Well. Hmm. So. I didn't realize that I'd put off blogging here so long, that all of my more recent attempts to write something here were still saved drafts — a digital monument to my usual difficulties matching execution to ambition. Consistently matching, let's say. Be a bit more charitable.

This summer has been strange. It hasn't been great, but then I wouldn't say that it's been all bad by any means — I just don't feel like I've been able to get much of a handle on it. For a while I thought that might be OK, but I think I don't have the detachment or the demeanor to just roll with whatever summer gives me, if it's going to be all mercurial.

I need to make sense of things. Funny how easy it is to forget how you work.

One thing that's really saved me this summer is my Scavenger Hunt, a daydream that I surprised myself by following through on. It's still amazing to me that I can make a list of stuff I think is cool and/or hard to find, and people will send me pictures of it. Even two weeks from the end I still get excited when I see a really good photo.

After it's done I'll give a breakdown of what it was like and what I've learned — because I had to do a lot of this from scratch and I'd definitely do some stuff differently — but I like the idea of doing something like this every other year or so.

OK I need to go to sleep, but I am NOT making another draft. Some other summer highlights:

-Playing LA Noire with my two Fringe buddies in the off-season. I think it's probably best played as a couch co-op game, actually.

-Since the last post I've seen Scott Pilgrim vs the World, Monsters, and Justified season 1, all of which were great.

-Lawrence Reunion. It was cool to see everyone again and it led to us getting together at Jonas and Sarah's for games recently. Hoping to do the same thing when the Lawrentians in the Scavenger Hunt come over in September.

-Bastion. An Xbox Arcade game that I played over the course of a weekend, really good (videogame) story.

-Biking. Sometimes it's been too hot or I've been too lazy or sick or tired but I've biked a lot this summer, enough that I won't feel guilty in the winter.

-I successfully brewed a beer with creeping charlie instead of hops and submitted it to the state fair. I call it Yardwork. Even getting that far was worth all the effort. I've done a lot of weird wine and herb beers too in 1 gallon batches.

-Boardgames. I just got Hex Hex XL and Bang! from Amazon today and this summer I've gotten to try a lot of other good games: 7 Wonders, Carcassonne with the Princess and the Dragon expansion, Shadows over Camelot, and Lord of the Fries all stand out. I sold my copy of Tobago (meh) for a paltry sum yesterday and plan to buy Race for the Galaxy sometime this week.

Working from St. Cloud for most of this week, wrangling errors and prodding people for our current big project. I'm sure to be burnt out by the end of it if I keep letting myself work the hours I have been, but I'm still getting over a very bad cough and in a weird way this feels like a sort of break, being away from my cube for a few days in a row.

This last Friday my mom came down from B-town and we went to dinner at Brasa with my brothers and their wives, as a belated birthday celebration for Our Bold Hero. And afterwards we reconvened (plus one BFAB) at my place for my family's traditional cardgame, Polish Pinochle, and a quick game of Dixit, which I was pleased to be able to introduce to another group of people. It was all pretty fun.

(Someone got offended last time I called it "a little something for the ladies" but Dixit has met with far more tolerance from the various non-gamer ladies I've played it with than any of my other boardgames. I actually bought it with my non-gamer ladyfriends in mind, and it's probably the only boardgame I own that I could have convinced this group to play.)

On Saturday after a quick breakfast, my mom and I went to the Mall of America, very spur of the moment, where I narrowly talked myself out of buying still more boardgames (when am I playing the ones I have?) but did find and purchase a fantastic kitchen rug.

Back at my place we spent the afternoon watching American Pickers and making cheese, which turned out pretty good actually — basil-thyme — then hit up this new-to-me Italian place, Scuzi, for a fantastic happy hour.

After my mom left I joined some friends at a party-already-in-progress at a bar in uptown and whether it was because I hadn't been drinking as much or because it was just such a tonal shift from the rest of my day, I don't think I ever really got into it. In retrospect I should have either drank more or ended my night prematurely.

But since I was d.d. the most memorable thing for me is the drive home, the unreal distracted-driving-commercial comedy of the various drunken personalities in my car. I think someone actually poked me at one point.

