shannon_a

Kimberly and I have been playing a little board game lately called _Harmonies_. It's one of a few games that I've bought following successful play on BoardGameArena, so I guess that's that site doing its job!

The basic premise is this: you take sets of three discs that represent terrain (mountain, field, tree trunk, tree top, building, water) and lay them down on a limited little board. You also take cards that depict preferred habitats for animals. An animal's habitat might be something like: buildings next to high forests (for squirrels), fields next to low forests (for lady bugs), deep waters near heavily shading trees (for crocodiles), etc. When you establish the depicted arrangement of 2, 3, or 4 discs, you then get to place the appropriate animal on one of the discs. In the end you're going to score most of your points from animal placements, and slightly less from terrain placements. (The terrains have various rules to keep you on your toes too, like buildings need to be next to three types of terrain to score, fields score only if you have 2 or more and more doesn't help, mountains only score if you have 2 or more, etc. Some terrains can also be stacked atop each other, allowing for just a little 3-D play.)

I like it for a bunch of reasons:

First and most obviously, it's got great strategy. You really have to plan out how you're going to lay down your terrain to both scores that terrain and the animals.

But it's also a "creative" game. I love those. I mean games where you're not just engaging in efficiencies (like most euros) but where you're building something that can be different every time. A few of the other games Kimberly and I have played a lot since we moved out here fit in the same category (Calico & Cascadia in particular).

But the creativity is really beautifully. Because of the various rules for how terrain works and because of the arrangement of terrains desired by the animals, you finish up with a board that really looks like something. Like a field running by mountains with forests on the other side. It's an impressive design. And the animals all feel really thematic too, like those crocs waiting in the deep part of the river, below the dark shade of the high trees. That's all pretty impressive for a game that looks abstract (and could have been).

The graphic design of the game is also amazing. Beautiful art by Maëva Da Silva that is reminiscent of Dixit or Mysterium (and it looks like she's done some work for each). Even the box design is great. It includes a sturdy divider and flap that define a compartment for holding the cards, and it even has a fingerhold for picking them up. Amazing. That's all courtesy of publisher Libellud.

As far as I can tell this is the break-out game for designer Johan Benvenuto, but I can't tell for sure because his (impressively large) output is from the last several years, and I've been less connected to new game output since Endgame sadly shut its doors at the end of 2018.

And I can also see I didn't have to proselytize it here, as it's already ranked #87 on BGG, which is a hair below Azul and a bit above El Grande. Do I hear SdJ? (Assuming they can convince the committee that they can put out a few supplements.)

Anyway, check it out, it's very cool.

My sister & fam are visiting from the mainland. We had a nice dinner out at Hanapepe Art Night yesterday, and I'll see them again at lunch tomorrow. While I was eating a tasty al Pastor burrito yesterday and my sister was eating curry, she mentioned that she didn't really know what was going on with me because I'm now writing journals anymore.

True enough. I've been erratic at my journaling since we moved out here to Hawaii, I think because I'm now writing full-time during the day, but then I got even more burned out when Lucy was sick, a year and a half ago now, and so I've mainly written about our couple of trips since then.

But here's a bit of what's going on.

CONTRACT WORK

In November I took on a new client for my technical writing. I gave them a day a week and we undertook a 13-week contract, which closed out in February. It was my favorite type of work because they had four big documents to write, and they handed them off to me, and I wrote them over the course of about 100 hours as I saw fit. Some required some online research, some required interviews with their staff. But mostly I could just sit and write. At the end I handed them several foundational documents about security practices for their company and about the architecture of their platform that have already proven to be very helpful in spinning the company up.

The hope is that after they've ramped up a bit, they'll call me back in for more work. Maybe as soon as in another month, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much later in the year. But, at the moment I'm very happy to get my day a week back, because it was putting a real strain on getting my personal projects done.

PERSONAL WORK

And my personal work is really getting to some big milestones, which is good after five years of half-time work.

This is Free Trader Beowulf, my system history of Traveller, started hitting shelves in print form last fall.

Designers & Dragons Origins, my four-book product history of early D&D products is moving through the editorial process. I got the fourth and final book back from my editor on Friday and have it open in another window to check those edits.

Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, my three new volumes of company histories, is nearing first draft where I will have all the histories written for the new volumes. But, there's lots more to do there regarding updates for both the new and old company histories.

I suck at marketing, so I haven't been calling around to get on any podcasts or in any magazines at the moment. Both of those things happen from time to time, but it's because they ask, not me. So I should do some of that, especially as I close out my current drafts!

(If you have a podcast and would like to talk history, or if you have a magazine and would like a history-related article, call me!)

CATS

When last I wrote we had a cat stand-off, with our new scaredy-kitty Megara and our slightly-older bully-kitty Elmer not allowed in the same rooms at the same time. Which has resulted in tiring months of cats being locked up either in our bedroom (that's Megara most of the time) or my office (that's Elmer and optionally Mango when I'm working or gaming and we want to let Megara roam).

We tried animal behavior work for a while, and there's been some good reactions, but I just don't see it breaking Megara's flee and cower reaction or Elmer's chase and bat reaction.

So we've called our carpenter and he's going to be over in a few days to put a wooden gate at the top of our stairs. See, Elmer has mostly hung out downstairs for the last couple of years, mainly coming upstairs for food. So we want to try and make that more official. He won't be neglected because my office is downstairs, and I do my online gaming downstairs, so he should get 40-50 hours of whatever interaction he wants down there.

