new year cheer

Happy new year’s folks!

I have been neglecting this thing, I’ll admit. Laura’s post this evening (yesterday now) convinced me that I should share my new year’s resolution with everyone. Wait for it… I’m going to finish my novel!

Yes, I know, I said I was going to do that last November. It’s hard to believe that December is already gone, and not only that, but in the whole month I wrote a total of less than what I had to write in one day for November. I haven’t done any writing to speak of recently, but since new year’s I’ve thought about it a lot, and I have some new ideas to bring to the last chapter(s) that I’m hoping will make things worth the wait. I had a small eureka moment after staying up too late last night reading one of the few Rucker novels that I haven’t yet finished, Spacetime Donuts.

So once I’ve finished the novel, I’d like to edit it sometime this year too. But I’ll waive that lofty goal if I’m instead in the middle of another novel.

Nate’s entry about the balloon fencing tournament that he and I took part in last sunday is already the third result on google for balloon fencing. If you misspell balloon (baloon) the photo Nate took and I sent to my moblog comes up.

Anyway, I took sixth place in the tournament! I’ve maybe balloon fenced out at fest a total of two or three times before this. There were less than 20 participants total, so I’m not sure how good that really makes me, but I did beat Fisch during the tournament, which probably made him regret he’d ever brought me. I wonder if anyone has ever used more than the two balloons attached to the face masks? I think it would be cool to make a sort of balloon suit (maybe out of those long balloons you use to make balloon animals and stuff). Then you’d know wherever you hit your opponent. As nate mentioned, my forearm is pretty bruised after the tournament. He neglected to mention that it was my bout with him that landed me the only wound I actually felt later that day on the knuckle of my right thumb. Fisch already has a couple of fencing masks, and I’m going to see to it that he (or I) end up buying a couple of foils in the coming months so we can practice outside of tournaments.

As happened last year around this time, I have gotten really into board games the last few weeks. Fisch and I had been playing go on an almost daily basis, and at least once a week for the last few weeks I’ve had people over to play new games. Fisch is in Texas for the week, and I’ve been missing the Go playing, but tonight my friend Derik and I went over to DrBombay’s place and played Puerto Rico for the first time. It was a pretty cool game, and I’m looking forward to playing it again sometime when I know more what to expect. (more players might be fun too.)

I set up my board game geek profile tonight and started adding games to my collection. (username: grid) I’ve also decided I want all the games on this list at abstractstrategy.com.