Get a Hobby. Seriously.

I have some hobbies, and that fact is the thing that unifies the rest of these otherwise loosely related news items:

First of all, it turns out that my roommate's spouse's spouse's cousin's brother's roommate's roommate's roommate Adam is a budding sci-fi author, and he's looking for an editor. Or really just kind of a peer review sort of thing at this point, but it was cool to find out that I had something big in common with this guy I'd hung out with a handful of times. He's looking to write novels for a career, and I'd love to look to write novels for a career. I've just started reading, and it's pretty cool so far. I'm not a super-experienced literary editor or anything, but I did get an English degree with pretty high marks, which should have at least distorted my outlook on fiction enough that I can give all kinds of useless academic feedback. This should be fun. Watch for Adam Henderson on the shelves wherever books are sold.

Second thing. And holy cow, have I been waiting to say this for a while: there's a piano at my house now! Awesome! Kirsten's mom and her husband live in a place called Jubilee at Hawks Prairie. The residents are "active adults at play," which means that for the most part, the residents are retired but don't want to just move into a regular neighborhood and be "those old people that live down the street." (You could argue that some of the residents are kinda playing fast and loose with the phrase "at play," but it's a pretty nice place.) Anyway, since a lot of people there are retired, they're not planning on moving any time soon, and they can get all kinds of stuff that would be a big pain to move. Some friends around the corner got a baby grand piano to replace their old console, and they were just going to give the old one to the movers! Kirsten's mom stepped in and told them to stop in the name of love. She knew I'd wanted a piano for, like, longer than I've been alive. So we rented a cargo van from Enterprise and picked it up. The cargo van and the 90-minute drive to Lacey were all it cost. Well, that and a tuning, which we need pretty badly now that we moved it from a 70-degree house to a 30-degree nortwestern afternoon and drive it 90 minutes up I-5 to Redmond. They were happy to send it to a good home, and I was excited to find a place for it in our apartment and release my inner Elton, musically (and only musically) speaking. Everyone was a winner in my book. I don't have any pictures at the moment, unfortunately, but if you do a Google image search for Baldwin Acrosonic, you can find an idea of what it looks like. It's small but cool.

The same part of me that enjoys theme parties and such, and Risk games at work, found another outlet and secured my bid for the position of Official Workplace Hangout Enabler last week by putting together some quick tournament brackets and dragging seven coworkers into a ping pong tournament. It's the First Annual Table Tennis Tournament, Celebration, and Meeting Point. (Acronym FATTT CAMP; which came first, the name or the abbreviation?) It's going swimmingly. We already have a signup sheet outside the office for the next one. We're going to have sixteen people next time, ideally. Then will come the foosball tourney, the 8-ball (or possibly 9-ball; it's cooler) tourney, the floss fest, the toothpick caber toss, etc. Any ideas are welcome. We're gamers here at Xbox, remember. Hardcore, unapologetic analog gamers. We're so hardcore that we've probably already played your suggestion. But give it a shot anyway.

And then the other night I got this terrible itch to build something. So I made this awesome rocket, which was so obscenely manly that it actually started growing its own chest hair. True story.
I love building things. Sigh. I especially like building things out of paper. I remember going to some kind of week-long nerd day camp thing when I was a kid, and we talked about buoyancy and displacement and load bearing objects and all of this stuff, and we got two pieces of printer paper to build a boat that would A) float and B) hold the most pennies and then something about a tower that would withstand a siege of some sort. The details are fuzzy now because I'm old and have a receding hairline. Anyway, some time ago, I spent an excessive number of hours building this:and it was one of the coolest things I (or you!) have ever done. I just wish the picture would do that beauty justice. It's at my parents' house now, the product of the better part of a semester at college, several hours a week. I did a Roman Villa one way back in the day, and made a short attempt at some kind of colonial village before I remembered that Colonial America was the most boring place ever - more boring, in fact, than the surface of the moon, lifeless, even, as that place is - and stopped. Well, I used some of the fundage left on my Barnes and Noble gift card from Christmas to order this one the other day:

I can't wait to get started. These pictures make it look like these things could be built in a couple of hours, but they're so, so detailed, it takes forever, and when I finish one of these, I feel sort of like Hannibal must have when the first elephants made it over the pass. They're awesome, and I don't care what you say, even if it wasn't for the x-acto blades involved, these things are manly, and I am more awesome when I build something. Even something made out of paper.

So there's a slice of what is cool these days. Also, check out boardgamegeek.com. That's also what's happening in the streets, in the clubs, in the hot spots that you love. Get into it.

Alright, take care of yourselves. Have a great Valentine's Day. And like I tell somebody at some point every year, there's always someone to do something nice for, regardless of your situation. Have fun.

Kent