pedanther

. It's been a social whirlwind by my usual standards. On the long weekend, all the family members who live in the vicinity had lunch together and watched The Princess Bride. Later in the week, another family member came to visit and we all got together again for a breakfast in the park, where we admired the varieties of waterfowl, which included several kinds of duck (including a striking one with a black head and a brown front that I think from subsequent research was probably a chestnut-breasted shelduck) and some large white ones with red faces that might have been some kind of goose. I also went to a concert (the kind that exists largely as an excuse for a social event, and on that basis I'm inclined to be charitable about the quality of the music), and toward the end of the week one of my friends from the board game club had a dinner party.

. As usual there was also the weekly board game club meet, where we played Betrayal at House on the Hill, Guillotine, Forbidden Desert, and Uno: All Wild. In Betrayal, we successfully fought a giant snake. In Forbidden Desert, we wound up being buried by sand a couple of turns before we would have made good our escape. It was the first time I've played Uno: All Wild, which despite the name is significantly duller than the usual version of the game.

. Later in the week, I went for an early morning walk and saw a lot of birds that I wouldn't normally see about the place later in the day.

. Rehearsals of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown are continuing. At our most recent rehearsal, we got as far as fitting together the various harmony parts on one of the songs, and it sounded really nice.

. The way I've chosen to shelve my library, with all the unread books together on one bookcase, means I have a visual indicator of how large the to-read collection is. Over the past couple of years I've been focusing on reading books I've already got rather than acquiring new books (and also trying to get better at looking at a book I've been holding onto for years and deciding I'm never going to actually read it), and as of this week I've cleared an entire shelf's worth. The shelf is now being used for part of my DVD collection. We will, for the moment, overlook the fact that many of the books that were on the shelf are still in the room, in a big pile on the floor composed of books I've decided to get rid of but not yet decided how.

. Due to time zones, I had to choose between going to Parkrun or staying put to watch the Artemis II splashdown. I decided to assume that everything would go uneventfully, and went to Parkrun.

. On the weekend, there was a busy bee at our old and increasingly ramshackle community theatre to deal with a number of maintenance issues. I got to wield a hedge trimmer and took a hand at helping to re-paint a ceiling. I did not entirely get the hang of removing excess paint off the brush before lifting it above my head, and wound up with a large white deposit dripping down my temple that made it look rather as if we had giant pigeons to deal with on top of everything else.

. I had the whole week off, and spent a lot of it either enjoying having nothing particular to do or feeling crumby due to the well-known phenomenon whereby as soon as I was on holiday and the show wrapped I came down with the mild lurgy I had been steadfastly refusing to entertain because I had things to do.

At a couple of points, I attempted to do some things I'd been putting off on the excuse that they involved getting things done during office hours, only to find (as I frequently have on previous occasions when I've counted on getting things done when I was on holiday) that the businesses I needed to interact with were also off for the holidays.

. On the weekend, we had a long gaming session where we played Mansions of Madness. The scenario we played was an interesting variation on the usual: ( Read more... )

. At the weekly game meet, we played Cockroach Soup, Flip 7 With a Vengeance, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. ( Read more... )

. Rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown have begun, and are going well.

. I watched the NASA live stream of the Artemis II launch, and have been following its progress.

. I went to Parkrun this week, despite a bit of rain being forecast; I already had a cold, and I didn't have anything I needed to do later in the day, so I figured it wouldn't hurt. In the event, there was only a brief light sprinkling of rain. I got a couple of nice comments from people who had been to see the play.

. My relationship with hot cross buns since I parted ways with the Holy Mother Church has been erratic. Some years, I make a point of eating one on the wrong day, to prove that the Church can no longer tell me what to do; other years, I make a point of only eating them on Good Friday, on the principle that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing correctly (because I might be a lapsed Catholic but I'm still a practising pedant). This year, the entire question escaped my mind until it was already Good Friday and all the shops where I knew they were on sale were shut for the public holiday, so I bought some at a discount on Saturday morning and had them for morning tea.

. Until recently, I had managed to avoid getting any spam comments on my AO3 fics, but a couple of the fics I wrote for the most recent Three Sentence Ficathon have apparently stuck out enough to become targets for the kind of spam comment that pretends to be a real review before trying to get you to a secondary location. The one I received this week asserted that "i wasn’t expecting much at first but this actually turned out to be a pretty decent read", which is particularly transparent in the context of a fic that's only 37 words long.

