Snow, Caching, and Kohan

Started: 2004-01-25 19:20:15

Submitted: 2004-01-25 20:04:43

Visibility: World-readable

More than three months after I first attempted to create my first Kohan: Ahriman's Gift map, I finally got around to finishing it off. It's a small map designed around three players. Each player gets one corner, each with their own space to expand, and they all meet in the same killing zone in the middle. There's plenty of monsters protecting rewarding treasures in the north. Download it yourself and see what all the fuss is about.

(I've play-tested it a bit myself, mostly to ensure that the triggers worked the way I wanted them to (that was the part that screwed me up the first time around), but I'd like the opportunity to play it with a real, live human. I'll be in #fest for most of the evening should anyone feel like wandering by, although I can't guarantee I'll be near my keyboard.)

Instead of going to Boulder for church yesterday, Gem returned home after playing for young adult Sabbath school and we headed down to Denver First. (We've managed to become fairly over-committed at Boulder, so in the interest of still being marginally religious, we like to flee Boulder as often as possible. Denver First is still further from our apartment than Boulder, but it's not too bad. The fact that no one runs up to us five minutes before the service starts and says, "Can you do X?" is great.) Denver First has a contemporary service at 1130, which worked nicely for our schedule. (I still haven't figured out why Denver South's contemporary service starts at 0830 -- someone wasn't thinking with respect to that one.)

Yesterday, I attempted two nearby geocaches, both on the Coal Creek Trail in Lafayette. (That's a popular place for caches -- my one previous successful cache (Cache a Fish was on the trail as well.) I managed to find Coal Creek Black Diamond without too much trouble (after an almost-a-mile trek from Yoda; I walked by the cache two weeks ago without realizing it was there) and contemplated going home to eat lunch but decided to spend ten minutes looking for Mondo's Red & Dead. Ten minutes isn't enough for most caches, but I knew this one was close. I lucked out and found it well within my designated window.

Last night Gem and I amused ourselves watching Mars Attacks!, which was, as I expected, stupid and kind of funny. I did enjoy seeing the Landmark Hotel get destroyed. (How often do movies manage to capture real, live implosions?)

After doing laundry today, I contemplated my options for the day and headed out on another geocaching attempt. I headed to Viele Vexation, which seemed sufficiently complicated to keep me amused. As I wandered around the frozen Viele Lake, it was colder than I expected; when I couldn't figure out what the "infamous sports team" was, I gave up and headed back to Yoda. I dropped by the George Reynolds Branch Library to deposit a few books due today. When I got out of Yoda, I thought I saw a few white flecks that could be snow; when I returned, it was definitely snowing. I contemplated my options and decided to try for one or two quick cache.

Next on my list was Sphere, located in Green Mountain Cemetery, which I didn't know existed prior to searching local caches. It was an interesting experience to walk through the old cemetery while snow fell around me, dusting everything with a thin coating of snow. I found the memorial the cache mentioned and jotted down the required information to verify my find.

Although it was snowing more heavily, I decided to try one more cache: Dirty Laundry, which intrigued me based on its strange location, just off 28th Street in Boulder. I was able to find this one without even leaving my car.

Having successfully geocached, I returned home in the snow, ate my next meal of the day, and headed out with Gem to Toys'R'Us, where we hoped to get a Game Cube to feed my Pikmin addiction. (We happen to have a gift card from our wedding that Gem is kind enough to let me use for this nefarious purpose, although she's fairly convinced she'll still regret this in the future.) It was snowing far more heavily; before we got a mile from home I decided it would make more sense to turn around and get it tomorrow. (There was maybe two inches of snow on the ground, but the biggest problem was the speed with which it was falling -- those two inches had fallen in the past hour, and visibility was quite low. By now the snow has subsided, but now I'm afraid of something else: ice on the roads. Since I don't have to go anywhere tonight, I'm not going to, even to get a Game Cube. Gem can have one more night of peace.)

In unrelated news, I decided to change my desktop background. My new plan is to change my background every month (call it a "calendar"). As is my tradition, I created a modified version to serve as the background to my Eterms. I decided simply darkening the image (as I usually do) was too dark, so I tinted it blue, which is a bit easier on my eyes. You may examine my handiwork in my latest screenshot.

I even spent some time this weekend contemplating a "Christmas letter". We'll see what becomes of that.