Happy Birthday!

Jen's birthday is this Tuesday, but since she was away this past Friday, Lily and I decided to throw her a surprise party.

I worked on Friday and then came home. Our original plan had been to eat junk food and watch movies all night with Lily (something she ran out and told to mommy as soon as we had it planned, much to my chagrin). Unfortunately, Lily was at the lake all day with her Nana and was out for the night by the time she got home.

She woke up pretty early on Saturday and we watched some cartoons and made a cake. We have a couple different shapes of pans, so I asked Lily which shape cake she wanted to make. "Do you want a square, a rectangle or circle-shaped cake?" She looks at me and smiles mischievously and says "A triangle!" like a smartass.

That wasn't hard to do, though. I was already planning on cutting the cake in half because Lily had said she wanted fruit filling, so I just baked it in the square pan and cut it diagonally. I let it cool, spread the strawberry jelly on top of the one triangle and then put the other one on top of it.

I let her mix up the icing too. I picked up some white icing and split it into four containers and let her mix in the food coloring. I did the actual icing of the cake myself, though she told me where to put each color.

Why, yes, a four year old was supervising this project. Why do you ask?

We waited for Jen to get home, then lit the candles when we saw her pulling in. Lily whispered "Daddy! Quick! Hide!" in that amazingly earnest way kids have. So Jen enters, we hop out and yell "Surprise!" and fun is had by all.

Baby Bear was a guest and not a gift.

I got Jen two books on taking digitial pictures of nature scenes. (These two books, if you care: Digital Wildlife Photography and 100 Ways to take better Nature & Wildlife Photographs) Lily got her a stuffed raccoon that makes a magical sound when you squeeze it and some chocolate. She also made a card all by herself.

Since we started celebrating Jen's birthday three days before the actual event, she asked us if it was going to be like Hanukkah, and we'd be celebrating all week. Sounds good to me. Happy birthday, sweet, and many more!

The Replacement JLA: Session One

We had our first session of the DC Adventures Super hero game and it went pretty well. Jen was working late at an event, so I picked up Lily and she helped me shop for snacks. She was very careful to buckle in Baby Bear before we started driving.

We bought some munchies and did some last minute preparing while we waited for the guys to show up. I turned on some Avengers cartoons to set the mood.

We each had a super person we were playing:

I was Dawnfire, a 17-year-old girl with a degenerative nerve disease, who was an invalid raised in a clean room until an experimental therapy gave her super powers. She looks like Ellen Page. Here's a picture of Ellen Page dressed up like a superhero.

Dave was a guy modeled on the Greatest American Hero, a more or less regular guy with a supersuit that gives him powers. He didn't come up with a description or background for the guy as of game time, so we all decided that he looked like William Katt.

Believe it or not...

Casey ran Blink, our teleporter. During the game, he remarked that the guy played a lot like a speedster and I agreed. No picture for him; he moves too fast to make that possible.

Frederick had Rächen Bloodson, the half-human son of Etrigan the Demon and Morgan Le Fey. I enjoy the exercise of designing the characters, so I built most of the guys we used, and I think his guy came out especially well. I didn't think I'd be able to make him in the system, but it's really versatile and it doesn't penalize you for playing a concept character.

Lastly, we had a guest star. Frederick's son came along and he ran Plastic Man.

While we were waiting for the last guy to show up, Lily was off to the side, playing with her little toys, apparently completely engrossed in what she was doing.  She took Belle from Beauty and the Beast and put her on top of Brainiac 5, with Belle's pleated dress completely covering Brainy's head.

Lily: Belle's peeing on Brainy. Pee, pee, pee...
Me: Uhh....
Lily: ...pee. pee. pee...
Me: *Sigh* The sad part is, there's probably a picture of Belle peeing on Brainiac 5 somewhere on the internet.
Lily: (stops playing) REALLY?!
Josh's friends: *laughter*
Me: Sigh. How do I know this is getting back to Jen?

If there wasn't a picture of it before, there is now!

The session was pretty short. The gist of it was that the Justice League was MIA and supercrime is on the rise as the badguys realize there's no one to stop them. We opened on the scene of a museum robbery, with us watching from the skylight as a guy in power armor directed his minions to loot the place.

(Lily wanted to play as Wonder Woman, so every so often, I would have her roll a die and tell her that's how many badguys she lassoed.)

