This year has been pretty cool for me, I must say. Sailing, surfing, feeding the sheep… finding new recipes, and then making them over and over… hosting visitors and meeting up with friends and family… giving in to the gardening itch with a few bulbs and seeds in pots… witnessing concerts and matches… most recently finding a choir to sing with as well as an informal “barbershop” group… and I just created a flickr account with two pictures. That’s right, two blurry pics rate the new year post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quebarbarakan/

Massage school continued through most of February and exams were in April. I missed a few sessions when we went home to renew driver’s licenses and so on, but I’m now an ITEC qualified holistic massage therapist. I haven’t taken any classes since, though I’m pondering music instruction in the new year. I finished up the rest of a sailing class owed me from the previous year, and got up for a surf lesson in Donegal, which was really fun. It’s pretty great living near an ocean for a change.

Throughout March a crop of lambs was born at Airfield, and thus began my first serious foray into photography with Morgan’s lovely Canon schtuff. It’s all mine now, especially the zoomy 70-200mm lens, which I like to pretend is a macro. (Thanks dear!) Quite a few afternoons were spent on the grounds of the Airfield Trust taking pictures of flowers and animals after the morning feeding. The farm should really get a post of its own at some point, as I’ve been volunteering a few times a week feeding animals and watching seasons go by in the gardens.

Or at least, I’ve volunteered during weeks that visitors aren’t staying. Both our families have been, as well as a handful of adventurous friends. The spare room has been getting good use, and I do love the apartment, so we’ve decided to stay in it for this year as well. So come make our rent worthwhile by visiting us! Guests are always good for getting us out and about to discover new spots.

Though we always want to travel more, this year had its fair share of trips: Oktoberfest in Munich (and again in Dublin in similar company), Budapest, Oslo, Paris, York, Brighton, and other bits of England, and most recently Barcelona. I’ve revisited favorite places in town (shops, restaurants, museums), and favourite places on the island to the North and the West. I got to see my sister and her boyfriend perform in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Iolanthe” in Vancouver, and see my friends get married on a beautiful day in Jasper, which totally made my trip, not to mention my year.

Around town there is always good company to be had. And pints. I’ve discovered language exchange at the library, cheered on the Belvo ladies rugby team (well, I don’t really yell much, I just take pictures and wonder when I should bite the bullet and play), gone walking in the hills, arranged lunch dates with the girls, and seen a bunch of great concerts downtown, including Serenity’s only tour date before their singer got sick. And being part of the human tsunami that hit Croke Park for U2. Dublin `09, baby! Also, a shout-out at this point to the “pocket queens” who’ve been keeping my spirits up: a happy new year to you wherever you are, and all the best to you wherever you find yourselves in the coming seasons!

Looking ahead to 2010 now, I plan to keep up with my newfound vocal groups and keep spending time at Airfield. I hope to do more blogging and sort out a bunch of the pictures and videos we’ve amassed into something for us all to enjoy. I want to keep taking pictures for sure. Same thing with knitting – hey, I can cast on and off now! Pretty good eh? Almost ready for scarves…

Diane

Us at the Christmas Party

Once again this year, we are happy NOT to be going home for the holidays. The last cold snap in Edmonton bottomed out at -46. It doesn’t even really matter Celcius or Farenheit at this point. It’s only positive in kelvin. So, our condolences to all the folks at home. We’ve had fun at the epic company Christmas party and good weather for travelling, and it’s off to Barcelona for Christmas!

Happy Christmukkah to those in warm places and cold!

Diane

This is getting crazy. I’m having trouble getting us all caught up. Photos have been up on flickr for awhile, but somehow I keep forgetting about this poor little blog when I get a spare moment to breathe. So … here’s a quick hit list of some of the highlights of the past couple months. Hopefully I can remember all the highlights!

• 

  Sugarloaf

  Company Summer Party: The company pulled out the stops for the summer party. We spent the day at the Ritz-Carlton hotel next to powerscourt gardens. Starting with an excellent BBQ, free booze, massages, climbing wall, trampolines and more. Later on, Republic of Loose played a private show for us (I’m led to believe a pretty popular Irish band). Then when it got dark, we went inside to see some belly dancers, followed by a chocolate fondue fountain, more booze, and dancing. All in all, a very fun day!

