September 2008 Archives

Jon, Nick and myself played at Cat Hollow Today.

I got a couple of birdies on holes 3 and 18. 18 is especially tough. There is a row of trees that block easy access to the basket. You have to throw a high hyzer to the right and up and over the trees. And, if you make it over them, it would then fall back to the left land close to the basket. Or, at least, that is the plan. This time it both made it over the trees and landed close enough for a birdie!

Galaxy Trucker

First up on the table was Galaxy Trucker. I like this game. It is thematic. And both parts of the game are fun for me. The tension building your ship while competing with everyone else for the same parts. And the tension of trying to stay alive during the delivery run. The events can be brutal. You just might loose large chunks of your space ship.

Race For The Galaxy

We kept within the Science Fiction theme tonight and played Race For the Galaxy. My cards eventually fit into a clear strategy: build and score developments. I was also able to set up a trading chain which netted me seven or so cards every other turn. But I knew I had to end the game early. I didn't want the others to catch up to me. Fortunately, I was able to do so and win the game.

Here is yet another loaner car. Which I have had my fill of recently. What with the two separate replace the header gasket incidents recently.

This time I am driving a BMW X-5. When I bought the car, part of the deal was replacing the car's chip with a performance upgrade. Apparently, they couldn't just install it before I bought it. I had to first buy the car, then drive it off the lot, and then come back in to have it upgraded. Whatever. Bureaucracy or State Laws at their finest, I guess.

Last Thursday, I drop the car off and here I am with the car. Almost a week later. Not the speediest upgrade. But, I can't complain with a free rental. However, when I get the bill, I notice that part of the bill is $130 in freight! That is crazy! Like almost plane travel transportation crazy. That part of the bill I can complain about...

Back to the car, or SUV. Sesh, it is a pig. Big, heavy, extremely slow. I don't know why people would buy cars like these. Sure, its roomy. But it is underpowered and a gas guzzler.

This is the first time I have had all seven doubles in my hand! I was the first to bid and I automatically called plunge (a convention meaning that you have four or more doubles in your hand and one of them is the six/six). Unfortunately, this was the wrong thing to do. The score was six to two and we were winning. The last player on the other team raised my bid to four marks. Which won the bid. And he also made me completely irrelevant by calling "doubles are a suit of their own".

This is another reason why I hate 42. There are lay-down hands or even very-likely to succeed hands, and yet you can just up the bid and try for a lucky chance. Like, for instance, that you partner holds the bone, or bones, that will stop you (this being a 1 in 3 chance).

One time I blind plunged. My partner hears this and raises the bid. He has the other three doubles and a punt (a bone that is not under one of his doubles). This was an automatic four point swing. With the game being the first to seven points, that is a huge jump.

I saw this car parked at the Monument Cafe this morning with a huge Teddy Bear sitting in the driver's seat. The colors matched as well. How cute!

Mike, Jon, and I went out to the Brenbrook subdivision to play disc golf at the new course. This was our second time out there. I drove us out there in my BMW X5 loaner car. The directions that the iPhone gave us was a little squirrelly. But we made it to the proper location.

Hole 5 was rather tough because the out of bounds areas were not mowed down like it was for the rest of the course. Jon managed to narrowly miss throwing his disc in the lake. And I managed to get stung by a wasp.

I did get a birdie on hole 9. But it was not that tough. The hole is only a short distance away and it is in a wide open field.

Hole 17 was not that hard with the severe drought that we have been through. The pond where you throw your disc over is completely dry.

They have made one improvement to this course. They put concrete tubes that act as bridges where you have to cross water. But this course still needs a lot of improvement. There are no signs for the tees. And there are a couple of places where you can get confused as to where to go next.

On somewhat of a spur of the moment, I purchased a new car. I have been thinking about getting something different for a while now. So, when I realized that I needed to replace all four of my tires and brakes, I decided that it was time. If I bought a car now, I could avoid having to spend around two grand for new tires and brakes.

I took a BMW 335i for a test drive. I liked the car. It was fun to drive: well balanced, responsive, and it telegraphed the road feel nicely. So I asked how much my trade in would be. They initially told me 12K. Which was disappointing. The blue book value for a trade in was 16K. But I eventually talked him into using 14K as the value.

