shannon_a

I: AVE MARIA

We've now had our new Kia for almost a week. We actually haven't taken it out much, but then we don't drive a lot. So she came home with us on Tuesday and has been out to the golf course and the ramen restaurant since.

We of course needed a name for the new car. She's a sparkly white car, and so my first suggestion was Emma, after one of my favorite X-Men characters, the White Queen. But, that had zero resonance for K., I think because Emma wasn't in the '90s cartoon. So after playing around with names a bit, we eventually came up with Maria Kia, because it's a nice rhyme-y name.

Maria turns out to have a lot of songs about her, but most of them aren't very good, and most of them aren't very memorable. There's a lot of "Maria, Maria, Maria." The one obviously good and memorable is obviously "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" but we hope we won't be singing that for a long time. (There was also a Blondie song we enjoyed, but it wasn't memorable, just pleasant.)

Oh and I should note that white would have been pretty much bottom of my list for car colors, because anything white on Kauai quickly turns to red because of the high amount of iron oxide in our soil (a slow transformation that has taken hundreds of thousands of years and so doesn't show up on the other islands). On the other hand, since I've been driving again I've noticed that brightly colored cars are a lot easier to see than darkly colored cars (like our belovéd, lost Julie), so that's probably a plus even if she ends up sparkly white with a red skirt.

II: THE BIKE DILEMMA

My biggest dilemma with the Kia at the moment: I don't have a way to transport my bike.

Julie had a 2" receiver hitch, and I used that to mount my bike rack. It's a decently good bike rack, which I measure by the fact that it's sturdy and I could get it on or off Julie in just a few minutes when I was just packing my own bike. (Two bikes took more time because they had to be pretty carefully arranged.) I've seen my dad use a bike rack that has to be hand mounted every time on his car, and it takes much more time/effort, so I'd prefer to go with the tried and trued.

Kia has a standard receiver hitch for Maria, but it's smaller 1.25" hitch. Now I could get a bike rack at that size, but they're reportedly flimsier.

And I've found at least one third-party 2" hitch that should fit Maria, but it looks like a slight pain to mount due to a a need to "drop" the muffler and cut a panel, and so I think I'd prefer to have a shop do it ... and the Kia dealership won't mount a third-party add-on.

Which, whatever.


The bigger problem here is that I really can't ride my bike until I get this all resolved. There are basically only two ways out of neighborhood, one is the highway, and the other is another high-speed road. Neither of them has reliable shoulders. All of them have tourists too taken in by the scenery. I can take a short little loop around the golf course that's between a mile or two but if I want to get out to anywhere else safe to ride, I need to pack my bike on Maria.

I've got a query in to our salesman if he recommends any other mechanics on island for working on a Kia. But I still need to do some work to make sure I've got the proper 2" hitch and that dropping back to a 1.25" rack wouldn't make more sense, and I haven't been diving into that because ...

III: A PRESENT YOU DIDN'T ASK FOR

I got another little gift I didn't ask for from Kia: a cold.

We were sitting around the dealership for four hours between Monday and Tuesday, but I suspect the culprit was all the handshaking that's still an unfortunate part of modern business dealing. I had really hoped it had gone away with COVID. We were happily fist-bumping here on island, but nope, the plague-carrying handshake is back.

I rarely get sick. I hadn't been sick since a few years before COVID, but now I've gotten two colds in six months or so. Super annoying! (The other one came home with us from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.)

IV: THE ELMER REPORT

We got the cutest picture of our former kit Elmer today. He was staring out at the snow in his new home on the East Coast!

It struck me as entirely amazing that our Kauai cat, who had never known climate control or a temperature much under 60 can now stare out at snow. But that's the weird, wonderful interconnected world we now live in. (As is you being able to read this, in the US, or Europe, or Australia, or wherever you are; so different from the much more balkanized world I grew up in, where distant states, let alone distant countries were just a distant dream.)

Every picture of Elmer we see, he appears to be happy and content (though perhaps a bit confused in today's picture with the snow!).

Meanwhile, our household is so much improved four months on. (K. and I were shocked to realize it was only four months!) Megara continues to grow less scared every day. Mango doesn't scurry through the downstairs trying to ward off attacks. And K. and I aren't constantly vigilant for the same.

So that continues to be the best of decisions, even if it was expensive and stressful at the time.

Today Julie the Benz went in to get her "check engine" light checked and it was sadly bad news.

The check engine light actually was not a big deal. It's the engine thermostat. Which would be somewhere between $500 & $1000 to replace, I expect, with standard Benz markup. Irritatingly, this is the second time it's gone bad.

The bigger problem is that I asked them to look at Julie's rough ride, which has been an issue since at least last year some time. They said that the mechanic had managed to get her acting up and that the problem was somewhere in the transmission, which would require a full rebuild of said transmission to fix. Which was kind of what I thought might be going on. The mechanic looked up the cost, and just the transmission would be something like $7000. (Standard Benz Markup.) Plus shipping. Plus labor.

So we were both totally on the same page that this was not worthwhile. The mechanic suggested that it wasn't worth dealing with the thermostat either when Julie was already on her last legs, and assured me that she was totally safe to drive and that I should go ahead and do so until the transmission issues worsened.

So, our loyal car, Julie the Benz, the first car I've owned in thirty years, is sadly dying.

I'm not in a rush to replace. The hope is that I might extract a last year or two from her. But I am now officially on the lookout for a new car.

My ideal would a 5-year-old car (to give it more runway than Julie, who started having problems a year or two after we got her, and has been in the shop once or twice a year), preferably a Toyota (they have the best reliability by a long shot), preferably a SUV (though I am somewhat uncertain if that's a real requirement), and preferably with a trailer hitch (to make transporting my bike and locking up my keys while swimming easy).

We'll see. I did some looking today, but there was nothing in that sweet spot. I probably need to add it to a weekly or biweekly schedule, hoping something perfect drops in my lap before Julie gives out.

