They’ll be friends, eventually.

One of our three cats, Bennett, is definitely the bully of the group. He really loves to play, but his idea of roughhousing angers and terrifies both Sasha and Sophie, so it’s not uncommon for us to hear the two girls running around with him in pursuit, or simply hear them complain when he’s in their presence.

As Bennett is so rambunctious, when Lucas was born I commented to Jennifer on more than one occasion, “He’s just met his best friend. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Over a year later, they’re well on the way. Whenever Lucas is playing in the living room, Bennett goes out of his way to try and get Lucas’s attention, rubbing against him and the like. When Lucas sees Bennett, he automatically goes over to him to interact with him.

The only problem right now (and the reason I use the word “interact”) is that as Lucas is so young and Bennett has no experience with kids, they’re not entirely sure how to properly interact with each other. Lucas doesn’t know how to be gentle with Bennett, so sometimes tails are pulled. Bennett, for his part, loses patience quickly. It’s a shame, really, because I can tell they WANT to be friends but they simply don’t know how yet.

It’s one of those things we’ll have to give them time and guidance on. I still believe they’ll be close friends one day. :-)

Release the creamy kraken!

Recently Blue Bell released a new flavor called Cookie Two-Step. We’ve agreed that it’s become our new favorite. Last night, Jennifer shared her theory regarding its existence.

“They created it years ago. However, they left it on the shelf because they could make more money selling the two flavors: Oreos and cookie dough. However, since they had those health and safety problems and have an image problem now, they had no choice but to release the awesome.”

It definitely makes sense to me. :-)

Toy gamepads should be a thing.

On the rare occasion that Lucas actually manages to make it into my office, usually the first thing he makes a beeline for are the DualShock 4 controllers for my Playstation 4. He absolutely loves carrying them around and playing with them. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but most of the time “playing with them” involves putting them in his mouth, so that’s a no-go.

My first instinct was to go onto Amazon and purchase a toy gamepad for toddlers. After all, one would think that would be something the toy companies would sell, right? My son can’t be the only one who likes them.

As it turns out, they don’t actually exist.

In the end, I decided on a compromise. Rather than give him an old controller with the cable cut (and thus expose him to the wires) or an actual controller I might be using (like a 360 gamepad or DualShock 4 controller), I pulled my old Wavebird out of a drawer and gave it to him. After all, I rarely use my GameCube these days, and when I do the wired gamepads work just fine for me. For his part, Lucas loves playing with it and it’s become a mainstay in the living room toy collection and almost always comes with us in his diaper bag when we go out.

I just think the toddler toy manufacturers are missing a potential lucrative toy line. :-)

Recently I got to experience Dungeons and Dragons from the other side, so to speak.

A few friends and I have a group that meets every month or two to play D&D. We started in earnest once 5th edition came out, and our friend George acted as dungeon master,  putting us through the introductory adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver. It was pretty fun, especially since I’ve learned that my best character class is a cleric (namely, the party healer).

As we played, though, I started thinking about maybe running an adventure myself. I was pretty hesitant at first, considering the last time I ran an adventure myself was for the old World of Darkness system, and it was twenty years ago. (Christ, has it been that long?) That adventure turned out to be an out-and-out disaster, as I hadn’t planned it very well and wasn’t willing to let the players make their own decisions. After that negative experience, I wasn’t sure I could do it again. There was also the small issue of not having enough time to create a campaign of my own.

What made me firmly decide to go ahead and give it a try was that Wizards of the Coast announced that they were releasing a new updated version of the classic Ravenloft module called Curse of Strahd. Before I had gotten into D&D in earnest, the Ravenloft campaign setting had interested me the most, and it was also the setting I was most familiar with. So, I went ahead and purchased the three core rule books (Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) and the Curse of Strahd campaign rulebook. After studying all four as best I could, I felt I was about as ready as I could be.

We started the campaign two weeks ago. I don’t think I was as ready as I could have been.

My biggest issue was that I hadn’t studied the campaign rulebook as well as I thought I had, so there were a few times where I had to request do-overs because I had missed something. Thankfully, everyone was patient with me while I went through those learning curves.