(Not that we can actually build a gate tall enough to keep him out if he tried, but we think he mostly won't try, and besides that it'll likely break any chases if Megara wanders downstairs and then gets scared by Elmer. Because she'll go over the gate like a leaf and then Elmer will have to figure out how to jump high enough.)

Fingers crossed this is a solution, because nothing else has been so far. And I'm really tired of our bedroom door being closed all the time and my constantly sealing off my office.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

We also had the same carpenter out last year to rebuild the steps up to our porch in front. As he explained, they'd been built badly originally, with wide planks that bowed, causing them to pool water, and with risers on the back, further preventing draining. So the stairs were rotting out and slimy and looking pretty bad in the process. We called him out not knowing exactly what he'd want to do, and he pretty revamped the whole stairway. Looks very nice now, and isn't constantly wet or slippery.

(Mind you, we've had a VERY dry year here in Kauai, I just saw a report that the rivers are at a 109-year low state-wide. Shades of California and the constant drought panic encouraged by the newspapers trying to sell their stories.)

That carpentry encouraged me to finally get back to work on home improvement projects, something that's been on the back burner since at least before Lucy got sick. (I've got two not quite done: repainting the rest of the deck on our lanai, as I'd previously painted just the new boards we put in on the outer third of the lanai; and putting laminate flooring down in my office closet, to match the rest of the office.)

But our carpenter's work encouraged me to restain the porch as well as paint all the railings around the porch, as he'd had to repair them some and so they were now a motley or old red paint and white epoxy or other patching material. Kimberly and a I chose a rich blue and over several hours on a couple of weekends I sanded and prepped and then put enough of the new blue paint down to cover up the dirty red that we'd never liked. (And the white epoxy; that actually took the most work to cover.)

But that of course requires redoing all of our red highlights. We're thrilled to get rid of all the muted red, which looks too much like the red dirt of Hawaii, but it's a big task. After the porch I also painted trim on the archway of our garage and on the top of a wall just inside the garage. Still to do is the railing on our lanai and one shelf at the bottom of the short stairway in our garage that leads to our house. Then we get to the big stuff: a 3 or 4 foot tall strip of stucco all around the bottom of the house and the trim at the roof line. Kimberly and I are going to figure out how to paint the stucco, and then we'll hire someone to do the roof trim, which will probably require replacing the rain gutters (which is fine, as some of them were off the house and some of them were badly damaged when we moved in, and that hasn't magically gotten any better, so I'm not sure how well they work at the moment).

And after that, I can maybe get back to some of those other tasks.

UKE

Oh, and my mom and Bob got me a Uke for Christmas, so I've been playing with that a bit. I'm not practicing every day like I'd like, but I'm gaining familiarity with chords and how to hold the strings right and strumming and all the rest. I'm working on "Here Comes the Sun" as the first song I actually know how to play, as it's got some fun finger-picking riffs in-between the main strums.

Still a ways to go.

So that's a little bit of what's going on at the moment.

Berkeley may be the Karen capital of the west coast. When we were at Millennium on Wednesday night, a group of four raucous middle-aged women came in and sat at the table next to us. I couldn't help but constantly hear them because they were LOUD, and that included one of the Karen's drink order. She said, "I'd like an Emperor Cocktail on the rocks." And then after a pause of maybe a second, she continued, "That means with ice cubes."

Yikes.

(It was hard not to ignore the racial undertones, since they all seemed white and the waiter was black. But maybe she's that rude and condescending to everyone.)

Thursday was our last day in Berkeley. Kimberly and I had a leisurely morning at our Air B&B, then we headed into The City together, her going to the Asian Art Musuem to meet Katherine, me going to The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) to meet no one.

CJM was on my maybe-see list last year. It moved up on my list this year because I'd read that the museum was closing down for at least a year. (Apparently the foot traffic in downtown SF has crashed since COVID, and CJM's attendance and also revenues is down 50% in that time. I have to imagine that the anti-semitism that's risen since October 7th last year has also contributed.) However, I was still uncertain about what I was going to do with my day in SF, because I was craving a visit to Golden Gate Park, but after Tuesday's hike I decided I'd had enough of the cold and honestly my legs were _still_ tired too. (They seem to have finally recovered this morning.)

CJM is a museum with no permanent collection, so everything at the museum is individual exhibitions. There were five of them at the museum for its last weeks.

A celebration of the building itself was perhaps unsurprisingly my favorite, because it was about history. The building was originally a power substation, one that survived the 1906 earthquake (though it had to be partially rebuilt with bricks from nearby, fallen buildings). But it had fallen into disuse in the modern day. The architect for CJM renovated and expanded it, in part by expanding the traditional silhouette of the building to suggest two Hebrew letters: chet (ח) and yud (י), which together spell chai (חי), or "life", as in L'Chaim. There was also a lot of other cool symbolism in the building, such as the 18 steps up the main staircase and the 36 windows in the Yud gallery, one of the huge rooms formed by one of those letter additions. (Chet and Yud together sum 18, and so multiples of 18 are considered lucky.)

The Yud gallery housed one of the other cool exhibitions, Leah Rosenberg's When One Sees a Rainbow. It covered the (36) diamond-shaped windows in the gallery with colored films and then matched that with colored chairs. Very modern art, but gorgeous.

Another exhibit called Looted was based on Polish artwork that had been stolen by Nazis in WW2. It was a film (and on a different screen a collage of films) that showed the stolen artwork being recreated by modern artists, then erased. It was moving.

