Kelsay Farms v.5 / SaGa Frontier II / Baseball Playoffs / etc.
Had a pretty great weekend, and it would be a shame if I didn't take the opportunity to write some of it down, even if I'm awfully tired today and may not be as lucid as normal. (Insert ranting about 8:37 first pitches for a team who easily averages 3:20 for a 9 inning game here.)
Friday, September 30
Had an impromptu supper at Yats on Friday night, which was tasty as usual. My only hope is that the Greenwood location starts experimenting with some of the home base location's recipes sometime. I do like several of the staples of the Yats menu, but their chorizo dishes intrigue me and I'd like to try one at some point. Maybe we'll stop by the home base on Massachusetts when we go to the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show on Butler's campus in a few weeks. (That was a happy thing that popped up in the last week; we were afraid that WWDTM would never come to Indianapolis. Now we don't have to schedule around that when we head to Chicago next year, which simplifies things.)
Anyway, after Yats, we headed home and settled in to watch game 1 of the Tigers/Yankees series. Unfortunately, that lasted about half an hour before the rains came and washed away the Verlander/Sabathia duel. With that off the docket, we split up for a while and killed a little time on video games, me with SaGa Frontier 2 and her with a Mystery PI game that we picked up at Granny Bea's the previous week.
Gaming Aside: SaGa Frontier 2
SaGa Frontier II (PS1) - Another in my project of playing through all the PS1 games I hadn't played yet. I played SaGa Frontier back in college and hated pretty much everything about it except the music, some of which I still keep around. When I finished it up, my next door neighbor Mike told me, "You should play SaGa Frontier 2; people who like 1 typically hate 2, and people who hate 1 typically like 2." I took his words to heart when I picked up SF2 several years ago at Disc Replay, but I just recently got around to actually playing it.
Well, I certainly didn't hate it. I have kind of mixed feelings, as the story and gameplay were so vastly apart from each other in quality that I couldn't mix them together as a cohesive experience.
Story: There are two parallel storylines that take place in SF2; one of a royal outcast named Gustave, and the other, a miner named William who's obsessed with finding an ancient relic, the power of which killed his father. The story takes place over the course of about 60 years, spanning multiple generations of each set of characters. (The characters do meet at a couple points, but they are largely independent stories.)
Early on in playing the game, I dubbed the story 'Gustave the Angry Squib'. At the time, I'd only experienced Gustave's side of the story. Gustave's story is similar to what the fantasy novel series "The Wheel of Time" turned into - lots of political dialogue, wars and rumors of wars, and not a whole lot of action. The stories are divided into individual episodes such that no episode is longer than half an hour or so, with the exception of one or two dungeons. Gustave's story is about 25 episodes long and only has two or three dungeons and two grid-based field battles; the rest is nothing but a plot that has more holes than swiss cheese. I did *enjoy* what I saw of the story, but the game tried to squeeze a 600 page epic novel into an 8 hour visual novel (approximate time I took to play through Gustave's plot). There are many devotées of the game who extol it as the best thing ever if you put time into thinking about the story and fleshing it out in your mind - what I would call the Chrono Cross Corollary - but I'm sorry, the epic story is in your head, not the game. Even a few screens of "so, here's what's going on and here are the names and titles of the characters we're about to show you" text would have been better than the jumping around the game did.
On the other hand, William's story is far more simple. In short, "My name is William Knights, you killed my father, prepare to die." It does get a touch more complex than that as the nature of the relic is slowly revealed and as William's children and grandchildren learn about and have to deal with the relic, but it takes a simple concept and builds on it rather than throwing you 500 puzzle pieces and trusting you to put it together. (William's story is also much more combat-heavy and took me 10 hours to get from start to finish initially.) Needless to say, I preferred William's story despite some of its holes.
Gameplay: Standard SaGa material with a twist; most weapons and armor have defined durabilities and only last a certain number of uses, and characters have incremental stat-ups after each battle rather than over-arching character levels. For example, each character has their own levels in the following weapons skills: martial arts, sword, staff, bow, spear, and axe. Each weapon type has its own branching skillset where you learn new abilities by using certain older ones.
The twist is that some rare equipment does NOT have durability issues and can be used infinitely. Many of them have their own disadvantages in that they either do not enhance or actually detract from magic casting ability.
