Words are inadequate

In the event I made it through customs easily. My customs agent was a dead ringer for grumpy John Cena. He asked for my citizenship (US) and passport. and then glared at the passport and his comupter screen for about thirty seconds. I had enough time to start getting nervous and also to notice that his biceps were the size of my head before he handed my passport back without a word. I'll count that a win.

I'm in Niagara, at the Gathering, saying hi to folks and playing a bunch of games. There's sufficient variety and sufficiently pleasant social that even when I get stuck in a 2.5-hour game that is emphatically Not For Me it's still a decent time. And it's good to see people I know and who know me, and to feel, well. At home, maybe.

They've been issuing special black badges for folks who've been to at least twenty of these since before I started coming (which was I think number 24 or 25). Last year or this they started giving 'grey' badges to people who've been to at least ten, and I was a little startled to realise that yep, that's me. I'm pretty bad at recognising when I've become A Regular at a thing. In my head I'm stuck as The New Guy, there's plenty of folks who've been around longer than I have.

It's Sunday night. Four and a half more days of gaming and Gathering, and then Steph gets here for two and a half days or so, and then homeward. I do miss my kitten. I don't miss the rest of home, not yet, but I can see that from here. For now, things are good. I appreciate that.

I've made it to Niagara, where I can attempt to regrow my brain, at least a little.

This was a rough travel. It didn't help that the night before I only got around three hours' sleep: woke up out of a weird Twin Peaks-ish nightmare before two AM, couldn't re-settle. Or that the Amtrak train from Toronto to Niagara NY was cancelled due to track maintenance, so I had to do the multi-transit hop, light-rail to bus to walk (or, in this case, taxi) to the border to the hotel. In the event I slept minimally on the plane due to a small child kicking my seat, ongoing conversations, and at least one person playing a video game without headphones.

It turns out that being able to hear other people's electronic devices really grinds my gears. Not just "annoys me" but renders me unable to concentrate on anything else. I ended up putting in my earphones and playing instrumental music just loud enough to drown them out. I couldn't sleep but at least I wasn't fuming.

But I did get to walk across Rainbow Bridge and see the Falls on a gorgeous sunny day, and that helped.

I've made a big grocery-run, including stocking up on cinnamon pop-tarts as usual, and I am very tired. Tomorrow I see Steph for the first time in a decade, more or less, for a second first date. I feel like I should be nervous, and maybe I will be tomorrow. Right now 'tired' is sort of overwhelming everything. Goal is to stay up until at least ten PM.

---

I've been mildly obsessing over work (well, ex-work), too. I figure this is partly because the end was so sudden and partly due to lack of sleep leading me to focus on bad things.

What I know:

• I got laid off.
  
• My grandboss talked about it as though there were a bunch of layoffs happening, as did my boss.
  
• Grandboss also mentioned that profitability was down this year, which goes against all the messaging we'd been getting but whatever.
  
• Everyone who's responded to my 'goodbye' email has sounded shocked.

My working theory at this point: there's a rumour that the company is planning an IPO in the nearish future. For that to go well they want to look Lean And Mean. Grandboss got told to cut staff, and I have been underperforming. Maybe the tech side didn't have cuts, or maybe mine just got announced early because my last day was slightly accelerated (would have been Friday but I'd already planned my vacation).

There's a part of me that wants to take it more personally, to focus in on the 'underperforming' bit. But I got some nice notes from people I've worked with that went above and beyond to let me know that they thought the work I was completing was good, so that helps with that.

I also appreciate that this didn't come down until after the end of the fiscal year. That ought to mean that in a month I'll still get my annual bonus. Assuming there is one, between "me underperforming" and "profitability is down," though honestly I can't imagine they'd zero the bonuses. They aren't my awful previous company, after all.

---

I'm kicking around the idea of getting out of tech writing. This has some appeal: among other things, it might free up the 'writing' part of my brain to do more fun writing, which is historically hard when I'm putting words in a different kind of order all day. Too, every tech writing job I've had (sample size of three), I've been annoyed and frustrated by the end of it, and that point has come quicker each time. Plus I doubt I'll be able to dodge video production forever, and I hate video.

