On Saturday, for first time in over a decade, I played a game of D&D. Bunch of people around my age, mainly guys, with the mandatory roleplaying babe, whose special power of being a girl was significantly diminished by the fact that most of us were in the category of wondering if we would ever have grandchildren rather than wondering if we would ever find a girlfriend.

We played the same adventure, "Keep on the Borderland", that I first played in the late 70s. Basically there is this keep where we are stationed, and, off in the woods, a series of caves inhabited by monsters. When I was 13 or so playing this for the first time, we went from room to room, rolling dice and killing monsters, who were all oblivious of the slaughter that had just taken in place in the room next door, inches away. At 39 we adopted a more sophisticated approach: if we start killing things in one room, chances are the goblins in the next room will be alerted, and being cowardly bastards, would likely not approach us without the aid of a hundred or so of their colleagues. Of course attacking the caves wouldn't have made sense anyway because we were evil. So we had to make a plan to get the monsters in the caves to attack the people in the keep instead, offering to disable defenses. We have the plan in place now, and in two weeks we reconvene to set it in motion.

This concludes my current update. Now I have to drive several hours so I can go visit some medical specialists at Johns Hopkins with my daughter, and hopefully figure out what is wrong with her feet.