Category: Consumption

Carcassonne: The Princess and the Dragon

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I guess if you’re on your third expansion for a game, you’re officially a fan. Carcassonne came with the River expansion, and we added Inns and Cathedrals a year or two ago. This time around, we’ve added The Princess and the Dragon to the mix. All the expansions layer on top of the base game, and now it’s extended to a Hera-and-Zeus level of near chaos, which makes for an awesome game. We played until 1am last night (and I still biked to work, woop!).

Killer Joe, the play

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We were blown away this weekend by the Raleigh Ensemble Players’ presentation of the off-broadway show “Killer Joe”. As a member of the audience, you’re practically injected into the living space of the trashy trailer that takes up 80% of the little theater, with three thin rows of chairs lining each side of it (we were on the “Pabst Blue Ribbon” side). It was like watching dysfunctional fireworks. My friend Ryan played the core role of Chris, down and out and looking for a way out. It was awesome to watch him nail the part.

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Wrenny Turns Six!

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Wren turned 6 on Tuesday! We had a party for her on the previous weekend at her gymnastics gym. We were worried it wouldn’t happen – ice and snow were predicted – but the bad weather held off and all 12 friends showed. The kids started arriving in the front room, and before the party started they had turned that into an extension of the gym, rolling and tumbling and yelling. Everybody had a blast!

I think the best part was watching Wrenny thank each kid for attending, politely handing each a goodie bag. Mom had given her some preemptive manners lessons to head off Wrenny’s shyness, and it worked like a charm. Coupled with Wrenny’s new desire to carefully enunciate every word, you couldn’t ask for a cuter kid. :> Pictures forthcoming…

On Tuesday we all played her new cooperative game called Rainbowland. You can’t beat a great cooperative game for family fun, and this one qualifies! Cute as all get out. :>

9.0 Battlestar Galactica

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Just finished watching the Battlestar Galactica miniseries (read: pilot) and season 1. Good fun! I fell in love with episode 5 and did not like 10, other than that it was solid military-centered space sci-fi. I even broke out Descent yesterday in inspiration! Descent 3 still rocks to this day. If anyone’s got the guts to play, shoot me a hello and I’ll hook ya up for a smackdown. :>


Rubik’s Cube: 3×3 down, 4×4 to go…

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I solved the Rubik’s Cube I got for Christmas yesterday (cool gift, thanks baby!). I never had the patience for it in my youth, and that always bugged me. This time, I just used some formulas and it’s a piece of cake. My pal Larry got a 4×4 Rubik’s Revenge (he’s the pro) and I played with that a little bit… now THAT is going to take some work…

Let it snow!

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We’ve got a white day-after-Christmas!

It was snowing when we woke up this morning, and it kept up for an hour or two – just enough for us to scrape out a few small sled runs, throw a few snowballs, and harvest up enough snow for a snowman “little person”. Once we were frozen we headed back inside for some Burgundy Soup that Grammy and I scrounged up. Yum!

And Happy Birthday Grammy! We gave her tickets to see The Nutcracker performed by the Carolina Ballet Company and the Carolina Symphony Orchestra. We had to leave extra time for driving on the icy roads. We ended up in the FRONT ROW! We got to watch the percussion guy pull out all kinds of special noisemakers – he was only 10′ away from us. It was a great show, full of beautiful costumes and mesmerizing dancing – leaping acrobatics, a choreographed war between the rat and his mice and the nutcracker and his toy soldiers, and the enchanting “coffee” dancer – quite a hottie! And it’s a pretty rare treat to be that close to a full orchestra.

9.5 The Polar Express: An IMAX 3D Experience

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The most visually stunning computer animation display to date. Imagine seeing a gentle snowfall in 3D, and you’ve just started to understand how beautiful this film was. Not just cheesy layers of occasional 3D, but a total, immersive 3D world. Everyone loved it, even Wrenny, who closed her eyes a few times when things got scary. A nicely done story about a kid recapturing his faith (even if it was faith in some guy in a red suit). It was below freezing and windy at the IMAX theater, which added to the ambiance.

From a technical perspective, the only thing that still needed work was modelling the physics of the human body better – all the human characters still had that imperfectly-motion-captured jerkiness. But the richness of the 3D world drawn on the huge IMAX screen was simply stunning.