April 24-28: Crafting, Unpacking, and The Blue Prince

 Thursday, April 24

I didn't sleep well on Wednesday night, and spent much of Thursday morning trying to nap. My napping efforts were interrupted by my mother, who planned to order pizza for lunch and wanted to ask what I'd like. I picked something out and lay back down. My mom ordered around noon and the pizza didn't arrive until almost 1PM. I ate up in my room, like usual. I would feel antisocial for always eating in my room, except that my mother always eats in her office and my father always eats in front of his TV in the living room. 

So okay, it's still antisocial, but I come by it honestly.

I finished eating a little after 1:30 and realized, oops, this was about when I'd meant to leave to see Sophrani. She had kindly suggested a time frame of 2-3PM instead of a specific time for me to arrive, so I was in the range when I arrived around 2:30PM. Despite my conversation with my mother on Wednesday night, I took my own car again and drove very carefully, staying at or under the speed limit. My father's car is fine, but I'm more comfortable in my own. Also, I don't have to adjust the seat or mirrors on it.

Sophrani had a big quilling project she wanted to work on, but she decided to do something small and unambitious as a warm-up because she hasn't done any quilling since December. She spent a little while in her office, picking out a design to base her project on.

I started by re-working my favorite of the pictures I'd done of Caliper, the goblin protagonist in Be That Way. I've drawn her four times now, trying to get her right. My favorite depicted her in an evening dress from late in the book, but I wanted to use it as an illustration relatively early. I want to have an illustration of Caliper, specifically, because "goblin" covers a wide range of shapes/looks. I drew pictures of all the protagonists, though. Anyway, I changed Caliper's outfit and the background to be appropriate to the early scenes.

With that done, I had more-or-less finished pictures of all four protagonists from Be That Way, and could finally draw something else. I did a portrait of Delphia, the protagonist of the romance soloRPG I have poked at briefly. 

Around the same time I finished the portrait of Delphia, Sophrani did a final flower for her quilling bouquet and pronounced her work for the day done. She invited me to get dinner with her and Kage, so I hung out until Kage got back from his dentist appointment. Kage had some crafting of his own to do: powder-coating a lightsaber hilt. He masked off the parts he didn't want coated (mainly the interior) and put it in a smoker (dedicated to this purpose) to bake.

Once it was sufficiently baked, he turned off the smoker and we went to a little Japanese restaurant for dinner. I ordered chirashi for dinner, and discovered a problem with ordering chirashi: it does not make good leftovers so I have to eat it all in one sitting. This restaurant served a ginormous portion and it was too much food for me to eat at once. I ate it all anyway because I can't bear to let delicious food go to waste.

Afterwards, we went to the nearby grocery store to get soda and a box of cereal. 

Kage: "Shall I move the car closer to the store?"

Me: "It's in the same plaza; we can just walk. Although we'll have to carry back whatever we get."

Sophrani: "We're just getting soda and cereal. It's fine."

We left the grocery with soda, cereal, a gallon of distilled water, and three bags of Other Stuff. 

Kage: "This always happens."

Kage: "It's not too late for me to bring the car around."

Sophrani: "There's three of us. We can manage."

Me: "I'm sure we can make it. Possibly with some complaining along the way."

We didn't complain much en route to the car, though. I found the episode amusing because I've been doing either grocery pickup or delivery for the last eight years. So while I still remember getting a bunch of extra stuff every time at the store, It's been so long since I actually watched the phenomenon. 

I went home soon after we got back to their place, because overeating was putting me into a food coma and I didn't want to end up too tired to drive. 

At home, I finished dailies in Time Princess, took an ibuprofen because my legs hurt, and crashed early, around 11PM. For the first time since my stuff arrived on the 14th, I didn't unpack any boxes on this day.

Friday, April 25

Despite getting to bed early, I was tired for much of Friday and did some napping. I did get up in time to watch Veo stream a new game, "The Blue Prince". They were enchanted by the game and streamed for two hours while playing it, instead of their usual ninety minutes. You can only save the game at the end of an in-game day, which is awkward given that it took two hours to finish a day. It's not clear to me what the "save" in this game does, since the house resets at the end of each day and you also lose your inventory. The game doesn't keep any digital history for you; it encourages players to use a paper notebook to take notes. Presumably saving does something, because Tufty noted there was a save-game bug on one platform.