I also looked at Corvettes. There is some serious deals going on there. For a 2008 Black Corvette with the Z51 package, the MSRP was 62,140. They were offering employee pricing of 53,029. Nine grand off! They too offered me 14K for the trade in. There was only one car in stock with that type of deal, though. It was black and an automatic.

While I have wanted a Corvette for a while now, I just don't like their profile and how I fit inside them. The car is really low to the ground and relatively big. And I barely fit inside one. My head feels like it is dangerously close to the pillar and ceiling. Which is not a good thing since, in an accident, you are likely to go up and forward.

The BMW has a lot of refinements to it. It is very polished and civilized for a car. I like the fact that the radio was made for the iPhone. It connects via an accessory cable to it. You can charge it and it will transfer the phone book contacts and music play list to the radio. And the radio also acts as a blue-tooth headset as well. The car key acts like a fob. You only need to carry it in your pocket to lock/unlock or start the car. The car also comes with free maintenance for four years. All costs are covered.

I also learned that BMW offers an upgrade to the chip which controls the car's computer. This upgrades the car's horsepower rating from 332 to 384 and the torque from 325 to 421 lb/ft. Even better, the warranty is not invalidated. It is fully supported by BMW. When I asked that they throw in the chip for free (a 2500 value), the salesman immediately agreed. Damn. That was too easy. I wonder else I could have got. But it was enough to tip the scale towards buying the vehicle. It also helped that BMW was offering 0.9% financing.

Looking back in time, I paid $19075.72 in October 2003 for my F-150 Lightning which included TT&L. The MSRP was $33,310.00. I traded it in today for $14,000. Which meant that I only lost 5 grand? But the cost to me included my previous trade in. So I don't think that would be a good way to remember my truck's value. But it is better than the 19 thousand dollar loss (33K-14K). While my vehicle is a limited edition version (only 2500 were made), Ford makes a billion F-150s. And it probably hurts that my truck is only a two seater.

My total gas cost over the lifetime of the Lightning was $9126.50. My total maintenance cost was $3060.77. And the insurance cost was $6957.00. Over the 59 months of ownership, that makes it $324.48 a month to operate. Which seems like a lot of money.

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London from above, at night link via

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Jon and I played at Wilco today. And it seems that there was a little bit of preparation for the upcoming Outlaw Singles Shootout. There were temporary tee boxes on holes 3, 4, and 10.

We came across some bones. Which were part of a vertebral column. Who knows what creature it came from. Or what ripped it up.

After the round, we stopped at Chuy's for lunch. The Green Hatch Chile festival was still going on. They had a cute tie in with the presidential elections.

It seems that another month has gone by. And we don't have a pesky hurricane to ruin it either. Ike moved east and completely missed us. Not a drop of rain hit the ground around here. Which is sad. We desperately need the rain in this drought.

Mike bought a new DM screen. Which he was happy to display. And Joe bought some appropriate candies: Mike and Ike Tropical Typhoon flavor.

Ike did give us a good show during sunset. The colors were beautiful.

We slowly worked our way deeper into the dungeon. And we all gained another level (to 3). I was luckily enough to find a magical wand of Witch Fire. I need the bonus help on hitting monsters. Our new NPC, Brother Tanaka, is a Warforged Paladin and he is very helpful. No close calls this night.

Although the dice was rolling poorly for Jon. He rolled 6 critical fumbles! Amusingly, one of the minions rolled a critical fumble and caused him self a couple of hit points. Which was enough to kill it!

Well, it looks like Hurricane Ike's path is currently projected to head right over Austin! But I should know better. Even though they have a projection, it is completely worthless this far out in the future...

When I bought my super-truck, I bought an extended warranty to go with it. I liked having the peace of mind that goes with a warranty and I knew I would be driving the snot out of that truck.