Sunday was predictably quiet, which is just as well considering that I had to work for five hours. I expect this week to be quiet too, or rather I'll pretend it is, since I'm not getting back to the Cities until after happy hour anyways.

I seem to have escaped more-or-less unscathed from my birthday yesterday, although I suspect that if I try to get up from the couch again my hangover will be waiting for me.

I'm not sure there's anything to really say about turning 28: as an age it is well and truly meaningless, a little fake even. The odometer has rolled over again, and I have the same adomania, the same Torschlusspanik that I had on New Year's Day — but no plans to act on it just yet. See hangover, above.

Yesterday night we watched Josie and the Pussycats and played the product-placement drinking game, which is sort of a birthday tradition at this point. I hadn't seen that movie since last year and I'd almost forgotten how much I love it. I cut the guest list this year after last year's craziness, but there were still almost too many people for both my space and the game.

Brooke and Jenna actually brought a set of leopard ears for me to wear during the party, ensuring that there will be still more pictures of me out there that are completely unsuitable for a Facebook pic. I made several abortive attempts to text Markie before she arrived, so she could set me up for the "They're not bunny they're leopard, and they're not stupid they're special" line from the movie. But alas.

Anyways, before the main event I had Brooke, Barry, Jenna and Kevin over for a game of Last Night on Earth, the online "We've Got to Go Back!" variant. It was fun, even though I played the zombies and got absolutely destroyed. We had some good but overpriced pizza for dinner, followed by some Dairy Queen cake, then played King's Cup as people trickled in.

I'd been mulling all week about what I actually wanted to do on my birthday, and I think what I actually came up with was pretty close to ideal. I don't remember everything — which is to be expected with 10 people sending me drinks all night — but it seems like there was so much that could have gone wrong yesterday but didn't.

Barry and Kevin spent the night upstairs in the Infinite Bunkhouse (I keep forgetting to call it that) and we stayed up long after everyone else left. I didn't get to sleep until past 4. I feel like I deserve some recognition for not being exhausted right now.

The place where I work is making me spend the week and a half of vacation I'd saved up now, because we're switching to a new vacation system for the next fiscal year (and I'm sure this helps their bookkeeping), so this is the first of many days off for me.

This doesn't actually disrupt much: even with the holidays over I hadn't yet settled into a winter routine.

Part of the problem has been balance. I like hanging out with my Lost buddies every Tuesday, but we haven't found a show that's engaging enough to get together for every single week. (Or rather we have, and it's Fringe, but they aren't caught up yet.) I like going to the bars maybe once a week for a cheap happy hour, but my usual drinking buddy Barry is only free on Fridays, the absolute worst day to go out to our local.

And I like playing boardgames — I love playing Last Night on Earth — but finding four other people who want to play can be pretty hard.

(Last weekend I was desperate to play some zombies again and so despite my (somewhat absurd) misgivings about being around so many randoms, I ended up going to a game night hosted by some of Rae's friends. Unfortunately I forgot to explain a key rule and my zombies beat the heroes narrowly and unfairly... so I may have ruined my chances of playing LNoE with that group in the future.)

I don't expect to fall into any reasonable pattern now, with so many lazy days stretching out before me, but one of things I really got into in 2010 was boardgames, particularly cooperative ones, and my experience so far has been that I'll need to spread that around between multiple social groups in order to play the amount I want to.

I mentioned in my last post that I actually met some new people last year and part of the reason why I decided to play Introvert About Town was my inability to coordinate enough people to do practically any of the stuff I love often enough, to balance everything out to my satisfaction.

Right now I want to be playing zombies every week, and in the spring I'll want to hit the patios, and weather permitting I'd like to have a fire every weekend this fall. You need people for that stuff and I need a variety so that I don't get burned out or try to strangle anyone. Once this year gets started in earnest and I have a more-or-less routine "Lost" Night and a "Girls" Night and a "Bros" Night like I did last year, I'll have to figure out where everything is going to go.