Finally, the biggest exhibition in the museum was the California Jewish Open, which had been an open call to Jewish-identifying artists. They were organized into "connections", one room for the earth, one for other people, one for the divine, and one that I seem to have forgotten. I think the most beautiful thing I saw there was a set of "light sculptures", which were basically colored cellophane arranged in front of lights which doesn't sound like a lot, but it was stunning. I was also struck my a few different artists who had discovered they had Jewish ancestry through genetic tests and were now exploring that. Finally, there were seven missing pieces: they'd apparently been pro-Palestine/pro-Gaza but they'd required the museum meet a set of demands to be displayed, and the museum was unable to. (I don't know the exact circumstances, but this felt to me like more progressive purism in the Bay Area. These artists had an opportunity to contribute to the dialogue, and thus make a difference, but were unable to without this additional requirement.) The museum noted the issue and left a blank wall where the pieces might have been, to acknowledge the loss of that point of view.

Overall, I was quite happy to visit CJM while it was there. I hope they're able to recover and now that I've seen is history, I hope they don't have to sell the building, which is apparently on the table.

After CJM, I walked down to the water and looked over the Bay at the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island.

Then I went back to Berkeley, hung out in the library (again! It had become a regular stop for us in downtown) and finally went over to MB's house for gaming. The whole old Thursday group got back together and we played _Havoc_ (a brilliant Poker-like game that is sadly out of print due to conflicts between the designers) and _Rise of Augustus_ (again, but EL loves being able to draw the tokens from the bag, and I enjoy it though I usually can't seem to win, so I wasn't going to complain). I think I came in second at both games, with MA winning _Havoc_ and CA winning _Rise of Augustus_, though the _Havoc_ loss was by a hair!

When I got home, we got things packed up, then early this morning it was off to the airport. We're boarding in about half an hour, and will be home by this afternoon.

We've been in Berkeley for two days now. Two out of four. I'm ready to head back to my island paradise, but we still have a few things to do and a few people to see.

And of course we've had stuff to do every day.

EXPLORING THE GREENWAY. There's a little Greenway right behind our AirB&B. Just a few blocks long. It runs between the very important landmarks of a kid's playground (on our side) and the DMV (two blocks down). I biked it here and there when I lived in Berkeley (it seemed longer then!), but it was nice to get to walk it for once, which I did on Monday morning. Just a few short blocks of pleasantly Californian trail (meaning that it had plenty of leaves that were autumning). There used to be a homeless encampment at the far side of it, which was there every time I biked through, and that seems to be gone now. I'd heard Mayor Arreguin had dropped homlessness by 45% in Berkeley these last few years, which is a Christmas Miracle after he spent the first six years or whatever screwing up the city with purist progressive beliefs, which meant that great projects got sidelined because they weren't good enough. Anyway, I wonder if the same is going on in Oakland and so it's a general trend and not Arreguin actually doing anything.

LAPPING THE LAKE. Later in the day on Monday I headed out to Lafayette to visit with C&M. It's become an annual tradition: we walk the Lafayette Reservoir, which is a pleasant little ~3 mile walk that reveals some more open (less treed) California landscapes, then we go have lunch somewhere. C & I inevitably talk just a little bit of business, but not much, so as not to leave out M. So we did that and we also talked some TV shows and some politics along the way. A pleasant little excursion! Though I talk with C. every week for Blockchain Commons, it's always good to get some face time.

GLORIOUS GAMING. And the same was true for my Monday evening. One of the joys of being in an Air B&B is theoretically having room to invite friends over. And sure enough this Air B&B has a very little table (which I knew), but it even has a leaf to extend it (which I did not know). So that was sufficient to have just a couple of people over to game. So we had an in-person Wednesday night reunion: just myself, S. and EL. We'd have loved to see EV, but he's up in Sacramento at the moment, and there was no way he was coming down here on a week night. (Aligning a Thanksgiving trip to get time with friends not during the week is challenging, and something I'll have to work on when we do it again presumably in two years). We ended up playing two games, _Calico_ and _Rise of Augustus_. Ironically, _Calico_ just appeared on BoardGameArena, so it was a game we didn't need to be in person to play, but EL appreciated the in-person teach (and I think I've gotten better at teaching it, after figuring out what the tension points in the game's teach are, when I was down in San Martin). _Rise of Augustus_ also exists on BGA, but only in a different form called _Via Magica_, and _Rise of Augustus_ is better in just about every way (better theming, more opportunities to increase your number of meeples and so play a less random game, better balance on super powers). So, that was nice to play.

THE B&B. Two days in, the air B&B has held up to our original expectations, which is to say it's the nicest and perhaps also most comfortable Air B&B I've been in. Could the higher-priced ones (at least at their regular price; this one was discounted when I rented) actually be better and not just bigger? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. In any case, everything is very modern, but that also has its drawbacks. For example, it took us a full day to get the heating system something like what we wanted, by adjusting both temperature and fan settings, and even now it's just slightly on the chill side ... except when it gets too hot at night. And the bathrooms have super fancy lights that go on whenever you enter. Which was great until the night before last when Kimberly got up in the night, walked _by_ the door to our master bathroom, and the light came on, waking & blinding me. Then I of course had the flipside while showering today: I was apparently too still, and the lights when off while I was in the shower. Anyway, very nice B&B. We're lounging around today because it's a pretty quiet day for both Kimberly & me, and it's totally comfortable. (But if I had to list a top win it might be the great overhead lighting in every room. Too many Air B&Bs I've been in have just been a dull twilight at night as a single table lamp fails to light a room.)