• 

  U2 in Dublin

  U2 Plays in Dublin: At the last minute, we scored tickets to one of the three shows U2 played at Croke Park in Dublin. By the time we picked up our tickets and found our seats, we had just missed the opening bands (one of which was republic of loose!), but U2 played a pretty awesome show on a kick-ass claw stage. There’s nothing quite like going to see one of the biggest rock bands in the world play a sold out show to over 60,000 people! Definitely an awesome experience.



Streets of Galway

• Galway trip with Bryce: A little while later, our friend Bryce Paradis came to visit us for a couple weeks which was really fun. On the long weekend, we headed out to Galway which sadly was a little rainy. Highlights from the trip though was the few hours we spent peddling our (electric) bikes around the Aran islands. On one side of the island there’s the ruins of an ancient fort called Aonghasa where you can look over the tall cliffs into the oceans for a fabulous view. In addition to showing Bryce around Ireland, we spent a few nights playing Castle Crashers on the xbox which was pretty fun.
• 

  Over the Hill

  Surfing in Bundoran: The second weekend Byrce was here, Christine organized a surfing trip to the west coast of Ireland. So the three of us drove out to Bundoran to join Aaron and Christine there. I had never been surfing before, but it was a mighty fun time. It’s really quite hard though! We went out both weekend days for a two hour session each day. The first day, I only got up on the board once, which felt awesome after getting smacked in the face for an hour and a half with meter tall salty waves! The second day was much better conditions than the first, and as a result I think everyone did better than the previous day! After our surfing, we headed on a short hike to see Slieve League — apparently some of the tallest ocean cliffs in Europe. Thanks to Christine for organizing such a great trip!
• Another Visitor: Diane headed back to Canada for a visit a couple weeks before I left, leaving me at home, but I was able to keep myself pretty busy. For one thing, my travel buddy Mike Smith (I’ve been in more countries with Mike than anybody else, although Diane’s going to pass him someday I imagine!), started work at Pocketkings at the end of August. Right as he started, his friend Frano from Winnipeg came to visit — a guy I had known back at University. So it was pretty fun to hang out a little in Dublin with yet another visitor!
• Back to Canada: Our good friends JR and Shelly were getting married at the beginning of September, so we made the trip back to Canada to catchup with friends and family. Diane was there for a little longer than I, so she might fill you in on what she got up to before I got there. I got in and tried to see as many people as I could — but unfortunately missed a few people I really wanted to see. Sorry to those people! The theme of our trip back? All the engagements that had happened! I can count no fewer than five newly engaged couples. Eesh. Congrats to all of you!
• 

  Elk

  Jasper in September: JR and Shelly’s wedding was lovely! We spent two nights in Jasper in the lovely Canadian Rockies. We ran around taking a lot of photos — at the ceremony, and then taking scavenger hunt photos around Jasper. They had some pretty fun ideas for contests. The scavenger hunt had us taking creative photos, and we ended up with some great ones (including this lovely Elk!). The reception was also really fun — it has been a long time since Diane and I got out on the dance floor. So congrats to you guys, and here’s to many years of happy marriage!
• Back in Dublin: Life didn’t slow down at all after returning to Dublin. Work has been absolutely nuts, and now we’ve got Diane’s mom and her sister in town to entertain (look at all the visitors we’ve had!). They’re in town for about ten days or so, and we’ve got some plans to head up to the Giant’s Causeway on the weekend. In the meantime, we made a short, wild trip to …
• Oktoberfest! That’s right. Mike, Carolyn, Diane and I got on a plane headed to Munich for a very short, but pretty fun trip to check out Oktoberfest. We took off from Dublin around noon on Saturday and arrived back just 24 hours later the next morning! I’ll have to type more about the trip later, but it was really quite fun, even with the insane schedule.

I’m trying to get this post done, so I cut things a little short. I’ll try and flesh it out a little with a couple more posts, but no promises! It’s going to be a busy few weeks here still!

Morgan

We’ve got a lot of catchup to do! It’s already the latter half of July, but there hasn’t been any blog posts to tell you all about the adventures we had while my parents were in town for most of June and the beginning of July. So, in an attempt to catch up, I’ll be spending some time writing posts about some of the things we did!

Here’s a summary so you know what to expect:

1. The Arrival: Malahide Castle
2. West Coast Road Trip: The Burren, and the Cliffs of Moher
3. Northern Ireland Trip: Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, Giants Causeway
4. Little Road Trip: Trim Castle and the Hill of Tara
5. Off to England: A weekend in Brighton

That’s what I’ll be writing about, and hopefully catching up with uploading pictures (as of this moment, I’m finally almost through the west coast trip photos, so I’ve got a lot to catch up on still!). If Diane gets a chance, she can fill you in on the other stuff she took my parents to see while I was at work. There’s a fairly long list there too!