In the meantime though: I'm on vacation, everyone is at work during the day, and I have all the time in the world to try and get fun stuff organized. It looks like I'll escape my least favorite month relatively unscathed.

The year closed out with a long, odd week. Today it feels like my New Year's Day hangover has lingered, minus physical symbols but still putting me in that strange detached headspace typical of certain hangovers.

My thought earlier today was that I feel like an "adult," which is basically not something anyone over, say, 23 should be saying with any sort of earnestness. I know. There's no one reason for it: I haven't taken on any new responsibilities, haven't completed any sort of rite of manhood, and haven't been forced to reconsider my behavior or my place in the world.

Still, for the first time in a while... I dunno quite how to describe it. Not clarity, not contentment, and certainly not motivation. Detachment is getting close to it. Control maybe, or rather a change from being in control of a car on an icy road to being in control of the television remote on a Sunday night.

I buzzed my head after Christmas. My hair had been getting very shaggy, and I like to believe that I store my stress there, and that by cutting it off I can shed my troubles like snakeskin. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

This time I don't think it did, and I had some major stress since, which I'm not about to describe in detail to the Internet of all people (don't worry everything is fine now). And that, combined with all the petty worries and the slow buildup of missed opportunities and bad decisions that come with living life with any sort of engagement — it was a problem.

But on Friday night I went to a good party, had fun, got drunk, stayed up extremely late, and then as my hangover all-too-slowly went away on Saturday, I was left feeling like this. Whatever this is.

This is the blank slate that I was hoping for: 2011. I've fumbled slightly here and there already (keep in mind I was hungover or drunk for a good percentage of early 2011, as previously mentioned), but I haven't made any real mistakes yet, haven't hurt or been hurt, and everything that was bothering me — either I've successfully locked it away where I don't have to worry about it, or it'll catch up with me again at some point, hopefully not today.

But I wouldn't describe myself as content. Or restless for that matter. Hard to say too much more about my state of mind without crossing the line between description and composition, in any case.

I took a nap on Saturday, which is saying something in itself, and essentially skipped most of the day. Since I wasn't about to leave the house I had my cousin Marz and her b/f Aeron over for some Last Night on Earth.

I played the zombies and won not easily, but certainly definitively: by killing every single Hero until they had no one left to play as. Not since I first beat Forbidden Island have I been so amazed at the outcome of a boardgame. I could probably have gone to sleep then, but with those two here it was worth my while to stay up and 100% some LBP levels. They're probably the only two people I know who aren't sick of the game.

This morning I put on my Pajama Pants of Motivation (Cursed - Player Cannot Leave The House) dinked around, and made a batch of homemade cheese. My brother Josh and his wife Erin got me the book Wild Fermentation for Christmas and I've been making a lot of stuff from there in the past week, since I haven't had the time for real brewing.

Christmas this year was good, since I haven't mentioned it here yet. We had three Christmases, our family and then both sides of extended relatives, over the course of one weekend before actual Christmas, up at my parents' house.

The family Christmas in particular was a lot of fun, with some good jokes and an epic late-night game of Polish Pinochle. The presents I bought for that seem to have been well-received, and I got a lot of cool stuff I've already been using.

This meant however, that on actual Christmas Eve I was down here in the Cities, both because I had no desire to go to Brainerd just to attend midnight mass and because special guest Lawrentians Ben and Nora were in town staying at my house with their dog Finn.

My friend Pete, who took me along to New Year's this week, came to hang out early in the evening while his fiance was at work (we watched Chronos, which is surprisingly bad), but when he left I started to feel weird about feeling weird about not celebrating Christmas on the day.

I know I tend to go on about "Yuletide Dan" in December, and my friends seem to enjoy the conceit, but with all my stuff done, I had expected to be able to treat Christmas Eve as just another day.

Instead I ended up having to embrace it. I turned on the lights, and the music, and the Yule Log channel, and stayed up reading until Ben and Nora got back from their Christmastime activities for some quality hanging out. If I ever again hear the 1953 novelty song "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," it will be too soon.

