THE OFFICE THIS MORNING (true story):
One woman who works down the hall left for maternity leave like two weeks after I started working here, but she's been in twice to visit and show off her cute little girl. While she's elsewhere in the office, the baby gets taken in here.
EVERYONE: Awww, isn't she so cute?
Harriette: Look, she's smiling at all of us! Coochy coochy coo!
Me: Heh, it's a nice change. I remember when babies would take one look at me and start screaming.
Harriette: Oh, that reminds me, I met this really beautiful woman on my vacation, you should have seen her!

Now, how should I interpret that?

Oh, and how could I forget... I signed a lease. I have to get some pieces of furniture out of storage and buy some others, and probably a lot of smaller items too. The lease looks pretty good, and the place is nice. The money, well, getting out of my parent's house will be good for everyone. Only downside from my dad's point of view: he can't send a cat with me.

I went to Rochester last weekend. It was my fourth trip out there since graduating last May. But when I was in school there I never drove myself, except maybe to give my dad a break on a boring stretch of road or something. And I'm terrible at absorbing directions if I'm not actually driving, so the times I've gone by myself I was always fumbling with maps. In fact, of those eight trips (counting each part of a round trip separately), I don't think I've gone the same way twice in a row. Maybe not even at all. Construction detours, relying on mapquest directions which sent me to confusing or just inconvenient exits, getting off the last interstate on the way back too early because I always forget that a tiny town in upstate New York has like four interstate exits, ad-libbing the route back this weekend and I'm pretty sure I wound up on a road I've never taken before but it worked out fine...

Anyways, the reason I went was for the release tournament of Dissension, the latest M:tG set. Fun times. The crowd has grown — for Ravnica it was just me and Kenny, for Guildpact another guy came too, and this time there were six people wedged in the car.

The tournament was a mixed bag. On the one hand I only won one match out of the five. One close game I lost just because I forgot about something I could have done, and the good cards I could put in my deck were pretty evenly spread out among the colors, so I just used all five colors — way too many.

But on the other hand, I won a door prize. I think there were three different prizes, though I only remember my own and the one before it, a limited edition print of some artwork. It was pretty surprising; I was only listening to the announcement with one ear, so to speak, because I was trying to see the pairings for the next round, until I heard my name. I won a fat pack, they call it: six booster packs of cards, two boxes for holding cards with the artwork from popular cards on them, the paperback novel tie-in, and a couple more doodads. And after the tournament I bought a couple more packs. And in one of them was an Infernal Tutor — a shiny, foil Infernal Tutor, no less — which seems to be such a good card that Kenny expects it to become restricted to one per deck.

"Mixed bag"? What the hell am I talking about? I could have lost every game of every match, and with luck like that, it still would have been fun and worth doing. After I opened my pack but before Kenny had gone to buy some of his own, I had him rub my head for good luck.