Blog

I managed to get going about 8ish this morning. Evan had spent the night and headed out soon after that for some more pickleball play. I then watched a few more Game of Throne episodes of season 2. I am now on the third episode and have noticed that the storyline is slowing. There are so many items happening simultaneously, and new characters (and actors) have been added, slowing the story development. I am quickly losing interest if this is the new pacing for the show.

I did some laundry. I then spoke to mom Wild, and she loved the Olympian Provision heart filled with sausages–very Pacific Northwest. I spoke to her, my sister Linda, Bill, her boyfriend, and other folks over there in Michigan to have Mother’s Day dinner. I later spoke to mom Guild (Leta), and she liked the tea and honey from Upton Tea Company.

Today I have housework and various maintenance things. I got gas for the car, bought groceries at Whole Foods, and got them home. I stopped by the gaming store and picked up some washes to paint Richard’s figures. I worked last weekend and did a lot of off-hours coverage–I am still tired from it.

I then rested and read a bit. I made a beef stew for dinner.

Susie watched movies on DVD most of the day.

I will stop the blog a bit short today as I want to paint some figures, and I have a 10PM call.

India is having terrible Covid-19 issues. Our hearts go out to India.

241 people died from Covid-19 today in the USA.

I found this Afghanistan 🇦🇫 Song. A school was destroyed by a car bomb, and many girls died. Their parents buried them today and yesterday. I thought we should hear some from that part of the world.

Evan and Mariah met me this Saturday at the Golden Valley Brewery for lunch. I had started Saturday by attempting to sleeping in, but my attempt failed, and I was up at 7ish. I had coffee and a bagel and watch the last of the first season of Game of Thrones. I was surprised by the number of cast members that would not return as their characters died. I have not read the books; so much of the story is a mystery to me until it unfolds in the TV series.

I find that the show has grown on me, but I am not sure I could spend hours watching it. I only watch it when I am tired and on weekend mornings. I think I like British murder mysteries and cooking shows more.

Before headed out to lunch, I finally had some time to paint Richard’s figures. I spent about an hour on them. I hope to have more time on Sunday. I managed to finish the base colors on one set. The other set has plants growing out of a SciFi mech, and I tried a green ink over the dark green on one of the figures. That really added to the look. Again, Sunday, I will be doing the touch-up and some more ink work.

I had a cobb salad, it has their homemade bacon in it, and I like the local blue cheese they also include in the salad. Mariah went with a salad with chicken. Evan had their fantastic avocado bacon sandwich. I forgot my hat and later picked it up. They kept it for me; it was not the first time!

Mariah went off to have her film developed. Her camera, an old Pentax, had jammed. She loves the old manual camera and has enjoyed the good work it has done for her.

Evan and I headed off to Wildwood Tap House. Evan, a beer. I was still tired from a long week and stayed to just one beer with lunch. Evan then beat me at the board game Concordia. We use a few elements for the Salsa add-on. Playing a two-person game that works well with the game. I once again over-focused on building than collecting cards. I lost by six points. I enjoyed the close battle. Me building as fast as I can and Evan collection cards. It was interesting to me that the score was so close.

Concordia is one of the best newish games and is ranked 18th at boardgamegeek.com. You are running a roman trading house, and you are trying to build the most powerful and capable trading family business. There is no war, no armies, just trading posts and colonists. You collect resources and then use them to build various trading posts. Each ancient city has a random resource, with cloth and wine being the most valuable—tools and food with more than bricks. You need to sell goods to get money to pay the cost of the new trading posts, but those same resources are needed for the trading post and cards. This is a deck-building game, and you play a card from your hand each turn to do an action, including an action to get your cards back and be rewarded for using waiting to restock your hand. The cards also control end-of-game scoring, so the more you have, the more you will score (thus my loss to Evan).

The game is a bit hard to learn as the cards and all the relationships of money, resources, and trading posts take a few games to get a clear understanding. But, once you have the clarity, it is a good game, and for every turn, you are trying to make it work for you. Every decision is important, and every trading post built and every card purchased to bring the game closer to the end. When you buy the last card (a special card) or build your last of your 15 trading posts, the game ends after everyone, but the person who ended the game gets one last turn.

