Kiva Han Countdown: 25 days (yesterday's post)

I keep managing to not write these short blurbs until the day after. Oh well. This post corresponds to the unique day where the number of days left in Kiva Han's existence is also the day of the month. My mathematical mind felt that was important to note.

I stopped by yesterday evening around 8 pm for a cup of tea. This time, I went with the liquorice peppermint herbal. It was surprisingly delicious, considering I usually don't like liquorice. I played a couple of games of Outfox with my friend and then did some work. Not much to say, but it was fun and productive, a good combination.

At one point I heard strains of Bob Dylan's voice wafting over my ears, and I strained them to finaly identify the song as "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". Then I heard faint music coming from the speakers out in the other room. At that point, I realized the guy at the table behind me had his earbuds playing music so loudly I could hear them and identify the song. Turn it down, dude. You're ruining your ears.

The sign was gone from the counter! I had momentary hope that maybe Kiva Han isn't closing after all. That was dashed, of course, later on when I overheard this exchange:

Customer: Are you guys closing?
Barista: Yeah, on February 19th.
Customer: Oh. I meant, like, tonight.
Barista: Oh right. At 10.

By the by, isn't liquorice a weird looking weird? LIQUOR ICE. Weird.

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.