To make up for unpacking zero boxes on Thursday, I unpacked three on Friday. I ate my leftover pizza for lunch. CoffeeQuills' stream started at 7PM. I had decided earlier to skip dinner because I'd had a big lunch, but by 7PM, I regretted this decision. I made eggs-in-a-hole for dinner. Once I'd finished eating, I forced myself to actually work on writing fiction for a change. I did not write a lot -- 400ish words -- but this was an improvement over the zero  words I've done on most days this month. Seriously, I'm at about 2000 words added to The Secret Dragon in the entire month so far. I haven't been writing the soloRPG, either -- about 1000 words for the month to date.

It's been a busy month and I'm not gonna beat myself up over it, but it makes me antsy to not be writing at all like this.

After the stream, I remembered that I hadn't checked the mail in a few days and my mother's driver's license was supposed to have arrived (I have "Informed Delivery" from USPS, which means they email images in the morning of any envelopes that should arrive that day.) The mail also had the gas bill from my old house, which USPS had said would arrive on Tuesday but which still hadn't been there when I checked Wednesday. I'd already guessed at what the bill would be and paid it, and was pleased to see that my guess had been just a little over so I didn't need to send more money. I put the envelope with my mother's license on her computer keyboard, since she was already in bed and I figured she'd be sure to notice it there.

Around 11:15PM, my brother M texted because he'd gotten a notification that a "new device" had logged in to our father's Google account at 8:30PM. Google often counts "this device was logged out and then logged back in" as a "new device". My father was asleep now, but had been awake at 8:30PM, and it seemed likely to me that either his TV or his tablet had logged him out for whatever reason, and so he'd logged back in and triggered the alert. My mother's TV had done an update earlier in the week that logged her out and made her log in again. 

Since (a) my father was asleep now and (b) likely would not remember if he'd had to log in a earlier anyway, M wanted to investigate further. So M wanted to log in to my father's account, which meant he had to look up my father's password and then I had to authenticate M's login from my father's phone. This process turned out to take 45 minutes, because M has the world's most sluggish laptop. He rebooted once during the process and the reboot alone took 20 minutes. Opening a spreadsheet was another 10 minutes. My desktop is ancient too but it's not this slow. o_o We didn't start the log in process until after midnight. I played Time Princess while waiting for M's laptop to complete basic tasks.  Around 1AM, M had identified the login as "a Linux device" in the state my parents and I live in. The "Linux device" was weird, because Android devices are identified as Android and we don't have a LInux computer here. We figured it was the smart TV, though, given the location and the need for two-factor authentication to log in. 

Once we'd finished, I went to bed.

Saturday, April 26

I woke up around 6:30AM.  and decided to get up around 7AM, eat breakfast, and nap later in the morning. Around 9:30 AM, I was ready to go back to sleep. I let my mother know I was gonna nap, in case she wanted anything and also so she wouldn't wake me up while I was napping. She wanted to go out for a little walk with me sometime today, but no urgency on it.

I read for a bit until I fell asleep. I started a new comic on Tapas.io: "Sigrid." It's a returnee fantasy romance manwha. I read a lot of these, but this one struck me because the female protagonist was a knight, and she's still an adult after returning: she was 25 at the time of her unjust death and goes back to when she was 20. The female protagonists in romance fantasy manwha are most often noncombatants. Those who do any fighting are more likely to have magic powers than armor and a sword. I've seen two with melee combatant heroines, but I didn't stick with either of them (one where I got to the point of disliking most of the case, and the other because I detested the male romantic lead). Sigrid seems much more promising, although I hate the male romantic lead in this one, too. Sigh. Not as much as the ML in the one I dropped, though. Tapas was running a "first 20 episodes already unlocked" promotion for "Sigrid", so I read the first 21 episodes over the course of the day and still liked it, which is generally a good sign.

Around noon, I got up from my nap and checked to see if my mom wanted to walk now. She was eating lunch, so I made my own lunch and ate it. I checked again around 1PM and she was napping. At 2PM, I checked a third and she was ready. I got dressed, then sat down on the stairs to wait for my mother to finish dressing. Then moved to sit in the living room as it became clear this would take a while.