It was your run of the mill superpowered fight. We jumped down through the skylight and started punching or zapping people. Because we misunderstood the Area Attack rules, Blink was absurdly effective against the minions (he's got an area attack of quickly popping in and and out and punching all the targets in a 120 foot radius) and effectively dropped all of them before anyone else could make a move. Bloodson and the GAH zapped power armor guy with their hellfire and heat vision respectively, and as I had no ranged attacks, I closed to melee and kept punching him. Plastic Man kept transforming into Foghorn Leghorn and a putty colored Superman.

So we went back and forth and even though the guy in the power armor (Bob was his name, as it turned out) had a couple levels on us, we made short work of him. We were pounding him pretty steadily and he decided to just surrender rather than be battered unconscious, which is probably what I'd do if I had a bunch of superpeople beating on me.

After his surrender, we had this exchange:

Eric the GM: How old is your character?
Me: She's 17.
Eric as Bob the supervillain: (an aside to the Greatest American Hero) That girl over there...is she legal?
Me as Dawnfire: No, but I have super hearing!
The Greatest American Hero socks Bob in the jaw and he goes down.

Those heroes still on the roof noticed that Batman was perched there observing us. Plastic Man, the only one who knew Batman, realized that this guy was a substitute. He recruited us to his substitute Justice League, and that's where the session ended.

Overall, a very decent session. We're still learning the finer points of the system and this was essentially a prelude where we were setting up the premise for the campaign. I think I would have preferred a little more role-playing, but I think that will come in time as we all get a firmer grasp on our character's personalities. I'm looking forward to the next session in two weeks.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Great Slow Kings

This is one of those fun short stories. It tells the story of the Great Slow Kings, two reptilian monarchs named Drax and Dran, their intellects vast and ponderous.

Drax and Dran sat in the great Throne Hall of Glan, discussing life. Monarchs by virtue of superior intellect and physique--and the fact that they were the last two survivors of the race of Glan - theirs was a divided rule over the planet and their one subject, Zindrome, the palace robot.

It's a one note story, with the gimmick being that Drax and Dran act so slowly that vast spans of time pass between every line of their conversations. It's a silly story, inspired, no doubt by similar ones Zelazny had written as a kid with lifelong friend friend Carl Yoke about their namesake monsters Yok and Zlaz.

"Dran, I've been thinking. There may be life on other planets in the galaxy."

Dran considered his response to this, as the world wheeled several times about its sun.

"True," he finally agreed, "there may."

After several months Drax shot back, "If there is, we ought to find out."

"Why?"  asked Dran with equal promptness, which caused the other to suspect that he, too, had been thinking along these lines.

And it's all pretty much like that. The humor is in the juxtaposition of things like "several months" and "equal promptness".

"Masters,"  suggested Zindrome, "the half-life of radioactive materials being as ephemeral as it is, I regret to report that only one spaceship is now in operational condition."

They send their robot out and he returns with two humanoids. They tell him to go back and get more.

In the midst of their discussion Zindrome returned and stood waiting to be recognized.

"What is it, Zindrome? Did you forget something?"

"No,  great Lords. When I returned to the world from which I obtained the samples I discovered that the race had progressed to the point where it developed fission  processes, engaged in an  atomic war and annihilated itself."

"That was extremely inconsiderate--typical, however, I should  say, of warm-blooded instability."

Also, the two humanoids Zindrone left behind had reproduced and overrun the planet. The pair are irate and dictate to their robot a very sternly worded proclomation, but by the time it is completed, the humanoids on this planet have also developed nuclear technology and used it to wipe themselves out too.

Drax and Dran instruct their robot to archive their proclamation (which by now is already moldering) and then spend some time discussing what has happened.

"At any rate, I should have to ponder your suggestion carefully."

"And I yours."

"It's been a busy day," nodded Dran. "Let's sleep on it."

 "A good idea."

Sounds of saurian snoring emerged from the great Throne Hall of Glan.

I doubt it tops anybody's list of best Zelazny stories, but I think it's very good humor story because of its length. Zelazny provides enough variations on the concept of very slow, obtuse monarchs, and then quits while it's still funny.

New Geek Speak

If, for some reason,  you're not getting enough Jugular Joshness here at the blog, I have a few pieces up in this month's Geek Speak.

The Thousand Names of Baby Bear

So a while back we lost Lily's stuffed animal, Baby Bear. We had lost her at a local mall previously, but quickly recovered, but this time it was more permanent. We were never sure if she fell off the roof of the car in the parking garage or if we actually made it all the way to the highway before she made her tumble. So we rushed an order on eBay for a replacement Baby Bear and Lily was none the wiser.

