Day 302: Saturday Quiet

Today started about 9ish and remained slow and pleasantly boring. No bleeding, no coups, no elections, and a few deliveries.

I managed to sleep a regular night’s sleep. I was up as I thought it was later than it was. I think I dreamed it was in the afternoon.

I did stay up to play A War of Whispers board game last night. This is a new Kickstarter Collector’s Edition. I learned that meant all those blurry markings on the board were now replaced by a cool looking 3D piece of plastic. The armies were also replaced with a banner marker that looked well like a banner. The appearance was impressive for a 60-minute play game. It needs to be a visual game, allowing the players to grasp decisions without reading the rules or looking for minutes to find their move.

The game is a new take on a worker placement 4x game. Instead of running the empire and participating in the 4x styled running of the empires, you are trying to get the empire that you support to do well, the one you just support to do good, the one you sort of like to do fair, then one you could care less about, and one is an enemy. You have agents that can get the empires to do things. You can also collect secret powers to use later for any of your agents. All of this would be simple if the other players were not trying to do the same thing, but they have a different set of empires. Thus the one that would make you a winner is the enemy of another player. I played it against myself to learn the game. It appears that the four rounds of play in the game are just enough time to get something done, but not enough for all your plans to happen. When Covid-19 is The War of Whispers is going on the gaming table!

I did the dishes again and ran the dishwasher. And was then informed that we out of coffee.

Corwin made breakfast of Eggo Waffles for Susie, and I dressed and went to Wholefoods for coffee. As usual, I ordered and had groceries delivered yesterday to discover I am out of coffee the next day!

Wholefoods was busy. Everyone is careful and keeping to masks (fully on). I picked up the coffee, Mexican Fairtrade, non-GMO, every cup the taste of liberal. I have been drinking Mexican board-crossing coffee since Trump was elected, a small protest. Today, I got just one more bag. I grabbed the Rainforest blend for the second bag. Time to move to other issues!

As I was driving home, the police were out with shotguns on my small local roads. For a moment, I had a flash to the words of the song Alice’s Restaurant, “We don’t like your kind.” I imagined some southern drawl saying, “this yours” while lifting up the coffee. “Yup, he is a liberal–he has a fresh piece of Parmigiano cheese in his bag,” from a dreamed-up deputy. “Creampuffs from the Bakery,” says the officer with an eye-roll and reaching for his cuffs.

But none of that happened. The peace officer was putting the shotgun away, not pulling it out. Some drama was already over, and I suspect it involved a scary animal; we get them sometimes. But I was smiling that I escaped with my coffee.

I made dinner of bratwursts baked in the oven. We had the creampuffs as a snack.

My baking plans are more complex than I had hoped. The sourdough start is here, but the crock I purchased lid was smashed to pieces in the mail. I have contacted King Arthur Flour already. I have begun the feeding process. It will take 24 hours to start the process. I will likely get to bake bread in a few days, sourdough. Yes, Covid-19 had driven me to baking bread! I use the hook on the KitchenAid mixer to knead.

Dan Gray is working in Visual Basic, and I looked up how TRY works for him. My memory was it was added to the Borland version so many years ago (when I used it on IBM PCs), but I did not know if Microsoft had included it. I was happy to see they added it in the 2018 documentation (it was likely there before–but that is the first date I found it). They added the whole Ada-like version with FINALLY. This takes me back to my days before finishing college doing BASIC programming.

Tonight, I wanted to play another practice game, so I grabbed the board game Istanbul off the shelf and set-up a two-person basic game. I love the look of the board, and the play is easy, even just against myself. So something to do while waiting for the sourdough starter to well start.

That was all to this quiet day. We will have a cup of liberal Sunday morning Coffee soon.

3,235 people died in the USA today from Covid-19.

Today I opened the Methodist Hymnal, and it opened to #512, Stand By Me.