shannon_a

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.

_Yesterday, we set off for the Bay Area for the holidays._

SNEAKER ALERT! At Lihue Airport yesterday, the TSA seemed to be giving extra attention to footware. I get randomly selected for a footware check, which involves me stepping to the side and them wiping down my sneakers and then putting the wiper into a bomb detector. No problem, since I have TSA-Pre. My shoes were on my feet, and I was not required to remove them. The guy two behind me got flagged too, and since he didn't have TSA-Pre, he had to wait for his shoes before he can bring them back to the TSA agent. I've never before seen checks specifically on shoes, not even in Mad Shoe Bomber days. Was there a shoe threat reported yesterday morning? And why were extra checks required on shoes that had just gone through the x-ray machine?

CLOWN CARS. The planes were _crowded_ yesterday. Yeah, I'm sure that's true all over the country, but flying out of Hawaii just before the holidays and back just after, we're often avoiding the biggest crowds by running contraflow. Not yesterday. As our plane arrived and we watch it deplane there were huge numbers of people getting off. Then there was a big gap and I thought they must be done, then at least as many people get off again. I thought of clown cars at the circus.

We got to watch this phenomenon again and again over the course of the day as we were constantly first-on/last-off due to Kimberly's ailing knee.

ALMOST, BUT NO CIGAR. I long for the old Hawaiian airplanes that were laid out with their seats 2-3-2, meaning that you had two seats near the bulkheads, then aisles, then three in the middle. Unfortunately, they stopped being used right around COVID, replaced with smaller 3-3 planes. That means that you can no longer fly off the islands and have two seats to yourselves unless you fly first class (and there were no first class seats available for the trip out). Which is a bummer in this age of COVID, especially when disease is rising during the holidays.

Nonetheless, I always do my best to game my seats. So I'll always choose two seats in a row where the third seat isn't taken yet, and I'll even switch seats at the last minute if that third seat has been taken and there's another row where it hasn't. Heading into this flight, the third seat in our row was empty, and it being an "extra comfort" seat, I had some hope it wouldn't be filled at the last minute. Well, all the early group numbers boarded, and that usually would have included the extra-comfort seats, and no one filled or seat. Then another 10 or 15 minutes went by as more people slowly entered the clown car, and the seat stayed empty. Would we be lucky despite the extremely full flights?

I could see the very, very last person on the plane queueing up down the aisle, with the bulkhead doors closed behind her. And ... she dropped her backpack in that third seat next to us before heading rearward to try and find someplace for her carry on.

Alas!

MASK ALERT. Hawaiian Airlines has pre-recorded their emergency instructions for many years. The ones that you get at the start of a trip. I noticed when we flew yesterday that after the prerecorded message, they then had a spiel that they did live about how if the oxygen masks drop and you're wearing a face covering you should take that off before putting putting on your oxygen mask. And I thought: they haven't updated their prerecorded emergency info since the pandemic.

INTERESTING TIMES. Our seatmate seemed perfectly nice, meaning she didn't try to talk to us, but also pretty weird. I think she just gave no f***s.

But she had earphones in most of the flight and was frequently shaking her head and moving her lips along to the song.

She puts on about seven layers of clothes after boarding the plane, most notably standing in the aisle to pull on a pair of pants.

When she ate her meal, a gentrified hot pocket, she ripped off all the outer bread and just ate the inner bits. Apparently the more cooked bread wasn't as good.

At one point she caused me and Kimberly great concern when she seems to fall asleep with her elbow on her tray table and a cup of coffee lifted up in the air.

We exchanged a few pleasantries when we were landing. She took a bazillion pictures of San Jose's lights as we landed, and seemed pretty entranced by them, so hopefully a great time in the city.

AIRPORT RACE. Landing at San Jose, Kimberly had another wheelchair, which took her to our luggage pickup. The lady wheeling her RACED. I had to hustle to keep up! (Good exercise after five or six hours on a plane.)

FIRST & LAST. We had a weird first and last day. We were literally the first people on the plane to San Jose because Kimberly was in a wheel chair. Then our seatmate was literally the last person on the plane. Then, picking up our luggage, we were literally the last people out of the Luggage Chamber. Ah well, our plane arrived about 30 minutes early. And there was the mad airport rush.

_Today was our first day of holiday, and we made the most of it, not only with lots of great eating, but lots of stuff too._

PICKLEBALL. My mom and Bob have been playing pickleball for six months or so (and were both variously injured from it when I was out in September). So we went out to play pickleball today, along with my brother J. First time pickleballer here, lots of fun. It felt a lot like Ping Pong to me, but obviously more athletic. More Ping Pong than Tennis, though I don't think I've played Tennis since High School. I mostly figured out the serving and got into the play. Not particularly good, but competent. I played two games alongside Bob, two alongside my mom, and one with another player at the court. (The community there seemed great). All around, a good time. After five games, I decided I should stop because my ankle I hurt in September was twinging and that hamstring had also gotten really tight.

But I'm thinking about picking up a pickleball paddle for Christmas, as it looks like they play at the tennis courts about a mile from us, on the mauka side of Kalaheo. Both the exercise and the community would be very welcome, and those courts are really close.

ADAM. After we got home, we watch _The Adam Project_ on Netflix. I love a good time travel movie, and this was a good time travel movie. It wasn't that it had clever timey wimey paradoxes (which I love). Oh, there was some attention to how paradoxes worked. But the movie was great because it visited some of the same people from different time periods, and it was super charming in doing so.

CASCADIA. We closed out the day with some Cascadia. Always fun, though I crashed & burned for my second game in a row. Oddly that's the two games we've played since we pulled in the tiles from the Landmarks supplement. Huh.

_So a first full day of vacation ends, and I feel somewhat lighter. Obviously, K. is still having serious problems with her knee, and is in mucho pain, but just relaxing with family who are taking care of us is great after a hard, hard year._

I. I Game Once More

I had a wonderful plentitude of gaming while in the Bay Area this year. Everything I brought (Between 2 Cities, Boomerang: Australia, Railroad Ink Challenge Lush Green Edition) got played, most of it multitude times. And, I was also introduced to a number of new games. It was the best gaming I've had since we moved (and makes me really determined to get a local gaming group going, now that we finally seem to be in a lull for both COVID and my need to absolutely 100% remain well for upcoming events & medical procedures).

That culminated on Black Friday when Eric V. was kind enough to set up gaming at his house with Sam and Eric L. Not only did he provide good company & a trio of games to play, but also delicious air-fried potato wedges and a very tasty turkey burger. Mmm-mmm.

The new games:

HONSHU. This is a cute little card-based city building game built around one major limitation: each card shows six different areas with different advantages, and when you place a new card, you have to cover up at least one area on either the new card or an old card. It was a fun game and I could definitely see picking it up, but on the other hand I didn't feel a _need_ to pick it up because I've already got the co-op SPRAWLOPOLIS offering a similar card-based city-building play.

ANNO 1800. This Martin Wallace game was our main play for the day. It was a dense technology building game where you're constantly trying to produce the resources to make new technologies and/or fulfill order cards. I enjoyed it, I decided it was a bit dense/long, and I've thought about it a few times since, so I could pick it up if I had a group interested in games of this density (but generally I let all but a few Wallace games go when I moved, as I decided they're a bit denser/more economic than I usually play).

