if you don't wanna say anything at all, I'm happy wondering

For the second week in a row its Monday and I feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. Only this time I'm actually at work, as opposed to having a quasi-legitimate excuse to call in sick.

I had, for the record, a really good time this weekend. I continue to find Prophet's Fall an exhilarating experience that is generally quite a lot of fun in addition to being action-packed. Plus the game is just chock-full of nifty people who I enjoy spending time with. I say all this carefully and deliberately now, as a disclaimer, because when I recount the actual details of the weekend it might sound a little... well... miserable.

It all started Friday night. I had agreed to give Steve (war_pug, I'm pretty sure -- I haven't gotten around to friending him yet, but I probably should) a ride from his place in Somerville to the game site in Charlton. Steve is a motorcycle guy, you see, which doesn't work so well in the cold or the rain, and especially doesn't work well when one needs to bring LARP supplies. I discovered, in the process of picking up Steve, that I had forgotten to pack something vital, namely bedding of any kind. Steve helpfully loaned me a blanket, but I should have seen that it was a sign of things to come.

So we're driving along the Mass Pike, sometime after 9 PM, and we're within a couple of miles of our exit when I hear this fairly horrific high-pitched rhythmic scraping. I wonder aloud what the Hell is causing it and Steve informs me I have a flat tire, so I pull over. Sure enough my right rear tire is flat. And its not merely popped, its sheared, and almost certainly unsalvageable. Quick like a bunny Steve is rooting around in my trunk for my spare tire and jack, neither of which I was even certain I possessed. I stood and held my emergency flash light like the generally useless and thoroughly un-handy person that I am while Steve changed a tire faster and with more good cheer than I have ever seen in my life. We limped off the highway and to the site, and the fact that we were only lost in Charlton for half an hour seemed like a mercy at that point.

So I arrived at the game site, happy because it is not on a hill like the one in Ashby, and unpacked and knocked around. And I was generally nervous, because when we got there Steve was the only person on staff currently in attendance who I know even sort-of well. And though some more people with whom I'm familiar were expected to filter in later in the evening or on Saturday, for the most part I was anxious and fighting a nagging fear that I shouldn't have come. And eventually opening ceremonies commenced and things got under way... sort of.

I won't get into the particulars of the plot, but Friday night went badly. Abysmally even. It came as a surprise to Blinky (another member of the PF core staff, and one I'm coming to like more and more), during closing ceremonies on Sunday, that the players didn't seem to consider it the single worst Friday night in the history of the game. And I can see why it surprised him, because it was poorly paced and somewhat out of control and just generally ill-coordinated. Most of the staff went to bed around 4 AM (which sounds late, but is really very early by PF standards). I was part of a small contingent that stayed up another couple hours after that, but we didn't do so to any particular purpose (we were, at best, advancing a minor plot point, but not really) so for the most part everyone went to bed a little miffed to say the least.

Saturday went well. It was rainy and cold, of course, so every time I went out as a crunchy I ended up lying in the mud after the players took me down. That wasn't so keen. But I will say for the site at Charlton that their module hall is unbelievably nifty. Steve and I both commented that we would be happy to stay in the module hall all weekend just building things. The big Saturday night fight took place indoors, thankfully, and seemed to be generally well-received. From my perspective it was the worst blind fight of my entire life. I stood in a line of people, adjacent to a fog machine and directly under a strobe light, jabbing a two-handed hammer blindly into a mass of indistinct shapes in the flickering haze. Basically I just thwacked fairly randomly, called "crushing," and shouted an apology every time I hit Blinky in the head.

Sunday plot was, from my perspective, nonexistent. There was some minimal stuff that went off, but I wasn't part of it, so basically Sunday was spent on clean-up, which was fairly extensive. I had realized the day before that my spare tire looked fairly flat, but thankfully it just needed air, and Shannon (who is human_typhoon I think, but I could be wrong) had a portable air compressor thing in her car that was entirely nifty. Once things were fairly well squared away and closing ceremonies were complete, I headed out, sometime around 2 PM. A call to my home in CT revealed that there was, in fact, someone there. Logistically speaking it made more sense to go from Charlton back to West Hartford and grab my snow tires. Its certainly not too early to put them on, what with the weather being this cold and rainy, and that way I don't have to buy new all-weather tires until sometime in the spring. Of course that meant tacking an extra couple hours of driving on the highway on a donut which can't really handle speeds in excess of 55 mph, so that was fun. Oh, and I missed the West Wing again. Grr.

See what I mean? It sounds bad, but it wasn't. I'm tired now, but it was a good weekend.