Yesterday I won this correspondence chess game with the Black pieces when my opponent playing White resigned. Our board at game’s end is below:
Our two Kings were equally defended, but my Rook and Pawn advantage meant that I’d be able to advance one of my pawns to its last rank and convert it to a Queen, while he couldn’t do that. I could then force checkmate easily. An animated gif file of our full game can be seen below:
I won this correspondence chess game yesterday with a simple Queen-Bishop combination checkmate.
But the bare board at game’s end doesn’t tell the whole story of this game. My opponent and I had actually played well fought game and at the end of our 36th full move we were at material parity: we each had the same number of the same pieces and plenty of fire power.
But from that point to the end of the game, things got quite bloody and ended with my White Queen, assisted by her Bishop, checkmating the Black King.
Watch the game play below:
… in my front yard, between the sidewalk and the street, doesn’t look particularly impressive in and of itself. But…
… I feel pretty good about it being there in time for the city to haul it away on Monday morning, our neighborhood’s designated Brush Collection day.
Those are the mostly dead branches from the fig tree in my back yard that I was able to prune this afternoon. One live branch bearing plenty of unripe figs had to come down, it was growing directly onto my roof.
Yesterday and the day before were very rainy here, and tomorrow and the day after are supposed to be rain filled, but today was dry. The ground is still too wet to mow, but I was able to prune my fig tree.
Proof that God has a sense of humor: that big tree saw I ordered to cut those larger branches seen in the picture above was delivered this afternoon AFTER I had finished the pruning with my small, 10 inch hand saw. I had hauled all the branches around the house and piled them by the curb, and had sat down in my recliner to cool off with a bottle of water when I heard the Amazon driver set the package with my big saw on the front porch. Huh! Talk about timing.
A lot of The Travelling Wilburys lately
You all know that old party game where one person in a room tells something to another person, then that person tells it to someone else, and so on, and so on, until we get to the last person in the room and it’s interesting to see how garbled the message has become? I’m currently dealing with a situation in real life that’s sort of like that, and it’s not funny at all.
I’m waiting now on a phone call to set a face to face meeting with a person who may have become an unwitting victim of incorrectly relayed messaging. A phone call to me last night tried to involve me in an impossible situation. But I made another phone call this morning to a person with authority over the situation, and he helped me see through the smoke of misunderstanding currently clouding things.
Hopefully the phone call I’m waiting for comes through today. If it doesn’t, I’ll try to track down the person tomorrow. I really need to have a face to face with him. He needs to see through the smoke, too.
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