Mer and I tried adding the (free, came with the game) river expansion pack to the basic Carcassonne game. The river pack adds 12 river cards – one spring card (where the river starts), one pond card (where the river ends), and 10 river cards. It adds more interest to the game, especially where farmers are concerned, because it creates a boundary to the fields, which adds complexity to the strategy.

I felt as if I was winning throughout the whole game. I managed to take over a castle that Mer had spent a lot of time building, and I managed to get an extra farmer in the main field of the game, so I had two big point-scoring opportunities. It turns out that my confidence was misplaced. I won by three points. If Mer had gotten any one of four different cards that I drew, she would have won. One of the cards she needed was the penultimate card drawn (I got it) – at that point she had a 50/50 chance of winning. It’s weird how you think you are in control of a game and then start sweating it as the points are tallied. I’m looking forward to trying this game with three people sometime. I think that would add complexity without making it simply a land-grabbing game (I fear that four or five people make the game about playing any piece you can any time that you can).

Awwwwwwwwww!
We must have been a good boy and girl this year!

We just got back from calling hours for Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob was a dear friend of Mer’s family, and he was a huge influence on the entire King clan. He was a long-time friend to Dale, and was responsible for Dale coming to Ohio to teach at Malone College. Uncle Bob loved theater, and his New York and Cleveland tours exposed a young Meredith to the world of the arts. Uncle Bob was also an ordained minister, and he presided over our wedding. Here is his obituary, as printed in the Canton Repository:

Dr. Robert Leland Lair
Robert L. Lair, age 75, went home to be with the Lord on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at Aultman Hospital. He was born to Francis
and Georgia Morrison Lair in Gloversville, NY, on June 21,1932. He was
one of six children.  He received his
doctorate in English at Ohio State University, and his masters of
English from Middlebury College at the Bread Loaf School of English.
His undergraduate studies were completed at Bob Jones University where
he also received a masters in Bible, was professor of English, and
served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He also taught at Ohio State
University before coming to Malone College where he taught until his
retirement in 1994. During these years he was very active not only at
the college but in the community. For many years he served as the chair
of the Language and Literature Department. He started a series which he
wrote and directed entitled “Evenings with” where he acquainted
students with the lives of various authors. While at Malone he received
the honor of the yearbook dedication and was also recognized as
Professor of the Year when he retired. His acting and public speaking
skills landed him leading roles in Malone College Shakespearean
productions of Richard II and King Lear, and he could be frequently
seen at area churches performing one of his religious monologs. An avid
writer, his books on T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson were published by
Barron’s Educational Series, and he was a regular contributor to the
Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges and Universities. Robert was
pronouncer several years for the Repository Spelling Bee. He was quite
an accomplished pianist and accompanist and wrote many musical
compositions as well. He could be heard in the community where he
served as interim pastor of three different churches: Sixteen St.
John’s Church of North Lawrence, Market Heights United Church of Christ
of Canton, and St. Jacob’s Community Church of Cairo, Ohio. A lover of
the arts, Bob led NYC Theater tours for 30 years, Cleveland Playhouse
tours, the Spoleto Festivals, Europe and Stratford Festival Tours as
well. There were many faithful participants in these tours who attended
just to experience the warm personality and fun of just being with
Robert Lair. He will always be remembered as a wonderful husband,
father, teacher, pastor, tour director, actor, pianist, friend, and
always the life of the party. He will be greatly missed. He enjoyed his
retirement and spent much of it in travel, antiquing, reading, and
writing, having written hundreds of prayers which he shared with
friends. Most of all, he loved his family dearly and was so proud of
their accomplishments. Contributions may
be made to Malone College, to establish a scholarship fund in the Department of
Language and Literature in memory of Dr. Lair.

Rest in peace, Uncle Bob. Welcome home.

The CVCA server has enough data (250+ GB) that it has become difficult to back up. Backups are taking 8-24 hours to complete, depending on technology. So, after dumping $2000+ into various solutions, the next attempt was to install a firewire 800 card in the server and use that to back things up. How hard can installing a PCI card be?

Uber-technician takes the server offline just before 7:00 am. He unhooks the 10,000 cables and hoists the 800-pound server onto the workbench. The side just pops off (good Dell!). Uber-tech takes out the not-fast-enough USB2 card that was last month’s solution to the backup issues. Uber-tech installs the new card. Success! Uber tech slaps the side back on, hoists the 800-pound server back into place, and reconnects the 10,000 cables. Uber-tech confidently powers the server back up. Wild success! Uber-tech goes over to his desk to await the “found new hardware” announcement. Silence. Hmmmmm. Uber-tech figures that the server just found the card and happily hooks up a firewire 800 drive. Silence. Hmmmmmm. Uber-tech remembers seeing a standard power connector on the card. Even though the manual says nothing about the power, uber-tech figures maybe the card needs 12 volts.

