ayca introduces Featured Question.

So, there I was:  I had one week to go before GenCon and I got nothing done (other than finish HP7).  Thus, the Sunday before was busy:  doing laundry, packing for the trip, building a deck for my first Ritual of the Unnameable tournament, attending mass, buying chocolate for my catsitter, checking for last minute updates on Guardian 6, and packing for work the next day; all the while trying to make time for my cat before I left.  At mass Fr. Gene announced that a new associate pastor, Fr. Bob would be introduced at all of the masses.  I'm sure he was happy to get a replacement for Fr. Joy.

Monday morning Bob was kind enough to give me a ride to work.  Midmorning I realized I had left my badge, event tickets, and my hand written schedule at home.  Luckily, my mom was kind enough to stop by my house on her way home from work and drop them off at my work.  After work, Doug was kind enough to give me a ride to Troy's place.  It was the first time I'd met his third child.  His daughter showed me their baby scrapbooks (again), while his older son showed me the Over the Hedge console game.  Ken called and asked if I could bring some extra Shadowfist decks for him to borrow, as he was having trouble finding any of his built decks and didn't have time to build new ones.  Then we all watched the first few episodes of Jack of All Trades, which turned out to be an awesome television show!  We interrupted an episode for dinner, but never returned to it as we adults chose to watch Star Wars:  Fool's Errand instead (as Troy' brother-in-law has a small part) while the children went to bed.  As we needed an a/v cable to watch it, Troy and I did a quick trip to his bank and Wal*Mart.  After the film we all called it a night.

Tuesday morning Troy and I headed to Sky Harbor.  We met up with Steve and had a overpriced, overly heatlamped breakfast at the terminal's Burger King.  After a short delay, we boarded.  Steve busted out Settlers of Catan to pass the time.  The flight was mostly uneventful, though we had to wait through some very light turbulence for the storm to calm down at Indy before we could land.  Bill came and picked us up, and we went to check-in at the hotel.  It turned out that the hotel was having a Guest Appreciation Evening in their 120 West Market.  They had cocktail tables set up throughout the restaurant, some delish fruits, breads, and cheeses; sushi and sashimi; gourmet pizzas (including an awesome salmon pizza); and the piece de resistance:  a mashed potato bar!  For dessert they had various cakes and tarts, plus a chocolate fondu fountain with pretzels, cake cubes, and fruits.  The mashed potato bar was too incredible.  The server would take an ice cream scooper and scoop either mashed sweet potato, mashed yukon gold potato, or mashed garlic potato into a large martini glass.  She'd hand the glass over to you, and you could load it up with over a dozen different topping choices.  I could have ate that every day for the whole week, but the hotel didn't offer the mashed potato bar ever again, even for a fee.  We settled into our hotel room while Bill went to run some Cthulu for KFG at the Ram.  I called up Mary to confirm that she and Ivan would be joining us for True Dungeon on Friday night.  Steve and I played a couple of hands of Shadowfist.  That's when I discovered that I had somehow packed several decks, but not the Ritual of the Unnameable deck I had built on Sunday.  That was very frustrating.  Meanwhile, Troy had an online game to run, the name of which escapes me.

How lame, apparently there is a limit on the number of tags I can put in my blog.  Oh well, I'll just split the week here and continue further in the next entry.

	My Flixster

"Continuous effort is the key to unlocking our potential." ~ Black Elk, Indigenous North American