Went to visit friends last night, like I try to do most Fridays. We generally play games and visit, and eat cheese. The cheese is important. We have only been doing it a couple of decades now, so we already know what everybody thinks about most things, but we say it anyway.

Last night was not a good night at the table for me. While waiting for others to show up, three of us played a game of The Ark of the Covenant, a variant of Carcassonne. It was made a bit more interesting because we were playing on an end table, the large table being used by the children for a game of Killer Bunnies.

The much smaller space made it much easier to decide to close off the castle holding bubba. (The prophet piece. I had to look that up, we never call it that. Big meeples are bubbas, in all the games.) The turn before I played a piece to share sheep with another player, who had more than me, the third player put down a piece to block it. At the endof the game, the third player ended up winning, with me second, and the other player last. If I had managed to share the sheep, I would have won the game.

When everybody showed up, we started a game of 6 player Empire Builder. This is very rare for us, we usually only manage to get 3 or 4 people at a time there, because 2 of us live over an hour away, and the others mostly have lives. We really wanted to make it a game of Iron Dragon or Lunar Rails, but one person had only played once before, and we were getting a late start because of the Killer Bunnies game.

I went first, and because of the 6 players, I decided not to try the sugar run to Chicago I had. I figured it would be too expensive to get through the Rockies since others would grab cheap routes. So I took a shorter double run of Lead to a couple of places in Mexico. Then I watched everybody else build East of Kansas City. The entire eastern half of the US was packed.

That is an example of how the decisions I made worked for the rest of the game. I am not bad at these games, I won the Empire Builder International championship at the Puffing Billy tournament at Origins this last year. But lately I am getting my butt kicked at our weekend games. Good thing I am the only one from them that makes it to conventions.

But it was a fun night, even though I was just over $100 million when the game ended. And the 5th place person had almost $200 million. It wasn’t even close.

I am definitely not cut out to be any kind of public figure. I do not know how the President-Elect (Officially now!) can stand all the harping and complaining about the job he is doing and the people he is picking to help do it. Yes, I wrote about this stuff before. But it really annoys me, so I am doing it again.When Obama was elected, the majority of the country was happy. That was apparent almost everywhere you looked. The Democrats in Congress were happy, the blogosphere was happy, about the only people that weren’t happy were the conservatives, and even a few of them were not too upset.

Obama was very popular when he was elected and he still enjoys that popularity. Congress, on the other hand, was about as popular as Bush, and that hasn’t changed either. So now, the very popular President-Elect is getting closer to taking office and the very unpopular Congress is feeling their oats.

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t like the fact that Obama wants to just allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. Instead, they should be repealed as soon as possible. While I admit to feeling that way myself, I am willing to admit it may not be the best idea. The tax cuts expire at the end fo 2010, so they have less than 2 years to go. Why doesn’t she worry about getting the stimulus passed as soon as possible, see what happens, then take up the question about the tax cuts. That makes more sense to me than slowing down important legislature that the entire country wants passed.

Then there is Representative  John Conyers of Michigan. He is objecting to Dr. Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General because Gupta is not qualified. A practicing neurosurgeon, reporter, and speaker, who was a White House Fellow in the class of ’97-’98, not qualified to be the spokesman for the Public Health Service?

Admittedly, Paul Krugman also has a problem with Gupta’s appointment, but not because of his lack of qualifications. And the issues Krugman brings up about Gupta’s encounter with Moore should definitely be explored. By the Senate, when they hold hearings on his confirmation, if he even decides to accept the appointment. (I don’t know if I would, it would be an immense pay cut.)

Then there is Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was very unhappy about Obama’s choice (still not official mind you) of Leon Panetta for head of the CIA. I guess I am somewhat confuse, I did not realize that the President had to clear his choices with the Senate before he actually made them. Questions about his qualifications should be brought up in the confirmation hearings. Getting upset because you were not asked about him being nominated? Not really part of the Senate’s job, as I understand the Constitution.

But Obama, and Joe Biden, called and apologized to the Senator. Because they know that if they did not, she would probably cause all kinds of trouble for any of their nominations that went in front of her committee. And any other committee she serves on.

