All New

Oops, a month went by. My bad. You can guess that my life has either been really busy, or really entertaining. Truth is that it has been both.

September was our last month in the old apartment. Sean came up to visit us and on the weekend of the first, we moved into the new apartment!

With just the three of us it was a little hard, but luckily we weren't taking everything. Mostly just a bunch of things in boxes, bagged groceries, and a couple of pieces of furniture to get us by until we buy new furniture.

Basically we rented a truck, loaded it, then drove over everything we planned on keeping to our new place. Then we went back, loaded the truck, and dropped off all of the stuff we weren't keeping. It took all day, but we got it done with plenty of time for booze and pizza afterward.

The new place is in a better, safer location right by the college Aaron goes to, so he can bike to class. Within walking distance there is also a grocery store, a Target, a Walgreens, a Home Depot, and an In 'n Out. Delicious In 'n Out burgers, mmm... Those of you not on the West coast have no idea how good those things are.

We also found a used book store right around the corner with an awesome selection of really, really old books in really good condition. We bought King's, The Shining first edition in hardcover and a neat hardcover edition of Russian history from the 1950's. I foresee many hours and many dollars being spent there. To make it even better, they've got a shop cat named Sugar. An old, portly white cat without a tail. Super friendly. I may wind up visiting the book store just to visit her on occasion (though I'd undoubtedly leave with a book anyhow).

As if the old book store wasn't rad enough, we also found a comic shop. Scratch that. A huge comic shop. So big in fact its got its own building. Not like usually, where the comic shop is in one of those little strip malls in some tiny neglected section beside a laundry mat or whatever. Wall-to-wall nerd, just like I like it.

We picked up some snazzy new dice, Apples to Apples, and later ordered Arkam Horror. A Lovecraftian boardgame which we've found ourselves playing daily since it arrived. Yesterday Cthulu got out. Aaron was like, "Welp, game over." And I was all, "Lets try to fight him!" But neither of us had dice pools anywhere near big enough to even do damage. So the game was indeed over. Haha.

Basically you randomly select an investigator and an Ancient One. Then you go around the ''city'' as random, usually dangerous, events take place -- fighting monsters and closing portals to other dimensions along the way. If you manage to close all of the rifts, you win. If too many open, or any of several other situations are allowed to transpire, the Ancient One you selected at the beginning of the game is unleashed and you lose.

Well, you may not lose automatically, depending on the Ancient One you wound up with. For example, Yig has a combat modifier of -3, which is doable albeit challenging whereas Azathoth has a combat modifier of -infinity. Which basically means you instantly lose, with no hope of fighting him.

Aside from fighting great beasts from beyond, we've been playing Civilization 5, watching House, Stargate: Atlantis, Dead Like Me, Madmen, The Office, and reading A Feast For Crows together.

If anyone hasn't seen Howl's Moving Castle, you should do that right away.

We're as settled in as we can be until we get all of our furniture. Which, should be soon. We've got the funds, we just haven't actually gone out and made the purchases yet. We even found two furniture stores nearby. One which we've been to (and made note of items we liked) and another which we'll have to visit soon.

I think it would be amusing to buy furniture from both of them and have it delivered on the same day. So they run into each other on the way up.