Dragones, Navidad, y Comida Mexicana

"Dragons, Christmas, and Mexican Food"

Se acabaron las fiestas. The parties are over...at least for 2011. There's looking to be at least one more late nighter for the New Year, but the next few days should be on the quieter side. Kind of. I'm supposed to be singing Metallica covers with my wife's cousin's band at a bar tomorrow, part of a six-band set (I don't know what order we're in...sometime around 10pm) but I might bag it. The kids aren't bad, considering their age (about half mine or a little more), but only two of the members bothered to learn the song they told me to prepare (Iron Maiden's Hallowed Be Thy Name), and they want me to learn a SlipKnot song (*barf*) by tomorrow so I can "come in on the chorus."

I'll probably do it anyway...my chances at "rock n' rollin'" these days are slim and far between, and I can pretty much do Enter Sandman and Master of Puppets in my sleep...besides that's a lot closer to "singing" than Pantera or Trivium (the band's main influences...oh, and Slayer, of course). The things I do for family (and ego)...

But up until tonight, the partying has been pretty much non-stop since I arrived. Let's see...party Thursday, wedding on Friday, Christmas Eve (till 4am) on Saturday, Christmas Day (party, late night Mass, relatives, party) on Sunday, birthday party (for my son, who doesn't turn 1 till the 19th of January) on Monday (involving about 50+ assorted relatives), birthday party for my wife's other cousin (involving many, many more people) on Tuesday...

Today's Wednesday, right? Yeah, just (very loud) band practice and a quiet chocolate and churros with the wife and baby today. We did some laundry.

In between partying and stuffing myself with excellent food, I've managed to accomplish exactly 0 (zero) as far as writing is concerned. Hell, this is the first chance I've had to type ANYthing (the baby requires quite a bit of wrangling, too)...and I can see it's actually Thursday around 1:14am. And I should be hitting the hay soon.

However, I have managed to squeeze in enough reading time (on planes and busses and in quiet moments) to finish Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight, something I've long been meaning to do. What an utterly fantastic book...I see how it launched such a successful (critically and popular-wise) series. I'll have to pick up the sequels when I'm back state-side. Just ridiculously good and interesting...it wasn't until about halfway through the thing I realized that it had not ripped off D&D's "chromatic spectrum" of dragons, having been written in 1969, well before Gygax and Arneson (and thus was probably part of the inspiration for the RPG).

And I have to say I prefer McCaffrey's version of dragons to those created by TSR. That is, her color/size/personality/role descriptives for dragons makes more "biological sense" to me than the different color = different breath weapon thang. And this despite the totally bizarre "telepathic/teleportation/time travel" abilities of the Pern dragons. I guess it's just a matter of taste, but her animal mounts had more personality and "reality" (for me) than any of the dragons in the Dragon Lance books (for example).

I have much more to say about the Dragonflight book (not pertaining to dragons), but I'll save that for a later post. I've had an epiphany or two reading these old school SciFi/Fantasy books (I'm halfway through MZB's classic Sharra's Exile, and I hope to finish it in the next couple days) and I want to collate my thoughts in a way that will be useful from a gaming perspective.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to bed. Have to get up early tomorrow and download SlipKnot.