We'll see how this week goes. It's a nothing, five days of work, no holidays, my first regular week in a while although some of the deadlines at work might make it hectic. I have no resolutions for the new year, more like stuff I could tell myself I didn't have time to do in December and for which I now have no excuse.

As for 2010, it was a mixed bag for me, particularly towards the end. I had fun, biked in the summer, met some cool people, became better friends with others, had campfires in the fall, and even went out of my comfort zone a few times — often with poor results, but I don't regret any of that. My brother got married, nobody died, and I started homebrewing, which will probably be something I'm still doing 20 years from now. More so than in 2009, I figured out how I should live my life in order to be happy, even if I didn't always follow through on that wisdom.

At the same time, 2010 was another year where I was sick in the summer for several weeks (the lesson, in part, is never to convalesce on a couch that's too soft). I also dropped the ball on a lot of things I should have done, and in the last half of the year I developed a nasty tendency to get myself down about stupid people or past business or both, when I should be having fun. Some of my worst days in years were in 2010, which reflects well on how good I have it... but still, I'm glad to see the end of it.

I have so little concept of 2011 though, it's crazy.

Hard to believe it's been a month; I thought two weeks maybe. But then I've been distracted, exhausted this week. Some dim, overoptimistic bureaucrat in my hindbrain is convinced that I only need five or six hours of sleep a night. Anything more is counter-revolutionary.

On Friday I finally had to give up and stay in. I think I was in bed for 12 hours, but I managed to sleep for 8, which is enough. Whatever my brain is up to, I just wish I didn't need me as an audience to do it. At the very least it could clue me in.

Anyways, hopefully that's done — I feel OK today, and I was able to outlast all comers at Barry's b-day party yesterday.

As a pre-party we played Ticket to Ride; I'd talked to Barry a few times about getting it for myself, but after reading some reviews he decided to just bite the bullet and order it off Amazon. Great news for me as that means I can continue collecting light fantasy stuff to complement Last Night on Earth. It seems socially convenient to become the go-to for the type of boardgames I really really want to play.

(I've been brainstorming a Christmas variant of the zombie game, with Santa as an added NPC, but I have no sense of how to do the balancing. Going to try it with three player deaths, maybe scale that down.)

Ticket to Ride was fun though. I can't help but think of it as Risk For People Who Like People. There's still the competition to dominate the map, the limited space. But. Instead of armies and dice rolls you have train cars and cards, conflict is a race not a battle, no one gets kicked out early, and there is an end to the game, definitive and swift.

Probably it was good that I cut my teeth on Monopoly, Risk, Illuminati — long cruel games, sure to build character, to teach people to compete without taking it personally. But these days I can only play Illuminati, for its humor and depth.

I can't stand the other two, and part of the reason I've been getting into boardgames recently is that I'm finally discovering ones that encourage the kinds of social interactions I want to have: quick games that are strategic, but where nothing is taken personally. Games that aren't a battleground but rather an excuse, like the magic of a bar (we can sit around and talk and yet it's doing something — six years drinking and I'm still fascinated by that).

I think I've mentioned this before, but my aversion to direct conflict has been growing for a while. I was in debate for five years, mediocre although I had my moments. I used to think that I liked arguments, but by the time I was out of college I'd realized that, no, I like ideas, I like differing points of view.

Monopoly, Risk — these games encourage arguments, and an actual argument just isn't worth it unless the stakes (personal, political, what have you) are actually high, unless the argument actually matters.

As a general rule it doesn't, and I've seen too many conversations grind to a halt to admit the argument, like it's some movie star shown up suddenly at a small party. I've seen too many arguments in bad faith, with fallacies on both sides, implications that are veiled insults meant to get a rise out of the other person without looking like the bad guy. I'm done with that, done with any little argument that doesn't have a healthy sense of humor.

(Which is another reason why I still make an exception for Illuminati. Somehow, we've more-or-less figured that one out: there's nothing like a tongue-in-cheek Illuminati argument, where everyone knows exactly what everyone else is up to and we're just having a bit of sport about how evil the other guy is compared to our sainted selves.)