. I was pleased to see the announcement that Farah Mendlesohn has been selected as the GUFF delegate to Swancon 50, then spent several minutes trying to remember where I actually know them from. I eventually managed to narrow it down from "overlapping online fannish space of some kind" to "mostly Diana Wynne Jones fandom, when I was still actively interacting with Diana Wynne Jones fandom". (Skimming the list of GUFF voters, I recognised a name from the old DWJ fan group, followed by another name whose owner was not yet born then, let alone old enough to vote; my, how the time etc.)

. At the board game meet, we played Lovecraft Letter, Flip 7 with a Vengeance, and Concept. ( Read more... )

. I blew off Parkrun this week because there was a forecast of rain. Another time I'd probably have gone anyway, and likely been fine (the rain didn't start really coming down until after Parkrun had concluded), but it was closing night of the short play season that evening and I decided I owed it to the audience to stay dry and warm and not catch the flu or lose my voice.

. The short play season went very well, with good audiences for a short play season, especially on closing night. The cast and crew all got on well, too, which is always nice. We start rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown tomorrow.

. I've been intrigued for a while by the

no_true_pair fic challenge, in which you choose a set of characters and are given fic prompts for each pair of characters in the list, but the sticking point has always been that I can't make up my mind what characters to do it with. I waffled about joining the latest four-character round for ages, and eventually signed on literally five minutes before the posting phase was opened with a set of characters picked more or less at random. So far, I've written a vignette for one prompt and started on another, and it's been an interesting exercise in thinking about what the paired characters have in common, but I'm not sure it's going to result in anything I actually consider publishable.

. I've completed the jigsaw puzzle I've been working on. In the end, I liked it a lot more than the previous one I tried from the same manufacturer, although I still think the engineering of the pieces could stand to be a bit tighter.

. The latest addition to my daily puzzle routine is Glyph, a Wordle-like game in which you have four guesses to identify a word with the assistance of an image showing the letters of the word stacked on top of each other. I'm enjoying it, and doing pretty well; the only time I've needed all four guesses was the first time I tried it, and that was partly because I'd got the explanation of the letter-order hints back to front.

. I'm not sure what it says that I've been only vaguely aware of NASA's Artemis II mission -- which plans to send a human crew on an observation pass around the Moon, closer than any humans have been in fifty years -- and it was only by chance that I saw a notice that lift-off is scheduled to take place this week (early Thursday morning, Australian time).

. One of the problems creeping up on the community theatre I'm a member of is that we have a shortage of people who know how to design, rig, and plot theatrical lighting. ( Read more... )

. In one of the online groups I'm a member of, there was a conversation about Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, Black Jack, and Princess Knight, which gave me an opening to introduce more people to the existence of one of my favourite episodes of the 1980s Astro Boy anime, which uses time travel to set up a three-way crossover between the main characters of those three shows, with some bonus cameos from other Tezuka series thrown in.

. I completed my play-through of XCOM 2 without needing any more do-overs, and felt sufficiently confident to start another play-through with the commitment that this time I would push on and not take any do-overs no matter what setbacks might befall. Consequently, I have achieved something in XCOM 2 that has never happened before: I've seen what happens when you lose the game.( Read more... )

. I had my annual dental check-up. No serious issues, though the dentist did note that there are signs I'm brushing too hard on the side of my mouth where the brush is at a comfortable angle, so that's something I need to be conscious of.

. I didn't make it to board game club this week, because I had to go to a meeting instead.

. The supermarket nearest my house has been closed for months, because the space was bought out by a different operator and it's been going through a full refit. The official opening of the new supermarket was this week, and I walked over at lunch time to see what it was like. ( Read more... )

. My November pick for the random reading challenge was Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, which I've been vaguely meaning to get around to for ages. ( Read more... )

. At Parkrun this week, there was a group of visitors who are travelling around the country doing as many different Parkrun courses as they can. Some of them have done 250 or more different Parkruns.

. On Saturday evening, I went to a concert by a touring group who performed sea shanties and related works (including a rendition of Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage"). The music was nice (they harmonised beautifully), but it was also a valuable experience in that it got me out of the house and socialising with the other audience members, many of whom I knew well enough to be comfortable chatting with, and some of whom I haven't had a chance to talk with in ages.

I'd been feeling rather grim all week, and I think part of it was a lack of opportunities to interact with people in a non-goal-oriented way. Anyway, whether it was the music or the social interaction (or just that the weather had finally broken), I felt much better when I got up this morning.

