the_rck

I've managed to give away both of the Christmas cacti. The local niece took one, and her older brother wanted the other. Scott's sister said she was willing to look after the plant while her daughter is away at school. It's a little weird seeing the shelf by the back window completely bare, but it's also a huge relief to know that I'm never going to have to water the dratted things again.

Our niece came down Monday evening to discuss character creation and setting. The niece in Seattle was in a text chat with us. I don't think we'll do that again because the local niece kept talking out loud and not bothering to include the Seattle niece.

The Seattle niece has a strong preference for a secondary world fantasy setting (which, to be honest, I kind of expected). We compromised by letting the local niece keep her character idea but saying that he'll fall through a gate into the fantasy setting.

Character generation will be a PITA, but I run dice-lite and tend not to take character sheet numbers as absolute. The Seattle niece is having a bit of trouble with that idea because character creation is full of a gazillion fiddly details. RuneQuest has more of that than Call of Cthulhu does. I've asked her to write me some backstory for the character she wants to play; we'll meet on Discord again, and I'll work through a skill list with her. I'm not planning to run in Glorantha (I don't have the sourcebooks and am not interested in acquiring them), so some of the skills on the character sheet will be irrelevant, and some things not there will need to be added.

I currently have four open exchange fic assignments. I need to do a little organizing so that I remember my priorities and due dates. We Die Like Fen is a flash exchange that's doing four rounds this month. Defaulting on that wouldn't be terrible, but I matched with someone I've wanted to treat in several exchanges past.

I'm doing a pinch hit for Crossworks, also for someone I've wanted to write for before. I have assignments for Exchange no Jutsu and for Battleship. That last isn't a standard exchange. It's a two team challenge to play Battleship by writing fics with specific tags attached. I'm on Team Void. The other team is Team Abyss.

I've started writing the least urgent of these four fics. I suspect that I'll end out throwing out all of what I've written so far because it's me groping for world building details.

I'm still working on the medical edition of What's Been Going On In My Life, but it's very tangled. It's like a three dimensional maze with randomly occurring chutes and ladders and no actual exit.

One of our nieces, the local one, is interested in getting an online game going with me and the older of the two nieces in Seattle. We've been having trouble organizing, though.

The niece who wants to play is inspired by various game podcasts and focused on fantasy games played with D&D rules. This is not my forte, so she and I talked a bit about genres and settings and rules. I prefer talky games over combat heavy games or puzzle heavy games. I also strongly prefer percentile dice with a sort of Frankenstein's monster set of rules, bits looted from the corpses of other games.

(I like designing characters and settings and such in GURPS, just to check the point balance, and then running either percentile, dice lite, or altogether diceless. I also love that this approach makes certain types of rules lawyers feel ill.)

Right now, we're trying to put together a Call of Cthulhu character for her. Scott and I own the 5th edition rules, but I'm eying pdfs of the 7th on DriveThruRPG because I think the girls might want copies of the rules. I'm not sure what rule changes there are between versions, though, and I'm going to tweak character creation. At this point, we've agreed that doing stats with a point buy system makes more sense to us. I still haven't put together what I want to do for the stats that are 2d6 and 1d10. Possibly just a roll for that last.

The niece in Seattle says she'll have time to talk tonight at 8 p.m. (our time, not hers). I don't know if she'll want to play Call of Cthulhu or if she'll prefer a different era than the one the first niece wants (1930s, noir detective meets cosmic horrors. Minus Lovecraft's racism, sexism, etc.). The local niece considers the risk of character death/insanity to be a bonus, but that style of game doesn't work for everybody.

It does, though, have the advantage that we could do one scenario and stop if anybody at all isn't enthusiastic. It would give us a chance to get a feel for each other's styles.

Anybody know the differences between 5th edition Call of Cthulhu and 7th edition? Particularly with an eye toward me throwing out most things that aren't character creation.

Scott has been playing a lot of board games online. He's also playing a Sentinels of the Multiverse rpg online with a group that, apart from him, is all somewhere in Canada. He's very happy about that.

He and I have been playing Suzerain (solo, text game) together. The idea is that the player(s) make decisions for the head of state of a small and not very stable nation. The options are limited, and we've discovered that the game doesn't give any chances for partial compliance with things we've agreed to. That is, agreeing to turn back 'armed insurgents' fleeing another country becomes 'nobody whatsoever crosses the border because that country considers them all armed insurgents.' Scott and I had assumed we'd be able to give orders to our troops to let refugees cross in anyway, but the game didn't offer that option.

The game is also pretty clearly drawing on real world history but blending multiple eras and conflicts. There's a cold war with a not-the-USSR and a not-the-US option, but a lot of the internal economic/social issues are Europe between WWI and WWII. There are groups that are oppressed minorities in territory that crosses national borders (not-Kurds?) and arguments about national language (both for education and for religious services). There are young fascists and young not-Communists. 1930s levels of unemployment and of men with military training and access to old weapons. We're trying to get a new constitution through and to update education and medical care and transportation infrastructure. We're also facing a very real threat of invasion that will steamroll our existing military. We've chosen not to put money into the military yet as a gamble that our economic plans will give us more options soon enough.

