Helmet Cat Bed, Bag-o-Parts

        I dreamed I was working on a network install in a very Frank Lloyd Wright house. The man who lived there was a famous quarterback from back when I was much younger. He had a great photo of two small red tabby kittens in his football helmet. He brought the cats, now grown up large, like our own seventeen pound monster, and they immediately took a liking to me.

        I played with the cats and we swapped cat stories. I suggested that we could get an oversized helmet from a store display and re-create their kitten-hood a little bit. He immediately got on the phone and made a couple of calls. While I was finishing up  the network configuration of his four laptops, a courier arrived with the store display. I helped make a stand for it that would be somewhat cat proof, and we put one of the cat blankets in the helmet, along with some of the quarterback’s laundry. Soon enough the cats were romping around in the helmet, just like they did when they were kittens. I had my camera so took a batch of photos of them, in the larger helmet. One photo almost exactly matched the one of them as kittens. I downloaded all of the photos to one of the laptops for him.

        The quarter back invited me and N to dinner at his diner on Saturday, so I accepted.

        When N and I got there, he had a spot for us at his table. I had expected we’d have our own table and a free dinner, but it was a full on party. The quarterback had the cat pictures we’d taken enlarged and hung on the wall back in his ‘club room.’ Several of the folks at dinner wanted to make arrangements for me to come and take photos of their pets. (Which I scheduled as best as I could.)

        Before the evening was out, we were being introduced as “new friends.” We felt comfortable with the whole group of people, and despite not being particularly athletic, seemed to fit in just fine.

       

        Later, I dreamed I was at a gaming convention. I had Spare Parts rules on several different colored sheets of 11x17 paper and had a bag of nuts, bolts, knobs, washers and other hardware that I was using as both game counters and miniatures in a scenario I was about to run for the convention. I had a couple of battle mats all rolled out and ready to go. N was hanging out on the side, as well as A and S. They were just there to observe, though, and to take notes. Part of the deal was that the players could only read the one sheet of rules and ask one another about how to play. I was then going to run them through a few encounters with some medium RP while the observers would take notes on how easy or difficult the players found it to get the gaming system. I was pretty nervous about things, but was calmed by the fact that my game testers were finding the nuts and bolts of the miniatures system to be funny and useful at the same time. I let them discover using washers and nuts to mark their character cards for fatigue and damage, and everyone seemed to get the system. A couple of players were overwhelmed by the sheer number of potentially useful skills, and wanted to try them all.

I had foreseen this so had set up a bunch of pre-made characters to run for the first go round. Most of them wanted to customize their characters so I let them trade skill cards around the table as long as they could make the argument from a character standpoint as to why they should have that skill. We then got rolling on a sort of search and rescue mission that I had crafted to allow all of the skills to be used, and to even allow enough use that some of the characters’ skills would increase during the demonstration. The play testers really liked the skill increases that popped during their first encounter. (At this point the paper character sheets had been replaced by online sheets, the players were using their PDAs or cell phones.) I was periodically taking a shot of the battle mats and uploading them to my game server so the spectators would be able to follow what was going on.

Ad astra per technica,

FF