. At board game club, we played a string of card games: Thirty-One, Bacon, Psycho Killer, The Mind, and Star Fluxx.( Read more... )

. I tried a different picross/nonograms program that I found available on Steam, on a similar basis where the first twenty puzzles are free and then you can pay for extra puzzle packs.( Read more... )

. I did not in fact remember to take the fly veil to Parkrun last week, though fortunately the flies were well enough behaved that I didn't need it. I did remember this week, and hopefully will continue to remember as we get into the part of the year where the flies get really friendly.

. The local public library celebrated fifty years of operation this week, ( Read more... )

. While I was at the library, I borrowed Death of a Foreign Gentleman by Steven Carroll. In post-war Cambridge, a controversial philosopher is killed in a hit-and-run. There's a detective on the case, but it's a novel built around a murder investigation rather than a mystery novel; ( Read more... )

. This week, I also finished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I've been reading on and off for a while. ( Read more... )

. The Youth Theatre did their end-of-year show, which this year was a collection of short plays and skits on a common theme. It was a lot of fun. One of the highlights was a short play the senior class wrote themselves.

. At board game club this week, we played Night of the Ninja, Gravwell, and a couple of games out of The Lady and the Tiger.( Read more... )

. A while ago, I noticed that the storage space on my current phone is large enough that I could put my entire CD collection on there without making much difference, ( Read more... )

. At Parkrun, the weather was warm enough that the flies were out and about and kept coming to say hello. I made a mental note to remember the fly veil next week.

. On Saturday afternoon, I was between books and not in a mood to start anything long or heavy, but I had a reading streak that was one day away from a significant milestone, so I read a picture book from the library called The Grizzled Grist Does Not Exist!. It was fun, and it was nice to see the heroic role going to the quiet, observant child who nobody pays much attention to.

. Another week where I didn't do many journal entries. ( Read more... )

. At board game club this week, we played Scape Goat and Zoo Vadis.( Read more... )

. There was some kind of special event at the local Parkrun this week ( Read more... )

. I haven't been doing a jigsaw puzzle this week, because there was a puzzle game called Polimines going very cheap on Steam, ( Read more... )

. Still listening to The Hidden Almanac. There's currently a story arc going on where the in-universe radio station that broadcasts The Hidden Almanac has been bought out by new owners that are trying to revamp the station's image; Reverend Mord is tenaciously defending his turf, but has not been able to prevent his usual eerie underscore being replaced by upbeat bluegrass music.

. At board game club, we had another Sunday afternoon session, and also the usual evening event. At one or the other, I played Dune: Imperium, The Tainted Grail, Mansions of Madness, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game (only the runner-up for most awkwardly named LOTR-themed game I encountered this week, because I also came across Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings™ Game). Three of those were co-operative games, which we won with margins of varying widths; Dune: Imperium is competitive, and ended up a very close competition, with only one victory point separating the winner from the player who ended up in last place.

. I finished reading The Night Marchers, my April book for the random selection reading challenge, without ever warming to it. My chances of getting caught up in the story weren't helped by the fact that the printer hadn't trimmed the page block cleanly, so I had to keep stopping several times a chapter to separate the pages with a letter opener.

. I got a good time at Parkrun again: not as fast as last week's record, but still faster than the previous record.

. In the afternoon, I sat out on the front porch in the sun for a while, reading, and watched a butterfly and a couple of bees investigating the flowers that are starting to appear on the volunteer plants in the front yard.

. I've started reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow, one of the reading challenge options for March. I'm not sure what I think of it yet.

. I've already finished the jigsaw puzzle I started last week. Either I'm getting really efficient at organising and solving jigsaw puzzles - which is not necessarily a positive, because the value of them is in having one around when I need to relax by bringing order out of chaos, not in having finished them - or I've been in particular need of the relaxation lately. (Work has thrown up a few challenges lately, and so has the committee.)

. I wrote a journal entry every day this week. A couple of times I didn't get it done in the morning, and was tired in the evening, and considered skipping a day, but then I told myself it would only take about half an hour and then it would be done, and I could probably manage that, and so far I've turned out to be right.

