Good weekend. Short, but good. I had one of those fantastic moments on Saturday evening where I suddenly thought, I don't have to go to work tomorrow, either. Wow, did that feel good.

We had a visit from the hormone fairy last night, though. I swear, I thought it was early in pregnancy when women were supposed to get over-emotional and weepy. But no, I got frustrated because I thought I was being told that I was missing something obvious. Feeling stupid always gets me upset. The hormones just tipped me over the edge.

Poor Matt.

It didn't help that it came more or less right on the heels of a bit of frustration from the Hall session the night before. Matt, who was running the session, had us facing a sphinx with a riddle.

I suck at riddles. I can almost always identify the bit that contains the hook - the part where human assumptions fill in things that aren't really there to lead you down the wrong path... But that's as far as I can ever get. Even when I know I'm on the wrong path, I can never find the right one. I'm even worse at them if I'm on a hotseat.

So it happened again. I immediately noticed the weird phrasing of one sentence, but hadn't the slightest clue how to re-interpret it.

So I cheated. I entered some keywords from the riddle into Google and found it. I rationalized that my character is vastly more intelligent than I am, so I needed a little boost. It didn't stop me from feeling guilty. And stupid. I about half-expected Matt to get offended and angry about it, but he just teased me a little. I was fine with that. We didn't get eaten.

K.T. told me later that Matt had told her the answer (since she's co-GMing the plot) to prevent us from getting killed, and that she was trying to hint us in the right direction. But I was mostly ignoring everything said on the channel because I can't get anywhere with mental puzzles if I'm distracted, and her hints were other riddles. And Karen actually figured out the answer - honestly, thankyouverymuch - just about the same time I was typing in the answer on-channel. I should've waited just a little bit longer, I guess.

Really, what I should have done is trusted him not to kill us. Even without knowing that KT had the answer, Matt had a character deliberating with us. Obviously he wasn't going to just hand us the answer, but the mechanism was there, in case we got stuck too long, or went too far down the wrong path. I guess it's just that everything in this plot has been so ruthless and "damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't" - it seems like every thing we try to do to free ourselves just ends up tightening our bonds - that it never even occurred to me that Matt would stop us from impaling ourselves on the sphinx's claws.

Bad player. Not Trusting The GM: 15-yard penalty.

But Saturday, I was fine. The session we had Sunday was fine and fun. I don't even remember what the comment was, Sunday evening, that suddenly tossed me over the edge from being in a perfectly good mood into the Pit of Despair.

Yaaaaay, hormones.

(I swear, if this plot doesn't wrap up at least a few weeks before I have this baby, so I can get my characters back on a more even emotional keel, I'm going to go mad. I'm loving the plot. Really, I am. It's got a wonderful scope, and everyone is involved, and the story is fantastic... And I'm trying to remember to trust the GMs to give us the pieces we need, but it's hard to figure out whether those pieces are only coming slowly, or if I'm just missing most of them. I'm going to need a few weeks of happily-ever-after to recover.)

--Liz