Hello from Texas! It’s been difficult adjusting to life without Will, the furbabies and my home, but I look forward to the day that we will all be together again in May.

So how have I been spending my time here? Lots of death by powerpoint lessons, classroom instruction, formations and Army-chow *yummy*. I have my 360 and my PC to keep me occupied, so I don’t do too much outside of my room. I did, however, venture outside on Friday to see the World Combat League competition. I was less than 1000 feet away from CHUCK NORRIS!!! This league is his baby, and he made a special guest appearance to meet with the local Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines.

There were 4 teams - NY Clash vs. Miami Force and NJ Tigers vs. St. Louis Enforcers. You can find out details about scoring and the team members from the site. It was 3 minutes of beat downs and let’s just say that the Northeast did not represent the way I hoped they would. It was very entertaining and I hope to see this take off like UFC. Check out their schedule and see if they will be in your area. My photos didn’t come out as great as I had hoped, but I assure you that the action was real.

UPDATE: Here is a video of the last fight between NJ (orange) and St. Louis (grey).

I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. Most of my D&D group was there, so when all the non-gamers left we started a game of Descent. This is a excruciatingly long miniatures game that tosses role-playing aside and focuses on dungeon-crawling. The site suggests that the game can take up to four hours to complete; after seven and a half hours, we stopped playing because the Overlord (Descent’s version of the Dungeon Master) threw in the towel.

We were just starting the dungeon.

Later on we face a large force of monsters.

During the game, I learned about the French Nameday. I looked for references to this holiday on Google and Wikipedia, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. It seems that if a French person shares a name with a saint, then on their namesake’s day they get a cake. This specially prepared cake has a small animal figure in it; if you find this figure, then you get to wear a crown. My description is pretty vague and kinda sounds made up, but that’s all I remember (it was late and I was really tired).

I found the donkey figure in my piece, and was made to wear the crown:

This image is fuzzy because I haven’t figured out how to take up-close figures on my camera yet.

I was holding the camera above my head at an angle in this shot.