. I reached a milestone in 750 Words: one year since I resumed keeping a journal and began what has become by far my longest streak. Though the streak count (which goes by days when I actually wrote an entry) only just reached 300 days, which gives you some idea of how shamelessly I've been exploiting the generous allocation of vacation days on the occasions when I haven't found time or haven't felt up to stringing words together.( Read more... )

. Sunday was the first meeting of the new committee since they were elected in the AGM. ( Read more... )

. On Monday, I woke up while it was still dark. As I lay in bed, I found myself singing a riff on "Morning Has Broken" that started by observing that morning had not yet broken and ended with the conclusion that this might be a good opportunity to do some productive work done before the day started and distractions arrived. I did not in fact get any productive work done, because when I got up I went on the internet to look up a rhyming dictionary and try to improve one of the rhymes in the song, and from there I was perfectly capable of distracting myself.

. This week at the board game club I wound up on the casual card games table and played Monty Python Fluxx, UNO Show 'Em No Mercy, and Flip 7. ( Read more... )

. I've been listening to a fair bit of classical music this week. It started when I watched a video about The Shawshank Redemption and then decided to listen to the full version of the Mozart aria that's featured in one scene, which led to Youtube suggesting other bits of Mozart to listen to. I also, unrelatedly to that, saw a post with a linked video about a violin piece by Bach which is designed so that it can be played both forward and backward and that if it's played forward and backward at the same time it forms a pleasing duet.

. The week at work has been interesting, with several challenging projects that were stressful to be faced with but satisfying to have completed successfully.

. Parkrun went well. ( Read more... )

. I've started another jigsaw puzzle.

. At the board game club, we played a few games of Coup as a warm-up, and then a new game called Bomb Busters.( Read more... )

. I'm still catching up on the backlog of the randomly-selected reading challenge. The selection for April is The Night Marchers and other Oceanian stories, a collection of Oceanian folk tales retold in comic book form. ( Read more... )

. I've finished another jigsaw puzzle. Looking back, I think I finished it significantly faster than the last few, which I attribute to the fact that I went and worked on it whenever I was feeling stressed, and it's been a stressful week both at work and in the committee I'm on. I did lose one piece off the side of the table at some point, and only noticed when I was nearly finished and found myself with a single gap in the puzzle and no piece to put in it, but fortunately once I started looking I found it under the edge of the sofa pretty easily.

. I'm still doing Parkrun, though I haven't always been mentioning it. It went well this week; I didn't have to stop and re-tie my shoelaces even once, and I got my best time for the year to date.

. I went to see the new Superman movie with friends. There were bits of it that I didn't think entirely worked, but I had a good time.

. At board game club this week, the main game we played was Night of the Ninja, a hidden-roles/social-deduction game where each player is a member of a ninja clan trying to take out the leaders of the opposing clan while protecting the leaders of their own clan - with the added wrinkle that because ninjas are so sneaky, nobody knows at the start who else is in the same clan or who the leaders are. ( Read more... )

. Monument Valley III had its Steam release in the past week, and I've enjoyed the first two games enough to buy it straight away, instead of waiting for a sale to roll around. ( Read more... )

. Another reaction channel I've been watching lately is Marie-Clare's World, which I started following when she was working her way through Doctor Who. Now she's watching Babylon 5, and has just reached the end of the first season. ( Read more... )

. I've been having trouble with my printer for months - something was up with the release mechanism for the black ink, so that if I printed a document in black-and-white it came out illegibly faint, but anything with colours still came out at full strength. ( Read more... )

. I've been trying out a new tea blend this week, having picked up a packet on a whim while I was grocery shopping. It's labelled as "orange and cinnamon", with the small print mentioning that the base component is rooibos (as opposed to it being an entirely non-tea herbal blend like the peppermint or the lemon-and-ginger). It's quite nice, and a warm and comforting thing that suits the cold and uncomfortable weather we've been having lately.

. There was rain for a lot of the week, which led to me not getting as much outdoor exercise as I'd have preferred and also to ongoing trouble finding a good day to do the laundry. ( But I got a good walk on Saturday ) During the afternoon I also finished the laundry, did the washing up, and dealt with some paperwork that had been hanging over me all week (and printed it out successfully). After all that, for one reason or another, I felt much brighter and more optimistic than I had for days.

. I think I've found a good balance with the journalling, where I'm keeping a useful amount of notes about things I want to talk about and not spending an off-putting amount of time on it.

. At board game club, we played Power Hungry Pets and Space Base.( Read more... )

. ( Planning for the new financial year )

. I'm continuing to listen to The Hidden Almanac on the anniversaries of each episode's original release date. This week marked a milestone: ( Read more... )

. I had a productive week at work, and learned some new things.