JOAN OF ARC. This is the Orléans draft-and-write game. It's one of the denser X-and-write games that I've seen, and was overall pretty great. There were considerable different paths to take (though you apparently need to do them all somewhat), a lot of ability to build up tactical advantages with building, and a drafting choice every turn that was hard. I loved it even aside for my enjoyment of the original board game. It went on my definite buy list ... except there's no US edition right now! (And the US publisher of Orléans, TMG, is gone.) I think it was an Essen release, so maybe it'll sneak into the supply chain by next year, but at the moment I can only find it for about €50 in the English edition or €35 in the German (including shipping), which isn't too bad for the gameplay you get, but I'm not willing to put out €25 of that for shipping.

I stayed later than I intended, but got home to our AirBnB a bit after 9pm, and just had a little packing left to do.

II. I Karen a Bit in Our Travel

Saturday morning it was up at 6am (4am Hawaii time!) to make sure we were all ready to go, and then we were off in a Lyft to the Oakland Airport before 8am. No problems on checkin, and security was quick, none of which tends to be the case at Oakland Airport (which is no Amsterdam, but it tends to have long lines everywhere). We in fact didn't have any problems until we were getting onto the plane and Kimberly's boarding pass made the scanner flash red and beep.

I should back up and note that we brought Jeeves, one of Kimberly's scooters, along for the trip. She's walking again since the recovery from her surgery, but she has a tendon that gets tight after she walks for 10 or 15 minutes. So, we brought it mainly for the day we went into SF.

On the way flying in to the Bay Area, we checked Jeeves at the front desk, because we had a tight transfer on Maui, so we didn't want to have to wait for the scooter to be ready. But in Oakland, we brought it to the gate instead, to check there, since we didn't know how far back we'd be in Oakland airport.

Kimberly's boarding pass beeped because she had an exit row.

Now, this really shouldn't be a problem. She can stand, she can walk for 15 minutes. She's perfectly capable of executing exit-row requirements. But either the FAA or Hawaiian is actively discriminating against people with mobility limitations by treating them all as if they're the same. So the gate agent told us that because Kimberly rode her scooter to the gate, she couldn't sit in the exit row. (And that it would have been fine if we'd checked it back at check-in.)

Kimberly and I were nonplussed, because we knew that the rigidity of the rule as stated by the gate agent was not just discriminatory but ridiculous. I mentioned the possibility of an ADA complaint. The gate agent offered to put us in another "comfort+" row, claiming they were all the same. But, they're not. We only relented when the gate agent offered to call her manager. I said no, that wouldn't change anything, but she called anyway, apparently because she had listened to our arguments and really wanted to see if there was anything to be done.

Nope, but she ended up not only giving us the row right behind first class (which has considerable more leg room than anywhere else on the plane, including first class itself, even though it's just another "comfort+" row), but also keeping the other seat in our row empty (because as it turns out flying the *Saturday* after Thanksgiving back to Hawaii results in a plane more than half empty).

I was a bit embarrassed afterward because I realized that I'd Karened a bit, but we had a really comfortable flight back, once more with no one next to us to give us COVID.

(I just read the claim that only 1 out of 20 Americans hasn't had COVID at this point; wow.)

III. We Return

We were very happy to get back home on Saturday afternoon.

Mango had a funny moment when we came in the door: he looked at us very suspiciously at first, then his whole face lit up and he ran at Kimberly.

All three cats have been staying pretty close to us since we got home (although Elmer is starting to fade back to his alone time).

It's been gray and cool, but not Bay Area gray and cool, so we're thrilled to be home.

IV. We Begin Rearranging the House

Theoretically, carpenters will be in sometime this week to start installation of the cabinets & shelves that we've been waiting almost three years on (!!!), and which will allow us to finally complete our settling into our home.

So on Sunday Kimberly and I rearranged all the cabinets to get them them into the right places for the carpenters (as we previously hadn't understood the different between "furniture edges" and "non-furniture edges") and then we moved my research book-shelf upstairs, to soon be replaced with cabinets.

It's in the Living Room now, and is just the first thing that'll be brought up there, as it's time to bring up the Christmas Tree too.

Maybe tomorrow.

TRICK OR TREAT

So we've had our first proper Halloween on Kauai. Part of that was that we were out in town doing the weekly shopping, and so we got to see folks in costume. Most of the staff at the Target and Costco we went to, actually.

And then at home that evening we got our first trick or treaters. Because there were no trick or treaters in 2020, and in 2021 we were still COVID-reluctant enough that we left our lights off. But this year we got a grand total of *1* group of kids. About a half dozen.

One of them was apparently enchanted by Mango, who was looking out the windows while I gave out treats. Kimberly later held him up, and made the little girl's day.

I told them to feel free to take more than one candy as I held out of bowl of assorted sweets and one of the girls just kept taking and taking, which was fine. I later looked and discovered she'd taken all the good stuff: most of the Kit Kats and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. Leaving what I now think of as the adult candy: Whoppers, Rolos, Milk Duds, and Heath Bars.

I told them to feel free because they were the first kids of the evening and it was already late enough that I'd considered turning off the lights. That surprised the older kid who was chaperoning the group. Do you think it's because of the "Do Not Enter" sign, he asked, pointing back to the head of the street. I told him no, that was just because it was one way, but he then asked if it was a private road, and I said no.

Only later did I realize that he'd perhaps never seen a one-way street. They're really rare on Kauai, with the county instead just jamming people down narrow streets from both directions. But from what I've heard, our street became one way when the school went in down the hill from us. Because it likely wouldn't have been OK jamming cars onto the street from both ways when there is a little bit that's just more than one car width wide and there would have potentially been a constant stream of cars from the school. (There actually was the year we moved in but after COVID they apparently redid their pick-up and drop off methodology, because we no longer get streams of cars in the morning when kids are dropped off, which is a big win.)

So that was our mighty Halloween. I guess we'll probably get candy again next year. Most of what we have left this year is the stuff Kimberly likes.

(Well, it was our first proper Halloween in Kauai other than the fact that we were here for Halloween 2001 and went out to Keoki's for dinner and saw some costumes, but didn't have any trick or treaters at Waikomo Stream, where we were staying. Nor would I have expected any since it's a gated community.)

WAITING FOR INFLOW

Meanwhile, we continue to hurry up and wait.

After three calls, our local Benz maintenance shop has ordered the "harness" we need to fix Julie's A/C. It's coming from the mainland, of course. No idea when it'll show up, though the real question will be when we should start calling to ask if it's shown up. (They *have* proactively called before for that sort of thing, but that's the exception, not the rule.) For the moment I've decided: after Thanksgiving.

We are still waiting to hear from Home Depot cabinet-triage woman. Kimberly and I worked through the big confusing invoice of our cabinet purchase (and learned that one of its main deficits is that it lists adjustments to the existing cabinets as new numbered line items) and figured out what was missing. Which turns out to be three boards intended as toe kicks to mount under our wall-hung cabinets. We notified cabinet-triage-lady a bit more than a week ago, and discovered she was out of town for a week. But it's been two more days since then. We need the missing stuff (which could be in the mail as it happens, but we haven't been able to confirm that either) before I'm willing to get our carpenters out here working, so the ever-stalling Family Room and Office work is again stalling.

Life should return to our normal patterns next week, as the folks are returning to the island after a granddaughter visit.

But we're also heading off to San Jose and Berkeley for Thanksgiving, though that's still a few weeks away.

