Whew! It’s been a busy week. I’m thankful that Sebastian only works four days a week at the office. On Tuesday, Kellyn and Alex invited a bunch of us to Science Pub, which we arrived two hours early for and still managed not to get any of the big tables. Portland is apparently full of nerds. The lecture was all about undersea volcanoes, including such things as liquid CO2 bubbles, lakes of sulfur, and worm-like pillow lava. That, and a ton of critters in chemotrophic ecosystems, literally living off of the volcanic activity. The most surprising thing was how much the pressure suppresses the explosions — the remote explorer bot could get within feet of the activity, and only a few times got caught in the debris (and even then it was only partially encrusted with rocks and unfortunate crabs). My jaw was loose for most of the thing, and in the end I walked away with two free OMSI tickets for winning the trivia contest (8 out of 10 questions correct, bingo). Totally worth the $2 admission price!

Last night was the second episode in Max Hallock’s Space Opera game, which is basically Star Trek crossed with Battlestar Galactica with alien races from Cosmic Encounter. We are intrepid explorers traversing parallel timelines through a strange anomaly, in search of technology and information that could aid us in defending the Alliance from invaders from the future — or possibly just in search of home. My character, Colonel Amygda Waye, managed to be promoted to Captain after the initial attack killed the original one. She’s secretly a terminator, but in the meantime is something slightly less horrible than a cross between Colonel Tigh and Commander Cain (go, go BSG). But I still get to say, “Engage!” I also have to put up with my crew: Sharak, the competent if cold Shadow security officer and First Officer (played by Thomas), a smart-aleck rock of a science officer, a wiser-than-thou Yoda-Yogi frog-man anthropologist, a hyperactive hot-shot pilot who is also incredibly stupid, a four-armed bounty hunter cat named Dog, a hippie fishy chaplain, a giant sapient ant, and Slurm, a war-profiteering worm-thing that keeps sneaking around and sabotaging equipment without anybody noticing. Try to juggle that bunch whilst stuck in an alternate dimension! Not only that, but we ended on a cliff-hanger — now we’re being pulled onto a prison asteroid called… Rura Penthe.

I will now leave you with a recipe for a delicious apple pie that even pie-haters love (yes, I didn’t even know such people existed, but there were two in our game group, plus an apple-hater who also liked it): Fresh Apple Pie.