A few people have been asking me for an update on my adventures with the New Mexico snowstorm, so here's a more detailed account of my vacation:

December 22: I left St. Louis, heading southwest via I-44 in the general direction of Arizona. I made it through Missouri, then the Oklahoma turnpikes, via Tulsa and Oklahoma City, then across the state line into Texas, and then took a nap at the rest stop that's about an hour east of Amarillo. It's a *great* rest area by the way. Lots of effort went into decorating it, from the soaring architecture of the main building, plus huge picture windows, and even the bathrooms are decorated with elaborate mosaics of the desert skyline.

December 23: I arrived in Albuquerque, staying with my friend Cindy. In the evening I visited her son Ian, who's got a house with some of his friends. Nice "gaming" house, with a pool table and a dartboard and lots of people coming and going, and I partied there until about 5 a.m., then heading back to Cindy's.

December 24: I set off for Page, Arizona, arriving at my sister's house that evening. I felt a bit like Santa Claus, arriving with a car full of presents.

December 25: Normal Christmas stuff. Gifts and wrapping paper strewn everywhere, kids and toys and loads of food. My nephew got a PS2, and I'd brought a lot of games and accessories for it.

December 26: Mostly hung out with my niece and nephew, playing PS2 games. We especially enjoyed "Okami." Though it was a single-player game, the art is beautiful and we all enjoyed watching it, plus the dialogue is fun. My young niece would generally be the primary player, and as we encountered various NPCs, I'd read the dialogue aloud, playing the different voices. Then if a difficult combat situation came up, my niece would hand off the controller to her older brother, who would get through the battle for her and then hand the controller back. Eventually we were all playing different characters, reading aloud in different voices, helping my niece with some of the harder words. It was really a lot of fun. Since I'd brought a Multi-tap and some extra controllers and memory cards, we also played 4-player Gauntlet, which was chaotic but fun.

December 27: Played Okami in the morning (when I left we were working our way through Taka Pass and Kusa Village), then in the afternoon drove down to Flagstaff, and spent the evening with my parents.

December 28: Drove to Albuquerque, had dinner with my father and Anatoly K., the two people who helped with the final part of the solution on the Cyrillic Projector Cipher. It was at "Macaroni Grill", and since we were there fairly late and most of the other customers had left, they let us take over one of the tables for a game of "Settlers of Catan." :)

December 29: My birthday. It was starting to snow at that point, but still pretty light. I spent the morning with a friend from St. Louis 2600, Electrojoker. We had breakfast at th... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]