Dominion, if you're not familiar with it, is a deck-building card game. You start off with a deck of ten cards; each turn you draw five cards, play them, and buy a card to add to your deck. Some cards give you the coins that you use to buy more cards; others do things like let you draw more cards or buy an extra card. Your ultimate goal is to ( Read more... )

I'm done with work for the year! I'm taking today and the rest of the week and all of next week off, so I won't be going back to work until January 4th. (Work has been encouraging us to take PTO, because nobody's been using it and it's messing up the budgets...)

I spent, golly, almost the last 3 weeks doing AGU online. Which was... fine, overall.

( Read more... )

We stayed home for Thanksgiving this year.

We'd been planning to anyway, but then the week before my Mom & Larry had a potential exposure from Leslie, who's working at a group home. Everyone's tests came back negative, happily, but we all agreed that it was best to just stay home.

I took Wednesday off, so had a full five-day break, which was nice ( Read more... )

Some time a while back (going on twenty years ago? Yikes!) I went to the Renaissance Fair down in Larkspur with some friends.

I decided to go in period costume.

Not the correct period, mind you. I went for late 1800s cowboy drag: boots, jeans, long-sleeve shirt, vest, jacket, cowboy hat. Except for the shirt, every stitch of it was black.

It was ( Read more... )

There are a number of books that I have stalled out on reading over the last several months, and I was worried that maybe the internet had crippled my attention span or something, but then I took a few days off, and during my downtime started re-reading some old favorites, and ordered some new book in the series I didn't have yet, and over the ( Read more... )

Things that have happened more than once over the last couple-few months of pandemic:

Online concerts. Two, both for Abney Park. The first was back at the end of May, the second just last night. They sell "tickets", but it's just donations through a fundraiser website; they livestream the show on youtube and post the link on their website. They ( Read more... )

We have started taking the cats for walks.

They don't get to roam freely; we put harnesses on them and walk them on a leash, because we're concerned for their safety (we have major streets nearby, plus we've seen coyotes and foxes right outside our door on a couple occasions), plus we don't want them murdering all the birds and other wildlife in a ( Read more... )

David V. is moving out.

More than two years ago (sometime in the spring of '18, IIRC) he called us to ask if he could stay in our guest room "for a week or two," which has turned into, well, two-plus years.

We have been trading a little light housekeeping for room, board, and a bit of spending money. More as a way to try to inject some dignity into ( Read more... )

I'm on a citizen advisory board for my city. It's been going for a while, but for a variety of reasons it's been hard to really get traction. Back in February, City Council came and met with us and told us how much they valued and wanted our input and that they wanted us to feel empowered and not roadblocked by process.

So when the protests ( Read more... )

Things I Have Managed To (Sort Of) Do Despite The Lockdown: A Post

Go To The Dentist: The dentist's office has opened back up, and it was time for me to get my teeth cleaned. They're enforcing social distancing, so I had to wear a mask and call them from my car, then wait until they said it was okay to come into the building. Extra masks on the ( Read more... )