Going backward, I had a late dinner of Poppies fried chicken around 11PM. I hate eating late, but my medications are less fun without food. I still have not found the right balance of nutrition, health, and exercise, but I am still working on it. I also read all the emails, texts, and Slack messages for a while to keep focused on the project at the shoe company. I watched my emails and Slack messages all day and responded here and there. We are running 7/24, and I am covering the shift 8-4, but I also (as all of us do) help the other shifts.
Returning to the narrative, before reaching home in Air Volvo, I had played games at Richard’s house in Portland with Kathleen and Caroline (I only heard her name once or twice, so I think I got it). Caroline was a new guest and German like Kathleen, both living in the USA. Caroline was delighted to hook up with another gamer group; she loved some of the older board games. Agricola was her request, and I do not remember playing it before.
Agricola is an older (2007) but recently updated (2016) Euro resource management and worker placement game. It has complex turns and many options that grow every turn. Caverna, another board game, is a re-skinning of the game, leaving most of the mechanics in place. I watched 1/2 of a long video while Susie slept in the afternoon, so I was not lost when trying to play.
This one is a brain burner as you have to make your workers you get two to start, get resources, use resources, and some resources are competitive. Your worker is placed on an action, and nobody else can do that action. So sequencing and turn order (you can buy the first player marker) are essential. You must feed your workers at harvest time, with game-losing penalties if you fail to do this, and harvest resources and add more animals to your herds. Agricola was an exciting and fun game with four players, and the 2016 base version seems complete and complex. It played like a newish-styled board game–I think I might need a copy in my collection–an excellent game in a revised format.
We also played the tile board game. Azul and Richard had to help me with the correct point counting as Zophia, and I counted everything every round, ignored single tiles and counted only once for a value. We played a four-person game which I have not done very often, and found that the four-person play was still excellent. I managed to score second as Kathleen broke sixty and ended the game.
I drove Kathleen home, and we talked about roses. She adopted some of the roses that came with her house, and we spoke about possible names. The large white tea rose bush might be JFK as they are older roses. The pink roses bloom first and last and match Old Blush (a well-loved old rose, one of the oldest). Some of Kathleen’s plants might be English roses (hard to look at the pictures while driving), but Kathleen said they had the shape of a tea rose but with great perfume–modern tea roses, then.
I am looking forward to seeing the roses in the spring/summer to get a better guess.
Before this, I was hanging out with Susie. She was sleeping when I returned to the hummingbird house after lunch with Mariah at Ancestry Brewing (about twenty minutes from Susie’s place). When I went to leave, Susie moved to her chair, and there were tears in her eye when I headed out. Susie felt left out and worried it was her fault that she was being left for dinner. It is heartbreaking to see.
A year ago Susie was in hospice and the little green frog was an early St. Valentine’s gift, attached to a heart box filled with chocolates, that Leta had me get for Susie. We did not believe, Susie had stopped eating and drinking water, that Susie would make it to 14Feb2022. So I got out the one-year-old frog stuffed animal today. Here is a post from last year: Feb 08, 2022
Before this, I had a beer and fish and chips for lunch with Mariah. Ancestry Brewery‘s food (and beer) was excellent. Unfortunately, the location in Tualatin was with the usual ugly traffic in that area. I had not been in this area since the pandemic started, and when Susie was judging, the Sherwood Ice Rink was not far away. Also, the Ancient Wonder store there closed, it was an excellent gaming store focused on used role-playing material, so I have had no reason to visit the traffic-choked area in the last few years.
Before this, I was with Susie from the morning to a late lunch. When I got there, Susie was delighted to see me; she was sitting in her recliner in the shared living room. The network connection and cable were working again. Anassa, the nurse aide for the weekend, lifted Susie to her wheelchair and then into her rocking chair in her room. We watched some episodes of Poker Face on the Peacock cable network.
Poker Face is a rework of the same processes of Columbo and the Rockford Files from the 1970s, where the audience is aware of the identity of the murder and watches as the star, an on-the-run gal who knows when you are lying, solves the murder and finds a way, as she is on-the-run, to get the murder punished without involving her. The guest stars are good B-level actors you see in secondary roles in movies now getting the spotlight to be the murderer, victim, or bystander. The first episode is set in Las Vegas with all the glints and setting up the stage for more episodes. The second one is a minimalist episode set at a Route 66 truck stop, and I liked it too. So far, I would recommend it if you want a show with a slow burn with character development and good acting taking an hour and five minutes, without commercials (in my case, I paid the $5 a month to not have them).
Susie nodded off a few times during Poker Face. We called Leta, Susie’s mother, before watching the show, and Leta and Susie used my iPhone to do FaceTime. They had a friendly, quick chat.
Before this, I started about 7ish and was online working for the shoe company with Zoom meetings starting on Saturday at 8AM and going on for an hour. I also had Slack messages and emails from work I had to review and understand before the status meetings. So far, no important crises on the weekend have surfaced. Finally, I managed to get dressed and get some coffee, liberal style, and a banana. Once dressed, I traveled in light traffic to Susie’s place in Tigard.
Thank you for reading.
Alohawild (Michael Wild's) Website 