And ugh, cars have gotten expensive in the last several years. (We saw new car prices spike up during COVID, which carried through to used cars, and now I presume that Trump's tariffs are entirely wrecking us with new car taxes.)

Kind of a weird feeling walking out of Destination Auto, who has always worked on Julie. I felt like we were saying goodbye forever. Especially since they don't seem to be doing Safety Checks at the minute. But it's also kind of freeing to know that I don't need to worry about Julie repairs any more. I just hopefully can find the perfect new car before she heads off to automobile heaven.

We are heading home *tomorrow*!

--

I haven't really written about our AirB&B.

Over the last few years I've shuttled back and forth between hotels and AirB&Bs. When I was in Köln for the last Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, I had a particularly terrible AirB&B (no AC, big-south-facing windows, serious noise pollution from a biergarten downstairs, very tiny), followed by a great hotel in Frankfurt on my last night before I flew back. We'd had a disappointing AirB&B in Berkeley the year before (poor lighting, noise pollution from the other half of the duplex, Ayn Rand books on the shelves). So it was to hotels for a year or two. And that was of particular help when K. was still on her scooter, as most of the AirB&B's had also been handicap inaccessible. However, the Hotel Shattuck Plaza where we stayed was a bit rundown (poor heating, and just not in great shape), so last year we moved back to AirB&Bs again.

We had a very nice AirB&B in Rockridge last year and would have booked it again if it was available. (My experience staying holiday after holiday in Berkeley for five years now is that the same AirB&B is *never* available. Maybe if we made our reservations earlier, but nope.) So this year we found several options again in the Rockridge area and splurged a bit to choose one of the nicer ones. (Probably only $20 or $30 a night more expensive than the other one we were looking at it, and it looked so nice in the pictures that it seemed worth it.)

It's indeed very nicely decorated. Recently redone. Gorgeous bathroom. Large, well-lit living room. Two comfortable places to lounge. Tiny bedroom, but as big as it needs to be (e.g., space to walk around the bed). The neighborhood is also nice. It's the first block where the foothills start to rise up on the east side of Berkeley (or Oakland really, we're just over the border), and that's where the increasingly fancy/expensive houses are. That means it's safer and quieter than places just slightly more low-land.

But the downsides:

First, the owners seem like obsessive paranoids. The lock is what I believe is called a dimple lock: it has side pins rather than the normal pins that would be pushed down by the bottom of your key. The locks tend to be harder to pick because of their overall design, and the keys are also much harder and more expensive to duplicate, which I suspect is the goal.

Likely due to that, the owners only gave us a single key, and yes there are two of us here. Perhaps that's fine for most couples and most other people willing to share a single bed while visiting together, but K. and I have different friends to see and different places to be while we're here. So we have to go through this stupid dance of locking the key in an outside lockbox every time we leave. If we mess up: someone gets locked out in the cold, possibly for hours. (Or someone needs to cut one of their get-togethers short.)

The particular lock they choose also sucks. You have to do another weird dance here, of lifting up the handle before you twist the key around to lock it. You have to do similar on the inside with a knob, and afterward you CAN'T GET OUT unless you first unlock the door, which seems like a fire hazard and that it should be illegal. (Maybe it is.) I have to guess that it was more secure in some way or another, further feeding their paranoia at the risk of our safety.

Also evidence of the weird paranoia: buried in the house rules (not anywhere you'd see before renting, nor even if you just read what they message you when your arrival date is drawing near) is the statement that you have to OK with them anyone coming into the unit other than the registered guests. Not staying the night, just dropping in for coffee or a game. (To which I said: yeah, I think not, and though I considered having people over on Sunday to game, it never became necessary.)

(Frankly, if you're that fearful of what might be getting done to your unit, so you're obscuring keys, putting in unsafe doors, and trying to keep people out, then you probably shouldn't be renting, but I'm also totally unsurprised by the attitude here in the Oakland foothills.)

Second, the unit, which was likely originally a basement and/or storage space for the nice house atop, has SERIOUS noise pollution issues from upstairs. K. took a nap after we got here on Friday, before our play, and she was woken up multiple times by people talking upstairs. Then, while we ate dinner and got ready, we frequently heard the thundering of stuff being moved around upstairs. I had thought it might be a miserable stay, but as far as we can tell there's been no one upstairs since that first day. I have a suspicion that it's a rental too, and was being cleaned on the day we got here, and we got lucky and it's been empty since. But given the annoying noise on the first day, I would never rent this place again, just because you can't expect the rest of the house to be unoccupied when you're staying.

Anyway, that's our AirB&B. We'll probably still be on the AirB&B side of things next year, as the overall experience has been fine, even if that was apparently due to the luck of non-occupancy upstairs.

--

Sunday was gaming day #1, with a few members of the old Endgame crew.

Very few members, it turned out, as E.V., who usually sets these things up for me, ended up sick. E.L. and S. and I got together instead, at E.L.'s place out in Concord. (Easy to get to from Rockridge BART!) It was a nice gaming day and we played three games that I do not believe are on BGA, and so we can't usually play when we're online: Railroad Tiles (because I continue to spread the gospel), Machi Koro, and Orléans: Invasion. The last was a particular treat because it's a favorite that I haven't played since 2019.

Orléans is a bag-building game with some pretty neat mechanics, while Invasion! is the co-op version of play. The Endgame crew all like the co-op much more than the original, whereas I'm totally good with either. It's the type of game that's too complex to play with the folks I'm gaming with in Kauai (K., my folks, and new friend M.), which is why I haven't seen it since we left. But maybe K. and I should give the co-op two play a try sometime. (When we have some time. Our three-player game took 2.5 hours, which by my memory is pretty standard for Orléans.)

--

Monday was a day of meals & theatre.

I had lunch with C&M. We went for a little walk in the Rockridge area afterward. That's pretty much our typical visit.

