the_rck

Scott had fun at UCon. He says he probably won't get a room next year, though. It's only a half hour drive, and our bed is more comfortable (and less expensive). Also, the food at the convention wasn't great this year, so he ended up leaving the building more often than he'd planned. We'll what he thinks closer to next UCon.

He has left for his first day on 2nd shift. He'll be doing supervisory work on top of the usual machine operator stuff. It shifts him from hourly to salaried and will mean more frequent weekend work. We're not sure how much more. There are two supervisors per shift, and one of them has to be there when people are working. We're not sure how many weekends this will affect.

We're also looking at how this affects our grocery shopping and such. Some weeks, Scott's been picking up pre-orders at a Meijer on his way home from work. That store carries things that aren't available in the Kroger where he normally shops. An after-work pick up won't work now (before work would only work for a few items), and the nearest iteration of that chain is half an hour away. I don't think he'll want to trek out there on his days off. Maybe we can make it work once a month or every other month. Most of what they have that Kroger doesn't is frozen or shelf stable at room temperature. We'd have to store things in the basement, though.

I'll also have to figure out, in advance, when I need prescriptions picked up or other things that require a brief shopping trip. As in, the half and half has gone off or I forgot something critical on that week's grocery list and can't wait until next time. If I could walk better, I could take the bus for some of those things, but that's about a 3 hour trip, including time waiting for buses, so I strongly prefer not to do it trivially. When I do, it's likely to be the only thing I do that day.

Scott can, in theory, run errands before work, but it will require getting up earlier and getting out the door promptly. I think it will be feasible. We just haven't done this part of 2nd shift before. The last time Scott was on 2nd shift, we were on heavy lockdown and just doing without in order to avoid unnecessary trips into stores.

Long time no post. I keep starting posts and then getting distracted and not finishing. At this point, I don't remember what I've said and what I haven't.

Cordelia is in her second year at university. She's still aiming for a psychology major. This year, she's aiming to stay on campus more weekends than she did last year (last year, she came home almost every weekend). We're only a month in, so it's too early to say how it will go.

My body has continued to disintegrate. I did months of hand OT and ended up with a couple of splints and some exercises. The splints keep my joints from hyper-extending, and the exercises help with the resulting muscle cramps.

I'm using a walker now, at least when I go out. It's a heavy thing that doubles as a portable seat so that I don't have to stand while waiting at bus stops. We got it so that, if I took a walk, I could stop and rest as I needed to. I can't use it for supporting my weight because I can't put that stress on my hands and wrists, but I do use it for balance. It works pretty well for that.

Back in May, I dropped my laptop while I was getting up. I caught it before it hit the floor, but I caught it edge-on on my left ankle. It's still swelling up and screaming at me when I do much of anything. I did a couple of months of PT, but we couldn't find anything that helped beyond ice and compression. I have to ration my time on my feet, so I can shower or do the dishes or go to an appointment. Heat (including warm showers) has tended to make the ankle worse, so the shower chair we got for me has been minimally useful as far as helping my ankle.

I took a lot of cold showers over the summer. I found them helpful for all of my joints. Now that it's getting chilly, cold showers are much less appealing.

I've had a couple of rheumatology appointments in the last year. The official diagnosis is 'benign joint hypermobility syndrome' which is one of those things that, if you google it, will come up with 95% of results saying, "Don't worry. Your child will grow out of it." The joint hypermobility diagnosis meant the rheumatologist I saw shoved me out the door because it's not inflammatory. He said EDS-h but declined to put that diagnosis on my record, just offered to send me some informational urls about it. I think he was mostly peeved that I can't take any of the medications he'd normally prescribe for pain.

I think that I'm hitting a barrier in having my pain taken seriously given that all I take is lots of acetaminophen and occasional naproxen. I'd take naproxen more if it didn't make me sick after about three days. It's just that naproxen is less nasty for me than all the other NSAIDs. Opiates are off the table due to my genotype-- I need higher than usual doses to get pain relief, and I metabolize what I take much more slowly than normal.

If it weren't for the pandemic and my logistical issues, I'd probably be exploring marijuana as an option. It's legal in this state. I just don't have easy access to cash or to transportation to any of the stores. I'm not willing to go online because I've got an extremely long list of things I can't have (when I tried CBD oil products, there was only one thing on the shelf that I could consume without getting ill). I can't smoke or vape due to asthma triggers.

We haven't had anyone in to clean in months. Cordelia's friend quit when her schedule got too full, and Scott said it was better not to spend the money ($20 a week). This unfortunately coincided with me becoming even less able to do cleaning. Scott's too overwhelmed and exhausted.

I suspect that, without the pandemic, I'd have noticed my loss of function/independence as a gradual thing. With the pandemic, I didn't really notice because I couldn't easily run errands or go to appointments or whatever for other reasons. We went out to dinner with Scott's family last week to celebrate our nephew's college graduation, and just sitting at the restaurant wiped me out for three days.

