A couple of days ago, Xiven came along to pick me up and take us down to meet Gwief and Phil down in Bath for our now annual christmas time meet up (that is two years in a row so far!).
The drive down was mostly filled with us talking about stuff we did in World of Warcraft and the realisation that talking about World of Warcraft out loud sounds really really odd. All the place names in WoW seem fine when typed, or their abbreviations used (e.g. Zul'Gurub or ZG) but having a conversation involving these seems totally weird.
When we arrived the conversation continued along the same thread, with Phil joining in with his experiences and also Gwief when he eventually arrived (late as usual.) Though we hadn't seen each other for a while we keep in touch over IRC most of the time so the usual questions about how we are getting on didn't occur and we just continued the discussion of goings on in World of Warcraft.
Once the explosion of WoW talk was over (though it still was most of what we discussed) we played some Mario Tennis, Donkey Konga and Mario Kart (both on the GameCube and on the DS). I wish I had brought my 2 sets of GC Bongos with me but alas I did not so we were stuck playing with the controllers. Still fun but more fun with the Bongos.
The next day we played some Smash Brothers (still a fantastic game and great fun after all this time) and some Bohnanza (The Bean Trading Card Game) to keep us away from the TV for a while. Then came the offline I-Sketch, otherwise known as Pictionary!
Since we couldn't get hold of a copy of pictionary, we decided to write our own words. We each wrote a fair few words on some paper and put them into a bowl. We have fairly similar thought patterns so most of the things we wrote down were fairly similar. Anime shows or characters, final fantasy related stuff, some World of Warcraft terms and a few odd ball things.
The game was pretty enjoyable although sometimes it was too easy to guess the words because we all think too much alike or they were simply too easy to draw. However there were some tricky ones in there including ones that the person who wrote them couldn't guess. This may have been down to the person drawing it badly though!
The most memorably bad drawing was Xiven trying to draw a "Druid" and failing so badly to draw a bear that I thought it was a horse. I was surprised to see some words repeated especially the ones that were. We had Shaman, Fruit Fucker and Selfie twice each. Thats a World of Warcraft class, a character from a web comic and a Final Fantasy 8 character. Were we trying so hard to not make duplicates we second guessed each other too much?
I enjoyed some typical english cuisine while there, including Chicken and Mushroom pie and chips, a fried english breakfast and the classic Penguin chocolate biscuit.
I thank Phil very much for his hospitality and hope we can meet up again around christmas next year.