Isolation Report, Week #4

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week was surprisingly difficult.  You would think by week friggin’ four I would have gotten used to the whole thing, but somehow it just took this long for me to crack.  Or something.

First of all, the days are really starting to run together, as The Daily Show recently pointed out.  There’s little incentive to go to bed at a certain time, or to get up at a certain time for that matter.  I thought the return of those shows that I consider my window onto the world would be helpful—and they’re all back, at this point—but of course the world that they’re windowing is not so much one I want to hear about.  Surely there must be some other things going on in the world ... right?  Even John Krasinski’s quite welcome new YouTube Some Good News show is good news ... about the ongoing pandemic.  Better good news than bad news, I suppose, but you know what would better still?  Other news.  Non-virus-related news.  News about something ... else.

Okay, how about I make a list of all the advantages of being stuck at home?

• I only have to do laundry every other week now.
• I haven’t been to the gas station in about a month.
• I’m saving a butt-ton in lunch money.
• My house key has always been a bit flakey—I think it just wasn’t cut properly in the first place.  But now I don’t need to use it any more.  It is literally never the case that I come home when no one else is there to let me in any more.
• I’m starting to get a little sun on my shoulders from sitting out by the pool with the kids.

No, I don’t think that’s helping.  I could almost get excited about starting summer early ... but it just started raining again.  I hear it’s supposed to rain until Thursday this time.

So overall a hard week.  I had to cut my middle child’s hair for him.  I had to keep The Mother from freaking out that our eldest child had booked a flight to New Jersey—because, hey, flights are really cheap now!  (Happily, the flight was cancelled.  Unsurprisingly.)  I had to cook a little more than usual, I had to go out for food a little more than usual, I almost had to bag my own groceries, but the checkers at my local Trader Joe’s said they didn’t care if they had to touch my bags, so I lucked out there.  I had to talk to my parents for the second week in a row to make sure they hadn’t caught pneumonia and died, and I reckon I’ll have to call again next week, and if that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is.  I had to keep on working in a vacuum and hope I’m making sufficient progress.  I had to buy a new CPAP mask because my old one developed a leak.

On the other hand, I also had to play videogames with my baby girl—because she’s going just as stir-crazy as I am—and that wasn’t all that bad.  It was pretty nice, actually.  I got to play D&D again, but I’m actually locked in with my gaming group, and we all agreed that we’re going to play before dinner as well as after dinner from now on ... because, what the fuck: time has no meaning, so why not spend more of it playing games?  I had to go through 13 pages of games on Target’s web site because The Mother had the idea that we’d also start playing board games more often, and that was actually kinda fun too.  I’m trying to find some bright spots, but it isn’t always easy.  Hopefully this is a temporary dip, and next week I’ll be on the upswing again.

Till then.

Isolation Report, Week #3

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week was slightly better.

First of all, Trevor Noah has not in fact given up doing shows; he’s just been hiding them where I couldn’t find them—on YouTube.  They’re not full shows either ... just little snippets here and there.  But, still, quite refreshing to get some news, even if it’s 100% virus-related.  Surely there’s something else going on the world ... there was another Democratic debate, for instance.  But I’ve heard literally nothing about it other than seeing the clip where Biden and Bernie bump elbows instead of shaking hands, and that Bernie promised to fix this ebola pandemic while Biden swore he’d do something about this SARS outbreak.

That latter factoid from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, who are also soldiering on, bless ’em.  But that’s all I’m getting: Colbert’s Internet snippets seem to have petered out, and John Oliver is in hiding, I think.  I was so desperate for news I actually watched a YouTube clip of Jimmy Fallon.  Fallon, I say!¹

It has also, finally stopped raining and warmed up at least slightly.  Which means the plumber came out to fix our gas leak, finally.  Which means we can use jacuzzi again, which we damned well did, although only once so far.  After that, I switched the heat over to the pool; it’s probably too early in the season for the water to retain the heat overnight, making it infeasible to really keep the temperature up, but I decided I was going to do my best to let my little girl swim at least once this weekend.²

Because it’s her birthday weekend this weekend, you know.  She’ll be turning eight, officially, on Tuesday, so she picked this weekend to be hers.  And what a shitty time to have a birthday weekend!  We can’t go out to sit down at any restaurants, and we can’t go out to see a movie, and she can’t have her friends over for a party.  On the plus side, The Mother was so afraid that all her presents wouldn’t get here in time (due to shipping delays caused by ... well, you know) that she went out to Target and bought some just-in-case presents.  And then the real presents did make it,³ so then she had way more presents than she really ought to have.  But obviously she did not complain about this.

So that was a minor bright spot.  And she still gets to pick the meals ... we just have drive-thru and bring them home to eat.⁴  So far we’ve had Taco Bell and Panda Express ... not sure where to next.  Jack-in-the-Box, I’ve heard.  We’ll see.

So, you know, things aren’t as bleak.  But I’m still a little concerned.  Our president⁵ is going on about we need to reopen the country and get everyone back to work.  I started to wonder if people—such as you, dear reader—might think that this is what I was advocating, given some of my previous statements.  I hope not.  Besides not wanting to be associated with any opinion that Trump is holding, I think the larger issue is that I’m concerned that we’re acting like there’s only two options here.⁶  On the one hand the U.S. administration is saying no one should be staying at home and everything should go back to normal.  On the other hand, the majority of the social influencers—including, admittedly, all the folks I praise above—are beating us over the head with the message that we all have to stay indoors or we’re all gonna die.  But I’m the balance and paradox guy, remember?  I haven’t figured out a way to do both at once yet, but surely there has to be a middle ground in there somewhere ...

Perhaps I’m just feeling a bit sad that listening to my favorite media personalities has now devolved into hearing people yell at other people—especially young people—for daring to live their lives.  It’s like The Daily Show: Grumpy Old Men Edition.  You kids today!  You and your going to beaches, and having fun ... why can’t you cower in your houses like normal people!  The mayors of Italy are going out into the streets and yelling at young people.  The mayor of New York has threatened to walk around the city removing all the basketball hoops.  I mean, seriously, people!  Again, I really do understand the necessity for action on this disease (for a particularly informative—and refreshingly less hysterial—discussion, check out Trevor Noah’s interview of Anthony Fauci), but is a society of people shaming others for having fun where we really want to end up?

In any event, I can’t go on about it too long.  I have a ruthless master to serve.  There ain’t nothing like an eight-year-old to really milk the max out of being in charge for a birthday weekend.  At this point, she’s gotten into the habit of prefacing everything she says with “birthday request.”  You know, like: “Birthday request: bring me that glass of water.”  Or, “Birthday request: stop talking so I can hear the movie.”  It’s a ... special time.  I’m not sure I can say we’ll treasure the memories, but we sure as shit won’t forget them.

__________

1 To be transparent, that was really only because Trevor Noah was his “guest.”  Such as guests are in the time of social distancing.
2 Addendum: Yes, both she and her elder brother got in the pool this afternoon and swam for over an hour.
3 Just barely.
4 For her brother, who managed to sneak in his birthday weekend just before everything went to shit, this would be fine.  It’s how he prefers to do it anyway.  But my baby girl is more of a social animal.
5 See, now I know what the fuck our president is up to, because I found Trevor Noah’s hiding spot.
6 I did allude to this issue last week, but I thought it worthy of further elaboration.

