shannon_a

In April 2020 I started writing new Designers & Dragons articles for a project I called "The Lost Histories". Since the 2014 publication of Evil Hat's 4-volume Designers & Dragons, I'd collected notes for about half-a-dozen additional histories, but I just hadn't been able to find the time to write them—a problem that only accelerated in the latter half of the '10s, after Kimberly and I decided to move to Hawaii in 2020.

But in April 2020, our move was done, we'd mostly managed to furnish our Hawaiian house, and most importantly I was moving over to freelance work. About half of my time was allocated to technical writing for a variety of clients (Blockchain Commons, Bitmark, Rebooting the Web of Trust, Transparent Financial), to bring in the money, while the other half of my time went to my own freelance RPG writing, as part of a new company that I created, Designers & Dragons LLC.

I immediately had two priorities for my Designers & Dragons LLC work: putting together new company histories, starting with the ones that I already had notes for, and collecting the D&D product histories I'd written for DTRPG into publishable volumes.

It's been four years. In the interim I wrote a full history of the Traveller RPG, which has already been published as _This is Free Trader Beowulf_ (print book pending!). I also finalized the first four books of D&D product histories, which Evil Hat will be publishing as _Designers & Dragons Origins_ (and though they're still a ways from publication, I just sent back my revisions of the first set of editing for the first book on Monday).

As for the Designers & Dragons company history, there's been considerable work there too, though we're likely still years from publications.

At this point I've settled on three-and-a-half books worth of "new" content: two volumes of Lost Histories covering new companies for the 70s-00s and a book of 10s Histories. The Lost Histories books are now at 109k and 114k words and the 10s is at 117k words. My plan had been to close them out this summer, but that's now pushed into next year with the decision to expand the 10s from the 120k+ words typical for the series up to 180k or so (so that there are as many 10s histories as the original histories supplemented by the new Lost Histories for each of the other decades).

And, that won't even be the end, because we're also looking at updating the original 500k+ words of histories that we published in 2014, many of which are about companies that have continued publishing in the last decade. Which means it's probably a few years before the whole project is done, even though my original goal of producing new histories is coming to a close.

Which brings me to The Moon Files that The Kraken just announced. These are excerpts from Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, covering two new "company" histories that I wrote in 2020 or 2021, one for Reaching Moon Megacorp, the other (not announced yet) for Moon Design Publications. They tell the story of RuneQuest and the world of Glorantha in the 90s, 00s, and 10s, between its major publication by Avalon Hill and its return to Chaosium. How did the game and the world survive? Spoiler! It was because of one of the most amazing fandoms in existence, fans that are now officially in charge of the game at Chaosium itself.

My publisher Evil Hat has been super-cool in letting a few previews like this out. (There are also a few company updates over in BAYT AL AZIF for Cthulhu-related histories, which are previews of Designers & Dragons 3e, the update project I mentioned.) It's especially nice since we are a few years out from full publication.

So if you are interested in my history writing, in Glorantha, in RuneQuest, or if you want to support the Kraken convention in Germany, keep an update on Fabian Küchler's updates, as this book is going to print next week.

FREE TRADER BEOWULF. My first history book in a decade (where does the time go!?) came out today. This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller. It's 296 pages (110,000 words) detailing the history of that singular game system across four and a half decades. It was a joy to write, and I think it's my best book to date. Mongoose Publishing has the product page for the PDF and/or preorder of the hardcover: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/this-is-free-trader-beowulf. My original Designers & Dragons hardcover through Mongoose is pretty rare now, so don't miss out on this one!

I was sitting at the airport this morning, waiting for our plane which had already been delayed more than hour, trying to finalize my Designers & Dragons article on the release of This is Free Trader Beowulf, when I idly flipped to Lihue's departures page and saw *)(@#$@ that our flight had been cancelled. We were off to the races.

