Packin' a Box

Helped a friend, M, pack boxes to prepare to move today, someone who I haven't seen in years. It was nice to catch up, and helping someone to move is a strangely good way to reminisce about past times.

I met M at uni, and I'm pretty sure he was the instigator of Late Night Settlers. In fact, he did mention that he still had the computer that stored all our LNS stats, and it was famous for rolling more 10s than any other number (I don't know if it was just a freak of stats, or if there was something broken in the RNG built into the client we used). I think LNS would have to have been one of the highlights of my time at university. M, as the host, would always get his preferred colour, which was red, and that colour always reminds me of him. Which is odd, because at work, I'm always the one who ends up playing red (we discovered last week that my red set is missing two road pieces, so that's probably why nobody else wants to play it).

One of the things I also enjoyed about today was not being the nerdiest person in the room. M and R both played Warhammer 40k, and various flavours of pen and paper roleplaying games. I had actually completely forgotten until now that M and I played Pendragon together, though I still feel bad about my character in that game, as she spent most of her time sleeping (I was the only spellcaster in the game, and in that particular system, you have to rest to recover from the exhaustion caused by casting spells. The more powerful the spell, the longer you have to rest).

It turns out that M is a fan of the Honor Harrington series, and I think I ended up reading at least one book while I was at uni, at his suggestion, but when he handed me a copy of the first book (of which he said he has 4), it didn't ring any bells at all, so I am going to give it a shot. It's fortunate that I just finished the last book I was reading on my kindle. He also tried to give me a CD containing a song from Civilisation IV (Baba Yetu, which is the first song from a video game to have won a Grammy), which I tried to decline, as I don't listen to music all that much. R ended up taking the CD, saying he was going to help me become more cultured. While dropping R off at home, he conveniently left the CD in my car...

Even though I hate moving, and hope not to have to do it again for a very long time, I enjoyed catching up with M and R, and I think the company is what made it enjoyable.