Our character has split his political party in pursuing constitutional reforms and alienated a lot of very wealthy people who're used to having politicians in their pockets. Our VP (long time best friend, per the game) is very clearly on the take and also prone to showing up to things either drunk or hungover. The game offers no options for replacing him, and he keeps trying to pull us into parties with imported booze, imported food, and vast numbers of prostitutes.

I quite expect that one faction or another, foreign or domestic, will end up murdering our character. We might muddle through, but history shows that most countries going through this sort of thing end up with the attempted-to-do-the-right-thing governments failing repeatedly. Possibly the game is more optimistic about such things than I am?

We've been nice enough to the people around us and good enough at trying to take care of our family that we'll be remembered as tragically incompetent or as having tried very hard to do the right thing but having had it spoiled by Evil People.

I keep wanting this to be a tabletop game where we can actually change course and/or lie instead of having a script that limits our choices so much.

Our Firefly tabletop game continued meeting online during the last year and a half, using Bluejeans and then Vorpal Board. We're hoping to have a face to face session soon.

I'm not happy with Vorpal Board because the interface is not tremor friendly, generally, and not even the slightest bit intuitive. Also, three of us have connection issues where we'll suddenly no longer be able to hear one of the other players while also having no way to know it happened unless we notice weird gaps in the conversation. There are six of us, so sometimes any given person just doesn't talk for a while. Also, the other three players don't lose sound from anyone unless everyone does.

The very puzzling thing is that Scott has zero problems in that direction. He's in the same building I am, and we have a signal relay thingy in the room where I am. We can't be on the same screen because he's the GM and has information I can't see.

At any rate, I'm looking forward to having an in person session again. We're all vaccinated, and all of our family members are vaccinated, so the general consensus is to try it two weeks from now (two of the players are currently visiting family and weren't local last week). The four of us who will be in Ann Arbor got together to play Betrayal Legacy. I had to have the other players do all of the hand related stuff for me, moving my game piece, writing required things, picking up cards, rolling dice.

I probably could have done some of it, but the amount of pain involved would have taken away any pleasure in the game or in the social time. There really isn't a bearable number of times to smash one's hand with a hammer, not if there's no reason to do it but pride.

Scott has to go in early tomorrow, so he's already in bed (it's 8 p.m. as I write. He'll be getting up around the time I usually go to sleep.

I've got a test scheduled for the 7th of October to see whether or not I have full on carpal tunnel. It involves needles and electricity and sounds thoroughly unpleasant. I'm not looking forward to it with any sort of pleasant anticipation.

I had energy today, so I did a lot of cooking. Nothing fancy, just dumping things into the instant pot and shoving pans into the oven. I cooked some cod, two types of chicken (I can't eat chicken thighs without reflux issues; Cordelia hates chicken breast) with potatoes and mushrooms. I found some brussel sprouts in the fridge, so I steamed them in the instant pot. I microwaved two ears of sweet corn (I don't eat it, but Scott and Cordelia do). We had a huge sweet potato in this week's Imperfect Foods box. I washed it, wrapped it in foil, and shoved into into a corner of the oven while the chicken cooked.

We got food delivered from Evergreen Wednesday because we had a Firefly session that evening. I still have leftovers and might eat them later this evening.

The Firefly session was fun. I was feeling reasonably good and awake, so I was able to think. My character was trying to investigate an artifact we'd found. She lacks the skills to do any sort of testing, but she could explain what she was looking for and why she wanted to know. The characters who can actually do the testing weren't quite sure why she wanted to do it, not at first.

Today, I mixed a can of Zevia ginger ale with a can of carbonated water and about three tablespoons of lime juice. The goal of this was to make the Zevia palatable to me, and I succeeded. Previous attempts haven't gone really well because they've usually intersected with migraine days. I was almost certain that the migraines were't caused by the Zevia because each occasion had other fairly clear explanations and because there's nothing in the Zevia that ought to give me trouble.

I did wonder if I had an upper limit for the amount of stevia I can handle in one day, but it seemed improbable.

( UCon related )

Cordelia's had a week of classes now. Most of the instructors are still figuring out how to make things work and are finding their planned lessons either much too short or too long for the scheduled time.

Cordelia's really missing the social interaction. It's not just the between classes chatting. Normal classes include some time when the kids can talk to each other or, at the very least, exchange glances. Right now, Cordelia's crocheting during some lectures. She's done some classes in bed (which is apparently common) and some in the dining room (also common).

The dining room had the downside that the chairs are all terrible, so she and Scott went and bought a new chair. Scott put it together last night; Cordelia used it today and gives it two thumbs up.

Choir is going to be an issue for me because I wake up and want to make tea halfway through the period. I can be in the kitchen during choir, if I'm quiet, but I can't use anything that whistles or dings.

Skyline Blues poses a similar problem to food preparation because the rehearsals run two hours and put the kitchen off limits. For Blues, Cordelia wants us in our bedroom, the bathroom, or the basement for the duration because being reminded that we're in the house increases her anxiety about doing well.

I think the Skyline Blues stuff is mostly a matter of me and Scott adapting. We can make sure we have food before practice starts. I'm less sure about choir. The classes run just short of two hours, and I need 10-15 minutes to be able to make my tea. If I set an alarm and get up at 10:00, I can do it before choir. Otherwise, I can't do it until after 12:10. I'm mostly waking up between 11:00 or 11:30. Sometimes, I sleep as late as 1:00 (having gone to bed between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.).