K. and I then had dinner with our financial advisor, A., who took over the business a few years ago and has slowly been meeting all of his clients in-person. (We talk via Zoom about three times a year, but that's of course not the same thing.) Apparently, when the business was founded by A's predecessor, all the clients were in the Bay Area, but there's been a gradual exodus since them, with people moving to the East Coast, Hawaii (we're not the only ones), and everywhere in between. A. has been making trips to see some people, but was able to meet with us because of our visit out here. We were apparently among the last people for him to see. (It's been a few years since he took over.) Obviously, we have a business relationship with A., but it's great to have a bit of personal interaction as well.

--

Before I write about the theatre, I should note that when I was at the Legion of Honor on Saturday, I not only saw the Manet/Morisot exhibit, but I also visiting with my favorite artwork in the museum's permanent collection. It's a small pointillist painting of the Eiffel Tower by Georges Seurat.

Which is a prelude to the fact that I had no idea that the play we were seeing Monday night, "Sunday in the Park with George", is all about Georges Seurat. And more so, about his painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte] (which is out in Chicago, not at the Legion of Honor).

It wasn't my favorite Sondheim (that's likely Into the Woods, which we saw on Friday). But it was thoughtful and it was an intriguing insight into the world of a post-impressionist painting (though from everything I've seen there wasn't a lot of attention given to historical veracity).

Appropriate for a play about Seurat, it was a pointillist play with a pointillist score and pointillist scenes. In fact, much of the play is spent introducing the various characters in the park (point-point-point-pont), so that we know who they are when they're all rearranged by Seurat into the actual painting (as the points resolve into the painting) as the act-one finale, which I found oddly moving.

I found the two-act structure weirdly similar to Into the Woods. In both plays the main action that's set up at the start of act one comes to a complete conclusion at the end of act one. In Into the Woods, it's the high point of the play, an inversion of the usual plot structure (where we'd instead expect a low point, where everything seems the worst). Maybe the same could be said for Sunday in the Park with George, as Seurat has completed his masterpiece(?), but it's fundamentally a more logistical conclusion. In Sunday in the Park with George, we then jump forward a hundred years to see some of how Seurat has been recognized, and also that his grandson (a made-up character) faces many of the same issues as him. It was a pretty surprising twist for the second half, but I hadn't realized that Seurat died at the very young age of 31, leaving just 7 major works behind (one of which I saw a few days ago, though as I said, it's a pretty small piece, unlike "Sunday Afternoon", which is 2x3m and took more than two years of work).

Overall, I loved the pointillist creation of the painting and also the idea that it embedded these people and their stories forever, so that they were all there 100 years later, when all but the youngest babe had passed on. The personal stories felt weaker to me and the more abstract discussions of art (create what you love, don't be afraid to do something new, etc.) were ... well abstract.

I admire Sondheim's consideration of the question, "How could I make a pointillist musical?" And I admire the fact that he mirrored the two Georges' take on modern-art with a modern-art musical. I'm thrilled to have seen it once. But I wouldn't feel the need to see it again, in part because of the distance that the story created from me overall, but also because I just didn't find the music that memorable. (I see people lauding "Finishing the Hat" and a few others, but none of them ear-wormed for me.)

--

Today is our last day. I'll be gaming with some of the folks who used to get together at my house on Thursday nights.

Then K. and I need to pack up, and we're off to the airport in the morning.

As I already wrote, Monday was our travel day, and the only thing that I didn't write about was its annoying end. We arrived in San Jose right on time at 9.30,pm but then had to wait almost an hour for our luggage.

I can't blame Alaskan (Hawaiian) too much, because they had a flight from Honolulu that arrived an hour late, just before us, and they probably had minimal ground crew that time of night and they had to prioritize the late flight over us, but it was still annoying.

I later learned that Alaska has a 20-minute luggage guarantee. You can get a small amount of credit or points if you complain about late luggage. But you had to do it in-person that their baggage office within two hours of either your flight's arrival or your luggage actually showing up (I forget which), which is just crap. Almost no one is going to go beg for a few points or credits while they're either waiting for their very late luggage or after they've *finally* gotten it and just want to go home. So, it's entirely performative (a word that I increasingly use to describe the East Bay now that I've been away from it for six years, though Alaska of course has wider scope). They can make extravagant promises (OK, not very extravagant), and never pay out on them.

But because of the luggage hijinks, we got into San Martin about 11pm, which was even later than the very late time we'd reluctantly agreed too. Poor Bob who picked us up and stayed up past his bedtime!

--

Tuesday through mid-Friday were our San Martin days, spent with my mom and Bob and at various times visiting with my brothers (and sister-in-law and niece and nephew).

Oh man, it is so wonderful to just be taken care of for close to four days. Bob and my mom prepared us all our meals and made sure they met our dietary restrictions (which is mainly the annoying no-dairy for me). They also had all the activities planned as usual. So we didn't have to do anything but enjoy company and relax and talk and play games and pet dogs. Nirvana!

Often biking or pickleball or both are scheduled, but Christmas visits tend to be a bit tighter than Thanksgiving visits because of how the days fall, and in addition, it was forecast to rain the entire time we were there. (It did not, though there was some decent downpour one of the nights. Apparently the atmospheric river swung north of us.)

So instead we had visits scheduled. Tuesday my mom scheduled a nice Christmas ham dinner with some friends and my brother J. Wednesday we had our typical shrimp Christmas Eve dinner and my brother R. made it for that. We had our familial Christmas that night, a Christmas Eve tradition for many, but never for us. (But, it fit R's schedule and kept Christmas from being crazy, and meant I got to start reading one of my Christmas books that night!) Then Thursday of course was Christmas, which means we went to Hollister to visit J's family, including niece, nephew, and sister-in-law L.