. I went to see the Rep Club's latest production, The Great Emu War. ( Read more... )

. I finished the jigsaw puzzle I was working on in around ten days, and left it sitting around to look at for a few more days before taking it apart and getting started on the other jigsaw puzzle I got for Christmas. This one is based on a Star Wars movie poster, and is proving challenging: ( Read more... )

. At Parkrun, ( Read more... )

I've been experimenting with my journal entries in the last week or two, ( Read more... )

We had a family get-together for the public holiday, ( Read more... )

The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions ( Read more... )

I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. ( The next bit involves injections )

I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: ( Read more... )

( Movies current - Ocean - and upcoming - including ) Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.

I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. ( Read more... )

I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: ( Read more... )

I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. ( Read more... )

I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)

I haven't been watching the just-finished season of Doctor Who, ( and I was rather put out this morning to be told, by someone who assumed I'd already seen it, how the season finale ends )

In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.

At board game club, ( we played Risk Legacy and Century: Golem Edition )

( Computer games: Battletech, The Beekeeper's Picnic, Mark of the Ninja )

( Reading challenges )

( Podcast: The Hidden Almanac )

( I overslept and missed Parkrun )

I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".

Strictly speaking, this is an octave in review, covering the period from Saturday, 29 March, to Saturday, 5 April. I seem to have settled fairly solidly on doing the weekly blog post on Sunday, and it was getting annoying having to keep reminding myself "no, that happened yesterday, it goes in next week's blog post", so I'm shifting the window.

Our production of Guys and Dolls finished yesterday. It was successful both in the sense that the audiences had a good time and in the sense that the cast and crew got on with each other and also had a good time. The wrap party after the final performance featured karaoke, which, since it was the cast of a musical doing it, was a lot less painful than some karaoke sessions I can remember. I didn't step up to the microphone - I wouldn't have minded, I just couldn't make up my mind to a song - but I enjoyed singing along to the chorus parts and a few songs that the whole room did en masse.

After having never, to my knowledge, ever heard "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan before, this week I've heard three different versions: the original, Rick Astley's cover, and a karaoke rendition done at the wrap party.

The light bulb in the spare room died during the week, which wouldn't be particularly noteworthy except for an incidental consequence. To get a ladder under the light fitting to swap the bulb, I needed to move the boxes that were piled there, and in the process I regained an accurate sense of just how many boxes I have full of books that I'd shoved in a box with the intention of carting them to a second-hand book shop at some point. I now have all those boxes piled in their own space where I can continue to see how many of them there are, and have added another reminder to my phone; whether that results in any of the boxes actually being disposed of any time soon remains to be seen.

At board game club, we played MLEM Space Agency as the main game, and then several different variants of Uno to round out the evening.

I finished reading Comet in Moominland. I didn't vibe with it. I realised afterward that I'd been in a bad mood on the day I read the last third, due to lack of sleep and some life things that I'd been not thinking about, but I don't think it'd have clicked in any case. I liked the first chapter or so, and then the comet shows up and it turns into a string of arbitrary whimsical events - and, mind you, I like a story that's a string of arbitrary whimsical events when it works, but this didn't work for me.

I did Parkrun both Saturdays of the octave, but if I encountered any charismatic fauna, I didn't make a note of it.

The colour-coded exercise tracker I set up in January seems to have hooked into my brain in a useful way, and my consistency of exercise is gradually increasing. In January, I never went an entire week without exercising at least once; in February, at least twice; and in March, I exercised at least three times in every seven-day period, which was the minimum goal I was working toward. So far this month, if it's not too soon to be saying so, I'm on track to never fall below four exercises in a week.

The new fitness tracker is going well. The "time to get up and stretch" notifications are better targeted at my use case than the Fitbit's method was, and are still working effectively.

It took several attempts to get the new fitness tracker to track my bicycle rides. On the first attempt, it didn't track anything; apparently there was some permission or other that hadn't been set correctly. On the second attempt (after I'd confirmed that all the permissions were now set properly), I decided not to hit the "starting cycling" button and see if the automatic exercise detection figured out what I was doing; not only did it not detect that I was cycling, at the end of the hour-long ride I got a notification that I'd been sitting in one place for an hour and should get up and do some exercise...

Since then, I've been hitting the "starting cycling" button every time, to be on the safe side.

It's been a bit tricky lately finding places to ride the bike that are off the road: we have a fairly good network of bike trails around the town, but in January a lot of the trails in my vicinity were torn up as the first stage of laying down fresh tarmac, and it was only recently that the actual laying down began. Looking forward to having that finished; the new tracks, in the areas they've been completed, are smooth and very nice to ride on.

