shannon_a - Dreamwidth Studios
My favorite genre of board game is increasingly the creative game. You're not just moving around a set board, trying to maximize efficiency, and you're not forever auctioning (though all of that can be fun). No, you're building something, and though there are rules for how you build, there is still a lot of openness. I wouldn't classify CATAN in the category, though it's close. But there are tight…
I used to journal with at least some regularity, but I hardly ever do any more. This has been part of a continuing trend since we moved to Hawaii. Obviously, things change with a big move like that, and the lack of journaling I think comes in two parts, both related to the fact that I now write full-time, including writing on my own projects half-time. First, that means that after I've done 7-8…
Another play on Sunday, "The Play that Goes Wrong". It was pretty much a less-funny, less-clever "Noises Off", so the fact that the Kauai Community Players chose to show it a year or so after "Noises Off" is a bit flabbergasting. I had a suspicion of how things were going to go when the show started 10 minutes late because cast members were walking through the audience talking about their lost dog…
We finished our winter Sondheim trilogy last Friday with "Assassins" (having previously seen "Into the Woods" and "Sunday Afternoons in the Park with George" while in California for Christmas, which when you put them all together is oddly enough Sondheim's main work of the 80s). I wasn't sure of the structure: presidential assassins sitting around talking about themselves. But it turned out to be…
Bad night last night. I couldn't get to sleep. And then I woke up and realized only a few hours had gone by, so I stumbled out to take some more melatonin. Then something I had to eat yesterday didn't agree with me, leaving me awake feeling sick from 3.30-4.30. Then I was up again at 6.30. So, pretty bad's night sleep. It was also raining and storming every time I woke up. Forecasters have been…
GRAPEFRUIT DIET. About two and a half weeks ago, K. and I went on a diet. It's not actually a grapefruit diet, but rather a gut balance diet. The goal is to "reset our gut microbiomes" to have more good flora and less bad flora, hopefully to improve my digestive difficulties that have been getting worse for years. Is it just pseudoscience? I hope not! It was recommended to me by someone who said…
I: AVE MARIA We've now had our new Kia for almost a week. We actually haven't taken it out much, but then we don't drive a lot. So she came home with us on Tuesday and has been out to the golf course and the ramen restaurant since. We of course needed a name for the new car. She's a sparkly white car, and so my first suggestion was Emma, after one of my favorite X-Men characters, the White Queen.…
I find it entirely bizarre, but there is now a new car parked in our garage. And by new car, I actually mean *new* car, and if you'd asked me yesterday I would have said that I didn't ever expect to buy a new car in my life. But, I dunno, maybe the car market is in a weird place right now post-COVID and post-tariffs. Or maybe Hawaii is just a weird car market. But it made sense! So we made a…
Today Julie the Benz went in to get her "check engine" light checked and it was sadly bad news. The check engine light actually was not a big deal. It's the engine thermostat. Which would be somewhere between $500 & $1000 to replace, I expect, with standard Benz markup. Irritatingly, this is the second time it's gone bad. The bigger problem is that I asked them to look at Julie's rough ride, which…
My last day in California was spent (shocker) gaming! With my old Thursday night crew. We got to try out _Seven Wonders Dice_, a brand-new game that I purchased during a brief break on Monday. I'm always looking for more 6-7 player games that are actually good, mainly for familial gatherings. This qualified, though I'm uncertain if it's actually simpler than my standard, _Between Two Cities_,…
We are heading home *tomorrow*! -- I haven't really written about our AirB&B. Over the last few years I've shuttled back and forth between hotels and AirB&Bs. When I was in Köln for the last Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, I had a particularly terrible AirB&B (no AC, big-south-facing windows, serious noise pollution from a biergarten downstairs, very tiny), followed by a great hotel in…
A few years ago we expanded our days-in-Berkeley (sometimes Oakland) from three to four, mainly to make sure K. had plenty of time to visit with all of her friends. Meanwhile, I do more efficient visiting of friends because I can meet them two or three at a time for gaming. That means that I often end up with a day free in the East Bay. Last year I went and saw _Wicked_, which wasn't available in…
