Dale Yu: What I Did This Week!

Well, this week was devoted to four things… 1) Work, 2) children’s athletic endeavors, 3) assisting some of my friends on a ruleset to an upcoming release, 4) Spring Cleaning.  Wanna hear about them?

Let me start about talking about work.  The good part of work is that it brings in a paycheck.  The bad part about work is that it is work.  For the time being, I’m resigned to taking the good with the bad here.

Second, let me just mention here that this is the first year that I truly realized what it’s like to be a suburban “soccer mom”.  Until this week, I had never really realized how hectic our kids’ schedules can get!  Every night is some permutation of soccer practice, soccer game, T-ball game, T-ball practice.  Weekends often necessitate exquisite parental choreography (sometimes even including grandparental assistance) in order to get two children to their different activities—which of course occur at the same time on different sides of town!  So far, the kids love both sports; watching them enjoy the games makes it worth all of the scheduling hijinks necessary to get them both there.

Third on the list—Spring Cleaning.  I had initially intended to clean the house this week for my upcoming Queen City Confluence.  However, due to a number of scheduling conflicts (including my own!), the event is being postponed until a more suitable weekend can be found.  However, I had already blocked off time to clean the game room—something which sorely needed to be done.

Each time that I clean up the game closet, I’m never sure how to approach it.  Let me draw a picture of it for you.  My game closet is located in the corner of my basement.  It is, in fact, the same room where our furnaces, water heater and stationary tub also reside.  The main portion of this room (where the games are) is a space about 15 feet deep by 15 feet wide.  This space has been filled with modular plastic shelving, floor to ceiling, in a W like pattern—with the middle bar of the “w” having a double set of shelves so that things can be stacked on both sides.  Additionally, in the section of the utility room where the furnaces and other mechanical things reside, I have been able to place four shelves up against the wall to increase my storage space.

In total, I guess that I have 600-ish to 700-ish games.  I can’t really tell you more than that because I’ve never catalogued my collection.  I started to do it on the ‘Geek, and I think I got about 16 games into it before I quit.  They are currently arranged on the shelf in a mostly haphazard pattern—though you might be able to imagine some arrangement by size as well as some arrangement by when I acquired the game.  (For instance, most of the games from the last Essen currently live on the same shelf—when I put them away, I just looked for an open expanse of shelf and filled it!)

How do I find the games?  Simple.  I just remember where on the 54 shelves that I had put it last.  It’s a system that has never made much sense to other people, but I can usually get within 1-2 shelves (in any direction) of a game’s location through this system!  Of course, there’s no guarantee that a game gets put back in the same location that it was taken from, so I have to make a point of being the only one who puts games away!

For that reason, I had about 50 games that were lying on the pool table/countertop/floor that needed to be replaced on the shelf.  I had my recurring dilemma—should I pull all the games down and then reshelve them with a coherent plan?  Should I develop a catalog system or database so that I know what games I have and where they live?  Unsurprisingly (at least to those that know me well), I chose the third option:  Put the damn games away in the first place that seemed suitable so that I could be done with the dastardly chore of cleaning up!  It took about 8 minutes total which includes all the mental time and energy needed to re-catalog the games and their locations in my mind.  Maybe I’ll do it next time… Or maybe I’ll convince Frank and Sandy to come up to my house and install their excellent system onto my little collection…

Finally, I’d like to talk about what has interested me most this week… but I can’t.  I’ve been asked to assist with the ruleset to a soon-to-be-released game, and it has been quite interesting and mentally stimulating.  This is the third ruleset that I have been asked to take a more active role in preparing, and I must say that the most difficult thing to do is to take a step back and read the rules as if you were a neophyte to the game.  There are plenty of places where the rule-writer can write poor rules because he made assumptions of what the reader knows about the game. So, most of my work now is nit-picky proofing that will hopefully make a good ruleset into a great one.

The project has gone along more quickly than I would have imagined, but I think that some of this is due to the fact that I’m here in the States and the others are in England.  Given the time difference, as well as our late hours, it seems like someone has been working on the document during each hour of the day!  Anyways, I can’t wait until I can tell you more about it—and I will, don’t worry—but in the meantime, I need to get back to proofreading.  It has been unbelievably frustrating to fix up the document and then have it repeatedly sent back to me with spelling errors such as colour and honour and favour.  I’m starting to think that their “U” key must be stuck!  (Same thing with the “comma” key!).  Anyways, off to the word processor!

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

Comments:

< Back Home