Saturday Games and Painting

I rose early-ish and was going by 7:30. The sky was gray, and blue broke through as the maritime clouds burned off. My roses are ignoring the lack of rain for weeks and are full of blooms. The flowers are smaller on some plants, but my climbers are full of the usual David Austin English roses; Wedgwood is the variety.

The hummingbirds are slurping up any bugs that have survived the weeks of no rain. I also saw a huge bright red dragonfly that was at least four inches long zip in, freeze, and zip out of the yard. I had not seen it before. Wow! The grasshoppers, another of my favorites, seem to have moved on. I saw them flying up and down a few weeks ago. Their life cycle may have been completed, and/or they were found delicious by various birds and other hunters. The apple tree is weighted down with apples, and some of the fruit are not completely wormy. I leave them for the animals and watch the animals. I imagine the apples fermenting, and my backyard is the local hard cider house for the furry and feathered locals as winter comes.

It is always hard to imagine now that my brown, desert-like backyard was green, mossy, and flooded to the rose bush during the rains. Six to eight inches of water in the corner! The rains start soon in September as the heat low in Death Valley cools (it is already down to the eighties) and stops pushing storms out. In October, the storms flow back into our valley from the coast. There is no reason to expect less rain than last year.

I invested the morning in coffee, reheating it in the microwave, and writing the blog. I was able, with some effort, to make a good story out of Friday. It was hard to recall the day, and Grammarly and I fought over the words as it made some strange edits. I did not notice everything it had done (I often want spelling, plural, and comma updates but not word changes). I revised them back and ignored some hints and suggestions. But generally, I let it fix the small things I would catch on a reread. To be able to write this blog every day (it is not far from stream-of-consciousness writing), I use Grammarly to fix the small stuff so I don’t have to rework it into a second draft. I often find that Grammarly wants to rewrite my sentences because I have missed a word. When I add the word, it is appeased and leaves me alone.

With the blog done and chatting with Deborah for part of the morning, Saturday moves to the afternoon. I reheat a chicken thigh with mushrooms (over-salted) and try out the new microwave with a plate, and it works as expected. I was going to stick to soup, but some protein seemed a better idea. I did not have it with anything, trying to reduce my intake to hopefully make the output less of a messy story with the colonoscopy prep party on Sunday evening and early Monday. I am an IT professional, and I know a lot about input and output.

I shower and dress. The scale is still showing 228 pounds. I go with casual for today.

Next, I enjoy more Ted Lasso season 3 episodes, and Corwin stops by. He tries his steam cleaner on the carpet stains. The dark bits on my brown carpet have been there for years, but new carpet or professional carpet cleaning has not been on my list (the amount of stuff that would have to be moved is nothing I want to experience again). It works, and the carpet is better. Excellent. Corwin heads out as I watch more Ted Lasso and then start on figures.

Next, I washed the new Scythe figures from the game Duel of Moloch, as well as two extra Call of Cthulhu figures from Etsy, to paint. Dish soap and water, taking care not to damage the 3D-printed figures, which are more fragile than hard plastic figures. I let them dry, then set them in the sun to dry further. I then, and this is always startling when you do it, paint them flat black using Chaos Black from Warhammer as the spray-on primer. One coat nearly works. A few additional sprays are needed, and I have to hold one figure and get black on my hand. I use a mask for most of the work.

When dry, I hand-paint the bases with my usual go-to Army Painter paints. I let that dry for about 40 minutes. The figures start to look 3D with just those changes.

I watch a bit more Ted Lasso and read some church paperwork. I then get out the special dry-brushing-style brushes, which are like larger brushes but with the tips cut off. I then take a tiny bit of white paint, brush it out on a paper towel until it is less, and then use the brush to color the surfaces to create a contrast between deep features and surface one. It looks like an X-ray.

I will touch up the base coat after I am done. I then get out my paints and a dilution solution that prevents foaming, and mix my Army Painter colors to be more of a flow paint than a coverage paint. This allows the white to be painted, or more like colored, with the dilution, while the dark pushes through the color, creating a weathered, shaded look.

I manage to spill paint, and with that, I stop painting for a while. My rule is two mistakes (I had dropped a figure without casualty earlier), and it is time for a long break (it also lets the paint dry, and the colors stabilize, as some paints do not dry to the color you thought). I cleaned up the mess; light brown paint on light brown carpet was not a loss, and I managed to get it out of my pants by treating the spill with Dawn dish soap and washing them immediately. Acrylics are a lot more forgiving than enamels and other oil-based paints.

I grabbed my copy of the board game Vestige and my new Quantum Computing book from No Starch Press (recommended at Hope 2026) and took Air VW the Gray to Cedar Hills’s Panera Bread for soup for lunch. I arrived without issue; traffic was light. I soon had a very hot bowl of Chicken Noodle soup and read the Nemesis rules for Vestige and reviewed extra cards from my Kickstarter awards. I added them to the game and decided that the Nemesis rules add a crushing level of complexity and would be best for cooperative play. Yikes!

I was still hungry. I had a chocolate chip cookie (no nuts) for my meal and read about coding quantum computers. I did not finish the introduction, as these technical books — this one is more than an inch thick — cover how to use and read the book before you even start chapter one. It was time to head to Richards; I wanted to arrive a bit early to set up the game.

I was 15 minutes early and started on the game. I did the teaching, but it was always hard going, as Richard and Kathleen kept poking holes in the rules, and we had to find answers. Richard discovered I had missed something: that jobs have to be picked up and dropped off at different locations. We also learned that chop bots are immune to certain effects, as they are not contacts. This slowed us, and the turns went slowly at first.

Kathleen and I suffered bad rolls on completing jobs and lost many contacts. Richard went for the land grab following a Vindication strategy—this game is a reworking of Vindication —and it landed him in second place. Laura took the game by about 10 points ahead of Richard, managed to play all the roles, and was deep into the process (how I think the game should be played). Kathleen, with her losses from bad rolls, was ten points behind Richard, and I was last by another ten points. I missed play, as did Kathleen, and the bad luck on rolls was crushing. It was an intense game, and the random End-of-Game conditions did not fire until after hours of play. Unusual in my limited experience with this game.

The verdict was that another play is needed, but generally it was enjoyed. The $49 price tag for the “Wretched” version makes it a cheap game, and the small box makes it less trouble. The Swanky version is much the same. The “all in” for $180 adds lots of moving parts. I think the “Wretched” already has enough rules and parts. Richard, I could tell, was tempted to pick one up: the “Swanky” version. Laura thought she could buy it.

I returned home, and even though it was late, I sat down, switched to my 3x protective glasses, and resumed painting. Again, I diluted my paints and then worked on the character and the mechs for the Scythe. I wanted to see how they looked with some paint, let the new work dry overnight, and see how they would color.

I read for a while and remembered my pills. I soon fell asleep, waking once to check my hydration level — it was fine —and woke at 6, thinking it was still early. I dreamed I needed to dress and was soaked in water and paint. There was a power failure, which made it difficult. I woke.

Thanks for reading.