Isolation Report, Week #2

[You could also read last week’s report.]



Well, it’s week two, and I don’t think it’s getting any better.

First of all, let me say that the major development in actual virus news is the release of a study by Imperial College in London that paints a pretty grim picture about what could happen with COVID-19 if we don’t take extreme measures.  If you don’t enjoy slogging through statistical analyses, NPR did a nice summary of it, but personally I like the summation by history professor Jeremy Young: there’s a text version, and also a more graphical version illustrated by artist Danny Colee, if that works better for you.  If you’re not much for clicking on things, the takeaway is that (according to these projections) doing nothing kills 4 million Americans—about 4x the number of Americans killed in the Civil War, or 2/3 the number of people killed in the Holocaust.  If the pattern extends worldwide (and, to be fair, the study only looks at the US and UK, so there’s no reason to believe it would ... just no reason to believe it wouldn’t, either), that works out to 90 million deaths: 15x the Holocaust number, or 1.5x the total numer of deaths in all of World War II.  And the reason (at least here in the US) is that extreme cases of COVID-19 will need respirators to survive, but when everyone gets sick more-or-less at once (that is, over about 3 – 6 months), the number of respirators we would need (again, talking about the US) is 30x more than the number we actually have.  So more people die than would otherwise.  Taking moderate social distancing measures could cut those numbers in half, but only the extreme measures really bring them down to where everyone who needs a ventilator gets one and no one (or at least very few people) dies when they didn’t need to.

So, first let me say, I get that.  I understand it, and I believe it, and I in no way am attempting to argue against it.  I don’t think the study is biased, or that it’s wrong.  Please keep that in mind as you read on.

But this is supposed to be a report of our family’s experience this week.  So how’s it been going?  Not great, honestly.  In the first place, we live in southern California—you know, that place where we don’t have weather?  Where the plot of both a movie (L.A. Story) and a song (“It Never Rains in Southern California”) revolve around the fact that it “never rains” and it’s always “72 and sunny”?  Yeah, that place.  Normally, not a bad place to be stuck at home, especially when you’re fortunate enough to have a pool with a jacuzzi in the back yard.¹  But, here’s the rub:  Monday of last week (that is, two weeks from the day after this post), I went to work.  At our status meeting that day, we were told that we could stay home any time we were uncomfortable coming to work, due to the virus or whatever.  The next day, it started raining ... and I’m not talking about a little drizzle.  To call it a torrential downpour would not be exaggerating overmuch, especially considering how little it normally rains here.  The weather report said it would rain for a week.  I stayed at home that Tuesday, not wanting to fight the rain and the resulting traffic, and Wednesday was my normal work-from-home day anyhow.  On Thursday, the rain let up enough that I decided to go into work; I don’t like to wait too many days before I see my coworkers again.  But, as I was preparing to leave the house, I got the word: nobody’s coming in any more, for the foreseeable future.  So I stayed home.  And it kept raining.

The following Tuesday (i.e. 5 days ago as I write this), it was still raining, but the next day the weather cleared, as promised.  I went out to the grocery store, as I always do on Wednesdays, and let me tell you that wasn’t a barrel of fun.  And the next day it started raining again.  Even as I’m writing this, the rain is pouring down outside.  Now, while on the one hand it’s nice that by now we’re bound to be out of the drought conditions we’ve been under for the past ... months? years? I can’t even keep track any more ... but this is not a great time for stormy, overcast days and buckets of rain pouring down.  It’s difficult enough to keep one’s spirits up, but at this point it’s difficult to even get out of the house into our own yard.  It’s difficult to take the dogs out, and there’s certainly no sitting by the pool, or going out for walks in the fresh air.

Of course, getting out at all is problematic now.  Last week, when I told people I was worried about us (as a society) getting to the point where people couldn’t go outside for fear of other people freaking out and calling the cops on them, I sounded like a raving lunatic.  Now, an article in The Atlantic tells us that people going to restaurants and walking on nature trails are “more unnerving” than “empty streets and storefronts,” Stephen Colbert is yelling (his word) at young people in Florida to say at home, and Max Brooks is telling me that I’m going to kill his father Mel (and Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke) if I leave my house to become a “spreader.”  But, much more to the point, the governor of my state has ordered that my family (and the remainder of the residents of my state) are not allowed to leave our homes unless for “essential purposes,” under penalty of misdemeanor, and, when asked how in the world he planned to enforce this, he advised my neighbors to apply “social pressure” on me to feel bad about leaving my house.  So I’ve managed to go from raving lunatic to fucking prophet in the course of a week: not only could people conceivably be calling the cops on me if they deicde my purpose isn’t “essential,” but also they have permission from the governor to get in my face about it.

So, again remembering that I agree with and understand all the points about mitigation, and I agree with and understand that we must do something, perhaps you’ll understand that I’m worried that we’re going too far.  That same Atlantic article says:

But experts are saying that Americans can’t really over-prepare right now.  Overreaction is good!

But I don’t buy this.  That article tries to convince us that “overreacting” isn’t inherently a bad thing because the original meaning of the word wasn’t negative.  But this is a bit like saying it’s okay to use the word “faggot” because it originally meant “a bundle of sticks.”  The word means what it means, now, and there’s no point in yearning for “the good old days” when it meant something else.  And what it means, now, is “to react or respond more strongly than is necessary or appropriate.”  So, while I can’t argue that we’re reacting more strongly than is necessary, I still have to wonder if we’re reacting more strongly than is appropriate.

My kids have barely left the house in 2 weeks.  My little girl has a birthday in nine days, and, despite the fact that her presents were ordered before this lockdown started, it looks like some of her gifts won’t make it in time.  I talked last week about how many of the shows I watch regularly are going to be gone now—The Daily Show has given up, Colbert taped a few half-hearted attempts at monologues via his iPad, there’s no Last Week Tonight this evening, and even Critical Role, my go-to, forget-the-world-and-just-watch-some-folks-play-D&D show, has gone dark.  Now, I know that last one sounds like me just whining about not being able to watch my favorite shows ... and, sure, it is that.  But these are also the things that are keeping me sane, and, judging from Internet comments, I would say I’m not alone in that.

The grocery shopping situation isn’t helping either.  My usual trek to Trader Joe’s was ... interesting.  I had to wait to get in, of course, but it wasn’t too awful.  Most of the people waiting in line were friendly enough.  Once inside, there was plenty of room to roam the store, of course, and there weren’t even that many things that were totally gone: no toilet paper or even tissues, of course, but there was enough milk and eggs, and those were the main things I was worried about.  Perhaps it was because of the restrictions: “loose” items, such as bananas or tomatoes, were unlimited, but pre-packaged items were strictly limited to 2 per customer.  Also, no more than 2 “uncooked meat products” of any kind, and hot dogs count as uncooked.²  The restrictions also included sparkling water, of which I couldn’t buy more than two bottles regardless of flavor, despite the fact that my attempt to get six was in no way hoarding: that’s just how many we normally get through in a week.  But, then again, the restrictions didn’t seem to help certain things: the pasta shelf was devastated, and I got one of the last 3 containers of sour cream.  There were plenty of frozen pot pies, but no frozen burritos or microwave Indian food.  There was plenty of canned tomatoes, but no cans of tomato sauce or tomato paste.  Plenty of regular milk, but no lactose-free milk.  There were plenty of bags of potato chips ... except for the BBQ chips, which were all out.  I have no idea if this was because the store didn’t get any of those items, or they just sold out of them before I got there.

