Today is the fifth Monday of January, almost certainly no one’s favorite day of the year. I’ve been trying to shake the doldrums of winter. Lots of rainy and sunless days. Work has been busy and my increasing load of meetings and random tasks means less time to focus on writing software. Michelle went back up to school yesterday, so the nest is empty once again.
Guess what, I’m in a D&D campaign again! Our last one ended over a year ago when Michelle went off to college. Last week out of the blue my friend Mark H. up in the Adirondacks asked me if I wanted to join his group. So I came up with a few ideas for characters, all of them different kinds of fighter/magic-user combinations. One was Fingongolfinger, an elvish fighter/wizard, an attempt to re-create the classic elf type from the original D&D game. Fights with a sword and longbow, and casts spells like fireball and lightning bolt. But the party already had and elvish wizard. The second was Hiro Ünliikli, a Dragonborn barbarian/sorcerer. This would’ve been pretty wild and weird, but the party already had Teifling, which was weird enough.
The one they liked the best was Grimli Son of Groin, a dwarvish cleric whose deity is Thor. He fights with a magic warhammer and axe and shield, and has spells like spiritual weapon, and other spell to boost his and party’s fight ability, endurance, and resistance. He started at level seven and the DM gave him a bunch of cool magic items. I’m very stoked.
We had our first session last week, over zoom, and I met the party, Mark’s friends, and the whole thing was fun and easygoing. They’ve been playing long enough to have their own tone and rhythm and in-jokes. I came at a time when they were choosing where to go for the next major adventure, so there was alot of roleplaying and backstory, but no actual combat.
Only problem is the group meets on Wednesdays, which is the night of my rehearsal jazz group. As luck would have it that was cancelled last week and again this week. I’ve been thinking of leaving anyway since the group isn’t all that good. It’s more like going to the gym for sax playing and improvisation over real book tunes than anything else. But I kinda wanna find a new and better group to replace it. I’ve been thinking of signing up for a jazz workshop in the city to maybe meet some new and better players.
Happily Spacecats, which rehearses on Thursday, is still fun and creative and sounding better than ever. My new song Los Gatos de Cosmos, is developing nicely. But I feel like we need to find some gigs.
In other news, they finally got some snow upstate, so on Saturday we went skiing for the first time this season. Good to spend time outside doing something physical and get away from staring at the computer screen. If you recall I took seven years off from skiing, and started again two seasons ago. At the time I bought new boots and demoed skis on the mountain. Last year we went skiing three times, up from one the year before. This year we’re hoping to beat that.
I demoed skis last year but didn’t like them that much. They were a little short, and while they were very maneuverable, they weren’t so fast on the straightaways. This year the skis I got are longer, they’re stiffer and lighter than my old skis, and very controllable on different conditions, ice, powder, etc. But they’re actually close to the length of my old ones. I’m thinking maybe 5cm shorter would be perfect.
Anyway it was a great day skiing, and we did sixteen runs, which is good amount more then our first trip last year, when we did ten runs. Michelle is way faster then Jeannie and me now, and just zips right down the mountain. Jeannie and I are thinking of taking a weekend up to the Adirondacks of Vermont or something in a few weeks.
