Gameholecon - Eating and Other Things

The first few trips to Gameholecon we ate almost exclusively at the food trucks and on site.  The last two years we've gotten out to eat some better meals and treat it more like a mini vacation.

This is from Mickey's Dairy Bar.  We went there last year too - cash only.  It's incredibly popular.  My pancakes were WAY more than I could eat.

They have this monkey with bananas and this year we were there after Eryn went to Hausu at the Trylon with Peter and Lara, so it had special significance.  Bananas, Bananas, Bananas!


We had sushi the second night.  This is Muramoto Hilldale,which is the upscale mall. The dumpling place next door smelled better, but Eryn was really happy and I'm always happy with the sashimi plate.


The last night we went out for ramen at Morris Ramen right downtown.  We went there last year too.  Hard to find, small place, but delicious.  I had the corn and sausage ramen which is a little midwestern (aka not very spicy) but has a great flavor profile.  Eryn went spicy.  There was s small woman sitting next to us who had hair dyed like my niece and was the same height, but on closer inspection was probably a 40 year old.


And on the way home we went past the Norske Nook in Osseo, WI.  I wanted pork and gravy, but it wasn't lunch time.  And then someone stole my berry pancake.  And so the waitress thought I could have the pork and gravy.  But no.  So I got my blackberry pancake, just after a long wait.  And she gave me my banana pie and Eryn's sugar cookie comped, which was nice but unnecessary.  I was AMAZED that she remembered us from our trip to House on the Rock in the spring.  Hell of a memory on that waitress.  She said she wasn't sure until Eryn ordered her burger.


These next two have nothing at all to do with food.  This is from the True Dungeon.  Not this year - this year's theme was a blue snake woman and a giant demon.  This was in the dungeon last year and Eryn has fond memories of a woman on her phone who was oblivious until the tree grabbed her from behind.  Our team this year was much more inexperienced and we actually failed a puzzle challenge and one of the guys dropped unconscious and I had to revive him with a potion as we had no cleric.

My favorite part was on the puzzle we failed where we handed gems into a crypt in the right order to turn some skulls.  One of the guys didn't realize there were people in the tomb and kept tossing his gems into the holes.  I'm surprised no one got seriously beaned.


And this is the original Greyhawk map they used for inspiration (the Gygaxes are from WI) for the modules.  Chris (from high school) was excited to see this photo when I sent it his direction.  Eryn's excited about making her own map and has my old D&D map out at the moment to see how I handled it back when I was world building (my rules were: only part of one continent so there was lots of space to expand, different land types, countries basically had a theme (Sherfora, horses, Cthulhu-y, Romanesque, Persian, various novels, ruled by Dionysus, Atlantisa) an; d then populated with geographical features appropriately (Sherfora, forest in the middle of a plain that was more English-like; the Cthulhu area had lots of mountains and the borders were determined by how far someone had managed to make it without disappearing; Atlantis, big volcano; Dionysus area lots of dunes and grapes....etc).  It did make it about a million times easier to put a basic framework around any adventure and local color/character building.

RAGBRAI XLI 2013 - Knoxville to Oskaloosa, 52 miles and 2,808 feet of climb

This is from later in the week.  I set my pack on a banana from the Iowa Conservation folks and, not wanting to eat a banana that had been mashed into my tent, decided to draw a face on it.  I surprised Adam in his tent with Banana Man and then mashed him over a sharp edge inside the trash can so that whomever opened the trash next would see him staring up, a look of surprise on his face at being trepanned by a trash can.  I have edited it down and added some music for Adam.


The windmill in Pella, Iowa.  The largest in-use windmill (of its sort) in the United States.  The thing is massive.  Shortly before the windmill we had pancakes at Central College.  At the other end of our table, and Adam missed this whole event, were two young guys and a woman having pancakes.  At one point one guy starts telling this story.  It seems he's sharing a tent with someone on RAGBRAI.  So he woke up touching his wiener (his word).  But it turns out it was the other guys wiener.  And that guy woke up, and he was touching his wiener. That was their homoerotic moment for RAGBRAI.  The woman starts laughing so hard I thought she was going to choke on her pancakes.  And the other guy, who's not wiener guy number two, looks absolutely shocked that anyone would admit to that story.  Laughs uncontrollably.  Is shocked again.  And then the three of them are laughing so hard for minutes they can't eat.  It was pretty funny.



The home of Banana Man, the Iowa Conservation free banana and postcard stand. It's somewhere along the route every day.  I sent Eryn a cow postcard and an owl postcard one stressing Whoo and one stressing Moooost proclaiming me to be the best dad.  She's still my little girl.