What that listing of meals and visits doesn't include is the gaming. We played at least a baker's dozen of games from Tuesday through Friday morning, not including kiddie games played with the niblings (and I can remember at least three of those). The Wiedlin family has always been big on gaming. I grew up playing card games like Euchre and Hearts and Golf, but we also had games like Twixt around, and of course I was starting to build up a collection that wasn't _just_ D&D (but was often other games put out by TSR). And so we always bring a couple of favorite games with us when we come. This year it was _Railroad Tiles_, _Cascadia_, and _Between Two Cities_ (the last being one that comes with us pretty much every year because it plays up to seven, but is still pretty small, unlike say my pimped-out Seven Wonders set, which is HEAVY). But my mom has increasingly been playing game with her uke and pickleball groups over the last year! So I think there was even more play than usual, because everyone is in the gaming mindset. Which is great, because in-person gaming has been more sparse since we moved. (Though we're working on that!) And that's how we hit at least 13 games. Everything we brought (with _Railroad Tiles_ being the break-out hit) plus _Harmonies_ (which my mom bought based on my journal entries talking about Kimberly and my's frequent play). We also played a few games that I definitely usually would not: _LCR_ (which probably should be categorized with the kids' games, and which I explained is an "activity", not a "game") and _Rummikub_ (which was simultaneously too random and too thinky for me).

Besides gaming, we also had the pups Joy and Zeke getting lots of attention. And my mom encouraged me to get going on the uke again, as I fell off as the year got hard (c.f. sending Elmer to Boston). My mom found me a few books of fingerstyle (fingerpicking) on the uke, as she knew I'd been enjoying the riffs for _Here Comes the Sun_, and they were terrific. I fooled around with a bunch of classics before finally settling on trying to properly learn _Yesterday_. (Yeah, there's a theme there.) On our last day in San Martin, I was lounging back in my seat, picking at _Yesterday_ again and again while we talked, which was pretty cool. Much more fun than just going off to a private room to practice.

--

Ah yes, and Christmas proper. As I said that was over at my brother J's house. L prepared us an absolute feast of deserts, appetizers, and a main meal (though I was pretty light in what I ate because my guts were pretty upset shortly after our arrival).

Everyone else had exchanged presents previously, but the rest of us swapped with J. and family (and mostly with the kids, who absolutely tore through their presents, not even pausing to see what one was before they went on to the next). My niece L. is still as sweet as ever, frequently throwing herself at people for hugs, even K. and me, who she just barely knows since we're a once-a-year sighting. My nephew J. is more obviously quite smart the older he gets, mainly in the way he talks, but also in working on a spatial puzzle-game (_Little Red Riding Hood_) that my mom had got. The two of them were both pretty wild when they were at my mom's house with J. on Tuesday, but they were on their best behavior on Christmas, though as noted the present opening was very frenetic.

--

Friday was our last day in San Martin. We had bacon and eggs in the morning (mmmmmmmmm!), then played some games (I think I might have won those two, after my mom being the main winner over most of the holiday). At 1 o'clock we headed northward.

We made in a stop in San Jose to visit with my sister M. and brother-in-law J. and other niece A. They were just returning home from their own Christmas visits and got back about half-an-hour before we came by. Usually we miss them because they're still away, so this was a bit of a surprise. We might have spent more time if we'd known! (But I don't know, as I said, figuring out the logistics of Christmas is always a little tough.)

Then at about 3.30 we landed at our AirB&B in Rockridge.

--

We actually had additional plans for the day! A play in San Francisco at 8pm! (I had wrangled us an early check-in to our Air B&B so that we weren't pressed for time, and that worked out great.)

The play was at the San Francisco Playhouse, which neither K. nor I remember at all from when we lived out here. I thought it must have been new, but no it's been around since 2009 or something. I eventually decided that we must have noticed it and decided we didn't need another musical theatre because we were already seeing four musicals a year at the Berkeley Playhouse.

Anyways, it's a neat venue because it's in the Kensington Park Hotel. You go up a flight of stairs to their mezzanine and then up one or two additional flights or stairs and around some corners to get to the theatre. And if you have tickets for the mezzanine of the theatre, that's ANOTHER flight of stairs. It was delightfully maze like (but also a bit much for K's knee).

I wondered what the weird multi-level room where the theatre now is had originally been, with my guess being a ballroom. (I've been in a similar upper story, multi-level ballroom in one of the older hotels in downtown Berkeley, though I can no longer remember which.) It turned out that the Kensington Park Hotel was originally built as an Elk's Lodge! The room we were in had originally been the Elk's meeting hall, but after the Elks started renting out space in their lodge in 1981, it was converted to a 750-seat theatre. It had been cut in half twice since, and now is a 199-seat theatre for the San Francisco Playhouse, which means that original room must have been huge. Besides being neat, it was a nice venue. We had seats in the front row of the mezzanine, and they were great seats (and cheaper than the orchestra would have been).

Oh, the play? That was _Into the Woods_, the first of two Sondheim plays that we expect to see while we're out here (the other being _Sundays in the Park with George_), and the first of three we hope to see in the next few months (as the Kauai Community Players seem fond of Sondheim and are doing _Assassins_ in April).

I've seen the movie and I love the movie, and I loved the play. The interweaving songs are so clever, and even more clever on stage, with interesting staged nuances like days being broken up by people reporting on their lesson learned, which I'm pretty sure wasn't in the movie. The interweaving faerie tales are of course terrific too. All around it's an amazing creative design, and so I'm thrilled to see the original on stage. And there was a reprise of _Agony_ that wasn't in the movie!

--

Sitting next to me was a young woman who had clearly never been to a musical before. When she talked to her date at intermission, she said things like "It's hard to understand what they're singing, it's ... lyric" and "You have to know what they're singing to understand the plot" and "The songs are all dialogue heavy." She also didn't like the fact that the play was "too happy."

Well, she got to act II and I heard two "Oh my God!" exclamations at some shocking moments and after that two "What the Fuck!"s after additional shocks (that were not quite as traumatic as the first two: one was when a character thought dead returned and the other was at an inappropriate kiss).

