LifeBox

Whew. Lots of improv this weekend. Kabaam! was awesome, directing Maestro with Aden was fun. Yesterday was “resting” - we took off our usual IFE rehearsal on account of folks being out of town and stuff, and I spent all day hanging out with and driving around with Pai. We had a trip to one of those big kiddie play places planned out (while Bernie mulched and trimmed and cleaned up the yard at the old house, in preparation for staging), but it turns out that it was closed on Sundays. Lazy!

So, instead, we swung by a couple of other play-related hotspots - first, for me, Dragon’s Lair, where I picked up a copy of Trail of Cthulhu, in preparation for a game this week. I also ran into my buddy Nick, who apparently works there, and we jawed about how awesome In A Wicked Age is, and we should play soon, and so on. Rad. Paidia has never been there, but once she realized that she was surrounded by toys, she became very interested. Unfortunately, game nerds are a bit more particular about who knocks their little dolls - oops, I mean miniatures - around, so we went to a more toddler-appropriate place.

Yes, Toys-R-Us. As a grown-up (for a very loose definition of the term), it’s a pretty depressing place. Big, kind of grimy, a little deserted feeling, and outside of the “science toys” corner, full of irritating branded crap. There’s almost nothing there that doesn’t have some kind of character or tie-in to a big corporation - already, just from having one sippy cup with that Dora character on it, Pai knows who she is, and gravitates towards the Dora-branded legos over the other ones. Ah, well. Anyway, it’s a much better place to let her run around and pull stuff off the shelves and play with the shiny things for a while. I used to work at a Toys-R-Us in college, and I remember the lameness of the last hour or two after closing when we had to do reshelving, so I was pretty conscious about putting stuff back afterwards. We wound up with a new noise-making book and a stuffed dog that she really liked, and headed home.

I’m mostly caught up on paying work right now, so instead of jumping into one of my non-paying computor projects, I set to printing up and cutting up cards for a couple of tabletop prototypes that are meant to be sent off to playtesting groups and agents and whatnot this week. I’m more interested in what the blind playtesters have to say than anything else. (Not literally blind - just people who have never seen the games before, and who won’t have me there to explain the rules to them.) Now that we’ve found a fairly decent print-on-demand solution for card-making, it feels like I’m really close to having at least two more card games to push out soon on Gizmet, and maybe one other light dexterity game. So, yay.

Today is a holiday (I believe), so, no meetings! Instead, we drop Paidia off at the babysitter, and get to go out on a date to see Iron Man at the Drafthouse. Also, it’s our eleven year anniversary (observed). That’s, like, a long time.