phew!

I feel as if I am always running to stay in one place in terms of so many things: keeping up with friends (especially LJ-only friends), correspondence and memberships, exercise and generally enjoying the outdoors (odd, but I've been having trouble motivating myself to go walking or cycling lately), paperwork (there are always stacks of things that I decided not to recycle when they arrived but that I haven't taken the time to do anything else with). But most of all, cleaning.

I often think that I'd like to have a small house of my own--a bungalow, especially a Craftsman, for preference. But if I can't keep up with sorting out this six-room flat, how would I ever manage with something larger? I spent this afternoon sorting out a couple of rooms. Not really cleaning, exactly, but making them less cluttery and more organized. Still a lot of that to do, and a good bit of cleaning on top of that. But hat will have to wait for another day. I did do a sweep through the game collection and came up with three dozen I'm going to send off to Noble Knight to turn into cash. Plus another two dozen that are going to get one more chance to impress me before they share the same fate.

I had the added pleasure of a morning filled with cats yakking up. Always fun. One thing I had meant to do for a long time is done: I took everything off the top of the fridge, threw away or recycled about 3/4 of it, and cleaned the top of the fridge before putting the rest of the stuff back. Not positive, but that *may* be the first time that's been done since Neta and I moved in.

gaming

In other news, gr_c17 and Mr Invisible came over yesterday and we played Here I Stand, an awesome update of the old SPI A Mighty Fortress. The game covers the early to mid 16th century in Europe, a fascinating time. Four of the six players are monarchs of the (Holy Roman) Empire, France, England, and Ottoman Turkey. The fifth is the Papacy--a half-temporal, half-spiritual ruler who has both his own armies and also legions of scholars and churchmen, who set out to stem the tide of the heretical Reformation. The sixth player represents the Protestant movement, entirely spiritual until it gains enough ground for the formation of the Schmalkaldic League (a confederation of Protestant princes intended to protect their followers from the temporal forces of the Church of Rome).

All of the monarchs have their trials. The Ottomans are perhaps the most powerful; they have huge armies and can build great fleets of corsairs. But they face the bulwark formed by the Empire, Europe's most redoubtable military force. The Emperor, though, stands to lose control of much of Germany if Protestantism becomes powerful. And he can't rely on much support from his brother Christian monarchs, who seek to take advantage of his distraction to carve up his western boundaries.

The French are natural allies of the Ottomans, under the time-honoured "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle. But they also have the English to contend with, who will want at the least to crush plucky little Scotland, France's other natural ally. And France begins partway through its attempt to dominate Italy, a move that puts it at loggerheads with the Pope, who is trying to do the same thing. The Papacy wants to enlarge its temporal territory, but it can't spend too much time and energy on that or the Protestant menace will become too powerful. The English want the best of both worlds--they want to be Catholic but do as they please (as the king pleases) in "the Great Matter" of the king's marriage(s).

And the Protestants struggle to manage a multilingual effort at subversion and revolution that sometimes sees members of their active cadre of campaigners burned at the stake after losing out in theological debate with the Pope's picked scholars. Once the Protestants achieve status as a political power, you would think that their troubles would be eased, but in fact this just means they have two realms of conflict to defend in, with more or less the same resources as before.

Meanwhile the Empire, the French, and the English are working away to explore and exploit the New World so as to support their efforts in the old.

It's a very fun game. Bryan took the French and Ottomans, Eric the Papacy and the Empire, and I took the English and the Protestants. Eric had totally spanked me the week before when we played a simplified two-player version, in which I took the Papacy and he the Protestants. I was unable to repeat the deed, though, and Bryan's Turks were not able to overthrow the eastern fortresses of the Empire, so Eric ended up with a well deserved victory at the end. purple Papal banners flying.