We paid our small bill at Wildwood, who were happy to have us at our “gaming table” inside. Most folks were enjoying the patio and the sunny but cold day in Oregon. We headed home.

Susie was ready, and we, Susie, Evan, and I, headed to our first return to a local movie house! Evergreen Regal! We bought tickets and popcorn to watch Raya and The Last Dragon. I thanked Nathan, the guy who sold us tickets and consumables, for getting us our drinks (he could not quite get the right seats for us, but we managed when nobody else came). He said, “I am just happy to be back.” So were we.

The movie is a mix of Mulan and The Last Airbender in my mind. I liked it, but it was not quite the straight Disney production I am used to. This is a fantasy world from a kid’s viewpoint. The best line I remember was from Wong when he describes what he will do with the captured Raya and friends: “It will be so bad it will take two weeks to clean up.” Yes, there were some funny lines in the movie. The sword and fight scenes were, without the blood and gore, fun to watch. I would recommend Raya and The Last Dragon for a good bit of pandemic-forgetting fun.

We went to Mazatlan Mexican Food off of 185th for dinner. They always have good food and drinks. I had a margarita, as did Susie. Evan had a house drink. Susie eats very slowly, and we were there for almost two hours. I drove us home and took a nap.

It was a full day. With masks and distancing, it was a busy day like I used to have on weekends before Covid-19 came.

Gov. Brown of Oregon announced that the hospitalization rates stabilized in Oregon, and the surge may have peeked for us. Also not covered by Gov. Brown, there are now plenty of places to get the vaccine shots in Oregon; some are drop-in now.

648 people in the USA died today from Covid-19.

I went with a fav of mine. Please enjoy this version of Lord, You Have Come to the Lakeshore.

 

Today was my first time playing games with the group in Portland. I have not played in over a year. We all kept the masks on. It felt safe and it was so nice to play again with more than two players!

The drive back from Portland was pleasant as usual on a late Friday. Richard hosted a game at his house not far from the Boardway and the mall in the same area in Portland. Four of us played On Mars. This is a worker placement, engine building, and resource management game. The theme is building the mars colonies, and the winner is the player who best helps the colonies. This is a giant game of such complex rules it took an overview video an hour to cover the basics. It is also a Kickstarter game, and thus there is some added complexity you don’t usually find in games that go straight to retail sales.

I had a grasp of most of the basic rules. According to my records, I had played once before, and that and a refresher video stopped me from making mistakes. I could not understand the strategy, and I did not understand the engine building of combining blueprints and scientists. I have to play again and try some of the engine building. Nonetheless, coming in dead last, I still enjoyed the game and look forward to another chance to work out the game’s systems. I spent my first turns building for mars and helping to uplift the colony to a better life. I pulled ahead for a while, but I did not buy the scientists and blueprints I would need later for the high-scoring end-of-game items.

One small complaint, the game is not immersive. The player must pay more attention to the game mechanics than the mars theme. There is nothing simple in this game. Even turn order is complex.

All of this happened before I took Susie to Taco Bell. As usual, we drove through and then parked the car and had our in-car picnic. I wanted Susie to have some dinner before I headed out to Richard’s at 5:15. The trip to Richard’s had some traffic, but I managed to be on time.

I stopped working for the shoe company in the late afternoon. I had finally finished all the patches requested (SAP OSS notes for those who know this stuff) and created a request to check my implementation to the vendor (a high incident again for those who speak SAP). This started, again, about lunchtime and went on for hours as I applied each one after another.

I had to get special access for some fixes, and for others, I had to request others to do the changes. I can make software changes, but I won’t change the software setting (config, again for our folks who know SAP). I am happy the base changes are in.

I have a meeting with India time on Sunday night (10PM PDT).

The day started at about 7:30ish, and I was dressed and ready for the first hour of Zoom meetings at 8:30. I did miss one status meeting as I was busy trying to fix one issue.

777 people in the USA died from Covid-19 today.

Today’s hymn is Saranam, Saranam from Pakistan.

My day started about 3:45ish for a meeting with India which then got rescheduled to 6:30. I am drained today, working on only a few hours of sleep. I took a nap this evening; I will likely regret it when I try to return to sleep tonight.

Today was the end of my least favorite pine. The blue pine was once an ornamental blue pine with all those lines suggesting a hard life on the mountains. It had grown into a monster block, the light for my roses, dropping needles everywhere, and attracting woodpeckers and other wildlife.