In addition, characters also have all their own skill levels in the six magic arts: water, beast, tone, tree, fire, and stone. Each spell has its own combination of those six elements, and can consist of up to four component parts. (Components can be repeated; for example, one defense up spell is a Stone + Stone + Stone spell.) Once learned by one person, a spell can be used by anyone in the party; however, to actually cast the spells in question, one has to be equipping armor, accessories, or weapons that contain the basic elements of the spell. So, there's a bit of a juggling act with equipment, as no piece of equipment can contain more than two elements, and equipment with two are somewhat of a rarity. The problem I ran into is that the most powerful weapons are elemental, but the most powerful armors by FAR are completely non-elemental, so I had to find a balance of 'spells I want to cast' against 'actually surviving attacks from enemies'.
That balance turned out to be 'acquire the spell Soul Hymn, win game'. I cruised to the final boss of William's portion of the game in about 10 hours, and got crushed. No matter, I thought, I'll just go level up a bit since I have four relatively fresh characters, and I'll be fine. Four hours of leveling later, I got crushed again, and it became apparent that I needed some variety of healing spell. In reading through spells I didn't have, Soul Hymn was the only one that sounded worthwhile. Unfortunately, only one person in my party could even potentially learn it, and I had a roughly 2% chance of actually learning it after a battle. Six more hours of grinding later, I finally got it; whether Soul Hymn or the power I'd gained in that six hours were more to credit to beating the game, I can't really say, but it certainly didn't hurt.
That's my one big complaint with the gameplay. I've seen difficulty scaling issues in the past (a particular Final Fantasy X boss and a particular Chrono Cross boss spring to mind), but never one that caused me to grind for this many hours that wasn't completely optional (say, Nippon Ichi postgame stuff where the bosses' levels are in the thousands after you've finished the game at level 90).
The music was OK, I guess. Really wish there had been any sort of variety in the battle themes. As I posted to Facebook when I finished the game, Andrea nearly got to 'MONKEY HATE FORGE' levels of hatred for the remixes of the SF2 battle theme. With so much variety in the first game's battle music, I thought there would at LEAST be two themes, one for each side. Not so much.
Overall, I can't say I loved it or hated it, but it was a fair sight better than the first one, and that's all I really could have hoped for.
---
Saturday, October 1
After last week's disappointing trip to Columbus, we headed down again hoping that the going-out-of-business scrapbook store would actually be open this time, and lo! it was. I took along my PSP (Disgaea 2) and DS (Animal Crossing) so I'd have stuff to do, and turned her loose. I did take a look around inside the store before I busied myself on the handhelds, and I was impressed with how big the scrapbook store was. I believe the sign on the front of the building said it was between 1300 and 1400 square feet, and that felt accurate. Even "the back" was open to shopping, as they had it set up for more display areas.
When I first heard about this scrapbook store going out of business, then heard of its location, I couldn't figure out why I had never heard of it despite living in Columbus for 4+ years. You'd figure that with a girlfriend/wife who scrapbooked and its position near the intersection of two of the five most traveled roads in the city, I'd have noticed it at some point. (It's also only a few blocks away from my Columbus-based dentist, whom I still visit to this day.)
Our first visit to the location confirmed why I'd never seen it; it's on the back side of a double-width strip mall, and this side of the mall is visible from neither of the two major roads that pass by. Kinda hard to find a new store when you're driving around if you can't see it. In my brief couple of minutes in the store with Andrea, I heard a conversation to this effect between a customer and a store employee. The employee seemed exasperated with the subject, as if she'd heard the 'boy, if I only knew the store was here!' angle 50 times since the liquidation started on Thursday.
After a few minutes of looking around, I left and sat in my truck while Andrea shopped for a solid hour. She found quite a bit of good stuff; paper, embellishments, paints, you name it. I can't quite remember it all, but a set of metal plates shaped like baseball home plates stands out in my memory as one neat thing she found.
Once she was done, we headed over to Panera to meet Mom and Dad for lunch. October is my favorite month of the year to eat at Panera; the seasonal cranberry vanilla bagels are quite good. I decided to just go for soup and a bagel, as the last couple times I've had sandwiches, I wasn't that impressed with what I got for the money. The French onion soup is great, though, and the only French onion soup I've found so far that doesn't give me headaches. Learned from Mom while we were there that my cousin Andy's wedding was that day - I knew it was coming up soon, just couldn't remember when. Good for him.