Hour 0 (5am hour, CET). At 5am, I'm standing on the platform at The Hague HS station. It's dark out. I'd originally thought with a 10.30 flight that I could roll out of The Student Hotel at 7 or 7.30 and get to Schiphol by 8, plenty of time for a 10.30 flight. But all reports are that the airport is a trainwreck. So 5am it is, because the 5.22 train is the only one that gets me to Schiphol with a window of more than 4 hours, as they only run once an hour until 6am. But, that's certainly better than BART, where a sufficiently early takeoff time meant you _had_ to take an Uber.

On the train, it's more crowded than I expected. Still seats at The Hague HS, but the train is maybe 60%-70% full. At 5am! On a Sunday!

There's a constant array of coughing and sniffling as I sit and write. I won't miss the sniffling, which seemed endemic in Holland.

I'd wondered why the trip to the airport was scheduled to take 45 minutes, and it's apparently because we sit at Leiden, our only stop, for close to 10 minutes. More passengers get on here, and there's a bit of brownian motion as they randomly bounce from car to car, looking for a seat. Eventually the atoms balance out, because there really is enough room in all the cars, even when selfish people like moi taking up an extra seat for our luggage (but there's no where else to put it, unless I chose to stand up by the doors for the entire 45 minutes).

--

Hour 1 (6am hour, CET). At 6am, I'm walking up from the train station under Schiphol, looking for Departures 2, Desks 9-15, which the Schiphol app has told me is where I should be. I finally find what looks like the right set of labyrinthine lines, and when I tell the attendant at the front the secret word of "Seattle", she bids me enter.

I'm here illegally early, because Schiphol says one may not enter the Departures hall more than 4 hours before your flight because they've made such a mess of their airport that people are showing up 8 hours or more before their flight. I'm also here pointlessly early because the check-in desk doesn't open until 6.30.

Or so I thought.

There's already one or two hundred people in front of me, but they're moving. We snake through the hall relatively fast. I'd been somewhat concerned because the Delta app was entirely broken, unable to give me a valid boarding pass or to accept that I'm bringing luggage because they claim it's actually a KLM flight (something they'd never previously acknowledged and something that might have deterred me from this particular flight because my memory of KLM on previous trips to Europe is mainly that they have uncomfortable seats). But here all the many, many check-in and luggage desks rotate their marquees between KLM, Delta, Airfrance, and Vrigin. Clearly, no problem. The Delta app just sucks.

Around 6.15, I come to a decision point: the shorter, slower "Check In" line or the longer, faster "Baggage Check" line. Because of my inability to generate a valid boarding pass from the Delta app, I decide that "Check In" is the right answer. I'm up to the desk by 6.30 and I'm efficiently given my boarding passes and my luggage is sent off. And the clerk tells me that I have "Sky Priority" coverage, presumably because of my Comfort+ seat (which was really a pretty minor cost increase) and I could have used the SkyPriority red-marked desks. Which I suppose would have saved me some time, but no biggie. And she tells me I can use the "Sky Priority" security stairway which is really much faster. She emphasizes this.

I hate-hate-hate this ability to pay for speed in a foundational human-rights situation such as transportation, but I'm hypocritical enough that I'm going to take advantage of it because the reports of the security lines at Schiphol have been stressing me out for days. I walk back quite a ways, spot the red "Sky Priority" desks, and then go up the secret Sky Priority stairway.

Seriously? After days of horror stories about Schiphol and security lines taking up to an hour yesterday, which was expected to be less busy than today, I'm through security in about 5 minutes. People have been posting their wait-times to our RWOT11 Signal group, and I decide it's best not to. *cough*.

Passport Control is more confusing mainly because it's automated. And confusingly they both say that American passports can be used at the automated machines and that only e-passport-enabled passports can be used. Do they really mean that all American passports are e-passports? I shrug and decide to give it a shot, because I know I'm also registered for my Global Priority card, which definitely has that e-passport symbol. But, I almost turn tail and flee back to manual passport control when I see that you enter a little stall to enter your e-passport and then a gate CLOSES BEHIND YOU. I envision being stuck there forever if I don't have the right e-passport credentials. My passport and my face-scan work fine (sans mask, of course, but at least you're not elbow to elbow with other people, as was the case when they required a face-scan to board at SFO). I'm excited that I'm going to get to stamp my own passport, but then I'm waved forward to a woman whose sole job is to stamp the passport.

Darn it.

And then it's just a long walk to my gate. As I pass by the Rijks Museum at Schiphol I suddenly remember seeing it before, when I passed back and forth through Schiphol on my way to Prague in 2019. From there everything looks familiar.

--

Hour 2 (7am hour, CET). My gate is mostly empty. I have to guess everyone else is still struggling through security. There are maybe a dozen people in a _very large_ gate area. Unfortunately one of them is a loud, nasal American speaking _very_ loudly into his phone. He's talking about his family, which he clearly hates, and how he'd like to take them outside and beat the s*** out of them because he expects more from family. Apparently that expectation includes physical violence. The whole gate is hearing every word of his melodrama. No wonder everyone hates Americans.

-

7.30AM, CET. Loud American is still talking. He's amazed that musicians can write music that speaks to him personally even though they've never met him.

I watch the sun come up. It still won't have set when I land in Kauai (hopefully) 24 hours from now. Weird.

As the sun rise, lighting the airfield, I see that our plane, where Delta couldn't deal with seats or luggage because it was KLM's flight, is clearly labeled Delta. Hopefully that means the seats aren't as bad as KLM's.

I go in search of somewhere to refill my water bottle.

--

Hour 3 (8am hour, CET). Back with water (painstakingly scooped up from a water fountain using my water bottle cap, one capful at a time), plus a cold bacon and egg sandwich. (I was excited to see a Starbuck's, but then they had no bagels. Blasphemy! So bacon and egg it was.) It's likely to be the first of 6 or 7 meals today. I'll have to make sure to leave room for the Taco Bell at the end.

Loud American is talking about when he was _technically_ still married. He emphasizes that word.

--

Hour 4 (9am hour, CET). They push a cart around the gate area to scan everyone's passport info and correlate it with the boarding passes. Seriously? This is so strangely alien that I worry for a second that it's an identity-theft scam. But everyone is handing their passports over to woman-with-a-cart.

Still, I don't see how this could possibly be efficient and how just a few cart-people randomly iterating around the gate area could catch everyone. Maybe they're just trying to catch as many people as they can who haven't previously had their passports scanned by Delta or KLM, whomever this is.

Loud American has finally shut up, though he was growing increasingly indistinct as the gate area filled up, creating a hubbub of humanity.

-

9.30AM, CET. We begin boarding and it's a chaotic mess. The problem is that KLM or Delta, whoever it is, classifies its customers by a bunch of different names. I'm Sky Priority or Comfort+, for example. But then they board by zone numbers which aren't printed on the actual boarding passes! My zone turns out to be 4, but the ticket just says COMF. You can figure out what they're _actually_ boarding by reading a little iPad screen being held up by one of the staff members. So everyone has to push forward and jam up the boarding area to do so.

--

Hour 5 (10am hour, CET). I'm on board in the 4-in-a-row middle just behind the fake bulkhead protecting business-class. Sadly next to the aisle, which is a prime disease vector, but it was what I had available in the good seats. Also sadly without the under-seat space that Hawaiian offered in its fake-bulkhead seat. Across from me are a couple that I joked with out at the gate and seemed nice enough. (My measure later notches up a level when she pulls out _A Clash of Kings_ to read.)

We're carefully watching the seat between us, which is empty. It looks like the flight is mostly boarded, but then the pilot announces that there are 15 minutes of boarding left! We're as tense as cats in a room full of rockers.

