(no subject)

My headache never quite went away yesterday. By bedtime, it was coming back pretty strongly, so I took an Amerge tablet. That helped but not quickly, so I had trouble falling asleep.

Cordelia stayed up later than I did. Because of how our house is configured, when she stays up, she has to be in her room with the door completely closed. Otherwise, there's too much light in our bedroom, and Scott can't sleep. (When he goes to bed early, he closes the door, but we don't like to do that all night. It's too noisy when I have to get up to pee.) I need to talk to Cordelia about being quiet when she goes in and out of her room late at night-- Last night, she woke Scott when she came out of her room for something.

Scott had to work 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. When that happens, there's always the threat that he might have to stay until 3 p.m. if somebody fails to show up. Fortunately, that didn't happen. He's home and relaxing now.

I have to bake bread today for a potluck. I was going to bake banana bread, but one of the bananas fell off the stem and proceeded to get moldy. I've never had that happen before. Usually, the stems are so tenacious that I have to cut them off when I use the bananas. That makes two occasions in a row when the bananas have gone completely bad before I got around to baking.

Left on my own, I would probably skip the potluck (my agoraphobia is kicking up. Maybe I need an Ativan), but Cordelia's been looking forward to it for weeks. It's the neighborhood 'block party.' People from our street (which runs two blocks), from the cul-de-sac off of our street and from a few houses along the adjoining streets will gather for dinner in the street. It's our one chance to see most of our neighbors. We don't go every year, but we've managed most years since Cordelia was born. I think about half the neighborhood usually shows up.

(no subject)

I've been playing more hidden object games from Big Fish Games. I've discovered that I really like the Dark Parables series of games. The stories are decent, and the graphics are nice. I can do about half of the puzzles, and the hidden object challenges are interesting because I'm trying to find the pieces of an object based on seeing what each piece looks like. It's harder than it sounds. I was expecting a written list of objects to find, so this surprised me.

I'm more or less randomly trying a few other lines of games. The one I just finished is Dreampath: The Two Kingdoms. I wasn't particularly impressed. The graphics were kind of chunky and didn't quite feel right. They weren't awful by any means; they just weren't quite what I was looking for. The story was kind of dull. Interestingly, this was the first Big Fish game that I've run across that specified the gender of the point of view character. All the others I've tried, referred to the point of view character as 'detective' with no gender attached. This one referred to the point of view character as 'princess' and ended with an implied romance for the character.

I recently played another Mystery Trackers game. This one was called Black Isle. Although I quite liked Mystery Trackers: Raincliff's Phantoms, the first Big Fish hidden objects game I tried, this one felt clunkier after playing so many Dark Parables games. I also couldn't do most of the puzzles in Black Isle. I'm glad there's the option to skip them. For most of them, my brain just doesn't work right to figure them out. Others, I probably could figure out if I resorted to paper and pencil to track what I was doing. I couldn't swear to it, but I felt like the two Mystery Trackers games I played had a lower density of hidden object challenges than the Dark Parables games did.

I've got three games left to play, one Mystery Trackers and two others, from other lines, that I picked more or less randomly. I'm hoping to find another line that I really like. There are still more Mystery Trackers games I haven't tried, so I can fall back on those, but I'd love to find another line I like as much as Dark Parables. Big Fish has dozens of different lines.

I have to decide what to do with the games I've finished playing. I bought them and so feel like I should keep them, but I think I'm unlikely to try replaying them. Nobody else in the household is interested (and I'm not sure I'd give up my laptop for the hours required for, say, Cordelia to play one of these games). Space on my laptop is not currently an issue, so I'll probably leave things as they are for now.