So … on to the posts!

Morgan

Life has been pretty insane of late, which partially explains the lack of updates here. Apologies for that! We sure have been up to a lot lately, but there really hasn’t been a lot of time between sleeps to post.

I plan, however, on finally working through the hundreds (perhaps a couple thousand) of photos over the next little while here, as well as posting about our adventures while my parents were here. In brief, Diane graciously showed my folks around Dublin and its neighbouring attractions during the weekdays while I was at work. On the weekends, we did several trips — one out to the west coast, one to the north coast, and a shorter trip to see a few castles and other landmarks. Then, this past weekend, we traveled with my mom (my dad had returned to Canada two weeks prior) to Brighton, England to meet some friends of hers and see some more things!

So in the coming weeks, I will work on recounting our recent adventures to you before I forget all the fun stories.

Morgan

It’s our first anniversay! As of Sunday, that is. We got married June 7th last year!

Wow, it’s the middle of March already! Apologies for the lack of updates. February was an insanely busy month and it appears to have disappeared. So lets see if I can catch you up with what we’ve been up to.

The snow in Dublin caused our trip home to be delayed. We attempted to get out of here on Thursday morning, and things looked like we’d manage to get out of Dublin as we got on the plane on time. But the snow and the below zero temperatures were causing havoc to an aiport that couldn’t handle those conditions, and we missed our opportunity to take off by not having the de-icer truck come by in time. By 2:00 in the afternoon, the conditions in Dublin had worsened, and we began to know that we weren’t going to get out of there in time. So after they finally decided to cancel our flight, we spent another hour or two standing in the airport waiting to rebook our flights.

This led us to a fun story. Standing in the queue for the airline agents, we passed by one of those Star Alliance signs that shows you all the member airlines. This sign had caused the lineup to squeeze by it, but after the sign there was some room on the left hand side. The next thing we know, there’s this older couple working their way *past* the girls who were in line behind us, and strategically setting themselves up to pass us as well. One of the girls behind us saw this happen, but was talking on her cell phone (presumably telling someone that they weren’t going to make it out of Dublin that day) so didn’t get a chance to confront them. After she hung up though, that confrontation happened and the older couple first claimed innocence and when that didn’t work, they said that the girls were not moving in the queue fast enough because of talking on the cell phone (which was clearly not the case). Thankfully, even though they were in a position in the line to get to the counter first, the customer service agent had seen what went on and refused to serve them before us. It’s a bit funny what people think they can get away with. They could have asked us if they could jump the queue in front of us — and if they had had a relatively good reason, I’m pretty sure we would’ve let them do it.

The next day we were back at the airport, and this time we would get out of Dublin after a 4-5 hour delay waiting for the aircraft to arrive. But this meant that we had missed our connecting flight in London. Thankfully, the customer service agents at BMI took good care of us both times we needed to rebook. This time they got us on an air canada flight to Edmonton direct the next day, plus a hotel room, and dinner and breakfast. Not bad!

Our week in Edmonton was a crazy time. We got the errands we needed to do done, and spent as much time as possible visiting people. At the time, we had only been gone for 6 months — but it was still a bit strange coming back. Not much had changed really, and I guess that we didn’t really expect them to. Still, 6 months is a fair amount of time! It was an exhausting trip though. There wasn’t a lot of rest to be had, and my body refused to sleep in past about 8am every morning despite being out every night visiting people.

When we got back to Dublin, work started to get really busy for me and that basically dictated what we did for the next month. There was a lot of nights where I didn’t do anything more than sit and watch tv programs and then go to bed. But we still managed to fit in quite a few social activities. On one memorable evening, we held a surprise birthday party for one of the other employees. His wife planned it flawlessly, and he was so surprised when they entered their apartment to find 15-odd people wearing party hats and yelling surprise, that he dropped into his martial arts training. I have some great photos of him with his keys clenched in his fist ready to defend himself.

On another night, one of the Polish guys at the company took us (for the second time) to a little Polish restaurant downtown. A group of 18 or so of us took up most of the back of the restaurant where we ate what I can only describe as gourmet perogies and other very tasty items. Mmm, perogies.

