As anyone who knows me, knows I like icons. I often forget a player's name, but remember what icon they have. Halloween has brought oodles of new icons to this site & at least temporarily, I must try to remember people's actual names instead of the little animation alongside.

Even though I hate the spooky aspects of Halloween, I do like some parts of it, which now includes the icons here at GT. So far, I haven't seen any scary ones, thank goodness, so it's been a fun thing. It's amazing how many different ones there are!

There's a lot involving black cats, which I appreciate. And more than expected of bats, which are a favorite group of animals for me. The bats usually aren't zoologically accurate, but still amusing. One of the funniest so far is a cartoon vampire who opens his cape and poof! turns into a bat. The vampire isn't scary, he looks like a grumpy teenager, actually. And there's wide variety of witches too. One is riding her broom like a race car, which is appropriate, since she belongs to a NASCAR fan. And plenty of pumpkins, sometimes with a black cat perched atop.

It's been nice to reclaim some of the fun aspects of Halloween, which increasingly emphasizes the horror angle. But like so many other things on this site, GT takes a higher road and the silly and cute Halloween icons makes me smile instead.

My learning curve continues on GT. I am finally learning how to play dominoes properly after months of playing it without a clue. After a scoreless round or two of Fives and Threes, a kind opponent commiserated about my lack of scoring tiles and this lead to the discovery that the end of the tiles had to be divisible to earn points. Eureka! Until then, I had simply been matching the colors of the dots. I'm really not a bimbo. Really. And the irony is that I'd actually won a few games playing in this manner. But now I know there's math involved, which worries me, as I was terrible at math in school. But it's not like I have to find the square root of anything, it's just simple counting. I may even set a pocket calculator by the computer for backup if needed. Just in case, you understand.

This week also brought a million new games to my Game Sheet. Too many, way too many. I not only signed up for a club tournament which started on Monday, but I had forgotten that I also enrolled in a site wide tournament which began on Thursday. WHAT WAS I THINKING? Now I have twice as many games as I've ever had before and some of them are, yes, domino variations.Which now take longer to play because of all that counting. Thank heavens the games have several days time limits.

So while I may miss the method of just joining the pretty colored dots, it's great to see my score as more than zero for numerous rounds. I still may lose most of the time, but at least my brain will get a workout, now.

I passed the 100 mark within the last couple of days. That would be the 100 Wood Token mark, which means I've lost more than 100 games. With so much wood, I could have a big BBQ or have quite a few toasty fires in my fireplace, if I had one. Or a more positive use of them would be to build something. Probably not a house, but that's just a matter of time, I'm sure.

There is a nice handful of Silver tokens in my collection and more Gold ones than expected. I think of them as self-standing little medals. It's Gold Token Bling!

It's a good thing I enjoy playing the games themselves, or all those losses would bother me. But then, I'm not a very competitive person, so that helps too. I have sampled a number of games just from curiosity and even when I'm awful at them, view it as a learning experience. There's some that I don't completely understand that I've tried playing, like certain variations of checkers, that I might be better at if I had a firmer grasp of the rules. There's others that have poetic names, such as Dragon's Breath, that I haven't a clue about and others, like Camelot, which have terrific graphics. There are some games whose explanations are too intimidating, they set off alarms in the part of my brain which hates math.

There's certain ones like the Shake games and Dominoes that I never played before, but dived in and am actually improving at. I still don't completely understand how dominoes is scored, though I managed to figure out Double Twelves Fives and Threes. And for awhile, I was fixated on the cribbage board which accompanies that one.

The important thing is I'm having fun, learning things and meeting some very nice people. And that's a terrific way to stay inside, away from the humid heat of an Ohio summer.

My xanga blog never got many comments, so I was really surprised when I got a lot of response from my very first blog post on this site. One extremely generous person even gave me a coin. She didn't even know me, but gave me a coin with a little bee on it, which is very cheerful. Other people explained how to get icons next to names & various technical details. All that help was really startling and I was amazed at "the kindness of strangers".

Which brings me to the main point of this post; why are there so many nice people on this site? People chat during games, write private messages, comment on photos, comfort each other on the loss of a pet or person, it's really remarkable. So far I've not met anyone nasty or mean, there's an astonishing amount of genuine kindness here.

While I've seen a similar sense of community in private groups and an actor's message board, it seems unusual for a game site. After all, we are competing against each other, so you'd think that would bring out a more guarded and sharp-edged part of our personalities, but it doesn't. And I think when people join GT, they find the culture of kindness & thus learn the proper behavior. It's a lesson on how a community can affect our everyday actions and I can't help but wish that good feeling could spread to other places.

Since becoming a Silver member last week, I've been trying to find out more about the bells and whistles on the site. One of the things I've been curious about is how some people have so many Tokens, oftentimes rows and rows of them. I have been given 2 which were a happy surprise.

After digging around, I've learned that you can just buy Tokens! Or some of them at least, there's certain ones you can only win by playing in games and tournaments, etc. which is what I thought all of them were. But no, there's a whole bunch that can be bought with varying amounts of Golderoes. So now maybe I can add to my little collection? I especially like the one with a fox on and the Knight Templar.

I'd also like a little icon next to my name, which I've now learned can be requested on a certain page. But none of those available really strike my fancy. The complex ones are only for higher paying levels, but they do have one of the Outbreak characters for Silver members, but it's not my little red raspberry, unfortunately. I'm trying to work up the nerve to ask if it will be added in the future, but that may take at least a few days.

I could always get the Ohio flag, but I'd rather have something more personal than my location. lol