Finally, the pilot announces they're closing the doors. We celebrate by piling pillows up on the extra seat.

--

Hour 6 (11am hour, CET). Meal #2. It's theoretically pesto chicken, but no pesto is detected. Instead it seems to be in some Ratatouille sauce. The chicken is quite good. Moist, with a bit of flavor. There are also some good cold vegetables.

For the drink service, Game-of-Thrones-woman asks for two white wines. The steward laughs. And she says, "No, I'm serious, I'd like two white wines because it'll be a while before you're back." He nods and passes the word on to the booze gal, who serves the liquor.

The booze gal shows up a few minutes later and laughs and says, "What would you like?" Game-of-Thromes-woman repeats that she'd like two white wines. Booze gal laughs even harder and says, "He told me that and I was sure it was a joke." Games-of-Thrones-woman assures her it is not, and she gets her two white wines. Booze gal also tells her that they'll be around with more drinks right after they finish the dinner service (and they are, even before they clear our meals).

During dinner, the masked couple across from me notes that one of their video screens won't come up. The flight attendant offers to let the unvideo-ed member of the couple, mask-woman, swap to the beloved empty seat between myself and Game-of-Thrones-woman, now filled with not just pillows but also one _Clash of Kings_, one MacBook, and one Galaxy Tab. I hold my breath for a moment, but mask-man says, "No, that's OK." Whew, they're probably preserving their health by staying off in their little two seats away from anyway else and don't want to make the jump to the four-seat-middle. Smart. But Game-of-Thrones-woman doesn't know how near we came to disaster.

--

Hour 7 (noon, CET). After being held hostage by the remnants of my meal for an hour, I'm finally freed up around noon. Which means I can get back to work. My most immediate goal is preparing my Designers & Dragons Patreon material for release tomorrow. (The goal of the Patreon isn't to fund the work, but rather to help ensure that it occurs, hence the monthly releases.)

So I'm back to editing "Grim & Perilous Studios", which I'd just barely started before the meal.

-

12.15pm, CET. At a quarter after noon they announce that people should lower the window shades so that others can sleep. It feels even more ridiculous than the early evening blackout on our way out, because it's just barely afternoon. But somehow, a few people are already starting to sleep.

I'm pretty sure I won't on this flight, which should land around 7.30pm Amsterdam time. The next one is anyone's question, but if I'm able to stay awake, that'll aid my transition back to HST. (Hoping to be able to: nap no more than an hour on the plane + take melatonin is usually a great formula for me, and worked once more on my trip out, other than my getting sleepy in the early evenings.)

--

Hour 8 (1pm, CET). The downside of having a center seat up against a fake bulkhead is that some jerks treat it like it's an aisle. It's just been a couple of overprivileged Americans so far, but c'mon folks. Hello, this is our row of seats on an _airplane_. Were you raised in a barn (with a bulkhead)?

To my left, mask-man has fallen asleep with his video screen paused on _Before Sunrise_, with the two main characters still blissfully wrapped in each others' arms, just a few minutes before the credits. Don't hit the play button, mask-man! Let them stay in the second of togetherness before sunrise forever.

--

Hour 9 (2pm, CET). There's a child sobbing and sobbing in First Class. I'm surprised Karen hasn't complained. Meanwhile, the rest of the plane is blissfully protected from the faraway distress.

I've put maybe an hour and a half into editing this month's Designers & Dragons work. Grim & Perilous Studios has comments incorporated from one of the principals, plus a full edit, and I've also written a commentary on it. Meanwhile, I'm about a quarter of a way into an edit on the chapter of the TSR Codex about the BECMI Companion Rules and adventures. When that's done, that'll be the end of the stuff I have to have ready for posting tomorrow.

I nap for about half an hour, constantly interrupted by my head tipping over.

I wake up to see mask-man watching the end of the Before Sunrise. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy head off in trains for different destination. His wife, mask-woman, was the one with the broken video arm, so he now trades seats with her so that she can watch it too. Awwwwww.

--

Hour 10 (3pm, CET). The long dark night of the plane continues. (Not actually night.)

After some time spent reading the various things I've collected on my Galaxy for the trip, and of course that little nap, it's back to work finishing up my edit of the D&D Companion series histories.

But no sooner do I set back to work than the attendants are back handing out packaged stroopwaffles. It's tasty, but almost nothing like the fresh one I had yesterday. I've always been amused by the constant flow of drinks and food on longer flights as a tool to keep the inmates from rioting.

--

Hour 11 (4pm, CET). It took me hours, but I've finally finished my edit of the 14,000 word Companion Rules section for the third TSR Codex. Plane hours aren't real hours.

On the screen next to me, Julie and Ethan are once more heading their separate ways.

--

Hour 12 (5pm, CET). Still pseudo-dark in the plane. Which surprises me, because it's 8am at our destination. I'd think they'd be bringing us into morning soon.

Not that there's been much sleeping by anyone that I've seen. With a few exceptions it's just been an excuse to watch movies with high contrast.

I'd swear Men in Black has been going on for hours in front of me. Next to me, more people are kissing goodbye.

--

Hour 13 (6pm, CET). 6pm and all's well? We have definitely entered the long limbo of trips from Europe to the West Coast. I'm now working on another Designers & Dragons project: adding recent material to my "Chromatic Appendix", which collects together material from my online column at RPGnet. It's fortunately mainly methodical formatting of texts and pictures because my eyes are starting to glaze from the long time in a pressurized cabin, sitting motionless in a chair.

At 6.45, the lights finally sputter back up with a bright surge of orange. The coloring was doubtless meant to allow for a more gradual (and natural) awakening, but the quick surge up likely foiled that.

--

Hour 14 (7pm, CET). For the first time on the trip, the attendants draw the (mesh) curtains on first class, I expect to hide the serving of a tasty breakfast. They actually haven't been doing a good job of keeping the animals from rioting in the rest of the plane, with just that (distant) lunch and a mini-stroopwaffle for our troubles so far.

A while later, business and comfort+ is served. I got a soggy spring roll that's too spicy.

--

Hour 15 (8pm, CET). We are finally descending into Seattle, my layover!

We land about half past the hour, then have to wait until a plane clears our gate. Apparently Seattle should have a rule about not arriving early, like Schiphol does.

--

Hour 16 (noon, PDT).

My first experience of Seattle Airport is that none of their Global Entry machines work. I shrug my shoulders and wander down to collect my baggage. I have plenty of time.

After getting said luggage, Passport Control is pretty quick, but the officer I get is one of the aggressive jerks who was probably denied entrance to the police for that reason. He seems sure that he's going to catch people in a lie as he presses hard and almost angrily at people like me who've been in transit for at least half a day.

What was I doing? Was it work? What was my conference about? What did I do?

Seems to me like a lot of that is none of his f***ing business since I'm a US citizen. But like everyone else I meekly (and groggily) answer the questions until he lets me reenter my country.

I'm very pleased to see that the place where I redrop my luggage is also labeled Delta so that I have some faith that my luggage will make it to Hawaii. (Spoiler: it does.)

When I get out past the TSA booth on the other side of Passport Control I unfortunately can't find my flight listed. And I'm a little concerned that there's a Maui flight by Delta right when my Lihue flight should be. I look up my flight in the Delta app, which thankfully works this time, and it directs me to a gate which turns out to be right. I discover the problem when I get to the gate: the flight's destination is not listed as "Lihue", but "Kauai — Lihue". Thanks, Delta.

