Lost It

I was having such a good day too; a picnic at church to celebrate its 70th anniversary, made some pork belly burnt ends for a barbecue on Tuesday, got the eavestroughs cleaned out, and the nephew even stopped by for dinner. Afterwards, my cousin Parker called for a chat, and while he was on the line, Glory video chatted Audrey from Churchill with Fenya and Bobby in the room.

I jumped on after my call was done and we were having a nice catch-up when I looked at my hand and noticed my wedding band was missing.

I immediately tried to think about where I might have taken it off, but it is very, very rare I do that. Both my wedding ring and my claddagh on the other hand have been too snug for me to bother with taking them off unless I am doing something very messy, like mixing a meatloaf or something.

But I have lost a few pounds over the last year, and the rings have been looser...and my gloved hand got snagged on a piece of metal on the eavestrough this afternoon, prompting a momentary, monkey-trap panic reaction, but I don't think my glove ever came off at that point.

They were going on and coming off all afternoon though, and with any removal my ring might have gone with it.

I excused myself from the call, checked the gloves with no luck, put on my rainjacket and got the stepladder from the garage. Propping it up underneath the eavestrough, I imagined a scenario where, while furiously trying to extricate my hand from the metal snag, perhaps I did my glove off for a moment to check for bleeding - and if I did, the ring could be just sitting there in the silt at the bottom of the trough.

But it wasn't.

That had been a forlorn hope from the get-go though; the rain after supper could've washed it away and down the spout, depositing it either in the rain barrel (not very likely) or the pipe going to the weeping tile (far more probable).

And that is if it even came off while I was up the ladder.

I swept the front yard with my worklamp, and the garden under the eavestrough. Then the rest of the lawn and the area around the rain barrel. When the lamp ran out of juice and I dropped it in the house, Audrey suggested it could have ended up in the bucket of detritus from the eaves, which would necessitate a search of the green food scraps bucket that all of our yard waste goes into.

After throwing on my chemical gloves and pawing through the topmost layers of the bin, I saw no sign of it, but recognized the possibility it could have sank to the bottom. We will have to throw the contents onto a tarp and sift over them a bit. I suppoe there is always a chance, but at this point I am treating the ring as lost, and any potential recovery as an undeserved miracle.

I am tremendously upset with myself - not so much for the ring coming off, but for the fact that it was missing for hours before I noticed its absence. Just one more sign of the ADHD symptomology I discuss with Fenya from time to time.

At the end of the day, I know the ring is a thing, and I should be a little embarassed for telling Audrey that I would rather have lost the finger than the ring that was on it.

But it is also a symbol, and represents the best thing my wife ever gave me besides our daughters. I haven't misplaced it for more than a minute in our three decades of married life, and to have lost it so quickly is not just frustrtating, it is maddening and disappointing in ways I cannot even articulate.

So I am afraid I am going to go on being upset about this for a while.

Randomized Nation, or Of Dice & Men

As detailed previously, I got a set of Dice of Disappointment at G&G XVIII - basically a bag of odd or misprinted polyhedral dice - factory seconds, if you will. A couple of them appear to be legtimately pretty dice, and I may throw a die with a blank face into the mix for my own amusement at some point, but they are mostly a novelty item...except for the one nostalgic entry.

You see, one of  the proferred dice is a jet black 10-sider (or "d10" in the vernacular of my people), with barely discernible numbers etched on the sides - some sort of inking failure I suppose. But back in the day, this was how most polyhedral dice came. If you were lucky, they included a crayon so you could grind some coloured wax into the faces to make them legible.

And as off-putting as this might seem now, it was a vast improvement over the first boxed edition of D&D I ever got, which contained a crappy set of laminated chits (meant to be drawn from cups) instead of any dice! (And this was apparently not due to a dice shortage as is commonly reported, but because of TSR's poor transition from ordering dice to manufacturing them, according to James Ward!)

Regardless, I am currently indulging nostalgia at a higher-than-normal rate, including drinking paralyzers while the Oilers are still in the playoffs, so this afternoon I took it upon myself to see if I could salvage this d10.

Luckily I have not one but two large sets of Crayola crayons I have received as gifts (one coming from the factory store in Minneaoplis!), and in the tin of the older one, I have somehow procured another dozen or so as well? And with one of these duplicates being the white I was looking for, I set to work.

It took my fingers some time to remember the methodology of getting the wax into the engraved numbers and filigree - a firm grip on both die and crayon, high pressure in a variety of directions and switching from circular to linear motion as necessary.

The faces look pretty sloppy after all this, full of smears and the occasional wax crumb. The next step therefore is to wipe off the excess wax, leaving only the deposits in the engraved recesses. I started doing this with my bare thumb, but eventually wised up and started using a nearby paper towel, whose increased frictional coefficients made for much more thorough removal of the errant waxy pigment.