She was temporarily lost again at Great Nanny's house, and we ordered another replacement, but in a scene familiar to sci-fi fans, the original was unearthed when the clone was still running around. So we had two Baby Bears, and since Lily takes her everywhere, she occasionally gets left behind at school or at a sleepover, whereupon we break out the Baby Bear we keep in my dresser drawer.

Well, we had a moment where she saw both of them. The one was in a duffel bag from a sleepover and the other was out in the open. Lily poked in the duffel and saw the replacement. She looked at Jen and then asked in a hushed whisper, "Did you know that there were two Baby Bears?!"

So now she's making distinctions between the pair. She announced that one is Baby Bear and the other is Bear Baby ("Her nickname is Cubby, because a cub is a baby bear!") Sometimes when she's laying down to sleep, we'll hold hands and think of "silly stuff", though that's usually more a thing that Jen does with her. I was doing it the other night and I suggested that Baby Bear's mom was really Triplicate Girl, and there was a third Baby Bear out there. She sat up and her lip quivered and she said, "I bet she's all alone and really scared," and I had to reassure her that the third Baby Bear was the white one we gave away to another little kid for a birthday, and that she was happy and well loved.

We were in the cemetery a couple days after that, and we saw a cloud that looked like the number three. I asked Lily who would write in clouds like that and she answered, "Mother Earth?" and later on she said, "You have to listen to Mother Earth!" in that absolutely sincere way little kids have.

She's asking a lot more esoteric questions, like "Does space go on forever?" and "Does the earth ever get any bigger?", the last because she knows there are more people being born and she's worried we'll run out of space. I asked her what we would have to do if we did run out of space, and she said everyone would have to share a house with an old person, and got upset when I thought that was funny.

This Friday, Jen's car broke down on the way home from work. She's terrible about charging her cell phone, so we couldn't reach each other on that. So, I went to the garage where she was going to be towed, waited for 45 minutes, and then got a phone call from Jen on a borrowed phone that she was still waiting for the truck, so I went to pick her up. I got there just as the truck was leaving with her car. Convenient, right? Or it would be, if my car didn't choose that moment to break down as we were driving away. So we pushed it to a local restaurant and called for a second tow. I'm pretty sure it was overheating, (the temperature topped out at 103 degrees that day) because it started up a couple hours later.

Saturday was okay. We went to Jen's sister's baby shower, at a church where Jen had had her own when she was pregnant with Lily. Lily was pretty bored, so I mostly just watched her in the cemetery and the playground.

(I'm very disappointed with this cemetery. The nicest feature is a gazebo near the entrance. It has more garbage cans than I've ever seen in a cemetery too. Two stars. I would not recommend it to my friends.)

Lily decided to start pretending to be Wonder Woman near the end of our time on the playground. She tied up the Joker ("tie-tie") and said "That was easy!" It is easy, Batman! It's not that hard to arrest an anorexic clown! Maybe it's time to face up to the fact that maybe you're not the A-1 sauce of crime-fighting! And after that, she said, "Now I'm going to drink some chocolate milk and go down this sliding board." Wonder Woman even knows how to celebrate in style!

Lily woke up in a good mood on Sunday, and as we were going downstairs, she said, "Let's think about what things we have in common and what things are different," so we decided that we both have brown eyes and we're both nice and funny and smart, and we both like the Legion of Superheroes. When we got downstairs, we talked about what she has in common with mommy. Lily said, "We're both girls and we both wear dresses and we both love you," which I thought was very sweet.

Later in the morning, I was trying to finish up a piece on Veronica Mars when Lily came upstairs and looked at the screen and asked me what I was doing. I told her that I was writing a story about a girl who solves mysteries. She said that she didn't want to be in my story, and pointed to a segment where I wrote about Veronica's best friend Lilly Echols. She's getting very good at spelling. Take a look at the bracelet she put together for me on Sunday morning:

Our mechanic works on weekends, so we got Jen's car back, and then went to the mall where we kind of had an ugly incident. I told Lily I would buy her something in the dollar store. She picked up a little thing that looked like a whistle, but I told her not to blow into it and I took it away because it looked like she was going to do it anyway. As soon as I turned my back, she grabbed another one and blew into it, and I told her that's what we would have to buy. She started bawling. She was really very upset, and it's really hard being a parent at times like this. But we paid for it, and met up with Jen, who asked how we were, and Lily was all "Don't tell mommy what happened!"

The troublesome toy

She calmed down somewhat and went into the computer store to buy a car charger for Jen's phone. While she was paying, Lily and I asked her what her favorite candy was. Then we didn't go over to Gertrude Hawk and we didn't buy Jen a birthday present and Lily didn't say "Mommy is going to be DELIGHTED with her present!" when we were done.