Life is Still Nowhere Near Normal

Family

You might think that after my trip that life would be returning to normal in these parts, but they aren't.

Ariella, our oldest daughter, started the army on Thursday. She will be training for four months and then be a drill sergeant for troubled kids: drug abuse, discipline abuse, and so on, who would otherwise have no prospects.

Meanwhile, aside from being hot and cramped, it's a lot like camp. She knows just about everyone who was inducted at the same time as her. She's not only knowledgeable about all the words used in the army that are really abbreviations (and therefore undecipherable to us), but also knows most of the unwritten rules between what's cool and what makes you a "green".

Rachel is preparing for her 10 month postdoc in the University of Toronto, which she starts in late August. Eitan has already gone ahead.

Blogging

I've been blogging part time for my new company for two weeks. I'm thrilled, and I think I'm doing a good job, but I'm running up against some expectation issues. As a result, I'm not entirely sure what's going to be happening in the near future.

Meanwhile, I'm entertaining other part time blogging opportunities for the other half of my day, while trying to get the Hebrew version of Apples to Apples off to the publishers, and not getting any time at all to move forward on game design.

If you know of any companies that want a part time blogger (1 to 2 posts a day), do let me know.

Gaming

Nadine, Rachel and I played Puerto Rico. Still a fascinating game, every time we play. In part that's due to my standard set of buildings, all of which are useful enough that the game varies greatly from game to game.

Rachel won from second position, which is the second second-position win in a row. I started the game feeling pretty well until about midway. I had a coffee monopoly, and a reasonable amount of victory points and money. But somehow I stalled when the Trading House became blocked and Rachel was leveraging the ships against me.

Nadine's Hacienda brought her only Indigo's, so she got an Indigo plant and a Wharf, which gave her lots of victory points in the last few rounds, but not enough. Rachel started off feeling like she was behind, but pulled forward inch by inch to a hard-fought victory.

News

Splitting Eights has a nice post about playing board games, both seriously and for fun.

Big Brother apparently had a board game day last week. Games played: Downfall and Operation. Whoopee; 37 and 42 year old physical dexterity kids games.

One of Gleemax's first online board games will be RoboRally.

Yehuda