I rose in the dark again. I cannot seem to sleep past 7 (until Monday, when I blinked and the clock went from 5 to 8). I am still dragging, but not as bad as Saturday. My left arm is less sore from the COVID-19 shot. I never had issues with the Yellow Fever shot. I’ve also been getting headaches lately and waking up with a stuffy nose, which I think is from the heat running in the house. It is cold out now.
I make coffee, liberal coffee, but I forget to press the bold button, which you can’t change once the coffee is brewing (hmmmm). It is OK coffee. I have a banana with that. I return to the office and start doing the usual morning stuff.
The amount of political (all Democratic) email I get is impressive, with all of it being deleted without being read. I delete lots of things I sometimes read, and I spot one impressive phishing email that I just delete; it looked real except for the strange email address and the fact that I don’t have an account with the company they are pretending to be. I received many emails pretending to be Apple, since the crooks know my storage re-up is in the fall, but I avoided them all.
Aside: I use Apple’s Time Machine and a drive plugged into my laptop for backups. I have images back to February available. I also do an old-school file copy to a solid-state drive I keep in the car and refresh it every month or so. I am not paranoid; four hard drives have failed on my laptops, and I’ve never lost any information. I have broken two screens and replaced the one keyboard.
I update my transactions in Quicken and read the NY Times not so much because it is a liberal paper (they really aren’t), but because of how they tell stories and edit. It is a lesson each day. And no AI-generated content.
I manage to finish in time to post the blog before I have to get ready for church. I manage the rush and arrive in Air VW the Gray, loaded with Brazil trip stuff and updated Dungeons & Dragons (I had to make a last-minute character update). I was giving the Stewardship Minute in the service, and the service is here, and my little speech is at 1:11:03.
My ushering was busy; we had many late visitors, members, and some homeless people parking to get coffee, donut holes, and cookies. I also got my Brazil books to Eric K, and my hard-copy forms to Kathy. One person brought a dog, and the dog made noise while getting a bowl of water and some food. I got a few looks and smiled back. It was a dog, and I had to stop myself from laughing when members gave me the “stink-eye” for doing nothing.
Ken was back, and he was going for broke in length and content. Eric K, who was also the liturgist, read the whole chapter of Isaiah 59, and the congregation called out memorable verses for Ken to focus on. Ken, who had just lost his father, remembered his father at points in the sermon.
With that done, I was tired again. Nothing like standing for over an hour, dealing with people, and then giving a short speech to run your batteries down. I headed home, watched more Borges, and then headed to Market of Choice. There I bought some expensive cheeses, a loaf of bread (I was down to a few slices), bread flour (on special for $5.69 for the good stuff, 5-pound bag), and a few small breakfast items.
I was late calling Deborah back and, at that time, was headed to M@ for a game. We said an early goodnight. We will try to connect for a show to watch together.
The game at M@’s was different. Our group avoids combat and mostly ignores treasure. We are in D&D Hell, the 5.5E version, and trying to recover some lost heroes and destroy an unholy artifact that the leader of Hell, Asmodeus, introduced in D&D in the 1970s, knows the secret of how to destroy it. Thus, the field trip. M@ assembled a different story for us, as we were not going to do the large combat and instead implicated a Pit Fiend with false but very convincing evidence of mismanagement and wastefulness. Pretty much the worst you can be accused of in Hell as a leader. Even consorting with dangerous adventurers for likely “good” reasons. A terrible mistake for a Pit Fiend to be discovered being “good.” The details cannot be covered here, but we managed a whole night of gaming and partying with Devil Lords and not having to roll for combat once.
M@ had acquired some new cloth maps from China and a see-through cloth mask to play some of the characters. M@, unlike me, can do the voices and acting when DM-ing.
After that, I chatted with Scott C for a while about retirement and health; we often talk outside by our cars after a game. I arrived home tired and read for a while, and somehow it was 11:30 before I was ready for it.
Today the clock got away from me. Thanks for reading!