And Holder may have some trouble getting through the committees to the floor vote. But at least that is coming from the Republicans, not the Democrats.

At least it looks like Tom Daschle will be getting through the various committees without too much trouble. Not really surprising, since he is appearing before a lot of old friends.

All of this, along with trying to figure out how to lead the nation, and the world, out of the troubles we are in. Nope, I am not cut out to be a public figure. Thank god there are people that are.

It was a pretty good weekend, except for the parts that weren’t. I guess that technically fits all weekends, but at least most of this one was good. Well okay, most of it wasn’t really good. It just wasn’t bad.

Went over to see friends in Indiana Friday night. This is a pretty regular thing, we try to get together every Friday, although we do sometimes have scheduling problems, like holidays, vacations, or illness. We have been doing this for years. Actually, we have been doing it for a couple of decades at this point. We started after college graduation and have kept it up ever since. Even when I moved to Virginia for five years, the others continued getting together. We originally got together on Saturday nights, but moved it to Friday nights earlier this year because it worked better for work schedules.

Why do we go this, for over 20 years now? Well, for one, we like each other. We don’t agree about a lot of things, like politics or religion, but we still like spending time together. We show up, usually at Linda’s house, and spend several hours talking and playing games.

Guess I forgot to mention the games. That is how we started hanging out during college. Sort of. Most of us met and became friends and started playing games there. We had heard about some sort of game dealing with wizards and dragons and wanted to try it. So we found some Basic Edition Dungeons & Dragons and basically taught ourselves how to play. Our DM at the time was not the best, but we still enjoyed the games.

From there, we expanded to board games, especially Risk. We also played other thing, like Rook, Shogun, and Civilization. We were pretty open to playing about anything, as long as we enjoyed it.

Getting older did slow us down a bit. Jobs made it harder to find the time, I lived an hour away from the rest of the group, then I moved to Virginia. But the others kept getting together and playing games. We went to Gencons (before it was in Indy), Origins (I still get to this one as much as possible), and a local game con. One of us died very suddenly on a Saturday morning, a few hours before we got together, leaving his wife and 3 daughters. And still we get together as much as possible.

These days we mostly play train games. We started with Rail Baron, then moved on to the Empire Builder games. We own all the versions and like playing them, but the India version is pretty much our favorite. Well, I am not liking it all that well after the last 2 weekends. My game both weekends was poor to say the least. But that is how it goes sometimes, you just don’t get the cards you need when you need them.

We also played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride using the USA 1910 cards. We like that version because of the large number tickets available, making each game so different. We also play the Switzerland version on occasion. It can get pretty cutthroat, but is still fun. I did manage to win one game of Ticket to Ride, but again failed miserably at the second.

So it was mainly a losing effort Friday night. An hour drive, got my butt kicked at multiple games, then an hour home. Lots of fun. Wish we could get together this week, but the holiday schedule makes it impossible.

Saturday was more fun. I drove to Kentucky and participated in an orienteering event put on by the Orienteering Cincinnati group. It was marginally closer than the event the IndyO people were running. Considering how badly I did, the less time I had to drive to get home, the better.

I do not expect to do extremely well at the events. I left myself get too out of shape over the last year for that. I go to get out of my house, get some exercise, and basically have a fun walk through the woods. But that doesn’t mean I want to do badly on the course. And this time I did. I was doing the orange course and read the map wrong at the first control. (A minor mistake, after all, how important is reading the map at an orienteering event.) So I found the second control first, realized what I had done, and had to go back to the first control, then back to the second. Given my slow speed, this was a real problem.

So I walked through the woods, occasionally frustrated, usually sweating, and trying to find the shortest way between two points. Since I like the straight line definition, I did some of the sections the hard way. It was mostly fun, except for the cramps I had most of the time in my quadriceps. I didn’t warm up enough before starting, and it was a chilly day. They were painful, and driving for over 2 hours getting home didn’t help. Which was why Sunday was not a fun day at all.

Which pretty much leads me back to my first paragraph. It was a good weekend. Except for the times it wasn’t.