At Parkrun this week (where the fitness tracker had no trouble automatically detecting that I was doing walking exercise), I saw a small brown lizard sunning itself by the side of the track.

It's been a rough week at work, featuring one of Those Clients.

At board game club, we played Last Light, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources. In general outline, it's somewhat similar to Eclipse, which we played a while back, but with some significant differences in gameplay (including a less complicated scoring system) that result in it being less of a marathon. One of the interesting gameplay differences that's not directly related to the playing time is that the board representing the galaxy rotates at intervals, with different parts of it rotating at different speeds, altering the strategic situation each time it happens.

Went to the cinema to see The Return, a demythified retelling of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after decades away, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It's getting good notices for the central performances, which I agree are spectacular, but I think the story as a whole has some shortcomings and I'm not sure the ending would have worked if the performances weren't so good. (It probably doesn't help that it's not that long since I read The Last Song of Penelope, another demythified retelling of Odysseus' return which I found more effective.) I did enjoy some of the nods to other parts of the Odyssey that are woven into the story.

This week was the release of The Beekeeper's Picnic, a new point-and-click adventure game featuring an elderly beekeeper named Sherlock Holmes who used to be a famous detective but is now very definitely retired but keeps tripping over mysteries needing to be solved anyway. I'm enjoying it so far.

On the library trip where I picked up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I also discovered that the library had a copy of Tove Jansson's first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, so I've now read that and am partway through the sequel, Comet in Moominland. (Neither of them count for the book chain "no people" challenge because I take it as read that Moomins count as people.) I'm not disliking them, but I suspect I've left it too long to start the series and have missed the age where they would have clicked with me.

I need to have a proper think about how I'm using 750 Words as a journaling tool. The journaling itself feels helpful, and I want to continue doing it, but I'm not sure 750 Words is actually the right place for it; I'm not really using it the way it's supposed to be used. For one thing, you're supposed to pick a consistent time of day to do it, and to start and finish in a single sitting, but I've been all over the shop lately (the best time of day is clearly first thing in the morning, but that's also the best time of day for several other things so it often gets bumped) and have frequently written a journal entry in two or more sittings when I've been able to find the time. (None of those has resulted in me failing the challenge of writing 750 words without interruption, because each journal entry is easily over a thousand words - which in itself is another reason why this might not be the appropriate application.)

Our production of Guys and Dolls opened this week, and has been playing to good-sized and appreciative audiences. My American accent, which had been commuting between New York, Chicago, and some other place that might have been New Jersey, finally settled into place in time for the final dress rehearsal.

This week I retired the Fitbit. The display screen has been on the way out for some time; at first, it was illegible in sunlight, which was annoying from the viewpoint of wanting to know my progress while I was out and exercising but otherwise supportable, but by the end it had got to the point that I had to shut myself in a room with the blinds drawn and the light off to be able to read it at all.

During the time I've been using the Fitbit, Fitbit-the-company was bought out by Google and I have some concerns about how things have been developing since, so I decided to look elsewhere for a new fitness tracker. In the end, for a variety of reasons of which some are more sensible than others, I opted for the Samsung Galaxy Fit3, which I'm liking well so far. (One thing I particularly liked about it was that I could use a stockpile of reward points that was otherwise just going to expire to get it for only $30.) It's actually a slightly better fit for my wrist than the Fitbit was, and the screen is nicely legible in all kinds of light levels. I like the Fit3's version of "maybe it's time to get up and stretch" reminders better, too.

I follow several Youtube channels whose thing is gameplay videos of computer games designed to be played by multiple players (either competitively or co-operatively). Usually there's a variety of games represented, with some channels focussing on new releases and others being more into old favourites, but it happened twice this week that a recently released or recently updated game showed up on two of the channels at the same time.

One was Make Way!, a racing game where the players build the race track as they go along, which looked like it would be fun to play with the right group of people but could be a bit difficult to follow as a spectator.

The other was Split Fiction, a two-player co-operative game, and I don't have any opinion of the gameplay because the video I watched included the opening cinematic that sets up the premise, which was so stupid that I got bored and quit the video just as it was getting to the playable part. (The stupidity was a mixture of clichéd characters and situations - it's the kind of story that features a sinister machine called The Machine, with audible capital letters - and a few bits of blatant plot convenience. The one that really sticks in my head is that one of the protagonists is presented as being suspicious of the situation she's entering, but doesn't get around to demanding answers about what's going on until after she's compliantly gone through the induction process and it's basically too late to avoid getting forced to take part; it's particularly jarring because the induction includes changing out of her own clothes into a jumpsuit with all kinds of mysterious electronic attachments, which if I was her would have been the point where I refused to go any further without an explanation.)

