I am now on my fifth date with the new woman, so I suppose I should come up with a strange moniker to match last year's streetsmart ninja kickboxing reporter. I don't know though, I guess I'll just call her 'the girlfriend'

Anyway, things seem to be going well enough so far. She is a divorced schoolteacher with split custody of her seven year-old son. That works out pretty well because she has half the week free. So far we have gone out to dinner, gone on a hike and swimming, seen a movie, watched a play, and spent the day at the Renaissance festival. On the way back from the Renaissance festival we stopped by the county jail so I could visit a client, a move I thought was particularly romantic. We are from very different backgrounds (she's Jewish and the daughter of a Harvard professor. I'm Italian/Irish and the son of a factory worker), but we seem to think a lot alike, and I feel very comfortable with her. She's not the woman of my dreams, but maybe my dreams will change if we hang out together enough.

Last Friday I went to the local gaming club. I played Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition from Cheapass Games. It's not a great game, but there is a certain point where you string a bunch of cards together and use them to tell an imaginary tale about an adventure you never went on. You don't have to do this to win, but it makes it funner. So if you collected a strange totem, a hero card, a tribal ritual, and a rare flower on your imaginary trip to Africa, you can just lay the cards out, or you can present them saying, "Fellow members of the Gentleman's Club, I have returned from the deepest heart of Africa where I completed my quest for the rare polka dot petunia. While there I was captured by the Huntoi tribe who tied me up to a totem pole and paraded around me in a circle using only their left elbows for movement. Fortunately, Stanley Livingston arrived just in time to save me from certain death."

I like games like "Captain Park's" a bit more than the pure strategy ones. I'm capable of thinking strategically if I really push myself, but I'd rather have a little strategy, a fair amount of luck, and the opportunity to be a ham.

Finally, for some reason I was thinking about high school the other day. Although I was in fact the person who got handcuffed to a toilet in gym class and was picked on a fair amount, I was also the guy who convinced our class to pick "Comfortably Numb" as our class song. In addition, in science class, I managed to get everyone talking seriously about how we could eliminate sterility through selective breeding. I got them convinced that this was a serious problem that we might be able to reduce if only we could convince sterile people not to reproduce.

Well anyway, I'm supposed to clean up my apartment now.