Friends make weekends

It's late and I'm tired, so I'll just say that since the last blog entry, I've had a couple of very enjoyable days with two groups of friends.

On Saturday, I went to dinner with DL and HV at a Mexican restaurant called The Chocolate Dog. It had a real homely atmosphere and the servings were huge. I ordered the tequila prawns which were delicious and came with a mound of spicy salad. Lucky I had clean hands as I had to shell the buggers at the table.

Agreeably stuffed, we then walked half a dozen blocks to a church hall for Ukuleleland III, a concert in which our mutual mate CM was performing. It's hard to praise the acts without sounding biased, but trust me when I say there was more variety than you might imagine (including a surreal comedy performance) and some excellent musicianship (Azo Bell is the Hendrix of the uke).

Today, I made the trek down to "The Shire" to my pal TC's place to play games with he and another buddy, LPO.

We started with the old Games Workshop boardgame "Ultramarines", in which rival chapters of Space Marines fight for control of alien artifacts. With a lot of beginner's luck (in both dice rolling and card drawing) and perhaps a little strategy, I emerged with the most booty AND managed to annihilate all of both my opponents' forces!

This was followed by three long, close, highly amusing multiplayer games of "Magic: The Gathering", using decks randomly chosen from the 10 Ravnica-block pre-cons (without replacement). Cinematically, we won one each. My victory came with the Gruul Wilding deck - it's good to see green/red's still kicking butt efficiently after all these years!