I hope the second act helped her gain an enjoyment/understanding for musicals, but we later saw them go by on the street, and her date was still trying to explain things to her.

(Well, I guess _Into the Woods_ is a slightly twisty, complex, deconstructionist type of play, so it might not be the best first musical. But maybe it is, because it's awesome.)

--

The person sitting next to K. was also interesting, but apparently less enjoyable. He apparently elbowed her, kicked her, and constantly burped. And that then there the Tik Tok women he constantly watched before the show and during intermission, dancing in tight, tight clothes.

--

In any case, we had a great time, with the only issue being that it was tough to get out of that maze with 197 other people also fighting their way free. But we eventually made it to the street, and we'd already negotiated that we were going to call a ride-share so that we'd get home at 11.30, not midnight.

So we did.

And we did.

And that's been our first four days in the Bay Area, with us just settling into our first night in Berkeley (Oakland, really, we're a few blocks over the border) as this entry ends.

I haven't written to my personal journal since October 12th, and that's because of the crowdfunding.

When last I wrote, I'd done five interviews in a week, and I was ex-haust-ed.

Yep, more exhausted now. (Or at least I was a week ago when the crowdfunding closed).

But the crowdfunding for Designers & Dragons: Origins went very well. We closed out at just under a quarter of a million dollars, which was as high as I could possibly imagine it going. And we had just more than 1500 backers, and that one was pretty much at my expectation, because modern-day RPG crowdfunding (the only category I look at closely) seems to convert 50% of its early signups to backers and we had 3,000 early signups.

Evil Hat is talking about increasing its print run from 3,000 per book to 4,000 per book, something that would be entirely covered by the crowdfunding. It means I won't see $$$ any time soon, as our agreement is profit-sharing, but that's totally good by me. It was a good tech-writing year and I'd prefer to see the long tail of another 4,000 total books, especially since that'll keep my work in print longer.

Over the course of the crowdfunding, I did 11 interviews, published three articles at my blog and tried to make meaningful posts to Bluesky on a daily basis.

(That would be the exhausted part.)

Hopefully all of that contributed to the project's success.

And now, we wait. The books are out to proofreading right now, which means that I get 5 or 6 weeks without having to worry about Designers & Dragons: Origins, as the due date on the proofreading is the end of the year. (Sorry to proofreaders who have work due at the end of the holiday season!)

---

Speaking of tech writing: that's been busier than usual too. I don't have many clients at this point, which isn't great, but my biggest client keeps me as busy as I want to be, and that discourages me from seeking new blood. (Which is all OK as long as, and only as long as, my biggest client is still needing work.)

But three weeks or so ago one of my other clients came back with some rush work for November (and some less rush work for December). So for the last two weeks of the crowdfunding, I was also putting in four full-time days of tech writing.

(That was the rest of the exhausting).

That all made it pretty tough doing creative work for the month, but I did manage to do the minimum revisions/expansions of Designers & Dragons: The '10s that were on my schedule. Mind you, I worked one Saturday to manage that and have been doing other creative work on evenings (a magazine article and some large-scale work on my eternal Michael Moorcock book).

Just like the 'ole days before I shifted to freelance work so that I could work on roleplaying history half time without it being in the evenings.

I should have put my Patreon on hold for November, while I did the Kickstarter. Ah well. I *am* putting it on hold for December to try to catch up on other work and to not worry about writing while I'm in California for the holidays.

---

There's been some fiction writing too: Kimberly and I have been attending a writing group at the local library since summer sometime. It's just a couple of people and it's not organized to offer comments on anything by the flashest of fiction. But, it's been encouraging me to play with fiction again. I wrote an actual flash fiction a couple of months ago, for the first meeting I went to, and I was pretty happy with it.

But for this month's meeting (tonight!), I tried something else. I dug out a Microscope campaign that a few of us had run with the intent of using it as the foundation for fiction if we wanted and after poking around a while found something to write about. My intent is to write a longer short story (e.g., not just flash fiction), but to write it in flash-fiction sized segments. So last night I put together 800 or so words for the first section, and I'll take it in tonight, and we'll see how the group reacts to science fiction.

Hopefully by next time (January, since we'll be out-of-town for the December meeting), I'll have all or most of the story, but I can still bring the second segment.

---

I guess the other inevitable thing to comment on here is cats, because then I can put cat pictures on the Facebook copy of this.

Elmer is entirely settled in Boston. His new dad stopped giving us updates after things had settled a couple of weeks in, which is totally fine (and probably healthy), but one of his workmates (the old gaming friend who introduced us) occasionally sends us pictures of Elmer looking very happy (with his new dad's OK). So we are happier than happier that worked out.

In the last few weeks, both Mango and Megara seem to have gotten much more comfortable downstairs. Mango has started hanging out in the cat tree and the comfy chairs that were definitely Elmer's territory before. Megara still often sits hesitantly at the bottom of the stairs, but she makes many more forays beyond that in the downstairs than she did even just a week ago, and we've occasionally found her sitting in the comfy chair in Kimberly's office (which definitely was another thing that used to belong to Elmer).

---

More busyness coming up. I've got Monday scheduled to figure out my health insurance, since my monthly rate is jumping to almost $1000. (Thanks GOP! Thanks Trump!) I've got some taxes that I need to deal with. And our Christmas trip is just more than three weeks away.

But for at least tomorrow, and maybe more, I can rest.

(Well, not totally, I have that article to finalize, which is for Wyrd Science, and I promised it for Friday, but maybe I'll relax other than that for the next four days.)

I had been fearful that we'd spend the whole week stressed over Elmer's transition to his new home and how well he was eating and such. And that's pretty much what happened.

But, the reports coming out of Boston continue to be great. He's eating wet food. He's grazing dry food & emptying his plate. He's playing with toys. He's following his new cat-dad around and talking to him.