I keep meaning to work on shifting my schedule to an earlier bedtime, but my body keeps wanting me to stay up later every successive night. I think my internal clock might be expecting a 24.5 hour day or something.

I've leveled up in Ingress. Almost all of the points involved in that came from recharging portals since I haven't gone out much in the last several months. I need one badge in order to attain level 16 (currently working on 15, so it will be a long time). At the beginning of this year, I assumed that I'd be getting the 4th level in Trekker for distance walked sooner than any of the other options, but I think I'm going to have to try for one of the others (I think it's called Sojourner), the one for playing daily for so many days in a row. I hadn't wanted to commit to 360 daily treks to the nearest portal, but I'm more than halfway there because of how they shifted what counts toward it.

I'm just concerned that I'll miss a day and have to start over. 360 consecutive days is a lot. I'm at 184 days now, and it's something I'm currently capable of doing, but...

I've put in a grocery order for pickup. I'm not sure whether the substitution thing was toggled on or off because the state wasn't marked in either position. The last time I ordered for pickup, I said no substitutions, so I'm hoping that will hold.

In many cases, it's better to get nothing at all than to get whatever the Kroger employee thinks is the closest match. I mean, the half and half would be fine, but the wrong hummus cups would mean I couldn't eat them. I picked a loaf of bread that didn't contain anything that would make me sick, but some other whole wheat breads do and so do other breads from the same company.

I've skipped three family gatherings this month; Scott and Cordelia have gone to all of them. I feel kind of bad about it, but I also know that Scott's parents are not being very careful. They're a risk to us, and Scott is a risk to them (and to me and Cordelia, but us avoiding him isn't feasible given the givens).

The gathering I missed on Saturday was for our niece's graduation party. They only had a few people at a time, and it was all in their backyard, but I feel like it was very unnecessary. I'm not sure how our niece felt about it, though.

I slept through a lot of the day. Cordelia says that I actually looked ill-- kind of groggy and vacant (she used the word 'dopey'). I eventually figured out that it was a migraine. My head didn't start hurting until quite late in the day, and even then, it felt like a sinus issue. Still, when I took naratriptan, all of the symptoms started to fade.

The main thing that I knew during most of the day was that I was falling over exhausted in spite of having slept well and that my general pain levels were way, way down. I expect my ordinary, walking around pain levels to be between a 5 and a 7. Saturday, I was between a 0 and a 2 for everything but my neck and head. It was weird, and I could tell that something was really off, but 'suddenly I don't hurt!' isn't a symptom that medical professionals have generally considered worthy of note.

I rather think that it should be, though, because it's really major shift without any explanation.

( UCon play testing )

I have ordered some mugs. Now that Cordelia's filling and running the dishwasher, my single 16 ounce mug isn't getting washed reliably. She says she's never sure whether or not I'm going to want it again before the dishwasher would be done. I think it's mostly that she doesn't look for dirty dishes anywhere except the sink and right next to the sink. She often doesn't check the stove and overlooks cups and mugs in the living room.

At any rate, I had a hard time coming up with the right search terms to find what I wanted. I spent a couple of hours on it. I found a lot of very pretty things that claimed to be microwave and dishwasher safe but that looked unlikely to be. I wanted to avoid anything that narrowed much at the base as I'm likely to jostle my mugs. I wanted a solid handle that's big enough for me not to scorch my fingers.

I also wanted something that I wouldn't hate looking at. Most of the things I liked were too small (half of them were 11 ounce; the other half were 15. I wanted 16-20). I decided to avoid text because at least 95% of it was stuff I wouldn't want to see every day, either because it said something like 'Dog Mom' which I'm not or because it had a joke or an inspirational quotation or a political statement. Seriously, I just want a pretty picture or a pretty design.

( Cordelia and yarn )

I like the lighter weight of the new laptop a lot. I feel less like I'm constantly about to drop it. I also like the fact that I can put it to sleep with Chrome open and not have it crash when I try to wake it up.

I am a little sad that I no longer have a functional version of Scrivener. I never really found it useful for writing, but earlier this year (right around when my hands got bad), I had an idea for using it to organize my saved fic prompts and plot bunnies. The recipe template looked promising. I just have no idea how feasible it would be in terms of my own workflow and preferences. The upfront conversion time investment would be massive, and I might never do it because of that.

Shelling out for a Scrivener upgrade simply in order to find out whether or not it'll work better than my current practice (dumping prompts into documents with confusing names and occasionally reorganizing and/or culling them) seems kind of silly right now. Maybe in a year or three.

I let myself get distracted yesterday and didn't finish an Overdrive ebook that I was enjoying. It expired about an hour after I got up today, and I was only 68% through it. Getting the ebook again will take a long time, so I've put a hold on the paper version. There are copies of that on the shelf, so getting one shouldn't take more than two weeks.

( Death of a neighbor. Few details )

UCon has announced that they'll be online this year rather than face to face. I'd been expecting that because the convention is in November. I'm pretty sure that they needed to let the venue know at a good distance out from the date.

We know some of the organizers, and Scott will be helping some of them test a couple of different platforms for running boardgames. They were supposed to play Flash Point last night, but the other person was ill, so it's delayed until tonight. Hopefully, it will happen.

I'm not sure if I'll participate in the convention this year. I'm not sure that I want to fight the technological challenges involved. I would like to run some role playing scenarios, but I'm not convinced that a virtual convention will be as welcoming for that.

