The joys of Tuesdays can nearly drown the sorrows of home return...

Well, the rehearsal was awful, except for the fact that I got to sit next to Lisa the whole time (easily the best singer in the chorus, and satisfactorily loud). I saw Wes at the break, then went back to another session of killing good music with a bad rehearsal.

But then the rehearsal was over. We went first to Taco Milagro, with everybody (Corita, her daughter Arielle, Bill, Salad, Chuck, Ian (sleaze), Sally (drunk), Lois, me and mama) and had food and sat outside and gabbed. Salad described his trip, and I was outdone, so I didn't say much about mine. He went to London, Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Egypt, Bolivia, and some other South American country. So that, Corita and Arielle's horse trip to Montana, and my mom's end of the table encompassed the conversation. And then.

People got tired and the restaurant closed and they kicked us out, so Bill, Salad, Sally, Arielle, mama and I went to the next door bar and found a relatively smoke-free spot. The band was really loud, but they eventually got around to playing real music (Free Bird!), which you could sing to or yell over.

Well, in the lulls, there were, as always on Tuesdays, interesting conversations. And other things, also. Salad had just thumb-wrestled Arielle, so he challenged me. Well, I won. It surprised him. And then Bill challenged me, and I won against him. Salad wanted a rematch, with the same thumb, and he just barely won that time with a big struggle and the most energetic, all-over-the-table match I've ever been involved in. He was (or made out to be) really impressed. Bill was, also. And then we played with the matches, making Cyrillic letters and Russian words (he making swear words, I making Yes and No and exclamatives) out of the matchsticks.

Arielle and he and I had interesting conversations, too, about the trips we'd all taken, and somehow Salad's shirt came up (oh, he'd lost his luggage, so he'd had to buy a whole new set, so the circus-peanut-colored, striped shirt he was wearing was new), and they decided it was pimpin'. I was on the subject of the cool people I'd met, and I told him he could never beat Jorge, pimpin'wise. He'd just sent me a picture of himself in full swing regalia (red suit, black pants, red pimp hat), singing Minnie the Moocher, and I described it. They were suitably impressed.

The topic of birthdays came up (Arielle's 19 on Sep 1, when we're coming back from Mexico City), and I was surprised to notice mine's in less than two months. 17 this time, the age of consent, supposedly (though Arielle enlightened me on the intricacies of that particular law, to Salad's great amusement and my great embarassment). But then, he played me one last lefty thumb war (I lost; I'm not good with my left), and then settled down in his chair to challenge me to an arm-wrestling match.

Well, he won, of course. I never got him past 90 degrees. But I held up against him for at least a minute, and a quarter of that was hovering half-an-inch above the table. He was flabbergasted (I'm not sure why), and made a big deal of how tired and sore his arm was. He said my strength began to frighten him. I wondered why, and said I hadn't accomplished anything. He said, "No, but you made me work for it. Then again, I like to work for it" with a wink. I turned interesting colors.

Well, my wrist is still sore. But it was a tremendous night.

(no subject)

Innnteresting game. It's more fun with power characters. I'll list the players for your convenience.

There was Nia, a Druidess and werewolf (name preserved)
Raymond, Jenny's brother, as Susan's wolf companion (Celer, Latin for Swift, but they call him Bugbiter)
Me, a Brass half-dragon sorceress musician (Neferankhenseti, Ti for short)
Alex, a halfling kleptomaniac (Archie)
Nabil, a jedi-like fighter with monk abilities (Remus Ravenclaw, the poor sod)
Laura, a super-rich elven princess with an intelligent heirloom sword (Utenna)
John, the most famous paladin in the world (Sir Osric the Bold)
Jenny, a vampiric assassin (Aislynn)
and
JR, DM and half-demon monk NPC

And it was a pretty sci-fi quest. We encountered a lot of people trying to sell us these weird, unorthodox healing potions, and as we were recovering from Osric's bright, shiny idea to attack the orc hordes, we kind of needed them. So all but the two most suspicious of us drank them. We heard about the wizard cabal who made them, and decided to seek them out and see what was up. Well, it was an Earth-type office-building/lab once we got past the secret passages.

To cut a long story short, the healing potions were an experimental form, and so all but two of us have DEX-1 and will now be zombies after we die (unless we find the antidote in the next quest), and Alex has the active form, so he's actually dying (but he's not going to die, because Susan and John take turns casting Remove Disease on him every 8 hours to keep him in the first stage of it). Also, John has DEX-2, an earlier form of the experiment, which we know will slowly cause him to mutate and his skin to drop off ... slower than it said in the office papers, though (I cast comprehend languages, so I could read English, but not technobabble) because he's a paladin and has Divine Health. But we killed a bunch of zombies, and a thing that was apparently a dog before it'd been transormed by DEX-2 and given zillions of HP.

Throughout the game, Osric exploited his notoriety without shame, and to the extreme annoyment of the rest of the group; he got free potions, he chatted up the barkeep... he had everything but an autograph-signing session. Once we got to the bad guys, he tried using his name against them, but they were from Earth so it didn't work. He was also continually calling people the most arrant knave that ever lived, and threatening to smite things. I say this not in annoyance (though there was a lot of that at the time), but for future reference; I promised (threatened) to write a ballad about him, so I think I may, and call it a situational satire.

Info session was yesterday 11:00 to whenever, and I left right before rehearsal. Today, we actually had a quest. It was innnnnteresting.