Icehouse

Last weekend I decided I'd like to play Icehouse more often than once a year at Origins. Ideally, I'd like to get a local group together to play regularly (say for about an hour about once a month?). It might be kind of neat to do so outdoors in summer if the weather's nice, but that's not required.

Would people be interested in a regular but not too frequent meet-up for this? Could possibly turn it into part of a slightly longer pyramid-games themed event.

[Also, quick brag, eked out the last finalist medallion in the IIT this year. I'd been really hoping (but not expecting) to get one of those.]

Knives

I own a pretty decent set of Henckel's International knives (high end of one brother imprint). Not having yet had an opportunity to borrow really high end knives from anybody, I suspect they're the best knives I've ever used, and they're certainly the best I've ever owned or had regular access to. So I try to take good care of them. I hone them occasionally, I don't sharpen them with a home sharpener, I make sure to only cut on wood or cutting-board plastic, and a knife is either clean, dry, and in the block, or is currently in use.

Because the knives are good and pretty expensive, and I don't want to have to worry about how other people might be handling them, I have a standing request with my housemates that nobody use my knives, and I keep them in their own block in a somewhat remote part of the kitchen to make that less burdensome to other people (there are house knives, kept on a convenient magnet near the stove, with a wall-mounted manual sharpener nearby).

I just went into the kitchen to discover my chef's knife sitting in the sink with a cutting board [a nice wood cutting board of mine, and that's a separate but related rant, actually] and a prep bowl filled with whatever was in there and water.

I'm not pissed yet, because I don't really get pissed these days, but . . . seriously? You [allow your friends to] use my knife after I've explicitly asked you not to, and you [allow your friends to] leave it lying around dirty and wet? Do you simply completely lack any respect for others' property?

It's bad enough that it was left sitting in the sink, but should I be worrying that when I'm not around somebody is sharpening them, putting them through the dishwasher, or even cutting on glass? I mean, seriously, a complete stranger is using my good tools when I'm not looking; I don't actually know what they're doing to them.

[Edit: Of course, it could always be a simple miscommunication where somebody didn't get the memo, and I could be overreacting.]