When I was done, however, there was a more notable discomfort in my hand than I recall from doing this when I was 13...but at any rate, it didn't take too long to get a new ten-sided polyhedral randomizer into my Crown Royal dice bag.  

And this exercise was nostalgic in exactly the right way: it reminded me of a simpler time, while simultaneously making me grateful to live in the time I do, with pre-inked dice available in countless shades and permutations.

Pride Sunday 2024

The St. Albert support and advocacy group OutLoud was forced to close its doors a while back, which means it is very likely that there will be no Pride in the Park Festival late in June as there has been in previous years.

Our church has always put up a table at the event, so I wrote an email to the other members of my church's Affirming Ministry Team, confirming the sad news and also mentioning a recent poll describing flagging support for 2SLGBTQIA+ people (despite the same poll stating that 12 % of Canadians identify as a sexual minority in Canada, and 22% of those younger than 35.

Our minister asked if I could perhaps speak to this as part of our Pride Sunday observances this morning, and I said I would be happy to. Well, not happy, precisely, but certainly willing to draw attention to it!

Pride today is intended primarily as a celebration, but we must never forget its origins in protest.

As we heard, June is Pride month in North America in part because of commemoration of the riots that took place in June of 1969 following police raids at a gay bar in NYC. Police raided the bar, called the Stonewall Inn, ostensibly for serving liquor without a license, but the crowd on hand pushed back and eventually trapped the officers inside the bar for a time.

Almost everything in Stonewall was broken and the windows boarded up the night of the riot. By the next day, graffiti supportive of the LGBTQ community appeared on the boards, and a demonstration arose there later in the day. Hundreds of protestors, both gay and straight, protested there off and on until the fifth of July.

Since then, Pride has become a global movement, celebrated in some areas with joy, sombrely observed with activism in others. Urban legend has it that the first Pride parade in Edmonton was a number of gay men running down Jasper or Whyte Avenue with paper bags on their heads, as being gay had not yet been decriminalized, but a proper Pride movement was born in response to the Pisces Spa raids in 1981

But we probably won’t have a Pride in the Park event in St. Albert this year, because OutLoud, the support and activism group that organized it, was forced to close its doors just a few weeks ago.

Edmonton moved its Pride events to August but hasn’t had a parade since 2018. And I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I really appreciated the opportunity for a public show of support for sexual minorities, reflected in both delighted parade watchers, but also people marching in support of gay rights and equality, like our own United Church.

But on the other hand, with hate crimes on the rise, and bigots seemingly feeling more emboldened every day, part of me is glad I won’t have to worry about marchers being jeered, or assaulted, or driven into, or worse.

It feels weird to see all this opposition to what feels like a simple proposition: that love is love. That adults should be allowed to love other adults of the same gender. Or of a changed gender. Or of no gender at all.

And yet we see it. We see it all the time.

You hear it too, right? People at the grocery store, or the water cooler at work.

“I don’t know why those people need a special day.”

“More of this woke BS…”

“I mean, I’m fine with it, I just don’t want to know about it.”

“There is no place for those discussions in schools.”

And I know there are people who wanted to be here today who can’t make it, but I am also confident that some people chose not to be here because they don’t want to listen to people like go on about stuff they don’t care about. And that’s fine. It saddens me, but it's fine.

We became an Affirming Ministry nearly a decade ago, and to me, it just felt like a natural progression; we had undergone some significant soul searching and deliberative dialogue, and as my daughter is fond of reminding me, when you know better, you do better. We decided to take the big step from being implicitly welcoming of everyone to explicitly welcoming a group that had experienced tremendous persecution from people of our faith.

The backsliding since then has been staggering. And I don’t just mean the eyrolling when someone notices your preferred pronouns in your email signature.

• The vandalism of rainbow crosswalks. 
• The petition against Pride recognition by the municipal government in Westlock.
• Prominent hockey players refusing to wear Pride jerseys.
• The opposition to teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity or SOGI in schools.
• Right wing trolls labelling those who defend sexual minorities as “groomers” by trolls, both online and in-person.
• Cranks disrupting council meetings with fearmongering about “the gay agenda”
• The increase in hate crimes against sexual minorities.

A recent Global News headline stated “Poll finds declining Canadian support for LGBTQ2 rights and visibilityPoll finds declining Canadian support for LGBTQ2 rights and visibility”, a drop the man from Ipsos described as “precipitous”.

According to this poll this poll, in just three years, the number of Canadians supporting LGBTQ+ individuals being open about their sexual orientation or gender identity with everyone has dropped from 61 to 49 per cent.

Support for gender-affirming care for adolescents with parental support has gone from 59 to 48 per cent.