HAWAIIAN HOURS. I've been keeping Hawaiian hours since we got here, which is to say I've been waking up between 6.30-7.30 and going to bed before 11. Yesterday, I discovered that doesn't sync well with Berkeley hours. I was up, showered, and ready to go not long after 8, but I wanted to grab a sandwich for a hike up into the hills. I didn't want another Safeway sandwich, since I had one for dinner on Monday, and anyway I knew from past experience that it's a major fight to get someone to serve you at the sandwich counter at the Safeway if it's earlier than 11 or so. But Ike's Overpriced Sandwiches next door didn't open until 10.30. So I hung out at the Air B&B and did some reading and writing and then headed out to get to Ike's a few minutes after it opened. I was their first customer. Still overpriced. Still tasty. (I had a sandwich with delicious halal chicken and a few other goodies.)

THE HIKE. Big, big hike yesterday. I'm fairly certain it's the biggest hike I've done since November 2, 2019, a few months before we left. Since we're in Rockridge, I knew we were right under Lake Temescal, one of my favorite destinations when we lived here. I used to bike up there in the evening with a book or my computer. I did a lot of work on _Designers & Dragons_ and the DnDClassics histories up there. I remember finishing reading _A Dance with Dragons_ up there too, primarily because I realized I couldn't throw it across the room afterward because I was outside (and it was a library book beside).

Anyway, I decided to walk up there, with my theory being I could then walk into the North Oakland Regional Sports Center that's above it and use that to get up into Sibley, which is a ridgeline park, and then walk the ridgeline until I hit Berkeley, when I'd come down the fire trails in Strawberry Canyon to the campus. I've done all those individual bits before, but not necessarily in that order (as I was starting a few miles south of where our house in Berkeley was).

And so it went. I had lunch in Temescal, and moved on pretty quickly afterward because it was *cold* sitting out at the park. The paths up through the Sports Center took the most effort, and it took me two tries to find the correct path up to Sibley. Oh, and I got attacked by a coyote! Well, almost. He was hiding in the underbrush and burst out at me as I went by. But he obvious saw I was much larger than the prey he was expecting, so he nope-noped back into the brush when he was only halfway out. Then just half-a-mile on from that I ran into something even more dangerous: an overprivileged hill dweller with almost a dozen wild dogs, all off-leash. Several of them started aggressively barking at me and one kept aggressively advancing on me as the owner (walker probably) tried to bribe them back to her side with treats. After a very wary minute or two trying to get past them and not get assaulted I realized I really should warn her about the coyote but couldn't because she wouldn't have been able to hear me over the thunderous barking and there was no way I was getting closer to her again. Hopefully the super aggressive dog kept the smaller ones safe.

As soon as I went over the ridge, just before Sibley, the temperature felt like it dropped by 10 degrees, and so my overshirt went on again. Sibley was great, but then I faced a major challenge when I hit the connector trail between Sibley and Tilden: the trail was marked closed! This was my only way to get where I was going (well, except _maybe_ a road that went almost all the way down to Orinda and back). So I decided I had to chance it. Worst case, I backtracked and asked an unhappy Uber driver to pick me up in the middle of nowhere. It turned out that part of the trail had collapsed, I suspect during the torrential rains that the Bay Area got just before we came out. Fortunately, the collapse was just four or six feet across and there was still maybe three-foot width of trail and it looked like it was on solid stone. If I were living here, I'd avoid that trail until it was fixed, but it was OK going over it once when i really needed to get from point a to point b. When I got to the far side of that connector trail, there was another closed sign, but this one had been moved to the side of the trail so as not to impede traffic on it.

One of the neat things about the hike was that it was through a lot of places, such as Sibley and the North Oakland Regional Sports Center and even the closed connector trail, that I hadn't expected to ever see again. But when i had a full day free, the sky(line) was the limit. The fire trails that I took down to Berkeley were more familiar, and I've even been on them a few times since we left.

It turned out to be a LONG hike, longer than I expected, but I didn't usually go both up and down like that when I planned a hiking day when I lived here. If I was going up into the hills for that long of a hike I usually planned to take a bus back down: there were two bus lines I walked to up there: one in Tilden (which was pretty close) and one at the Chabot Observatory (which was pretty far). But this time my plan was basically to use the hill trails to transit from Oakland to Berkeley, the _long_ way. I did about 1200 feet of rise from our Air B&B to Sibley. There was more up and down later, but that was most of it. I hit almost 17 miles for the day, the vast majority of which was on that hike. I was *exhausted*. As I said, it was the longest I've walked since we moved, but even back in the day, 17 miles would have been a major outing. (The badges system on FitBit says I've hit 35,000 steps 14 times in the 10 years or I've had a FitBit, which was what I did yesterday, but I was close to 40,000 steps, which I've only hit 5 times.)

MATCHBOX MAGIC FLUTE. The reason I was transiting to Berkeley was that Kimberly and I had tickets for a play that evening: Mary Zimmerman's Matchbox Magic Flute at the Berkeley Rep. We'd seen two of Zimmerman's plays many years previous, her Metamorphoses and her Arabian Nights, and they were both terrific. This was more of the same.