I am pretty deliriously happy & am hopeful I can let go of the stress at this point because everything sounds great. It really looks like Elmer is as happy as we could have hoped and getting more interaction and attention in a house where he doesn't have to be kept isolated, just as we'd hoped.

Whew.

Things are also better at home.

Our house is no longer divided into multiple pieces. For the last several months, we'd either had the bedroom door or the stairway gate closed at all times, and I hadn't realized what a psychological effect that had, let alone it just being that much harder to get around.

We don't have to worry about Elmer wanting to come upstairs and trying to figure out how to get Megara into the bedroom when she's still not carryable.

Megara hasn't been locked up since we got home on Monday, except for 5 minutes to get her medicine-laced (anti-anxiety) churu most nights. Instead she's mostly been lounging about the towel we put out to share some catnip the night after we sent Elmer off.

Mango hung out with me for my workday yesterday, which he hasn't in quite some time (since he got wounded by Elmer, which was what made us realize we couldn't continue on like this). Instead, Elmer had usually been in my office, and Mango was off in the nearby family room or closet, not quite willing to share a room with his brother, but wanting to be nearby. And Mango doesn't flinch and run away when he suddenly realizes he's on the floor with a predator.

The goal here was win-win-win-win-win, and I'm very hopeful that we're there:

* Less stress for me and Kimberly.
* I get my orangie Mango cuddling with me sometimes at night again instead of being locked out.
* More attention for Elmer in a single-cat home where he's not isolated.
* Less fear/danger for Mango.
* The same for Megara (x10) and also free run of the house.

The ridiculously difficult task of getting Elmer all the way out to Boston now seems worthwhile too, as his new dad seems absolutely amazing from what we've seen of him in this stressful week. (In retrospective, we wish we'd flown Elmer out there ourselves and stuck around to help him acclimatize, but we didn't know how bad Island Pet Movers would be, nor how upset Elmer would be by the move.)

Super-hard, and we're always going to miss Elmer, but it wasn't working having him in a multi-cat home, so we really needed to rehome either him or the other two.

Not to bury the lede: Elmer made it to Massachusetts this morning and is still pretty scared at his new home, but at least wandering about, even to somewhat open spaces like shelves. He hadn't eaten yet, which is my last big stressor, as cats can hurt themselves if they go more than a couple of days without eating and it's been a day and a half for Elmer at this point. But hopefully he'll chill enough to eat sometime today. (He's always rejected even treats if he's too wound up, but I'm hopeful Elmer's new dad will be able to tempt him with Churu.)

But yesterday, Elmer's moving day SUCKED. Especially the morning.

The biggest problem is that Island Pet Movers, the company that we hired on to make the process easier and less stressful for us and to make sure we had all of the right info on the process, at some considerable expense, did none of that.

We'd already had some problems with them giving us straight-up incorrect information prior to yesterday, such as carrier size, and not giving us crucial info, such as their desire to see the health certificate before we left. But yesterday morning took the cake.

We got to Hawaiian Air Cargo at 4.30 in the morning yesterday. We knew they opened at 6, but IPM had assured us that they had talked with HAC to have someone there at 4.30, to check in Elmer, and that it was a requirement we be there to check him in 4 hours before his 8.30 flight. IPM did warn us that they might be on "island time", so we shouldn't be worried if they weren't there until 4.45 or 5.00, but said that it was important we be there, waiting on them, rather than vice-versa, so that if we missed the four-hour window, it was obviously their fault, and so they'd still take Elmer.

When they hadn't shown up by 4.45, I figured someone had forgotten about the early wake-up, so Kimberly messaged IPM and got them into motion getting someone there. Except they were totally useless. All we definitively know that they did was wake up IPM's owner to tell them about the problem (or at least so they claim, I no longer really believe them) and call the empty office in front of us. After 30 minutes or so they shrugged their shoulders and said, "There's nothing we can do, they'll probably be in around 6."

DUDE, this was exactly what we paid you to do. This was literally the one job you had this morning, and you not only did not do it, but had us totally uselessly standing out in the dark for an hour and a half before Hawaiian opened their doors at 6.00, exactly on their schedule. And when they opened their doors, we never heard a single person say, "Oh, shoot, we were supposed to be here at 4.30" or, "Oh Yeah, we knew you were coming", though IPM absolutely claimed they knew we were coming! At this point I don't know if IPM lied about talking to someone being there at 4.30, "arranged" it in some pointless way like leaving a voice mail, or is completely incompetent, but they 100% did not do their job. (Generally, I'm drifting between them being incompetent and rent-seeking grifters at this point, but I don't know, and moreso other than still being pissed about it, I mostly don't care.)

Anyway, Hawaiian told us that no, the deadline was 2 hours before the flight, not 4. We hadn't needed to have Elmer checked in until 6.30. (So we could have given him two hours not in the crate, and we could have given us two hours more of sleep.) A fairly cold and curt clerk, exactly not what we needed, and quite surprising for Hawaii, then proceeded to get Elmer checked in and deliver us a few more problems.

First, she insisted that Elmer had to have been offered food within four hours of the flight. This was in direct contrast with our supposed experts at IPM, who told us not to give Elmer any food starting about 12 hours before his flight. We fortunately had a small bag of food in case of emergency layover, and we offered it to him, and as I knew would be the case it was totally pointless. I wish we'd had churu, because there is some small chance he might have eaten that.

Second, they told us that if Elmer had an accident before he left Kauai, we'd have to come clean it up. That obviously meant he would miss his flight. IPM had never even acknowledged this possibility, and of course they'd made it more likely by having him sitting around for hours more.

But, we got our boy off, and I could already see he was increasingly scared, but we hoped that would soften when he actually got on planes, because contrary to myths about animal cargo transport, they're in a quiet, temperature-controlled area that's not different from the cabin.

