It’s been another busy couple of weeks. When we last left our intrepid hero protagonist, he was on the eve of a jazz gig at a club in Mt. Kisco. Here’s how that went.
I hadn’t been to Mt. Kisco in a while, and it was a bit further than I remembered, out past Bedford almost to Katonah. The club itself was in this funny little pedestrian mall. Inside the place was nice, with a bar, a dozen or so tables, and a stage with a grand piano and drum kit, and a PA and mixing provided. The club owner was the bartender, sound engineer and host for the diners. He was a bit fussy about the setup, and insisted the bass go direct and not use his amp or effects. I guess he was afraid of the bass being too loud. However, we had trouble hearing the bass thru the monitors, which affected our performance.
Still overall it went well. The energy and playing were good. We had a decent crowd and they seemed to really dig us. Robyn sat in with the group, singing a bunch of standards. We had more of a chance to rehearse the arrangements since her last gig with us, and it felt more together. The show was a single long set, so we did about half songs with Robyn, and half our originals, and one or two standards. The food there was pretty good too, and the cocktails too.
That was Wednesday night. That Friday evening Jeannie and I drove up to Buffalo for a visit, leaving home right after work and arriving after midnight. The motivating event behind this trip is was wanted to have Charlie go on a tour of UB, his first college visit. We figured it’d be good to do while Michelle is still a student there. Saturday was rain out, and was a chill day without any plans, the first in a long time. I’d been thinking of buying a new bicycle, so we went to Burt’s Bikes, a big bike store up there. Our local bike store is small, and I need an extra tall sized frame and would rather test ride a bike than order one unseen. I looked a few bikes, but due to the rain wasn’t able to ride them outside. So they said come back the next day if the weather is better.
We also went to the Walden Galleria mall. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to any mall, and the last few trip the mall was always pathetic and mostly empty and on the verge of closing down. But this mall was really hopping, full of people and stores. There was a gaming store where I looked for a new D&D module and Jeannie bought some dice. There was an anime store, a Lego store, and Apple store, and even a Spencer’s. Wow, throwback to another era. That evening we took Lizzy and Josh and Michelle out to dinner at a nice place in Allentown. Before and after we hung out at Lizzy’s apartment. They have alot of legos in their place. Everyone is happy and doing well. Lizzy and Josh just got back from a min-vacation to Washington D.C. Michelle and Josh are both graduating in May.
Sunday morning I went back to bike shop and auditioned several bikes. In the end I bought a Trek Dual Sport, which is a hybrid trail and road bike. It has an aluminum frame and carbon fiber front fork, and disc brakes and a single ten-speed derailleur, as is the modern way. It also has more comfortable handlebars than my current bike, is more curvy looking and is a nice shade of blue. When I got it home I saw that the proportions and dimensions are almost identical to my old bike, a Mt Trek 850 I bought in the 1990’s when Google was just a small startup with their office above Palo Alto Bicycles and a handcrafted neon sign on the door. (I talked Jeannie out of applying for a job there, but that’s a whole ‘nuther story.) Sunday afternoon Kathleen and kids showed up. I took them for a walk out to the local playground. In the evening we played D&D.
The D&D campaign had reached the big climax of the adventure. By now all the characters are third level and are gaining some good fighting and spellcasting abilities, and the players are learning how to use their characters well. And the monsters and bad guys are getting tougher and more fun to run. The module we’re doing is called The Sunless Citadel, and the big boss is an evil druid doing unnatural experiments with growing plants underground without sunlight, aided by evil animated plants and a plant-zombiefied Paladin and his Cleric sister. In the middle of the cave is the tree of evil, so Charlie (playing Luna, and Elfin Ranger) decides to climb it to try and pick the white apple of pure evil, and finds a host of monsters up in its branches. At some point the rest of the party realize that if they destroy the tree it may break the spell of the zombified NPCs, so thay start hacking at it with their weapons. Charlie’s cousin Rylee (playing Nyx, and Elvish Fighter, rolls a natural 20, so I have Charlie roll a dexterity check to see if he falls out of the tree. He failed his save and so fell and took enough damage to reduce him to 0hp.
Charlie was revived, but was really upset and decided to attack Nxy with an unarmed strike for revenge. (All of these characters are neutral to chaotic, but I figured it would have been Matthew and Abbie to come to blows first.) I guess to his credit he used is second attack for this. Rylee retaliated by swing her sword at him, and Charlie was reduced to 0hp again!
All that was the week before. This last week they spent mopping up and making their way back out of the dungeon. I give them some magic beans of levitation, but they never figured out what they were and spent a good deal of time climbing up a shaftway and falling repeatedly. At last they made it out, only to be ambushed by a White Dragon Wyrmling they encountered earlier. It had escaped when Abbie tried to charm and befriend it while Matthew tried to kill it, and an altercation erupted between the two of them. This time the dragon incapacitated most of the party instantly, and soon the only ones left standing were Nyx and Luna. Nyx had climbed a cliff wall and jumped on the dragon’s back, and was attempting stab it in the neck but rolling low, when it dove out of the sky to lunge at Luna. Charlie delivered the killing blow, which caused the creature to crash into the earth rather than veer back skyward, and so Rylee had to roll a dexterity save or take massive damage from the fall. Fortunately for her, but much to Charlie’s chagrin, she made her save and took only half damage, and survived the ordeal with 2hp remaining.
Monday morning was the campus tour. Jeannie went with Charlie and Kathleen, since she’s an alum of the engineering school, which is where Charlie’s interest lies. I took Abbie, Mathew and Ellie on an informal tour of the campus of my own basically walking around. We went to Baird Point, where Abbie found a strangely crafted and polished stone block. She and Match developed a theory that there were five of them hidden around the campus, so she was on the lookout the rest of the morning (she’s a bit of a collector) but found only a random brick or chunk of wood or metal. We walked out to Ellicot complex and across the terrace and ended up at Goose Poop Island. There was sort of circle in the ground like a giant seal, probably where people did tai-chi on the weekend. The kids surmised that if you brought the five stones together in that spot and stacked them in the shape of an Inukshuk, it would grow to enormous proportions and re-arrange Ellicot into the shape of a normal, rectangular building! Meanwhile Charlie enjoyed the tour and both he and Kathleen found it informative.
Wow, I’ve been going a while. Gonna hafta call it a night here. Next up: the new stuff at work, progress on the Spellbound recording project, and defragging the studio part II.