This past few days leading into this weekend have been insanely busy. Despite it being deadline time at work, we were still out Thursday night for farewell beers, and then again on Friday night for birthday beers. And to top it all off, yesterday we had people over for Pi Day. For the uninitiated, Pi day is March 14 at 1:59pm (3.14159…). It is a great excuse to have a gathering of people and eat pie. So that was great fun. I think the day’s best pie was Xan’s beef and bacon pie. In the early evening we caught the Ireland versus Scotland rugby match of the 6 nations cup. I kind of feel like I’ve got to learn something about at least one of the sports they play here. Of them, rugby seems the most exciting to watch — and it’s an exciting time right now since there’s this international competition going on right now. Ireland seems to have a fairly strong team, and are one win away from sweeping the competition.

Diane and I have finally booked our next trip: a long weekend trek out to Budapest to visit a friend there. That should be fun!

Morgan

Well, January looks like it has slipped away without much in the way of blog updates from us! The last couple of weeks haven’t been particularly eventful in terms of fun stuff. But I haven’t updated with what we’ve done since the turn of the new year.

On New Years Eve we were over at Darse and Xan’s for a rather fun evening of party games. In the first of several of these games, we all wrote down names of 4-5 famous people in a hat. The game proceeds by going through the hat three times. The first time, players try to get their team to guess the person using any words not on the paper. The second time through, you only get two words to get your team to guess, and the third time through you have to do charades to get your team to guess. The game is naturally comical, and this night was no less so than expected.

This game was broken up by the countdown to zero for the beginning of the 2009. We were out on the balcony and got to see fireworks going off all around us. I’m not entirely sure where everyone would’ve got them, but they seemed quite plentiful. It reminds me that this kind of behaviour was happening on Halloween night here in Dublin too.

We finished our game, and then moved on to play another one. In this one, each player writes down a famous person on a slip of paper, which is then taped on the next person’s head. That person now has to ask yes/no questions about that person until they can guess who they are. Thankfully, Darse gave me someone I knew, so after a little while I managed to guess mine: Kurt Cobain. Diane had a little more trouble with “the artist formerly known as Prince”, but she got it. The toughest one that was eventually given up on? Genghis Khan.

We had a bit of trouble getting a cab, so we settled into playing a game of dictionary pictionary until something like 5am at which point we finally got a cab to come pick us up and take us home.

On the 2nd of January, one of the server guys had got tickets to a Rugby match: Leinster vs Connacht. So a group of us server guys went to go see this clash of Irish rugby teams. Before going, I spent some time trying to read up on the rules, which helped me know a little bit of what was going on, but I found it extremely hard to follow exactly what was happening. The thing I had the most trouble seeing was some correlation to the penalties being called and what was done wrong by the offending player. The other thing that I expected was that the game would flow more than american football — but that turned out to not be the case. There was many more stoppages than I had thought there would be. Still, it was a fun time, and it was a great atmosphere to watch the game!

The last few weeks have been relatively quiet for us. I’ve been working, and not getting to bed early enough on a nightly basis so by the weekend I’m ready to sleep and laze around. The weather also hasn’t been all that cooperative for doing fun stuff on the weekends. On one particular Saturday afternoon, the clouds were dark, it was raining, and the wind was blowing harder than we’ve seen here.

The next day wasn’t too pretty either, but we were invited out to go have dinner and see a movie called Slumdog Millionaire. Dinner was at a place called Indian Summer for some rather tasty Indian food, and then we wandered over to the movie. The movie was about a guy who gets on India’s version of who wants to be a millionaire and makes it deep. They suspect him of cheating, and through interrogation (and flashbacks for the audience), they discover that he actually knew the answers through a series of unlikely events. It’s a moving film, as it shows many harsh conditions which the man had to live through when he was a boy.

This week, Diane and I went in to take our driver’s theory tests. We had spent some time studying for it over the week and both came out with 100%. So after we take an eye exam, we’ll have the necessary paperwork to get ourselves a provisional Irish drivers license. When that happens, we’ll have to wait 6 months before we can take our practical test. It’s weird having to go through this process again, and a little awkward too! I’m not sure why there isn’t a faster route for someone who already knows how to drive to get a full license here. Oh well.

There’s another party that we’re going to tonight, and it looks like our social schedule is starting to fill up again!

Morgan

This has been a very busy year for Diane and I (to put it mildly). Any year that you get married or move to another country or score a decisive victory for computers against humans is bound to be a pretty busy year … but these were just a sampling of some of the things that happened to us during the past twelve months. This is my year in review. (You can find my year in review from last year here and Diane’s here).