As I walk Seattle, I'm amazed how much less pleasant it is than Schiphol. Well, then the backside of Schiphol, as the insane frontend which I mostly avoided was clearly horrible.

But it's so much more crowded and everyone's all jammed into so much less space. I was really surprised how spread out the gate in Schiphol was. Here, that'd be at least two gates' space, maybe a little bit more.

Now I wait, as my flight doesn't board until a little bit after 3pm. (I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time for Customs and Passport Control, even with my Global Entry (ha!). So the four hour layover was no great sacrifice, though I would have been happy with 3. In all, it was about one hour gate to gate, maybe a little less.

Also, there's a TV blaring here, but no one's listening. That's America in a nutshell.

--

Hour 17 (1pm, PDT)

I didn't bother with internet while I was on the flight this time, as I found I made very little serious use of it on the flight out.

So since landing (at Seattle and at my gate) I've been chatting with Kimberly and with Chris. Nice to be back in touch with the world.

And now I'm thinking about getting a quick snack at the darn McDonalds right at our gate.

I don't want to spoil Taco bell in ... 9 hours ... but I also don't have to eat whatever mediocre food Delta serves on the next flight.

--

Hour 18 (2pm, PDT)

I wander the terminal for a while to stretch my legs after 10+ hours cramped in an airplane. Returning to my gate that previously read "Kauai — Lihue", I see it now reads "Detroit".

Yeah, don't want to go to Detroit.

Returning to the departures board I now know to look for Kauai and discover our departure gate has moved a quarter mile down the way.

More leg stretching.

--

Hour 19 (3pm, PDT)

Boarding for the next flight starts just after 3. It's much more organized than the Amsterdam boarding most of a day ago primarily because they actually use the right names for all the classes.

The first thing I notice when I board is that there are no bulkheads in the plane: I can see all the way to the back and the front.

The second thing I notice is the woman in the seat next to mine. She asks if her husband can swap seats with me so that they can sit together. I have a window seat; he has a window seat. No problem. Of course the young couple can sit together on their vacation to Hawaii.

The whole Comfort+ section is just two and a half rows and a lavatory right in front of the plane's main entrance, so it's not even a big change: from the right side of the plane to the left and back a row to just in front of the door.

--

Hour 20 (4pm, PDT)

No good deed goes unpunished.

This is one of the worst seats I've ever sat in in a plane.

Oh, I have leg room, though it's not as good as the bulkhead seats I had on my other long flights (let alone the business-class seat on the trip out to Amsterdam).

But the seat is deafening. I hope not literally so.

There's a loud metallic grinding sound the whole time we're taking off and that finally lets off after ten minutes or so but then there's the constant buffeting of the wind against the door. I'm used to planes being pretty quiet, and this is anything but.

It's as if there was a reason that bulkheads exist in the cabin.

Delta accommodates the loud noise in the cabin by blasting their announcements.

I feel like I'm riding on some super cut-rate airline who is cutting every corner they can. DELTA.

(If I'd kept my original seat I suspect I would have been a fair amount more sheltered from this sound.)

--

Hour 21 (5pm, PDT)

Somewhat used to the dull roar of the door. Not being able to hear most of the people in the plane has its advantages.

Still, it's like being on a BART train for 6 hours.

The turbulence starts hitting a bit after 5 and the captain turns on the Seatbelts light.

--

Hour 22 (6pm, PDT)

I've decided I can't work any more, which is a pity because I was close to finishing up that Chromatic Appendix for Designers & Dragons and some editing for Chris.

But I guess I've been up for 22 hours, minus that very brief nap.

I'm having troubles figuring out the hours any more, but I guess it must be 3am in Amsterdam. Wow, later than I realized.

--

Hour 23 (7pm, PDT)

For an hour or more now there have been people constantly hovering behind our seats. That's because we're across the aisle from the bathroom. Surely not the only bathroom on the flight. There must be one or two way in the back. But there are obviously too few based on the constant queueing.

More Delta cost cutting. A pity, I thought they were fine on that international trip, but for this Hawaii trip I feel like I'm flying Spirit.

At least they're not charging for the lavatory.

On the other hand, the only food has been some snacks and a scam cart (of paid sandwiches). I guess I've gotten "spoiled" on Hawaiian and international flights. Other airlines apparently don't realize that a six-hour flight is long. Good thing I had that McDonalds in Seattle, even if the grease did turn my stomach a bit at the time.

--

Hour 24 (8pm, PDT)

Yeah, this one long plane trip after another is pretty tough. Feel very out of sorts, but then I've been awake for more than 24 hours at this point. Will have to think about best options for next time I'm out on the other side of the Atlantic.

At 8.15 I slide into another nap but am woken almost immediately by Delta bothering us about the Hawaii agriculture forms.

My seatmates mightily struggle with the trick question of where you're staying in Hawaii, which I remember being equally befuddled by on our first few stays here. It's just the type of thing that's often not in your carryon (or nowadays, dependent on having a cell signal to look it up on the internet).

Well, at least that all distracts me for 10 or 15 minutes and soon we've just got an hour left(!!).

--

Hour 25 (9pm, PDT)

I finally get Steam to run despite not having an internet connection and am able to play some games to wile away the last hour.

--

Hour 26 (7pm, HST)

We land! (The sun is actually setting just as we land.) My dad has to fight through a mob of cars like I've never seen before at the Lihue airport to pick me up, but once he succeeds it's open roads all the way home, yes with a pickup at Taco bell.

--

Hour 27 (8pm)

And finally, about 28 hours after waking up, I make it home. Whew!

The orangies are quite skittish, but I suppose they've never had someone disappear and come back two weeks later.

Be ready, kids, we're planning to both head out for a week next month! (But we won't be 28 hours away)

I had to look up my past entries to figure out what day of the trip it was. It's my 8th day in Holland (but the 10th day of my trip since I layed-over in San Jose after the first 6 hours of air flight). It's increasingly a blur since it's been constantly busy days without any of my usual week markers.

Anyway, we finished RWOT today! Yay! Three years later, we finally held a new event. My group finished perhaps 80% of its paper draft. Today, we split up the writing of four more identity-focused threats among our four team members and each went at it using the model of the threat we wrote together yesterday. It worked out to be a pretty good process, as I thought it would be. Some of us finished, some not quite, and we still need a conclusion, but I'm pretty sure we'll be able to work it out. (We roughed out what still needs to be done, and Kate, who came up with the idea originally, will be leading on that in the coming weeks.)

Today was also the day when I make the rounds to figure out what everyone's paper is and how to contact them after the event, since I'm the editor-in-chief who gets everything finalized from here on out. We have 15 pieces I believe. Based on the last two events, we'll have 7-8 complete. But this year felt like things had progressed more than usual and that we'll have a higher percentage as a result. (I always think we'll have a higher percentage based on peoples' feeling on the last day, but I swear it's different this time, in large part because we _finally_ managed to get people to work in smaller groups, and I think that meant more progress.)

(Today was probably also my day of greatest potential COVID exposure, because almost 4 days after the poster session, we're spot-on at the average incubation period of the current strains of COVID. Meanwhile, when I met people in their personal writing groups, most of them were unmasked, though I was not.)

We did some final group discussions about RWOT after pencils-down at noon, including plans for the future. It looks (fingers crossed) like we're back on schedule for semiyearly workshops, which was always a part of my own plans after we moved to Hawaii, to help give some balance to our more rural urban life, so yay. (And yay to see this design workshop, which offers people creative and progressive work in the identity space unlike anything we know, is going again, irrespective of how it impacts me personally!)

