shannon_a

It feels like whenever I had a bit of free time in the evening in June, I spent it preparing for our move. So it's perhaps no surprise that I woke up this morning from a dream about wandering and wandering, through an endless series of disconnected back yards, and not being able to find our new home.

(There are six months of wandering left to go, as we're now T-184.)

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My big task in June was to get going on the handyman repair of our house that we have flagged before sale. And mission ... kinda accomplished? We found a new handyman, got him out here, and OKed a quote (which was a bit high, but who cares at this point). He's got us scheduled for four days, starting in mid-July.

There's still stuff to do on this topic, including: finding an electrician (for two other issues), finding someone to re-drywall our art-room closet ceiling (because handyman keep shaking their heads at that and walking away), getting our gardener our to clear the back yard (so that I don't have to, in particular to get our handyman access to one of the crawl spaces that he's going to cover, and this is now planned for Thursday), and going downtown to buy some new parking passes (in case gardeners and/or handymen need them, but it's no longer an immediate issue since our gardener will be out on a holiday).

Ah well, onward.

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I say that was my big task, but I must have spent 20-30 hours in June culling books (with Kimberly) and packing books. Basically, every night if I had the energy, I did a box, and that takes 30-45 minutes on average. And every few boxes, new culling was required.

As of this point, I've boxed 32 small (10x10x16) boxes of books. That covers everything in our bedroom and the art room, plus all of the non-fiction in Kimberly's office. We've still got the rest of the books in Kimberly's office (kids books, plays, poems), ditto for my paperback science fiction, but at least they're culled. And that culling has led us to send 24 boxes to the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library, plus 2 bags of books to Mike A and Katherine's little library* and one bag of DVDs to Half-Price Books (which paid for a McDonald's dinner, because Half-Price Books is more like one-twentieth price for selling books, and that might be estimating high). So, 32 boxes prepped for Hawaii vs 27 "boxes" of media culled. And I actually have another 12 waiting for pickup from our friendly neighborhood Friends of the Berkeley Public Library man, John, tomorrow morning.

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Pulling those 70 or so boxes of media off the shelves has resulted in the first freeing up of furniture. Eric is going to be taking a few small book cases and a comfy chair for a reading nook that he's set up at home. We've also got another three large bookcases ready to leave the house. (We'd have more, but our realtor suggested that our stagers might want to use our matching Fenton MacLaren book shelves, so those stay for the moment.)

We've also freed up a couple of extra desks. We've got those and the book shelves listed on Freecycle after a failure for Nextdoor to move the bookshelves. (One rude lady said she was interested, and asked if the shelf she wanted had movable shelves. It didn't, and she didn't even bother to say she wasn't interested afterward, which is typical Berkeley entitlement.) Getting those things out of the house is going to feel like a big step forward.

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PS: We received our permits to import the cats into Hawaii a few days ago. Whew! One more stressor gone. We still have to get them a final health certificate and some type of flea/tick spray before we leave, but that's gotta be within two weeks of our flight, so it's no time soon, just yet another thing to remember.

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And as for July. I'm hoping to finish up with tangled handyman and gardener issues. I've suggested to Kimberly that she get in contact with the painters, as there's going to be as some extensive (and expensive) reworking of sun-damaged trim and then we need to think about whether we want to make the main paint on the house look nicer, just to sell the house (as someone else will surely redo it en toto after the price they pay for the house).

And the packing will continue. Hopefully we'll get all of that ready-to-go furniture gone, and I'll probably need to move on to comics or games. (I'm still struggling to figure a good box for comics, as the sizes of boxes I have are just barely the wrong size and thus pretty inefficient, but this afternoon I placed an order for some boxes that I hope are just graphic novel sized and some that are hopefully just RPG sized, we'll see tomorrow when they arrive one-day, after ridiculously expensive shipping, because that's what they had.)

Had horrifyingly mundane dreams last night. I was reading GMail, and noticing that some relevant email messages were ending up in my "Unread" area instead of "Important" and thought, "I should mark those as important to retrain this AI."

This morning I keep looking at GMail, feeling like there are email messages I should retrain.

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My Top 10 Censored RPG Books column for Designers & Dragons continues to do well. Not only has it been read 4,300+ times, but it's also the first article from my post-publication Designers & Dragons column which has done better than any of the articles from my pre-publication A Brief History of Game column.

(RPGnet has great search engine presence due to its longevity and the frequency of its updates, so any old articles always continue to get great hits over time. That an article 20 or so days old caught up with an article about a year and a half old is thus of some note.)

I wasn't trying to be purposefully provocative or anything when I wrote the censored article; it was just something that caught my attention immediately when I conceived of it, and so I wrote it. But now I'm having performance anxiety trying to figure out what else might be a great topic like that one.

About an hour after I woke up this morning, I was suddenly struck that I'd had a dream about our upcoming Pathfinder game. We were running the first session, and I managed to kill all the PCs (which mirrors game #2 or #3 of the Savage Tide). Well, all but one, and it's weird that the one was Kevin, because he's opted out of all of our current Saturday gaming.

So people were bummed and we were closing the game out, and then I said, "Oh! I forgot that in Pathfinder you don't die until you hit -CON." And that just seemed to make things more anti-climatic.

No anxiety about the new game there ...

Last night I dreamed that I was at some gathering with about a dozen people or so. Someone delivered us a game, and we were instructed that we had to play it. However, as he wandered off, we realized that he hadn't told us how to do so.

Looking over the game, I began to make intuitive leaps, and it became increasingly obvious to me how you could create a great game with the components included. I was figuring out how to distribute cards initially, then how to give them out again over the course of the game. At first everyone was impressed by my ability to suss things out, but then they began to drift away. Soon, I was shouting trying to get their attention so that they could learn the game that I was still figuring out, but no one was paying the least attention.

I awoke sometime in the early dawn hours, thinking, "That was a great design. I should write it down." Then I drifted back to sleep and woke up again around 9.30, with no more memory of the game than what I have written.