Erin suggested GIS work (I am pretty sure she's suggested a few things but that was one that stuck). I did a little GIS in high school, and I enjoyed it. From the small amount of looking-into-it I've done it looks to be a combination of playing with maps and playing with databases, both of which could be fun?

There's a full-time program at BCIT (the local two-year college) that gets you a GIS "diploma" in nine months. With that I'd be eligible for ... well, for jobs. And (again, thank you Erin for pointing me to this) it turns out that I can take classes and still get EI payments. Probably. There's a process, but it certainly looks like I'd be eligible.

So that's something to consider. Classes start in September so I have at least a little time to make a decision.

Of course my brain also kicked up "what makes you think you'd be able to get a job in GIS, you have no experience and you're competing with younger fresh-outta-school folks." So that made for a fun part-of-evening last night. That one I attribute primarily to being very tired and thus having less defence against jerkbrain.

I dunno. There are options. It's kinda nice.

The Gathering was good: lots of people, lots of gaming. No particular highlights/standouts, I think, but no real lowlights either. Played most of the games on my "i am curious about this" list, determined that I do in fact like most of them.

It was also, unsurprisingly, a massive plague chamber. More people started wearing masks on Wednesday, after the first positive test reports trickled in, in the manner of a farmer barricading the door to the barn once the horse has vacated. I had a supply of KN95s and an improvised head-strap so I wasn't relying on the painful-by-day-three earloops, and I seem to have mostly done alright. Random symptoms coming and going (runny nose! coughing! irritable stomach!) but nothing persistent.

Until yesterday, when I woke up feeling run-down and possibly-feverish and woozy. Took a rapid test and got a negative result, but it's my first time doing a test on myself so I may have screwed it up somehow. I'll try again this afternoon. It's also entirely possible it's just a nasty head cold, of the kind I've dodged for the last couple of years. I'll chow down on Tylenol and clean out my CPAP bits this evening (meant to do that yesterday but, well, woozy) and hopefully that will help to shake it.

---

Moving-in continues apace. The bathroom is functional but requires a medicine-cabinet posthaste, or at least one of those racks you stand up behind/over the toilet. The bedroom is usable but I haven't finished setting up the bedside table. I am going to try rearranging the furniture in there: the current setup works but feels cramped, and I hope a different setup will feel less cramped and not sacrifice too much in the way of "works". I kind of want someone else to help me move things, though, and that's not happening until this weekend at the absolute earliest and more likely next weekend.

The kitchen is Organized, which is not the same as being unpacked. I need another shelf for one of the cabinets to put the tea on, and I need to unload the random condiments etc into the pantry, and I need to figure out a solution for a couple of pots and pans. It's mostly usable, though, so I also need to do a serious grocery run so I can stop eating restaurant food.

And of course the living room remains a disaster. I may have solved the bookcase problem thanks to Craigslist etc, but I still need to reattach the backs to the survivors, and move boxes so the bookcases can go against the walls that the boxes are currently against. Bah. I was hoping to get some of that done in the evenings, and I probably will, but the endless "move this here to move that there to move this over here" just feels overwhelming.

I am still annoyed at my movers. Jerks. This should have been ... not a non-issue but a solved problem by now.

---

I am finally reading Aspects and it is amazing and delightful and I am mad that there won't be any more. So far (halfway through) it is a deeply Fordian character study. It sparks thoughts on, o, friendship, and damage, and the ways close-knit groups shift and work over time. I may have to reread it immediately.

This year's Gathering was smaller than usual: 262 attendees was I think the final count, where in a normal year it's a little over 400. (To the extent that anything pre-plague can count as "normal" going forward.) I noticed this partly in several missing people I'd hoped to see, and partly in a difficulty in finding pickup games by just wandering through the main hall.

Joe H-- pointed out that he'd seen a bunch of people he knew who weren't really circulating this year but were playing a bunch of games together. Which makes sense: normally (that word again) they'd get plenty of gaming with each other during the year and would use the Gathering to meet new folks and try new things, but, well.

