For most of the year, at least one day of the weekend, I'm driving down to handle yard work and run errands for my mother. Most of the time it's an afternoon of cutting grass, trimming, raking... changing light bulbs and batteries, keeping things tidy, occasionally scrubbing through what's now decades of nicotine and living alone.
The fringe benefits of the trip is usually visiting the numerous game and hobby stores in the Lehigh Valley. Between Trains and Lanes, Cloud City, and Mythic Beasts and Brews, just those three alone were withing bike-riding distance when I was a youngin. There's not much I'm buying when I visit, but happy to turn over cash when there is...
In my trip to Mythic Beasts last week, for some spicy watermelon concoction that hit the spot (and my algorithm apparently), I got a quick text, a blast from the past.
"Hey you could have said hello if you were in the area."
My buddy Brian, not the Battletech playing Wooly, but another long-term friend, a regular in my Hackmaster and 20's Cthulhu games, a regular at the last game store I ran, Griffon Game, during *cough cough* the turn of the century. Heck, for years, I'd finish work around noon and with our schedules, we'd grab lunch somewhere and hit a series of games stores, sometimes the ones out to Allentown, sometimes into New Jersey.
An all around good guy that I've only seen for conversations at Historicon when we each have a moment.
And he kinda knows I'm down there most weekends... and I should text him more...
So we arranged for to meet for lunch and talk things over some chain restaurant beers.
After yard work all morning (and a random spat of genealogical questions from my cousin while I recovered... involving affairs, occult, and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping,) that beer was frickin' delicious!
The good news is that after COVID broke up the in person gaming, within 10 minutes we were talking about the same old stuff, like nothing change (minus my divorce, the kids moving three hours away, and their imminent graduations.
A wonderful simple Society of Boring Men.
No gaming was on the docket, although talk of future stuff was started, and the usual pipe-dream of restarting that Hackmaster game from 2001 to 2004, The Burning Trogs Rule!
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