The following day The Mother braved the lines³ at Costco, where the restriction was per SKU, so you could get different flavors or different sizes of the same thing, but there the limit was only one per customer.  Still no toilet paper.  We’re trying not to hoard anything, because that’s just shitty, and, also, where the fuck are you people hoarding milk and eggs putting them?  I just don’t have that much refrigerator space even if I wanted to hoard that sort of stuff, which I don’t, because it’s a shitty thing to do.⁴  On the other hand, stocking up on things just seems prudent at this point, given how horrifically annoying it is to get to the store.  And, given the aforementioned limited refrigerator space, a lot of what we’re stocking up on is prepackaged crap.  I’ve eaten my first really-truly Pop-Tarts—as in, actually made by Kellog’s—in probably more than a decade, and there’s plenty of other stuff out of boxes and cans and, in a few cases, freezer packs, that I wouldn’t normally touch.  But we’re saving the fresher food for special occaions at this point.

You know what isn’t limited?  Alcohol.  TJ’s made it very clear that we could buy as much of that as we wanted, and they were fully stocked in that department.  I bought a couple of bottles of wine and some hard cider.  Costco also excepted alcohol, and The Mother came home with a giant bottle of Absolut.

So, basically, my state government seems to be pushing me to become an overweight paranoid agorophobic alcoholic.

Because, you see, nothing is black and white.  All our overreacting will almost assuredly save lives.  But everything has a cost.  A lot of restaurants won’t survive this pandemic, and I’m almost positive that the movie theater industry is toast.  At least one local amusement park may disappear.  Will suicide rates spike during this period?  Maybe not.  But if I find out later that they did, I shall certainly not be surprised.  Will depression increase?  What will the long-term effects be on our mental health, on our economy, on our children?

The problem with saying such things, of course, is that people will assume I therefore advocate doing nothing.  The study says we have to! they’ll cry.  You quoted the results right at the beginning!  Yes, I did.  That report studied three possible scenarios, and there really is no doubt that, among those three, the shit-storm we’re stuck with is the best option.  But there are an infinite number of scenarios—an infinite number of things we could do.  Those are not the only options.  And I personally think it’s worthwhile to explore some other options, because this one ain’t really working for me.

But, then again, if it would just stop raining here, maybe I would take my giant bottles of alcohol and go work by the pool and be perfectly content.  Honestly, I’m not much for going out under normal circumstances.  But, you know, when people tell you can’t ... after a couple of weeks, you start to realize what you’re missing.

__________

1 Okay, realistically, the pool is our back yard.  But still.
2 You guys know hot dogs are actually cooked ... right?
3 And don’t even get me started on how moronic it is to pack 50 people into a line together so that you can make sure they’re all 6 feet away from each other once they get in the store.
4 Did I mention how shitty it is?

Kicking off the Family Campaign

[This is not exactly a series, but it’s a report about my ongoing D&D campaign with my kids.  This is the first proper report, but there was also a sort of prologue that you could read if you haven’t already.]


So, I previously described how my daughter decided to invent her first D&D characer at age 7, and how that spurred a whole campaign that we finally started to do what I called “flashbackstory” sessions for.  Well, this week was the first official session of the “Family Campaign,” where each of my children’s characters finally met each other for the first time.

Since I’m always a little irked by the standard cliché of “you all meet in a pub,” I went with an entirely different cliché: “you are all summoned by a mysterious benefactor who wishes to call in his favors.”  I mostly justified this by having inserted the initial favor into the flashbackstories, so that, instead of feeling like a tired plot device, it would feel like an organic outgrowth of the story-thus-far.  At least I hope I achieved that.  The kids seemed to enjoy it anyway.

I kicked it off with a short encounter that the benefactor figure, whose name is Hervé and who is sort of the fantasy equivalent of an alien-pretending-to-be-human, engineered as a sort of audition.  I wanted to throw them together fairly quickly and let them work out their group dynamic, plus I knew there was a butt-ton of exposition coming down the pike, and I didn’t want them to get bored by dumping it all on them before anything exciting happened.  I designed this encounter to be just a bit hard, but certainly not deadly, and it turned out to be way too easy, so obviously I’m going to have to up my game on the GM side.^*  They pulled a classic divide-and-conquer technique (which I wasn’t really expecting from a group so unused to working with each other), had a few good rolls, I had a few really bad ones, and at the end of the day those bad guys never really had a chance.  Interestingly, they decided against outright killing them, even applying some emergency first aid to one who seemed like he might slip away from his greivous wounds.

Then we did our long exposition, which I tried to make as entertaining as possible by framing it as a story, and also because I gave their mysterious benefactor an insane accent, which sort of migrates around from French (Monty Python and the Holy Grail style) to Eastern European (Vlad the Impaler style) to Spanish (Puss in Boots style).  I thought it would be an interesting way to emphasize that they couldn’t pin down the accent, and also it means that my accent can never really “slip,” because then I can just say I did it on purpose.  Plus I get to mangle English expressions just for fun (e.g. “Congratulations! You all have passed with the colors that fly!”).  Of course, besides my own desire to have a good time, it’s also designed to keep them entertained while I have to talk for long periods of time, which I think I mostly succeeded at.  I think perhaps my eldest was losing focus a bit by the end, but the younger two seemed to enjoy it pretty well.^**

So, other than that, we did a little journey planning and that was pretty much it.  I’ve never been the type of GM who likes to handwave away travel time (“oh, you’re gonna walk to this place halfway around the world? should take, let’s say, a couple days”) or even travel details (“you guys ready to depart? okay, you travel for three months; now you’re there”).  I mean, imagine if you removed the “travel details” from The Lord of the Rings ... you’d hardly have anything left!  Travel is where a lot of cool adventures happen, and where some of the most important character bonding takes place as well.  It matters to a story what method you travel by, and which route you choose, and how long it takes to get there ... at least, I believe it does.  So I let the kids plan out their route to get to the magic item they’ve been sent to retrieve (or “the MacGuffin,” as my eldest correctly identified it).  Of course, no matter which road they pick, whether they choose to walk or ride horses or swing through the forest like Tarzan (an actual option, given this particular group), something exciting is bound to come of it, so I’m happy to let them work it out for themselves.

Mainly it was a chance for each character to meet the others, and it went far better than I expected.  Let me give you a brief rundown of the characters my children have developed.

My youngest is Corva Ravenstone, who you may recall from last post.  She’s a classic “jungle princess” archetype, raised by a tiger and with a little blue monkey constantly chittering on her shoulder.  She doesn’t care for people, for civilization, for sleeping in beds, and she’s about 16 years old.  But, since she’s been looking out for herself since 5 or so—tigers don’t coddle their children, you know—she’s quite competent.  She’s a half-elf with blue armor, a big honkin’ bow, and the ability to speak to all animals.