I actually hadn't known what to expect, and thus was somewhat surprised that it was fully operatic (or opera-lite as Berkeleyside described it). And in some ways that made it marvelous. Oh, I could have done without 80% of the lines being sung in operatic tones, as that made it hard to understand at times. But getting this viewport into another word of storytelling was amazing. It was a Hero's journeys amidst fantasy realms, sure, but additions like the fool (papageno) and a storyline that totally undercut traditional views of who might be good and evil were terrific. And the constant Mozart concert and all the singing were fun, even if the latter obscured the words at times.

Zimmerman also did a marvelous job as writer and director, upping the humor and even modernizing it (there was even one non-overt Trump dig, about "storming the capital ... I mean castle" and how that character might become attorney general as a result). And the staging, oh my gosh, it was beautiful. Over the top colors, iconic outfits, even a red-lit airvent that poofed up the Queen of Night's skirts and gave them a red hue.

Overall, a terrific experience. Papageno's bird calls were still running through my head when I was getting ready for bed last night.

(And today, I rest! Total plans = Wendy's for lunch, Wicked for desert, then Millennium for dinner.)

The rest of our plane ride to the Bay Area was uneventful after I convinced Hover Man (who hovered in the aisle to be near his wife for about 45 minutes before I got irate) to sit down. Curiously, Hover Man was very friendly to Kimberly when he later saw her in the airplane ("Oh, so good to see you again.") Weird.

Well, the flight was uneventful other than lots of turbulence which maybe would have caused airline staff to force Hover Man to sit down anyway.

I almost finished up my Designers & Dragons history for the month (Thursday Knight Games) while on the plane, but nowadays I always find the mere 4-5 hour flight to and from Hawaii not long enough, so I still have a bit of rearrangement and editing and clearing out of notes (to make sure I didn't miss anything).

--

We've had two nice days in San Martin. Yesterday was of course Thanksgiving and the fam was here: both my brothers and of course Jason's family. There was good food, good talk, and a good game of Calico. There were just the one niece and nephew present but it felt like at least half-a-dozen. But we played a quiet little game of Candyland too.

Today my mom showed me a bit of how to play a Uke in the morning. I was able to slowly piece together "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", as it just has two chords, C and G7. My mom said I picked it up very quickly, but I have played piano and (more briefly) guitar in the past. Might there be more uke playing in the future? Maybe.

Then we went out to played pickle ball. I played maybe four games and felt pretty good. I think my partner and I won 3 out of the 4, but we played inside this time, and they had (or at least we played with) more beginning players. My mom, again offering the compliments, said I'd improved notably since last year, which if true would be impressive as I haven't played since then. (I got pickle ball paddles for home after our play here last year, but I'd been hoping to play with Kimberly rather than dive in on my own, but that just hasn't been possible with her knee and leg problems. So we'll see, maybe I will dive in this coming year.)

And to conclude the busy day, my brothers came back (sans fam) and we played board games and ping pong. The games I ended up in were Carcassone and Cascadia.

(How weird is it that of the four games I played over the last two days, every one started with the letters "Ca", though granted, we brought two of those ourselves.)

Anyway, good time. Good hanging out with family.

And lots of good food. Thanksgiving fixings, of course. Eggs (from my mom's hens). Bacon. Pancakes. Homemade sourdough bread. Pulled pork sandwiches. Shrimp and crab cakes. Mmmm.

It's cold though.

I should lead off saying that the cats are totally integrated at this point. Once we started letting Megara roam free, Mango was totally OK with her thanks to the weeks (months?) of careful integration, mainly focused on churu-feeding and then a gate that allowed non-threatening new-cat sightings. More than totally OK: they chase each other back and forth in a totally fun way! We were still locking Megara up at night, but one night she refused to come back to her room, and I said, well, I guess that's that.

Beyond that, Megara is getting increasingly friendly. She spends all of her time upstairs, much of it hanging out at the corner of our couch. (Though we learned there's a not great reason for that.) She's also getting better and better about being petted when she's laying around. (Less so when she's up and about.) And we've learned that though hands still scare her, feet don't. (Petting a cat with your feet is difficult, but possible, and fairly safe when you're lying on a couch and she's at your feet.)

But we're also having a variety of cat problems that have increased in stressfulness since we're shortly heading out of town to visit friends and family on the mainland. Fortunately, we've come up with a variety of solutions too.

PROBLEM THE FIRST: THE EVIL BLACK CAT

I've written previously about the evil black feral cat that torments Mango at night by hanging out on our porch or patio. He growls and yowls and throws fits, waking me up, but he also gets aggressive and sometimes attacks his brother. (Displaced aggression is apparently a common problem with cats; we had the same issue with Callisto.) My last solution was to lock up the boys at night for two weeks, to convince the evil cat that our house was uninteresting and to spray the outside with citrus.

Which worked for a couple of weeks, but the black cat came back on Wednesday night, first threatening the boys in the laundry (mud) room in the evening then taunting Mango until he woke up the whole household at 5am.

I was at a loss, but fortunately Kimberly came up with a solution. We'd had a similar issue in Berkeley with Cobweb, where an evil outside cat (Tuxedo Max, I think) would climb on our garage and Cobweb would throw herself at the window such that we were afraid she was going to knock it out. We eventually taped a few pieces of paper on the window to block her view and wrote BAD CAT on them. Problem solved.

So Kimberly suggested we do the same. The problem is that our house is made of windows here in Hawaii, so it was a lot of work. We used butcher paper to cover the bottom half of our front door and the thin windows on either side. Then we did the same with the sliding glass door in back. That was all a LOT of work. Maybe two hours. We were able to just put printer paper on the double-hung windows that overlook the patio and the small window that overlooks the garage roof (where the evil black cat has also appeared).

