Ye Olde Staging Point

It's been pretty quiet on the posting front here lately (fortunately, Michele has been more than making up for it with a slew of excellent posts).

It's been a good January thus far. Michele and I visited with a lot of friends over the Christmas/New Year's stretch, which was a wonderful way to spend the holiday. As Michele has noted, we played an unusually large number of games--numerous Settlers of Catan matches and also a number of Magic: the Gathering duels. My Christmas stocking contained, amidst other assorted miscellanea like the Annual Rau Christmas Pickle (a story for another day), a couple Magic packs; that was all it took to get me to dust off my Magic collection and sit down to build a few decks. I'd forgotten how fun and strategic that game can be. After re-learning the rules, I roped Michele and our friend Steve into numerous matches, which everyone seemed to enjoy. We also met for a truly epic, incredibly fun 9-hour D&D session run by yours truly--I haven't played in a marathan roleplaying session like that since high school, when I had way too much free time. It was exhausting; by the end of the session, my voice had gone hoarse from all the talking I'd done. The experience prompted many fond memories of entire weekends spent in the basement huddled with my California friends around battlemaps, dungeon-master screens, crumpled character sheets, Mountain Dews, and dog-eared gaming rulebooks.

Since then, our January has more or less normalized. Michele is plugging faithfully away at her studies, and I'm doing some freelance editing work for a roleplaying company; the latter is at least partly responsible for the dearth of posts here lately. It's incredibly fun work and I hope to continue with it.

So that's what I've been up to. Hopefully I'll be getting back into the swing of blogging. And if not, you can expect another where-have-I-been post in, say, two or three weeks...