I had been thinking to experiment with GMing online, but I put the idea on hold when I started having issues with my hands. The new laptop handles audio and video better than the old one did, though, so it may be time to look at that again.

Saturday afternoon, Scott and I tried to play Spirit Island. We found the rules confusing because the game has many, many moving parts. Scott's been watching play throughs since then, so that he'll have a better idea how things are supposed to flow the next time we try (maybe next weekend). I'm hoping that we can get to the point where I'm used to the complicated bits because right now they frustrate me.

Scott's sister has decided that there will be a family Zoom chat every Sunday evening from now on. She had us play Pictionary but did not try to get me or Cordelia to draw anything. Even if I had wanted to, my hands wouldn't have allowed it.

I have a bus draft of my Wayback Exchange story. I plan to post it tomorrow and then do more editing. There's a flash exchange going on that I think I could still write treats for and a couple of other things that I also wanted to treat but may not get to.

I'm considering signing up for Fandom 5K, but I'm not really feeling enthusiastic about most things I could request. I just want to write. Maybe there will be a good pinch hit for it. Signing up for exchanges is a vast amount of work, and I feel like a bad potential recipient when I can't manage more than a tepid yeah-these-are-good.

Tomorrow morning, it will be two weeks since I interacted in person with anyone but Scott and Cordelia. That's not entirely weird for me, but I keep thinking that I'd like to go to the library or to get bubble tea. The fact that I can't makes those impulses feel more important, less fleeting.

I made biscuits in the toaster over today. Well, more like one big biscuit that we can cut pieces off of. I didn't want to have to bake more than one batch, so I flattened the dough on the pizza pan that came with the toaster oven. Scott now thinks that I should put pizza toppings on it next time.

I had trouble with reflux Friday night into Saturday morning. I think it's because Cordelia and I had ground turkey with Alfredo sauce as part of our dinner. I'm not sure if the issue with Alfredo sauce is the fat content or the seasoning. Possibly it's both. At any rate, I don't think I'll risk it again. That was fully eight hours before I went to bed, and that wasn't long enough.

Scott and a couple of friends managed a video chat yesterday to play Flash Point. They had a lot of issues with the video of the game board not updating and with the audio being staticky. I had intended to participate, but I was feeling too terrible from the lack of sleep the night before.

I'm trying to listen to Paradise Lost via Overdrive, but I keep losing track of what the words mean, not the individual words as much as how they're strung together. The reader is pleasant to listen to, but I think the text needs more focus than I've got. Odds are that I'd follow best if I listen while simultaneously reading the text. I don't know if I'll try that or not. I don't know if I care that much.

I keep thinking that I'll get my feet under me and manage to deal with life well enough to get back to posting here regularly. Then something else smacks me.

I've had four PT appointments for my knee so far. We're trying a lot of different exercises because it's really hard for me to be my hamstrings to do anything at all without making the knee worse or getting my quadriceps very sore. We also haven't found anything that works for stretching my calf muscles. We spent most of today's appointment on that.

While Scott was driving home from work on the 17th, the car spun out and went into a ditch. He was a long way from help, so we're lucky that the car could still be driven. (He called the insurance; they said that staying and calling the police wasn't necessary since no other vehicles were involved and since nothing but the car was damaged.)

The back end of the car was smashed in. The rear window shattered. The trunk crumpled and couldn't be closed. The repair estimate came to $9000, so the insurance declared the car totaled. They'll give us $13000 toward a replacement, and they've been covering a rental. We're currently planning to start looking at options tomorrow.

Scott's still on 2nd shift, so he was driving on unplowed roads. It was past midnight by the time he got home. We've had some nights with bad weather since then, and all three of us have been a bit edgy about him driving home that late.

I dealt with the annual LTD review, and they've decided to extend my benefits for another year. That was a huge weight off my mind.

I've scheduled three college visits for Cordelia and am trying to pin down the best time for two more. We'll do EMU and U of M the week of spring break. MSU will be the day before she and her father go to see Dear Evan Hansen up that way (so they can just stay overnight).

Kalamazoo College and WMU visits will happen some time this summer. They make sense as things to combine with a visit to my family on that side of the state. I'm not sure how interested Cordelia is in either of those schools apart from the realization that those visits will fill awkward time with grandparents.

We may drag her out to Washtenaw Community College, too, just so that she knows where it is and how it's laid out.

Scott's birthday was at the beginning of this week. I missed the extended family gathering for his birthday because Friday's PT left me unable to move much over the weekend. Cordelia and I gave him season 2 of The Expanse and a game called Spirit Island that he and I have both wanted to try.

We were supposed to play Betrayal Legacy last Saturday, but one of our players forgot and went out of town, so we played the expansion for Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters instead. This was our first try at it, and we had abysmal dice luck. We lost the first game pretty rapidly because we couldn't get rid of any ghosts. (The ghost fighting mechanic is dice based. The players roll 1 or 2 dice, depending on how may player tokens are in the room right then. 3 faces of each die have ghosts on them. If any of those come up, a ghost in the room vanishes.)

( Christmas Eve )

( Yuletide )

( Christmas Day )

Saturday, we had a friend over, and we tried the fully cooperative version of the Warehouse 13 game. I think it went fairly well. We were mainly playing it for proof of concept. Scott and our friend thought that the cooperative version might need more challenges (the rules offer options for that). I don't mind games being moderately easy, so I wasn't bothered by that part.