Another poll last September showed Albertans as the least likely to speak up in defence of homophobic or transphobic comments online.

So, to be clear - treating our brothers and sisters and others who are gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, or trans, or queer, or intersex or asexual or two-spirited doesn’t just make some people uncomfortable - it makes them angry.

There are a lot of what I call ‘Talibertans’ in this province, who would gleefully recriminalize same-sex relationships if they thought they could get away with it.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, honestly. How am I impacted if two women get married? How does having two grooms in a wedding party make my lifetime commitment to my own partner any less worthy or honoured?

And these folks are too quick by half at quoting the Old Testament to defend their _____ - if they did even a minute’s research they would realize pretty quickly that the Hebrew Scriptures are not talking about two consenting adults moving in together. And even if they were, I don’t see you stoning people for working on the sabbath or wearing two different fabrics at the same time or not trimming your beard corners or whatever.

The fact that so much of this animosity comes from people who claim the same faith identity as I do, but who conveniently forget critical lessons like “judge not, lest ye be judged” or “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” or even “love one another, as I have loved you”, makes my eyes spin, when they aren’t actively weeping.

I think a lot of us here believe that love is love - without conditions, without exceptions, without limitations.

And that, my friends, is why I believe we are here.

To continue telling these people who are hated by some, that they are loved by many, they are loved by God, and, I hope, that they are loved by us.

To continue to speak up in advocacy for those trying to make a more tolerant world for themselves and others.

To make a place for those who are often shunned by their own families.

To speak up in the face of willful mis- and disinformation, prejudice, bigotry and hatred.

And to do all this, even in the face of ignorance and opposition, with love.

Because in a world that feels like it is growing angrier and less tolerant with every passing day, love may be the greatest protest of all!

Amen

G&G XVIII: To Games and Togas!

I was in a weird headspace last Wednesday afternoon when I finally began making my way to the southside for the 18th iteration of Gaming & Guinness, our little group's annual event focusing on concentrated game-playing, eating and drinking, not always in that order.

Being unprepared was nothing new, and I had been painting scenery for the Star Fleet Battles game that very morning while roasting a pork loin on the Traeger for supper, but there was an apprehension that being rushed alone did not cover. 

As the fellow who ends up making a fair share of the decisions as to which games are played, I tend to agonize over whether or not the participants will have a good time even before we get together. And realizing I had left some medication at home after I had picked up a big pot of Pete's renowned chili verde and had to reverse course to my house and delay my arrival even longer (like, 4 hours later than anticipated)  did nothing to aid my disposition.

True to form though, once I was finally ensconced in Belongamick, where Totty was hosting for an astonishing eleventh time (!), and a majority of us were onsite playing games and hoisting pints, my spirits improved considerably.

Wednesday night is generally spent playing smaller scale pick-up or party games, and one of these was Totty's Kickstarted trivia game "Everyone Else Thinks This Game is Awesome", which not only allows you to make guesses on trivia questions but then get points by wagering on whether or not your opponents have the right answer. The questions themselves range from the moderate to insanely obscure or counter-intuitive, but are generally entertaining, and there is even a space to bet on whether all the players or none of them have the correct answer.

And as a result of this, the phrase "tiny stilts" will never be forgotten by the five of us who played the game a second time late Friday night...

My modest dinner of roast pork, peas and instant mash was very well received on opening night, and made for quite a few leftover sandwiches over the event too.

Thursday afternoon, before getting things fully underway, Earl and Jeff handed out this year's magnificent commemorative items, starting with personalized whiskey glasses with the Tolkien's "One Ring" inscription on the bottom.

And if that wasn't enough, personalized stainless steel mugs!

Rounding things out were a fun set of "Dice of Disappointment" and a fridge magnet.

we tackled the Aliens boardgame, Another Glorious Day in the Corps, a co-operative game that saws us trying to usher some of our favourite movie characters through a mob of xenomorphs and onto a waiting armoured personnel carrier.

I really, really want to like this game, but in three attempts to play larger games (with fairly experienced gamers, I am sure you'll agree), we have never fared too well. And I don't just mean not winning, but not seeing any path to victory whatsoever from where we ended up. 

There is a chance we are putting too much focus on fighting and not enough on running, and a general agreement that the time spent gathering weapons was rewarded with half the squad being bottled up by bugs on the same board they started on. Scott took the game home to play with his son though; hopefully they can unlock some strategies!

Jeff made us his renowned and adored Maui Ribs for supper, with Island Mike (having arrived only that morning) accompanying him on the roasted potatoes. 

Role-playing games have only showed up at G&G once before, but this year we tried something very unusual; a horror-RPG called Dread which, instead of using dice to resolve outcomes, uses a set of stacking blocks like Jenga. If the block tower collapses, not only does your character fail in whatever they were attempting, but they are now out of the game, perhaps having died, or possibly gone mad, gotten arrested, become catatonic, or simply called in for a double shift.

