Kiva Han Countdown: 16 days (yesterday's post)

Something unfortunate dawned on me yesterday while I was sitting at KH and gulping down a cappuccino. I realized I'm not actually going to be in town for the last few days of KH's existence! This brings my "go there every day for a month" crashing down, of course. You see, I'm going to Chicago to visit a friend that weekend, and it will be hard to eat a hangover cure from Illinois. I will most likely be back on that Sunday, the last day of KH, so … there's that, but still. I completely didn't realize this when I set out on this adventure. Who cares, right? It's been fun, and it will continue to be fun. I'll just do something crazy on that last day to make up for the prior two or three days I'll miss.

Something weird also happened to me yesterday there. I walked upstairs to pee, bouncing off the walls from my triple shot beverage, and not more than 5 seconds after getting into the bathroom, someone was knocking on the door. Now, this person must have seen me close the door and known I had just got there, but they continued to knock, ever more insistently and frustratingly, eventually making audible (through the door, mind you) deep sighs, "Sheeesh", as if I was somehow taking forever, all despite my calls of, "Just a minute!" and "Hold on!". Who does this? I wasn't being slow, and I even rushed through the hand-drying process just to get the hell out of there, but this person still gave me a head-shake and glare when I walked out, as if to say "Jeez buddy, thanks for ruining my day with your slow-ass peepee time." I thought of many rude things to say on my way by and back downstairs, but opted for the silent route at the time. Why bother?

Kiva Han Countdown: 27 days

I crossed two items off my Kiva Han bucket list today! (See this post for what I mean.) A friend of mine gchatted me during the day and said "nice blogging" and met me here in the afternoon. When I got here, he said he was just talking with the barista and mentioned this here blog series, so I guess folks will know about it somehow. Cool.

I didn't quite feel like settling down and working, so I looked through the shelf of board games while waiting for my coffee. The stack was falling over after I plucked one out from the middle, and I had to do some careful rearranging to keep the whole pile from toppling onto the ground and making a big mess and din. I settled on the game Outfox. It looked like an easy-to-learn game, was playable by three people, and the time component said 10-30 minutes. Perfect. I went back to our table, unpacked the box. In the process, two balls of paper (one a ripped-up brown napkin and one a pink receipt) fell onto the floor and I said, "Oh well". I also discovered that there were two rules sheets, one entirely in French and one entirely in Spanish. Between me (French) and my other friend (Spanish), we pieced together the rules and started to play amongst the three of us. I realized that those balls of paper were in the box to replace some missing pieces, so we made do with some spare change I had in my pocket. (A penny makes for a great "brown circle".)

We didn't play long enough to develop fully intricate strategies, but enough to realize that the game is not easy, and amounts to being careful about setting up your opponent for an easy win. Perhaps the two player version is different/better/more strategically rich because, as it was, we could really only play with one future move in mind, and that was hard enough. Still, a fun game, and I'd recommend checking it out. So yeah, that was one check on my KH bucket list: play a board game. I'll likely do that again in the coming weeks. There were several other games I'd never played before, and Balderdash is a great multi-player game that I've played many times.

Later, I went upstairs to the bathroom and checked another one off my list.