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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Miles Pilitus" data-source="post: 3323599" data-attributes="member: 41553">Round 1 Match 1 (Friday):Aris Dragonborn vs. Miles PilitusGods, I hate family reunions. It's always the same drunk relatives telling the same old stories, and everybody cherishing and reveling in the one new story everybody has brought out each year. At least the family managed to get the old family house in Virginia. It's an old colonial house near the Roanoke Rapids on the southern border of the state. It's a nice old place, but Uncle Joseph didn't like to offer it out for the family, but one of the few changes this year is his absence, given that we buried him in the ground in December. Alex is managing the property now, I'm not sure he knows what to do with it, but at least he's offered it up as the site of our latest family debacle this year before he finally makes the decision to sell it.    I manage to arrive by noon on Saturday, in spite of the plane dropping me off in North Carolina an hour later then it was supposed to. I get out of my rental truck (which is somehow cheaper than taking a taxi both ways) and take a look at the sky. I agreed to fly all of the way back to the east coast for the kayaking, and if my luck with these family trips held out, the skies where only a half an hour away from opening up. Surprisingly, the only clouds in the sky didn't seem to be threatening rain anytime today. [1]    I knock on the door and get brought into the house by Elizabeth, Alex's wife. We exchange the standard pleasantries as she leads me up to the guestroom that will serve as my personal refuge for the time that I'm here. I drop off my 2 articles of checked luggage and my carry-on bag, then turn around and ask Liz when lunch is. It was sandwiches, she and Alex picked up a good amount of meat from a local deli, so lunches for the first two days was taken care of. After that, the last of the stragglers will arrived, just in time for Alex to break out the wood and try to use the house's open fire pit to cook burgers and steak. I was, of course, going to miss the resulting inferno, as my job required me to fly back to Detroit before Tuesday.    The next few hours pass exactly as I expect them to, talking to family members who I haven't talked to in a year, and who I don't want to talk to, otherwise I would have kept in touch with them. They ask after me, and I give my half-hearted response to their questions, trying to deflect off the inevitable questions about why I haven't settled down yet. I manage to succeed for the first few hours at least, directing family members to their particular quirks, like asking Aunt Sue how her little princess doing, and smile and nod as I pretend to listen to her talking about her show dog for the next thirty minutes. After an hour or so of this, I beg my leave and go talk a long walk through the forest that sits on the property.  I take my time walking through the paths of the forest; and, for a while, I actually manage to forget that I'm anywhere and just let my mind wander through the trees. I start walking back towards the house as evening begins to approach.    I enter the house through the kitchen door and walk into the kitchen. The kitchen is bustling with family members trying to do their part to help create the meal. It's probably the one thing worth coming out here for, the family dinners. Everybody puts all of their efforts into it, treating every dinner that the family eats together as Thanksgiving dinner. As I walk in, I get handed a peeler and pointed at a pile of potatoes sitting in a basket on the counter. I'm working on the island in the center of the kitchen, next to Tim and Sue, who must have arrived when I was losing myself in the woods. We exchange a set of honest pleasantries, Tim and I are probably about the only two who actually keep in touch with each other outside of this little reoccurring nightmare and the other holidays that call us together. They're prepping the salad, dicing the ingredients as Edna comes over with the camera and says she wants to get a picture of the happy couple. They smile and raise their knives, and actually manage to keep the smiles as Edna pulls out her horrible "Say Ginsu" line.[2] After the witch has moved on to torment others, including me as I take my turn mugging for the camera, I lean over to Tim and as him if he and his darling wife would like to join me in finding someplace to drink enough to sleep through the rest of the weekend. Unsurprisingly, they both agree that they would love to join me for a little time out on the town tonight. We plan it out as we finish the prep and are given our freedom by the prison-matron of the kitchen. I thank my mother for her endless graciousness as Tim and I walk out to the gazebo after each grabbing the primer for our night.    I manage to suffer through dinner, taking some time to take measure of the few teen and college-age family members who've been given the honor of sitting at the adult’s table. Most disappoint me, barely able to understand some of the concepts that are being discussed at the table and having a skewed view of what few things they do manage to fit into their small minds. But the food is good, and we've managed to avoid delving into the taboo subjects of Politics and Religion, which is probably good as it's too early for the police to make their regular appearance at our family reunion just yet.    When dinner is over, we men-folk are ushered out of the dining room into the family room as the matrons of the family take control over the kitchen once more, it's time to wipe from existence all traces of the dinner and leave only strangely labeled Tupperware as a reminder. It's still light outside, but Alex insists on lighting a fire, and no one else seems to want to disagree with our wonderful host on these matters, so Alex spends the next twenty minutes pulling wood in from outside and poking at the stack of lumber with a candle-lighter. Just as he starts to get the logs light through sheer bloody-mindedness Tim motions to the door where Sue is waiting and we bid the family good-bye to check out what life there is in this area. As we walk out the door to Tim's rental I make mention of an Irish bar I noticed on my drive up here and Tim, New Yorker that he is, thinks it might be amusing to see what Virginia considers a Irish bar. I ask him is wants to try what they consider pizza as we pass a local branch of the soulless corporate pizza chain and he reminds me that we are in Virginia, not Chicago or New York, and that they don't sell pizza here. All three of us laugh, letting the tensions of dealing with family loosen as we prepare to get utterly smashed.     My eyes hurt. My tongue has been replaced with cotton and I feel like I had a midget dancing on my head. Midget? What made me think of a midget? Brief snippets of last night float back into my memory. The leprechaun. The bar employed a leprechaun. I think I remember something about a leprechaun who poured drinks.[3] I think I remember Tim making a comment that it was a bit more tasteless then any Irish bar you'd find in NYC, but it certainly had that "quirky local flavor" that we used to try and find back when we shared a room in college.*Ahem*     S<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />. I look up, shielding my eyes from the bright sunlight streaming into the curtains that have been thrown open by the person who standing over my bed, guilt trip already beginning to roll off of her tongue. I nod through my mother's speech and promise that I will participate in family activities today. I roll out of bed and prepare myself for the day. As I walk into the dining room, Liz has just finished setting up the lunchmeat and I get into the line to make a sandwich. Over the sandwiches, plans are made for the day. It seems that enough relatives have arrived between today and yesterday to actually merit some activities other them re-transmittance of our wonderful family narratives. Alex is saying it would be a shame to not use the near-by water to have some fun with, and I back him up on this concept, which gets more then a few strange looks from those with a more acute understanding of the family politics, perhaps not the least from Alex himself before he realizes that he's actually stumbled upon an idea the whole family agrees with. Stopped clocks as they say. Before I can suggest a quick run into town to rent some vehicles for water-sports, Alex says that Uncle Joseph's old family canoe is still in the tool shed behind the house and it has room for everybody who wants to go.    All of use strong and burly girly-men lug the canoe to the water, with Sue and Liz grabbing some paddles. We reach the water and walk the canoe into the water. As soon as the water's deep enough, we drop the canoe and start to pile in. After a quick game of Twister as everyone figures out where they want to sit and if they want to paddle, we're seated and start paddling. I'm sitting in the back of the canoe with an old wooden paddle and I'm trying to keep us going in a straight line as we paddle.    Then I begin to notice my ankles are getting wet. I feel the water creeping up my legs and ask Alex if he's examined to canoe or taken it out on the water before this particular acid test. He asks me why and as I inform him that my end of the canoe has just hit the bottom of the shallow that we are currently in, I think the boat may be suffering from a slight leak. Abandon ship comes the cry as everybody tries to leave the ship all at once, dumping Liz into the water.[4] We water-soaked rats stumble our way back to shore and I suggest we go into town to see if we can't rent some kayaks. The idea is not considered unwise and we manage to bring back half dozen kayaks in the back of my rental truck along with some life vests for those who didn't think to pack one in their bags. Liz agrees to drop us off a few miles upriver with my truck for this first run and we spend the rest of the day ferrying people to the launch point with the kayaks and letting the kayaks drift back down river and be handed to the next family member in line. I manage to get a few trips in before dusk arrives upon us and we store the kayaks and head into the house to dry off.    The day of pure exertion seems to have loosened something up. There's not the tension that was there, the waiting for the other shoe to drop and for someone to start the exchange of ideas that will lead to the exchange of blows. The rest of the night passes without too much hassle, although the conversation is still tedious. Jason's offers up a new plan for tonight instead of sitting in a stuffy living room, to make a nice big bonfire and sit by the fire and talk till the fire has spent it's anger against the wood that is fed to it. I've always had respect for the other writers in the family and their ability to turn a phrase, and when combined with the idea, it made the perfect pitch to me for how to spend the rest of the night. We build a long, slow fire that doesn't die until three in the morning and sit outside and drink beer. I don't talk much, but the primal need for man to stare into the heart of the flame allows me to go without special comment. I'm one of the last to crawl into bed, having arranged have Jason drive me back to the airport tomorrow morning so he can take over the rental of my truck.Another family reunion survived. We should have realized long ago, that if you don't introduce fire and water into these gatherings, then the empty space would simply be taken up with hot air.[1] <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=27620" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=27620</a>[2]http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=27622[3]http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=27621[4]http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=27623</blockquote>

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