The last weekend of January means it’s time for the Charleston Kennel Club dog show, and the CSCLRC Supported Entry that goes along with it.
I made it over there around noon, and the first thing I noticed was that the dog show in general wasn’t nearly as busy or full of dogs as it has been in previous years. I’m told the number of Labs registered for this year’s Supported Entry is lower than last year, but last year was unusually large too, so this year is probably about normal.
The weather was nice this year again, and there were a lot of good and happy looking Labs.
Best of Breed winner today was Ch Belquest Deep Run Easy Peasy, a very good looking Lab.
Connie and I played a game of d20 Yahtzee to see how it would go. It definitely lasts a lot longer than Yahtzee played with plain old d6s, and getting the special combinations (3/4 of a kind, full house, straights and crits) is a lot harder than it is in regular Yahtzee. Scores are a lot higher too. I got solidly trounced 1264 to 1023.
Connie came up with a few modifications for the special combos, like all primes, powers of 2 and other math-y related things. I think that calls for a new variant of the game.
I think there’s something very satisfying about rolling d20s, although that may be a result of many mis-spent hours playing RPGs.
Connie and I were playing Yahtzee last night and ended up talking about playing with different dice. Of course, the Bag o’ Dice came out, and I started thinking about how a game of Yahtzee would go played with d20s.
Well, I wasn’t the only one, and a Google search brought me to this page with rules and even a score sheet for d20 Yahtzee, or “Yahtwentee” as he calls it.
I decided to turn his PDF score sheet into a Google spreadsheet (d20 Yahtzee) with one minor fix to the bonus score threshold for 1-6’s.
There’s a sundial on the cathedral tower, but the indicated time was about an hour ahead of what my watch said. Not sure what the proper correction is for it. The website for the cathedral doesn’t mention the sundial at all.
After that we walked over to the Castillo de San Marcos. It’s a pretty cool stone fort used by the Spanish, British and Americans. Lots of history and well worth the visit to learn about the history of the area, the fort and for the views.
On the way back from the cruise, the first stop we made was at Kennedy Space Center. At the last visit there back in August, we upgraded to the annual pass (which you can do for an extra $5 or something like that with your regular admission). I’ve visited KSC before, but it’s always a fun place to go back to. This time we got to use our annual pass, which also includes free parking (apparently they started charging for parking not long after our last visit). Totally worth the price of the upgrade.
The main entrance has changed quite a bit since the August visit, and there looked to be a lot of progress made on the new exhibit building for the Space Shuttle Atlantis (which I was told is supposed to be opening in July now). There’s a new building for purchasing tickets, and some automated ticketing kiosks. With our annual pass card, we just walked up to the turnstile, scanned our cards and walked right in. Easy peasy.
Inside was mostly the same, although there were a few new things. We only planned to spend a couple hours there so we skipped the bus tour this time. The rocket garden is one of my favourite places to wander around.
Spent some time at the Astronaut Memorial. I love how quiet it is there.
New this visit were these ST:TNG LCARS panels decorating the side of one of the buildings. A neat and fun surprise.
We’ll probably go back again in February either on the way to or coming back from the Orlando Hamcation.