The outlook on 2008 was pretty exciting. Diane and I had become engaged in May of 2007 and our wedding date was setup as the June 7, 2008. So one thing we would be spending a bunch of time working on for the first half of the year was planning that. I was still working at the university for the computer poker research group. Having come so close to beating some very good poker players the year before in Vancouver, we were itching for a rematch. Finally, two people I knew were already working in a company in Ireland, and I had started to consider what it would be like to do the same.

So lets get started, shall we? Early on in January, a group of us ended up at the museum to do some photographing. With how the busy the year would become, I’m sad that we didn’t get more outings like this because it was a lot of fun! Later on in the month, the annual department ski trip to Jasper was once again a highlight of the year. The people from the CS department at the UofA are a lot of fun to hang out with, and at this point I definitely suspected that this would be my last trip to join the department for the forseeable future.

In February, Sonata Arctica — one of my favourite bands, came to town so I was ecstatic to check that out. Later on that month, we went on a ski trip to Lake Louise and Sunshine with a couple of friends. That was a great trip, and filled with many good photographs.

In March, my grandparents celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary and my grandpa turned 80. To help celebrate, we went down to Rimbey to surprise my grandfather with a big party. My sister played her harp, and it was a lovely time.

April’s big event was going to Dublin to interview at PocketKings. The company generously flew both of us out to Dublin to meet the team I would eventually join. It was a packed 5 days, with two of those days being travel. I spent two days in the office and a third wandering around Dublin with Darse, Xan, Mike, MK, and Aaron. We were out for dinner all three nights we were there, met quite a few people, and saw a lot of things. Not long after we returned home, I was offered a job with them and pretty soon we were not only planning a wedding, but planning moving our lives across the Atlantic ocean to Dublin, Ireland.

In May, we had a packed social schedule which combined with getting ready for the wedding made it a busy month! Nightwish, another one of my favourite bands came to town, we attended dinner parties, brithday parties, and got out on another photoshoot this time in Edmonton’s river valley. I also attended a meetup of Edmonton Flickr people, as well as a separate outing with Edmonton Twitter members. May was a very busy month!

The big highlight of June was our wedding day on the 7th. Thanks to the help of many, many people, we were able to put together a pretty good day I would have to say. Diane was radiant all day, and we both managed to get through the day with no bigger mishaps than us forgetting to write a speech for the dinner. Highlights from the day are in this post, but really the highlight of the whole thing was of course being married to such a wonderful person in Diane.

Because of the computer poker research group’s efforts to have a rematch against some top human players in July, work prevented us from leaving on a honeymoon right away. Instead, we settled in and attempted to get some of the details for moving to Ireland sorted out. We also attempted to see as many people as we could, which meant that one thing we had to do was go see my grandparents in Rimbey. As always, it was quite a pleasant trip. Lots of food, games and good company. I really don’t see them enough!

On July 1st, we left for Las Vegas, where for the next several days we would prepare, run, and eventually win the match against several very good human players including one of the best in the world: Matt “Hoss_TBF” Hawrilenko. It was a lot of work building up to that point, but it was a wonderful bit of closure to get before I left the group. A week after we arrived in Vegas, the work portion of our trip had ended and the vacation/honeymoon part of it started. We spent a few days hanging out with some of the research group members in Las Vegas before flying to San Diego where we spent a day at the San Diego Zoo before getting on our honeymoon cruise.

The cruise was a 5 day affair starting from San Diego and stopping in Cabo San Lucas on the way down the west coast and then in Ensenada on the way back. The highlight of the trip was the excursions, where we did a zipline and climbing wall excursion down a canyon in Cabo, and a kayaking trip in Ensenada. The food on board was pretty good too…

We returned to Edmonton where we had just a week left to pack up all our belongings and spend as much time with our families as we could before heading off to Dublin. It was a pretty surreal experience packing all our stuff up and saying goodbye to everyone. Late in the week we had a party at my parent’s place where we had a huge number of friends and family over to say goodbye to. It was a lot of fun, and I’m glad so many people turned out! Before we knew it, we were packed up and on a plane to Dublin, Ireland!

In our first weeks in Dublin, in late July and early August, we had a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to get the required documents to stay in the country, and find a place to live so we could get a bank account and all those other little details. Thanks to a bunch of help from Darse who had recently made the transition, we got everything sorted through in record time. Within two weeks of our arrival we had an apartment, internet, a bank account, and immigration cleared for our first year.

