Well, here I am. Having slept most of yesterday evening (from around 4 in the afternoon to around 11 at night, with a few interruptions) and then slept again from about 7 this morning until noon or so, I'm up, waiting with no patience at all for the mailman to show up with Mike Norton’s latest package. Of course, I've most likely just gotten spoiled by the astonishing rapidity with which packages have been arriving lately and today's the day the dice roll the other way. That will suck, if so.

At Mike’s recommendation, I haven’t told Paul that a new package is expected, so he’s sleeping blissfully unaware right now. If something shows up, it’s a nice surprise for him; if not, well, he won’t know until it does show up tomorrow or Monday. Leaving me here going “hurry up, you goddam mail truck”.

However, after sitting outside with Chewie feeding him pieces of donut while desultorily reading A HORSE AND HIS BOY for an hour, I decided I may as well do one of those few things that makes the time just FLY by... sit down at the computer and write something.

Yesterday, while Paul was at work, I took down the Christmas decorations, undecorated the tree, put everything back in boxes, put the tree out for the trash haulers, and generally went through that annoying ritual that truly indicates the holidays are over once more for another year. I always hate that, and Jesus Christ, the Bucs aren’t even in the playoffs this year, so I don’t get to watch football any more, either. (I mean, I could watch football, sure. I could watch the Cowboys take on the Panthers this weekend. And, what, root for either Bill Purcells or the goddam fucking Panthers? Please. If there is some way both teams can lose, I’ll watch and hope for that, but otherwise, football is dead for me until next year.)

Okay, now we’re just going to talk about HeroClix, so everybody stop reading.

One of the things that interrupted yester-eve's sleep was Scott calling to ask me what a purple swatch over Defense on a HeroClix meant (since Scott doesn't have copies of the latest rules, he needs to call us for stuff like that... all he has is the material that came with his Infinity Challenge starter set). I was so sleepy I didn't realize until later that that must mean Scott had gotten more clix yesterday, but, indeed, he came over last night after Paul was home from work and had a few additions to his rapidly growing army.

After a lot of haggling back and forth, one way or another, it wound up that my Mr. Hyde, Puppet Master, experienced Invisible Girl, rookie Human Torch, and Blastaar all wound up disbursed to Scott and Paul in various lots. However, what I got back was:

a rookie Crimson Dynamo, a veteran Abomination (Scott had two), a rookie Scorpion, two of our original figs, the Vulture (rookie) and an experienced Parademon Scout, and, best of all, a veteran Quicksilver, and rookie Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye figs.

Hawkeye is all but useless, but I don't care; I wanted him for my Avengers line up, which now consists of him, SW, Quickie, Thor, the Wasp, Yellowjacket (yeah, the MOE subbing for Pym, but I'll call her Hank anyway when I field an Avengers team) and the Black Panther. That's a decent line up, and if needs press, I can use the Crimson Dynamo as an Iron Man piece. I can also toss in the Black Widow. Any of the FF are also legitimate Avengers members by the book, but the Thing is the only one I'd really feel relatively untroubled about putting in a line up... and I wouldn't want to do it at all, I'd rather have old guard Avengers.

Oh, my Whirlwind piece must have got tossed into a trade, too.

The reason I took the Vulture back was that with him, Doc Ock, and the Sandman, I have half of the original Sinister Six. A quick visit to the WizKids site indicates there are no Mysterio or Electro figs as yet, but I can get a Kraven, and should certainly make the effort, since he's kick ass. Some searches based on sheer curiosity have led to me finding out that there is no Swordsman or Mantis fig, but that Dr. Strange is pretty amazing. I'll be looking for one of him, too.

We're planning a Sunday expedition over to Big Top Flea Market, where Kyle (one of Paul's buddies we rarely see these days, but he turned up briefly last weekend for an hour or so) claims he's seen a table with a lot of HeroClix going for a quarter each. I suggested that, to avoid arguments, we each pick two characters we want and call dibs on them before we get there. Paul and Scott both wound up calling figures that the other one wanted, of course, so they rolled dice, and oddly, Scott, who prefers DC figs, wound up with dibs on Magneto and the Hulk, and Paul, who would prefer, well, Magneto and the Hulk, wound up with dibs on Batman and Superman. (The mechanics of this were silly but predictable. I said "Scott, pick two figures you want more than any other, then Paul and I will do the same." Scott, because they'd just been talking about Magneto, said "I want Magneto." Paul said "No way, Magneto is mine, I'm the X-Men guy!" So I told them to roll some dice. Now repeat that process for Paul saying "Batman" and Scott saying "the Hulk" and Paul saying "Superman". Me, I wound up at first just saying "any Avengers or Fantastic Four members are mine", which they accepted because they don't care, and I don't regard Hulk as anyone I want in an Avengers team. But later, after checking on the WizKids site, I went out and amended it to Dr. Strange and Spider-Man. )

Last night, after shopping at Wal-mart (we needed groceries; Scott was looking for the unrated version of AMERICAN WEDDING on instructions from Amber, but of course, Wal-Mart is the Sink of Decency and First Amendment Suppression, so they won't carry the unrated version there) we came home and since everyone wanted to play a game of HeroClix but we didn’t have much time before Scott had to go home, I actually came up with and refereed a scenario in which two different teams of superhumans converged on a particular location to find and recover a stolen vial of deadly cancer virus. I told them there would be a couple of surprises and there were. Surprise #1: after they picked their teams, I told them that Super Senses would help to locate the hidden vial. This helped Scott enormously since he’d chosen the only character on the board with Super Senses.

