I love playing games online with my friend, Joyce, but we have really been struggling to get a handle on Villainous. In Villainous each player is a Disney villain, but each villain has its own set of rules to win the game. Some players have to accrue power (coins), some have to defeat heroes, and the Queen of Hearts has to take a shot through wickets (which are her converted Guard cards). I think our real struggle (besides learning 6 sets of rules) is that we're just not mean enough to play this game the way it was intended. It reminds me of Chutes & Ladders on steroids. Just when you think you're close to winning the game, a "hero" attacks you and you're back to square one.
I should probably stick to biking. It's much more relaxing. The past 2 weeks, the Bike Club has ridden around the local reservoirs - Cherry Creek and Aurora. Both times the really good bikers and the e-bikers have started from home. I usually put my bike on my car and meet them halfway. That's still a 25-mile ride for me. You can't see it in this photo, but the guy behind the girl in pink brought along his little "teacup" dog in his handlebar basket.
I went riding on the Platte River trail later in the week and then stopped at Hudson Gardens to do some sketching. I got some new paints I wanted to try out. The brown color on the tree trunk has some purple tones that I think look very interesting. And I finally got a shade of green that is reasonably dark.
Even though it's only the end of July, a lot of the summer flowers are starting to go to seed. I'm planning to collect the seeds and throw them over the back fence. Maybe I'll be able to start a wildflower meadow so the deer won't jump over into our yard. So far, they haven't eaten any more of my plants, but I think they like hanging out down the street where the yards are shadier in the afternoon.
This month the Geek Club presentation was on photo books that you can publish yourself online. I've made a few photo books over the years using Shutterfly, but evidently you can even go to places like Walmart and Costco and get photo books made. I thought this was an interesting topic, but you can tell by the audience (almost all women) that the club is getting less and less geeky.
In sad news, St Louis was bombarded with rain this past week. Our old neighborhood got 11 inches in one day! The Metrolink was hit really hard with flooding, mostly because the tracks are open, but below grade. I remember when Monsignor Polizzi organized a picket line in our neighborhood to keep them from building the tracks at street level, which would have caused major traffic delays every day at rush hour. Unfortunately, this is the station that joins the red and blue lines, so that's a huge disruption in the system. We're pretty lucky we don't live there anymore, because if we were, I'm sure we'd be bailing water out of the basement right now.