My middlest is Zyx, a changeling from the world of Eberron, which is the only place in the D&D multiverse that changelings are found.  A changeling is a creature who can change their form to look like anything they like, within some broad size limitations.  They can’t be giants, and they can’t be halflings, but pretty much anything in between is fair game: human, elf, dwarf, half-orc, any hair color, any eye color, fat, thin, male, female ... anything.  As you can imagine, changelings don’t have the same concepts of gender, and identity in general, that other people do.  They have a tendency to develop certain forms that they favor, and they give each its own name and history.  There’s even a cool racial feature where you choose a particular identity and you are really good at some skill—but only while in that form.  Zyx’s parents moved them to a whole ‘nother world, Ixalan, when they were just a baby, where they also grew up in a jungle, but a very different one: instead of tigers and monkeys, Zyx grew up with merfolk and feathered dinosaurs.  There, they learned to be a druid, and was content enough with that life, until somehow both parents and druid mentor disappeared within a few weeks of each other.  Zyx doesn’t spend much time looking like themself though: he can be Jon Wood, a very non-descript human man in his mid-thirties, or they can be Moon, a fierce shifter with short white hair and yellow eyes, or she can be Xoc,^*** an orange-skinned merfolk teenager who’s really great at alchemy.

My eldest is Isabella, a human who was raised in a creepy cult that turned out be to riddled with lycanthropes.  Her father was the cult leader, who turned out to be a werewolf, and, when she came of age, he bit her, and now she’s a werewolf too.  She soon ran away and has spent the remainder of her life trying to control her condition, and has now reached a point where she can enter a battle rage, changing to her hybrid wolf form, and not rip her allies to shreds.  Mostly.  Interestingly, she’s the oldest (although all Zyx’s forms appear older, Zyx themself is only 15, a year younger than Corva), but also the most sheltered, since she was never on her own until she left home, which she did at a much older age than either of the other two.  She’s capable of handling herself, certainly, but there’s also an innocence about her that contrasts with her bestial nature.

So far, it’s too early to know for sure how the intra-party dynamics will shake out, but we see some early indications.  Isabella seems somewhat disconcerted that a “child” will be accompanying them, even though Corva is no younger than she was when she left home.  But perhaps she sees herself in the younger girl a bit.  Meanwhile no one even knows how old Zyx is, since they’ve only met Jon and Moon so far—for that matter, no one else even knows Zyx’s actual name!  Corva just seems excited to be a part of all this, and no one at all seems concerned that, within the first few hours of meeting, one of their new friends turned into a werewolf.  And they’ve still yet to meet the mysterious fourth member of their party ...

I’m feeling pretty excited about where the story is going.  There will be some secrets revealed, and some dangers faced, and some dangers handily circumvented, and some new abilities discovered.  Hopefully some friends will also be made along the way.

Perhaps I’ll drop in here to report the progress from time to time.  I think it’s a story worth sharing.

__________

* That means “game master,” if you’re still not a D&D person and you still didn’t read the prologue blog post, which contains a footnote nearly identical to this one.  In this particular case, though, the relevant part of being the GM is that I’m responsible for choosing all the enemies they’ll have to fight.
** Which is a bit backwards from how I thought it would go down, to be honest.  But probably it was because the younger two are more easily amused, while my eldest was looking for more substance.  Hopefully this situation will improve as time goes on.
*** Pronounced “shock,” if you care.  Due to a bit of linguistic nerdery, we decided that “X"s in Ixalan are pronounced as “sh,” meaning that instead of “ICKS-uh-lan,” which is how most people pronounce it, we say “EESH-ah-lahn.”  We’re weird that way.

Another decade bites the dust

Well, the holidays are over, and it’s time to get back to work.  On the one hand, I haven’t been to the office at $work for about 17 days now, so it’ll be nice to get back, and I’m sure my family is just as sick of having me around as I am of being around.  On the other hand, there’s something to the sentiment that The Mother expressed a few days ago: “I want it to be the week between Christmas and New Year’s for the rest of forever.”

From the I’m-Getting-Too-Old-for-This-Shit department:  Today I broke my 5th or 6th dish in the past few months.  It completely exploded (because of course it did)—as Neil once said, it was smashed into 15 million pieces, and every single one of those pieces was smashed into 15 million pieces, and, although at that point I stopped counting, I wouldn’t be surprised if ...  Apparently they make special dishes for old people that are easier to grip, so I reckon I’m going to have buy some of those.  Or at least dishes that don’t shatter on impact.

This year I’m looking forward to more sessions in the Family Campaign, and possibly getting some interesting Perl work done, and hopefully marking a few things off my todo list.  It’s a new decade, after all, and I’m sure many folks look at that as a fresh start.  But, you know, I’m not going to complain about a little more of the same ol’ thing, because, for me, the same ol’ thing is pretty nice.

Sickness behind, hope ahead

Well, another Christmas come and gone.  Mostly I was sick for it.  In fact, I didn’t eat anything at all for over 24 hours: no Christmas cookies, no Christmas chocolate, no ham biscuits.  And, when I did finally eat (right before bed on Christmas night), it was cinnamon toast and turmeric tea.  But enough whining.

The kids seemed to have a lovely day at least.  (They got over their respective bugs well before the big day.)  There was lots of playing with videogames and dolls, and the eldest one and I got to play D&D on Christmas night.^*  So it wasn’t all bad.

Still, hoping New Year’s will be disease-free.  Oh, and that you, dear reader, will have a lovely 2020.

__________

* This was the second of the “flashbackstories” that I mentioned previously.

No Time Like the First Time

This past summer, while sitting in the hot tub with my youngest child (age 7), she announced that she had an idea for a D&D character.

Now, I am not a sports dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you for the first time to say they want to learn how to throw a football.  And I am not a musician dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you at a young age and tell you about the song they’re trying to write.  But I imagine that what I felt at that moment, in that hot tub, was comparable to those scenarios.

My two youngest spend a lot of time in the pool (mostly fighting, or playing, and sometimes doing both at once), and I like to sit out with them and work on my computer stuff and watch them.  Occasionally I get in, but, honestly, I’m not much for playing in the pool these days.  I still do laps sometimes—it’s really the only exercise I actually enjoy—but that’s not a thing you want to try to do while kids are playing (or fighting) in the water with you.  But, when they’re all tuckered out from playing and fighting and playfighting, they often get in the hot tub to cool down (figuratively, obviously).  My littlest one likes it way more than the middlest one: like her old man, she loves the heat.  The middle child will usually give up after a while, complaining “it’s too hot!” And then it’s just me and her.  Sometimes we play 20 Questions.  Sometimes we just talk about mostly nothing.  But, this time, she decided to tell me about her D&D character concept.

It’s perhaps important to establish that she’s never played before.  She’s watched us play many times, of course, and once I let her be a sort of pet character,¹ but she didn’t really do much.  Sometimes we listen to a D&D podcast in the car—specifically, the excellent Dames and Dragons, which is the one she really likes—but, overall, not any real prior experience.  And, yet, this was not a vague idea she was presenting to me.  This was a fully-fleshed out concept: this character had a name, a race, a class, hair color, eye color ... she even told me what type and color of armor she wore.  When she said, “now, her parents—well, she has kind of a dark backstory,” I almost squeed.  I’ve had thirty-year-olds who put less effort into their characters than this.  “Dark backstory”?  What kind of weird YouTube crap is she watching?  But, from a GM² perspective, it’s gold.

