Bored games? No way

My brother and his fiancée arrived last Tuesday. I just gave him a quick call; they went to Christchurch today and rented out a flat in New Brighton. I asked him about buying a car, momentarily forgetting his (second) driving ban which lasts till February. My parents arrive on Wednesday. I'll be flying down south at Labour Weekend. I hope I manage to see my brother, and my future sister-in-law, but he and I do have a knack of missing each other.

We had a wonderful weekend of Wellington weather and it continued today. It would have been nice to have had someone around to enjoy it with. Just something simple like a walk along the waterfront. Sometimes sunny weather can make me more depressed because I see people enjoying themselves in the company of others while I'm on my own.

I can't complain though. Compared to how I was feeling six months ago, well there is no comparison. Those "head-banging" days, when I couldn't see for my thick depressive fog, appear (for now at least) to be over. Changing roles at work certainly helped, even if my current environment isn't somewhere I want to be in the long term.

Last Monday I went to Tracy's flat in Kilbirnie to play some board games. Four of us (that's always a good number) played. We started off with a quick game called (I think) Tsuro, where players follow tracks laid down by square pieces on an 8x8 board. It was a fun game if a little chaotic: you could easily be whisked away to a different part of the board, and then sent off the board entirely, in which case you were dead. The game continued until only one player remained.

The main game we played was Ticket to Ride, where each player had to form train routes to and from various cities across Europe (there are several versions of the game including the European one we played). A lot of the skill in the game revolved around the decision to accept or decline routes based on their length and location, and various other features. I bit off more that I could chew, accepting pretty much everything and although I made some nice long routes, my incomplete ones counted against me in the finish and I came third.

The games were a lot of fun and I hope we can do something similar again.

The iPhone 5 is out, and will be appearing in New Zealand on Friday. Inevitably there will be snaking queues then at various stores as people clamour to get their hands on the Holy Grail. This is all good news for me because it puts us one step closer to the iPhone 10. When the iPhone 10 comes out, I'll be able to snap up a crappy iPhone 4 or 5 for under fifty bucks and finally see what all the fuss is about.