James Stewart, a good friend of mine from college is moving to upstate New York to be with the love of his life who is studying at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America). She moved away this summer to go to school and now he is following her up there. Score one for true love.
We went to Opal Divine’s to hang out last night. He talked about starting at SUNY in January for the master’s program in computer science and about producing old-school, 8-bit style Java games. He also mentioned a fantasy novel he’s working on for which he studied a lot about castles. He was busy using the lemons from his Bourbon and Cokes to make a spiral staircase on the table. He mentioned something about how they would wind the stones clockwise so that attackers would be forced to fight with their left hands which put them at a disadvantage. Sometimes it gets really quiet when it’s just he and I and I start to talk a lot about myself and my problems to fill the space. Quiet is something I have a problem with sometimes. I was watching myself unravel and blab, so I grabbed a chess board from one of the other tables so we could play and talk and smoke. James, of course, annihilated me.
We decided to go back to my place to meet up with J and play some Risk back at the house. Before we left he said I should read the Tao Te Ching. After we got back to my house I started a fire in the fireplace while James checked in with his girlfriend. Then I baked some cookies (for some reason the last few times James has been over I’ve made cookies so now he expects them and makes cookie comments) and when J got there we started the Risk action going. James, of course, annihilated me. This despite the overatures at making some sort of alliance to counter the black horde sweeping across the eastern hemisphere (J). He was on the verge of steamrolling Jody too, who he gave a chance to surrender, but because she stayed in the game he had to surrender since it was nearing midnight and everyone but me had work in the morning. Of course, I wanted to play another round since I had gotten killed so early in the game. I really suck at strategy.
James had to leave, so we took this picture and hugged. I wondered if I’d ever see him again since he was leaving town Friday for New York. Now I’ll have an excuse to go to New York again.