Monday happened again! As usual, I have trouble sleeping on a Sunday night. Even in high school, I always have trouble sleeping on the change of weekend to more regular hours.
I slept into 6:30ish as my first Zoom meeting, yet-another-status-meeting, was at 8AM. This was followed by status meetings that go on until 10:30 with almost no stop except some meeting end early, leaving you with twenty minutes to work all the little issues appearing in email and in Slack channels. I had quite a few crises of the moment that filled in the spare moments.
I also blocked a week-off in April for a short vacation. I have to get my driver’s license updated, and this is complex in a Covid-19, and I am now old enough to require the mandatory eye check. I have to be at the state office on April 15th early and in a distant office as that was the only one with appointments. I had to wait three months to get the appointment. It is my birthday on the 16th so I thought I should just enjoy the week.
Susie rallied for her Monday appointment at 9ish. She had hair, fingers, toes, and so on with Zeriada. Her driver was on time, and she picked up her fav of McDonald’s Happy Meal Chicken McNuggets. I ordered Massaman Curry (beef) from Ma-Now Thai Cuisine delivered by GrubHub. I took a short break and prepared my Roll20 Dungeons and Dragons game. On Monday we play so I often prepare at lunchtime. I checked that the maps were ready and reread the material to be ready.
I also managed a walk today despite all of the meetings and some booked over my walking time. Oregon Spring is beginning to brighten with flowers:
The status meetings were non-stop again in the afternoon, and while listening and commenting here and there, I was replying to email and slack requests. I also did some reading on how to connect some software together.
I finally stopped about 4ish and rested a bit, and read.
I made dinner of tacos made from boxed taco shells and ground beef cooked with a flavor packet.
The tacos were fine.
For Roll20, I had one player skip and one late. So we played with the smaller group. I came up with an alternative to the normal plan. The players fought one of the boss monsters with the reduction that it had killed and captured the two missing players’ characters (In D&D 5E, you can be brought back from dead, so this is just for effect) and so the boss monster, an undead wizard, available spells were reduced. We also agreed that this was an alternative time-line caused by the Mad Mage, and if they all died or were defeated, we would restart as if this had not happened.
In otherwords, I was going to try to kill the players’s characters and they were going to kill my monster. If I win they get a save point to return to.
The battle was not that close, but I did scare the players a bit. With spells like The Finger of Death, the boss monster got a few hits in. The battle was emersive and I think we all enjoyed the challege. The players finally defeated it.
With this type of undead, it will reform if they do not find its phylactery and destroy it or at least get the life-force containing item far away from them.
They returned to the wizard’s tower and found the vault where the phylactery was kept. A hideously powerful woman snake-like demon with six arms and each wielding a sword, much more dangerous in some ways than the undead wizard, protected the vault. Just at this moment, Bill showed up–he was late, and his character is an evil paladin that loves to slay demons. Matt’s dwarf cleric was in the coils of the demon, and Macker’s druid was near death. Between their wizard, played by Cory, and the paladin, the demon was finally overwhelmed.
That is where we ended tonight after they discovered that it was tough to destroy the phylactery. No need for that save point after all.
I then helped Susie send some Saint Patrick Day items to her family.
I deleted about 1/2 of this blog–work details, church politics, and retirement thinking do not belong here. Events at work and with my church have upset me. It is a hard tonight to find my way.
12,853 people were vaccinated yesterday. We are out of Johnson and Johnson vaccine already. We still have not been able to schedule shots.
Seven hundred and eighty-eight people in the USA died today from Covid-19.
I have done This is My Father’s World, but it just fit with my day. I found this Covid-19 lockdown version.
Alohawild (Michael Wild's) Website 