When Sarah left she dropped me at the grocery store, so I picked up my standard pop-tarts and sandwich fixins so that breakfast and lunch were sorted. I've taken to bringing my own tea and small hot-water-heater, so I'm not dependent on a) bad hotel tea or b) a coffee-maker for hot water. This works out really well: tea and pop-tarts for breakfast, sandwich and apple for lunch, wander off to a restaurant for a "real" dinner. The sole advantage of Niagara in the summer is the row of food trucks a couple blocks from the hotel: slightly cheaper and faster than restaurant food, and far more varied.

I got in an 18xx game every morning but one, when I overslept due to overstress. I progressed from making obvious errors at the start of the game (1880: starting my initial railroad with a tile lay that could have helped Mark, but Tom's railroad could help him more, so I got quickly shut out of some early money) to obvious errors about a third of the way through (1822CA: starting a minor with enough money to buy a 2-train but miscounting and buying a more expensive 3-train out of pocket... and then the minor I actually wanted came up next round instead of one round later) to no obvious errors (2038: I could probably critique my play if I reviewed it closely but I didn't see any severe misjudgements). I even managed to win my first 18xx at the Gathering: a three-player 18CZ against Tom and Mark, where I got enough of a mid-game dividend lead to (barely) carry me through against Tom's superior share-value position and Mark's impressive late-game dividends.

Apart from that I spent a surprising-to-me amount of time with Jacob D--. I met Jacob ages ago at Origins, even before I was running Fluxx tournaments for the Looneys, where I gained a lot of respect for him as an Icehouse shark, a savvy game developer, and a generally insightful if somewhat pushy person. "Game developer" isn't a term I would have used at the time, I would have said "designer," and he's designed one of my favourite abstract-strategy games in Pikemen, but even early-mid-2000s I think a lot of his best work was in refining other peoples' ideas. More recently he's done an awful lot of work on Sidereal Confluence, a game of aggressive cooperation.

"Pushy" isn't the right word either. I struggle some with Jacob, honestly: he's very much an extrovert, and he's interested in people, and so he asks probing questions and talks a bunch. He's happy to back off if you ask him to, or if you're obviously uncomfortable, but to me it's still awkward. It's by no means wholly or even mostly unpleasant: I enjoy talking to him. (Compare with my ex-friend N--, who always seemed like he was looking for ... weaknesses, or sore points to poke at: Jacob just feels genuinely interested and curious.)

I played two rounds of Sidereal Confluence with the late-playtest-stage expansion, about which I can't say anything other than OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME. SidCon is already one of my favourite games: a trading game where the point isn't to make a few good (ie, lopsided-in-your-favour) trades, it's to make as many trades as possible. Everyone has a pile of Stuff, and everyone needs some Stuff to run their machines, but no one has the kinds of Stuff they need. So there's a mad flurry of exchanges and negotiations, and the more of those exchanges and negotiations you can be a part of the better off you are. Even if you're not technically "gaining" anything, you're getting more Stuff that you can actually use. Now add on to that what they call "variable player powers," where each player can break certain rules in certain extreme ways. The end result is an awful lot of busy chaotic noisy fun. The expansion ... basically adds in a new and even wackier set of variable-player-powers. There is just so much gamespace to explore here.

I also played a handful of "normal" games: nothing super exciting but plenty of "that was fun" or "someone I know should own this so I can play it a few more times and figure out if I like it." And I talked to Jacob, and to Tau (the designer of SidCon) and Chris C-- also from Origins, and a few other folks.

And it was, for the most part, a really good time. I've missed people, I've missed having a flood of gaming, I've missed getting my butt solidly kicked in a bunch of different 18xx games. I've missed travel, though by the end of it I was ready to be Home for awhile.

Hotel reservations are up for next year (back to April again, in theory). Hopefully Alan will put up registration info soon and I can start thinking "I get to go back soon" instead of just vaguely hoping.

My normal travel plan for the Gathering (a small-to-medium boardgame convention in Niagara Falls NY): take a red-eye flight to Toronto, catch the Via/Amtrak train from Toronto to Niagara, taxi from the train station to the hotel, and get Joe C-- to take me on a grocery run.