As I already wrote, Monday was our travel day, and the only thing that I didn't write about was its annoying end. We arrived in San Jose right on time at 9.30,pm but then had to wait almost an hour for our luggage. I can't blame Alaskan (Hawaiian) too much, because they had a flight from Honolulu that arrived an hour late, just before us, and they probably had minimal ground crew that time of…
We were up at 6am to make sure we had plenty of time to be ready & settled before we headed to the airport for our yearly trip to San Martin & Berkeley. But, not a lot to do this morning other than get our final stuff together and tell the cats, who were unnerved about us being up so early, that all was OK. (All was not OK.) -- I had thought we were going to have to go in early because I couldn't…
I haven't written to my personal journal since October 12th, and that's because of the crowdfunding. When last I wrote, I'd done five interviews in a week, and I was ex-haust-ed. Yep, more exhausted now. (Or at least I was a week ago when the crowdfunding closed). But the crowdfunding for Designers & Dragons: Origins went very well. We closed out at just under a quarter of a million dollars, which…
I've done five interviews in the last week and a half. Just more than a week, actually, as the first one was a week ago Friday and the last one this Friday. All of course for Designers and Dragons Origins, my new four books of history that crowdfund in just more than a week ( https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/0477a26f-723e-4d2f-8f11-74cdc007daf1/landing ). There was one text interview for…
I had been fearful that we'd spend the whole week stressed over Elmer's transition to his new home and how well he was eating and such. And that's pretty much what happened. But, the reports coming out of Boston continue to be great. He's eating wet food. He's grazing dry food & emptying his plate. He's playing with toys. He's following his new cat-dad around and talking to him. I am pretty…
I had one last fear for Elmer's move: that he wasn't going to eat properly once he got to Boston. Unfortunately my fears have continued to prove true since the move, at least the reasonable ones. I thought we were likely to get screwed at the drop-off, that no one was likely to show up at 4.30. Ding-ding. And I thought Elmer was going to have troubles eating upon his arrival. Ding. So today I woke…
Not to bury the lede: Elmer made it to Massachusetts this morning and is still pretty scared at his new home, but at least wandering about, even to somewhat open spaces like shelves. He hadn't eaten yet, which is my last big stressor, as cats can hurt themselves if they go more than a couple of days without eating and it's been a day and a half for Elmer at this point. But hopefully he'll chill…
Yesterday, I stayed home rather than going out hiking or biking because I wanted to spend some time with Elmer (and didn't want him locked up alone downstairs for his next-to-last day in Hawaii). I'd hoped to clean up my office while I hung out with him, which involved getting my filing cabinet back together (it's been increasingly falling apart in different ways) and then doing a year's worth of…
I woke up this morning and thought, "Elmer should be in Boston now. I need to make sure he's OK." But I was of course five days premature. Kimberly and I had talked about what we're going to do on Monday night, when Elmer should be hitting Boston around midnight our time and be getting to his new house by 2am or so. So it had entered my subconsciousness and confused my brain when it tried to wake…
We got the rest of our paperwork and stickers and such from the pet moving company yesterday for our big move of Elmer to the East Coast. I have no idea why we got mail delivery on Labor Day, but it's not the first time we've gotten mail delivery on a holiday here, and it was very welcome because there were PROBLEMS. The main problem was that the pet delivery company had sent us various bits of…
I feel like we've been dwelling in limbo for the last two and a half weeks. We got back from our anniversary trip to Oahu and we almost immediately had an offer of a new home for Elmer. Kimberly has been taking care of almost all the logistics (with the support of a pet moving company who services Hawaii and regularly moves pets to Europe, so we know they should be able to get him to the East…
So it looks like we are sending one of our beloved orangies, Elmer, to a new home. In Boston of all places. The reason is pretty simple: though he's terrific with people, a real cuddle-butt who lounges all over me and my laptop whenever I go down to my office in the morning, he's really bad with other cats. And we have two other cats. When he and Mango were little kits, they'd often wrassle, and…
A lazy yet exhausting final day on Oahu. We had another breakfast at Lulu's and got to look out over the beautiful Pacific Ocean one more time. Then we finished packing up our hotel room. The plan was to go to a museum today. We'd originally planned to go out to the Bishop Museum, but I was less then enthusiastic about hauling around our heavy gym bag of games and stuff, and Kimberly decided she'd…