To my credit, I was better about giving my players free rein where needed. I also tried to act out the characters as best I could. As my group is less about “role playing” and more about “hack, slash, get loot”, I had to remind them that Curse of Strahd is a fairly story-intensive campaign and that I would be taking character role playing somewhat seriously (which they all agreed to).

One of my main challenges was that our group’s schedule is rather hectic. While we started at around 2 or so, two of our group didn’t arrive until after 5. In addition, another member had to leave unexpectedly at 4. As a result, I had players who were playing multiple characters and had to adapt to the changing player group. As I don’t handle those kind of changes that well, I felt I kept things under control.

I also realized too late that I didn’t have anything to map out encounters, locations, and combat. To my relief, George lent me his dry-erase grid mat and cardboard tokens. I’ll probably hit Montag’s (the local Pearland game store) for something of my own before the next session.

More than anything else, though, I think Jennifer put it best when she observed that I was probably happier as a player figuring out the challenges than as the person actually running the game. It was pretty difficult for me to keep the player side of me quiet sometimes, and let the players figure out where they needed to go as opposed to me simply telling them. On the other hand, it was nice seeing the players figure out where to go and what to do without me explicitly needing to tell them.

All in all, though, I think it worked out well. Like I said, I need to beef up on the particulars before the game days and I need a mapping system of my own as opposed to borrowing George’s. Still, while I would rather be a player, I think I’ve learned and matured enough to be a capable DM. I’ve even considered running online campaigns for those friends of mine who don’t live in the Houston area.

We’ll see if they survive the Curse of Strahd campaign, but for now, I’m happy that I was up to the challenge of running it.

As I noted six months ago, we decided to save some money by getting rid of our cable TV service.

It was a bit of a difficult decision at the time, considering how much we used the TV for background noise and how often we used our Comcast-provided DVR. However, at this point, we don’t regret getting rid of it.

One of the biggest changes we’ve made since to our setup since we got rid of the cable service was to get a Roku Streaming Stick for the living room home theater. We were very impressed with how well the Roku 1 worked on our bedroom TV; on the other hand, the installed apps on our Samsung home theater receiver were terrible. Getting the Streaming Stick solved that problem, and now the streaming services work just as well in the living room as they do in the bedroom.

Of course, apps like Hulu replaced the Comcast DVR. On the other hand, we tended to use channels like Food Network, HGTV, and Travel Channel as background noise, especially on weekends. While the broadcast networks had some similar channels, we really missed having those networks. That was solved the other day, when we learned about Sling TV, which provided all the channels we were missing for $20/month. As we rarely (if ever) DVRed those channels, it was a good deal considering how much we had been paying for cable TV service before. We’re on day three of our seven day trial, and we’ve already decided to continue the service.

If there’s been one problem, it’s been the fact that our home theater receiver has a major design flaw that caused both the volume down and eject buttons on the front panel to malfunction badly. After Geek Squad basically declared it unrepairable, I managed to take it apart and figure out a) what the problem was, and b) how to fix the issue. The receiver is working fine now with no issues. I may do a blog post later detailing what I did.

All in all, we’re pretty happy right now with our TV service. When it comes to movies, though, it’s not been as good.

To be honest, there hasn’t been all that much we’ve wanted to go out and see. It doesn’t help, either, that we have to make arrangements for Lucas if we want to go to see a movie in a theater. The last two movies we’ve seen in theaters have been Deadpool and Captain America: Civil War, and unfortunately, we didn’t like either one. While I wanted to see Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, I knew Jennifer didn’t want to see it, so I’m waiting for it to become available to rent via Amazon Instant Video. Star Trek Beyond should be out soon, but I’m not sure yet whether we’ll see that at a theater or whether we’ll wait for it to hit home video.

Of course, considering we have a decent TV and sound system, about the only kind of theater it’s worth going out to see a movie at is a dinner-and-a-movie place, and for us that’s Studio Movie Grill, considering they have locations near our house and near Jennifer’s parents’ house. The food is decent, the ticket prices are reasonable (compared to places like AMC and Cinemark), and they have low tolerance for people acting up during movies.

In the end, we’re pretty happy with how things have ended up, six months down the road. With the addition of Sling TV, the one thing that caused us to miss cable TV has been taken care of. We don’t get to see as many movies as we used to, but we’re adapting there as best we can. I think we’re doing well, and we definitely made the right decision as far as cable TV goes.