be interesting.

After teaching my class, I travelled into the city to visit some book shops and a game shop. I bought a copy of Stephen Fry’s Heroes, part two of his retelling of the Greek myths, following Mythos, which was stories about the gods. I do love the Greek myths, and have a few different versions of them on my bookshelves.

When I got home I worked all afternoon on a secret project. Not secret from you, dear reader, but secret from my friends, some of whom might read this blog, so I dare not share any details here until the time is ripe. I can say that it’s related to a Magic: the Gathering card game evening that I am planning to hold – but no more than that. Oh, I can show you the invitation I just sent to my friends:

invitation

I am so looking forward to this!

New comics content today: