Editor's note: this entry should not make you cry. If it does, you're Chaley (my sister), in which case you were probably crying already.

So I did get to play Risk with Richie last weekend after all. My mother accuses him, not of cheating, but of witholding information on rules until relevant and beneficial to him. We found this to be the case.

Plus he plays by the "old rules, not the new rules, which are just stupid and confuse everybody." So there is no literature to back up any of these rules. Supposedly this is how Nah-poe-LEE-OH meant the game to be played as he used it to train his citizen officers in La Fraun-say in the 1800s.

We didn't finish because we wanted to watch Pirates of the Caribbean II on DVD from a .055" screen at the cottage. It was just as well because I was about to decimate Kelly's feeble one-soldier-per-country hold on North and South America with the Mongol horde I had amassed in Kahkkakkakkakk, or whatever that Aleutian - Siberian place is called in Risk. Then Richie was going to suffer a less humiliating, but equally decisive fate. So it's best that they saved face with their respective peoples and caved-in early, allowing me to control their regimes as puppet governments until we next meet on...  The Battlefield!!! 

My friend Donna N. had a great idea about playing strategy games online with Rich while I'm gone. An awesome idea. We will totally do that.

Much love, more later.