April 27: Day 46
Things I have done today that I feel good about:
- Yoga after waking up
- One DuoLingo lesson while eating breakfast
- Remembered the production push & did it without panicking
- Took a break after working a couple hours and did another DuoLingo lesson
- Made ham salad & used up a leftover
- Started defrosting meat for dinner
- Ate some fruit
- Did work in small, manageable chunks
- Cooked dinner, using up a leftover and some soon-to-expire green beans; also: delicious
- Called my cousin for his birthday, and was serenaded. I'm not sure that's how it works …
April 23: Day 42
April 20: It was the year of shopping locally
Yesterday, Jakob was 5,555 days old (Jorj wrote a program to count). This means we survived every single one of those days, one day at a time. We made it through 2 ½ years of not sleeping, we can make it through months of quarantine.
Jakob suggested a bike ride yesterday, so we went up to Seventh Dimension and back, with detours on the way there (because I don't take the back roads) and back (ambulance sent us to unknown back roads). Felt great afterward, despite feeling exhausted before.
In today's quarantine effort, I shopped locally, yet on line:
- Seventh Dimension Games: MtG pre-release packs (2) and Quirky Circuits They are delivering in the Jenkintown area, and tried out an ingenious pick-up system over the weekend.
- Gift certificate to Deluxe Salon, 2209 South Street, 'cause I already need a cut! Seriously considering getting highlights, especially if this lasts long enough that I buy multiple gift cards.
- Books from local stores! I went through Bookshop, and found Open Book Bookstore in Elkins Park. I picked up two books by Erica Armstrong Dunbar: She Came to Slay and Never Caught; Adan Jerreat-Poole's debut The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass because I saw a good review; Miki Kendall's Hood Feminism, because I've followed her on Twitter, and she's really opened my eyes; Zoraida Córdova's Bruja Born and Rebecca Roanhorse's Storm of Locusts, both the second in series I'd started, loved, and missed the follow-on novels to.
- Set up a recurring donation to Philabundance. It would be nice if we had a social structure to support our people, with the most fortunate helping the least, as Jesus instructed us, but apparently that's socialism.
- Plus a recurring donation to Pro Publica which seems to be one of the few sites actually reporting on what Italy and China learned from their epidemics.
April 18: It was the year of sublimation
Awful anxiety dreams continue, despite enjoying two happy hours last night: one with my department, one with Jorj's. Up very late, drank a sonic screwdriver and then a time lady (sonic screwdriver made with gin, very similar to a white lady).
To combat anxiety, I've been playing Elder Scrolls: Blades on the phone. Jorj found it, it looked interesting, I gave it a try. As a phone game, it's very, very casual. Nothing (so far) has taken longer than about twenty minutes, and can be stopped at almost any time. Easy to open up, do a bit of fighting, then get back to work. The main storyline is the queen's agents accidentally exploded your hometown in a dick-waving contestj while trying to collect taxes. You return to the demolished town after the events of $BACKSTORY, and set about rebuilding the town, earning money through fight to rebuild, eventually working with the queen to untangle the undead problem her people caused, finding the MacGuffin, and avoiding consequences of your $BACKSTORY.
I'm playing my character, Opal, as someone very tired from all the $BACKSTORY, who just wants a nice sweet bun and a cup of wine, but now has to clean up the town. She worries about the fire hazards in dungeons from all though lit candles, and wishes she could bring a shovel to clear out some of the rubble. Her favorite quest is rescuing villagers. Because that's how I feel right now. I'm tired, and I want to sit and do fun things, like sewing buttons or not thinking about the moral implications of feudalism.
Opal is a Khajiit, that is, a cat-person, named after Jet and Onyx's sister kitten. One might expect my home town to be full of cat people. One would be wrong. One would be disappointed but not surprised that it is mostly full of white people, with mostly men in leadership positions. Is it really that hard to have the villagers' heads be random combinations of whatever race you chose? Non-human villagers remain non-human, except the ones that match your race become human. The queen's an orc and stays an orc, which would make the sexist, anti-orc prejudice … interesting.