I didn't go to Parkrun on Saturday, or board game club on Monday, because my sleep patterns had been thrown off and I wasn't feeling well. I did get a good amount of other exercise in the course of the week, with several long walks and bike rides.

I finished reading The Friendship Factor; I don't have anything I want to say about it that I didn't already say last week.

. The family Christmas gathering was held a few days after Christmas this year, because that was when everybody could manage to be in the same place for the same few hours. (Including the out-of-town contingent, who I hadn't realised were also going to be there until I got a text message with a photo of something interesting they'd seen on the road here.) It was very nice to spend some time with everybody. My haul this year included several jigsaw puzzles, my siblings having taken note of how much I enjoyed working through my set of Magic Puzzles earlier this year (and possibly also of the fact that it's much easier to be sure that I don't already have a particular puzzle than that I don't already have a particular book).

. As the weather has been getting hotter, there's been an increasing issue at Parkrun with flies taking friendly interest in one's face, and the attendant risk of accidentally inhaling one. (Or nearly inhaling one, which is almost as bad.) After Parkrun last Saturday, I decided I'd had enough and afterward went straight to the shops to buy a protective net thing to wear over my head and keep them off. Step two is remembering to take it with me to Parkrun.

. My reading this week included Always Was, Always Will Be, written by Thomas Mayo, one of the campaigners for the Voice to Parliament, after the referendum went the way it did, which I saw in the new books display at the library and felt I should read; and, for a change of pace, E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, which I've been meaning to read for years and am very glad I finally did. (And not just because now I'll be less likely to keep getting it mixed up with The Boxcar Children and The Story of the Treasure Seekers.)

. I've started playing through XCOM: Enemy Unknown again. I set out with noble intentions that this would be the time I got through an entire playthrough without reverting to the last save point when things started going pear-shaped, and of course that didn't last but it did last longer than I might have predicted. As I've been getting back into the swing of it I've been pushing out the limit on what counts as going sufficiently wrong, and getting back near the mark of keeping going as long as a mission wasn't a complete failure, and re-learning that it is possible and even fun to recover from setbacks like having most of your most experienced squad wiped out in one go.

. Game Show 1939! is a fun podcast where contestants are faced with trivia questions sourced from quiz books published in the 1930s. "Some of the answers in the books have changed since then, and some of the answers were never right to begin with, but for the purposes of today's quiz the official correct answer is whatever was written in the book." Part of the format involves contestants being given a preview of the categories and trying to predict which ones they'll find easier to answer and which ones to force their opponent to answer. Most of the questions are followed by the host explaining who or what the question was about.

Saturday was my last full day in town. I went to Parkrun in the morning, taking the opportunity to visit a course I haven't done before; I picked one near the seashore since I hadn't been properly near the sea yet during my visit, though as it turned out the track was on the landward side of a string of high dunes so I didn't actually see the sea except in glimpses. Later in the day I went to WABA and to Astrofest, and caught up with people I knew.

On Sunday morning, I went to the beach with relatives, and we looked in tide pools and found interesting shells and generally had a nice time. In the afternoon, it was time for the train home. On the train, I read The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, one of a bundle of ebooks I got a while back which had originally been published in a serial format with different authors writing each chapter. I got on better with it than the last one I tried, in that I didn't give up before I reached the end, but I found it disappointing; the plotting was uneven, with elements being introduced without proper set-up or dropped without proper pay-off, and the characters were all Types without enough personal history or individuality for me to really care about what happened to them.

When I got home, I did read Remarkably Bright Creatures. If it weren't for the octopus, it would be a kind of book I don't usually read, but on the whole I enjoyed it, though one of the subplots set off one of my narrative allergies so badly that I started skimming chapters whenever it cropped up. It might have been a good thing that I didn't have it with me on the train; I think I might have been less happy with it if I hadn't been able to put it down and walk away for a bit when it was getting too much.