( Discussion of eye problems )

I managed to get everything written before UCon, but as it turned out, the game I was to run on Friday morning didn't get any players. I hadn't slept well Thursday night, so I was exhausted and kind of tipped over sideways. Scott ended up taking me home so that I could nap because there was no chance at all of us getting our hotel room six hours before check in time.

I ended up not doing anything much at all on Friday. Saturday and Sunday were better. I got two players for the Saturday morning, and Scott played, too. It was a good game, all talk as I'd hoped it would be. One of the players was a real shark in negotiations and got really into character.

I played in an rpg while Scott ran XCom that afternoon. I had generic tickets and kind of wandered around looking for a game that needed a player. I ended up in a beta test for a game called Xenolinguistics. It was fairly enjoyable. I think the game is meant to run without a GM; the designer was one of the convention's guests.

Saturday evening, I played in Scott's Flash Point game. We were playing in a building with three floors-- basement, first floor, and second floor-- and hazardous materials. We got extremely lucky. All of the hazardous material ended up on the same floor, so my hazmat specialist was actually able to get to all of them before the fire did. We had a little bit of trouble with explosions in the basement. Those damage the ceiling above and can break a hole in the floor that way, but we kept putting those markers on the part of the board for the 2nd floor because it was next to the basement board (which is separate from board that holds both the 1st and 2nd).

I got five players for four seats in my boardgame event on Sunday. The extra player was a friend of two of the others, and he sat in. Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters is a cooperative game, so everyone was contributing ideas for each player's choices. We did three games. The players won only the first one, but I think they all wanted to play again. I wonder if, next year, I could run two boards on adjacent tables.

Our local niece (as opposed to the two in Seattle) joined us for Sunday. I think she played two events, both with Scott, and the two of them played something from the Games Library collection until nearly 5:30. The convention officially ended at 4:00. I enjoyed Sunday more than I expected I would.

All I bought during the convention was a few dice, 3 d8 and 2 D12. I'm not sure if Scott bought anything.

Cordelia's choir participated in a three school concert tonight. Her school only had two choirs there. The hosting school had at least half a dozen, quite possibly more. (There wasn't a printed program.) Scott's parents came down to attend.

I find listening to choir music with English lyrics frustrating unless I know the piece because I can't follow the words most of the time. It might as well be instrumental. Well, no. It's harder for me because I understand fragments. I keep struggling and trying to comprehend more.

The weather has gotten very nasty today. One of Cordelia's friends got into an accident while driving to school (I'm pretty sure that the other girl has zero experience with snow because she just moved north this year). Scott left for work half an hour early and arrived late anyway.

Cordelia's school let out twenty minutes early which I think was meant to help keep the buses more or less on schedule for the middle school students and then the elementary school students as the same buses transport all three age groups, just at different times of day. I'm not sure if the early release gained the buses much time. Cordelia didn't reach her stop particularly early relative to the normal arrival time.

I'm not sure what the weather is going to look like tomorrow. I have an appointment with the LTD vocational counselor at 10:30, but if the roads are still bad, he may opt not to drive to Ann Arbor. My benefits run out on the 24th, and the only reason we're meeting is so that I'm compliant enough to keep them. I don't pay him; the LTD insurance management company does.

( Stressing about future paperwork )

( UCon game writing related babble )

ETA: And there will be no school tomorrow, so I can put off deciding about which FAFSA information session to attend.

The list of medical appointments for the last two years ran 9 pages. Scott is dropping off that and some insurance claims at the post office on his way to work. Scott was a bit put upon by me asking him to copy things and to address envelopes. I think it was the one thing after another part rather than that the tasks were so onerous.

My next task is to work on my UCon games. I have an idea for the space setting scenario that I think will let me get some words written for it. I have a general background for the supers game; I wrote that during a two person, last minute write-in last Saturday.

Which reminds me-- I need to send out write-in invitations for something this weekend. I wouldn't mind hosting more than one session, but it would be more fun and social all around if everyone can come at the same time.

( Writing goals )

I managed to send back that package that contained the incorrect item, and I've now got the right one. I ended up giving it to Scott early because it's a supplement for a board game he'll be running at UCon. The return process required an irate call to UPS after the driver who was supposed to pick up the package dropped the mailing label on our doormat and walked away without even climbing the steps to knock/ring the doorbell. We have a motion sensitive camera just above our mailbox, so I had video of the whole thing and was on the phone to UPS less than ten minutes after.

The camera is set so that it only reacts when a person is within about three yards of our door and is coming from directly in front of it. That means it catches most people right as they hit the foot of our steps (our walk is parallel to the sidewalk and runs from our driveway to our porch) or when they're in the middle of our front lawn. We'll very occasionally pick up bright headlights going by fast late at night, usually after something has happened to alter the settings, but we don't normally pick up people on the street or sidewalk. If we did, school drop off and pick up times would be a flood of notifications and a clogged folder of footage.

At any rate, the UPS guy came back less than an hour later and actually picked up the package this time. The woman I talked to was very unhappy that we had video evidence that he hadn't even come near the door.