Also in August, we went on our first road trip with Darse and Xan who took us to the Powerscourt gardens. We would do several more trips with them including exploring Killiney hill right here in Dublin, going to county Wicklow in September, the Southern coast of Ireland and the Irish National Stud in October.

Work got busy in November, which made me feel like not doing too much on the weekends other than relax. But December was an eventful month! It started off with our friend JR coming to visit us for a couple of days. We showed as much of Dublin as we could while he was here, and hope he enjoyed it! Just after he left, we were off to Kilkenny where the company held one heck of a Christmas party. A couple weeks later, Diane and I were at the Dublin airport crazy early for a holiday in Austria. We spent 10 days there over Christmas, and enjoyed ourselves immensely (the posts for the rest of our trip are coming still, I promise!).

This year has been amazing, and it’s hard to imagine that 2009 will top it. I closed one chapter of my life (working at the university), and opened several more (getting hitched, moving to a new country, starting a new job). That said, Diane and I have the opportunity to explore Europe while we’re young and we’re sure planning on doing as much of that as we can in the coming year. Work is going well, and I’m happy with how much I’ve been able to contribute. So we’re excited to see what 2009 will offer us!

To close out, here’s some maybe interesting numbers from this year:

• I took around 10,000 photographs with my camera this year, far surpassing the previous year’s total of less than 7,000. From that selection of photographs, I uploaded 1448 to Flickr for your enjoyment. I hope you’ve gotten a chance to take a look at my work.
• Despite having not had much time to play poker this year, I still did better than 2007 in terms of total profit. I earned $6300 in online poker in 2008, bringing my lifetime earnings to over $12,000.
• My passport has been stamped 11 times, 8 of which happened in 2008.
• We’ve posted 55 times (not including this one) to this blog, and these posts have accrued 33 comments. All but two of those posts happened in 2008.
• Number of countries I’ve been in this year: 6… four of which were knew to me: Mexico, Ireland, Austria, and England (albeit only in the London airport).
• Number of months living abroad: 5.

Any other numbers you can think of that might be interesting that I might be able to rattle off without too much counting? If I get some good suggestions I’ll add them to the post.

Lastly, here’s some of my favourite photos from 2008:

Megan finally let me photograph her for her recital poster.

A beautiful shot of Irish countryside with no one around.

A duck in St Fiachra’s Garden near Kildare, Ireland.

A sight seen on the Hofburg palace grounds in Vienna, Austria.

Beautiful lighting over Pichling lake in Austria.

David Thue is the one in the pipe, and he makes a fun silhouette with his hat.

I took photos of these flamingos for quite awhile before getting this shot.

One of my favourites from the wedding photos that Jason Kasumovic took.

A view of Sunshine mountain village.

A scene from Canmore, Alberta.

I hope everyone had a good 2008. Whether you did or not, I hope that 2009 is a good year for you!

Morgan

This past week was insanely busy. At work, I had a project that needed some help to get it all the way to completion, and it needed to be done by Friday. So I worked pretty hard this week trying to get it all done. As a result, there wasn’t all that much free time to do much else than go home and laze around on the couch a bit before going to bed.

But we did get out a little. On Tuesday night, a bunch of the American employees went out to a bar to watch the election results come in. It had been a stressful day at work, and I thought it’d be a good idea to get out of the house and de-stress a little over a beer or two. So Diane and I joined the party around 11:00pm and hung out with what turned out to be quite a few people! The group of us maxed out at about 25 people or so all with varying interest in the actual live results coming in. After awhile, a game of Chinese poker broke out — a game that I’ve had a little bit of interest in lately. I joined in, and we ended up playing until 2am!

Thursday nights at the office are geeky board game nights, so I stayed late at the office to play some games. This week, one of the guys had just got back from the States with a pile of games eight or so boxes high — many of which I had never seen before. We played Ticket to Ride Germany, the tutorial for Galaxy Trucker (a game I don’t think I’ll really like in full, but it’s kinda neat), and Wizard (a game that looks like it has got some major interest). Dave also explained the rules of a couple of his new games.

It has been a busy week, and in some ways I’m glad it’s done. Not that it’ll get any less busy at work. I’ve got some bugs to fix and I gotta get back to working a project that won’t be released until January, but needs a fair amount of work to get it finished. But even with how busy I’ve been, we’re still making time to do some fun stuff!

Morgan