There's a certain amount of speciesism that really is rooted in actual racism and xenophobia. Certain species (goblins) are bad because they're … doing goblin things? These humanoids are "monsters" and therefore bad: kill them. The NPC giving out the kill-all-the-goblin quests at one point says, "The only good goblin is a dead goblin," which, wow, you know this game was written by white people.
Of course, that's the usual problem with combat games: there's no negotiation because the point of the game is to tap the screen really fast and make the problem go away, getting more stuff that lets you tap the screen in perhaps different ways.
There are some nods to puzzles (find the secret rooms!), although that requires noticing the correct shiny thing, and not so much logic. There's an archeology theme, and it would be really cool to make translating the runes into a quest. A couple quests allow the player to choose to talk or negotiate, or go straight into combat. Opal wants everyone to go back home and take up spider-breeding or needlework, so that she can put her exquisite silver battleaxe of frost over the mantle, drink some wine, and complain about the weather. The only stabbing she'll do is into a taught piece of fabric.
The town is billed as customizable, and for a mobile game, it really is. Three types of house buildings, three skins of buildings (timber, stone, and "castle"), three shops to provide equipment, and one to provide so many visual add-ons of varying sizes. What I really want is my bakery. And my butcher. As you do jobs to rescue people and build more houses, the streets become more crowded and each townsperson has a backstory (and sometimes have a small part in quests). There is a baker walking around my town! One of the houses I built turning into a bakery when she returned would have been so cool!
It's not too much to ask for shops to open up as you rescue villagers, is it? The player picks which existing house now has a shop on the first floor, and the town looks even niftier. The skin is just a sign or maybe a changed first floor.
- bakery
- butcher
- basket weaver
- spinster (after the spider quest)
- tavern
- glassblower (close to my heart)
- tanner
- candlemaker — all those candle have to come from somewhere
- assassin
- cooper (she's walking around town too)
- wine shop
- seamstress or tailor
- barber
- cobbler (also close to my heart)
- potter
Plus I need a temple to devote to my choice of god.
Bethesda, call me!
Equipment is truly customizable. Not only can you build equipment of any material the smith can work (everything has levels), you can enchant and refine it. When I needed an axe that could deal frost damage (spider quest), I made the best, most damage-dealing axe I could, then had it enchanted to also deal frost damage.
If you're playing, come join our guild, Unicorns of a Certain Age! Guilds let you trade materials with other members. We don't do much else, although we could maybe battle each other in the arena. Send an e-mail or text saying "Opal sent you" and your character name for me to recognize who you are when you ask to join.
It's really helping me not think about every Republican in the Pennsylvania legislature (wh o have a majority thanks to gerrymandering) voting to end the shelter-in-place order. Fortunately, they don't have enough of a majority to override Governor Wolf's inevitable (I fucking hope) veto. Education Secretary Betsey DeVos (sister of the owner of the largest mercenary corporation fighting our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) has been funding protests to "re-open" the economy. And the idiot CIO of Penn Health System (aka, my boss' boss' boss' boss — maybe an extra layer of boss depending on how you count) is saying that people have told him they want to come back to the office, and he misses seeing our smiling faces. I don't now how you can rise to a C-level position in the second largest hospital system in the fifth largest city in the country and have so little understanding of epidemiology, so much hubris as to think you know better than epidemiologists, and so little feeling for your fellow person. At the very, very best, he's mistaken people wanting to return to normalcy and not trying to teach their children while trying to work in the same moment, which would include going into the office, for people wanting to ride public transportation. Fuck that shit.
April 14: It was the year of late taxes
Outside of really awful anxiety dreams — family dying — it's been a good morning so far. Woke up early due to my anxiety dreams, play Elder Scrolls: Blades for an hour, actually went for a run in the sun, pan fried two arepas con queso for breakfast, getting work done this morning too.
April 12: One month. Happy Easter?
