Arkham Horror

Saturday, August 1, 1998
One year ago: "Partir, c'est mourir un peu."

A new month, a new design! I wanted to use a cooler color scheme (it is summertime, after all!) and I wanted to try the right-hand border again, which I last used in October of 1997. I liked how this picture of me turned out. It was taken at the goodbye brunch for my friend Nancy Goudy. The body font I'm using this month is a free web font, Divona, from the Scriptorium. Check them out!

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Jack, whom I had dinner with a few weeks ago, had suggested that since he was bringing his daughters downtown for the Seafair Torchlight Parade today, I might like to come along and meet them. This sounded good to me, so I took the bus down the hill. I was so ready to get out of the house, since I've been mostly housebound since Tuesday. Imagine my surprise to see that they were already at the appointed parking lot!

Jack has two daughters. One, A----, is a young teenager, and the other, H----, is a pre-teen. They had been planning on doing some rollerblading in the almost empty parking lot on the fringes of downtown, so I sat in the truck and chatted with Jack while they did that. But those girls really should be wearing helmets when they skate!

We walked a few blocks to the Westlake Center. I thought since there was a large food court there, everyone could find something to their taste for lunch. Of course, we all ended up buying from the same place, an indian food stand. I had a massalah dhosa and a large mango lasse. I suggested an accessories store that I knew was in the ground floor level of the mall as our next stop. I guessed the girls and I would all be able to find things we liked there, and the price range was wide enough that either the girls would be able to buy their own hair thingies, or cajole their father into buying them, without huge scenes.

From this store, we walked to the Pike Place Market, through the lower levels (H--- will be able to amaze her friends with a three-card monte variation from the magic shop) and clear to the end of the market. It was getting time to go back to the truck so Jack and his daughters could get the gear they wanted to have with them during the parade, and so that I could head back home.

It was a fun afternoon! I did think A---- and H---- did well at keeping the picking on each other, nagging, and whining, to a minimum. It really isn't the most fun thing in the world to go to a place where the main activity is buying things, when every thing you buy has to be negotiated with someone else first.

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I had arranged to give my friend Bluejack a ride to Vanguard tonight. (Vanguard is a monthly SF-oriented get-together.) I went to his grandparents' place in Kirkland to pick him up, and asked the family present there for advice on how to get to the place where the party was. It didn't seem necessary to me to go all the way back down to 520, but I wasn't sure just how to hook back up with the written directions.

We got some sage advice, but we must not have followed it correctly, since the expected roads didn't appear. We finally cut out cross-country through the twilight. Bluejack figured since we knew the address, we could take roads that pointed in that direction and finally get close enough to our destination to figure it out. Meanwhile I was coughing, laughing hysterically, and swearing a blue streak. If he hadn't been with me I would certainly have turned around and gone back home.

We eventually got to Amy's house, but I think even in the best of circumstances this would be a trek coming from Seattle. There were still folks playing croquet as we pulled into the orchard to park. We had time to cook a few s'mores before the mosquitoes got thick enough to drive us inside.

Andy Hooper had a board game, apparently a collectible item, that was based on the Cthulhu mythos, so we decided to play it (not a normal procedure for Vanguard). It was great fun! Andy and Carrie were both familiar with the game, which eased things for us neophytes, and the main focus of the game is cooperative, not competitive, so I liked it much more than I normally do such things.

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