October Blog Challenge Day 6

My new plantar fasciitis inserts arrived today. So exciting. If only I’d thought to do an unboxing video. Maybe when the other part of the order arrives – five pounds of expensive (to me) coffee beans – I’ll have the forethought to do so.

Had coffee with Sunny this morning, then we swung by the office and played pool while I complained about how unfair life is. The man is truly a saint.

So those beans, they’re a coffee variety from Panama, and I’ve always wanted to try Panamanian coffee. They probably won’t arrive for another week, which is a shame. Hopefully it’s worth the wait and I won’t end up with five pounds of coffee I hate (unlikely).

I am seriously coming up with nothing to write about tonight.

I certainly don’t want to discuss my impending colonoscopy. I’m not really worried about the procedure, I’m just a wee bit apprehensive about the prep required to clean myself out prior. I don’t know how I’m going to keep myself occupied once I’m on a clear liquid diet. I suppose I could write on this blog, assuming I’m lucid.

Listening to the Metallica of my youth as I attempt to write. I’m a Metallica grognard. Anything after 1994 is anathema. I suppose if I were to hear any of their more recent music, there’s a slight chance I might like it. But the truth is, I don’t really care enough to find out. What joyous musical treasures am I denying myself? I guess I’ll never find out.

I slept very poorly last night. Tossed and turned. It was that kind of insomnia where it feels like you’re still awake, or at least aware of your surroundings, but time seems to pass in a blur. I haven’t had a night like that in some time. Hopefully it’s just a one-off and I’ll sleep like the dead tonight.

October Blog Challenge Day 5

I’m not sure how many words I’ve got in my brain tonight. It was a very uneventful day, wherein I ran errands (read: shopped for groceries) and not much else. I watched a couple episodes of the X-Files from the series’ first season. Thought about grilling burgers for dinner but ended up snacking instead. I’ll make the burgers tomorrow.

I’ll admit, I did do some serious napping today. If I’m tired enough to nod off at noon for 2-3 hours, I suppose I needed the rest.

After doing that canvassing yesterday, I’m noticing what seems to be my plantar fasciitis returning. I’ve got a pair of shoe inserts, but they’ve been in daily use for quite some time so I suppose they’re probably wearing out. I ordered a new pair, just to be in the safe side. I don’t really enjoy pain so it seems the prudent thing to do.

Maddy went with me to the grocery store today. As we were loading the car, I noticed a jumping spider on the roof. Maddy coaxed it onto her finger and allowed it to leap away from the vehicle. I commented that maybe she could’ve kept it as a pet, which evolved into a discussion about possible names. She insisted “Jerry” was a good name for a spider. When I scoffed, she said I shouldn’t dismiss the name because it is similar to my own.

I scoffed again and insisted that “Jerry” is short for “Jeremy,” to which she proposed “Jeremiah.” I said that no, “Jeremiah” is a bullfrog name, not a spider name. She had no idea what I was talking about, so once the car was loaded and we were leaving the parking lot, I pulled up Joy to the World by Three Dog Night.

She’d never heard the song before, but enjoyed it.

When we got home, she asked me if her mom was aware of the Jeremiah/Bulldog connection. I told her most definitely, and when we brought the groceries home I confirmed it by saying “Hey, mother, Jeremiah was a… what?”

“A bullfrog,” she answered at once.

October Blog Challenge Day 4

While the new Salem’s Lot wasn’t everything it might have been, it did remind me that Gordon Lightfoot had some awesome tunes.

Speaking of Salem’s Lot, I saw something today that said the director’s original cut was three hours long, but he trimmed it down to just under two hours. I would hope that cut is available someday, because I think it might be a huge improvement on what I saw last night.

I’m really tired tonight. Worked the day, then went canvassing for about two hours. Came home and grilled some chicken breasts, which we ate alongside the San Francisco treat. I also grilled up a pentad of bratwursts lest they creep past their expiration date.

Those bratwursts were pretty good. I’d read a click-bait article last week about the ten best bratwursts, and number two happened to be the ones they sell at Aldi. I’ve never been to an Aldi, so I figured I’d drop into the one up the road and grab some brats. The prices did seem pretty good overall, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of selection. I picked up the brats in the meat department and was slightly disappointed there wasn’t a real meat counter.

