Brushed the dust off my bike today and took it on a little geocaching circuit around town. Absolutely perfect weather. Picked up a bunch of caches. Lost my notes about 3/4 way through so I just decided to take the long way home via the CNR spur. Where the spur met the TCT, I was enamoured with a vision of some blue siberian squill on the shores of a riverbank, so I got off my bike to sort of just sit there and nod off on a log.

Then I pedalled back. My legs feel like jelly because I am mucho out of shape but there's a pound of wings arriving (ETA 10 minutes?) and some cider in the fridge to ease that pain.  

Yay! And, just a few weeks til my designation finishes processing... 

 I have some new creative pursuits on the horizon.

First of all, the BSG finale WRECKED ME BIGTIME. I started crying when the opera house dreams started aligning with the present, except that everyone was wearing TACTICAL VESTS and I couldn't handle the CONTRAST and the SOUNDTRACK and then ughhhh

AND THEN THEY FOUND EARTH, and a bunch of main characters died, another main character clearly hasn't got much time left! And then the characters I was rooting for this entire time got such a MESSY ending, and I guess toilet paper isn't even going to be invented for another hundred thousand years??

So I sobbed messily for half an hour after the end credits rolled while Krogoth ordered sushi. Which is EXACTLY the sort of reaction that four seasons of TV should wring out! So don't misread me here - I don't care that the last season veered from SPACE SURVIVALISTS to RELIGIOUS ROBOTS and then ROBOT MARITAL COUNSELLING, because when the finale hits like a frakking truck I WILL FORGIVE ALL THOSE SINS but also I will cry about it.

AND THEN, because I can't find that angsty post-canon Lee/Kara fic, I guess I'm gonna have to write it myself

Second order of business is to get my act together and really get the 5e space campaign rolling.

But, story first. Really. 

I will wear the prints off my fingers by the time I figure out how to configure my balcony planter brackets! A pox upon your houses, you non-self-sealing wingnuts!

Anyways, today is the first day of my proverbial march break. I filed our taxes today. It was frighteningly quick. Krogoth sold off the patio furniture, which was too big for the size of our balcony. Today, I'm off to get a haircut and touch up the dip dye, and get some new victims houseplants n seeds from the nursery. After that... I suppose I'll work on my homebrew world, and give Shivani a call to see if it's got legs. 

This week I lost my hair salon to corona, and learned that I was about to lose service on my nokia 1661 when 2G goes the way of the dinosaurs. 

I've replaced them with a salon closer to home, and a samsung sgh s275r that Potato liberated from a life of servitude to the provincial government. It's no nokia 1661 but it'll do until 3G bites the dust, I guess. 

So I've been busy. New things I've found that I love:
- Battlestar Galactica - I'm in Season 2, it's just so freakin good, I can't believe I'd never watched it before!
- Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American - So I've heard a bunch of their tracks on fanmixes but never listened to one of their albums straight through until now. How did I miss this too?? Any one of Cautioners, Authority Song, or Sundown Song would've been great closers... and all three together? I never stood a chance.
- Kat Black's Golden Tarot - IDK, the collage style and the alternately pained and awkward faces just really speak to me, yknow?

And I guess I can write about this now, since it's done. I ran a short 8-session 5e homebrew. It was called the Necromancer of Asterlee. The big bad was a necromancer at the top of a mountain, who turned out to be an old dwarven bard with red hair. His name was Erich. Hence, Erich of Asterlee. Say that out loud. I was pretty proud of myself. There are a few things I wish I'd done differently, including not having forgotten to roll Erich's initiative in the penultimate battle, poorly balancing the actual final battle, and perhaps a few other balance issues. But I was happy with the low-key magic items I made, the dungeon maps, and the overall structure. And also happy that Krogoth enjoyed his first dip into the game. I'm still not sure I'm cut out for the DM role, temperamentally speaking, but I'm glad to know that I can do it in a pinch.

Anyways, a quick, poorly-spelled recap of the highlights -

• ( plot summary )
•  

Yeah and there I thought that was gonna be, like, 2 sessions, 3 sessions max. What a pile of lies that was. But a delightful pile of lies, indeed.

just making this entry to note that this night's session was followed by two hours of dicking around in the discord voice chat about... just a lot of stuff. Making long distance relationships work. Older editions of d&d. Twenty-first century musicianship and piano shooting. Weebdom. Bandsluts, and American Pie. Mass Effect and alien tiddies. The greatest city in the world. Moving out of Japan. The green dot program, frosh-punching, and best buy brawls. Age gaps. Coming out stories. Keeping in touch with old friends, or not. The academic and musical subsets of the two-body program. 

Warms the cold cockles of my heart, it does. 

And before that the bladesinger said "I'm chaotic good" and the DM said "ha ha it's cute you think so" and I was like omggggg.

And before that, on Thursday, I got the best dye job of my life - actually managed to lift my dipped ends to a steel grey. 

Turns out starting the game I planned does not actually dispel the d&d nightmares - it gets me all amped up afterwards, before going to sleep, and makes them all 3x worse.  

After that bout of insomnia, I spent the day assembling tokens, stat blocks, and maps. In the evening I elected to watch TV and pass out around 9. Then, I dreamed about revisiting Camp Wanakita.

Not winter Wanakita from grade 11 - grade 7 Wanakita, in the last days of summer. I dreamed I ate a pile of macaroni & cheese, crossed the high ropes, and then climbed up the big boulder. It's a boulder in the woods, near the cabin I stayed at in grade 7. I don't remember what number cabin it was, but I know that rock - about 10 feet tall, near the girls' cabins, sort of shaped like a stubby thumbs up. Foothold in the low side. We climbed up on that rock and just... talked, I guess.  

IRL I think I found that cabin again in grade 11, but I couldn't be sure from the snow.

Gotta go and find some butts to fill virtual seats now. 

 This is absolutely ass. The worst. Went to sleep round midnight. Tried to sleep. Put a movie on to sleep. Took two melatonin. Put Star Trek TNG to try and sleep. None of it worked. Gonna have to slingshot. Havent done that since I went to Japan.  

- I started neither The Immortal Prince or The First Law. But I did finish Hillbilly Elegy and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I don't have particularly strong opinions about either, but I liked HE better than BHotTM, and BHoTM was kinda casually transphobic?
- Would like to see a book on the Menhaz Zaman murders though 
- I've given up working on my fic entirely for now, at least until I finish my two-shot campaign notes. Been consulting with Sedlak about what to do there. It's been fun. 
- Lately been weirdly sleep deprived - fall asleep watching TV after dinner, but can't fall asleep in bed.