Tuesday Games and Chicken

I finished the day in bed reading and completing the novel Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. I then started a technical book on AI for predictive processes, my interest, and will start The Humans, a gift from Deborah, as my next novel. If you like Ann Leckie’s space opera stories, this is a story that tells the results of the previous novels, and I liked it. I soon was too tired to go on and marked the start of chapter one of the technical book after reading all the “How to Use This Book” section, standard in coding and algorithm books, which this book covers both, Grokking Machine Learning.

Aside: Elon Musk appropriated the term “Grok,” and this book does not cover AI tools or large language models. Grokking is about the predictive model in AI shifting from overfitting (bad) to performing equally well on test and actual data (good).

I closed my eyes, got up, turned on the house fan to move the air (I forgot to turn it back on when I returned), and left the ceiling fan running. I slept better without waking with a headache and did not have to prove hydration, that I remember, nearly every hour like the last couple of days. The dreams came, and they were mundane wandering and traveling in locations I cannot remember. I woke late, after waking for sunrise and rolling over, and did not feel the allergy issues. Better.

I will replace the filter early and will dust and vacuum soon.

Returning to the story and moving backward, I cooked dinner late. I started around seven and had a whole chicken to cook. I sliced up onions to put on the bottom (my rack is long gone), peeled little carrots and added them whole with tops on (French style), cut up some celery (I like to eat celery cooked), and then sliced too many potatos (bad for me), and salted the 4-pound chicken and managed to fit it in the pot with all the veggies (and too many potatos). It was 100 minutes to get it done (and even then I thought it was just done). The carrots were perfect, retaining some crunch, and the potatoes were not mushy. I had mostly white meat. I have returned to watching Dave Suchet’s Hercule Poirot and tried his adventure on the Queen Mary (though I was disappointed that they did not film it on the ship, with their version being brighter than darker wood and without the thick smoke of the time period). I ate my dinner while watching the mystery, which I remembered, but it was still fun.

Before dinner was made, I watched some YouTube on ShipHappens and managed to nod off for Battleship New Jersey’s long talk about the placement of AA guns after WW2 and into the Korean War period. Yes, I could not stay awake for that and woke up after the video stopped and commercials on YouTube were blasting me awake.

Before this, I spent the afternoon and early evening at the local gaming store, Rune & Board, and played my first full game of The Plague of Dracula. This is a solo game. And I set it up and played it for hours as I tried to learn the rules; solo games, by their nature, have many rules and processes to follow. I made some mistakes, and I think next time I will get it mostly right. I need to make some helpful cards on the process and a Dracula standee to represent the bad guys’ attacks. I learned to better defend Mina and Lucy in previous short tries, and neither was turned. Mina played the whole game with a pistol and stayed with Lucy.

I found it, as I often do with solo games, at one point repetitive, and then just advanced to the end. I almost got Dracula as I was down to one ‘bite’ and Dracula to one point, but the vampire won. Next time! I will try to find another day to invest hours and hours. I often find the hours pass by unnoticed.

I nearly missed a good night with Deborah as it was late for her when I finished the game, but we did connect and ended our day together.

Before the game, I was home. I made another sandwich with plain bread for lunch in the style of a muffuletta, and before that, I wrote the blog, made a pot of coffee, dressed, and felt better, but with a headache and allergy issues. I did the usual updates and reading.

I managed to remember to get a postcard out to Mom Wild and was delighted that Highway 405 had not sent me any more demands for payment. I was worried I might have slipped into the Express Lane in error more than once on my trip in California.

Thanks for reading!