I am feeling better about my life these days and you can kind of tell by how infrequently I am posting.  I am having to force myself to update after several days.  Of course, I feel like my life has been getting busier--even if it is not.  On Wednesday, I was still a little tired from getting up early and going to Harvesters as well as from all the activity on the weekend.  Even though I had planned to do a bunch of things, I ended up barley getting to the bike store to pick up my bike before going to play in D&D Encounters.  We have one last encounter in this session.  For some reason I wasn't as excited about the session.  Afterward we went to a friend's house and played a couple of games.

We played Settlers of America: Trails to Rails. It is part of the Catan Histories games from Mayfair Games.  Klaus Teuber is definitely getting a lot of mileage out of the Settlers of Catan franchise.  I was a bit confused as to a strategy in the beginning and that proved fatal in my end game.  I started to slow and was not able to catch up later.  Of course luck was a part of the problem since it still had the dice roll mechanic.  Unlike the original Catan game, to win you had to deliver all your goods.  In the original you collected victory points which could come from multiple sources.  To win Settlers of America you must place all you cities in order to free up all your goods to be delivered.  To deliver the goods, you must build a train and move the train along rails you have built or pay to ride on an opponents rail.  It was an interesting game and I wouldn't mind playing it again.  I don't think they have left an option to extend the game to 5or 6 players nor do I think they will be adding any expansions.  The hexes are a fixed map with only some of the numbers being randomized.  The interesting part is that the random numbers move from hexes in the east to hexes in the west as settlers move west.  I did not win the game and I believe I had the most cities left to build and the most goods left to be delivered.

I was up too late on Wednesday and therefore got up late on Thursday.  I packed up some folding tables and met my friend from up north so that his wife could use them in her garage sale Friday and Saturday.  I then met some ex-co-workers at Panera and played some games of Dominion with the expansions.  I actually won a game, which generally doesn't happen.  When I got home I went through my DVDs so that Icould take them up to the garage sale the next morning.  Again I was up late and to make matters worse, I had said I would be up north around 9 AM.

Friday morning I went up north to help with the garage sale.  My friends had to work and another friend of theirs was watching the garage sale.  She had brought some stuff of her own, but she had never had a garage sale before.  There was a constant threat of rain so we didn't pull very much out into the driveway.  There was actually more traffic than I expected and Friday morning went pretty well--what I didn't know ahead of time was that it was a city wide garage sale weekend.  I didn't pull the DVDs out on Friday and I had to leave a little afternoon to go see my psychologist.

It was probably one of the better appointments we have had.  He asked how I wanted to proceed and gave be three basic options.  I explained to him how I felt all three options related and I talked more about my social life.  We discussed intimacy--not from a sexual context, but from a personal context of not letting people in.  He related this to vulnerability and trust.  Vulnerable come from a Latin word that means "I wound".  When you extrapolate to the noun form, you loosely come up with "able to be wounded".  Anyhow, we tend to think of vulnerability as a weakness in today's world, so I didn't want to be vulnerable.  The discussion was about my not wanting to be vulnerable and therefore not having any intimacy, therefore I was unhappy with my current lot where I wanted to be more social and wanted to feel more connected to people.  I probably am not doing the discussion much justice, but it makes sense in my head and I am having problems putting it into words, because there seems to be some feelings tied up in these concepts for me.  This resulted from me pointing out that even though I seem to have a rich social life, I am either standing back watching the action, standing behind the bar serving drinks, or engaged in playing a game.  I am still not very open.  What I have come to realize is that I tend to be more open with women than men and I think that may be that I feel I can not show any vulnerability around other men.  I even am unsettled when I am talking about personal matters around my best friend.  The other thing the psychologist brought up is that he thinks I have a lot of wisdom.  For some reason, this bothers me--I like to think I am insightful, not that I have wisdom.  I need to ponder on the difference and decide why I feel that way.

I stopped by Sam's on my way home and bought some food.  On my way home I called my older sister because I hadn't heard from her since I talked to her on her birthday the Friday before.  I was talking about the garage sale and she pushed me to take some stuff up there and try to sell it.  I spent the evening going through CDs and collecting some things from around the house.  I pulled out some luggage and a few small things from here and there.  I was once again up way too late, but I knew if I didn't do it then, I wouldn't do it.  I even put everything in the car before going to bed.

6 AM Saturday morning came entirely too early.  I managed to get up north by around 7:15 AM.  They were still pulling some stuff out of the garage.  I pulled most of the stuff out of my car--there were a few things I left.  I priced everything a little high for a garage sale--but still a good deal, so that I could negotiate down a little to make the sale.  A lot of people came by, but they weren't buying the CDs and DVDs at first.  Later in the morning, they started selling.  I made a few deals, but mostly they paid the price I marked them at.  I was disappointed in the luggage.  When I left around noon, only an old black suitcase my sister had given to me when I flew back home from her house in between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year had sold.  She told me to just throw the suitcase away, because she didn't want it an more.  I ended up making 5 bucks off it.  It was an absolute beautiful day for a garage sale--it was sunny, but the a cool breeze was blowing and the temperature was in the upper 70's/low 80's.

I left around noon to go to the D&D Game Day for D&D Essentials.  One of the regular encounters players brought a group of her friends, so I ran one table while the coordinator ran the other table.  I had a blast and I hope the people at my table had a good time.  They really had not played a lot of 4th edition it seemed like.  I am really enjoying running the game.  I am a little upset the coordinator does not want to do the Gamma World Game Day, but with the booster pack cards and stuff, I can see why he didn't.  I think it will cost more than it is worth.

After the game I went to the Showcase dinner. I had missed all the dancing during the day, but I went to celebrate at the dinner.  The food was good, but I was so tired.  I ended up leaving a little early and going home to go to bed.  I had a busy Sunday morning ahead of me.

Sunday morning I woke up, but stayed in bed a little too long and didn't really prepare for the Sunday school class.  Of course, I really didn't need to do much preparation since the other teacher was going to take the lead for this month.  The kids were actually well behaved.  You could tell a couple of the kids are very bright--I don't think there is a one with any type of learning issue, but we will see.  Since they are only 3rd graders, their attention did wander at times.  I was very nervous the entire time and still am even now.  Hopefully, I will be better next Sunday.  I went mass after and finally got home a little after noon.  I fixed a lunch and started to catch up on things on the computer when I got really tired.  I ended up sleeping for a couple of hours in the Lay-Z-Boy and being somewhat groggy the rest of the day.  I was ready to go to bed on time when I decided to update this blog and now it is almost 2 hours later and definitely not early.