Back at work

[viktor_haag]

After a lengthy holiday, I'm once again back at work starting this morning. Probably won't get to getting anything meaningful done for at least a day or so, as I now have a month of admin to catch up on (email, cleaning up after all the chron tasks that have been churning away in my absence), but that's a good thing as I always have to ease back into work after such a long time away.

This year's holiday was a pleasant one in one respect: our family suffered through a minimum amount of sickness, which means we only had to deal with the exhaustion of the endless social events without heaping illness on top of it. I know that a lot of you all were not so fortunate, and you have my sympathies.

However, this year's book catchup was a bit of a flop compared to last year. I did manage to clear a few books off the pile, but I still have one or two sitting there staring at me ("Lies of Locke Lamora", I'm look at you). However as mentioned in a previous post, I'm pretty committed to the notion that this year my project will be to chew through as much of my collection of Gene Wolfe's books as I can, spelling that task only with reading for my Dickens book group ("Our Mutual Friend") and the odd breather between Wolfe books or the "carry around" book I have for line-ups and the like (currently "The Prisoner of Zenda").

This holiday season I managed to try out a few new boardgames, the most memorable being "Cuba", which seems like a lot of fun despite the fact that I got absolutely pantsed in my first playing of it. I still haven't tried "Race For The Galaxy" yet, but it also seems like it will be a great deal of fun (from reading the rules) -- sort of a crunchier version of "San Juan". However, I rather expected to get more boardgames played over the holidays than I did, just as I rather expected to get more books read. Oh well.

I spent a fair amount of time watching some rather mindless films, and some not so mindless (the most not so mindless was "Oldboy", a very thought provoking work about which I still haven't completely made up my mind). I also managed to get through the entire third season of "The Wire" and was glad I did: very, very solid. Depressing, but solid.

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Plus there are some players that actually prefer quite subtle and defined points of interaction rather than "run up and smash him in the face" kinds of interaction. My sister really dislikes direct conflict in games, and she vastly prefers games that are of the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps faster than your neighbour" variety.