When she was ready, my mom went out the front door, throwing the door wide open to maneuver her walker outside. Lyric took this as an invitation to saunter out. I followed my cat, who did not go far or attempt to evade me, although she did complain when I picked her up. My mother took a seat in her walker while I put the cat back inside. Lyric stuck near the front door, waiting for it to open again, so I decided to go out through the garage instead. The garage opens into the laundry room, so the laundry room serves as a catlock to keep the cat from getting into the garage, with the garage as additional catlock to keep her from the outside. In this case, Lyric was so fixated on the front door that she didn't even try to follow me into the laundry room.

My mother has little stamina and walks slowly; she took four breaks over the course of walking four houses up the street and then back down to our house. I paced around her or in front of her while she sat, to keep my feet from hurting by standing still, but I didn't try to make the outing good exercise for me. We got back to the house around 4PM.

I made a point of making dinner around 6PM so that it wouldn't interfere with Coffee's stream, and then discovered that Coffee wasn't streaming tonight. D'oh. 

Instead of being productive on my own, I spent most of the evening reading the new book in Time Princess so I could finish the event for it before the event ended. I went to sleep a little after 1AM.

Sunday, April 27

I woke around 6:30AM again, but went back to sleep after an hour instead of getting up, and then got up around 9AM. When I went down to get breakfast, I asked my father if I could move some stuff around in his giant walk-in closet so I could have a section. He was fine with that.

In the late morning, I cleared the most inconvenient area of the closet (behind the door, so you have to close the door while inside to get to it). My mother had told me it was my father's closet, but the clothes in this section were all my mother's. Stuff she seldom wears anymore; all the clothing she wears is in her office. She didn't much care if it was moved, either.

After moving her stuff to other areas, I opened a wardrobe box and carried clothes down to hang in the closet. Like my mother, it's clothes I seldom wear, and mostly cosplay stuff.  Lyric was fascinated by the open wardrobe box and went to some trouble to climb into it and investigate. 

In mid-afternoon, I asked my mother if she wanted to go for a walk. She grimaced. "Give me another 30 minutes?"

"Sure. I'll be upstairs, just call me when you want to go."

She did much better this time, taking only three breaks and shorter ones, as well. The afternoon was more pleasant, too: it wasn't as hot in the sun and there was a pleasant breeze. Birds were singing in the trees, too. Lovely day. We were out for maybe half an hour.

During Coffee's stream, I did some journaling. Oh, and some editing on The Jewel-Strewn Night. I'd finished the PWA pass, but there were a few other alterations I wanted to make before I declared it done. I have declared it done now and it's ready for first readers. 

It's Monday as I write this and I have only the vaguest memory of yesterday. I didn't get to sleep until ridiculously late, around 2:30AM, for no good reason. 

After I went to bed, Lyric decided to scramble up one of the tall, narrow boxes, perhaps thinking that she could hop into a box on the other side as she had with the wardrobe boxes. Instead, she tipped it over and it crashed to the floor. Cat: unharmed. Box looked fine too. Oh well.

Veo was doing a bonus stream of The Blue Prince at 9AM my time, so I told my internal alarm clock to wake me at 8:50AM. "No earlier. I want to get as much sleep as possible beforehand."

Monday, April 28

I woke at 4AM, looked at my phone, and told my body, "I feel like you're not even trying here." I went back to sleep, woke again around 6AM, did a little reading, and went back to sleep again. When I woke at 8AM, I gave up and got up after a little reading. I made breakfast and brought it up to my room, then played Race for the Galaxy until Veo's stream started.

The Blue Prince is not the sort of game I'd play, but it's fun to watch Veo stream it because they encourage their audience to speculate and figure puzzles out along with them (as long as you don't already know the solution from playing yourself or looking up answers or whatever). Partway in, I made a Google spreadsheet to take notes of things, and then shared it with the chat so they could make notes too. Jubal used a new tab of it to organize certain clues in a new way, which turned out to be very insightful, woohoo! I even managed to solve one puzzle before anyone else (this was purely a mechanical advantage; it was a very straightforward puzzle). 

Veo normally streams for 90 minutes. At 75 minutes, they finished Day 2. "I know we can't finish another day in the time left in stream, but I'm starting Day 3 anyway."

At 110 minutes, they finished Day 3. Veo: "Oh no, I'm so sad it's over. I want to do another day but it'd take another hour and a half."

