APR 19

2024

Friday: I woke up at a pretty reasonable time. There was no construction on our street today, so after coordinating the day's schedule, I ran some errands. I went to the emergency vet, where they returned Koop's and Cliff's remains, and I got lunch at Subway. I had a long talk with David while sitting in the car in the Acme parking lot. At the store, I didn't need to pick up any ingredients, since I was just going to make spaghetti for dinner, but I bought salad supplies for the first time in almost a year.

Back home, I did the dishes while watching a video of a couple of card gamers testing each others' evaluation skills. Julie gave me a vodka-infused sauce to use for the spaghetti, but I didn't notice any difference in the flavor. We ate while watching the latest episode of Ghosts (which tried to confront the idea of suicide leading to regret) and two more episodes of Poirot, though these episodes were kind of unmemorable. Poirot himself is the only recurring character lately, so without Captain Hastings or Miss Lemon or Chief Inspector Japp, the strength of the show depends a lot more on how interesting the suspects and victims and local law enforcement are, and the suspects/victims/law enforcement in these episodes were not sufficient to make up the difference. While that was going on, I played more Bombe while lying with my hand sanwiched between a sleeping John and the comforter bag.

Once Julie went to bed, I treated the cats with more of these lickable treats, and then came in here to post this update. Work resumes tomorrow, after which I'll be crunching on Moondrop Isle.

IS THE COUGH STILL HERE? YES, FOR NOT MUCH LONGER I THINK

...Unknown to me at the time that I posted this update, this is the day that my parents' dog Maisie was hit by a car and killed.

2023

Wednesday: planned to go by the store before work, but I couldn't convince myself to dislodge the settled cats and get out of bed. Call volume is starting to get more reasonable, though follow-ups from earlier this week continue to annoy. A trio of new hires who were about to finish training listened in on a few of my calls. After work, I finished my salad, played a bit of Hearthstone (in which I lost one Tavern Brawl against a Pogo-Hopper rogue, and switched to an Annoying Fan deck to win my next three Brawls).

I then found myself revisiting Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing, which is something I've been dipping into over the last year. I finally broke out Trizbort to make a better map, and before I stopped for the night, I'd mapped 60 rooms and made major progress. I've discovered things that leave me with just the barest hint of dread, which is a little unexpected for such a light and personable game.