2001-07-18 - 11:44 p.m.

Forty Two

Well, today I turned forty-two. Another step closer to the grave, etc. Elvis died at forty-two, but I believe I am still several thousand fried banana sandwiches behind him.

Nevertheless, I feel great. I like my life a lot right now.

As far as days go, this one wasn't really special. I had a lot of work to do, so I couldn’t really kick back on my birthday like I wanted to. Oh well.

I had to get up early to get the comics, but I got up even earlier than that to catch a shower. Still some messing with Planetarion made me a little late for the comics. Nothing serious.

The rest of the day, until Lily came home, was spent working on my Chess Column and messing with Planetarion some more.

Another little PA drama was unfolding, which I was, thankfully, only a spectator to.

There was a player who was a friend of the galaxy who had been a member of Fury. However, the situation in his part of the universe became too difficult and he had to give up and join the enemy (VeX) for the sake of his galaxy.

However, since then he'd been trying to keep his galaxy mates from attacking Fury. For the most part they obeyed, except for a couple of miscreants. Finally, losing patience, the former Fury player attacked one of the offenders. The other one defended, so he asked me to attack him. I complied, but it boomeranged horribly. There was tons of defense at our targets, and the former Fury player found himself under a crushing assault. With over a million ships attacking him, he was forced to send his fleet away to keep it from being destroyed.

Later that evening I also participated in a second, more serious assault, but it was futile. Our galaxy is large, but we couldn't fight this whole galaxy's local group. It looks like the former Fury player is dead. His galaxy mates will attack him until he is nothing and then exile him from the galaxy. A sad story, but perhaps a useful warning to us about what happens when galaxy-mates fall out.

Did I say that today was nothing special? Not exactly.

When Lily came home from work she gave me the rest of my birthday presents: the American Beauty DVD, a CD by a group called Dakota Moon, and a replacement copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano since my old paperback copy from 1972 recently exploded into a pile of loose pages. Lily then cooked me my favorite dinner.

Now that I think of it, you can't do much better than that, can you?