And that was mostly the end of the bad part of the day. I mean, we were stressed for the next few hours, and I was jumping at every phone call, afraid it was Cargo calling to have us take Elmer back. Because I definitely didn't want to put us and Elmer through this trauma a second time. But the only time they called, when we were just almost out of Lihue, it was to check on the ID of the people picking Elmer up.

And we continued to be disappointed in IPM.

They'd told us we'd get updates as Elmer moved through his journey, but they oversold it. All we got was updates through Hawaiian's cargo app, which was sometimes delayed for minutes or hours after events occurred (e.g., we didn't see Elmed loaded on either plane until after the plane's departure time).

They'd implied they'd be taking care of him in Oahu on his long 5-hour layover there, but no, they never saw him, and we were told at that point that they only would if there was an accident and they needed to change out his bedding (he had extra rugs taped to the top of his carrier).

We assume that didn't happen, and that he got onto his plane to Boston fine, but there was no commo.

(If you wonder what IPM _actually_ did: they arranged Elmer's flights. They arranged a transport for him on the other side from the airport to his adopter's house, which would have been very difficult for us to do. They gave us a bunch of info on what we had to do for the flight re: paperwork and accommodations, but got a good chunk of it wrong. If our adopter had been able to pick Elmer up at the airport himself, it would 100% have been better to do everything ourself. Even with the need to figure out transport in Boston, we probably would have been better doing it ourself. There would have been more stress, as we would have been likely to worry that our interpretation of things was incorrect, and so we might have problems, as opposed to us assuming that IPM had it right until we were suddenly confronted with their newest mistake.

Oh, and if not clear when I listed out what IPM did: they did absolutely nothing on the actual trip. Our baby cat getting safely from Lihue to Boston was pretty much thanks to Hawaiian Air and no one else.

Anyway, I now wish we'd flown Elmer to Oahu ourself in baggage, stayed at a pet-friendly hotel, which I know there are some right at the airport, and then sent him on via cargo. But that little revelation didn't come to me until I saw his itinerary, which didn't include the overnight layover that they'd originally told us to expect, and so put him on the road for 22 hours straight including a long layover in Hawaiian's care.)

I was able to go to bed at around 11pm. Kimberly was not. But she woke me up around 2am to tell me that Elmer had arrived safely at his new dad's home and showed me a video of Elmer in Boston. (Elmer had apparently climbed under his bedding, something we hadn't anticipated when we taped it down front and back in the carrier, and of course had had an accident by the time he reached the end of his 22-hour-long-day, but the new adopter was able to deal with that all upon his arrival.)

So, hopefully the worst is over, though I'll be somewhat stressed until I hear Elmer is eating. But Elmer's new dad has been able to heft him around a bit without complaint (so that he could clean the carrier), and Elmer has been willing to wander out and about, though it sounds like he's mostly hiding.

Mango has been freaky since Elmer left. Yesterday when we got home from our early-morning send-off, he went and hid under the couch. Today when I got up, he was mrowing and racing around, and even got in the shower and all wet when I was preparing my morning ablutions. (He has literally never done that!) We suspect he realizes something weird happened yesterday and that there's something wrong and maybe even that his brother is missing. He'll calm down, I'm sure.

Megara seems less unconcerned, though she of course had a different relationship with Elmer. Both of the kits had what we now recognize as an abusive relationship with Elmer, since he randomly struck out at both of them. But for Mango it was confused with familial/long-time ties, and for Megara it was just terror. But she got to stay out in the house (as opposed to our bedroom) last night, which has been a fairly infrequent happening, just for a brief week or two when we tried to integrate her into the house before we realized that Elmer was constantly chasing and assaulting her, and just for a brief night or two more recently when we tried to settle into our new routine with Elmer locked downstairs, before Elmer's attack on Mango left him wounded and we realized a different solution was needed.

So we're picking up the pieces. I got a pretty small amount of work done yesterday, and I traded my tech-writing work I'd usually do today for later in the week, so that I could offer my best quality attention. I'll probably still be able to get some of my own work done today: I have a history of Modiphius from a few years ago that I'm trying to get updated, and I think I have the structure for the rest of it. Meanwhile, I hope to start to getting life back to its regular (new) rhythms. I mean, we've even had dirty dishes piling up for a few days, just because everything other than taking care of the move and doing my regular workdays was pushing a huge boulder up the hill.

Meanwhile, we seem to be getting some of the moisture from Hurricane Kiko this morning. Which is well appreciated. We had an almost California-dry summer on Kauai this year, which is very unusual. We definitely have a rainy season and a dry season, but even during the dry season we expect to see rain most weeks in some quantity. Instead the golf course near our house is brown, brown, browner than I've ever seen it. So the rain is appreciated. Hope to see more before Kiko passes by.

I woke up this morning and thought, "Elmer should be in Boston now. I need to make sure he's OK."

But I was of course five days premature. Kimberly and I had talked about what we're going to do on Monday night, when Elmer should be hitting Boston around midnight our time and be getting to his new house by 2am or so. So it had entered my subconsciousness and confused my brain when it tried to wake before the dawn this morning.

But it's really four days until our middle-of-the-night deposit of Elmer near the Lihue airport. Five days until his arrival.

Within five or ten minutes of waking, I was back to the low-level nausea that's settled on me most mornings.

---

Obviously, we have no control over the stressful parts of this process. Especially the trip from Oahu to Boston. But it feels like K. and I had each picked a part of the pre-trip, things that we also had no control over, to stress about.

I think K. was more worried about our new, required crate actually getting here on time (which should be today). With good reason, Amazon regularly misses their on-island delivery dates by days and occasionally things got lost entirely.

But what neither of us had realized is that after we chose an expedited shipment, the crate went out UPS. It's Amazon in conjunction with USPS that's horrible. And USPS seems to have gotten even more messed up this year. UPS instead is miraculous in hitting its dates. We'll go to bed and something will still be in the continental United States, and we wake up and see it reached Oahu. Then it gets shipped interisland before noon and goes out for delivery in the early afternoon.

