Some time in the park

I went to a friend's birthday party today. It started out in the evening in the park and then moved on to his place.

The part I want to mention is the park. These days, it's light outside until 9pm or so and spring seems to have finally arrived on a somewhat "permanent" basis (well, permanent on an appropriate time scale --- just think of my applying a philosphical form of multiple scale perturbation theory with this comment). One thing this means is that when I look at the part of the quad outside my window, some group of students is invariably playing croquet there. (This would be one of the accurate parts of the Oxford stereotype. I haven't played croquet since I was about 7 or 8... I need to join them for a game at some point. I want to play.) Another thing this means is that it has put me very much in the mood to play frisbee. It is frisbee weather, after all. Naturally, today was the perfect opportunity to do so, and I indeed got the chance to toss around a frisbee for the first time since I moved here in October. (People back home: I'd really like to play some frisbee while I'm visiting!)

There are a couple of other things worth mentioning:

(1) The park is only 5 minutes from home, and it's really nice! There are tons of great places to play frisbee, it is bordered by a river, etc. I could live without the tons of insects, but that isn't exactly avoidable. I hadn't actually gone there before, but I wandered about for a bit and it's really great. Maybe I'll be able to find people who are interested in weekly frisbee games? That would be awesome!

(2) There were a couple of "awesome" incidents at the park: In one, some random teenager came up to us and asked us for food. This wasn't somebody who was destitute and needed food but rather someone who thought it would be cool to try to get some freebees. We declined his kind offer and apparent need to eat food so that he can grow. In the other, a couple of teenage girls who were seriously drunk and/or stoned kindly offered us the burnt tampon that they were using to smoke stuff with. (The stated reason was that they weren't able to put it out entirely.) What the fuck? We kindly refused this offer as well. I hope they don't get themselves in serious trouble, because if they go up to the wrong person in that kind of state, there's a major danger of that.

New games + upcoming podcast

I browsed through Games of Berkeley today and bought a new frisbee and two new games: 25 Words or Less (which I had tried to find previously for a while but failed and didn't buy at Games of Berkeley on one previous occasion because I didn't want to add stuff to my luggage---then I couldn't even find it online for a couple of years before eventually forgetting about it) and Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot. The latter seems to have a sense of humor very much along my lines, but we'll see when I play it. (Of course, this does mean I'm going to have another games night soon.) They had the Dunwich Horror expansion set and I briefly considered getting that, but I decided I was spending enough there for one day and I would rather get completely new stuff. (And this will take up some room in my suitcase...) They also had a new 80s edition of Trivial Pursuit, which would be very fun for me but I'm not currently surrounded by people who like to play Trivial Pursuit, so that didn't seem like a worthwhile purchase. I could have spent quite a bit longer in the story if I really wanted to be thorough: I didn't look through the entire stock of games carefully and I basically didn't look at the RPGs at all. Another time...

Gazebo and I were also last-minute guests on an episode of Berkeley Groks that was recorded today. I'll let you know when the podcast is available. (The podcast for each episode goes online right around when the episode airs.) To say our session needs heavy editing would be kind.