( Voting )

Adjusting to Scott's new schedule is proving challenging. We're up until some time between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. Cordelia gets up at about 5:45 a.m. Scott can only see her awake if he gets up then, so he has been. She leaves at 6:50 a.m., and he comes back to bed. I'm taking half a tablet of Halcion when we go to bed and another when Scott comes back to bed. I talked about it with my doctor before I tried it. So far, I think it's the best option for me. A half tablet seems to help me sleep for three to four hours, so that still has me waking for the day between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. I'm spending much of each day wishing that I could sleep, though, and that's not a thing that makes the days enjoyable. I also have very little time when I'm home alone, and I miss that.

We got the LTD stuff printed, signed, and mailed yesterday. It got complicated because of some incompatibility between the documents, the ancient version of Word we have, and our printer. I ended up having to C&P all of the documents into Pages in order to fix the problem.

Basically, it was all good until I edited the dates to replace the '__' my mother had put in for the day of the month. At that point, for reasons beyond my understanding all of the margins became ridiculous and unfixable. The printer kept informing me that some of the text was going to be off the edge of the page. I reset the margins to 1.0" on all sides, and the result still lost words off the edge on both sides of the page and off the bottom. When I let the printer set the margins, it went with a narrow column of text with 2.5" margins on the right and the left and 6.5" margins on the bottoms of the page. It looked ridiculous and turned 7 page document into a 20 page one.

My mother apparently wrote everything in Libre Office but saved it in Word format. The most recent version of Word on my laptop is 2015. I think the only thing I lost in the C&P was the page numbers, and that was mostly because I didn't think about adding them back in to the Pages version.

Scott took all of the signed documents to the post office and paid for fast delivery. I'm not sure if he went for next day or what.

We had a game session last night for Scott's Firefly game. I was feeling sufficiently better to be able to stay upright through the whole thing (knowing that bed wasn't far away helped because I could have gone to lie down any time I needed to). We really wanted to get a session in before Scott starts working 2nd shift. We discussed options for weekend sessions, but I don't see one of those happening before UCon.

We are hoping, though, to have some gatherings with parts of the group so that various members can review the board games they'll be running. I'm running a co-op board game with rules that can be adjusted in difficulty, and I need to remind myself of which rules apply at each level. I'm probably running it on Sunday, and I'm going to be brain fried, so review can only help.

Scott's running five or six board games. He doesn't need to review all of them, but he's got some supplementary material for Flashpoint that he hasn't tried before. He wants to get a feel for how that plays before the convention. I think at least one of the other games is a thing he's never had a chance to play.

I haven't started pulling together words for my UCon table top rpg scenarios. One of them is using characters and a setting that I used last year. I think that getting that one ready to go will be straightforward because it's mainly a matter of updating the characters to allow for in-game-world time having passed. I don't have a firm plot for it yet, but I think that updating the characters will give me one.

The other scenario will be harder because the characters are still squishy in my head and have a lot of details that I'd like to let the players decide. I have to decide how many factions I'll have (I have no idea how many players I'll get, so I'm going to have to be flexible). I think I need to start with a timeline for the backstory which is a real world alternate history going back about 300 years. I want to keep it close to our history, but having it completely unchanged for that long doesn't make sense when I'm throwing in a tiny and widely scattered population with inheritable superpowers. Most of them have been trying hard not to be noticed, but three centuries is a long time, and the widely scattered part means a lot of people making decisions in isolation.

I'm considering asking a couple of people if they'd be interested in a write-in this weekend as I think that might help me focus. Scott will be working on Saturday, and he and Cordelia will be doing a choir fundraiser most of Sunday (leaf raking with Scott driving). There are two people I can invite even on short notice who might be able to attend. If I get even one person, it would help me focus.

I'll invite our niece, too, but she's very busy with her school related stuff, so I don't expect she'd be able to attend. I wouldn't mind her coming and studying her AP whatever, but her driving down here to do it would waste an hour of her weekend.

Scott will be working from 1 to 7 today. It's vacation coverage. He and the other person who could be pulled in for the shift decided to split it rather than have either of them work the entire 12+ hours. The current plan is for Scott to get the house ready for me to give out candy this evening-- Our front steps are small enough that opening the screen door risks knocking people off, so he's going to slide up the middle panel of the door to let me hold the bowl out through the door. I'm not sure if he's going to do a jack o'lantern or not.

My hopes for the morning involve him cleaning off the blades of the fan in our bedroom and changing our sheets. I don't trust myself to stand on the bed for the fan cleaning, and right before washing the sheets is the best time for dumping a lot of dust on them. There's no way to clean the fan that won't put dust on half our bed. Sheets that are about to be washed make a reasonable drop cloth.

I should have called Cordelia's best friend last night. Her parents have left the country for a funeral, and she and her brother are alone in their apartment. They're both responsible kids, and I trust them, but I'm the adult who's on call if they need something. I need to check in to be sure that they don't have anything that seems too trivial for calling/emailing me but that's actually an easy fix.

I think I'm also on call in case the parents are delayed in coming back to the US. They're both naturalized US citizen, but they've gone to Pakistan and look like Pakistani Muslims (because that's their family background). I don't know how aware the kids are of that as a risk, but I'm worried about it.