Not sure where I was going with that one, but hey. Wordcount, am I right?

This last week at work, everyone was given a Stanley 30 ounce insulated mug. They’re Smurf blue and have the company logo on them. As much as I’d written off Stanley mugs for their sin of being trendy, I have come to appreciate mine in a very short amount of time. I put a Miskatonic University sticker on mine so I wouldn’t mix it up with anyone else’s.

I’ve got my fingers crossed for a pleasant and uneventful weekend. I have nothing planned, aside from errands and seeing Sunny for coffee. I suppose I should go read his blog entries, just to make sure he’s holding up his end of the bargain.

October Blog Challenge Day 3

 

Day three. Look at me go!

The new Salem’s Lot movie released on HBO today. I’ve been waiting for it to come out, hoping that it’d be better than the latest crop of horror movies. It starts okay, but I tend to agree with the review I read over at https://www.rogerebert.com/ - it tries to do too much in a relatively short amount of time. There’s no time to get to know (or care) about the protagonists, except for maybe the scrappy, nerdy Mark.

I read Salem’s Lot for the first time earlier this year. Not sure why I never read it when I was in my Stephen King phase (back when I was 12 or so). Suffice it to say, it was one of the books I didn’t pick up early on. It’s a fine story, well-written, but very much a product of its time that feels a bit dated these days.

The movie diversifies the cast a little, which I appreciate. It also takes some liberties with the story and makes some changes I didn’t see coming. There are a few moments of genuine humor (as far as I’m concerned, Alfre Woodard is a national treasure), and not more than a few moments of truly ripe B-movie cheese.

While I found things to enjoy about it, the new Salem’s Lot isn’t a perfect film. Maybe another hour of action and exposition would’ve sanded down some of the rougher edges. At the end of the day, it is what it is, and since I get my HBO subscription for free with my internet plan, it didn’t cost me anything to watch. I suppose I might be interested in watching it again in five or ten years.

Plus, I’m really hard to please (cinematically speaking) now that I’m in my fifties. It doesn’t take much to sour me on a film lately. After Long Legs and Alien: Romulus, I will never again trust the hype surrounding any other movie. Go ahead, call me a curmudgeon. You might even be right.

October Blog Challenge Day 2

And we’re back with another action-packed episode (issue?) of our daily blog challenge. Assuming you read the previous entry, you know that I’m just typing so I can realize a three-hundred word blog post. It’s not that three-hundred words is hard to generate, necessarily. It’s good exercise, right? Brain training. Groovy.

Driving into work this morning I had Pink Floyd on shuffle, and Waiting for the Worms (from The Wall) came on. I’ve always liked the song, but all the sudden I was hearing it from a position I’d never considered before. Today’s politics are an echo of what that song expresses - a mask of 1920’s Germany held over Cold War-era Britain. And now it’s here, in 2020’s America. And about half of all eligible voters don’t even care.

Maybe I’m being dramatic. Would not be the first time.

Was also reading about feral children for no reason other than I’d been watching an X-Files episode called “The Jersey Devil.” Season One, Episode Five. Not the best episode offered by the X-Files, but suitably entertaining in spots. By the time it ended, I was alternating my attention between the television and my iPad. I checked the clock – ten minutes to nine – and decided I’d probably better go upstairs and get this blog post out of the way.

The cats are having a rampage. They are hungry, so they act out in a beastly manner until I get annoyed enough to feed them (or so they assume). At some unspoken agreement, they’ll eventually stop tearing across the scenery, sit or flop down, and stare at me as if trying to decide if there’s anything else that might intimidate me into filling their bowls.

I let them wait. It’s not even ten o’clock yet.

So… yeah. I think that about covers it to the tune of three-hundred words and change. More tomorrow.

October Blog Challenge Day 1

The last time I wrote anything in (on?) this blog, I was in my forties. How time flies.

Putting that last post into context, it was only about a month later that I slipped on ice in my driveway and fractured my ankle. That put the whole gaming club thing to bed for me, though (as I understand it) the kids at Rosemount did get together and play a few games.

At least I think they did...

