We went to water, water came to us - a quick roundup of the last few weeks.


The weekend's big news was hurricane Hilary making landfall (as a tropical storm) in Southern California.


News and weather apps had a lot of colorful maps that were unfamiliar to most people around these parts.


Jes had a girls' night out planned for the evening before. One of the attendees asked her to make hurricanes, not realizing that three years earlier our quarantinis had elevated covid from "over in a week" to "multiyear global pandemic".


While the inland empire had some flash flooding, the coast just experienced a full day of heavy drizzle.

Exploration

It was my turn to lead the beer exploration. Wanting to go coastal, we hit a couple spots in Cardiff.


Cooley set us up with a boat dive with Odyssea Diving. It was a very different experience from vacation dives with crowded boats, bad divers, and endless pre-dive briefings. Plus they had bean bags on the deck.

We went to two spots off of Bird Rock. The water was warm and the vis was good (well, relatively). The biggest disappointment was that High Dive's burger patties are nearly inedible after so many years of being the best burgers in the county.


(Most of these photos are either from Derrick or Shane.)


For Dani, the non-hurricane weekends have featured swim time, 'daddy games', and yard play.

Clank Legacy

The board game crew started Clank Legacy back in June. We've now been to both sides of the board and put the vast majority of map stickers down. A few thoughts:

• The amount of mid-game lore is significant. It's nice to have evolving objectives (especially if your round isn't going to plan), but it's important to be aware that the play rhythm is almost always being interrupted.
• The rounds are (lore reading and stickering aside) somewhat short. The deckbuilding isn't quite so fulfilling when you only cycle through a few times.
• There are a lot of potential objectives at any given moment - most with hidden benefits - so we're not constantly swooping on each other's objectives.
• The writing is rather entertaining.

Related