Scott will be going to UCon this weekend; I won't. He was a bit surprised, but when he thought about it, he realized that I was right about me going making both of us miserable. The convention changed their price structure, raising the weekend pass price, doing away with event fees, and doubling the number of hours of volunteering required to get a free weekend pass.

I had been thinking that I might pay the full price, run half the previously required hours of events, and see whether or not I was up to doing anything else. The last time there was an in-person UCon, I ran 8 hours of events and played 2 hours. My energy levels are unpredictable enough right now that running a 2 hour board game might wipe me out. Or it might not. There's no chance at all that I'm up to running a tabletop rpg. I enjoy those vastly more than I do board games, but they require a lot more energy to make them work, and I often don't notice until after just how exhausted I am. I also find hotel beds uncomfortable and can't safely eat the food on-site. There isn't anything I can do in the hotel room that I can't do more comfortably at home.

UCon is less than half an hour away from here by car, so Scott can get back quickly if I need him. It's the same sort of distance he'd have to travel to get here from work. That means I'm not particularly worried about being here alone. Well, not as long as we get a decent bit of grocery shopping in first.

I will have a lengthy post of fic announcements coming up soon. After that, I hope to catch up on some of my reading/watching logging in small bits. If I can post something small every day, I may be able to get back to posting regularly.

I'm not going to try to read things just yet, so I apologize for that in advance.

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'm still not reading here regularly. I'm reading more library books, both ebooks and paper, and finding other ways to fill my time. I get a bit overwhelmed when I think about trying to catch up.

I'm also still having a lot of hand/wrist issues. I've figured out how to minimize the pain and numbness, but I'm still prone to misjudging how long I can afford to keep typing. It doesn't usually hit me until hours later, sometimes, even a day later. The problems accumulate.

Cordelia took part two of drivers' training last week. It was several hours of lecture followed by a test. The class was held in the parking lot with each student bringing their own chair. They skipped the films they'd normally have shown.

We haven't tried to schedule the actual licensing test. Cordelia wants more time to practice parallel parking since she's not comfortable with that yet.

I've written a couple of exchange stories that haven't yet been revealed, and I'm working on three different writing projects and trying to figure out how I want to deal with UCon. That last requires some experimentation with platforms and with what our WiFi can handle in terms of me and Scott running games at the same time. I've asked Scott for help, but this is the worst time of year for scheduling anything that needs his participation.

The two probable options are him running in BlueJeans while I run in Discord or both of us running in BlueJeans. He's spending a lot of time working on investigating other platforms so that UCon can give their potential GMs some solid information about their options. I could probably get by with audio only and maybe some stuff on Gdocs, but I'd like to have video, too.

My body has reset the clock on menopause again. This period has been going for two weeks now.

( Stuff about writing )

( Cut for COVID discussion and risk taking relatives )

I'm having trouble managing my library holds. The decontamination delays and low staffing levels make it difficult to judge how long something will take. I've been trying to request only things that are actually on the shelf at the branch where we pick up holds, but it still sometimes takes two weeks for those to be available. I don't think there are good options in that direction in terms of predictability.

I want 4-8 CDs, 1-3 DVDs, and about 10 books (counting comics/graphic novels) a week. I'll only ever finish about half of those books, but it's usually not due to running out of time as much as there being a lot of things that I get a little way into and just don't want to finish.

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.

This morning started with a migraine. I got somewhere between 4 and 5 hours of sleep before I woke and couldn't manage to fall asleep again after. I was in that weird state of being too near to sleep to be able to get up to do anything about the headache but also hurting too much to manage sleep. I've been functioning at less than 50% mentally all day.

Thursday evening, there was a choir thing at Cordelia's high school, a parents' meeting for information about a trip to Spain that she doesn't intend to go on. I dithered a lot about whether or not I should try to go. It was fairly cold out, and with the meeting starting at 7:30, I expected a bus once an hour which might mean sitting at the bus stop for a very long time before being able to get into the building or after the meeting.

I wanted a better idea of the timing, so I looked at the bus website. The ride planner told me that I couldn't get to the school between 3:14 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. unless I walked a considerable distance (estimated as 20 minutes). I'm very nearly certain that it is possible to get there by bus between those times, but I wasn't willing to risk it. I also wasn't keen on spending between $30 and $40 to attend a meeting about something that Cordelia doesn't want and that we really couldn't afford if she did want.

I ended up sending the school board an email about the accessibility issues of having evening events at the school. The nearest bus stops are on the other side of the highway from the school. The highway exit ramps let out on traffic circles. The lighting is lousy, and there aren't sidewalks or any allowances for pedestrian traffic. It's not a safe walk in full daylight. I wouldn't want to do it at 7 p.m. which is full dark here at this time of year.

I pointed out that I can't possibly be the only parent who doesn't have access to a car all of the time and/or can't drive. I also can't possibly be the only one who considers cabs/Uber/Lyft prohibitively expensive for anything that's not life essential. The school has been there more than a decade, and the district and city have done damn all to make it safe for pedestrians to get there. 90% of the city of Ann Arbor is on the other side of the highway from the school, and the city is zoned for three high schools, so most of the students live on the other side of the highway, too.