Now, some things changed as time went on, but the final character is remarkably similar to what she gave me that first day.  Corva Ravenstone is a half-elven ranger with turquoise hair and lavender eyes.  Here’s the current version of her backstory:

Corva’s parents disappeared into the jungle when she was just a baby.  Corva thinks they were studying nature, but she doesn’t really remember because she was too young.  When she was barely old enough to walk, they never came back from collecting herbs one day; the only clue Corva has is that some blood and black fur were left behind. From then on she was raised by her tiger friend Bone.

Corva dresses all in green, except for her light blue armor.  She carries a bow and has a monkey companion named Chip.

Please note that, although I helped put the thoughts above into nice-sounding sentences, I didn’t really write any of it.  None of it.  It’s all her.

So, naturally I decided that this deserved a corresponding effort on my part.  This couldn’t just be a throw-away character concept; this had to be a real character that my daughter played in a real campaign.  The problem, of course, is that creating D&D campaigns is a major effort.  I did a little bit of it for my eldest child, but mostly it’s just been using pre-written adventures for the last several years.  But for this I felt like I had to put together something memorable.  The other two kids are joining us, of course, for what we’re currently dubbing “the Family Campaign.” And I’ve probably put more time and effort into trying to write background and plot and adventure hooks for this one game of D&D than I have in the past 15 years.

Therein lies the problem, of course.  I bit off more than I could chew, and it’s taken me six months to get ready to go.  All this is pressure I put on myself; the kids, I’m sure, would be happy just to play whatever.  But, the more I thought about it, the more ideas I had, and the more the older two started to get excited as well, and the more complicated it all became.  Definitely no one to blame but me, but it just felt like it had to be ... well, not perfect, but at least special.

And I’m definitely not done yet.  But I came up with this wacky idea where each of my three children would play a short, solo intro adventure, which would set up the whole background, and then they’d come together.  I’ve taken to calling these “flashbackstories,” an over-obvious portmanteau word to be sure, but too cool to pass up.  They will each take place 5 – 7 years “ago”³ and they will tell the story of how each character left their original home and came to be indebted to a mysterious benefactor, who will then call upon them to perform a certain mission in return (which will be the kickoff to their shared adventure).  For this purpose, I’m designing mini-adventures that are specifically too hard for their beginner characters, but then pairing them up with a higher-level NPC.⁴  So, the idea is, basically, there’s a fight they can’t really handle alone, discovery of a greater danger, and a guide to help them get out alive and take them away to some relative safety, whence they, years later, come together at last.

Did I mention I was making it way too complicated?

Anyhow, I finally got to the point where I could start with the first flashbackstory, which is Corva’s.  And, this past Wednesday night, my youngest child played her very first game of D&D with her own character.  And it was pretty amazing.

She took to it pretty naturally.  There was the standard amount of newbie fumbling around with which dice to roll, and which numbers to add to the totals, but my eldest volunteered to help out with that aspect.  What is often harder for people to get into is putting yourself into your character’s position and really roleplaying.  That part she just instantly grasped.  She asked intelligent questions and made intelligent choices.  When she ran into her first dangerous encounter, she understood instinctively that it was a fight that she couldn’t win and opted to stay under cover while her much more capable tiger mentor went in to do the heavy lifting.  Then, in a twist that frankly astonished me, she correctly identified my NPC as a friendly and ran to her (staying hidden, of course), and said “I want to grab her by the wrist and help her run away and hide.” This was the character I sent to make sure she survived, you understand.  But my girl knew that Corva knew the jungle better than this outsider ever could and wanted to get her to safety ... she was trying to save her would-be-savior.

We played for a couple of hours before we called it quits, and the next morning she asked when we were playing again.  “Soon,” I promised.  “Maybe when you get out of the shower?” she asked hopefully.  “I have to go to work,” I pointed out.  She seemed very disappointed.  And she’s already asked at least twice more since then.

So I would have to say it was a success, and, assuming I don’t kill myself trying to do all this extra work, I think it will be a pretty cool campaign.  And I think my youngest child will, at age 7, be a pretty amazing player.  I can’t wait to see how it all comes out.

__________

1 For those of you who speak 5th edition D&D, I was playing a pact of the chain warlock, and so she played my improved familiar.

2 And, for those of you who don’t speak D&D, the GM is the “game master.” Sort of like the referee of the game.

3 That is, from the perspective of “today,” which will be whenever we start the full campaign and they all meet for the first time.

4 You might find it interesting if you’re a fellow D&D player (and especially interesting if you’re a D&D player from my old gaming group) to know that, for these NPCs, I’m using updated-to-5e versions of my own old player characters.  At this point, I’ve played for long enough that I have an old character for just about every occasion, and I found what I think is the perfect one for each of my 3 kids’ character concepts.

It's the most overstressed time of the year ...

This has been one of our busiest weeks of the year:

• Monday the Smaller Animal was in D&D class.
• Tuesday The Mother took all the kids to Magic Mountain.
• Thursday was Inspire’s Winter Wonderland followed by Dojo Boom.
• Friday was Dave & Buster’s.
• Saturday was our belated National Heroscape Day celebration; I took the kids and The Mother stayed home this time.
• Sunday was a birthday party.

Additionally, there was going to be a vendor fair Wednesday and the annual holiday party for $work on Thursday night, but somethings had to give.  Partially because it’s been raining like crazy here in the desert, which is, needless to say, somewhat uncharacteristic.  So, I wish I had time to write more, but I’m just too tired.  Next time.

Happy birthday to me

You know how I said that this weekend was my birthday weekend and I wasn’t going to promise you a full post this week?  Yeah, well, this is me delivering on that non-promise.  Or anti-promise.  Or something.

Hey, you know what I just found out?  Neil Gaiman is a Scorpio, just like me!  This is important, of course, because (as I’ve written about before), Neil is the fifth point on my pentagram of literary idols.  There are any number of excellent reasons to love Gaiman—Coraline, Stardust, Sandman, Neverwhere—but surely the epitome must be American Gods.  Read the novels, watch the series, listen to the sequel Anansi Boys as read by amazing vocal talent Lenny Henry ... get it any way you can.  And send Neil some good thoughts today.

This weekend we didn’t do much.  My computer keeled over again, so that consumed 5 hours of my life.  We watched Men in Black: International finally; it was good.  We went to a fancy Italian place that we hadn’t tried yet; the lasagna and the mushroom risotto were particularly lovely.  I worked on my D&D spreadsheets and made a small amount of progress.  And the donut shop actually had cinnamon donuts for a change!  So, overall a fine weekend.

Next week, a proper post for sure.

Dark night of the soul

This week, our lovely power company turned off our electricity for about 24 hours.  It was quite a trying experience, especially for our children, who think that if you don’t have any electronic devices, your life is pretty much over.  “I’m so BOOOOORED!!” was the call du jour.