Not long after my failed attempt at Quebecois ice capades – just around the time I was starting to walk again – the Covid pandemic took the world by storm. I don’t need to tell you about the pandemic or how it panned out, I’m pretty sure you lived it, too, same as I did.

It’s just hard to believe the amount of shit that’s happened in those five years. I don’t suppose it was all negative, either. Ups and downs. Peaks and valleys. Highs and lows.

Yet, if given the choice, I’d probably prioritize ups/peaks/highs over their opposites, and for obvious reasons. I’m not exactly keeping track, so I don’t know what the ratio has really been like. I’m probably better off leaving it ambiguous, even though it feels like the scale tips a little too often towards the downs/valleys/lows, those sons of motherless goats.

Assuming you’re even the slightest bit curious – morbidly so, perhaps – you might wonder what has brought me back to this place. I was a lot more prolific back then. Maybe I was less private, too. I do feel a bit more constrained in being as publicly open as I once was. I’m not sure why, exactly.

It’s some kind of “October daily blog challenge” that Sunny came up with. Three-hundred words a day, any topic, anything at all. I could probably type “CTHULHU FHTAGN” one-hundred and fifty times, post it as a blog entry, and meet the requirements (though not the spirit) of the challenge.

Who’s Sunny? That’s not important right now. What is important is that I’m somewhere around 341 words for this post (and that number only rises the more I write). Which means I can feed the cats and go to sleep. I have to do it in that order, too, because not feeding the cats is a wonderful way to acquire A.F.I.I. (Acute Feline-Induced Insomnia).

Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.

What Do You Know? It's September.

I made myself an Instagram account. My initial thought was to post gaming-related photos there. I've recently gone back to painting miniatures, so I figured I could post those there. I've also volunteered to help organize a tabletop game club at my kids' high school, and I reckon there might be some good photo ops there, too.

I used to game a lot. Then we had kids and, well, the gaming went by the wayside for a little while. Before we moved to Montreal, we played every other week or so. I ran games for a while, and my friend JZ stepped in to run a game when I got GM fatigue. Moving here made for a pretty big disruption, but we're back on schedule. JZ runs his game on Roll20, and I've started a Call of Cthulhu game at work with my Narrative team.

All that said, I miss running games at home. Outside of work, I don't have many local friends or acquaintances (yet). Networking isn't always easy. I'm hoping the school club introduces me to some new folks.

I created this program back home (in the US) called Dungeon Scouts. I was a Girl Scout leader and I would run workshops to introduce girls to D&D. I planned to bring DS with me to Montreal, but by the time I got here, the Girl Guides were already wrapping up their year. I expect they'll start up again soon.

There's definite value in Dungeon Scouts. There's also the unknown elements. Being a man (oftentimes the only one) in the Girl Scouts of America was... interesting. In the beginning there was a feeling of, "Who is this guy?" from other leaders. It quickly faded, though. I was fully accepted into the organization, which is what gave me the impetus to start Dungeon Scouts in the first place.

Now that I'm in Montreal, there are a few things that give me pause.

1.) I don't know anyone in the Girl Guides here (though I have been in touch with one of the ladies in charge, and should probably drop her a line if I'm serious about starting the program here).
2.) French. I do not speak it. I'm picking it up a bit at a time, but I'm not even close to being "there" when it comes to communicating. I don't know how French Girl Guides Quebec is liable to be.
3.) Montreal. This place... it's unlike anywhere I've ever lived. It's an island. The roads are horrible. Parking (especially in the city) is sparse or non-existent. Driving anywhere requires a significant investment of time.
4.) Speaking of time, I don't know how much of that I have. I'm still getting used to living here. I have a routine of sorts, and it's sort of intimidating when I think about breaking it.
5.) Something else I haven't thought of yet.

Excuses, excuses. I know.

The way I see it right now, I'll forge ahead with the school club for now. I'll see how that goes and then decide from there what I want to do. There's no time limit, right?

Oh, I need to get more Dungeon Scouts patches made. I suppose I'll contact the manufacturer and get an estimate on costs. I'll have them shipped to my friend (and partner in crime) JZ. He's a really good dude and, dammit, I miss him every single day.

Enough pontificating. Maybe I'll paint some stuff.