Snowy Saturday

Every once in a while, you get a keeper.

HeroClix, snowball fights and snowman building, hot chocolate, grocery shopping, and laundry... all with my favorite people in the world, SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids.

Linear time is almost certainly an odd perceptual illusion created by the way our rather slow protein brains process sensory input. At least a few quantum physicists believe that there is no duration, no past, no future -- there is only an eternal now, in which everything that has ever happened, and that ever will happen, is actually happening, continuously, all around us, all the time.

It's possible that's true, and that individual consciousness, along with yesterday, today, and tomorrow, are simply chimeras created by the peculiar manner in which we perceive and process the information all around us. Perhaps we are all each other, all the time, and the rest of the universe, too, and our invidividual selves are merely fractal points amidst the vast infinitely faceted crystal that is reality.

Maybe we really know everything, all the time... we just choose not to remember it, to make our lives bearable. Maybe the illusion of other entities we create by subdividing our own consciousness and by limiting our own perceptual array is all that makes eternal existence as the only consciousness in a self aware reality bearable.

And maybe, if all that's true, we know we have to surround ourselves with dull days, frustrations, displeasures, and annoyances -- because without such things, the very rare good days that we, as God, dole out to ourselves would be meaningless.

Whatever the case, yesterday was a keeper.

An early afternoon HeroClix battle with the older two SuperKids was a joy. I didn't win, but after Super Dependable Teen's small JLA squad (experienced Icons Superman, veteran Hypertime Flash, veteran Icons Wonder Woman, and veteran Hypertime Plastic Man) and my original Avengers line up (rookie IC Hulk, vet CT Thor, Unique IC Wasp, AW Anthony Stark base with the Unique Golden Iron Man fig on it, and my Atom subbing in as Ant-Man) managed to polish off Super Drama Teen's gang of Indy goobers (Unique Hellboy, Unique Judge Death, Vet Shi, vet Johnny Alpha, Unique Hecate), we went back to slapping each other around, as was only fitting when the JLA meets the Avengers anywhere in the multiverse. We'd each taken some losses along the way (Iron Man took two early shots from Superman's heat vision that had sent him reeling into retreat; he was finally taken out when Hecate mind controlled Ant-Man and Ant-Man whacked his old avenging buddy from behind, most likely, I'm thinking, by sending some army ants in through Iron Man's helmet slits to take him out. Then Wonder Woman, tired of the Wasp buzzing around distributing Incapacitation tokens along with a few clicks of damage via her Stunning Blow feat, came charging across the new AW map Mike Norton had just gifted me with and swatted the dizzy young heiress out of the air -- 5 clicks of damage, plus one for Charge, say hello to the Excedrin bottle Janet van Dyne.)

I would probably have won the game, having carefully used the Thunderbolts feat to give my original Avengers the JSA team ability, after which I was just as meticulous in making sure that the entire team was always in adjacency to each other, so they could all share Ant-Man's 20 defense. (Ant-Man would have been using his ant armies to swarm the Avengers' opponents, keeping them off balance and allowing his allies to have a very high relative defense, of course.) What undid me was the Disbanded Battlefield Condition coming out of our random BC deck and sticking around for half the game. Even so, the bout eventually came down to a somewhat chewed up Ant-Man going up against a rather beat down Flash. As you'd expect, Hank Pym, for all his smarts, wasn't a match for super-speed.

But still, it was a lovely and enjoyable game. Superman unwisely gave the Hulk one good solid five click shot early in the game, putting ol' Green-genes onto his best click (12 AV, four damage with Battle Fury, 17 defense with Invulnerability) and I nurtured that click carefully and used the fig to distribute some serious pain before he finally went down. (To this end -- getting a figure to, and keeping it on, one particular click on its dial, I cannot recommend a shared 20 Defense Value enough.) Iron Man was on his last click for much of the game and the 20 defense he had for many rounds also kept him in it; I used his end dial Outwit to good effect, too, until he finally got knocked out.

After that, we went outside to enjoy the snow. Snowballs flew like insults in the blogosphere, and everyone got thoroughly pelted. Then we built a snowman, who is currently leaning drunkenly so far to the left or right (depending on where you are standing to look at him) that it amazes me he hasn't toppled over yet. Then it was back to the snowball battles. I discovered by direct experimentation that shouting "I am your king! I COMMAND you to cease your attacks and surrender!" in a goofy Monty Python accent works wonderfully as a snowball attractant.

Then we repaired back into the SuperFamily Secret Headquarters for some of SuperGirlfriend's wonderful hot chocolate. Ahhhhhh... snowball fights and snowman building with SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids, followed by hot chocolate in the kitchen out of the snowman mugs I bought us all for Christmas... life don' ged much betta dan dis.

There was some domestic stuff in there too... grocery shopping with SuperGirlfriend and SuperAdorable Kid in the morning, while the older two SuperKids slept in, and then laundry with SuperGirlfriend late last evening, where a complete jackass with no social skills at all did his best to ruin our evening by sulking for hours about us taking up nine washers (hey, we have three kids, deal with it, berk). But my domestic bliss cannot be dispelled merely by some overgrown baby having a hissy fit because he had to use front loaders to do his own laundry.

A few more chores on the list for today, and then, tomorrow, I start on ten hour days at work... which won't be fun while I'm working them, but the extra day off to spend with SG and the kids will be vastly appreciated all the way around.

Oh, a tip of the ancient katana (as well as my heartfelt thanks) go out to Mike Norton, for the package of clix and the map he sent along to me last week, as well as recent plugs on his blog in regard to this one. I also want to thank everyone who has responded to my recent invitation. Hopefully, that will step up the interaction level on the blog now that comment moderation won't be a factor for many of you.

SuperGirlfriend and SuperAdorable Kid are in the kitchen making monkey bread, and Super Drama Teen is in the back bedroom playing KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC on my X-box. Time to go see what kind of trouble I can get in. (Okay, actually, I'm just going to make the bed and grab a shower, but everyone likes to sound like a bad ass when they can...)