A milestone was reached last night, after many months of playing City of Heroes: With Dawn’s help, my main character (a sword-slinging scrapper who goes by the improbable name of Woods Cutter) reached Level 26, which allowed him to get the Stamina power. (Yes, I know you can get it earlier than that. My build required that I get some other powers first.)

Why is this so special? Well, Stamina helps you recover Endurance faster… and (almost) everything you do costs Endurance. Once I slot up Endurance a bit, I’ll be able to fight more effectively and keep my defensive toggle powers running more reliably. This is a very good thing.

I celebrated this achievement by getting my butt handed to me by a very nasty boss. Ah well. Them’s the breaks.

Today, I rolled out of bed around ten o’clock, and for some reason decided that trying out my recently-purchased (go ahead and laugh) Civilization III would be a good idea. One install and two patches later, I was in.

Three hours after that, my phone rang. Oops, I’d totally lost track of time, and there was a get-together at Mari and Doug’s to go to. So a quick shower and bit of packing later, off we all went. And by “we all” I mean Lilith and Geoffrey and the demonspawn and the boyfriend of one of the demonspawn. (Yes, it was quite a carload trekking west today.)

We had a lot of fun, including watching of DVDs, dining out on Chinese food, and playing Carcassonne. Yes, I’ve suckered even more people into playing my new favorite non-electronic game. Today we tried out the “Traders and Builders” expansion that Mari gifted me with a few weeks ago, and once we got the hang of it we got quite a kick out of the game. Geoffrey made a very good showing out of his first couple of games, while Mari absolutely obliterated us in our first go-around.

Obliterated, I say. As in, there are 50 points on the score card, and the Meeple in your color indicates the score by position on that card. As you lap the score card, the general practice is to change the position of the Meeple to show how many laps he’s done. He starts out standing, then goes face down, then sort of sideways (“flying like Superman” is one phrase heard during that first game) and then… well, we decided that once Mari had done enough laps on the score card we just went ahead and stood her Meeple up again. Yes, that’s right: Mari racked up over 150 points in a single game. Nobody else even came close.

In the future, I’m definitely seeing about finding some better way to keep score. Yes indeedy.

Anyway, it was a fun afternoon and evening full of laughter, food, good-natured competition and all of that good stuff. Thanks to Mari and Doug for inviting everyone over!