From there, it was a quick jaunt to Big Lots (thanks, Mom, for the tip on the Progresso price drop), then back home to scrapbook inventory and SaGa Frontier 2 (where I finally learned Soul Hymn and was able to resume plot progression). Had a homemade pizza, then settled in to watch the Tigers play the rest of game 1 after the rainout from Friday night.
Unfortunately, the game was a blowout in favor of the Yankees. Doubly unfortunate was a scare we had during the middle of the game, wherein a sound much like breaking glass came up. Andrea and I agreed that the noise came from inside the house, we just couldn't figure out where.
I assumed first that since the noise was soft, it had come from downstairs, and figured that a glass had tipped over in the sink. Both glasses in the sink were intact, however, as were all the windows and lightbulbs. Andrea and I split up and checked the upstairs windows, which were all intact, as were all the lightbulbs and standing glass elsewhere. Finally, we figured that maybe some of our neighbor's friends who were over having a party got drunk and broke a bottle or something. So soothed, we went to bed after the Tigers went down 8-1. (They eventually lost game 1, 9-3.)
Sunday, October 2
Sunday morning is grocery shopping morning in my world, so I prepared to do just that. Before I started, however, Andrea made a discovery that further eased our minds about the previous night. See, those eyelets I mentioned that she picked up at the scrapbook store on Saturday? They fell out of their bag... and when they clink together, they sound an awful lot like two pieces of glass that touch. And when twelve of them fall all at once, some of them into a very solid paper rack... well, you get the idea. So, the scary noise wasn't so scary after all.
When I got back from the grocery, we discussed doing our yearly trip to Kelsay Farms, a local dairy farm. Every year since we got married, we've gone down there - it's only a couple miles from our house, and we never fail to have a good time between the maze, the hay bale mountain, and the baby cows.
We checked into the weather before leaving, and found that it was going to be calm, dry, and in the mid to high 60s. Much better than the previous three years (one too hot, one too cold, and one too wet). We packed up our camera and jackets and drove down to the farm, coupon in hand. (The price went up by $1 this year, but they sent out a $1 coupon in a local mailer, so it was the same as always for us.)
We got there about half an hour after they opened, so there weren't a whole lot of people there yet.
Our first stop was the 'petting zoo', which was stocked with four baby boy cows who were 9 days old. (Typically, we go a little later in the season, when the babies are 15-20 days old.) The four of them were all curled up sleeping when we got there, though, so we decided to go off and do other stuff while they napped.
From there, we moved to the hay bale mountain, which was laid out slightly differently this year, but was in roughly the same spot at the front of the farm. This year, they had a few extra bales of hay sticking out one end that were laid out in the rough shape of a tractor, complete with red paint on the front bales, two actual tractor tires stuck between some hay bales, and a steering wheel stuck into the bale above the tires. I saw a couple little boys having fun up in the 'driver's seat'. Meanwhile, Andrea and I climbed and crawled all over and under the mountain, taking pictures in and from various spots. I particularly liked when she decided to lounge in one of the tractor tires, and got a nice picture there.
On to the corn maze, then, which was significantly simpler than the last couple years, but also more fun because the corn was actually green this year. No skipping through barriers because you can see scavenger hunt points through waves of brown stems! The shape this year included a cow with a party hat, a birthday cake with a 5-shaped candle on top, and the Kelsay Farms logo. Simple, but effective.
Back to the babies after that, three of whom were up and about when we got there. (The fourth was still curled up on the ground, but was at least out of their little plastic igloo.) I got the camera out while Andrea started petting the babies. Three of them came over to her and stood in a row patiently while she reached out to them in turn. The one on the right was pretty calm the whole time. The one in the middle mooed once, which took me by surprise - I never thought about when baby cows would start to moo. The one on the left was crazy, and as Andrea put it, "kept sticking out his Gene Simmons tongue to try to lick me" as she scratched his head. I don't know if he thought there was food, or if he just wanted a taste of human flesh with his huge round teeth, or what.
Once she was done petting the cows, she took the camera and made sure to get face pictures of each cow, as they all had name tags. (Well, one just had a number - they haven't named him yet.) While she was taking pictures, the fourth baby finally got up, walked back toward the igloo, then turned around and mooed repeatedly at us. We're not sure what he was trying to commoonicate, but she parlayed his talkative nature into a great idea for her scrapbook pages to commemoorate the event.
(I'll stop now.)