Adequate-tech unhooks the 11,000 cables from the server and moves the 900-pound server over to the workbench. Adequate-tech takes off the side. Hmmmmm. The only internal power cable seems to be powering the server DVD drive. Hmmmmm. Adequate-tech figures he can just share a network DVD drive, so he unhooks the power from the DVD drive and plugs it into the card. The card connection bends to the rousing chorus of “Oh, crap!” from adequate-tech.

Grumpy-tech pulls out the firewire 800 card and installs a second one (grumpy tech’s motto – “Always order two!”). Grumpy-tech hooks up the power connection. Success! Grumpy-tech puts the side back on the server and moves the 900-pound server back to the rack and hooks up the 11,000 cables. He powers on the server. Silence. Blank screen. Hmmmmm. Grumpy-tech unplugs the power and tries again. The front display turns orange and shows a memory error. Hmmmmm. Grumpy-tech tries again. Processor error. Hmmmmm. Again. Processor error.

Panicky-tech starts formulating emergency run-the-school-with-no-data plan. Not very encouraging. Panicky-tech unhooks the 12,000 cables and hoists the 1,000-pound server on to the workbench. Panicky-tech pops the side off the server and unhooks the power from the card and reattaches it to the DVD player. Panicky-tech pulls out the firewire 800 card AND the extra USB card (just for good measure). Panicky-tech puts the side back on the server and heaves the 1,000-pound server back to the rack. Panicky-tech hooks up the 12,000 cables. Panicky tech suddenly remembers he works for a Christian school and prays really really hard. Panicky-tech powers the server back on. Beep. Green lights. Screen comes on.

Relieved-tech looks at the clock – 7:40 am, 10 minutes after students arrive. The server still has no good backup solution. Server:1, Relieved-tech:0

(I’m still VERY grateful the server came back online!)

It’s 4:45 pm. The hard-working Mainer starts his way home, walking across the CVCA parking lot. There is some snow, and a little ice because the day was warm and some snow melted. Huh. The Mainer slips on some black ice. Tricky. Still, the dextrous Mainer stays on his feet. It will take more than one little patch of ice to bring him down. Still, discretion is the better part of valor, so the Mainer tries to stay on the crunchy ice that he can see. Ooops! Another black ice patch. Darn stuff looks just like water on the pavement, of which there is a fair amount. The parking lot slopes down at about a 10-degree angle, so it makes it hard to navigate over real ice. Still, the Mainer has survived 36 winters, most of them in Maine and Chicago. What can bad ole Ohio throw at him?

Three strikes, you’re out. Another patch of black ice and the Mainer is glad that he lands mostly on his forearm and manages to limp to the safety of the snow and make his way back home. If the Mainer had back problems, his back would not be happy about the sudden acceleration/sudden stop of his unplanned trip. Everything seems to be mostly okay except for his pride….

Christmas decorations have arrived in the new Riordan house! The tree went up last weekend (over the Thanksgiving break). We got a package from Maine (whooo!!) yesterday, and it had a real wreath in it from Mer’s grandparents. We hung it inside the door so that we could see it more often and enjoy the smell.

Since putting up the tree, I have fallen asleep on the couch three or four times (in one week!) while listening to Christmas music and looking at the tree. It is one of my favorite things to do during the Christmas season. Add some hot chocolate and a kitty or two, and life is very good!

Hope everyone has a nice and relaxing lead-up to Christmas!

Last Christmas, Mom got me and Meredith a game called Carcassonne, a game about building walled cities and the roads and landscapes about the cities. You try to use knights to control cities, thieves to control roads, monks to control monasteries, and farmers to control the fields around cities. You build the map one randomly drawn tile at a time, which must be placed in a logical connection somewhere on the existing map. Meredith and I finally got around to playing it twice last weekend during Thanksgiving break. It is a good game, with a fair amount of brow-creasing strategy in placing your followers. Knights, monk, and thieves score big during the game, but farmers can score huge at the end of the game. If you place too many farmers, you run out of followers to place during the game.

The first game, Mer ran way out in front by placing lots of knights in small cities, and by placing thieves. I concentrated on farmers. Since it was the first game, we were not totally sure about the best strategy. It turns out that the small cities that Mer was building scored me big points from my farmers at the end of the game. Mer invested in farmers too late to challenge my farmers, so I ended up supplying all but one city on the board, and I won by a few points (we found out we had been scoring cities incorrectly, so it is not clear what I won by – it could have been anywhere from 1-5 points). I think I actually may have won because we had holes in the map – those sorts of things bug Mer, and it may have distracted her in her thinking about the game.

