November 26-27: Sleep Fail, Cooking, and SoloRPGs

 It's Wednesday, November 27, and I am exhausted. I have "only" 80,000 words left to go on the 250k quest. I don't want to stop now when I'm two-thirds through and finally on track instead of running behind, as I have been for the last 29 days. But even the prospect of dictating word spam feels like too much work. 

Partly it's because I didn't sleep well last night. When I got up to go bed, around 11:30PM, Lyric wanted to go outside. So I let her out. I went to bed but couldn't sleep. My left arm was mad at existence and no position was comfortable for it. I'm not sure why. Possibly it doesn't like the aerobics core workout anymore. I used to do it every other day but it's been very rare the last several weeks, because I've been walking for exercise instead. I eventually fell asleep, around 12:30AM. Randomly woke at 3:15AM, so I let Lyric in, opened her food bowl, and went back to bed. Lyric wanted to snuggle when she came to join me, which was nice, and then she didn't want to stop snuggling. For hours. The problem with this is that I have a very hard time sleeping when someone is touching me. I love cuddling when I'm awake but if I'm trying to sleep it doesn't work nearly as well. Lyric resting on my feet or leaning against a leg is all right, but Lyric snuggled against my torso/on top of me: not so much. I eventually dozed off again, and woke around 6AM to find her still pressed against my back. I think she left after the second time I rolled over. I fell back to sleep, woke at 8AM, lay there thinking about sleeping more, and then remembered that V is getting back to their routine and therefore might be streaming.

I checked Twitch on my phone and lo, they were streaming! I got out of bed to make breakfast and watch the stream. 

I made a honey puff pancake (just websearch for it if you're curious) to use up more of the eggs before they go bad.  I feel like everything in my kitchen is now sticky and smells of honey. I'm not sure why. The pancake had finished baking and I'd eaten my usual "one third per meal" of it by the time the stream finished. 

After the stream, I stared at my computer, trying to convince myself to do a thing. Any thing. Eventually, I fixed the signature block issue on today's Apothecaria and got it posted. Then I went back to bed and failed to nap. I just lay there, alternately playing with my phone and trying to sleep, for 90 minutes.

At 11:30, I gave up and went to check if Lyric wanted to come in for lunch (yes, and now she probably wants to go outside but not badly enough to go outside if I go directly to the door to let her out. More "if I'm standing around in the vicinity of the door for 20 minutes, she will eventually decide she wants to go out." I don't know why. I am in the reclining loveseat, ensconced in a blanket, and not inclined to get up to humor her.)  I made a Coke float and sat down to write this. 

Around 2PM, I lay down for second attempt at nap and this time succeeded. Telnar had called while I was napping, so I called him back. We talked for quite a while, ninety minutes. We were winding down at around an hour, but I gave the conversation a second wind by griping about the stock market doing well. My money is 100% invested in stocks but the stock market being overvalued annoys me anyway. It just means the market will have to correct at some point and probably get a hangover and a recession and yuck. And no, "the market is overvalued" doesn't mean "so you should sell stocks/short stocks/any other market-timing based action." "The market is overvalued and will have to correct sometime" does not mean that I can predict when that "sometime" is. There's a great quote on the subject: "markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." (Coined by A. Gary Shilling, most likely, though it  gets attributed to more-famous economists because people prefer attributing pithy sayings to someone they've already heard of.) 

I called my mother after that and spoke with her briefly while she was waiting for pizza delivery. I told her I would call back tomorrow so now I have to remember to call back tomorrow.

While I was on the phone, I paced around the house as usual, so I counted that as exercise and showered. In the shower, I had more ideas for the soloRPG I'd been doing via dictation. So I dictated those after the shower, then went back to this entry.

I still need to illustrate tomorrow's Apothecaria. 

Tuesday:

I'd forgotten to illustrate an Apothecaria on Monday, so first thing on Tuesday morning, I illustrated one and posted it.

I also decided to try using dictation to play a SoloRPG. I went to itch.io to look at my enormous pile of unplayed SoloRPGs. Itch.io regularly runs "bundles" that contain hundreds or thousands of games and cost $5-$20, often to benefit nonprofits. I bought the "Solo But Not Alone 3" bundle for $10 to get Apothecaria, and so I have another 100+ SoloRPGs that came with it. One item from it was "Solo But Not Alone 3 Glossary", a spreadsheet from the signup process. I think it lists everything from the bundle. I downloaded the spreadsheet and went through it, looking for items that  sounded interesting, since the spreadsheet had brief descriptions of most titles and browsing the bundle on itch.io often shows only the title and cover.

I downloaded "It Ends With You", which had the tagline of "you are a monster. some say you are destined to end this world- but you love it enough to save it." Sounds fun! It's a four-page game with a list of 20-ish prompts to respond to. No other mechanics: just respond to the prompts as you feel like it. I looked at the prompts, did not feel inspired, and moved on. The next game I looked at was "Everyone Deserves Shelter". Player is a hermit crab looking for shelter: draw one major arcana and one minor arcana each day from a tarot deck, to represent the people you meet along the way and what problems you might help them with. I was not very inspired by this, either. 

Rather than continuing to dig, I thought "what if I just mashed these ideas together? Make a monster and then have it meet people and see what happens, and draw tarot cards for inspiration for the people as necessary?" 

So I did this for a while, alternating between dictating notes for the game and dictating the text of the game. It worked okay-ish? I have an ending in mind for the story but I want to add some more people before I get to it, and haven't fleshed the remaining people out enough to add them. We'll see if I actually get to it. 

I hadn't slept very well on the night of the 25th, either, so yesterday I also tried and failed to take a nap before noon. I do not like this pattern. I had grocery delivery scheduled between 2-6PM on the 26th, so I had to wait for it to arrive before I could attempt a nap again. I squeezed in an exercise video and a  shower before the grocery window started, though. 

I'd wanted to make sure I got groceries before the Thanksgiving crush, which worked out fine. I ordered ingredients for lasagna, including my mom's spaghetti sauce. It's base is tomato soup and cream of mushroom soup and it doesn't taste like marinara, which is why I like it. My plan is to make lasagna tomorrow for Thanksgiving. It's not at all Thanksgiving-ish but I don't like Thanksgiving foods that much and I love lasagna with my mother's sauce. And it's just me, so why not? I will be making way too much. I might even have to freeze some. We'll see.

Groceries arrived at 4PM-ish, so I had time for a nap before CoffeeQuills and took one, this time succeeding.  I wrote some Apothecaria during Coffee's stream, and illustrated an entry so I'd have one to post on Wednesday morning.

Oh, and I remembered to expel an inactive member from my TIme Princess society and contact someone from the waitlist. Who has now declined to join so I need to contact the next person on the waitlist.

Monday and Sunday have been lost to the mists of time. I did a lot of dictating and working on notes, mostly. Some writing Apothecaria, but it's slowed down as I near the end.