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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.

Brian’s birthday was on Wednesday, so we celebrated on Friday by getting some pizza and beer at the Northlake Tavern. Gabe ate 5 pieces which amazes me since I could only finish 2 from the pizza that weighs more than 6 pounds. After the pizza we came back to our house to play Settlers of Catan which I got Brian for his birthday.

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Kim and I needed to wear the dog out so we decided to go snowshoeing. Your options are severly limited when hiking with a dog. We found a trail in a book that would work, but it was only at 800 ft so would almost certainly have no snow. We stopped by the ranger station near Quilcene and got a recommendation for hiking Mt Zion. We decided to hike a nearby trail but couldn’t get past a pickup that got stuck and blocked the road. We had some good snow though so we started hiking up. Still not enough snow for snowshoes. It was fun to get out in the snow, but it was too foggy for views. The dog Gretchan seems to love the snow.

On the way back from the hike we stopped in a bar to catch the end of the Seahawks game. Playoff victory!

Kim and I helped out Amanda and Art this weekend by watching their two cats and dog in Bremerton. Art and Amanda were off at a marriage prep retreat. I’m glad to find out that Kim and I both don’t want the responsibilities of pets right now. They’re a lot of work and time. One of the cats was really funny though. I think normally the dog torments her a little, but we wouldn’t stand for that so the cat was taunting the dog. She would walk under its nose and rub her tail in the dogs face. Of course, she would also knock everything she could find off counters, including our stuff in the bathroom into the toilet.

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I have a confession: I’m addicted to this frickin Lost show.  I got one disc from Netflix to see what all the fuss was about, and next thing you know I’ve bought the first season and am downloading the second off Itunes.  In a way it’s a great show with all it’s mystery and character building, and in a way it hate it for always leaving me with more questions and wanting more.  I haven’t had a show that I really looked forward to watching every week since I was in junior high.  I wish I had gotten into it a little later so that a few more seasons were already out on DVD and I didn’t have to wait.

Kim and I took off with Preston and his friend Chris Saturday morning to do some snowshoeing. Preston and Chris just bought snowshoes, but we were a little worried that we wouldn’t find a place to use them since snow has been so hard to find lately. We initially wanted to do a route near Skykomish, but there didn’t seem to be any snow below 4000 ft so we kept going to Steven’s Pass were it was just barely cold enough for snow. Kim and I had already done a lot of snowshoeing on the north side of the highway, so we found a route in the book that went straight through the ski resort. It followed the Pacific Crest Trail, but it’s covered in the winter and passes through a lot of the ski runs so it’s hard to find.

We ended up hiking too far east and didn’t go the route described. We got to the top of a chairlift thinking that it was the one we wanted, but it turned out to be a different one that went to the top of the double black diamond runs. Thanks to Chris and Kim’s perseverance (aka stubborness), we decided to keep going up the very steep slope. After a LOT of hard work, we made it to the top and took some pictures of the nice view and the sunshine. We sat down to eat and enjoy the view and saw a huge wall of fog coming. Next thing you knew we were in the middle of a cloud and it had started snowing.

When we got back I was wiped out and Kim and I decided not to go out and play poker with Preston and Chris. I’m glad I didn’t, because I slept 10 hours and think I could have easily done more.

Last minute Friday I decided to see if anyone wanted to play cards. Brian and Bridgid were the only ones who showed up, so with Kim and I we had just enough people to play pinochle or Eukre. We started trying to play pinochle, but soon found out that Brian had different rules as I’m sure most people do with this game. There’s a lot of variations. We were going to try playing a couple different ways, but ended up settling on eukre instead. After a couple games of that Jacob sat down to play so we did five person hearts. We all had a blast playing, and people got a little rowdy but all in a good natured way. Kim really likes rowdy card play, so I think we might be having more card nights soon.

I tried acupuncture for the first time today.  I’m not as impressed as I thought I would be.  The lady only put four needles in me, three in my shoulder where I said I hurt, and one on the outside of my wrist.  I barely felt them go in.  The one in my wrist throbbed a little while it was in, but everything else wasn’t noticeable.  My shoulder doesn’t feel any better two days later either. She says that sometimes you need multiple sessions before you notice any result, but we’ll see how much my insurance pays for before I try that again.

For New Years Eve we decided on The Greatest Show on Earth as our evening entertainment. Some of our friends didn’t want to go because it cost $25, but I figure that’s really cheap for entertainment if you drink at home and don’t buy alcohol there. It was well worth the price to see the circus acts and the crazy Bosnian band that I think was called Kulture Shock who was a mix of Riverdance and Rammstein heavy metal. The lead singer wore a silver kilt with his head shaved except for a topknot. There was a stand up base and a violin, but it wasn’t at all classical sounding. There were a few Bosnian guys who sand along and knew all the words. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t English.

While the music played some of the circus performers would walk through the crowd on stilts or swing from a trapeze in the corner. Kim did the limbo under a weird Ozzy Osbourne looking fellow on stilts. Not as many people were dancing as I hoped, but some of it was pretty hard to dance to. The techno they put on later got more people dancing upstairs.

Downstairs there was another band playing, but we didn’t see much of them and it didn’t sound like much fun to me. The real fun downstairs started after midnight when burlesque dancers, fire eaters and a striptease act took the stage. My favorite part was the fire eating and spinning. They used fireballs on batons, chains and claws, and all this in a fairly small enclosed space. I think a lot of people thought they were going to set the place on fire, myself included at times. The performers were all from Pure Cirkus, and they said they’d have photos of the night up on their web page, but I’m not sure when.

Unfortunately, Art and Amanda had to leave shortly after midnight to catch a ferry back, but Kim and I stayed to hang out with Jessie until a little after 2.  Jessie left, and Kim and I danced for a while with a guy named John that we’d seen at the climbing gym before who is dating the sister of a girl who is in Kim’s culinary class.  The girl in Kim’s culinary class is dating the guitarist from Kulture Shock.  Weird coincidences, eh?  The after party turned out to be kind of a lame all ages (seemed like a lot of teenagers showed up real fast) bump and grind fest in the basement, so we went home for some much needed sleep.

Kim and I spent New Years Eve Day hanging out with Art and Amanda in Bremerton.  We considered going snowshoeing somewhere, but we didn’t decide where until almost noon which made the drive to hike time ratio really bad.  So we just took the ferry over and hung out.  We ate pizza at a Boston style joint claiming the best pizza on the west coast (good, but not the best), walked around Bremerton a little, climbed at the Vertical World there, and went back to their apartment to see the pets.  I managed to sneak in a few naps to get ready for New Year’s Eve, and after hearing about the party, we convinced Art and Amanda to come back to Seattle with us.

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