If you wonder what I've been going on about, here's links to the rough, unfinished drafts of papers, as they exist today:
https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot11-the-hague/blob/master/draft-documents/README.md

Neither Chris nor I felt comfortable going to a final dinner tonight, because of COVID concerns. We'll have to see how we can change that in the future, because COVID isn't going away. Perhaps after the bivalent shot?

But we had a good little dinner together at a vegetarian burger place that was quite tasty. Nice to be able to spend time with him while here, as we're now an ocean away.

And so RWOT11 is over!

I have tomorrow scheduled for a fun day, my reward for working through the workshop. Kinda wish I was going home, as it's been a long while away. I'm wanting to see my cats, my Kimberly, and my Taco Bell. But I don't know that I'll be in the Netherlands again, so I'll enjoy that and then head to the airport (too) early on Sunday.

It's been four weeks now since we lost Callisto. I'm still feeling it. It's going to take a while to get over because she was so relatively young, because we had to decide that we'd done all that we could in a situation where it wasn't just old age. It was tough.

My Blockchain Commons work has been good, because I have problems and needs set in front of me and I have an 8-hour period to work on them when I'm aware that someone else is paying for the time. But I've been dragging on all my personal writing. It's been hard to maintain the interest. So, it's crawling along, so, so, so much slower than it should. And I often feel like I'm dragging in the evenings. Mindless playing Railroad Ink Challenge on the computer, not really willing do much more engagement with something like reading.

---

After Callisto's passing I had the only moment I've ever had when I wondered what we were doing out here in Hawaii. It was momentary, just a day's thought, but the void in our house was just so obvious. Callisto was a big cat, both in size and personality. And though we have my dad and Mary, there were no other local friends to fill that void, and so it was just there.

I've moved on, from that at least. But the need to make friends is that much more obvious to me. It's the pandemic, the *)(#$@# pandemic. I *was* starting to make new friends at 8 Moves Ahead in the month that I went there before the pandemic, but I haven't been willing to go out gaming since.

We thought we were ready to start opening our lives more this summer, then Delta hit. That was the plan again after this Christmas visit, but now we have Omnicron.

But, maybe I can visit the new game store, Crow's Nest, sometime in January. Maybe I can put out the word and see if anyone is willing to get together specifically for eurogames.

---

And Lucy has been very weird since Callisto's passing. Very loud weird. She's constantly talking. Sometimes yowling in other rooms. Always begging for her food. Sometimes standing on one of us and mewwing right in our face.

Except for the day we brought her home, when she mewwed in her cardboard cat carrier the whole mile or so home from Your Basic Bird, where we adopted her, she's been mostly silent (other than the purring). But since, not so much.

I think she's gotten a little quieter in the last week or so. Maybe she's getting used to the new normal.

But I feel so bad that we're leaving her for Christmas. We left her alone once before, in 2013 after Cobweb and Munchkin had passed, and when we got home she let out the longest mew I'd ever heard, just a constant, monotone mew. We assumed she'd been very lonely (though she had a daily visiter, something that we instituted after Munchkin locked herself in the Junk Room on a previous Hawaii visit). I hope she accepts my dad's luvs when we're gone this time.

---

We had a loss that should be much bigger a few days ago. My Uncle Bob passed. COVID. If he was unvaccinated, that's even a greater tragedy.

I feel it, it's certainly adding to my malaise. When I talked to my dad today I could tell he was shaken, because they'd just talked two weeks ago. But my Uncle Bob was a distant, gruff presence to me. I remember the pride with which he showed off his naked furniture store (long gone), I remember the amused and tolerant love he always expressed for his kids. I know those kids, my cousins, probably now all in their 40s, are grieving big-time. I am grieving too, but it's distant.

---

Good stuff?

We had a nice Christmas at my dad's house this last Sunday. We had delicious ham and crescent rolls and I don't even remember what else in large part because Thanksgiving and our Hawaii Christmas just totally blurred together this year.

Afterward, we played Tichu, which I'd finally found in a box after a year or so of looking. It smelled musty which made me unhappy, because generally things have been storing well in their boxes, and now I'm worried that things might be getting ruined.

But that's a problem for not today.

---

And my dad and I did a little work on the house, something that hadn't happened since long ago (since they went to California themselves at the end of October).

We fixed a light switch in our bathroom which had stopped working. (Apparently, just a flaky switch that we needed to swap; easy, I could do that!)

We finished making the transition into my office. (Looks great! I'm happy every time I see it. And, I'm aware that I still have to floor the closet and we have more transitions to do under the door, but that's a problem that's definitely in the future, because it's not a critical path for anything else.)

We started in on the tiles in the family room. (This is pretty much the last problem on my list of things to resolve before we get shelving in. The problem is that something got done wrong when they were installed, so there are at least 7 or 8 tiles which peeled up from the floor and are various degrees of warped. But my dad chiseled the grout off of one of the tiles and pulled it up and then got the adhesive under the tile off. We've now got it reset on cardboard. (That's temporary!) I could do that too! So we need to do that work with 6 or 7 more tiles, then seal the ground with something waterproof, in case the issue was water coming up or across, then re-adhere them, then put grout in around them. And then at last the shelving work can begin.)

---

I'm hoping this trip can be a Great Reset for us. That we can come back to Hawaii and have left some of the badness of this fall behind, that we can get out and make friends a little more, that we can at last move on getting the last elements into our house to make it really usable (shelves, retaining wall).

Hoping.

(But I definitely wanted to write this journal now, before we left, so I can do my best to put it all behind me. Our flight is in just less than 12 hours.)

For many years now it has been my tradition to take off from work between Christmas and New Year's. I think maybe it started at Chaosium? I'm not sure, but as of this afternoon I'm officially on holiday.

And my what a varied work year it's been.

---

I was still working at Skotos when I moved to Hawaii. And, I took a little extra holiday vacation, not working for the Thursday and Friday after our arrival. But I know the Thursday was spent getting furniture for our house, and then there were many evenings spent building.

But after that few days, it was back to Skotos. I was supposed to work there through March. I kept going until May. That was because the new authentication server was not ready, and so we couldn't split out the games, and so I spent an extra two months of my time to make sure we could divest ourselves of them correctly, which seemed the right thing to do after twenty years of me supporting them and them supporting me.

And even that wasn't quite the end of Skotos work. I've given Chris a day a month ever since, the last of which was this Wednesday. But I've told him that's it.

And Skotos is mostly shutdown. We need to do a tiny bit of work to turn off our last machines, and I left Chris with some lists of lawyers and accountants to talk to, but after a year's work, and to various extents nine months more than was intended, I think I've mostly put that behind me. It's a big page turning.

---

My other major professional work for the year was Blockchain Commons. That was mixed in with my Skotos work for the first two or three months, and then I had to fully step away to get Skotos closed. Since them it's gotten two days a week (except when Skotos needed a day).

Blockchain Commons is in some ways delightful work. I enjoy the blockchain and Bitcoin technology: its intricacies, its foundational tech, and its premise of self-sovereign independence online. When I combine that with a strong project, an extended development that takes full advantage of both my technical and writing expertise, that's excellent.

The best project of the year was our 2.0 version of Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line. Chris and I did a v0.8 or so while working at Blockstream, but it fizzled out when we left that company, so it was delightful to not just finish it, but also expand it for a few years of new development. I'm very happy with the result, with is pretty much a text book on Bitcoin Core. And we know it's been influential, as we're aware of several engineers who got into Bitcoin through it.