(Photo courtesy of Earl J. Woods)

The scenario involved a spaceship crew investigating a derelict vessel, with the tension rising and falling periodically, and players becoming more and more reluctant to pull blocks. One player made the ultimate sacrifice, purposely pushing the tower over to ensure the ship's reactor could be set to overload, enabling the other characters to survive.

I wouldn't be in a hurry to play Dread again - it is fairly challenging to run and requires a certain mood that a group of analytical, middle-aged nerds don't take to altogether naturally. Having said that though, everyone agreed that as an experiment, it ended up being a pretty cool experience; Jenga with a story attached!

Friday kicked off with a G&G mainstay: Circvs Maximvs. In anticipation of this, I had suggested ordering sheets for making togas so we could have a memorable group picture, to which my boon companions gamely agreed.

I straight-up love these guys.

It can sometimes be a challenge finding a balance between racing and fighting in this vintage Roman charioteering game, and this year featured a couple of wrecks and two fatalities courtesy of five-time winner Jeff, who switched things up with an incredibly intimidating heavy chariot. 

This is the first time the deadly scythed wheels have showed up in our CM games  in years, but I not only managed to evade Jeff's gaze but injured a couple of other horses with my own medium rig, slowing them down significantly. And I ended up winning to boot!

(Rob is not actually grumpy, but LARPing a disappointed racer)

The awesomeness continued through the dinner hour with a Big Yellow Box from Dickey's BBQ, the first period of game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, and setup for a big Battletech game! Jeff's love of Battletech battled with his devotion for his beloved Oilers, but he remained focused on the game he had set up. He provided us with two lances of medium battlemechs and a 4 x 8 table laden with marvelous 3D printed scenery, including a massive Leopard-class dropship.

I had helped him come up with a scenario, suggesting the team that grabs a mobile objective in the center of the table be required to take it off the opposite side instead of the more usual friendly side, resulting in something that felt quite a bit like football. In the end, my opponents in House Steiner were victorious, but we caused a reactor explosion crit on one of their mechs, which gave us 12th Vegan Rangers something to cheer about as well.

The beginning of the final day saw the return of our Wits & Wagers game, another trivia game that you can win without ever getting a questions right, simply betting on the answer you believe is closest to the correct number without going over, Price is Right style.  

It is not a particularly photogenic game, but three players make up their own questions every year which keeps it interesting. Saucy talk also generated one of the best wheezes of the weekend as Jeff was incapacitated by the giggles for over a minute at one point.

After this, Earl and I set up our biannual Star Fleet Battles game (using the miniatures-friendly Call to Arms rules). This game is too fiddly by far, and some of the scenarios really lack balance, but dag is it a lot of fun to push models of 60s-era starships around a table and blow them up with dice. And it looks tremendous, making it totally worth transporting the world's most fragile models away from our homes.

The scenario was a pretty complicated one as well, involving a shuttle, lost in an asteroid field, next to a deadly star that pulls everything closer to it each turn. We tweaked the rules as we went, and while the Federation was first to find the objective, my command battlecruiser and its escorts managed to take out the rescuers before they could leave the field and claim victory, in true Klingon fashion.

Another tough balancing act: so many games, so little time, but playing the same games in repeated years make it much simpler to pick up again...

After a dinner of Pete's legendarily tasty chili verde, we got down to our final game: an Arena: The Contest game pitting two dragons and three heroes against each other. 

It is a surprisingly chess-y way to play this dungeon-crawler, and made for a tantalizingly close game; both dragons start with 280 hit points, and when our white dragon finally died, the opposing red dragon had less than 50.

And that was about it, honestly. We got in a final game of Neanderthal Poetry, a first time for some players, and everyone enjoys the opportunity to bonk their friends with an inflatable club, right?

And a handful of us got in some crokinole games, but alas, the tournament bracket will need to be competed at G&G XIX instead.

There is a lot I don't capture, because I try to be in the moment as much as I can, and a lot of my favourite things don't translate well into photos or video anyways. 

But I am confident that if my head had a dashcam, I could pull out some stellar moments of not just incredible luck, great strategy or wonderful production values or painting skills, but also beautiful displays of friendship, wry laughter and deep appreciation. A group of friends this good, who will turn a forgiving (but not blind!) eye to my foibles and tolerate that my patience is not what it used to be, getting together to celebrate nonsense almost every year since 2006, is to be rightly treasured.

And while the games are awesome and a necessary focus amongst a group as diverse and distractable as ours, it is the fellowship that keeps us coming back.

(Scott, a teetotaler, has just poured me an exquisite Crown Float that I requested after he failed a coin check)