malvasia bianca

I hope that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a nice one. We did; a congenial bunch of guests, a meal headed by cambodian chicken curry. Though there were other nice bits on the menu – in particular, Liesl made a very pleasant beef soup, also from The Elephant Walk Cookbook, and we made a very good (and easy!) chocolate cake from Bittersweet, which I continue to recommend highly. Zippy got bits from the soup as it was being prepared, and spent the entire meal asleep with a happily bulging stomach.

And I played several games of go today at KGS. I’d only played one other game in the last two or so years (other than the recent games against Miranda), and I hadn’t played online in more than a decade. But I had several quite pleasant games, people were very nice, I didn’t mind the online aspect as much as I’d feared (though I would hope I wouldn’t have lost one of the games in such a boneheaded fashion on a real board, but who knows), and I now have an official rating there. Of 6k, while information elsewhere suggests that, based on my AGA rating of 1k, my KGS rating should be about 4k. So, with luck, I should be able to bump it up a couple of stones.

My joseki knowledge has largely flown out the window. I should probably remedy that, but so far it doesn’t seem like a big deal – my other competitors’ joseki have also been a bit off, and they probably wouldn’t know how to punish my mistakes even if they did have joseki memorized. I’ve been surprised at how well I’ve been doing in the openings of games: that’s my traditional weakness, and even though I’ve probably been sandbagging a little, I wouldn have expected to come out of the openings more or less even at best.

We are, alas, moving to the main Menlo Park office – no more horses and beautiful scenery around. But maybe I’ll be able to occasionally get games against real players over my lunch break. I should see if there’s some Sun Menlo Park social mailing list where I can ask about that.