Did another tele-yoga class and baked hot cross buns and orange-cardamom muffins yesterday, and not much else, especially after Jorj found a mobile fighting/dungeon crawler based on Elder Scrolls, and we played that all last night. So today was laundry and cleaning and Spanish and brunch with Suzy and Keith and Illy. And now my brain is mush. My brain is so mush, I can't remember what Jorj told me five minutes ago.
I managed yoga every morning (except today, because I am stiff from doing half moon pose yesterday, when I learned my thigh pain is probably due to overcompensating for the "healed" sprained ankle). The converter for using self-rising flour is up. There's now a full inventory of our food (and booze).
In news-news, the Cheeto in Chief continues the Republican plan of killing off the post office, because he knows that mail voting will be necessary if quarantine continues, and without mail voting he expects to win.
And, oh yes, sometime last week photos went up on the March page. Too big, and the site will be supporting small, independent software developers to get a tool to resize, reformat, and watermark in one step. The cookies arrived for my uncle, and he was very pleased. No news.
April 8
Mornings have been, not chaotic, but haphazard. Without needing to get the teenager on the bus, we've slept in an extra hour. But that means there's no hour to shower and eat before starting to work at 7 (and being done at 3 or having time for a mid-day bike or run). So I've been working in my bathrobe for an hour, before dashing into the shower an hour or so later (before my first meeting). Then I wind up working until 4 and not exercising anyhow. This morning was operation Just Get Up at Seven and Take an Hour to Get Ready and Do Some Fast Yoga. And I did it!
April 7: It was the year we walked everywhere
Drinking a double negroni just to finish off the Thursday gin, after a two-mile walk around the neighborhood with Jorj.
April 5: It was the year everyone sewed
I sewed two masks today! I decided to do it, and I did it! Which is such an accomplishment in these days. These are pleated masks with ties, not fitted, not elastic The stash of fabric remnants should accomodate multiple masks. Leftover bias tap will accomodate another two masks, and there was a small roll of who-knows-how-old elastic, which has sold out across the country.
We've done a lot of socializing this weekend: School Happy Hour Thursday night, where I introduced myself as a beer o Zoom; then cocktails with biking buddies Melissa and John. Friday was Zoom happy hour with both my department and Jorj's. Yesterday was an hour and a half yoga class with Euphoria Yoga in Woodstock. Today we walked with Chris and his dog Gracie in Curtis. I'm positively voluble on calls. Clearly getting a bit a cabin fever.
Now we're hearing that the federal government is confiscating medical equipment directly ordered by the states, so that it can be given to distributors so that states can bid against each other. I am so fucking angry that people voted for this monster and now good people are going to die.
Mary still wants to hold Easter dinner, which can only mean she's not taking this seriously. It's that we're special attitude that white people have. We're not dirty and infected like those other people, so it's fine that we get together.
The weekend finished with powering through to bake banana-chocolate-chip bread with the three frozen bananas from the bottom of the freezer. They were so old two were nearly flat. But it was enough! For Jakob there is also a cup of chips (and because King Arthur delivered the three pounds of chips).
April 1: Day 20
Jorj could taste sweet this morning. We are far less worried.
Still having hot flushes here.
I continue running (and am trying not to feel guilty at not exercising every day) to get my lungs stronger to come through any illness better.
Jake fried rice for the first time, under our tutelage. One step closer to moving on campus. Fried rice is the new favorite dish. Freshly fried rice for lunch makes the days better, so it's been a weekly (or more) occurence here. It's so nice to have something that I can make that almost always makes Jakob happy: Surprise! Fried rice for lunch. Mom-made rice will continue, but now he's empowered!
Jorj will be ordering groceries for his mom, who is 78, doesn't drive, and has no Internet. Or I'll be going to the grocery store and leaving it on her front stoop. Eeesh.
As long as I avoid the news, evenings feel perfectly normal. I'm writing over at Christmas Baking. Trying get some software installed for CB to get back to food writing. Thinking about a home programming project. Normalcy feels weird.