this morning i caught the 90 bus leaving davis square at the intersection of lowell street and highland avenue. i was running late and i nearly sprinted uphill in order to catch my ride since the next one wouldn't arrive until another hour. i never knew there was a bus route within walking distance from my house that'd take me to the assembly square mall and beyond.

when i got to wellington station i gave dan a call, requesting a pickup. i could've walked to his place (about a mile away) but i wasn't sure about the directions and didn't want to get lost. despite standing outside in the light cold drizzle, it was interesting watching the people coming in and out to wellington station. there must've been a hockey game because i saw a lot of folks wearing bruins jerseys and hats. cymara ended up coming to get me, with dan back at home preparing the house for a day of gaming.

i was the only invited guest who wasn't a current coworker of dan's. i met bob and danny, as well as yvonne, besides elias and mike. i played some heart on guitar hero before settling down to the first game of the day, zombie fluxx, a card game involving the undead. it was probably my favorite game of the day. bob ending up winning through a random card shuffle. next we played two rounds of bang!, a wild west card game. players are randomly assigned to be either sheriff (and deputies) or outlaws. i was the sheriff in the first round and i won, partly because the outlaws had already killed each other off. i was an outlaw in the second round, and although i lost to the sheriff, i put up a good fight, going 10 rounds before they finally got me.

next we split up: while one group played a history babylonian (?) board game, we (dan, yvonne, elias and myself) played evo, a game about dinosaur evolution. i played it before and remembered it was more fun, but my dinos kept on getting killed off and eventually the game abruptly ended when i rolled the die to signal the meteor apocalypse (dan ending up winning with the most points). i find that basically any game that requires a lot of counting turns me off. which didn't explain the appeal of category 5, a card game about hurricanes. actually, it's more of a numbers game, but it was fast-paced enough that it didn't feel like being in a math class and mike volunteered to keep score, leaving the rest of us to randomly throw down number cards.

we took a short dinner break during category 5, where dan treated us to some greasy delivery pizza. while talking to yvonne i found out she was actually learning mandarin and showed me some of her excellent chinese penmanship. bob and danny left soon afterwards, leaving the rest of us to play the final game of the night, polterdice - combination of yahtzee and clue. the poltergeist theme itself is sort of weak, but we managed to pull through.

by evening's end, mike gave us all a ride down to wellington station, complaining about the nearby rotary the whole time. i was hoping to take the 90 bus back to cambridge/somerville but the last bus left the station at 10pm. while yvonne took the orange line further inbound, elias and i got off at downtown crossing and rode the red line back into cambridge. waiting for the subway at downtown crossing, we saw billboards for new kool-aid themed sneakers from reebok. who would wear something like that? maybe a child, but do children really know their kool-aid? when was the last time you saw a kool-aid commercial? perhaps an adult would wear a pair, but only ironically. i found out online that the sneakers are also scented with the corresponding kool-aid flavor. there's something about naturally smelly sneakers that don't seem very appealing.

amy adams hosted tonight's saturday night live. SNL is usually hit or miss, but honestly, the show hasn't been consistently funny for a long time. i still watch it, more for the celebrity hosts than anything else. i've never seen an amy adams movie, but she did a really great job tonight, really got into her roles, not somebody who was just reading from the cue cards (i'm talking to you, deniro!). the opening sketch was awful though, made me almost decide not to watch the rest of the show. it depicted president barack obama calling up hillary clinton in the middle of the night (3am) asking for foreign policy help in a moment of teary crisis. maybe i'm too much the obama supporter, but in what world is that funny?