Now, on the plus side, located as we were between (at least at one point) four wildfires, we feel very lucky that we suffered zero property damage, never had to evacuate, never were in danger of losing any of our family, be they fleshy, furry, or scaly.  So we’re very pleased about that.  On the other hand, the fact that power was restored to the vast majority of our city—including the vast majority of our very own neighborhood!—nearly 12 hours before it was to us was pretty irritating.  The Mother is of the opinion that they just plain forgot to turn us back on.  I prefer the theory that they foolishly tried to turn everyone back on at once and a couple of the circuits just keeled over dead from the shock of it all.  Either way, we’re not pleased at the extra expenditure at Costco (for flashlights and headlamps) or the food that will be slowly going bad faster than usual over the next few days and weeks.  What makes it even more frustrating is the fact that the power company claims that they have to cut the power to reduce the risk of starting new fires when the winds get high.  Yet, within minutes after they turned the power back on, a whole new fire broke out, and the current working theory (at least according to that bastion of accuracy, the Internet) is that the sudden resumption of power actually caused the fire.  So it’s quite frustrating overall.

On the plus side, my children finally got to play that Minecraft Uno game we bought them, and I now understand why people used to go to bed so damn early in the olden days.  Also, if there was any lingering doubt in my mind that I need that stupid CPAP machine to sleep, they are firmly put to rest.  I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 2am, then at 4am, then at 6am, then the next time I didn’t even bother looking at the clock because obviously it was 8am, then the next time I woke up it was 7:30am, so obviously I was wrong before, and then the power came back on 8:30am and I promptly got up and reassembled my machine and got 3 good hours of sleep.  So that was fun.

Compared to all that, nothing else this week is even worth mentioning.  Tune in next week when (hopefully) there will be a longer post.  However, next weekend is also my birthday weekend, so I make no promises.

Another proud father moment

Tonight my youngest told me her idea for what I believe is her first D&D character.  She will be a white-haired elven ranger with pink armor and a bow.  She likes bows, apparently ... my daughter that is, not her character.  Well, both, I suppose.  She’s getting to the age where she’s ready start playing—I suppose that, instead of finding myself a new gaming group, I’ve been breeding one.  But I’m cool with that.

My favorite part was that she had already concocted a backstory, which she described as “kinda dark.”  Remember the days when you had to explain to people what a backstory was?  Apparently kids these days are just picking it up on the streets.  I blame the Internet.

A longer post next week.

Closing out another Virgo birthday season

Well, all our birthdays are done for a bit: 4 out of 5 for the year, in fact.  This was a pretty easy weekend overall; our eldest is now 21, and thus fairly independent.  Not nearly as much work, don’t you know.

Still, not a lot of time left over for blog posts, I’m afraid.  Hopefully more next week.

What My Kid Did This Summer

According to the schedule, this week really should be a long post week.  However, we’ve entered the Virgo birthday season again: this weekend is The Mother‘s birthday weekend, and next weekend will be the eldest spawn’s.  So you’ll need to wait a couple more weeks for something substantial.

In the meantime, I picked up the middle spawn from camp on Friday—I mentioned last week that I thought it was his third year, but it’s actually his fourth.^*  Getting him to tell you what he did at camp is always somewhat painstaking, but the person who does the pick-up has the best shot, so I endeavored to gather all the info I could so I could report back to The Mother.  Here’s what I managed to get out of him:

• He ate pizza a lot.

• He had several counselors who he’d had before, including his lifeguard, codenamed Trillo.  (Counselors at Camp del Corazon, many of whom are medical folks, go by nicknames while at camp, for some reason that has never been completely clear to me.)

• Another of his counselors was an actor who looks like a viking.

• This year he had the camp’s first female doctor; her codename was Snowflake.

• He shot his badge with a BB gun, although he just sort of grazed it so you’d only notice if he specifically points it out.

• He won a competition at “disco bingo” and the prize was that his cabin got to jump off the dock into the water (this is a privelege normally reserved to seniors).

• He kayaked to Spain again.^**

• He went snorkeling and saw Garibaldis and a stingray and a leopard shark.

This is more info than we usually get, so we’re quite excited.  And possibly a bit jealous: I’ve never gotten to see a leopard shark in the wild.


Birthday weekend for The Mother was fairly chill; she and I are wanting less and less to go out and do “exciting” things and more and more just to be able to relax at home.  Sure, you can argue that we’re home all the time, so it’s nothing special to stay home.  But, here’s the thing: under normal circumstances, home is where you have to teach school, and pay bills, and take care of children, and clean up things.  Any time when you can actually just chill out, with your laptop or tablet, maybe hang out in the pool, have a glass of wine or a hard cider, and just do a whole lot of glorious nothing ... those are actually some lovely times.  This year we gave The Mother a hammock and a waterproof case for her Kindle to facilitate the relaxation vibe.  So far it’s been quite nice.


Anyhow, that’s pretty much all I got for this week.  Next week, most likely a brief recap of the next birthday weekend.

__________

* I did say that I was starting to lose track.
** As the story goes—as well as I understand it second-hand from my 13-year-old—there’s one “island” (no more than a large rock, really) that was accidentally omitted from the documents of the sale of Catalina Island.  Therefore, it’s “technically” still owned by Spain, and, thus, you can kayak to Spain from Catalina.

Another Camp Week

Today our middle child went off to summer camp again.  This is his third year, I believe; it’s starting to get to the point where I’m losing track of how often he’s gone.  You may recall that this is the child with the heart condition, which might make you wonder how we can send him off to camp, until I remind that we are amzingly lucky and live sufficiently close to Camp del Corazon, which is a summer camp designed specifically for kids with heart conditions and staffed by off-duty pediatric cardiologists and cardiology nurses.  It’s an amazing opportunity for my kid to go off to Catalina Island, which is a place even I haven’t gotten to go to yet, despite it being one of the first places I indentified as a must-see when I moved here 12 years ago.  So we take full advantage of it and he seems to enjoy it, although—as I’ve mentioned before—he’s the type of kid who likes to play things pretty close to the chest, so it’s always difficult to say for sure.  But I’m glad he gets the opportunity to be out from under the shadow of the eldest and the tyranny of the youngest for a week.  I’m sure he’ll have fun.

In the meantime, The Mother will take said youngest off to Lake Cachuma for some quality mother-daughter time, and I’ll take a few days off work for a bit of a staycation, and technically speaking the eldest will still be wandering around (they have work, as well as their second week of college), but I’ll barely notice that one.  So, a quiet week for me.  Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to catch up on some pet projects.  We shall see.

Next week, something more substantial.  Probably.

Another Father's Day rolls around

You know, when I wrote last week that a longer post this week should be “achievable,” I totally forgot that it was Father’s Day.  Today my lovely children (and The Mother, of course) are taking me to see Avengers: Endgame, which is, what? 6 hours long?  So I think my day is pretty full already, and I’m only setting myself up for failure (as The Mother would say) if I try to work in a long blog post too.  So let’s skate one last time and I’ll just wish everyone a happy and brilliant Father’s Day, even if they’re not fathers—doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate the general concept of fatherhood, which I can tell you from personal experience is pretty great.  Love to all my minions from their Gru.

Until next week.