Blockchain Commons has also included some less fulfilling work, including editorial work on other peoples' writing, shorter pieces, and fund-raising work. I'm happy to do it because I believe in the company (and because I'm getting paid a proper expert technical writing rate), but I'm always happier when I'm working on a meaty project that makes best use of my expertise.

I finished up my Blockchain Commons work for the year on Tuesday. My last work was some editorial support for Gordian Cosigner, one of the many, impressive pieces of software developed over the last few years. (It allows protected signing of multi-sigs on the Bitcoin network.)

---

I theoretically have two other clients.

One is Rebooting the Web of Trust, and I did some work on some dangling papers at the start of the year, but meanwhile our Buenos Aires and Hague workshops got canceled due to COVID. There's talk of virtual get-togethers, which is totally not what interests me about RWOT, but I can deal with one virtual workshop if it's what we need to leverage ourselves back into real meetings, hopefully next Fall. We'll see what 2021 brings.

The other is Bitmark, another blockchain company, who I gave somewhere in the range of 5-10 days of work over the course of the year. Not a lot, but they get darned good output from me because I usually think about their work, then hit the ground running when I'm writing for them. I did get one pretty meaty project from them, which was a manual for an upcoming app that I finished a few weeks ago. I'm hoping we're going to be developing some nice articles related to it early next year.

---

I'm still doing 5 days of week. Two days go to Blockchain Commons (and were sometimes co-opted by Skotos), some undefined (PRN) amount of time goes to RWOT and Bitmark. The rest goes to my personal projects. That was about half of my worktime from June onward.

In that time I researched and wrote somewhere over half a book of Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories. It comes in at 73.5k words, though the very last 5k or so words are out for editorial review. (That's what I finished today when I maybe ended my personal work for the year.) I'm thumbnailing the Designers & Dragons books at 120k words, so that's about 60% of a book. I've also got 15.5k words for Designers & Dragons: The '10s. I'm hoping to have two Lost Histories and one '10s book ready for a publisher (hopefully Evil Hat) in 2022, so that seems on schedule.

I also prepared a whole book on The TSR Codex. This is not exactly fresh work like the new Designers & Dragons volumes, but it's heavy editorial and revising, in some cases requiring almost total rewrites. (It's material I originally wrote for DnDclassics, and depending on its pedigree, it's either 80% of the way to the style I've developed for the books, for newer stuff, or as little as 20% or so, for the older stuff.) I'm also 1/6th of the way into a second book. I'd hoped to have the two books about the '70s and '80s ready for a publisher in 2021, and you might that I'm well on the way to that since I have 7/6th of a book, but the truth is that I've determined those first two books are actually four, so that personal deadline is blown. 2023? We'll see.

I've got lots of other stuff I'm playing with. I've got an old Michael Moorcock book that I'm making progress on again by editing my old material and reading to generate new material. I'm talking with Chaosium about an elf book, to replace (but not exactly reuse) the one I wrote for Issaries just before they went out of business. I've also been talking with Christopher about continuing our comics. Finally, I've produced a few new case studies for Meeples Together. Not enough: my support there has been erratic. Maybe I need to drop them back from semi-monthly to monthly, and see if I can meet that schedule.

---

It was easy to stop work for the end of year when I was working for Skotos. It's a little harder now that I'm working for myself. But, Chris and Bitmark both were good about respecting my rejuvenative time.

So will I work on my own projects? Yes, some, but not a lot.

I'm definitely swearing off going to my office every weekday for the next week.

I just finished my next Lost History (BTRC), so that can sit for a week.

But I definitely have a year-end history that I need to get ready in the next week or so.

And when I go out hiking, hopefully multiple times in the next week, I do like to bring my computer along, and I'll probably inevitably do some writing. Because I love writing out in nature. Probably on the third chapter of TSR Codex II, because I didn't finish it this month, so it's a loose end.

---

But this week I also plan to relax. I haven't read enough this year. It'd be nice to do some of that. I bought myself the Galaxy Trucker game on Steam, and I've been enjoying its campaign. And as I said, hiking, and swimming.

I used to sometimes think it was a shame that I took a week off during the coldest, most miserable time of the year. Now, that's no longer an issue. Unless it rains a lot. (But it's not looking bad.)

The Christmas holiday started off challenging.

I'd set out all our garbage on Monday night, including three bags of extra junk in extra-special Berkeley bags, because our pickup is Tuesday morning.

Well, Tuesday morning I looked out the window around 9am and saw that all of our garbage bags had been shredded and the contents strewn across our lawn; a homeless looking guy was sauntering off toward People's Park.

While I was getting ready to go out there and deal with the disaster, I saw that said homeless guy was back on our lawn, crouched over with his pants down and peeing. I later learned that he'd pooped all over too.

And that's about when our landscaper showed up, to start work on making our house look better.

And about when I started work making our house look better by cleaning up all the trash. I had to use two more of our precious Berkeley-approved (and ~$6 bags) to replace the two of the ones destroyed by our insane vagrant, and then managed to tape up a third, since I was out of extra bags.

Fortunately, the landscaper had a shovel and bags for the poop.

Yes, it was absolutely disgusting, and absolutely why it's a problem to have homeless people illegally camped all over Berkeley. Because our out-of-touch, blind city council is actively inviting large numbers of them to the city by not enforcing any quality-of-life laws, and unfortunately a notable percentage of the homeless are mentally ill, addicted, or both. And so they tear up peoples' garbage, spread it all, and then poop and pee like it's going out of style. (Or knife each other or sexually assault girls or even occasionally murder someone; the UC police are out at Peoples' Park multiple times every single day.)

I've said before that yes we should help people at a rate that our city can sustain and a little bit more. But this was really the last straw. I'm tired of it. We can't live like this and call it civilization. But we're leaving, so Berkeley can weep what it sows. And I think they're going to be doing that for a long time.

---

About three hours later, Bob showed up to pick us up. We've gotten rides all the way from Berkeley to San Martin (and back) the last few years, through Kimberly's foot and now stomach problems, and it's been very kind of everyone: Bob, Rob, and Jason at various times. And of course that gave us extra time to talk as well, which we did both there (and later) back.

The holiday was largely like others we've had down there: a shrimp dinner on Christmas Eve, a nice breakfast on Christmas Day, an excess of presents, a traditional ham dinner for Christmas (with traditional tamales from Lisa), and board games throughout (this time Dragon Castle and Sheriff of Nottingham, both games gifted last year, both courtesy of Rob, who I tapped to bring games, since mine are all at the Port of Oakland; Bob mentioned on the way down to San Martin that maybe we should ask Rob for games, and I told him I'd already taken care of it, because that was certain not something I was going to omit).

But the thing was, of course, this was the last one, and we all knew it. Kimberly and I will be in Hawaii next year, and we'll be reluctant to come back for Christmas because tickets will be expensive, and it'll be cold in the Bay Area; and meanwhile our nephew Julian will be two, and increasingly at the point where my sister-in-law Lisa will want to be making their home a Christmas center. But Kimberly and I both expressed that we enjoy Christmas with the Wiedlins so much that maybe we'll come back at Christmas some times ... but very likely not in 2020.

And, as I said, there were gifts. I got a light, breathable raincoat, thankfully replacing one that was getting increasingly ratty, and a few pairs of good-looking shorts, and of course my stocking stuffers. And I think everything else is waiting for us in Hawaii. My siblings told me about what sounds like an excess of books and games, which is exciting, though of course I'm still waiting to discover whether I can play my new games out there. Hopefully!

