Kansas City in Spring

My wife and I are up in Kansas City for a early mini-anniversary weekend. Here's a little trip update.

• The weather was wonderful yesterday, mid-60s. Today we woke up to snow. And they're expecting more throughout today. Its the first day of spring, too.
• We were able to get our hotel room for half-price via Priceline. The thrifty man in me is very happy.
• We went to the Federal Reserve Bank here in Kansas City and visited the museum there; definitely worth the visit. The best part was a viewing area into the money sorting/counting area. We couldn't see the whole area but it looked like it consisted of a long hallway with sorting rooms on each side the whole way down. The rooms were all glass and there seemed to be about five security cameras for every worker and there weren't a lot of workers. There were also three robots that took the cases of money from the sorting into the vault. These guys were highly automated with complete freedom of movement and the ability to wirelessly open the doors to the sorting rooms to pick-up the cases of money and, similarly, the gates to the vault to drop them off. The rest of the museum is mediocre unless you're into coin collecting but the engineer in me loved the robots. They were fascinating. Oh, and we got a free bag of shredded money.
• This morning at breakfast it was clear that there was a group of guys here at the hotel that were fanatical about some kind of Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game. Every few minutes it seemed like another one would wander in carrying an elaborate game case and/or folder. They congregated in the corner and as their numbers grew we heard more and more talk of "upgraded warlocks" and "damage rolls". As an occasional board game player (but never anything like this) I've never thought of trying to hold my own mini-gaming convention.

Up on the schedule today is probably some more shopping, an art museum, and visiting with some friends.