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The Miracle
Aug. 28th, 2017 12:06 pmI'm feeling some fatigue with my Star Wars game. It's been going for about a year now, and that's a decent run. After for-freaking-ever with only minis gaming, launching the SW campaign was a good way to knock some rust off. Joining the Pulp Cthulhu game has been a good decision - good GM and players and a ridiculously cute black kitten. Should go ahead and throw in on Imaginarium and Nerdlouvia, I guess.
Saturday was for nerdery of another stripe. Small model train show across the river in Sellersburg. A couple of good HO scale modular setups and one okay N scale display. Took my buddy Darryl along, and it turned out to be a great day for him - someone from one of the clubs was able up to repair his prized 4-4-0. They put it on their layout, and dude got to see his baby run for a while. The club invited us out to their meeting nights, no pressure to join or put down dues or anything - just come out and run some trains and learn some things. Depending on things, I'd like to pick up a couple of locomotives to run on their layout. Watch for warehouse sales and the like. Like the Chessie System GP15-1 over at Walthers, for a c-note. Not that I've been window shopping or anything.
Hurricane Harvey rolled onto south Texas over the weekend. Ungodly amounts of rain and flooding, but minimal loss of life. It's not over, as forecasts predict that the thing is going to get a recharge before heading back over land and up the coast. This one's going to be costly. Every refinery is shut down, either due to damage or as a precaution, and fuel costs are already starting to climb. Some cities in the Houston metro area ordered evacuations, but most didn't, likely out of memory of the Rita evacuation in 2005. Maybe 3 million people were trying to get out of the Corpus Christi area, hopelessly gridlocking the whole evacuation network, even with Interstates set to contraflow. Over a hundred people died during the evacuation, mostly due to heat-derived conditions, and the roads were clogged for days after the storm's passage, preventing relief supplies and personnel from getting to affected areas. Lessons learned. There's a small and surprising silver lining - one of the few people in the current administration who isn't utterly awful is the FEMA director, and he seems to be handling things as well as can be.
CNN's reporting that Texas's governor has activated the entirety of the state National Guard. 12,000 citizen soldiers. Customs & Border Protection has been retasked into relief and assistance. And there could be another four feet and change of rain coming.
Loosely related, traffic was utter hell for a hojillion people a week ago. A total solar eclipse was viewable across this great land of ours, and ... well, see my previous entry. A GenCon buddy and his girlfriend went to Nashville to see the totality, and routed through Louisville on their way back to Michigan. We made plans to get together for dinner. And then a late dinner. And then a midnight refuel. It took them nine hours to get here from Nashville, and no rerouting helped. Interstates, federal highways, state roads - all just choked. And it wasn't just a regional problem. Similar stories all along the eclipse's path, from Oregon to South Carolina.
LA's still on top of all of MLB, despite dropping two of three to Milwaukee. This has planted a tiny seed of worry in the back of my mind. This may be the best single-season baseball team, ever, but come playoff time, the season is much shorter, as short as three games. LA's collapsed in the postseason before (albeit with a less-talented roster than the 2017 team), and I can almost see it happening again. For now, though, 91-38 with 33 games left in the regular season. The Giants were eliminated a week ago, before the Padres, even. October's coming.
The late stage of baseball season means the approach of football season. I've already seen a few mediocre preseason NFL games, and UofL starts against Purdue this weekend. (High school games are already underway, but I give zero fucks about those.) Maybe as a by-product of the Dodgers being just amazing this year, but I'm not as excited about football this year as in most previous years. The rapid increase in information about brain injuries in NFL players has taken a lot of shine off the sport, too.
Saturday was for nerdery of another stripe. Small model train show across the river in Sellersburg. A couple of good HO scale modular setups and one okay N scale display. Took my buddy Darryl along, and it turned out to be a great day for him - someone from one of the clubs was able up to repair his prized 4-4-0. They put it on their layout, and dude got to see his baby run for a while. The club invited us out to their meeting nights, no pressure to join or put down dues or anything - just come out and run some trains and learn some things. Depending on things, I'd like to pick up a couple of locomotives to run on their layout. Watch for warehouse sales and the like. Like the Chessie System GP15-1 over at Walthers, for a c-note. Not that I've been window shopping or anything.
Hurricane Harvey rolled onto south Texas over the weekend. Ungodly amounts of rain and flooding, but minimal loss of life. It's not over, as forecasts predict that the thing is going to get a recharge before heading back over land and up the coast. This one's going to be costly. Every refinery is shut down, either due to damage or as a precaution, and fuel costs are already starting to climb. Some cities in the Houston metro area ordered evacuations, but most didn't, likely out of memory of the Rita evacuation in 2005. Maybe 3 million people were trying to get out of the Corpus Christi area, hopelessly gridlocking the whole evacuation network, even with Interstates set to contraflow. Over a hundred people died during the evacuation, mostly due to heat-derived conditions, and the roads were clogged for days after the storm's passage, preventing relief supplies and personnel from getting to affected areas. Lessons learned. There's a small and surprising silver lining - one of the few people in the current administration who isn't utterly awful is the FEMA director, and he seems to be handling things as well as can be.
CNN's reporting that Texas's governor has activated the entirety of the state National Guard. 12,000 citizen soldiers. Customs & Border Protection has been retasked into relief and assistance. And there could be another four feet and change of rain coming.
Loosely related, traffic was utter hell for a hojillion people a week ago. A total solar eclipse was viewable across this great land of ours, and ... well, see my previous entry. A GenCon buddy and his girlfriend went to Nashville to see the totality, and routed through Louisville on their way back to Michigan. We made plans to get together for dinner. And then a late dinner. And then a midnight refuel. It took them nine hours to get here from Nashville, and no rerouting helped. Interstates, federal highways, state roads - all just choked. And it wasn't just a regional problem. Similar stories all along the eclipse's path, from Oregon to South Carolina.
LA's still on top of all of MLB, despite dropping two of three to Milwaukee. This has planted a tiny seed of worry in the back of my mind. This may be the best single-season baseball team, ever, but come playoff time, the season is much shorter, as short as three games. LA's collapsed in the postseason before (albeit with a less-talented roster than the 2017 team), and I can almost see it happening again. For now, though, 91-38 with 33 games left in the regular season. The Giants were eliminated a week ago, before the Padres, even. October's coming.
The late stage of baseball season means the approach of football season. I've already seen a few mediocre preseason NFL games, and UofL starts against Purdue this weekend. (High school games are already underway, but I give zero fucks about those.) Maybe as a by-product of the Dodgers being just amazing this year, but I'm not as excited about football this year as in most previous years. The rapid increase in information about brain injuries in NFL players has taken a lot of shine off the sport, too.