Somehow the day and a half just flew by, and before we knew it, we were heading back to Berkeley with Bob.

I often regret not staying longer, but Kimberly certainly stayed as long as she could, because she was exhausted and hurting and having seizures by the time she got home. Yowtch.

---

If Christmas Eve was challenging before we got out of Berkeley, the Day after Christmas has been, after we got back.

I woke up, showered, and immediately set to making the five phone calls I had scheduled: California-side health insurance (cancelled!); AT&T phone line for Skotos (cancelled!), Comcast (cancelled! though being the immoral scumbags that they are, they were the ones to try and make it hard); new internet in Hawaii (scheduled!), and Intuit (business address changed for Skotos!).

I was most of the way done with those when I had to run the cats to the vet. I hated having to stuff them into the soft carriers that we'll be using on the plane (because they're small, and because I didn't want to create bad memories of these carriers before the plane day), but as we'd planned, that's all we had in the house at this point. (It's not like the accidental times when we discovered we should have left something behind, such as when I tried to make Chili for Kimberly and discovered we had no can opener!). The object here was to get them health certificates and get them their flea treatment. And that was hopefully the last bureaucratic hurdle to get them to their new home of Kauai (though I need to touch bases with Alaska Airlines and with the Humane Society in Kauai before we leave to make sure that our t's remain dotted and our i's remain crossed).

And then after lunch I ran around to the five places on my schedule in Berkeley today: UPS Store (Comcast cable-card returned!), bank (Christmas checks deposited! thank you!), Goodwill (a cartful of stuff dropped off! along with the cart!), USPS (a few priority mail boxes picked up! in case we want to mail anything to Kauai!), and the library (books dropped off! though I still have five out! one of which is a novel that I really need to finish in the next four days, and am not sure I will! and more importantly, more garbage backs picked up! to be ripped up by the dangerous vagrants that our city council invites to our city!)

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And meanwhile, our heat is out. Again.

Apparently the gas line supplying seven or so houses on our side of the road has mysteriously filled with water. I suspect the cuplrit is the EBMUD work that was going on right about where PG&E started to deal with the problem. We learned about the problem this morning, and 14 hours later, they're still working on it.

So for the second time in the December of our last year in California we've had a night without heat. Sigh. Our cats are cold, as are we.

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Tonight was also our last Thursday night game. We got started a little early with Concordia (which most of the folks hadn't played yet), then continued with Wingspan (which we played and enjoyed last week). Two great games, both best-of-class or near so (though I continue to think that Wingspan over values its eggs, and would have a much better endgame is they scored half as much).

It was a great night, and the end of 18 or 19 years of gaming here on Thursday nights. Hopefully the folks will keep it going.

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And I've got quite a bit of gaming scheduled these last few days. Tomorrow a few of us are jumping back to Curse of the Crimson Throne.

(And I just have to make sure the gaming doesn't interfere with my finishing to clear out the house, though I continue to make good strides with trashing stuff and Kimberly is doing well with getting things given away on Freecycle.

(And we're sadly no longer leaving most stuff out for "free" out front, because it seems to have attracted the wrong sort of attention.)

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(And I'm hoping that I can keep the sickly ickies away while we're in California. A few folks were getting over colds down in San Martin, and the chill of our house this evening got Mike A. sniffling from a cold he'd thought he was over ... and doubtless the rest of Berkeley is sick too.)

We had one big birthday celebration left: Kimberly wanted to have a big party with her friends before we left the Bay Area. (She says it wasn't "big", though we filled our living room and dining room with something like 15+ people; I say it was.)

And any party must begin with ... cleaning. That's what I did most of Saturday afternoon. There were several cat's worth of fur to be removed from the floor and a I-don't-know-what worth of dust to be removed from surfaces in the dining room and living room and dishes to be put away and horizontal surfaces to be cleared and junk to be thrown away or recycled. I even cleared out my pile of games-to-be-maybe-played-but-probably-not from the dining room.

And then disaster struck! (I say not disaster, Kimberly says disaster.) Our friend Jay arrived at Safeway to pick up our party platters ... and they weren't there.

Mind you, this was not a big surprise to me. When Kimberly had ordered the platters, she'd used a beta online Safeway interface, which is a fancy work for "don't use this". It only halfway worked, and she had to call a central office to make sure everything was right. But now it turned out that the online ordering also isn't interfacing right with the stores. With our local store in particular. For some reason, they hate their deli department and refuse to staff it adequately. So when this deli gets in these online orders for party platters, their response is to ... silently ignore them. Which is what they did.

Now, part of that big not-surprise involved me scouting out the store the previous evening when I was picking up the week's groceries. I'd already spotted all the alternatives, the prepared fruit and veggie platters and such, in case Safeway failed to prepare the platters we ordered. So, when they did, I talked to Jay, told him precisely where the alternatives were, and sent him haring off after them. Meanwhile, the online ordering people talked to the store manager and were presumably NOT VERY HAPPY. The result? The store manager hunted down Jay hunting down the various smaller platters available in refrigerators and such and gave them all to him for free. Yay?

(This all neither endears me of the store, nor makes me hate it. It's our closest Safeway, and is much better than the northside one which started having 20-30 minute lines when I stopped going there several years ago, so I'll keep patronizing this store, even if their deli sucks.)

But when Jay showed up he felt like he didn't have enough munchies yet for the party, which was scheduled through dinner time. So I went out with him to find more. We stopped at a Middle Eastern "deli", which had four sad cellophane-wrapped bowls in their refrigerator, one of which was mostly rice, and then we decided to just go to Berkeley Bowl. We ended up getting bread, crackers, cheese, sushi, baklava, and probably a few other things. It ended up being more than we needed, especially with the pizza we also ordered, and especially with delicious foods that some of our friends brought, but at least the party wasn't underfed. (Three days later there's still a ton of stuff in the fridge.)

I was shocked to open the door when we got back and see our living room absolutely filled. Almost everyone had arrived while Jay and I were our hunting & gathering. There were some of my gaming friends and a variety of Kimberly's friends. My brothers showed up shortly after. Meanwhile, I set to work putting out food.

The party was a blur in a way that such things are. People came, chatted, and eventually went. I was meanwhile active almost the whole time. I got some of the gamers going on games, teaching Rumis and Kingdomino over the course of the evening. I made sure drink coolers stayed full. I stopped in and visited with Kimberly from time to time. At the end of the evening I finally got to actually sit down, first for a game of Romans Go Home and then to briefly join the Taboo game in the other room.

And that was the end of the party. Well, other than all the cleaning up. Actually, days later I haven't rearranged the dining room to have everything in the right place, but otherwise all the chairs, tables, and purr pads have returned to their proper place. There's a cat sleeping on one of the purr pads right now.

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That was really the end of our final Bay Area birthday celebrations but on Sunday, Kimberly and I each took some time to de-people-ify. She hung out at home, and I took the bus up the Lake Anza, enjoyed lunch there, then walked home through the hills. It was a great day to do so, because South Park Drive opens to cars on April 1st, which means that it may have been my last chance to really enjoy the mid-south side of the park. (The problem with that area when cars are driving South Park is not only that the picnic areas are crowded, but moreso that you have to walk some bits of the road because the paths don't all connect up right, and it doesn't have enough shoulder for that to be comfortable if cars are also driving.)