Roll for Initiative

Summer is here and with it comes the onslaught of time to waste and the demise of my normal sleeping habits. I always go into summer with grand ideas and schemes but they all seem to dissolve once it occurs to me that I don’t actually have to do any of them. Summer plans are entirely too much like work or school to merit my time. That said, I do have one abstract goal to work toward: reading. I love to read but during the school year it usually comes down to sacrificing my reading time or my sleeping time. Guess which one usually wins. I have a reading list that I have composed, but not really a set number of books to get read. I’m thinking I’d like to get 10 or so done and/or get my page count (from my meticulously detailed Excel spreadsheet on what I read) up to 20,000 pages. Right now it is at 15,549. My spreadsheet tells me the average length of one of my books is 420.24 pages, so that comes out to… 10.59 books. See how clever I am? I wrote 10 books up there ^^^ before I did the calculations.

Every year on the night of the last day of school, the Sprague High German Club, under the command of the completely awesome but equally crazy Dr. Herr Juengling puts on a musical. This year it was Arielle, die kleine Meerjungfrau (the Little Mermaid). Yes, it is all in German. I feel I must note that Sprague is well known for its quality of drama productions and choral activities, which only serves to counterpoint the insanity of the German play. Quite fortunately, there are some members of the German contingent that are in choir and can thus sing well. Erica Nelson, aka “Gurke II”, was excellent as Arielle and Josh Trammell was epically awesome as Sebastian the crab, complete with Juengling-esque conducting. (Grab a stick and wave both arms as if you are an octopus on crack.) Some of you clever people may be saying, but you are in choir and German aren’t you Jordan? (or Günter if you are in German as well) Yes, I am but usually second years aren’t in the German play. Usually. Herr J got a bee in his bonnet and I wasn’t in class one day, my dear dummkopf of a friend, Hans Unrein volunteered me to be in the play. Singing “My Girl” in German. And dancing.  (Just for the record I still don’t forgive you, Hans.) Long story short, last Wednesday I found myself in my Goodwill old man suit singing and dancing to a packed house. Fortunately it went very well, and it helped that the front row was filled with my choir compatriots who didn’t know what I would be doing. I’ve built up such a dry wit persona that when I do something out of the ordinary it goes over really well. Herr J said that I’m a rock star now, so lets see if that carries over through the summer.

Wow, this is getting long and I am just now to my titular topic for the day. Last week I was introduced to the world of table-top roleplaying with the Star Wars Saga Edition Roleplaying Game. If you know anything about RPGs, you probably have heard of Dungeons and Dragons. Well, SWSE is essentially the same thing but set in the Star Wars universe. For those of you who don’t know anything, basically you make a character then go through a storyline rolling dice, killing and doing cool stuff. The story is run by someone known as a “Game Master” or GM and this is what I found myself doing. I met up with my friends Alex, Brandon and the Andrews (Naugle and Hatz) to play the first session of SWSE for everyone but Hatz. As the GM I was responsible for telling the story and controlling NPCs (non-player characters, or as Alex calls them, Munions). Please be remembering that I’d never done this before, but I did have a pre-made campaign and my obscene amount of Star Wars knowledge to draw on. It ended up being really fun, with highlights of the night being Hatz’s Zabrak named “Juancho Mahne” (pronounce in a Mexican accent) and selling Bail Organa a desk. (Points for you if you knew who that was.) The party of adventurers thought it would be a good idea to take everything that wasn’t nailed down, so I expect to see more of this in the future. I believe that this is going to become a weekly thing for the rest of the summer now.

Jordan Keagle is a level 4 Jedi with a Wisdom of 19.