Birthdays are done for a while

Another March birthday season is in the books.  The little empress didn’t demand too much: take-out from Panda Express, and eat-in at Chez McDonald’s, avec Play Place.  I was required to cook my world famous potato soup,^* and also to take out a second mortgage to be able to afford heating the pool for the first real swimming of the year.  Happily, we live in Southern California, so the water temp as of the last weekend in March was only 61 ... a mere 20° lift.  I’m sure it was only a several hundred dollar windfall for SoCalGas.  But, hey: when your baby girl says “heat the pool” ... whatchagonnado?

There was also a strawberry cake with strawberry icing and a metric shit-ton of sprinkles—which was way too sweet for me—and birthday donuts, and way too much Barbie spewage.  But she had a lovely weekend, and that’s all that really matters.

As with last year, there was a little bit of “birthday weekend hangover”: at 7 years old, it’s tough to have that amount of power for 2½ days and then lose it all just ’cause you went to bed and woke up again.  But she’s worked through it this past week and I’m pretty sure she’s back to Norman now.  Next year, we do it all again.

__________

* To be fair, it is only world famous because this blog post is visible worldwide, and I just talked about it here.

First birthday of the year

Sliding into the March birthday season, it’s the Smaller Animal’s birthday weekend, so it works out nicely that I don’t have to do a long post this week.  You know, I was just looking at what we did last year for the corresponding weekend, and this weekend was mostly the same: Subway and Panda Express, make The Mother cook “Burden spaghetti” (we call it that because it comes from my side of the family, although, since it actually derives from my mother’s family, it should more properly be called “Baird spaghetti,” and the tale of that recipe is probably worthy of its own blog post one day), attend a showing of a CGI movie.  Last year we couldn’t find a place to watch the chosen flick (Early Man, which we saw later when it came out on DVD/streaming, and it was quite excellent); this year we went with the Lego Movie 2, which was easier to find and just as entertaining.  Also, at home we watched Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is yet another CGI movie, and it was also quite fun.  Also, birthday donuts again (pretty much everyone gets that for their birthday), and still more videogames.

The new thing—well, it’s still technically a videogame, so perhaps not entirely new—this year was Nintendo Labo, which is this bizarre concoction of cardboard and string kits that you build, and then play videogames with, most of involves which a lot of moving around.  It’s half craft kit, half videogame, and half exercise machine.  It’s really quite amazing on a lot of levels.  First of all, my kid is, right this very second, jumping around in what is essentially a VR rig made out of carbboard, that he assembled himself without any real tools, and is now using to control a giant robot on the screen that he makes punch and stomp things by, well, punching and stomping.  So that’s pretty impressive right off the bat.  It was also amazing how much time he was willing to put into following the laborious instructions, which are themselves amazing, because instead of being scores of printed pages with indecipherable diagrams and badly translated text, they’re friggin’ movies.  And not just movies, because they use the gaming console, so you can back up, or zoom in, or change the camera angle.  Shit, man: if Ikea ever figures out how to do instrucitons like this, comedians will run out of material.

So it’s been a pretty decent weekend, and I think the kid has had fun.  And in 3 more weeks we get to do it all again, only with a more tyrannical master: our fairy princess will be turning 7.  Joy.

A Nauseous Super Naus

Well, this should technically be a full post, but there are two factors which mean that it will be at least slightly abbreviated.  One is that Christmas is falling just two days after this post.  Christmas is our big holiday this time of year, and often I wish you a happy-merry this and that, but you’ll just have to revist an older post for that sentiment this year.  (Check out my series listing of the informals and look for the “Happy Holidays” section.)

Because the second factor is what I alluded to last week: our family has been laid low by what we suspect is a norovirus: that is, a stomach flu that basically makes you barf your guts out for 24 – 48 hours or so, then magically just goes away.  In terms of evolutionary function, I’m still trying to work out what possible use this is to the actual virus.  I mean, obviously viruses can’t think and don’t have ulterior motives, but living things evolve a certain way for a reason, even if it’s a dumb reason.  In this case, though, I got nothing.

Our eldest child kicked us off, and the long lead time before anyone else started vomiting is a dead giveaway that they were patient zero.  They’re doing an intern program for an education class, you see, which involves sitting in for primary school classes for a certain number of hours a day.  And primary schools are just breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses: when single-celled pathogens get together, at pathogen conferences, or informal pathogen meetings, or even just hanging around in pathogen bars, they swap stories of their favorite primary school classrooms.  So patient zero here contracts a norovirus from some snotty-nosed kid, brings it home, and starts barfing.  It was only one really good day of digestive system evacuation, then it was over ... or so we thought.  It was almost a week later before the littlest one started barfing; the middle child kicked in about 2 or 3 days after that.  Then another week, and it was my turn.

My experience was, basically, you spend all day thinking you’re gonna barf, but you don’t.  After a while, you start to wonder if you’d feel better if you just went ahead and did it and got it over with—after all, that’s how it usually goes when you’re sick, right?  You feel nauseous, until eventually you vomit, then you feel better ... right?  Oh, no: not this time.  Because eventually you do barf, but you still feel nauseous.  Then you spend a few more hours thinking you’re going to barf again, but you don’t, until you do, then it starts over.  This continues until eventually, the hours of feeling like you’re about to hurl just continue indefinitely without any actual hurling, and you wake up two days later and you’re mostly okay.

And also I have to say: this was some of the most violent, stomach-churning barfing I think I’ve ever experienced.  I literally felt like my stomach was being wrung out like a dishrag in order to eject all its contents.  I luckily only experienced this twice; our baby girl had at least 15 episodes like this, until she was just bringing up water.  We tried denying her the water so she wouldn’t have anything at all to vomit, but that just led to dry heaves, which, if you’ve ever experienced that, is even worse.  So we went back to letting her drink water.

Water is pretty much the only thing I could consume, by the way.  I got a good lunch in before it started, then didn’t eat again for over 24 hours, and even then, it was a single packet of applesauce.  Later that evening I graduated to KFC mashed potatoes (light on the gravy), but, even then, I felt like I was pushing it.

But today I’m mostly better, and all my other humans are mostly better.  But it’s been a harrowing couple of weeks: even one of the dogs and one of the cats got into the act with us—entirely coincidental, I’m sure, since I don’t believe noroviruses are cross-species compatible, but it just felt like the miscrosopic world was out to get us.  Now that that episode is behind us (hopefully: The Mother never actually succumbed to the virus, although she got close a couple of times, so it’s still technically possible we could have one more go down), we can move on to Christmas.

Christmas and barfing don’t seem to have much in common, but allow me to tell you one more little story before I let you go.

Last night the family and I went out to L.A. Zoo Lights.  I was still breathing very carefully and moving pretty slowly, but I figured most of the serious barfing was over, and, besides: we’d already paid for it.  And plus the smallies were looking forward to it.  So I sucked it up and we went.  And it was okay: super-crowded, of course, and, in the end, probably not an experience we’ll repeat any time soon, but nice to say we’ve done it once.  On the way back home, needing some distraction from my stomach in order to deal with the LA freeways, The Mother put on the audiobook version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas—specifically, the 1966 animated special version, so the “audiobook” is essentially just the entirety of the audio from the show.  This is excellent, of course, because you don’t actually need the visuals to appreciate Boris Karloff’s amazing rendition of the book, and you also get the songs (which were specifically added for the special).  “Welcome Christmas” (you know, “fah who foraze, dah who doraze”) is nice, and “Trim Up the Tree” is mostly forgettable, but what we’re really here for, of course, is “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” as sung by the amazing (and amazingly named) Thurl Ravenscroft.  As I was concentrating very hard on this audiobook while driving us home, I can tell you quite definitely that there were a surprising number of allusions to my condition in this song, starting of course with the “seasick crocodile” reference, which I thought was a pretty apt description of how I was feeling.  But the final verse really brings it home:

You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch,
With a nauseous super naus!
You’re a crooked dirty jockey and you drive a crooked hoss, Mr. Grinch—
You’re a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich, with arsenic sauce!

