tigertoy

A couple months ago, I bought a Kobalt cordless electric chainsaw, because I occasionally need a chainsaw and I don't like anything about small gasoline engines. When I bought it, they handed me a rebate coupon at the register. Hey, this says they'll give me a second battery for the thing. 2 amp-hours at 80v is a non-trivial battery, so that seemed worth going to the web site and putting in the information. But after I put the information in, I tried to look back on the tracking information, and the website disavowed any knowledge of me. I decided to not get upset about not getting the free thing I hadn't been expecting when I bought the saw, and wrote it off.

Then yesterday, I found a small but heavy box in my garage. And today I opened the box and found that it had the battery it was supposed to have in it. As the kids say these days, w00t!

I have cut down most of the things that really needed cutting down with my new chainsaw, and determined that, to be best of my limited ability to tell, it's a serious tool, not just a dangerous toy. It doesn't forever on a charge, but definitely long enough to be useful, and the second battery definitely means that the saw will have more endurance than I do. (Turns out that a chainsaw starts to feel really heavy when you've been holding it for 20 minutes.)

Another Magic set is coming out, and the prerelease was this weekend. I did the two daytime ones at Armored Gopher. Saturday, I ended up running a white/green/blue deck featuring Emeria Shepherd and Kiora. It was kinda mediocre. After round 2, I decided that I would have been better off with black than white, because the Shepherd is a bomb but I only had a couple of other white cards worth running. But my opponents played too slowly, so I never had 10 minutes to do that level of surgery on it. I ended up just barely above 50%, got 1 pack, and two Russian Dragon's Maze packs as my door prize. Today, I thought my pool was fantastic. I had two Emeria Shepherds and several white removal spells, so I was definitely playing white. I got Ob Nixilis Reignited, so my first impulse was to play black, but as I built it I realized that I didn't have any cheap black creatures and my deck was just going to be too slow, so I went with red and white instead, getting to run my Resolute Blademaster with several allies. And my curse kicked in -- I thought I had a great deck, so I got mana screwed for my first two matches. I won, drew, and won, but my tiebreaks were dreadful with the two initial losses and I finished 1 place out of packs. Then I pulled my door prize, and hit the jackpot with the Zendikar Expeditions Flooded Strand -- a $300 card.

With some assistance from Jackie, I ordered a new memory stick for my laptop, and I managed to put it in. I misunderstood the procedure, so the first time I took the cover off I couldn't get the memory in, but at least I didn't break anything, and after Jackie pointed me to a website explaining the procedure, I tried again and got it.

With 8 GB instead of 4, surfing the web is now much less annoying. (I like to leave any web page that I'm at all likely to look at again open, so I frequently have 50+ tabs open. This seems to me perfectly natural, the whole reason browsers have multiple tabs, but the performance is so bad that it's apparent that the average computer user either doesn't do this, or has a lot more RAM than I expect for a low end machine.)

I did play at FNM on Friday. I didn't write it up yesterday because I went to EFRC. I lost the first 4 games. One of those games was interesting and the other three were just me not drawing the cards I needed. After going 0-2, I won the next one and should have won the last one but went to time.

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Next week will be the last hurrah for Standard with Theros block cards. It's spoiler season, and so far I'm hugely disappointed. Siege Rhino will still be a card, but I don't think the mana will be there for my luck to support 3 colors. I really need Sylvan Caryatid to smooth me out -- a card none of the pros have been running for months. I don't know what I'll be playing at FNM a month from now.

I played the same deck as last week. 2-1-1, 4th place overall.

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I have just returned from Indy Fur Con. I've been having a stressful few weeks, and I needed a con more than I knew. I almost didn't go, but thanks to the generosity of friends WANOLJ, I got there. It was mostly low key, and there were some bits of time where I wasn't doing much, but there were bits of time when I had fun, when I laughed, when I hugged, and even danced. I had some good conversation. It wasn't a particularly musical weekend, though there was a guy with a guitar in the main area Friday night who had parodies of popular songs, including something wickedly unprintable to the tune of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (ask me about it in person), and singing along with tollers as she sang "Thirteen" and something of Seanan's on a borrowed guitar.

We took a detour through Terre Haute to have dinner at Tokyo Steakhouse, and we stopped at EFRC and I showed the other people in the car some tigers. But, it being the middle of the afternoon in August, it was pretty warm, the tigers were mostly sleeping, and there was limited enthusiasm to look at all of them. Perhaps we'll have another trip when it gets less hot. A little sushi and some delicious teriyaki got us nearly home, and the caffeine addicts decided to stop at a local coffee shop called Mad Goat Coffee, which the others assure me serves excellent coffee. (I'm sure it would taste like coffee to me, so I didn't have any.)

I felt inspired to pick up my guitar (which I have been doing far too little lately), and it felt good to sing some songs, even if I'm a bit rusty. Hopefully this emotional boost will last.

I was hoping that if I played constructed the curse which has been on me since the third round of the first prerelease I played in for Origins might let up. It didn't really, I still drew very poor hands.

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Standard didn't happen this week, and I'm trying to be good and not spend the money on draft, so I tried my Modern deck. The problem with modern is that good decks require many hundreds of dollars worth of cards I don't have, so if I play I'm always running a less good deck that has to compensate by being a bit lucky, and I'm just not. Of course, I seldom play modern because my deck sucks, so I don't have experience playing the format, which gives me a little more disadvantage. Oh well.

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I played in Standard again this week, same 75 as last week (because it didn't occur to me to add the Tasigur that I traded for until halfway through the event).

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Friday at FNM I tried to pull off some shenanigans, but I had a truly exceptional run of bad luck, so I'm not quite sure if the deck is completely hopeless or just not really very good.

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