After the better part of two years, I've finally finished listening to all of Re: Dracula, the audio drama podcast adaptation of Dracula Daily. I started listening last year on its original release, but stopped partway through, then restarted at the same point when it came around again this year. To be fair to the podcast, a major reason I struggled with it was external; last year was the year I started logging daily reading progress and not just when I completed a book, and I made the possibly unwise decision to log Re: Dracula as an audio book and keep track of the cumulative run time. That would always have been a challenge and a distraction from simply listening and enjoying, though now I'm done being fair I want to also note that having to calculate and subtract the run time of all the ad breaks certainly didn't help.

With that out of the way, Letters From Watson is now the only serialised fiction thing I'm still participating in, and when that finishes next month I think I'm going to want a significant break before I let myself consider getting caught up in any more.

I put my 750 Words account into scheduled vacation mode before my trip, since I wouldn't have access to an internet with a keyboard and I don't write anything of significant length on my phone, and I didn't reactivate it immediately after I got home. Partly that was because I'd found that it was actually quite nice to be able to go "I'm tired, I'm going to bed" and not "I'm tired, but I have to write 750 words before I can think about going to bed", and partly it was because I couldn't decide what to do about the days I'd skipped: try to summarise them, or just write them off and resume journalling from where I was. Anyway, I didn't do any journal entries all week, and one of the consequences was that I didn't have a handy supply of pre-digested things to say. That's one of the reasons this is a week late, though perhaps not the main one – but that is a topic for next time.

. At the beginning of last year, I read Harley Quinn: Reckoning, the first in a trilogy of YA novels retelling the origin story of the Batman supporting character (and increasingly a headline character in her own right) Harley Quinn. It was very good, although I found it stressful, and had to read it in short bursts with long breaks between, because of it being a prequel and having certain events from Harley's canonical backstory hanging over it. After I finished it I immediately put a hold request on the sequel at the library - and then spent the next year and a half putting it off, and flipping the hold every time the book became available, because it was apparent from the blurb that this was going to be the volume in which those canonical events started happening, and I was dreading seeing how they played out. This week I finally bit the bullet and started reading Harley Quinn: Ravenous; the first few chapters were heavy going, but once it reached a certain point and it became apparent how the author was going to handle Harley's story a lot of the dread evaporated and after that I got through it much quicker. (It does an interesting thing where it treats Harley's usual origin story as just the rumour that got around later; by the end of Ravenous, you can see how people started telling that story, but some of it is exaggeration or misrepresentation and some of it is quite plainly the result of people who weren't there adding assumptions to incomplete information and jumping to entirely incorrect conclusions.) I'm still going to need a breather before I tackle the final book of the trilogy, but I'm not dreading it in the same way.

. This week was an anniversary of the the first local Parkrun event, which reminds me that I haven't kept up on reporting my progress there. I'm still doing Parkrun regularly, and have passed a few more official milestones: I've now participated in over 250 individual Parkrun events, and am working my way toward 500. My record as an event volunteer is much more spotty, because when I can make it to an event I usually prefer to be out on the course getting my exercise and not standing around by the finish line, but for the anniversary event I volunteered to scan membership barcodes. I remarked to the event organiser that this is one thing that has changed over the years: when I first joined, the barcode scanners were rudimentary and nobody was allowed to participate without showing an official member barcode card printed in the regulation size and format, but now the scanning is done with a smartphone app that can recognise a wide variety of sizes and formats, including official Parkrun wristbands and keyring fobs, not to mention the people who just have a copy of the barcode on their own smartphone. (Or smartwatch. At the event, there were several people who presented their barcode on a smartwatch; some of the watches displayed it very small to fit it on the face of the watch, and some displayed it as a square QR code instead. I was relieved when the app was unfazed by either challenge.)

. I went for a long bike ride this week, most of it through the park where Parkrun is held but exploring some of the many trails that aren't part of the Parkrun course. It was quite a warm day, and I had reason to be glad I'd remembered (for, as far as I can remember, the first time ever) to pack a water bottle in the bike's water bottle holder. It was nice to be out amid the nature for a bit.

. I've been doing very well lately at getting the washing up done regularly. Perhaps by way of compensation, I seem to be getting worse at putting the clean laundry away in a timely manner. (The sticking point appears to be the t-shirts. I thought I'd found a solution, but now that's not doing it either.)

. The café near my house does bubble teas in a wide variety of colours and flavours, but due to the discouragement of single-use plastics they're always served in an opaque cardboard vessel with a sealed lid. I understand the practicalities, but it does rather suck a lot of the fun out of having a brightly-coloured bubble tea when you can't see it.

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pedanther

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