Surprise #2 – after they each took their opening turns, I brought Daredevil and the Black Widow onto the board as a third group who was also trying to recover the vial. Their advantage was that they knew exactly where it was hidden, while everyone else had to go in and check out all the various terrain features looking for it (which one of Scott’s characters could do at a distance, since she had Super Senses). Their disadvantage was that I started them at the opposite end of the map from the vial (and, of course, since DD and Natasha add up to about 89 points between them, they were severely overpowered going up against two opposing 200 point teams and would have to use Stealth and maneuverability, since to win you didn’t have to defeat anyone, you just had to get the vial and get back off the board the way you had come in).

Scott wound up winning fairly quickly, which was disappointing, but since ‘fairly quickly’ wound up taking two hours, well, that was okay, too. I was a bit let down that I’d bollixed the scenario as badly as I did… I hadn’t seen a door way down at the end of the warehouse that gave easier access than I wanted to the spot I’d hidden the vial… and I’d hoped that DD and the Widow would play more of a spoiler role… but everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Now I have an idea for a scenario in which horrible monsters start attacking everyone in a mall and two different teams of superheroes show up to help, and they have to somehow discover what’s causing the problem and resolve it. What it would turn out to be would be a supervillain with a mystic device that opens a portal into another dimension who is deliberately letting these monsters out in the mall to freak people out… he’d be right there in the middle of it, but hidden under some sort of illusory disguise that the heroes would need Super Senses to penetrate (or they’d have to actually touch or move whatever it was that was disguising him, at which point, I’d put the actual figurine and the object he was manipulating on the board and the heroes would have to try to take it away from him).

The interesting thing about DMing a scenario like this is that I can make judgement calls based on my knowledge of the characters… like, for example, had DD managed to get close to the Mandarin (the character on Scott’s force last night who found the vial and fled with it) I would have allowed him to use his billy club cable (within the rules for range strikes) to attempt to get the vial away. (The Black Widow also has a range strike, but it’s a taser-like electrical charge, so I wouldn’t have let her use it to try to grab the vial.) When Scott wanted to know if his Mandroid could use TK to levitate the Mandarin AND another figure (the Mandarin using his flying power to ‘taxi’ the other figure by the HeroClix rules) I simply said “Yes, but it will drain the Mandroid’s power batteries, forcing it to take a click of damage”. Scott didn’t want to do that, so he didn’t. It was kind of cool, and allowed me to overlay my own particular database of relevant character-based information onto the fundamental framework of the rules.

I know, I’m hopelessly geeked out lately, even more so than usual, and it’s just intolerable. Well, this is what I’m doing these days. If you’d rather I wrote about sex, someone out there needs to get me some…

All right. It’s 3 o’clock; time to go out to the mailbox, find out the mail has already come today, and I’m not getting a package from Mike Norton until at the earliest tomorrow, which will irritate me further. Oh, well. Hold on, I’ll be right back…

Yes, as I’d surmised. The mail truck has already gone by today and I got nothin’. Hateful. May as well go back to bed. Nothin’ good is gonna happen today.

Oh, did I ever mention that a couple of weeks back… before Christmas, in fact… Paul’s buddy Chad, probably in a guilt trip about blowing Paul off after promising to drive him to a bookstore to get my Christmas present, gave him a rotisserie cooker? We’ve used it once to cook a chicken and it’s just the cat’s ass. I’m going to go out and stick a ham we got last night into it after I post this.

Oh, this mad cow thing has got to stop. Leaving aside little matters like the recession-bordering-on-economic-depression the country is going to tumble into if the beef industry goes under (do you have ANY IDEA how much money cattle farming puts into our economy? How many businesses and industries are interdependent with it?), a visit to Wal-mart last night showed that while beef prices have gotten rather interestingly cheap (and we didn’t buy any anyway, I may have a hole in my head, but I don’t need holes in my brain, thanks very much), whole roasting chickens were impossible to find (we bought a baking hen and are hoping it’s much the same thing) while prices on every meat besides beef (like, ham) are skyrocketing.

I realize militant vegetarians everywhere may be chalking this up as a great victory, but I think it’s a pain in the ass.

Hmmm. You know, I ate a bacon double cheeseburger at BK yesterday for lunch and didn’t even think about it. Oh, well. If this column gets less coherent than normal at some point in the future, somebody roll on by the house and shoot me.