Mer totally smashed me in the second game. She managed to place knights in cities and thieves on the roads, which scored her points right away. She also drew a few more monasteries than I did, which got her off to a big lead early. She then concentrated on matching my farmers, but only as she needed to. This left her pieces free to be knights for much of the game, while my pieces were tied up being farmers (farmers are always farmers in the game, and the piece is lost once played as a farmer). She also built huge cities so that my farmers could not score so big if I won the farming part of the game. The second game actually came down to the last three tiles. Meredith was trying to connect up her last farmer to the rest of the fields. If she succeeded, she would neutralize my farmers. If she could not connect her farmer, I would end up supplying all of the cities. Sadly, for me, she found the tile she needed, and she won by 50 points (ouch!).

One of the fun things about the game is that Mer and I visited the real walled city of Carcassonne in southern France. It was one of my favorite places in all of France. The old walled city is still intact, and is fun to wander around in. I hope to return to blogging about the France trip over Christmas break (kind of a six-month return!).

Running on a treadmill is not the most engaging of occupations, so both Mer and I try to multi-task while we exercise. Meredith is going back through all 84 lectures on American literature from the Teaching Company, and she is well over half-way done (she gets in one lecture per day that she exercises).

I just spent the last three or four weeks in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I have had this book recommended to me several times, so I went to the library and got it on CD, and listened to about 30 minutes at a time when I ran. The reader was excellent, changing her voice for each character. This is important, because to my surprise, Middlemarch was about the town of Middlemarch, and had at least ten important characters and several minor characters as well. I’m not too bright when it comes to names, so it was helpful to have the different voices to get the characters straight. The book is very well written, and the plot lines are interesting, especially in the last half of the book (once the plot lines are fully developed for all the primary characters). I’m glad to have “read” the book, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a highly regarded book.

Having finished up Middlemarch yesterday (on Thanksgiving), I needed something new to listen to. I did download the entire radio program The Shadow from archive.org, but I decided to see if anything else caught my fancy there. So, I went back to archive.org, and I was delighted. They have lots of free (legal) music – concerts recordered by fans and posted online with the bands’ blessing. I made an entire (free!) CD of Eddie From Ohio songs that are not on any of their other recordings (songs they only did in concert).

I also discovered that archive.org has many public domain books online that have been read by volunteers. I commend the program, but the readings are good amateur recordings, which are a little hard to take after the professional recordings of Middlemarch, Animal Farm, and Jane Eyre that I have heard in the last year. I kept looking.

What I found that made me quite happy was archive.org’s listing of the Burns and Allen radio show from the 40s. I had always heard that George Burns and Gracie Allen were extremely funny, but my exposure to their comedy had been limited to just a few clips here and there. Archive.org had (for free!) several years’ worth of the show online. I downloaded three years’ worth of programs and converted them to iTunes (they come as mp3s). I got my first listen this morning.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Gracie is a master of one-liners, and they are delivered flawlessly. I was laughing out loud on the treadmill, even after running for over 20 minutes. The humor was all clean, and the things that Gracie said were always funny, even when I knew what was coming (which was not often). George plays the stright man perfectly, never laughing or seeing anything unusual in what Gracie says. Beautiful.

My only complaint from the program that I heard was that the ads were placed in the show, as part of the show. There is no way to do subtle product placement on radio. Having someone come in and randomly start extolling the virtues of “Swan Soap, the soap doctors recommend for babies” in the middle of the scene was awkward and irritating. My best guess as to why they chose to advertise that way was to make sure listeners heard the commercial – you could not get up for a drink during the ad because it was part of the show.

Still, even with the odd ads in the show, the Burns and Allen show is worth downloading from the link above. It is good, clean fun, and it sure helps move 25 minutes of running right along.

Oh – for history buffs out there, it was interesting to hear Gracie encouraging Americans to save all the paper they could for the war effort.

Exercise – funny stuff!

Meredith and I had another fun Saturday, and I even was a little productive. I went to bed Friday with a slightly sore throat, and I woke up feeling a little blah (a medical term) and still had the slightly sore throat. So, I did what every sensible male Riordan would do – I punished my body. The thinking is that if your body starts to get sick, then you can make it so inhospitable to viruses that they will move out. It makes perfect sense. So, I ran for 15 minutes (about 2.25 miles) and then went out and mulched leaves for 30 minutes. That would show those virii!

