Lazy Saturday

I took a three-hour nap this afternoon (no fooling) to make up for my restless sleep last night. It put a big hole in the day, but I'm feeling much better now and I'll be better prepared to lose another hour of sleep tonight.

Tomorrow will be the first ever observation of Eastern Daylight Savings Time in Indiana. They've been warning residents of the imminent clock-setting for roughly three weeks on the radio -- and I only listen to the radio while I'm driving around town. Although we'll miss the convenience of Central Time's TV schedule, we're glad we won't have to play "What time is it in Indiana?" with our families for another summer. Come to think of it, we don't have cable anymore, anyway, so the TV schedule will hardly affect us. It seemed the local broadcast channels were on "Indiana time" last year.

The day didn't go quite as planned. We had been invited to our yoga instructor's home for an afternoon of "jamming", in musician parlance. His name is John. Roughly two weeks ago, we somehow got to talking to him after class, mostly because he found out that Paul was a Computer Science professor and sponsoring the Game Development Club. John is visually-impaired, with only a small area of vision in one eye, and he wishes there were more accesible games. It was a very interesting conversation.

It also came out in this conversation that John plays bass and some keyboards and when he heard that Paul was a fellow musician he just lit up and invited us, on the spot, out to their house to "jam". We finally got all the logistics in order and agreed to meet up this afternoon. However, they had to cancel at the last minute due to a ~7-hour power outage that defrosted their refrigerator and made quite a mess. We had a heads-up yesterday that they were also dealing with some sort of plumbing problem, so it sounds like they've had quite a weekend!

The power outage must be due to the thunderstorm we had last night. It cropped up pretty suddenly around 6:30pm, but didn't really affect us. We went to campus to see the student production of Cabaret (quite good), where the thunder quickly died away and the play went on uninterrupted. We returned home to find that the power had blipped out, but nothing serious on our end. John and Cynthia seem to have drawn the short straw.

Paul began playing one of the Neverwinter Night expansions this afternoon, "Hordes of the Underdark". Sounds cheery, no? NWN was the first game we played together (and by "play together" I mean he plays and I watch -- I am routinely invited to play my own character, as many of these games are multi-player, but I have no video game chops OR interest). The stories are usually pretty interesting and there's some great character interaction. As far as computer games go, I enjoy these more than most. Unfortunately, with the new fancy graphics card Paul's got in his computer, he can have the game at such a high resolution that it makes it difficult for me to read the on-screen text which makes it difficult for me to follow the dialog details. Most of the game is a boring dungeon crawl, so I'm quite content to entertain myself otherwise (like this!) and get the occasional storyline updates. I'm still mostly dreading the day when Jason and Tonia come and I may be obligated to participate in an actual tabletop D&D adventure.

Mom and Dad just called to be sure there were no tornadoes in the area and to see if we were at the Final Four game down in Indy. I had to ask them who was playing -- probably not an admission even a pseudo-Hoosier should make. Negative on both counts.