December 2017 – Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

We escaped!

We had talked about trying an Escape Room for a couple years; my work department finally got together for an outing recently. We split into two teams and did two escape rooms each at Mastermind in Schaumburg. Our organizer picked the two easiest scenarios – Sorcerer’s Secret (35% escape rate) and Lost in Time (42%).

I’ll be honest, I had no idea there were that many different kinds of combination locks available. In addition to the standard locker combination lock (3 times to the right to the number, 2 times to the left to the number, and right to the last number), there were luggage-style locks with anywhere from 3 to 5 numbers or letters needed, including some that had both letters and numbers on them, and what I can only describe as DDR locks – the options were up, down, left, and right.

Mind you, the locks weren’t the puzzles. The puzzles gave you the answer to the locks, assuming you could figure out which one to use where. There were also a few physical puzzles that required team work, like a maze where the person with the magnet couldn’t see the maze and had to be talked through it. And that’s about all the details I can give without spoiling things… I will say that there’s an Easter egg in the Lost in Time puzzle for Doctor Who fans.

I will also say that LARP experience helped, if only because of the number of puzzles involved in those games, particularly at the Whately LARPs. If you get stuck, you have clues available that you can spend points on, with a finite number of points (100) before it counts as a loss.

Both teams escaped from both puzzles… I guess that’s what happens when you put IT problem solvers in a room.

‘Tis the season

I spent a year abroad in college in the lovely, if somewhat dreary, city of Glasgow. It’s only dreary because of the overcast skies and rain, the people more than make up for it. I spent a decent number of weekends and holidays that year with newly found friends in Edinburgh, including Christmas Day.

I remember waking up that morning and finding my Christmas stocking, not in the living room near the tree, but on my bed with me. (Yes, I slept fairly soundly back then.) In all fairness, there was a large dog downstairs who might have gotten curious about the stockings had they been left in her reach. More surprisingly, as I reached into the stocking, I found that every gift in it was wrapped.

I think it was in high school when we noticed that our parents’ stockings had bare minimum content and started scrambling through our room on Christmas morning for assorted junk we could add to them. Most years, our stockings were about as random, it was just newer junk.

Holiday stocking & wrapped gifts — Oooh, wrapped stuff on a stocking.

I don’t remember anything in that Edinburgh stocking being junk. Fun and unnecessary, perhaps… I mean, does a college student really need Lego? (In my defense, I owned no Lego at all until that year. OMG, Lego Thor is awesome!) That year reshaped how I thought of Christmas stockings, and has certainly influenced the type of items that are seen in them at my house.

Here we are at the holidays again, and I found myself reminiscing about that year… and wrapping just about everything. Perhaps I should make some Yorkshire pudding this year too. Happy holidays!

Driving in a snow globe

One of the thrills of winter is, of course, snow. The first snowfall of the year is always exciting, the effect on the landscape is dazzling. The effect on driving… well… you get all the slipperyness (is that a word?) of driving in rain, but in the right conditions, it looks pretty even if the drivers are crazy.

When you move north, nobody warns you there are different types of snow. It’s akin to rain in that sense, quite literally, except for the part where it’s frozen. You can have anything from a light drizzle to a downpour of white, wet and packable snow (great for building, bad for shoveling) to dry, lightweight snow that blows all over the place (especially back to where you just shoveled it from).

It can fall straight down, as if someone just flipped the snow globe over and back again. But sometimes, that snow globe is slightly askew instead, and you get to experience the effect of walking or driving into the oncoming snow. In a heavy snow, that’s obviously a bad thing, with windshield wipers working furiously to keep up.

Holiday lights — No, I wasn’t driving when I took this photo. It also wasn’t snowing yet.

In a light snow, however, it has an idyllic effect as white bits swirl around you, paths altering with the wind impacts of vehicles around you. That is when it feels like you’re driving in a nice snow globe, and you decelerate as you pass decorated houses to appreciate the holiday season.

Thoughts on The Way of Kings

“Life before death.
Strength before weakness.
Journey before destination.”

Once upon a Capricon (not to be confused with Once Upon a Capricon, which was a couple years later), I met a gentleman who said I should read some books by Brandon Sanderson. To be clear, he gave me specific titles, though in the end, it really was just a “read everything he wrote” recommendation. (He also warned me that Blake would try to sell me books, and here I am, eagerly awaiting the next one in that series.)

Had I planned better, I would have re-read The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance before the November release of Oathbringer. But my fall months were somewhat unusual, and certainly not as I had planned, so here I am, a month after buying Oathbringer, just finishing re-reading the first book.

The danger of getting hooked on Brandon Sanderson’s writing is that he doesn’t have just one good series. At any given time, he is working on three or four books, updating his website with the progression. At the moment, it shows a first draft, a second draft, and a release (Oathbringer, yay!) at 100%, and a mystery project at 62%.

In The Way of Kings, we follow the stories of Kaladin (a slave), Dalinar (a lighteyes, uncle to the King), and Shallan (a lighteyes hoping to become ward of the King’s sister). The world and the characters grow through the book, learning about themselves and making discoveries that could impact the entire world as they know it. The thing to see, in this and the subsequent nine novels, is what they do with that knowledge, assuming they manage to survive.

Oh, did I forget to mention he’s not even halfway through writing the series? It’s epic, and totally worth reading (and re-reading).

Role-playing

I was introduced to role-playing my first year in college, starting with Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and Paranoia, and quickly adding Rifts and Marvel into the schedule. (Believe it or not, I also worked, went to classes, and slept.) That was several editions ago for D&D and Paranoia; I haven’t even seen the other two since college.

Last year, a co-worker suggested playing D&D at lunch, and brought in the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook. While tempting, we quickly decided that our lunch times were too variable for role-playing and settled into an irregular schedule of assorted card games. But the thought of playing D&D lingered for several of us.

We have an evening work event coming up and decided to schedule an after party with a mix of experienced and new players, so I find myself poring through rules to make a character. It should come as no surprise to those who have gamed with me before that I settled on a human bard. Beyond performance and some (totally optional, I’m sure) lock-picking skills, I’m not sure yet what I’m building. Whatever I decided, I’m sure it will be fun.