Joe C-- isn't going to be there this year, alas. More worryingly, there's no Via/Amtrak service. Flights to Buffalo (the nearest airport to Niagara) are stupid expensive and badly timed. So I figured I'd fly into Toronto and figure out the rest of it later. Worst case scenario, I buy more plane tickets from Toronto to Pittsburgh and Sarah picks me up on her way out of town.

In the event, travel to the Gathering required no fewer than seven separate steps in the transportation process:

• Driving from Fort to the Prince George airport (YXS), stopped for a plague test on the way.
  
• Flight YXS-YVR.
  
• Flight YVR-YYZ. This was the first time I've flown first-class, on the grounds that a) I wasn't going to sleep well anyway without my CPAP so I might as well be comfortable in my discomfort, and b) it was relatively cheap since WestJet is desperately trying to get people to give them money. Verdict: very nice seats, they fed me (TED: "What's the deal with airplane food? Why don't they serve it any more?"), and when I managed to get about an hour and a half of sleep they kindly left a snack box on the empty seat next to me. Not really worth it in the normal course of things but I'm glad I did it once.
  
• Commuter train from YYZ to Union Station in Toronto. One of the nicer commuter trains I've ever been on.
  
• GO train from Union Station to Burlington. Also a perfectly serviceable commuter train. Took me forever to find a) breakfast and b) the train, which I attribute partly to the aforementioned 1.5 hrs sleep and partly to Union Station being a poorly-signed hub for four different train lines (Via/Amtrak, GO regional, Toronto subway, and the airport thing). Plus I'd bought my ticket on the Via website so I figured that was where I was supposed to go, but no.
  
• Regional bus from Burlington to Niagara Falls ON. Uneventful except for having to lug my full suitcase to the second floor of the bus. I think I slept some.
  
• And finally, a half-hour walk from the bus stop down to the land crossing at the Rainbow Bridge, a typically unpleasant encounter with US border guards (ignored for ten minutes, then had my passport taken away for five minutes, then had it given back and told "go through that door over there." No "welcome to the US" or anything, and no request to see a negative plague test. Bah), and a fifteen-minute walk to the hotel, all in 30-degree heat.

But I got here, around twoish, after not quite twenty-four hours in transit, and checked in and dozed for a bit.

And then Sarah got here around 5:30, and left today around noon, and the inbetween time was almost entirely lovely.

Tomorrow I'll go down to the Gathering. Tonight is for talking to Erin and introverting and journaling and such.

At some point I should figure out how I'm getting home, too.

I'm at the Gathering.

I'm doing better this year than last year. Partly that's due to having a room to myself. I like Scott R quite a bit but our schedules collided just enough that I never really felt comfortable there. (As opposed to Christine, who was asleep when I woke up and otherwise basically never in the room at the same time as me.) Partly it's just, you know not being horrifically depressed. Which I'm pretty sure I was last year. I'm also taking a bit better care of myself, both before and during.

Anyway. I've only been here since Wednesday night, because time off is a valued commodity and because Erin vanishes for the far north in a couple of weeks and squeezing in as much time with her as possible is important. It's been good. No super-duper new games this year, not really even anything on the order of last year's Ponzi Scheme. Some good 18xx games, some good shorter games.

The passage overnight through Toronto and training down still seems to be the best way to get here. I had a middle seat for the flight but they gave me some sort of nicer, roomier seat, so it wasn't bad at all. Redeyes are still the most reliable way to get me onto East Coast time.

I feel like this is the con of my heart, in the way that BGG.con isn't. A lot of it's the venue: the light's better, the noise level is lower. Some of it's just that I've clicked really well with a lot of people here. I could do that at BGG.con if I went back ... but it's loud, and glaringly bright, and super-busy, and just not really a thing that interests me, not if I've got the Gathering.