Me: "Day 3 only took 35 minutes."

Veo: "But that's only because we got unlucky and it ended quickly."

Me: "Yes, but I also think the days take less time as you progress because you already know stuff about the game and don't have to spend time working it out."

Veo polled the chat to see if we all wanted to go another day, which of course we did. "Okay, one more day!" Day 4 began!

At 146 minutes, they finished Day 4. 

Veo: "..."

Veo: "Okay, one more day! Just so we can [redacted]. It'll be so quick. We've gotten so good!"

Me: *laughs out loud* 

All of chat: *jokes about Just One More [Turn/Day/Etc] in other games*

Veo: "I know and the days are SO LONG in this game, too."

At 210 minutes, Veo finished Day 5 and closed the stream, perhaps more because they were hungry and needed to make dinner than because they wanted to stop playing. 

I made lunch and played some RftG, then unpacked boxes. I decided to unpack all the tall, narrow boxes to prevent Lyric from toppling any of them again. One was for Lut's monitor and the other two held a few framed pictures each. I've been leaning framed artwork against a wall because I'm not sure how much art I have to hang and how much free wall space I'll have to hang it.

After carting the cardboard out to the garage, I decided to unpack the other two wardrobe boxes. This left my section of the closet crowded but not overflowing. Lyric wasn't quick enough to get a turn in the first wardrobe box I unpacked today, but she made a point of scrambling into the next one.

In the early 90s, I took figure drawing classes in college. The teacher had us use charcoal on 16"x24" paper, and I bought a gigantic portfolio case -- 24"x32" or something -- to lug them back and forth to class. That case was shoved at the back of the last wardrobe box. After I hauled it out, I went through it and weeded it down, dumping old sketches into recycling. I kept the ones that I liked and/or had sentimental value, then shoved the portfolio under my bed. 

I left the last wardrobe box up a little longer so Lyric could play with it, but still broke it down before the end of the day and took it out to the garage. I've broken down most of the emptied boxes, and used a few to fill with packing paper (I think I'm up to 5 of these now). I've been tucking them out of the way in the garage because the recycling truck would only take what was in the recycling cart. In my old city, you could put as much recycling as you wanted on the curb. I checked the new city's website, and apparently I have to arrange for a Special Pickup which will be of Flattened Cardboard Only. Yay. I guess I just jam as much of the packing paper into the recycling cart as I can every two weeks until it's gone? It's particularly annoying because they pick up trash every week but recycling only every two weeks. I will ask when I call for my Special Pickup if they'll take packing paper too and the website just doesn't say.

I asked my mother at 4:30PM if she wanted to go for a walk, but the Don' Wanna was too strong with her today.

Around 5PM, I was feeling pretty sleepy and thought about napping, but I was also hungry so I made dinner instead. 

After dinner, I found out Coffee's stream was postponed and would run from 2AM-8AM my time. I do not plan to stay up for it. Or get up for it. Maybe if I happen to wake at 6AM anyway, I'll poke my nose in. 

I unpacked a sixth box for today after finding out stream was cancelled, because I still rebel at the ide of doing anything creative. I only have nine boxes left to unpack. Single digits!

My room looks like a disaster despite having far fewer unpacked boxes in it, because I don't have good places to put stuff. I've got several open plastic bins where I've been re-packing things for long-term storage. All the board games and card games and Kill Team and Warhammer 40,000 and supplies for painting miniatures. Many of the actual paints are under my bed, because I don't know how they'll fare without climate control. But the brushes and bits and tools will go in the attic, if there's space.

There is not a lot of space left in the attic, but I think I can make room for more boxes by rearranging the stacks. I could also put boxes in the garage if there wasn't so much cardboard and packing paper in the garage already. And also I want to have space to store a bicycle when I finally get one. Biking around here will be so nice. The weather is lovely and the terrain is pretty flat compared to where I used to live. They have bike lanes, too.

Anyway, I haven't stacked these boxes in the attic yet because I am trying to pack them for maximum efficiency and organization. So I want to get as much of the appropriate kinds of stuff as possible into them first.

Since unpacking the day's last box, I've mostly been journaling. It's pretty late now, so I'll wrap this up here and post it. And play some Time Princess before bed.