The crate did even better than expected, passing through Oahu overnight, and hitting Lihue by the time I looked this morning. The odds should now be 99.9% that it gets to uson time.

As for me, I've been fretting about a hurricane that suddenly spun up on Monday. Since they show five-day outlooks, my continual question was: with the winds hit Oahu before Elmer goes through Oahu, which has a departure of about 2pm on Monday? But I needed to wait as the projections got to within five days of Monday afternoon.

Well, those are now up today, and at best the winds are expected to have reached Maui by Tuesday morning, and Maui is one (major) island past Oahu. So Elmer should be safely in Boston, at his new home, we hope, by the time Kiko can affect Oahu.

(More generally, the hurricane is expected to drop below 74mph tropical storm level as it approaches our archipelago, so it's likely to up our winds and drop lots of rain on us, but not be a major danger ... but that could have been enough to disrupt an animal on a flight if it was through a day or two earlier.)

So back to that continued stress about the trip itself.

Four days until our middle-of-the-night deposit of Elmer near the Lihue airport. Five days until his arrival.

I feel like we've been dwelling in limbo for the last two and a half weeks. We got back from our anniversary trip to Oahu and we almost immediately had an offer of a new home for Elmer. Kimberly has been taking care of almost all the logistics (with the support of a pet moving company who services Hawaii and regularly moves pets to Europe, so we know they should be able to get him to the East Coast.) And even that is mostly settled now other than a few details: an absorbent carpet for the bottom of Elmer's new dog-crate (with Amazon already having lost one! thanks, good timing, Amazon), some stickers and a document envelope for the outside of the crate (which we're waiting on from said pet movers), and of course Elmer's final vet appointment next Friday to get his certificate of health.

But we've been stuck between the decision to rehome Elmer (and it becoming a reality) and needing to wait because our adopter has a business trip this week I think and so couldn't take Elmer until the 8th. That's been somewhat agonizing, because it means we have to confront that decision every day, and at the same time we can't really move forward.

I haven't even felt the energy to get back to the house projects I'd just gotten started on, because it feels like all the energy is going toward the hurry-up-and-wait of Elmer's situation. (But I did get some primer down on some supports for the house in the back yard this morning, where the paint had gotten scraped away over the years and so these important pillars were open to our very corrosive elements. That was part of my normal Sunday working in the yard though.)

We got Elmer's itinerary on Thursday. We have to drop him off at 4.30 in the morning a week from tomorrow. That makes it all feel the more crazy. Meeting someone in the pitch dark, down by the airport, to hand off our beloved cat. And, I mean, hopefully they're there. The cargo company actually opens at 6am, but the pet movers say they've contacted them and someone will be there at 4.30. Hopefully, probably OK, but I hate having more stressors like that.

We had thought Elmer would have an overnight layover, but he's going straight from Kauai to Boston via Oahu. Unfortunately, with about 4 hours sitting around before his 8am flight to Oahu, then a similar wait on Oahu. It'll be about 22 hours door to door. That sounds like a long miserable time for Elmer, but the pet movers say they prefer not to overnight the pets if they don't have to, because it makes the trip longer and stresses them out more. So, we bow to their experience. Hopefully Elmer will just lounge around his crate not caring most of the time.

Elmer has been so much cuter and more cuddly in the last few weeks. He's hanging out more upstairs (which unfortunately means Megara gets locked in our bedroom), and is even cuddling against Kimberly as I write. We take this as a good sign, because he should get more attention as the only cat at his new home, and clearly he's been thriving on the more attention he's gotten since we made the decision to give him up.

And I feel increasingly confident about his new home. His new owner finished setting up most or all of his supplies a week or two ago. He's got a cat tree ready to go. He's not only been cutting up cardboard boxes to make his own scratch pads, but also 3-D printed a tool to make it easier to cut the boxes! He sounds like he'll be an attentive thoughtful cat owner.

But knowing we'll probably never see Elmer again after a clandestine handoff in the dark in eight days is still tough.

A lazy yet exhausting final day on Oahu.

We had another breakfast at Lulu's and got to look out over the beautiful Pacific Ocean one more time. Then we finished packing up our hotel room.

The plan was to go to a museum today. We'd originally planned to go out to the Bishop Museum, but I was less then enthusiastic about hauling around our heavy gym bag of games and stuff, and Kimberly decided she'd done more than enough walking in the last few days. Then we took a look at the Honolulu Museum of Art, which we've visited a couple of times, and saw they had some amazing looking exhibits, including an American Impressionist (Mary Cassatt) and photos of the islands in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But it turned out they weren't open on Mondays.

Ultimately, we decided to catch one more movie on the way home.

---

That was Fantastic Four: First Steps, which we enjoyed, though it wasn't quite up to the quality of Superman, IMO. (In the main, I thought the directing in Superman was amazing, and FF was fine.)

But, lots of things to enjoy in FF.

The actors were great. All four of the core characters were amazing (fantastic).

I loved the really positive spin on all the characters, rather than the more bickering dynamic that I remember best from the 70s and 80s. Johnny Storm in particular was a real surprise, as an earnest and responsible member of the team, without losing his youthful spirit.

Galactus and the Silver Surfer were both impressively terrifying. Really nicely done.

The 50s/60s SF aesthetic was very well done. It made me nostalgic for golden age science-fiction.

I think overall, FF really showed Marvel's strength, in its willingness to delve into different genres and categories of movies.

I'll be really intrigued to see how these folks are mixed into 616. (I mean, I know the how, if Hickman's Secret Wars is used as the foundation, I'll just be interested in the dynamics of how it works out.)

---

An uneventful trip home, and an exhausted trip through some grocery stores upon our return. (Did we say we weren't going to do that again because it was so exhausting? I think so, but we were talking about long trips from the mainland.)

Cats are excited to see us.

We are excited to be home.