THE STORM BEFORE NO CALM. Last night we had a heck of a storm. It was just pouring, for hours. The poor orangies spent much of the evening hiding under the couches. Our mud room had an influx of water, which happened one other time during a really bad storm. (I think it has to do with the dryer vent, but I'm not sure as it's been pretty mysterious both times.) There was thunder and lightning! (Very, very frightening said the orangies.) I eventually buttoned up the house as tight as possible before bed. Wow. When I got up in the morning I almost felt like a disaster survivor, stumbling around in the curious calm.

BUT THE STORM EFFECTS REMAINED. We're going out to Oahu for just a day so that Kimberly can see a BTS-related movie that was just showing twice, once a few days ago and once tomorrow. I could see how fierce the storm had been as I drove into the airport. At one of the major crossroads, there was mud all over the road and a bit of flowing water; the "flooding" signs told the story of how it had all been underwater at some point in the night. Did I mention we apparently got a foot of rain over night? Yow!

THE TSA SOUP NAZI. During what would be our first fight through TSA, they were tremendously understaffed, with just a single person checking IDs and boarding passes. She seemed to be the TSA Soup Nazi. She was constantly yelling at people to move up to certain places as she tried to coordinate the Pre-TSA, disabled, and plebeian lines. And she wasted SO much time doing so, as she argued with just about everyone about getting to the precise right places so she didn't have to wait 1 second for them to step up when it was their turn.

She also was discriminating against the disabled people, which was particularly obvious to us because Kimberly currently uses a wheelchair at airports (though hopefully she's now on a path to improvement for her knee after a good meeting with a physiatrist on Wednesday). But the TSA Soup Nazi would pick several people from each of the pre-TSA and plebeian lanes before she took someone from the disabled entrance. I'd never seen anything like it.

Real LEO agencies sometimes try to test out people who should *NOT* be in law-enforcement/authority positions. Apparently, the TSA needs some work there, because Soup Nazi was a Bad Cop stereotype.

BLOOD, BLOOD EVERYWHERE. At the airport, the departures board was a sea of red. Every single flight was delayed by an hour or more. Yes, including ours. (I'd checked that our plane was on time before we left the house. Hawaiian helpfully emailed me about the delay sometime after we'd already fought through TSA.)

I skimmed through the other flights and discovered one incoming flight had been cancelled. It was about 15 or 20 minutes before our departure, so I was pretty suspicious about that because Hawaiian turns their airplanes right around for their interisland flights. But Hawaiian said ours was just delayed, so I just kept a careful eye on things ... and then sure enough our flight was cancelled as well.

GETTING BACK ON TRACK. We were nowhere near the gate, so I knew we weren't going to get any help from what's one typically overloaded gate agent. I also felt pretty good about being able to get through TSA through the combination of us currently being on the disabled list and having pre-TSA, so back out to the main desks we went. Where we found a line 100 people long or so. Sigh. So Kimberly and I got into line, and I started keeping a hold of her wheelchair with one hand and calling up Hawaiian with the other. We only had moved several feet by the time I got an agent on the phone.

The online agent was able to get us a flight at 2.30, which was about 3 hours after our original flight, about 2 hours after our delayed flight, which was good enough. Thankfully Kimberly's movie is tomorrow not today. So, just an annoyance

We decided we'd better get lunch, since Oahu was receding further and further into the afternoon. So instead of a tasty Oahu lunch we had McDonalds. Ah well.

BACK INTO THE HURLY BURLY. Somehow our new tickets got printed without Kimberly's wheelchair this time, so when we got back to the airport, we had to wait in the ticket line, only a dozen or so people long this time. Then it was back into security. Fortunately, Soup Nazi TSA seemed to be gone and their staffing had improved, so back into the airport it was.

Ah, security checks twice in a day. haven't done that since last time I reentered the United States from Europe.

NO MASK? NO MASK! Astoundingly, planes seem to be back to no-mask classic. Besides Kimberly and myself there seemed to be just one other person wearing a mask on the whole plane. Seriously? Costco has more mask wearing! (But Costco also likely has more residents and fewer tourists than the average interisland plane.)