We had about half of that up last night with no trouble, and it's all done now. We might still need to put some up in the mud room, but doing so would destroy the usability of the jalousie windows there, so I'm reluctant, and the only time the evil cat has appeared there was that one evening, never at night.

So, we'll see if this solves that issue.

PROBLEM THE SECOND: A COUCH ACCIDENT

Someone had a pee accident on the couch last week. Almost surely Megara. I initially blamed it on maybe confusing her by laying out a blanket on the couch, which she might have taken as litter-appropriate. Though I think that might be true, it was surely encouraged by Elmer problems, more on that in a sec.

The solution here is pragmatic: Urine remover and baking soda. I figured that out when we had sick cats over the last few years. I haven't managed to clean all the smell out yet, but I'm getting there.

PROBLEM THE THIRD: ELMER DON'T PLAY

So this is the other big problem. Elmer has taken to chasing Megara to the point where she's hissing and growling and goes flying under the bed and then won't come out for a few hours.

It doesn't happen whenever Elmer sees her, but it does happen once or twice a day.

More notably, it seems to happen when she goes downstairs, where Elmer spends most of his time. When she and Elmer go flying through the house, Elmer chasing her, it almost always seems to originate in the downstairs.

We really noticed this when we came to the realization a few days ago that Megara hardly goes downstairs any more and seems genuinely afraid to do so.

Downstairs is where the litter boxes are.

So, we have a variety of solutions for this.

#1: I got a collar for Elmer today with a bell on it. We haven't had the boys collared for two years, because Mango constantly slipped his, and eventually started slipping it off when he was under the bed. There in fact may still be a Mango collar there because it's almost impossible to access.

When Elmer got his collar today, he was horrified that he now jingles. Now he's just lying around looking mopey, accepting the fact that he just jingles now. We're hoping this will reduce the fear factor for Megara, because she can track where he is.

#2: We're probably going to lock Megara in our master bedroom while we're gone. She'll hate it, but we'll leave her plenty of toys and a cat tree and it's a pretty big space with the bedroom and attached bathroom and walk-in closet. Obviously, this will keep any fights from happening while we're gone, but we also hope it'll reset the dynamic.

#3: We've got some squirt bottles. I've been pretty adamant based on my recent readings that we not discipline the orangies with squirt bottles. But, I just want to be able to bring the chasing to an abrupt halt. So we'll see how that all goes.

PROBLEM THE FOURTH: SCREEN ADDICTION

On Wednesday night, I was woken up three times in the night by cats. The second time was the 5am black cat visit. The third time was Elmer chasing Megara at 6.30am. But the first time was at 12.30am, and that was all Megara.

I woke up to Alexa talking in the kitchen. Not the first time that's happened. It really spookily happened not long after we moved here, with some weird lady talking on our Alexa in the middle of the night. This time, a video about ostriches was playing. As I came into the kitchen, I heard it talking about how ostriches were unusual because they had wings but couldn't fly.

And then, as I advanced into the kitchen further, Megara jumped off the counter and fled.

She'd turned on Alexa to watch a video about ostriches in the middle of the night!

No solution to that one, other than the fact that I've told her not to do it again.

There was a period of time from May or June of last year (whenever it was that Lucy got sick) to just a few months ago where the going was pretty hard. After Kimberly and I took care of Lucy (and worried about her!) for six months, Kimberly injured herself and then fell ill, and then we dealt with that for several months more. I was still perfectly able to get my work done. I closed out _This is Free Trader Beowulf_ last year (and now it's in print!) and I must have finish about a book and a half of _Designers & Dragons Origins_ over that year and a half, plus of course I was doing technical writing a few days a week. But work + keeping the household running + our various problems took every single erg of energy.

Finally, things are looking better! Kimberly has dealt with what looks to have been a bout or two of tendonitis and she's now walking increasing amounts. We did almost two miles up in Kokee two weeks ago, then almost two miles in the Arboretum last week, then almost two miles out at Mahaulepu yesterday. So, we've finally been able to get back to more than just treading water, which means home improvement (actually, it's home improvement of the sort that may be treading water too, but it's great to be working on it).

Our first new task was to call our carpenter who put in our great cabinets and book shelves two years ago. We've had some things in our master bathroom falling apart (cabinets and a pocket door; thanks humidity!) and I also wanted him to take a look at our front steps, which never drained water right and which had been growing increasingly ragged and bad-looking over the years.

Our cabinets and our walk-in closet door are operating well again now (though we'll have to replace the former at some point as the crappy particle board continues to deteriorate in this wet environment). The front steps were going to take more work, though. Besides looking bad and besides not draining right, there was a lot of rot. Really, unsurprising given the other problems.

So our carpenter did rather extensive repairs. Our stairs originally had been full boards on each steps and then a riser behind them. Our carpenter said he didn't know why people had ever put risers on exterior stairs, as they stopped draining and also said the boards were really too big and tended to bend and warp as a result. So the risers got pulled and each step was divided into two pieces of wood, also allowing draining between them. He built it all up, primered everything, and we already had appropriate colored stain, so he stained it too, and it looked great afterward.