After it broke, after being trimmed with care, and dropped a huge branch on my neighbor’s house, it had to go. The weather here is damp and windy. Non-native trees fall and break. So today, they brought in some incredible equipment and disassembled the tree like it was a kit and ground it and its stump to a pile of wood chips.

It is always sad to see a tree come down. But this one has been a hazard and a nuisance for years. The birds will miss it most.

My other roses are starting to flower. I suspect I will have pictures from the moss roses soon.

Today it was cool, and it did sprinkle a few times. The Oregon mist was heavy for a few moments.

I managed to return, fully dressed, to the Zoom meeting at Nike IT this morning at 8:30. The early meeting with India took only 15 minutes. It cost me three hours of sleep.

I reheated the Chinese from a few days ago for lunch. I had a bagel and coffee during the early meetings. Dinner was a Pappa Murphy’s Take-and-Bake pizza and a chicken caesar salad.

I picked up Corwin’s dry cleaning once work let-up at about 3:30ish. The local dry cleaners are now out-of-business. She cried when I paid. Ours was her last order. The pandemic claims another family business, a small Philipino family’s business.

I took a nap, as I said above. I watched email, and nobody needs me at the shoe company. I took more naps.

The stock market went up again. Wood, steel, and other construction-based materials have increased by 3x, according to some reports. There is concern that the economy will overheat. My thought is that I am really looking forward to a too good economy.

This reminds me, my 401K was re-org’d to work by age. Yes, you give your age and expected retirement, and then you get pre-balanced and risk-appropriate investments. I am now much younger as I overrode the investments to more risky and higher return investments–much like I used for the last three years. My annual return has fallen to 3.6% this year-to-date. I managed an insane 16% last year and 26% in 2019. I am not ready to move to debt instruments with low-interest rates.

860 people died in the USA today.

I found this Crown Him With Many Crowns yesterday when I was searching for music. An  Acappella version. I hope you like it.

Tonight we went to the local Mexican place, Mazatlan Aloha, and celebrated that they were still open for in-restaurant dining and that we all made it to Cinco de Mayo 2021. There was no celebration for 2020, of course. I remember the day in 2020 passing without even a taco.

Today I had the Mazatlan plate and a huge margarita. I finished with flan.

It was a wonderful sunny we-must-have-moved-to-California spring day. It is 80F+. And the pollen is crushing me. I slept into 7:15ish and started my first Zoom meeting, fully dressed and showered at 8AM.

I spent the day listening to status meetings and trying to work out some issues in data egress. As strange as this sounds, now that my one team has got all that into the systems, another of my teams must provide egress of much of the same data to other non-SAP and some SAP targets. Truly, there is no rest of the wicked or, in my case, for data flow. I was on four calls on issues with pulling the newly minted data.

I am happy to report that the Zoom meeting at 9PM for India’s morning ended this week. I have a problem with a vendor patch (an OSS note for those who speak SAP) and have a Zoom meeting scheduled for India’s end-of-day: 4:30PDT! Ugly.

The day at home working was full of crises of the moment, but I resolved most of them. Lunch was Aloha Teriyaki in the strip mall just around the corner from our house. They were open for lunch–most places except fast food are now closed for lunch, and I thought I should, after more than a year, pick up a chicken bowl for Susie and their bento box for me. It was good. Susie was surprised as it has been a long time since she had a chicken bowl from Aloha Teriyaki.

This is from last year’s blog on May 5, 2020:

The reports follow the same pattern of the last few weeks, and the counts of deaths from the virus increased by a thousand from yesterday: Two-thousand three-hundred-fifty. Unfortunately, the number of deaths is not decreasing yet. 

There is no hint of celebrating in the blog. I had no sleep and worked all night, and was suffering from a migraine last year, May 5th.

So a better year so far!

1.3 million people in Oregon out of 4.2M are fully vaccinated.

743 people in the USA died from the virus today.

Last May 5th, I picked For All The Saints in the middle of the first terrible surge of death and infections in the USA. Let’s go with that again and the same version too. The USA has lost more than 1/2 a million souls (saints) to the virus since I wrote the May 5, 2020 blog entry. Tears fill my eyes as I listen.