A very attractive picture of Adam with his camelpack on his front and applying sunblock.


Mr. Banana Man's family.  Bananas!  Bananas everywhere!


There were a couple signs like this on the ride, including one that warned that the road ahead was in no way built with bicycles in mind.

Oskaloosa's literature claimed they'd won a prize as one of the 15 most picturesque town squares in the Untied States.  Nothing adds to that beauty like dropping an orange safety fence and a giant, inflatable Budweiser bottle in the mix.


In Oskaloosa there was a cool book store called the Book Vault that used to be a bank and had a safe on each floor that was now a book closet.  Unfortunately, I needed a break from the book of plays I was reading, so I went searching for a horror or sci fi book.  There was a dubious looking book called Cryonic: A Zombie Novel on the shelf, but a search on the in-house computer told me it was about a 4.75/5 on Amazon.  These reviewers are friends of the author.  I can think of no other reason for a 4.75/5.  It is a bad book.  Sorry Travis Bradberry, but your book is one of the worst zombie books I've ever read.  Your main character is a Mary Sue of the most obvious sort and no one does anything particularly clever and your loose ends are blatantly tied up and the writing...well, at least it matches the plot.  I think I'm going to send it to Klund to read.

 

Next door to the Book Vault was an enormous coffee shop that looked like it had once been the movie theater.  For the first time since we had left Minnesota we managed to charge our phones to almost 100%.


For a while it looked like rain.  This was our tent neighbor's attempt to ensure his/her bike stayed as dry as possible.  I think it looks like a way to torture a bicycle.


The second picture of No Parking bicycle humor from the ride.


Mixed berry pie.  Excellent crust.  Delicious, even without the ala mode.


A pair of very wide photos of our Oskaloosa campsite.  The two of them together comprise about a 360 degree view.  There was a little girl near us who couldn't pronounce Oskaloosa.  I asked her if that was her name.  It was also near here that the Heather stretching discussion took place.

Through those tents lies a water hose that I used to fill my bottles.  The guy before me set it down and started walking away and when I picked it up I activated the hair trigger on the nozzle.  Shot him square in the back.  He took it with a good nature as I was obviously almost as startled as he was.

[Original]
 
[Original]
 

Team Fur Bandit.  They covered their bikes in fur and what seemed to be carpet.

Unfortunately, it was near here that we saw Grown Ups 2.  Our selection of movies was incredibly limited and, in order to take advantage of the air conditioning, we were willing to see whatever was playing at the time we were available.  That included Sandra Bullock's The Heat and Grown Ups 2.  Grown Ups 2 made The Heat seem like an absolute masterpiece.  Wow was it bad.  At first we couldn't find the theater, but a very friendly woman gave Adam a hug, copped a feel, and personally escorted us to the theater.  I thought she might come in to canoodle with Adam.

A number of Iowa towns didn't have a theater, or had a theater that was undergoing a major overhaul but had stalled for lack of money.  The new digital technologies seemed to be expensive enough that revamping to support what had become standard was incredibly prohibitive.  It was hard to believe downs of 6-8,000 people didn't have a single screen unless you drove 16 miles down the road.

Postpourri - Agile, Bananas, Breakfast, Beer, Memes

Been a while since I did a postpourri, but I had a few things queued up that I found enjoyable:

1.) How to open a banana at viral video. Perhaps Mean Mr. Mustard can benefit from knowing how to open those bananas he stores in his banana bunkers.

2.) Know Your Meme - in case there's an internet meme you don't understand or missed. You can't be expected to function in polite company if you don't know about Om Nom Nom Nom or the Keyboard Cat.

3.) Conner posts a link to the beer flow chart which advises you what to drink (hmm...this link might work better).

4.) Metro magazine reviews breakfast. I ordered a subscription to their magazine after reading their breakfast articles. They review the bacon independently. That's good journalism.

5.) How to turn your chest freezer into a chest fridge (why? because it saves you a lot of money when the cold stays in the fridge, and you can stop yelling at your kids, "QUIT STANDING AROUND WITH THE DOOR OPEN!")

6.) Boing Boing has a quote on their site from 8 years ago quoting Joel on Software talking about the MBA mind that I found highly amusing if you work with Agile at all:

"People who aren't programmers are just looking at the screen and seeing some pixels. And if the pixels look like they make up a program which does something, they think "oh, gosh, how much harder could it be to make it actually work?"

The big risk here is that if you mock up the UI first, presumably so you can get some conversations going with the customer, then everybody's going to think you're almost done. And then when you spend the next year working "under the covers," so to speak, nobody will really see what you're doing and they'll think it's nothing.