Of course, that made it obvious how bad the patio above our front steps and the trim around it looked. However, that was just wear and tear. Without the problems of rot and drainage this was something I could deal with (in theory). So in the last week I've been going at that, the first real home improvement in maybe two years. Restaining the whole deck has made it look great again, except for problems with bubbling. I think I caused some of that by power washing the deck and then starting in on painting six hours later or so, likely leaving it damp under. But I've discovered that there was obviously a lot of bubbling in the existing stain, it just wasn't obvious after years of use.

So I painted and scraped and repainted. I did the patio in sections because I was getting sore when I was doing it, especially on the first day. Most of the patio is pretty good now (though you can see where I scraped and restained, because there's a lot less layers on those areas, so I may actually need to put paint over everything to make it look its best). And there's still some bubbling from the last day's work. That was Friday afternoon after work. I just haven't had the oomph to go after it yet.

We also still need to paint the trim. We have a beautiful blue that we hope will be a nice replacement for the red-dirt red on there right now. Kimberly was going to help me have a go at that today (so she could do the careful work that I'm bad at), but the weather report was too threatening for me to want to put fresh paint out in the potential rain. So, soon.

Hopefully this will also help me get back to my old home improvement projects:

1. Scrape (very old) bubbling on lanai.
2. Restain back two-thirds of lanai (the part my dad and I didn't replace).
3. Put vinyl planks in my closet.
4. Put vinyl planks in the Harry Potter closet.
5. Think about redoing the floor upstairs.

(Whew.)

THAT MUSKY SMELL. At Costco yesterday, we saw a Cybertruck. It's the only one on the island, as far as I know. I pointed and laughed. It's not just that it's a comically ugly car, but that comically ugly people buy it. The driver smiled and waved like he was Mayor McCheese.

GATED COMMUNITY. Late last week, the pet gate for Megara's room (Kimberly's office) arrived. It's intended to better integrate her into the house, through Mango being able to see and smell her more constantly, and through being able to feed them all around the gate without the only barrier being me (as was the case previously, and it was awkward). So I took Saturday off from my normal hiking and biking so that we could actually get it installed. Not a big deal once I figured out the instructions. If it's set just perfectly we can even close the gate and office door at the same time.

The question is whether the 51" height (about 52" since it's not set directly on the floor) will be enough to keep cats from going over the gate. We're pretty sure our large orangies can't get that height with basically nothing to give them footholds, but we're less sure of teeny little Megara.

There is a small cat door down at the bottom of the gate, and so we've been using that to let cats in and out of the room, with the hope that we'll teach them that the cat door is the only way they could possibly get in and out. (Pay no attention to the upper area behind the curtain.)

We'll see if we're smarter than a 1-to-3-year-old (cat).

CREAKINGS IN THE NIGHT. Mind you, we're not fully trusting of the cats yet, so every time we've left the house for an extended amount of time or gone to bed we've closed the door as well as the gate. Until last night. That was the experiment.

I was woken up at 4am by a loud thump. Ugh, I thought, was that a cat clearing the gate? (Or failing to?) Mango was at the foot of the bed, not him. I trekked downstairs and it looked to me like Megara was on the cat tree, though it was hard to figure out for sure because all of her lights were out. But after I stopped by the bathroom I returned and she was right in front of the gate (on the correct side).

I never saw Elmer, and didn't feel like hunting for him at 4am, but I was pretty sure (a) that he was the least likely to clear that gate; and (b) Megara wouldn't have been so casual if he was in the room. So, it was back to bed.

All the cats were on the correct sides of the gate when I woke up in the morning.

LIKE SOME PICASSO OR A GARFUNKEL. I was determined that if I wasn't going to go out for my normal activities on Saturday, we'd at least get some things done. So after the gate installation (and some R&R), Kimberly and I did some work to get art up in our house.

Yes, it's been almost five years since we moved here. No, that isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Griselda has been up in my office since we moved in. We have a Starry Night print that was newly purchased when we moved in in our bedroom. A couple of Hawaiian pieces are also up and some of Kimberly's work. We also had a wedding present from a friend up in the kitchen until it got replaced with a cat shelf. But we had a lot of others to still put up.

So on Saturday we decided where everything was going and put up as much as we could. It feels like there's art _all over_ the house now, everywhere I look. We have a few pieces we want to get framed and a few pieces that need some repair and so we're going to go out to a local framing place some time to close out the work, but they're only open 10-2 three days a week, and that'll take mucking with my work schedule, so we'll take care of it sometime soon, but at the moment we've got enough to take care of (primarily working to get Megara integrated into the house!).

ALL'S WELL. One of the reasons that I had the energy to do all this stuff on Saturday (with the pictures obviously being long-delayed) is that Kimberly has been doing better. Yay! Her abdominal pain from early this year has been resolved through PT. Now she's working on her knee, also with PT. Which means she's walking again and able to help with Megara and the other cats and with dishes and such. So everything is easier right now, allowing us to get back to doing more long-term household work.

BUILD UP THE WALL. In fact, for a while now I've been working on our fourth big work planned for the house. There were actually three of them planned when we moved. We've been doing them slowly not due to lack of energy, but so we could afford it. The first was solar panels. That went in in 2020, first because we knew it'd save us $150+ a month (electricity is EXPENSIVE in Hawaii) and second because the tax refunds for solar energy were dropping every year. (They've since been restored courtesy of Biden, so it turns out we could have saved more if we'd waited two years, but had to pay two years worth of electricity.)

Second was our built-in bookshelves for our family room and offices downstairs, which must have happened at the end of 2022 as we got the cabinets that formed their bases delivered while I was in Europe for an RWOT. I guess that must have been The Hague.