From there it was off to home, where we sat down to eat. I was the only one who actually got to eat, however, as the phone rang as soon as I sat down. As our friend Ruth Ann had just commented to Andrea's cow-related status on Facebook, and Ruth Ann had failed to reach us by phone the previous weekend, Andrea asked, "I wonder if that's her on the phone?" Indeed it was, and Andrea did not eat lunch; the next hour and a half was phone time. (I took her a peanut butter ball during the call so at least she got SOME food in her.) She really enjoyed her time, though.
When the phone call was over, I noted that the Tigers/Yankees game 2 had already started, so I got that fired up on the TV. For a 3:30 game, it was interminable, as the Tigers kept nearly blowing the lead they picked up early in the game, and the rains came back to give yet another delay (and cause a Tigers player to blow a game-clinching catch because he slipped on the on-deck circle). But, in the end, they held on to tie the series 1-1.
We had a quick supper after that, and retreated upstairs for more video games. I played SaGa Frontier 2 up to the final boss (not knowing how long the credits / ending would be, I played it safe), then we headed to bed at roughly the normal time.
Monday, October 3
Neither of us felt well enough to go to work on Monday, so we didn't. What little activity I had that wasn't finishing SaGa Frontier II or starting Kartia (the next game on the PS1 chopping block) was spent cooking up some tasty food. I tried a salmon loaf recipe from a loaf pan recipe book, but modified it to use tuna instead. It didn't work as well as I'd hoped, but a necessary alteration probably made the difference. (I didn't have enough dry bread crumbs, so had to use some actual bread instead; that's probably why the final product was too soft. I think it'll work when I try it again.)
I also made the adventurous trek out to the mailbox when the postal employee drove through. Part of why I wanted to get there ASAP is because our next door neighbor was getting siding put on his house, and I wasn't sure we'd GET our mail because the contractor had the mailbox blocked. Luckily, our postal worker did stop and get out of the truck to give us our mail. This was actually important because our Wait Wait tickets were in the mail! (Usually, Monday is nothing but refinancing spam.)
Beyond that, we relaxed and recovered until 8:30, when the Tigers and Yankees played again. 3+ hours later, we gleefully collapsed after the Tigers pulled one out, 5-4, to take a 2-1 lead in the series. (I just hope they win in a blowout tonight; I don't think Valverde can pitch again after throwing 60+ pitches total between the last two nights, and I'm afraid he'd blow up if Leyland used Benoit to close instead of him.)
And that was the weekend. Good stuff all around.
Friday, September 30
Had an impromptu supper at Yats on Friday night, which was tasty as usual. My only hope is that the Greenwood location starts experimenting with some of the home base location's recipes sometime. I do like several of the staples of the Yats menu, but their chorizo dishes intrigue me and I'd like to try one at some point. Maybe we'll stop by the home base on Massachusetts when we go to the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show on Butler's campus in a few weeks. (That was a happy thing that popped up in the last week; we were afraid that WWDTM would never come to Indianapolis. Now we don't have to schedule around that when we head to Chicago next year, which simplifies things.)
Anyway, after Yats, we headed home and settled in to watch game 1 of the Tigers/Yankees series. Unfortunately, that lasted about half an hour before the rains came and washed away the Verlander/Sabathia duel. With that off the docket, we split up for a while and killed a little time on video games, me with SaGa Frontier 2 and her with a Mystery PI game that we picked up at Granny Bea's the previous week.
Gaming Aside: SaGa Frontier 2
SaGa Frontier II (PS1) - Another in my project of playing through all the PS1 games I hadn't played yet. I played SaGa Frontier back in college and hated pretty much everything about it except the music, some of which I still keep around. When I finished it up, my next door neighbor Mike told me, "You should play SaGa Frontier 2; people who like 1 typically hate 2, and people who hate 1 typically like 2." I took his words to heart when I picked up SF2 several years ago at Disc Replay, but I just recently got around to actually playing it.
Well, I certainly didn't hate it. I have kind of mixed feelings, as the story and gameplay were so vastly apart from each other in quality that I couldn't mix them together as a cohesive experience.
Story: There are two parallel storylines that take place in SF2; one of a royal outcast named Gustave, and the other, a miner named William who's obsessed with finding an ancient relic, the power of which killed his father. The story takes place over the course of about 60 years, spanning multiple generations of each set of characters. (The characters do meet at a couple points, but they are largely independent stories.)
