Geek-out weekend

As some of you may have heard, this weekend was Free Comic Book Day, and a book I helped put together was available at comic book shops across the country. I headed up to Omaha with my brother, Nathan, and we joined Vivian to crash a couple comic book shops and check it out. They were all sold out at one shop, but at the second one we visited they had one copy left on the shelf that I could grab and show off for the camera. I also met Margot Kidder, best known for playing Lois Lane in the Superman movies. I got her to autograph my DVD and bought an autographed picture of her for Viv. I also asked if she'd seen the new Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, and she said she loved it, and it was much better than the one by that "other" director.

After the comic shops, Nathan, Viv and I went down to Bellevue to join Ben, our friend from the Jitterbugs, and watch Spiderman 3. It was pretty good and had a significantly different feel from the previous Spiderman movies, but I'll wait a while before passing final judgment. After the movie, the four of us joined Eric "Onion-Boy" to stuff ourselves with Mexican food at La Mesa to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

After dinner, we crashed at Eric's place for an impromptu game of D&D. Since Nathan and I had never really played before, we didn't tend to argue too much during character creation and we got the game started up in a relatively short period of 90 minutes. It was a pretty fun time. My character was a halfling rogue with a whole lot of dexterity and would have come in very useful if we needed to pick locks or disarm traps. Unfortunately, we were mostly killing dire rats, wolves, goblins, and an earth elemental for the entire campaign, so Nathan's hack and slash barbarian proved to me a bit more useful (at least when he wasn't trying to mount and ride the wolf, which only wound up getting some amazingly unlucky damage in some very private regions).

We drove on home an hour or two after midnight in the middle of a torrential downpour. A few of the streets in Bellevue were flooded, but we made it. At least it wasn't quite as trecherous as the weekends of snow we'd suffered through last year.