The people. My first year here Eric B started teaching me 18xx games about midway through the week, and my second year he and his gaming friends sort of took me under their wing, so I've pretty consistently been able to find people to game with and to talk to. And I'm gradually meeting other folks as well and recognising them from year to year. And vice versa, which will probably never fail to surprise me. People remember me! They even sometimes seem excited to see me! It's ... neat. Eric hasn't been here the last couple of years due to life stuff, and I miss him and hope he can make it next year, but Joe R and Jeroen and all have been fantastic as well. I really like the sense of ... community, I guess, that I have here.

In a few minutes I'm going downstairs to play what will probably be my last big game of the weekend, and then tomorrow I'll maybe play some lighter stuff and fly home through Newark, with another Vancouver local who got the same flight I did.

Home. That's a thing.

Not really up for wandering the gameroom, and I could probably do with some downtime anyhow.

The Gathering is a week-long smallish (400 people?) gaming convention in Niagara Falls (US). uilos and I were first invited two years ago; sadly she hasn't made it back. Maybe next year.

I'm rooming with Scott, a guy I met at random last year. He's a fine roommate but very much an extrovert. As with Christine last year, I've not had to be this sociable in the mornings in a very long time.

Eric B--'s absence this year is notable: he welcomed me into the morning 18xx games two years ago, sort of took me under his wing last year, and is generally one of the Good Ones. Hopefully he'll be back next year.

Two years ago Splendor was obviously the Big Hit; last year it was Codenames. I haven't seen anything this year that would really qualify. There's a lot of Codenames Pictures being played, which is exactly what you think it is.

Perhaps it's Ponzi Scheme, which Dave E-- described as "a party game for economic-gamers." Every round, everyone takes a scoring tile and a funding card, which provides an infusion of cash now in exchange for a payment in a few rounds. Then there's a flurry of 'clandestine dealing' where you're exchanging money and score tiles with the other players, and then the round increases. You can pay for your ruinous interest by ... taking more and larger funding cards, but those will come due sooner or later as well. You're hoping for "later:" the game ends as soon as one player can't make a payment, so if you're going to go bankrupt in two turns that's fine as long as someone else crashes out next turn. Ponzi Scheme is currently extremely unavailable; there's a new edition coming in a few months, I believe.

The weather's been horrendous: cold, rainy, I think there was unpleasantly wet snow a few days ago, and so very very windy. I have not left the hotel except to make a grocery run the day after I got here. I may go out to the falls on Friday or Saturday, I haven't quite decided yet.

Three more days of gaming, and then travel on Sunday. It's been good to not be at work.

Spring in Vancouver is mostly like winter. It's still grey and rainy but there's a subtly different quality to the rain, and it's not so cold.

Except for days like today, when the sky clears and the sun's brighter than anyplace else I can think of. Days like this I just want to go out walking for hours.

---

We got a three-month extension on our lease, so we don't have to try to find a place to live while we're on the wrong coast for most of May. As a nice side benefit we'll also get to watch this year's rooftop crop of baby seagulls.

Although one of the regular nesting spots has been taken over by a grumpy Canada goose. Looks like geese lay a little earlier in the season than seagulls do. Not sure if the seagulls will attempt to share that particular tiny roof or just go elsewhere.

---

Leftover bits from the Gathering:

The secondary highway in Niagara Falls is the Robert Moses Parkway. I suppose that's appropriate enough. If you're going to run a road through a park you may as well name it after the guy who destroyed NYC and screwed up North American city planning for a century with his love of running expressways through poorer neighborhoods.

I came home with a copy of 1862 from the prize table. This is one of those overly complex 18xx train/stock games I seem to have become fond of. Not sure when I'll get a chance to actually *play* one around here, but hey. I look forward to trying to explain to new players that "In this game trains can only change direction at cities, no matter what tiles you want to place or upgrade: eventually you will need to yell that THERE IS NO FORKING TRACK."

Other games of note: Coal Baron, a fast (45 minutes), reasonably deep worker-placement-y game with less annoying blocking than it might have. Splendor, light and fast, with tough decisions; reminds me of Piece Of Cake in that "argh what now" feeling. Roll For the Galaxy, which is not Race but looks suspiciously familiar: I think it's lighter than Race but I could be wrong, and it's worth more plays (whenever it finally comes out) regardless.