One of the main barriers for Cordelia in doing extracurriculars is transportation. All of the kids who stay for those have to get on one city bus. She was pretty constantly stressed about whether or not everyone would fit and what would happen to people who couldn't get on or who missed the bus. School policy is that the kids can't wait in the building without adult supervision. There's a lot of emphasis on penalties for being in the wrong place.

This is the same school that made her think that they were going to close the building and kick all the kids out into the parking lot in a snowstorm to find their own way home. Cordelia doesn't trust them.

At any rate, even though it was around 7 p.m. when I sent the message, I got an email from the superintendent of schools less than two hours later. She said they're going to try to figure out a solution. I'm not sure what they can do, but I hope that this eventually goes somewhere. I've been meaning to complain the last 2.5 years, so it's past time that I did. I pointed out that the access issues most strongly affect poor families and parents with disabilities. I think I actually said 'ADA.'

I also finally sent an email to our representative in the state house to ask why Michigan law doesn't penalize bad faith by insurance companies. I don't know that that will go anywhere, but it definitely wasn't going anywhere without me asking.

I've made more progress on my UCon games. I think the space scenario is only going to need about another hour of work. A lot of what I want to happen in the game doesn't need to be in the character sheets or the setting material. I'd probably have gotten it done today if I'd had a reasonable amount of sleep. The superhero scenario will need quite a lot more than that, but I'm more optimistic about getting it done.

I have no idea why I'm still awake now. Hopefully tonight will be better than last night and tomorrow better than today.

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

( Cut for length. Some discussion of health/anxiety/depression/pain and disability )

Please assume I haven't seen anything posted here since early August. I haven't even been opening the DreamWidth tab.

I ended up coming home before Scott's game. I was headachy and exhausted. I knew I could keep myself going by eating pretty constantly, but it didn't seem worthwhile. If I'd stayed, Scott would have felt that he needed to come home as soon as he could. Of course, he then came home as soon as he could anyway.

I need to figure out a better way to do the convention next year so that I'm not too exhausted to do anything the whole time. I spent all of my spoons on running my games, and I enjoyed that, but if we're going to get a hotel room and pay for the convention, it would be nice if I did more than what I managed. I only played two hours of games that I wasn't running. There were 15 hours of games on Friday and 16 on Saturday. I'm not sure what the hours were today. I ran 6 hours and played 2.

I think the key thing is how terrible the week before the convention was. One way to go would be to stop running rpgs so that I have less preparation required, but... Running an rpg is the primary point of me going in terms of things I enjoy at the convention. Maybe if I write the scenario in January/February so that I don't end up in the looming deadline writer's block hell again?

Getting the scenario written ought not to have been the huge stressor that it turned into. I just kept having things I needed to get done that had higher priority and took longer than I expected. I need to remember that I can't compress the time necessary to write something by taking out the down time in the middle. That down time is part of the process. My brain will take its weekends off because they're necessary, so not scheduling to include them...

Cordelia and I got some leaves off the lawn and into the bin for pick up. We could have gotten more if Scott had picked up some bags. He prefers not to spend the money on the bags the city accepts and just to use the bin. I'd kind of like to just get them all gone at once, but he's usually the one who does all of the work.

I unpacked most of our things, and I'm running laundry. After that's done, I'll run the dishwasher. The sheets need changing, and I've got some forms I ought to fill out, but those are for tomorrow.

Including the writing for the UCon game, I'm at about 13.5K words for November so far. I didn't sign up for NaNo and am not going to spend the month focused on a single project. I'd like to finish my DCU mini bang even though I missed my posting date, and I need to write my Yuletide assignment. I know what I need to do for both and will probably give the latter priority.

I'm truly exhausted right now. Scott managed to get us checked into our hotel room early, so I was able to come up here as soon as my game was done. I kind of want to nap, but I can't get myself to fall asleep.

My game went well. I had three players, and each ran two characters. All three players were energetic and interested in trying creative approaches to the problems. They all said that they'd enjoy playing in another game in the same setting with the same or different characters.

Scott and I are cranky with each other. Several things went wrong last night in terms of things that needed doing that should have been done sooner. The final disaster was that Scott had to drive to work at 10:30 p.m. to set his out-of-office email message. He'd spent about half an hour trying to set it from home and couldn't get the website to save the status change.

That meant that neither he nor I got to sleep until after midnight. We snapped at each other all morning. Scott felt that I was fussing over trivia, and I felt that I couldn't rely on him to get things done efficiently.

He's currently running a game of Flashpoint (a cooperative board game about firefighters).

Our current plan is for Cordelia to stay home while we're here since she's not interested in the convention. She's a bit tempted by the idea of staying in a hotel room simply because it's different, but she also likes the idea of having the house to herself.