Parentheticals

This week in retrospect: Rea decided that she won't go to bed without crying. We thought it was the darkness, but now I think that it must be the fact that Sara doesn't go to bed at the same time as her. We got her a night light, but it didn't help. She also decided that she wanted to play hide and seek with Jesus on Sunday. It was pretty cute. We picked grapes and made grape juice on Saturday. We carved pumpkins on Monday. We also made some pizzas: eggplant parmesan pizza, and bacon sausage five cheese pizza. Both were good. My bike is finally working again. It had gotten so many goat heads I thought it was dead for good. Hopefully these new tire liners will work. My card game is still moving along (however slowly). I have some guys online testing it, and two now have said that they have played games. No-one has written a summary of their thoughts yet. I am also thinking of doing NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month) this year ...

I went through all of the cards in Polynesia and updated them to the new layout. It is apparently possible to make all of the cards have a larger image and smaller text areas without changing the rules on the cards or decreasing the font size. Here is a gallery of the cards. The guy who helped me to rework the cards decided that his work was done (probably more because of the fact that I didn't tell him why I was regenerating all of the cards (I was really worried that some card's text wouldn't fit in the small box, so I had to make sure of that before I could continue making other changes) than because he thought that the cards were actually up to snuff), so now I have to try to push on without him and see if I can finish making the cards look better. That last paragraph was a single sentence with a lot of parenthetical phrases in it... Pretty much true to my style. Alison and I have been talking about making a family motto. The impetus for this decison was ...

This last week in summary: Monday: We celebrated Andrea's birthday. She got a kitchen set from Grandma Sumption's house and a Lynley Dodd book (We had Slinky Malinki and Hairy Mclairy already, and both were fun books, so we got her Open the door, which was fun, but the punch line was above Andrea's head (though Alison and I found it very funny)) Andrea also played with Legos for the first time. It brings back good memories to play with Legos again. Tuesday: I went to Sort tech conference. It was fun, and the classes were pretty useful. I especially enjoyed the class about the Netdurino, and look forward to figuring out some hack that I want to make. Andrea had her 2 year checkup. She is 27 lbs, 2' 10" and healthy. Wednesday: I went to Sort tech conference again. Thursday: We baby sat for the Nelsons so that they could go to the temple. It went well. Friday: We made pizza, and went to the Clark Planetarium for our date. Andrea especially enjoyed the stairs and...

This last week I had 3 other people request copies of my game (bringing the total to 9.) No-one has given me any feedback about playing it yet, but hopefully that will come soon. I also got a message (on the same website) from a guy in New Zealand who requested me to sell my copy of " First Strike " to him. First strike is a WWIII war game about the cold war becoming a hot war. It was printed in Utah, and I found a copy of it at a thrift store. I played it a few times (I think with Andy and Scott), but it was pretty boring, and took much longer than it should have for the strategic depth that it had. I told him that I was likely to never play it again as I didn't like it, but that did not deter him. I priced shipping, and told him that it would cost over $40 to ship it, but he still wanted the game. I mailed it late last week (since he really wanted it). Hopefully he gets some enjoyment out of it. This weekend was General Conference , which I spent with my parents....

Last week I mailed out some copies (6 total) of my Polynesia card game to people who were willing to blind play-test it (I originally wrote 'bling play-test', which is pretty much the opposite of what I meant, since the copies that I sent them were black and white, and printed on 20lb paper and such. Pretty much the least bling version of the game possible). I have also been working on the symbology of the game with a guy who contacted me with questions about it. He has been very helpful in terms of coming up with symbols for various concepts. It is possible that the simple cards in the game will soon be much more light on words. We had too much milk this week, so I made a fast 'Fine Herbs' cheese on Saturday. Literally anyone could make this cheese. You can't go wrong. All you do is add some acid (1 tsp citric acid powder in 1/3 cup of water) to 1 gallon of milk and heat it to ~198 degrees. This kills everything in the milk and makes it form curds. You let it c...