Then we got distracted for a year when Mango (twice!) escaped the house and we had to buy some pretty expensive custom made jalousie windows for the front of the house.

But now we're finally back to our third and final planned project, which is a retaining wall, or rather a set of retaining walls for the back yard. The problem is that we had a nasty slope in what would be a pretty nice sized back yard. 14 foot top to bottom and pretty steep. So we want to flatten it out with walls in between so that we can have more backyard and I can actually mow it all rather than tottering on a steep hill with a weed wgacker where I'll eventually break a leg if I'm not careful.

We got a contractor out here a few months ago and then a surveyor to mark where our property lines actually were, but we ran into problems when we learned there's a drainage way & building set back line in the back of our property where can't build. It was actually kind of frustrating because it's obvious that parts of it have been blocked by our neighbors (it goes down the whole block) but since we're the house on the corner, if there's ever a complaint, it'll be about our very visible back yard.

So I talked with public works who had signed off on the original drainage way and after maybe a month they decided that it was OK to build a wall because it won't obstruct the flow of water in the direction. (An ADU would *not* have been OK, but they said a wall was a house of a different color.) We got a somewhat official letter in email right away but a month later and we're still waiting for the official paperwork on letterhead that we want before we start.

And my contractor hasn't seemed willing to draw up plans and give us an estimate before we do that.

So that's on hold right now, though I'd really like to pull money out of the market while it's up, and especially before the election, but not when I don't even have an estimate. (I might have to make a decision about pulling it out anyway really soon, I just don't want to pay taxes if it doesn't happen this year!)

But, PRO-GRESS.

At this point, our main concern with the cats is integration. This is always tricky, but it's trickier than usual with Megara because she's still very skittish and doesn't want to be picked up and we don't want to damage her trust by doing so. So we can't do simple things like move her out of her room so that the cats an explore it without her presence. Or show the orangies that she's our baby by cuddling her.

Despite that, Elmer has done great. I'd thought he'd be the easier of the two. He might end up bullying her, but he doesn't have the fear/hate relationship with other cats that Mango seems to have developed due to late-night visitors.

Though Elmer is still very cautious every time he comes to explore Megara's room, he's increasingly fascinated and decreasingly afraid of her. He's booped noses with her a few times with no bad reactions from other of them. Increasingly, she goes and hides in her "lair" (the far side and bottom of the bed, which form a tunnel when the blanket falls over them to the ground) and Elmer sits staring at the blanket and even reacts pretty well when she strikes out at him (playfully). Today's visit ended with the two of them staring at each other, lying down on opposite sides of the room, and Elmer finally getting up and heading over to Megara. She got afraid and fled and he chased. We're pretty sure it was play on Elmer's part. He really seems fascinated with the little kit and wanting to play with her at this point.

Mango is the problem. He's been willing to stare at her from far away, but he ends up growling and yowling and hissing when he's in the same room. He went into Megara's room last night when Kimberly was supervising and was eventually removed because he was mouthing off. And then when Elmer got put out too he and Mango had a brief but loud spat. I figure Mango got confused and thought Megara had been put out. (But he's also attacked his brother more than once after seeing a cat outside. That's what we're really battling, I think, six or twelve months of cats mocking him at the front or back door due to irresponsible cat owners in the area.)

Kimberly and I have both read that letting them see each other from afar or through a barrier is a good option. So I decided after yesterday's spat that I would be the barrier and I would come bearing churus (squeezable treats for cats). So I sat between the cats in Megara's doorway tonight and passed around the tube. We'll keep doing this every night and hopefully it'll help Mango calm down by associating Megara with tasty treats. Though today he mainly refused to look at her while getting his treats. (I'm also going to pick up some more cat-calming pheromones when I'm in town tomorrow. We've had them in Megara's room from almost the start, but I'm going to install some in the living room with the hope that it'll calm Mango down overall.)

In a normal situation the cats might be integrated already for better or for worse, but Mango seems more agitated than any of our previous cats and Megara seems willing to hang out in her room, so we can try and improve the integration for a while more.

THE NANOWRIMO NEPOTISM
A morality play in three acts.

ACT I: THE BRIBE. ProWritingAid, an AI editing suite, partners with NaNoWriMo, which is supposed to encourage casual creators to write a novel in a month.

ACT II: THE CORRUPTION. NaNoWriMo takes a strident new view that it's OK to use AI in NaNoWriMo. Want to write a prompt and have software built on plagiarism churn out a 50,000-word pile of crap? Good job. You've accomplish NaNoWriMo's goal!

ACT III: THE EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL. NaNoWriMo writes paragraph after paragraph about how it's ableist and classist to condemn machines built on stolen creativity.

I'd say they killed themselves by making their "challenge" entirely irrelevent, but their misappropriation, misuse, and corruption of social-justice language is just evil.

--

There's an issue here with every marketer in the world jumping on the word "AI". There are certainly editing tools, possibly even including ProWritingAid, I don't know, that *can* help out people. I mean, last time I looked at grammarly it was still catastrophically bad, but I look at the little underlines in Microsoft Word. The grammar suggestions are rarely right, but the spelling corrections sometimes are.

But for an official entity like NaNoWriMo to be unable to distinguish between grammar support and generative AI is just head-shakingly stupid, and it's likely to lead to the death of their organization. And deservedly so at this point.

https://www.404media.co/nanowrimo-ai-policy-classist-ableist/