08.31.05

Summer’s Growing Old

Tagged as Education, Games, Sacramento

Just one week until the beginning of the school year. It’s been a good, productive summer — I went to Charleston to learn how to teach Latin to children, learned more about the school’s recordkeeping sytem than I ever wanted to know, set up a new Gentoo box to use as the school’s web server, wrote an improved web design unit for the seventh and eighth graders, and bought a car.

Stephanie got a job teaching third grade — unfortunately, it’s in Antioch. But it’s a job doing what she wants to do, and after she builds up some experience she can move back to Sacramento if she wants to. Her school year starts the day before mine does. And no, she’s not commuting there and back every day — until she finds an apartment in that area, she’s staying with the principal of her school.

I started attending the Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup last June, and have been enjoying that immensely. The predominant style of games at these meetups is variously known as “German games,” “Eurogames,” “family strategy games,” and probably a few other terms I haven’t heard yet. They tend to be a lot more strategic than what Americans think of as boardgames (Monopoly, Sorry, Life, etc.) but lighter and more social than traditional strategy games like Chess and Go. My favorite so far has been Settlers of Catan — influenced not at all, I swear, by the fact that I won my first game of it. I also enjoyed Euphrat & Tigris despite coming in dead last and basically stinking up the board with my utter lack of strategic insight. Jim and I, among others, are working on a site to coordinate several Sacramento-based gaming groups with a central news and links page — I’ll link to that as soon as it’s done.

I also did some hiking up in the foothills. Nearly died. That’s a story for another time.

And that’s been my summer, pretty much. Now it’s over, and I feel like I accomplished a pathetically small fraction of what I’d intended to do. But it’s not such a bad list, looking over it now. Could be worse … right?

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