Today's to-do list:
Insurance claim forms
Dishes
Removal of blankets and pillows from bed
Fan cleaning
Removal and washing of dirty sheets
Putting clean sheets on the bed and putting the blankets and pillows back
Moving things out of the cleaning lady's way so that she can get at the floors
Finding a missing form that I need to turn in on Monday
Make two phone calls
Depending on what I get from one of those, possibly go and get flu shots
Have Scott schedule a dental appointment
Have Cordelia schedule a dental appointment

I mostly didn't manage to do much Thursday or Friday. I'd known that I'd be exhausted after Wednesday's evaluation, but I always think that I'm exaggerating my memories of how much my brain stops working after I get through something that stressful. It only hits when I stop moving and am no longer under that stress, but the longer I've been stressed and the bigger the thing was, the more I fall apart.

In this case, I was at the 'yes, a load of laundry is a big deal' stage on Thursday. I might have been able to manage more on Friday, but Thursday is the day the cleaning lady comes, so I spent everything I had left to get through that.

My IBS became a problem Thursday and Friday for the first time in weeks. I'm pretty sure that that was stress related because I hadn't altered my diet.

Our cleaning lady is going to be away for most of August. I'm not clear on the dates because she said 3-4 weeks. She also said that she'll be praying, so I think she might be going to Mecca. Google tells me that it's the right time of year for the Hajj.

Scott and Cordelia have been working on figuring out how to sell things on eBay. They've got three items ready for shipping and two still on sale. We've got a box of stuff still to post.

We had a good session of the Firefly game Wednesday evening. One of the players had to bow out at the last minute, so the rest of us did a flashback episode to figure out how my character joined the crew. It was fun, but I was a little surprise to realize that they basically needed a competent general manager to cover things like supply inventory and making people rest when they were exhausted.

With my character, the ship has a crew of five people, and my character is officially the cook. She has retired from her previous job (espionage and infiltration, no combat skills to speak of) and changed her name and was just looking for some place to lie low and found this ship convenient. Now, she's attached to the other characters. Also, the being paranoid about people's motives and seeing patterns and anomalies isn't a thing she can just stop.

I worry a little that my character's tendency to see conspiracies and shadowy maneuvers everywhere is giving the GM (Scott) ideas. Then I worry that I'm breaking his plots by guessing things that are actually going on.

We got word today that Pat Judy, someone we gamed with, back around the time we got married, has passed away. He played in the VOX game and in the Saturday Amber round robin. I don't think either Scott or I had seen him in the last two decades. He was still an undergraduate when we got married, twenty six years ago, so he can't have been that old. The email about it said 'complications during heart surgery.'

I don't think anyone following my posts here ever met him.

In happier news, I have a bus draft for my Turing exchange fic. I'm reasonably happy with it. I only figured out what the point of the story was about an hour ago, so it's very last minute, but I've even got a title. I'm going to post it before I go to bed tonight.

Scott and Cordelia tried to do most of the birthday stuff for me on Saturday, the day before my birthday, because we were scheduled to spend Sunday with Scott's parents and his sister and her family (minus the kid at college). We had lunch with everyone on Sunday at Scott's parents place, and then most of the group watched the Indy 500 while Cordelia and I read our books.

Monday, my lower back spasmed. I needed help with standing up and with getting out of bed. I couldn't stand for very long, either. I remembered the stretches I needed, but they only help incrementally. The first time I did them, I couldn't get up off the floor without Scott to help me. I weigh enough that I don't think Cordelia could have.

Tuesday, the spasmed had decreased enough that I could do things if I was careful, so I took care of some chores. Yesterday, I was still hurting enough that I took a cab to my appointment instead of taking the bus the way I'd meant to. I ended up walking around a bit after that because walking didn't hurt and then took a bus to central campus. I walked to the South University post office and finally mailed my hair to the charity that does wigs for kids in Michigan.

I got bubble tea for myself and for Cordelia, and I played some Ingress. I misread the details of one mission enough that I ended up going a couple of blocks out of my way as I headed for the bus home. I also ended up detouring to the library when I realized that my water bottle was empty and that it was time to take my thyroid medicine. The bus I wanted was pulling up to the station at about the time I went inside the library. I don't think I could have made it even if I'd skipped both the Ingress mission and the medication.

At least the timing worked out so that I could drink my bubble tea as soon as I got home.

We had a session of Scott's Firefly game last night. It had been a while, so we all had to remind each other of details from the last couple of sessions. It'll be at least a month before we can play again because two of the players will be at Origins next time. The rest of us will keep going with the Betrayal Legacy game.

I was awake and functional during the game session which kind of surprised me given all of the walking earlier in the day. My back was semi-okay until I lay down on the floor to do PT after our guests had gone home. I'm not sure if that's just when my muscles decided to announce that four-ish hours of walking is not what's good for a spasming back or if it was entirely me trying to do the stretch for my neck which involves tennis balls under my head for a minute or three, but it spasmed again as I sat up.

I managed to stand up on my own anyway (I wanted to be able to test that before trying it while at home alone this morning). This morning, I made Scott and Cordelia manage without me so that I could get a little extra sleep. I needed it pretty badly. My lower back is still twinging, off and on, but it's not as bad as Monday or even last night.

I'm hoping that I can make Scott clean out the dryer vent today in spite of the rain. He washed his two winter coats on Monday and didn't manage to clean out all of the pockets. Those coats have a lot of pockets, so that part doesn't worry me. The part I'm cranky about is that he found bits of tissues all over the coats and the inside of the washer and still put the coats into the dryer.