After a shower, I took Mer down Canton way for a $2 date. Since we still have two mortgages, we are not supposed to be spending any money, but I figured Mer would be okay with the occational outlay if it was minimal. This assumption seemed correct. So, I took Mer to the nice $1 theater in Canton (clean, and the seats recline!) to see Ratatouille, a movie both of us had wanted to see. Ratatouille was charming – it took place in Paris, and (not surprisingly) Pixar did a nice job of creating Paris for the film. Since we were recently in Paris (including the sewers), it was fun to see it again in the film. A movie featuring food is also a plus for the Riordan household. The characters were much fun as well – the rat was sympathetic as a character, but most importantly, the movie pitted an obviously American character against a short and mean and stereotypical French chef. How can you not have good comedy out of that? Ratatouille was a good film, especially for just a $1 each.

We got back home in time for me to make ham calzone. While that was rising, we listened to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! via the computer, a favorite pastime for us on weekends. We just mellow out and listen to the show for an hour. This weekend’s show was good, including a tear-inducing moment with trying to give comedian Paula Poundstone a clue about Santa (listen to the Nov. 17th show, Panel Round Two, if interested). We then sat down to watch a Quantum Leap episode while eating hot calzone followed by a brownie/pudding dessert. Yum!

We then drove (it was raining) the arduous .25 miles to CVCA to see the fall play, which this year was a double-bill, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever followed by It’s a Wonderful Life. If you have never read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, you should – it is a quick read, and it is really funny. The dramatized version held up well. There were a number of quick transitions in the play (scenes that were only a minute long or so), but they were handled well by the narrator. Seeing the terrible Herdmans running around live on stage was fun. I was amazed at how well one of the leads did in the play – the actress playing the mom carried herself well on stage, and she looked to be much older than 17 or 18. One of the fun things about working at CVCA is getting to see students you know up on the stage.

Mer and I missed the first few minutes of the second play – we were helping out the Diakonos service club do fundraising for the spring Habitat trip. The club sells “stargrams” where for 50 cents people can send notes to the cast or crew, and the proceeds help students defray some of their costs for the Habitat for Humanity trip in the spring (it costs about $250 to go). I  was put in charge of the table handling the cash, and Mer helped with running the stargrams backstage.

It’s a Wonderful Life is a great story – I love the film version of it (I have seen it at least 5 or 6 times). I love Jimmy Stewart – he is one of my favorite actors. So, I was very pleased when the student playing George pulled it off – he made a convincing George, and his wife, Mary, was played very well by a student as well. Both George and Mary looked great in the period clothing (the 30s and 40s had wonderful clothes that look great on people). Clarence was played by a Norwegian exchange student, and that worked well – his accent helped make his sound otherworldly (or at least different from the townspeople of Bedford Falls).

Mer had over twenty of her students involved in the play either on stage or as part of the crew, and I had at least five Fools or Ceili Club members in the productions as well. It was fun seeing the results of their hard work.

Another very fine Saturday!

Oh – the body is hanging in there. I still feel a little run down, and the throat is acting up a bit, but I feel a little better as of Sunday afternoon. More empirical evidence for Riordan medicine!

Today saw a couple of sporting moments for me. Once my half-marathon was over, I switched back to training for speed for a 5k race. I do not remember my 5k times from high school, especially from my sophomore year when I was relatively fast, but my fastest post-high-school time for a 5k is 18:57, which I managed to get when I was in college (around age 21 or so). My current goal is to break that time, and thus set a new personal record (a PR in the racing world), at least as far as I remember. I think it would be pretty spiffy to be in better shape at 37 than I was when I was 21.

To realistically pull off an 18:50 5k or so, I need to be able to run at 10 mph on my treadmill, which is an 18:36 5k time. Treadmill running is slightly easier than road running, so I need to be able to do better than my race goal in order to achieve it. My plan is fairly simple – run on the treadmill for 25 minutes, and increase the speed by 0.1 mph per week. This seems to work pretty well (at least until 9.2 or 9.3 mph, when it starts getting hard).

Well, as of this morning, I got back to 9.0 mph. That is about a 20:40 5k time, and is still a full 1.0 mph below my goal, but I’m still pleased with how things are going. I’d like to be able to try to get my sub-nineteen time by around St. Patrick’s day if possible, about 18 weeks away. So, I have 18 weeks to increase my speed by 1.0 mph. I’m hopeful that I can do that.

The second sporting moment was that I finally ranked at “pro” level on Wii golf. To be a pro in Wii sports, you need to rate at a level of 1000 or higher. As of this evening, I managed to get to 1047 in golf. I find I like golf on the Wii – I seem to be able to play the wind and to get myself out of holes (ha!) that I get myself into. It is much fun.

I’ll try to keep running updates coming as they come. Running gets much harder around 9.2 mph or so, so I do not expect to get to 9.5 mph until around Christmastime at the earliest, and more likely around New Year’s.