A nauseous super naus pretty much perfectly describes my last two days.  Now here’s to hoping that my heart will grow three sizes and I can get back into the proper spirit of Christmas.  Because, you know, Christmas is in our grasp, as long as we have hands to clasp.

So this is what "vomitorium" means ...

Our word for the week this week is norovirus.  I’m exhausted.

Next week, something more substantial.

Thankful for Thanksgiving

Well, it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving (here in the US at least), and that’s typically a time for me to blow off blog posts.  If you’re lucky, you may get one of my infamous abbreviated posts, such I did in 2014, and in 2015, and in 2016.^*  But this year, the weekend is falling squarely on a “full post week,” according to my new blog schedule, so I have less of an excuse than usual.

If you actually read any of those abbreviated posts I just threw you links to, you will have picked up some of our Thanksgiving traditions: enjoying the sides more than the turkey, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, and coming up with 3 things (each) that we’re thankful for and sharing them with each other.  Other than that, we don’t do a whole lot on Thanksgiving.  In particular, we do not travel for it, and we very rarely have anyone over for it.  Our lovely family (for those keeping score at home, current count is: 5 humans, 2 canines, 2 felines, 1 rodent, and a tank full of piscines, arthropods, gastropods, and an amphibian who still refuses to die) is quite large enough, thank-you-very-much, and just managing to get all of us to the table, with the food, enough clothes on everyone that some pictures can be taken, while also trying not to kill each other because cooking large holiday meals is stressful enough without even considering that our kitchen is basically the size of a sardine tin ... just managing all that is challenging enough as it is.  Hell, even getting the dining room table completely cleared off (which we pretty much do exactly twice a year) is a chore.  If we had to add to that the extra work of cleaning house enough to be presentable to friends and relatives, and the extra food it would require, and so on and so forth, I don’t think we’d survive.

But, as it is, it’s pretty much exactly the right amount of work and it pays off very nicely.  The 5 of us humans share pretty much the same feelings on politics and religion, and, if any of the fuzzy children are pro-Trump or anything along those lines, they at least keep it to themselves.  None of us are huge drinkers—I think my single glass of wine was the only alcohol consumed throughout the entire meal—so there’s no drunken ranting either.  So we don’t have the stereotypical issues that you hear office mates and late-night comedians go on about.  The smallies will occasionally fight over the last buttered roll, and The Mother may yell at the eldest for sneaking food under the table to the dogs, and maybe we quibble over who took much of that and they’ll never eat it all and why didn’t you pass the so-and-so to me, I mean you had it right there in your hand and you knew I wanted some ... and that’s about as contentious as it ever gets.  Which is, you know ... nice.

This year, the lists of things we were thankful for were dominated by having a heart surgery survivor in our midst, as might be expected.  I was also bold enough to be thankful for MST3K for the second year (not in a row), since we actually got the premiere of a brand new season for our Turkey Day marathon: six movies designed to be watched in one marathon sitting.  Sure, we only made it through three of them, but it was pretty glorious nonetheless.  And we were thankful for each other, and for our friends, and for the fact that none of us or our friends had their houses burned down or suffered so much smoke damage as to be unlivable, and for my excellent job that pays me very well and yet that I still enjoy going to work every day even after five years, all of which is a long-winded way to say, we’re thankful for our life.  It’s a nice life, and we quite enjoy it, and, in general, we’re not just living it.  We’re experiencing it, and relishing it, and thriving because of it.  And it’s good to appreciate that.  And I think that’s what Thanksgiving should be about.

Thanksgiving gets a lot of shit these days.  It has a serious image problem: many people like to trot out Thanksgiving as a way to whitewash the relationship between us white Europeans and the Native Americans.  But, you know, Thanksgiving didn’t actually start with that whole Pilgrims-and-Indians feast.  Wikipedia tells us that:

Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations.  The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but some Puritans wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including Christmas and Easter.  The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence.  Unexpected disasters or threats of judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting.  Special blessings, viewed as coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving.

Of course, we don’t talk about that, because Thanksgiving is supposed to be a secular holiday: something we can all enjoy regardless of our religious affiliations.  But of course even in its religious roots, it has a bit of anti-establishment in its history—the whole concept of days of thanksgiving was to replace the froufrou high Church holidays.  But even so it was still a Christian celebration; who you were supposed to be giving thanks to was never really in question.  Recasting it as a coming together of disparate cultures—regardless of how accurate or how fictional—seems to me like a desperate attempt to secularize the holiday (because of course the Native Americans wouldn’t have been giving thanks to the Christian God).  But I’m not sure that’s really necessary.  If you’re religiously inclined (and I don’t really think it matters what type of religion), you know who you’re giving thanks to.  And, supposing you’re not, who would you be giving thanks to anyway?  Now, me, I’m more inclined toward the agnostic, so I’m perfectly happy to throw some thanks out into the greater universe without particularly needing to know if there’s anyone on the receiving end.  But I’m at a loss to explain how a proper atheist can celebrate Thanksgiving: if everything happens according to random chance, there certainly doesn’t seem to be any point in thanking anyone for it.  But we seem to have all agreed that we can be thankful once a year without requiring deity, destiny, or doctrine, and I think we can continue that trend without needing to drag the Native Americans into it.

So I don’t need any Pilgrims^** to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I don’t need any attempts to rewrite history to pretend that our ancestors got along better than they actually did.  I personally think Thanksgiving is more about what’s happening right now.  It’s a chance to set all the bad stuff aside—and, let’s face it, there’s always going to be some bad stuff.  But on Thanksgiving, you ignore all that—you focus on the good stuff, and you get to say, hey, maybe my life is pretty damned good after all.  I think that’s the value of listing things to be thankful for: it reminds us that there really are a lot of things to put on that list.  And some of them are little things, and some of them are big things, but they all count.  They all contribute to that feeling that life is pretty sweet after all.  And so we get together with our family, and perhaps a few friends, and we celebrate that with some good food and maybe a beer or a glass of wine or a fine single-malt whiskey, and we eat too much and we drink too much and we watch too much television, and then we fall asleep on the couch, because, hey: life is good.

And I’m happy to be reminded of that, once a year at least.  Honestly, we should probably have Thanksgiving more often.  We’d probably be happier if we did.

Although we’d probably get sick of the turkey leftovers eventually.

__________

* Last year you didn’t even get one of those.  I plead heart surgery.

** And, anyway, as a native Virginian, I’m educated to believe that those Massachusetts Johnny-come-latelies are hogging all the glory despite the fact that we did everything first.