Early on in playing the game, I dubbed the story 'Gustave the Angry Squib'. At the time, I'd only experienced Gustave's side of the story. Gustave's story is similar to what the fantasy novel series "The Wheel of Time" turned into - lots of political dialogue, wars and rumors of wars, and not a whole lot of action. The stories are divided into individual episodes such that no episode is longer than half an hour or so, with the exception of one or two dungeons. Gustave's story is about 25 episodes long and only has two or three dungeons and two grid-based field battles; the rest is nothing but a plot that has more holes than swiss cheese. I did *enjoy* what I saw of the story, but the game tried to squeeze a 600 page epic novel into an 8 hour visual novel (approximate time I took to play through Gustave's plot). There are many devotées of the game who extol it as the best thing ever if you put time into thinking about the story and fleshing it out in your mind - what I would call the Chrono Cross Corollary - but I'm sorry, the epic story is in your head, not the game. Even a few screens of "so, here's what's going on and here are the names and titles of the characters we're about to show you" text would have been better than the jumping around the game did.
On the other hand, William's story is far more simple. In short, "My name is William Knights, you killed my father, prepare to die." It does get a touch more complex than that as the nature of the relic is slowly revealed and as William's children and grandchildren learn about and have to deal with the relic, but it takes a simple concept and builds on it rather than throwing you 500 puzzle pieces and trusting you to put it together. (William's story is also much more combat-heavy and took me 10 hours to get from start to finish initially.) Needless to say, I preferred William's story despite some of its holes.
Gameplay: Standard SaGa material with a twist; most weapons and armor have defined durabilities and only last a certain number of uses, and characters have incremental stat-ups after each battle rather than over-arching character levels. For example, each character has their own levels in the following weapons skills: martial arts, sword, staff, bow, spear, and axe. Each weapon type has its own branching skillset where you learn new abilities by using certain older ones.
The twist is that some rare equipment does NOT have durability issues and can be used infinitely. Many of them have their own disadvantages in that they either do not enhance or actually detract from magic casting ability.
In addition, characters also have all their own skill levels in the six magic arts: water, beast, tone, tree, fire, and stone. Each spell has its own combination of those six elements, and can consist of up to four component parts. (Components can be repeated; for example, one defense up spell is a Stone + Stone + Stone spell.) Once learned by one person, a spell can be used by anyone in the party; however, to actually cast the spells in question, one has to be equipping armor, accessories, or weapons that contain the basic elements of the spell. So, there's a bit of a juggling act with equipment, as no piece of equipment can contain more than two elements, and equipment with two are somewhat of a rarity. The problem I ran into is that the most powerful weapons are elemental, but the most powerful armors by FAR are completely non-elemental, so I had to find a balance of 'spells I want to cast' against 'actually surviving attacks from enemies'.
That balance turned out to be 'acquire the spell Soul Hymn, win game'. I cruised to the final boss of William's portion of the game in about 10 hours, and got crushed. No matter, I thought, I'll just go level up a bit since I have four relatively fresh characters, and I'll be fine. Four hours of leveling later, I got crushed again, and it became apparent that I needed some variety of healing spell. In reading through spells I didn't have, Soul Hymn was the only one that sounded worthwhile. Unfortunately, only one person in my party could even potentially learn it, and I had a roughly 2% chance of actually learning it after a battle. Six more hours of grinding later, I finally got it; whether Soul Hymn or the power I'd gained in that six hours were more to credit to beating the game, I can't really say, but it certainly didn't hurt.
That's my one big complaint with the gameplay. I've seen difficulty scaling issues in the past (a particular Final Fantasy X boss and a particular Chrono Cross boss spring to mind), but never one that caused me to grind for this many hours that wasn't completely optional (say, Nippon Ichi postgame stuff where the bosses' levels are in the thousands after you've finished the game at level 90).
The music was OK, I guess. Really wish there had been any sort of variety in the battle themes. As I posted to Facebook when I finished the game, Andrea nearly got to 'MONKEY HATE FORGE' levels of hatred for the remixes of the SF2 battle theme. With so much variety in the first game's battle music, I thought there would at LEAST be two themes, one for each side. Not so much.
Overall, I can't say I loved it or hated it, but it was a fair sight better than the first one, and that's all I really could have hoped for.