There were a lot of paper scraps when I opened up the dryer on Tuesday. I'm not running the damned thing until Scott cleans that duct. We're due for it anyway, and there was so much of it that there has to have been a good bit that got past the lint screen. We have four loads of laundry stacked up and waiting. Because I'm short, I can't get at the dratted thing, even if my hands would do the work, and Cordelia's no taller than I am. I don't like the idea of her standing on the dryer to try to get at things.

My state i.d. arrived in the mail, and my goodness my shortened hair is floofy. When it's not wet, the ends spread a pretty long way out from my head. Measuring with my hands at ear level, it goes a bit wider than the length of my middle finger. It's still flat above the ears, probably due to the weight of the hair.

I read back 200 posts this morning, just barely skimming, then decided that I didn't have time to go further, so there are things that I'm just not going to see at all. If there's something I really need to see, please let me know.

I've got a bus draft for the H/C Exchange story and twice as much written now on the Wayback Exchange story. I also wrote some snippets for five prompts that I picked randomly back in October. That puts me at having written for 17 of the 31 prompts for that challenge. I didn't complete any of those stories, and I still may not, but I know the shape of them now.

We had four for games last night and broke out Betrayal Legacy which Scott has been desperate to play, desperate enough to overlook that it's really, really not cooperative enough for me. I'll manage somehow, I guess. We played the first round which is 90% figuring out the rules.

I got steroidal injections in both hands on Tuesday. I couldn't use my hands that evening or during most of yesterday, and I lost sleep to the pain.

Last night, I got the facial flush side effect which made me think I was having an allergic reaction. Scott noticed the redness hours before I did but didn't mention it because he assumed that I knew and didn't consider it important. By the time our guests left, both cheeks felt like they were sunburned from cheekbone down to chin (not my normal sunburn pattern). I ended up staying up much later than I'd hoped to because I really didn't want to put on my c-pap gear. That has straps across my cheeks to carry the pressurized air to my nostrils.

I'm not sure what this means for the appointment I have tomorrow which is probably for a similar injection in my neck. I'm not enthusiastic about that level of pain and lack of function there, and I'd expect the facial flushing to be worse.

Anyway, time to prepare for today's appointment. That's an easy one, just a bus to downtown and a bus back. I will likely get lunch, too, rather than try to prepare food when my hands are still iffy.

Today was much better pain-wise than yesterday or, really, any other day recently. I think that having my hair shorter and not having to try to brush it or put it up repeatedly is helping. I mean, I did brush it, but at this length, it barely registers as needing movement.

I do, however, keep trying to move my hair so that it won't get in the way when I'm doing routine things-- picking up my purse, rinsing my mouth after brushing my teeth-- and it's not in the right place. It's long enough that my hand still touches it, but I only brush the ends. It's weird.

I've managed to get my Wayback Exchange assignment moving again, but I have no idea how I'm going to get from where I am to what I intend. Optional details are optional, but I'd like to manage something in the general vicinity of what my recipient is hoping for. I'm sitting on the H/C Exchange story for a few days while I figure out the bits that need to go into the already written part to make it work. I think I know what they are, but I need to set them in place just so or it won't work.

I've decided to return one library book without even cracking it open. It's due Sunday and has holds, and while I'm kind of interested in reading Elfquest some day, I don't think I actually care enough to deal with the book. It's too big and heavy (and I never cared enough to look at the comics online, so...). Mostly, I'm interested in it as something that people I played AD&D with in college were really into. The DM built his elves on the comics.

We had a pretty good game session last night. It took us a while to figure out where we'd left off because it had been so long since we last met. Scott kicked off a major plot for us. Well, maybe 'kicked off' is the wrong phrase. He dropped different bits of it on different characters so that we had to put the pieces together.

We discussed character advancement. The other players seemed to have ideas. I just have this blobby sense that the things my character ought to be good at don't fit the available options unless I twist the names of the skills beyond recognition. Part of that is that I built her backstory to explain her being good at the sort of inference about worldbuilding/plot that I do automatically when I'm role playing or reading or what-have-you. I thought I might as well lean into it since it's not a thing I can manage not to. I can play as if my character doesn't know a plot thread is there, but it's less fun.

I think part of my problem is that, as defined by the rules, there are three skills that my character should be really good at. I want her to be good enough at them to have multiple specializations without necessarily being that good at the other specializations. Scott and I kind of work around this because he knows what I think she can do and agrees that my ideas of what she can and can't do make sense. She has a high sneak skill, but she would actually be terrible at, say, ghosting through the streets or walking silently in the woods. She's good at knowing where the holes are in surveillance systems, and she's good at acting like she belongs wherever she is.

We're still trying to get Scott's sister to tell us what she'd like us to bring to the Easter dinner. Even a general food category would be helpful. She's told us what other people are bringing but not what she'll be making.

Scott bought some new trousers online. One pair fit comfortably, but the other two are going back. I wanted to wash the keepers today, but my hands weren't up to it.

My hands gave up on working properly before Cordelia got home from school. I think a lot of that was me trying to disassemble things that needed to go into the dishwasher. The cold brew coffee making thing wouldn't come apart. I tried several times, with breaks, before just dumping it into the dishwasher still assembled. It kind of got clean, much moreso than I expected, but coffee grounds tend to get wedged in seams and corners when I wash it that way.

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