Last Friday night - walked to Inman Square after work to make characters for an RPG playtest. I used to play a bunch of WoW with bryant and michele_blue, but since I've curtailed my raiding significantly, we've lost some contact. bryant reached out recently and invited me to a RPG thing he and some friends are helping play test... I'm pretty psyched, if only to keep in touch with cool friends :)

Last Saturday morning - my second trip to the gym, and my first personal trainer appointment. We spent the whole 45 minutes talking about what PT would involve, what I wanted, and how much it would cost. He also talked about his qualifications. After the meeting was over, I did a bit of random uninformed stretching to warm up, then some time on the elliptical. Didn't really know what else to do, but I knew that was changing soon.

Last Saturday night - attempted ice skating, discovered that either I have forgotten everything since I last skated 20 years ago, my ankles have gotten weaker, or it's harder when you're 6'1" than when you're kid-sized. I'm guessing all three of those, actually. Also, dinner at Marco, which I described here in a 365 post of the leftovers. Delicious, and a good evening all around.

Last Sunday - had a headache all day and evening. Rotated the mattress in the evening, and woke up Monday well rested. When they say "rotate the mattress every two weeks for the first two months" they mean it - this was shortly after the three-week mark.

Monday evening - QED, near-future sci fi RPG with twe, ilhander, and others. We started working on a murder mystery. I suspect this is going to be the kind of story where you have to wait for the bad guys to make their boneheaded move to catch them... but there could easily be something we are missing.

Tuesday evening - went to Odaiko New England's Taiko workshop with forgotten_aria, twitch124, and karynwashere. It was the first time for me and twitch, and it was a rough, fun workout! I may be interested in going back there sometime.

Wednesday evening - ran my own D&D Game, Brothers in Arms. (It still doesn't really have any reason to be called that. I should figure out how to make the name fit sometime... I reserved the name for a different game that never ended up gelling, oops.)

Despite it being a month since the last run, I basically prepped the run during the day and in the hour between work and the start of the run. And during the time the players recapped and did between-run stuff like leveling up. Even with that paucity of preparation, the run worked quite well. I think we all had a lot of fun that night.

Thursday evening, part one - a few weeks back I got a call from Toyota about a focus group for Toyota owners. They wanted to pay me $200 to talk about my car with some people. I think I would have offered to do it for free; there are nitpicky things I don't like about the car that I'd like to see fixed in a future generation. Anyway, we scheduled Thursday night 5:30-7:30 to talk, at my place, and they told me to expect a followup call to solidify the plans.

I never heard back from them, and stayed late at work instead of talking about my car that night. I was very, very glad of the extra time though; Monday to Wednesday had been relatively short days.

Thursday evening, part two - WoW, dcltdw's group's raid on Zul'Aman. I was beginning to think we couldn't do the gauntlet without a paladin along. We nearly got the bear boss in bonus time though. Next time for sure. We're still puzzling out how to get the eagle boss down right. It must be something basic we're missing, but our attempts do keep getting better.

Friday morning - waited for the bus in the pouring rain, made my way to Lechmere and the Galleria with time to spare for my Apple Store Genius Bar appointment. Seems like sometime during Taiko my phone got messed up such that the "lock" button got smooshed in, and couldn't be clicked anymore. The guy took pity on me and said he couldn't see any evidence that it was accidental (and really, there was no obvious sign of what had happened - I am still not sure myself, not having noticed an actual incident), and replaced the phone free of charge. I then bought a rubber case for it.

Friday night, part one - my next personal trainer appointment, for evaluation. He tested my flexibility and strength in various ways, pushing me just barely beyond my limits this way or that, and it basically kicked my ass. A squat or two, a lunge or two, and he had a feel for where I'm starting in this workout thing.

Friday night, part two - "*gasp* now I have to hurry up and get over to bryant's place and try to hack together the character for the RPG in the last minutes before starting at 7:30... No, wait. What did that email thread say again? It's cancelled?" I have to admit I took a deep sigh of relief at having a free evening last night.

Friday night, part three - On top of that, I got a packaged from Amazon yesterday. Mass Effect! Delicious hard sci-fi RPG goodness. I am a sucker for that point that comes right up front in the game where the crew is preparing a maneuver, approaching this humongous spinning thing in space, and the realization just came that, wow... that thing is going to catapult them into FTL space travel. And the characters are just doing their routine.

The conversation bits were pretty redundant right up front, but you have to expect that. You're not supposed to go depth first in a game like this, I suppose. If they put distinct, necessary info in each of the conversations you could have, it would be annoying to the people who just like to skim through such things. It's a hard line to draw, and I think they did ok, at least with the first few scenes.

Today, so far - second exercise meeting with personal trainer. This time I got my ass kicked in a workout, not in an evaluation. Not the usual wimpy stretches I do myself, but 30 seconds each of "Oww, does he really mean I should push it this far? Keep my knee straight? Heel down? How the heck..." Then some things with little free weights, lifting them over my head in certain ways. Eventually it burned so much that we took the 5-pound weight out of the workout and I just did it with my empty hands. Even that burned. Wow.

Needless to say, I'm sold, and I bought a 10-pack of one hour sessions with the guy, which I intend to schedule over the next five weeks. Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings are the likely times I'll be in at Boston Sports Club Davis Square if anyone wants to coordinate something.

So that's most of the news over this whirlwind of a week. Outside of the work stuff, which is interesting in other ways.