---
Saturday, October 1
After last week's disappointing trip to Columbus, we headed down again hoping that the going-out-of-business scrapbook store would actually be open this time, and lo! it was. I took along my PSP (Disgaea 2) and DS (Animal Crossing) so I'd have stuff to do, and turned her loose. I did take a look around inside the store before I busied myself on the handhelds, and I was impressed with how big the scrapbook store was. I believe the sign on the front of the building said it was between 1300 and 1400 square feet, and that felt accurate. Even "the back" was open to shopping, as they had it set up for more display areas.
When I first heard about this scrapbook store going out of business, then heard of its location, I couldn't figure out why I had never heard of it despite living in Columbus for 4+ years. You'd figure that with a girlfriend/wife who scrapbooked and its position near the intersection of two of the five most traveled roads in the city, I'd have noticed it at some point. (It's also only a few blocks away from my Columbus-based dentist, whom I still visit to this day.)
Our first visit to the location confirmed why I'd never seen it; it's on the back side of a double-width strip mall, and this side of the mall is visible from neither of the two major roads that pass by. Kinda hard to find a new store when you're driving around if you can't see it. In my brief couple of minutes in the store with Andrea, I heard a conversation to this effect between a customer and a store employee. The employee seemed exasperated with the subject, as if she'd heard the 'boy, if I only knew the store was here!' angle 50 times since the liquidation started on Thursday.
After a few minutes of looking around, I left and sat in my truck while Andrea shopped for a solid hour. She found quite a bit of good stuff; paper, embellishments, paints, you name it. I can't quite remember it all, but a set of metal plates shaped like baseball home plates stands out in my memory as one neat thing she found.
Once she was done, we headed over to Panera to meet Mom and Dad for lunch. October is my favorite month of the year to eat at Panera; the seasonal cranberry vanilla bagels are quite good. I decided to just go for soup and a bagel, as the last couple times I've had sandwiches, I wasn't that impressed with what I got for the money. The French onion soup is great, though, and the only French onion soup I've found so far that doesn't give me headaches. Learned from Mom while we were there that my cousin Andy's wedding was that day - I knew it was coming up soon, just couldn't remember when. Good for him.
From there, it was a quick jaunt to Big Lots (thanks, Mom, for the tip on the Progresso price drop), then back home to scrapbook inventory and SaGa Frontier 2 (where I finally learned Soul Hymn and was able to resume plot progression). Had a homemade pizza, then settled in to watch the Tigers play the rest of game 1 after the rainout from Friday night.
Unfortunately, the game was a blowout in favor of the Yankees. Doubly unfortunate was a scare we had during the middle of the game, wherein a sound much like breaking glass came up. Andrea and I agreed that the noise came from inside the house, we just couldn't figure out where.
I assumed first that since the noise was soft, it had come from downstairs, and figured that a glass had tipped over in the sink. Both glasses in the sink were intact, however, as were all the windows and lightbulbs. Andrea and I split up and checked the upstairs windows, which were all intact, as were all the lightbulbs and standing glass elsewhere. Finally, we figured that maybe some of our neighbor's friends who were over having a party got drunk and broke a bottle or something. So soothed, we went to bed after the Tigers went down 8-1. (They eventually lost game 1, 9-3.)
Sunday, October 2
Sunday morning is grocery shopping morning in my world, so I prepared to do just that. Before I started, however, Andrea made a discovery that further eased our minds about the previous night. See, those eyelets I mentioned that she picked up at the scrapbook store on Saturday? They fell out of their bag... and when they clink together, they sound an awful lot like two pieces of glass that touch. And when twelve of them fall all at once, some of them into a very solid paper rack... well, you get the idea. So, the scary noise wasn't so scary after all.
When I got back from the grocery, we discussed doing our yearly trip to Kelsay Farms, a local dairy farm. Every year since we got married, we've gone down there - it's only a couple miles from our house, and we never fail to have a good time between the maze, the hay bale mountain, and the baby cows.
We checked into the weather before leaving, and found that it was going to be calm, dry, and in the mid to high 60s. Much better than the previous three years (one too hot, one too cold, and one too wet). We packed up our camera and jackets and drove down to the farm, coupon in hand. (The price went up by $1 this year, but they sent out a $1 coupon in a local mailer, so it was the same as always for us.)
We got there about half an hour after they opened, so there weren't a whole lot of people there yet.
Our first stop was the 'petting zoo', which was stocked with four baby boy cows who were 9 days old. (Typically, we go a little later in the season, when the babies are 15-20 days old.) The four of them were all curled up sleeping when we got there, though, so we decided to go off and do other stuff while they napped.
