The existance of budget airlines and a reasonable amount of travel experience means if I want to go somewhere I can. Various things made a last minute trip to Edinburgh sound like a good idea. The last minute hotel booking turned out to be an apartment on the harbour, even if it turned out sitting in the car looking at the water was preferable to enjoying it whilst outside.
The National Museum of Scotland is something that goes on my list of have been there would happily go again (I do have a list above that, it contains the (US) National Air Force Museum in Ohio and maybe also the Boeing Factory and the two parts of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum - it should be no surprise to anyone that I like planes and spaceships). It brought back pleasant memories of possible the Science Museum, but maybe the Natural history museum abour thirty years ago when I remember looking at diamonds and models of diamonds and other minerals. They had a fantastic display of minerals/crystals including various pure elements in their dendritic form and an awesome pyrite crystal that was 3 cubes, the biggest being about an inch and a half.
We saw Dolly the sheep and concluded the display was flawed, one sheep fails to demonstrate cloning! There had a small bit of Cern on display, which required a quick explanation of sub atomic particles and the Higg's Boson, in some ways my kids are lucky with lots of intelligent adults in their life but all with different specialisations, we might lose it a bit when it comes to appreciating literature, but Biology to Pure Maths with a detour via Computer Science and Engineering, between us we've got it covered.
For dinner the choice was turn left or turn right, turning right took us past BRGR where slightly to my surprise we all ordered the same burger, but could we be nice to the waiter and not be fussy, no we could not though I think me and N win as he had it as it came and I only removed the bit I couldn't eat, the bread. The girls had IrnBru, I might have discouraged it had we had chance to check what everyone wanted not just know we were just about ready as the waiter arrived, it's not everyday, so I think they'll live.
N had all the luck when it came to opening value in his prerelease pool. They've started including reprints called masterpieces in every magic set, they are printed in new art all beautifully foiled. With 16 players I think the expected opening is less than one, N opened one, it was one of the lower priced ones, Solemn Simulacrum, but one of the more playable ones in this format, he thinks it won him at least two games, he also opened a torrential gearhulk the 10th most expensive card in standard (~1400 cards), it's also good in limited, it allows you to cast one of certain types of card from the graveyard (a bit like a discard pile in many games) for free, he then had another card that would bring it back from the graveyard. He lost some tight matches, some inexperience some bad luck, but his luck returned when opening his one prize booster pulled a planeswalker that's expected to be relevant.
A didn't have quite such luck in value, but some obvious synergies, but the poor kid would win a game and then have to mulligan to three - you start on 7 cards and keep it unless you think the chances are better to go to six, you need a mix of lands and at least some cheap spells, you can do this cutting a card each time and I saw her have to go to three and four when I never went below 6 (though I had some funky draws after keeping reasonable hands).
I had one hand where I kept something needing a specific thing to happen, I estimated that as at least 2/3, it didn't happen, then it didn't happen on my next draw or my next. I ran those probabilities through an app online it's a distribution that you can't just throw some numbers in a calculator, what I wanted was over 80%, what happened was under 3%, so I know I made the right decisions but it sucked when it caused me to lose the game and thus the match. I still have no idea what was going on with my deck that night, there seemed to be no synergy, none of my rares worked with each other, but I think it should have behaved better than it did.
Sunday morning we had some free time before we needed to head to the airport so we went and had a quick look at the the Royal Yacht Britannia. Me and Matt being the people we are this meant we then had to look up info about the Royal Yacht, turning up the fact it had been to Chicago in 1959, Matt says how, I say the St Lawrence Seaway and it's astonishing how much time you can spend learning about dams and canals. Did you know that the Three Gorges dam/river/canal has two parallel sets of locks, one for ships and one for boats. Also if you are claustrophobic like my don't look at a picture of the deepest canal barge lock and certainly don't go in it. The UK data that was most impressive to Matt was the series on the peak forest canal and then commits the heinous crime of managing to mispronounce Marple. He will be dragged there for a visit and he has brought it upon himself.
