Good Food Weekend

This was a pretty darn good weekend, especially in the food department.

Really my weekend started on Thursday when me friend Mark came over to play a game at my place. For the last couple of weeks we'd been intending to get together and play a War of the Ring game, with Orcs and Easterlings vs. Gondorians and Elves. When he did come over he brought a different game, one based on the movie Aliens. Contained within the walls of a large wooden box was a really nice set up of corridors and rooms made from cardstock. The terrain is printed out and then cut out and assembled. There is even furniture, like desks, chairs, computer consols and other pieces of equipment. The set was origially for a starship interior but it does yeoman service as the LV-426 colony. The game involved a squad of Colonial Marines moving from one end of the board to other, searching rooms for surviving colonists. Sounds easy, doesn't it. Enter the Xenomorphs. The game starts with multiple "blip" counters on the board, each representing a group of possible aliens. When a Marine comes into line of sight of a blip it's flipped over revealing what aliens are there, 0-3. The Marine miniatures where converted Imperial Guard troops for Warhammer 40K and the Aliens were a combo of stuff from Whizkids and 40K tyranids (for the facehuggers). It was not a good day for the Marines. Each turn saw a new blip generated in a random location. Despite a lot of firepower, including a lucky find of one of those nifty automated sentry guns, the Marines were eventually overwhelmed by the Alien hordes, with Hicks being the last one to go down. I was playing the xenomorphs and Mark had Hicks, Apone, Burke, the LT Gorman, Crowe, Drake and Dietrich. The poor LT was accidently fragged by one of his own troops when he was grabbed by an alien. The others met with various sticky ends, including the corporate weasle Burke who was dragged off the map for some alien baby making. Marines took out almost 40 xenomorphs before the end. Apone and Hicks could have exited but decided to check out a couple of more rooms, one of which which happened to be full of aliens. Oops. Each room searched generated a draw from a deck of encounter cards, some of which were good for the Marines (finding the sentry gun) and some, well, not so good, like an alien ambush. It was a fun game and it played well with Mark's homebrewed rules. Kind of reminded me of playing Space Hulk many moons ago.

Matthew was home on Friday due to a Board Holiday. It was strange because he'd only been back to school for three days. That evening I made a proper dinner, roast chicken breasts with lightly spiced potatoes and corn. I knew Eve had a number of nice food plans for the weekend and I wanted to make a contribution.

Saturday we had Bacon and tomato sandwiches for lunch and supper was a wonderful beef stirfry with udon noodles. Udon are my favourite noodles by far. The day was taken up with getting groceries and stuff around the house.

Sunday, Eve made giant pancakes with chocolate chips and a dollop of whipped cream on them. Later in the day we went to a very nice public pool in Guelph and spent an hour there. The kids had a great time splashing around. On the way back we stopped at a roadside booth and picked up some fresh corn and strawberries. Eve made steak with mushrooms and corn. It was all delicious. Eve and I ate the strawberries after the kids were in bed.

Monday we had peameal bacon sandwhiches for brunch and then Eve made a savory chicken curry for supper with basmati rice. During the day we watched the ten hour Star Trek Remastered episodes marathon on Space. The showed ten episodes in a row based on voting of the Space website. A number of the episodes I had voted for made the cut, including my top two, "Balance of Terror"and "The Enterprise Incident". There were also some good ones like "Space Seed", "The Doomsday Device", "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Tholian Web". The only slight dud was "A Piece of the Action" which didn't give many opportunities to upgrade the FX. I would have prefered to see "Arena" in there. Hopefully they will show all the remastered episodes as I want to see their take on a Gorn ship.

All in all, a good weekend, with lots of good food and relaxing. The rest of the weekends this month will be a bit more busy, with several SCA events and an Arts & Sciences day next Sunday.

I think that's all for now. Watch this space for further updates.