Planning my Summer Vacation

As some of you may know, I am planning to go to Toronto for my 35th birthday this June. I am going by myself, since I only have enough frequent flyer miles to get myself there for free, and no more. I also have enough hotel points to stay in downtown Toronto in a nice Marriott or Hilton for free, so this should be a pretty reasonable vacation from a wallet standpoint. The primary reason for going to Toronto is to go to the Hockey Hall of Fame. As a pro hockey fan for 20 years, I figure I need to make the proverbial "journey to Mecca" and get to the Hall. This is where they store the Stanley Cup, people. I was originally planning on a quick weekend trip: up on Friday, hit the Hall on Saturday, and then back on Sunday.

However, I then checked to see if my favorite baseball team, the Toronto Blue Jays (long story), were in town that weekend. It turns out that they are! Playing the Phillies! That's pretty awesome. What isn't really awesome is the fact that the game is at 1:05 P.M. on Saturday, which screws up my perfect plan of spending all day at the Hall and then going to a ballgame that night. But an afternoon ball game with the roof open (assuming it's a sunny day)? That's pretty sweet. So, I'm probably going to need to make some adjustments to my original plans. I'm either going to head up on Thursday and hit the Hall on Friday, or come back to STL on Monday. We'll just have to see which days has better free flight options on American Airlines, I guess.

He Who Has Ears to Hear, Let Him Hear

Or, in this case, he who has eyes to read, let him read, in this case a fascinating and insightful look into the effects of Christianity in Africa by a quite unlikely source. Original link courtesy of the Business as Mission network.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the St. Louis Blues are in the Stanley Cup Playoffs

In light of this momentous occasion, there is only one thing to do.


Aahhhh, yeah.

Memoir '44

This time on my journey through my game collection we come to Memoir '44, a board game depicting ground warfare in France during WWII, from the D-Day invasion up to 1945. There are a number of expansions for the game that cover other theatres, but the main game focuses on France. The game is designed by Richard Borg, and is part of his Commands & Colors rules set. I already covered the basic rules in my post about C&C Ancients, so I won't cover that again. The difference in this game is that there are only three types of units, so tactics is a little simpler. You have infantry (which can engage in close combat, or fire from a distance with rifles), tanks (which move faster than infantry, have better range, and have a smaller chance of taking damage when attacked), and artillery (which don't move well but are hard to damage and have lots of range). There is also more varied terrain in this game, which can have a significant effect on game tactics.

Memoir '44 is a pretty basic wargame overall. It takes no more than 2 hours to play a game, including setup and breakdown, and it isn't very complicated, so even people who aren't really into complex wargames can quickly grasp what is going on and develop decent strategies. The limitations of your command cards can be irritating (like when you really want to attack with your left flank, but all you have are center and right activation cards), but you usually have enough to do that you can do something useful each turn. This has been a popular game for the publisher, Days of Wonder, and there are many expansions available, covering different theatres of the war, and even changing the game by including airplanes. The main game comes with about 20 scenarios, though, so just that by itself gives a lot of variety in games. As you can probably tell, I like this game quite a bit.

What is Going On, David Backes?

So, I know the Blues have a big game tonight against Detroit, our evil nemesis who usually cannot be stopped. I went to Yahoo! to check the score, and I see that we won! Yeah! And then I see that David Backes scored four goals. Four goals! That is insane! Where on earth did that come from? What did Andy Murray put in his corn flakes this morning? Whatever it was, how about giving it to the whole team from now on. Maybe that would get us into the playoffs.