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The Vegetarians of Washington, which Kim and I are members of, sponsor free classes that include yoga, nutrition and cooking. The class we went to today was at Whole Life Yoga in Greenwood.

The yoga section was a really good class. Kim even liked it and she’s kinda picky about what yoga classes she likes. The nutrition section was all about how a vegetarian lifestyle is healthier. It was very informative, but I knew most of the stuff already. There’s a good general overview of the basics of why to go vegetarian on many websites, but this little lecture had a lot of citations of medical studies that were fun to see. The cooking demo didn’t happen because some of food was forgotten, but that was okay because I was ready to go and we got tofutti chocolate as a consolation gift.

Kim and I are planning on going to Veg Fest this year to help out and give Kim a chance to meet some good vegetarian chefs – and to eat a lot of really good food of course.

Kim and I went with her friend Jessie to a pizza party with a bunch of people who work with Jessie at the Student Conservation Association. Sarah and Chris hosted the gathering and it was a ton of fun. It’s really nice to hang out with young, educated, passionate and environmentally minded people. It makes me more optimistic about the future of our world, although it also makes me sad to realize that it’s really a very small microcosm of our society.

We ate really good food including pizza that we helped make. There was no meat in site and I think almost everything was organic. I really liked the green olives stuffed with whole cloves of garlic. Between those and the pizza toppings, I ate a lot of garlic.

Once a bunch of people left it was down to just the hosts and Kim, Jessie and me. We were told to bring games and now it was a manageable enough number to play settlers of catan. Yes, again. That game is too much fun.

Gabe and I went over to Armin’s to watch the NFC championship game of the Seahawks against the Carolina Panthers. I’ve come to expect Seattle teams to disappoint me in the playoffs after amazing regular seasons as the Sonics and Mariners have done so often lately. However, this game was Seattle dominated the whole time. There were 8 or 9 people yelling and screaming with every Seahawk touchdown or interception, so there was a lot of yelling. Armin’s mom cooked food for halftime too, so it really couldn’t have been much better a game.

After the game Gabe and I went running and we probably heard 25 people yelling “go seahawks” or honking their horns wildly. Seattle will erupt if we win the Superbowl, at least as much as a city in the middle of what feels like the longest gloomy spell ever can erupt out of their seasonal affective disorder, zombie-like state.

This game is too much fun. I’ve played Risk with friends before and thought it was fun, but mostly because it was an excuse to hang out with friends, drink and shout, but that’s about the extent of board games that I’ve played in a long time. Settlers of Catan is just plain addicting. I think it’s a lot like Civilization IV on a board, made for multiplayer.

It involves building settlements, collecting resources, and trading. In Risk when an opponent screws you over with attacks and lucky dice rolls all you can do is call them names. In this game you don’t attack opponents, but there’s all sorts of more satisfying and subtle ways to compete, and dice rolls can benefit multiple people at a time. What really makes board games fun is the social aspect, and this game has all sorts of ways to interact: trading, blocking routes with roads, blocking resource production, stealing resources, and competing for longest road or largest army.

Normally I’m not a big fan or randomness in games because it leaves little room for skill, but in this game the randomness makes it more interesting by forcing you plan a strategy based around what is most likely to happen. It’s not just hoping that the dice roll the highest number, because sometimes you want a low number, or a low probability number to pay off since high probability numbers pay for just about everyone.

Now the only problem is finding people to play when I want to which is all the time lately. I just found out that there’s an online version (although it’s run by MSN and only works with Internet Explorer), but I don’t think it will be nearly as fun without friends nearby to share it with.