When the head gasket failed last April, I thought those problems had been fixed. So, when I started to smell burning oil, I thought that something else was broken. Perhaps the transmission was leaking or the fluid was burning out. This time I took it to Leif Johnson Ford instead of Mack Haik Ford. It is interesting how different these two dealerships are. Leif did not charge me investigatory fees. And they drove me to work in a huge F-250 diesel.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the head gasket failed again. Apparently, there are two sides to this engine and they only replaced one of the sides. What a coincidence! I wonder if it is anything like the analogy of when two new lights have been on for ages -- when one fails, the other is surely near its end of life. It is strange that, when they had the engine apart, why couldn't they replace both gaskets? I don't think that the gasket price is that expensive.

Another difference between the dealerships is that they did not talk about the deductible on the rental. Although, this time, the charge to fill up the gas themselves was a ridiculous 7 dollars per gallon.

So it seems that my warranty has saved me around five thousand dollars so far I imagine. That is, if I would have fixed this on my own dime.

According to this article, The Monument Cafe is moving. So I went to see if it was true or not. And it is. They are moving North 11 or so blocks. The owners will keep the old location. And there is no definitive word on what will replace it. I do hope they repair that old parking lot. It is rather bad.

Jon and I did another round of disc golf at Wilco this morning.

Man, this course was crowded this morning. I am guessing that the upcoming Outlaw Singles might have something to do with that.

On hole 17, my Wraith barely made it around the huge group of trees on the left. And I was able to putt it in for a birdie.

On hole 18, I found a blue Valkrye which had no name on it. I left it on top of 18's basket. Later on, when we left (because we had skipped the first 6 holes due to congestion), someone was asking about that disk. I told him where it was (and I hope that it was still there).

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization

It's been a while since we have played TTA. Especially a four player game of it. This game is tough to balance. There are just so many variables to juggle. And, for tonight, my problem was science and rocks. My lack of science kept me from putting down a lot of buildings. I had to really pick and choose. And my lack of resources coal/iron/oil kept me from building more high value buildings. Especially my army. I knew it would be scored at the end of the game and I came in last in that race. But no one attacked me during the game which was nice. And I was able to keep in second place. Ahead of Marty, who seemed to pick up steam in the last couple of rounds.

Rachel joined us for bridge tonight and was my partner. She did pretty well considering that she was new to bridge (or, at least, her handicap was higher than we started with).

The date is 09/02/2008

The players are:

Shadow Hunters

We started the game day off with a filler game. Which was so-so. We probably should have waited for some more information on who is your enemy and who are your allies before attacking. But as we gathered information, we just started wailing on each other. Which is a good thing as it sped the game up.

Stone Age

Next up was a game that I wanted to play. It had dice in it and sounded interesting. You collect resources to trade in for victory points. There are some factors which mitigate dice rolls. First, you can gather tools which will bump up bad dice rolls. Next, the only critical dice roll is where you gather food and you start out with enough to last you for two turns.

I liked this game and would buy it.

Neuland

We played this classic game. But the new version. Which I hate compared to the old. The graphics are worse. The changes to the rules are horrible. Ugh. Give me the old version anytime. Fortunately, we used the old rule set with the new board (we did have to use a special counter to show where your turn ended ten spaces away from your current start position).

In this game, two things were painful for me. Both the mines and the coal mills were far away from my starting position. So I ended up being very inefficient. I also took a huge risk and left my food generation spot unguarded. I did this for two turns. But I was rewarded for this. I was able to get ahead of the pack and acquire the resources to build the final victory spot.

Can't Stop

There was some serious Grimming going on in this game. So we started up a game of Can't Stop at the table. That game is easy to pick up and leave. You do not need to remember any strategic information while you are away.

Ricochet Robots

Marty wanted to play this classic Russcon game. I was a little worried though. We had two new gamers at the table and I didn't think they were up to the spacial challenges that this game requires. But, towards the end, they started to get the hang of the game and even scored a victory point. Without Jeffles or MarkY at the table, this game is much easier to win.

Gipsy King

We ended out the night with this abstract game. I like it and should add it to my shopping list.

Before we headed up for Ed's game day, we played at the Rivery. Man, its been a while since I have played here.

On the course, Jon spotted a snake. He hates snakes, apparently. After I took this picture and left, I looked back to watch Jon attack the poor snake with a branch...

That was also at the hole where I made a birdie.