2002-08-29 - 11:13 p.m.

Gone

As promised I'm catching up after a weekend away playing chess. On the day I was leaving I left a brief entry saying that I was going to be gone. My intention was to take it down after I got back, but since people have left comments there and I don't want to erase them, I'll leave it where it is, albeit out of date order.

Today I put Lily on a plane to China, where she will be for the next three months or so. It was kind of a sad occasion, but there was no big tearful farewell. However I was definitely feeling a little misty as I watcher her disappear around the corner at the airport checkpoint.

I know that this is only a temporary separation for the two of us, but somehow I feel that this marks the end of an important chapter in my life.

Lily and I have been each other's almost constant companions since she moved in with me in August of 2000. Lily considers the time that we spend together precious, so much so that even since her college semester ended she actually has been accompanying me to Latham to pick up the comics. Of course SAUSAGE BUSCUIT may have something to do with that too, but I'll take my flattery any way I can get it.

For the last couple weeks I've been feeling sort of odd and withdrawn. Sometimes I've been a little cranky, other times I've been just sort of numb. I'm sure part of this is the high blood sugar I've been experiencing recently, but I think part of it was that I couldn't really grasp that Lily was going to be gone for so long. While I understood intellectually that she would be leaving on August 29, I don't think that I really grasped that fact emotionally. I guess I'll see how I feel now that Lily is actually gone.

In the meantime, I plan to be busy on a number of projects so hopefully I will be distracted from missing her too much, and hopefully I'll be a better person (and a better boyfriend) at the end of the three months.

I'd like to play more serious chess than I have been, and that is going to start in just a couple of days when the New York State Championship begins over Labor Day Weekend. I would also like to do some serious work on my health, since lately it's really starting to get annoying, and it's probably only going to get worse unless I start taking some serious action now.

I'll probably be talking about this stuff in more depth in subsequent entries.

This evening I dropped by the Frown Town Chess Club, which meets on Thursday nights. My intent was just to drop some stuff off and leave, but they were getting ready to run a tournament, and on impulse I decided to play, even though I didn't have any of my chess equipment with me.

The time control was Game in 20 minutes, which is a lot faster than I'm used to. My thinking time has been really slow recently, so I was not expecting to do well.

My first game was against an older fellow rated 500 points below me, but who is a dangerous customer if you are not alert. I got a favorable position against him, and it improved with every move, but I was taking for too much time thinking. Almost out of time, I sacrificed a rook to get his king out where I could get it. The sacrifice turned out to be sound, and I could see that I had a clearly won game, but to my horror I looked over at the clock and my time had expired. I was waiting for my opponent to notice, but he kept playing. Finally when he was looking at mate in one, he resigned. He never noticed that my flag was down, even though his was down to by the time the game ended. However, his resignation is what ended the game, so it was marked as a win for me.

My second game was against a veteran club player named Bill. We fell into an opening that he and I had discussed before and I had a decent position, but again took too long to think. I had a decent advantage when I lost on time, but we were only on move 26. I think I was concentrating too much on trying to record my games.

My last round opponent was rated about 250 points below me, but he had a fearsome reputation as a speed player, and has won several blitz tourneys at the club ahead of players much higher rated than himself. I resolved to play as quickly as I could to give myself a fighting chance of beating this guy. To my surprise, he went into an opening that I was very familiar with and at move eleven diverged into a line I knew was bad for him. His position went downhill rapidly after that, and just as things were looking critical for him he up and dropped a bishop. He just resigned after that because he didn't even have a hope of blitzing me out - I had plenty of time and was even ahead on the clock because I knew the opening.

So I went 2-1 in the event, and actually got my entry fee back. The overall winner was Bill, my opponent in round two, who scored a perfect 3-0.