As a pre-party, Ticket to Ride was a bit of a failure unfortunately, but only due to timing. I was literally late to the party and so we didn't finish quite quickly enough.

With the recent snow the roads were still terrible, so instead of dining out we had some pizza (only one of the three pizzas was veggie and once I realized it was the clear favorite I had to eat fast to get a decent dinner before everyone else finished it), then played some Soul Caliber (where I'm still the button-mashing king), some Tekken (where my mashing failed me as ever), and sat around listening to music over a muted episode of She-Ra.

I'm somewhat worried that Barry didn't do quite everything he'd have wished this year: certainly I run my birthdays more tyrannically, I feel like it's an understandable prerogative. But whatever, I had a good time, seems like everyone did.

Today I did my usual Sunday Psych and Bloody Mary ritual, with Markie thrown in the mix because this episode was a Twin Peaks homage.

On Friday I'd thought, rather ambitiously, that I might go into work yesterday, but I just didn't have time between running a week's worth of errands and undoing a week's worth of insomnia. Today though, well, that's just my fault, but I won't go into any of that. Suffice it to say that, except for Psych, even my slacking off today wasn't what it should have been.

(I'm thinking it may be that these pajama bottoms are cursed, or more prosaically, that it's difficult to actually start a day without proper pants on. When I put these on this morning I was committing myself to a day where I didn't leave the house.)

Today was bottling day for my unnamed Dunkelweizen — I was able to confirm that it hadn't been contaminated, but it's hard to judge much else from an uncarbonated, room temperature sample.

Bottling takes forever, hours from start to finish if you clean everything, but I had some good podcasts to listen to (My Brother, My Brother, and Me is tailor-made for this and many other occasions) and I'd still rather be packaging five gallons of beer than mowing the lawn or putting together that toilet downstairs. Let future Dan worry about that stuff, if he gets to have all this delicious beer.

Halloween was fun. I went as Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and no I didn't know beforehand that was a recently published book — although I'm not too surprised. After so, so many years of bad costumes I had decided it was worth spending the time and effort on something good, and I didn't regret it.

My plans for a low-key get-together on Friday fell through (basically: people either couldn't come or flaked, and because I'd sent out an invite rather than just calling around, I was stuck at home in case someone did show: lesson learned) but on Saturday everyone came over to pre-party here. We watched Scream, played a half-round of Last Night on Earth, then headed out to Kevin's friends' party.

As was pointed out a few times, Kevin apparently hadn't seen these people for five years, but it turned out to be a good time nevertheless. The party had good costumes, and there was a large garbage bin that had ingeniously been turned into a cooler for four kegs of homebrew. I remember a bit of conversation with a guy who'd dressed as Philip J. Fry, and then playing many rounds of Tippy Cup without losing one.

The next day Jenna, Kevin, Jess and Our Bold Hero went to Brasa for breakfast and then to Dixie's for their great Bloody Marys. I take partial credit for that plan. Because as usual I had neglected Saturday when planning my Sunday, I got next to nothing done for the rest of the day, unless you count giving out treats.

I have to say, the costumes were noticeably better this year, probably because (like me) all the kids had gone to the huge Halloween costume shop that popped up on the main drag near my house. There were a lot of classic costumes this year, vampires and pirates and fairies, and the best were probably these two little twins that were both dressed up like vampires.

I love giving away candy to trick-or-treaters, but after last year's poor turnout I wasn't expecting so many visitors and so I ended up running out of candy after about an hour. Next year I'll have to double or triple my candy supply so I can keep doling out candy by the fistful as is my wont.

Snickers this year mainly, if you're wondering. Because of that great commercial with the disturbing fake lady. I love that commercial.

Bottling notwithstanding, tonight is my night off — at the spur of the moment yesterday I got together with my Lost buddies Markie and Matt for happy hour and a flick. (The movie was Dance of the Dead, a B- zombie movie that I've been sitting on for a few weeks now. Maybe a little better than you'd expect.) I felt more-or-less fine today, but I've got hunting this weekend and I've been going through my hard cider recently at a pretty steady clip.