From there, we moved to the hay bale mountain, which was laid out slightly differently this year, but was in roughly the same spot at the front of the farm. This year, they had a few extra bales of hay sticking out one end that were laid out in the rough shape of a tractor, complete with red paint on the front bales, two actual tractor tires stuck between some hay bales, and a steering wheel stuck into the bale above the tires. I saw a couple little boys having fun up in the 'driver's seat'. Meanwhile, Andrea and I climbed and crawled all over and under the mountain, taking pictures in and from various spots. I particularly liked when she decided to lounge in one of the tractor tires, and got a nice picture there.
On to the corn maze, then, which was significantly simpler than the last couple years, but also more fun because the corn was actually green this year. No skipping through barriers because you can see scavenger hunt points through waves of brown stems! The shape this year included a cow with a party hat, a birthday cake with a 5-shaped candle on top, and the Kelsay Farms logo. Simple, but effective.
Back to the babies after that, three of whom were up and about when we got there. (The fourth was still curled up on the ground, but was at least out of their little plastic igloo.) I got the camera out while Andrea started petting the babies. Three of them came over to her and stood in a row patiently while she reached out to them in turn. The one on the right was pretty calm the whole time. The one in the middle mooed once, which took me by surprise - I never thought about when baby cows would start to moo. The one on the left was crazy, and as Andrea put it, "kept sticking out his Gene Simmons tongue to try to lick me" as she scratched his head. I don't know if he thought there was food, or if he just wanted a taste of human flesh with his huge round teeth, or what.
Once she was done petting the cows, she took the camera and made sure to get face pictures of each cow, as they all had name tags. (Well, one just had a number - they haven't named him yet.) While she was taking pictures, the fourth baby finally got up, walked back toward the igloo, then turned around and mooed repeatedly at us. We're not sure what he was trying to commoonicate, but she parlayed his talkative nature into a great idea for her scrapbook pages to commemoorate the event.
(I'll stop now.)
From there it was off to home, where we sat down to eat. I was the only one who actually got to eat, however, as the phone rang as soon as I sat down. As our friend Ruth Ann had just commented to Andrea's cow-related status on Facebook, and Ruth Ann had failed to reach us by phone the previous weekend, Andrea asked, "I wonder if that's her on the phone?" Indeed it was, and Andrea did not eat lunch; the next hour and a half was phone time. (I took her a peanut butter ball during the call so at least she got SOME food in her.) She really enjoyed her time, though.
When the phone call was over, I noted that the Tigers/Yankees game 2 had already started, so I got that fired up on the TV. For a 3:30 game, it was interminable, as the Tigers kept nearly blowing the lead they picked up early in the game, and the rains came back to give yet another delay (and cause a Tigers player to blow a game-clinching catch because he slipped on the on-deck circle). But, in the end, they held on to tie the series 1-1.
We had a quick supper after that, and retreated upstairs for more video games. I played SaGa Frontier 2 up to the final boss (not knowing how long the credits / ending would be, I played it safe), then we headed to bed at roughly the normal time.
Monday, October 3
Neither of us felt well enough to go to work on Monday, so we didn't. What little activity I had that wasn't finishing SaGa Frontier II or starting Kartia (the next game on the PS1 chopping block) was spent cooking up some tasty food. I tried a salmon loaf recipe from a loaf pan recipe book, but modified it to use tuna instead. It didn't work as well as I'd hoped, but a necessary alteration probably made the difference. (I didn't have enough dry bread crumbs, so had to use some actual bread instead; that's probably why the final product was too soft. I think it'll work when I try it again.)
I also made the adventurous trek out to the mailbox when the postal employee drove through. Part of why I wanted to get there ASAP is because our next door neighbor was getting siding put on his house, and I wasn't sure we'd GET our mail because the contractor had the mailbox blocked. Luckily, our postal worker did stop and get out of the truck to give us our mail. This was actually important because our Wait Wait tickets were in the mail! (Usually, Monday is nothing but refinancing spam.)
Beyond that, we relaxed and recovered until 8:30, when the Tigers and Yankees played again. 3+ hours later, we gleefully collapsed after the Tigers pulled one out, 5-4, to take a 2-1 lead in the series. (I just hope they win in a blowout tonight; I don't think Valverde can pitch again after throwing 60+ pitches total between the last two nights, and I'm afraid he'd blow up if Leyland used Benoit to close instead of him.)
And that was the weekend. Good stuff all around.