BACK ON OAHU AGAIN. And we're back on Oahu again, safely ensconced in our room before we go out to eat some dim sum, pay the sunscreen tax (because you can't take sunscreen back and forth between the islands unless you check-in luggage) and otherwise enjoy our evening out.

In December 2012 I received a query from some of the folks at DTPRG about whether I'd be interested in writing product histories for a long series of classic D&D products to be released through DTRPG at a subsite called DnDClassics.com (later subsumed into DMsGuild.com). At the time I still had a little bit of work to go to finish up my drafts of the second edition of Designers & Dragons, to be released through Evil Hat, but it seemed like too good of it opportunity to pass up, so I cautiously entered into negotations.

DTRPG paid me a fair rate for the histories. Nothing to break the bank, but enough to make it worthwhile when combined with two other elements. First (and I hate to use this word) I knew it'd give me exposure as an RPG historian, and over the years I probably have gotten as many emails about the D&D products histories as I have for Designers & Dragons itself. Second I insisted that I maintain rights to the histories.

The latter point turned out to be the biggest stickler in the contract negotiations. The DTRPG folks were 100% reasonable, but they had valid concerns about being able to continue running the histories themselves (which I was totally OK with) and whether people might think they'd copied them in some far future where they also appeared in a book (which we covered with a credit for them in any future books). I suspect it was actually more negotiation than they wanted when they were also trying to desperately get a first batch of PDFs online, but they were great, and we finally came to an agreement.

And I started writing. At first Kevin Kulp was also writing histories for DTRPG, me for the earliest D&D products, him for the later ones. After a while (A year? Two? I'm not sure) he faded away, but I kept writing. It was actually a considerable amount of work. Even after the initial big batch I was researching and writing histories about 2-4 books every single week, in and out. But I had an incentive: I had the rights to everything I wrote.

(If there's a lesson in there about incentivizing workers by giving them a stake in the work, you should definitely take it; I would have ended my work, much as Kevin did, years earlier if not for that fact.)

So I continued on through 2017, and by then DTRPG had published somewhere over 90% of the possible products from the previous 43(!) years of D&D and their regular schedule fell off. They did publish bits and pieces afterward, and I would have loved to write histories for them, but without the weekly schedule of new content, we fell out of touch.

At some point I looked at what I'd written over the previous five years and it came out to almost a million words of D&D product histories, but I figured there was probably a lot of repetition as I talked about common elements of various books.

I was busy with plenty of other things, particularly an upcoming move to Hawaii as we entered 2019, but I did play around with a table of contents for putting those histories into print. After all, I'd retained the rights, and by now I was even getting queries as to whether they might even be collected into a book. I eventually laid out a table of contents outlining how to collect product histories on every D&D book from Chainmail to fourth edition into a series of four volumes. Apparently I thought a LOT of material was going to be repetitious, because four books were likely to have space for no more than half-million words, not a million. And I hadn't yet counted all the histories I *didn't* write for D&D 2e, 3e, and 4e, in the earlier days of the project.

In 2020, after our move, I reallocated my work schedule to allow for halftime work on more creative pursuits. My main goal was to write new Designers & Dragons histories, but pretty early on I also started playing with my D&D product histories, arranging them into chapters in actual books.

Well, pretty soon I figured out that four books were likely to cover a lot smaller scope of time than the entire run of D&D. But I also discovered that there were definitely possibilities in gathering content into full volumes. Some of the histories needed to be expanded, particularly the ones I'd written in the initial frantic leadup to the debut DnDClassics release. Everything needed to be regularized into a standard format. New interviews needed to be scoured for new tidbits. And there were missing histories that I needed to write (mostly focused on products DnDClassics hadn't gotten to in this early era).

But I completed a full second draft of a first volume in late 2020. Then additional volumes in 2021 and 2022. By that point I'd laid out a definite organization that would collect all of the product histories for OD&D, AD&D 1e, BD&D, and the later Mystara line into a set of four volumes. It covers 1974-1988 on the OD&D/AD&D side (that's the first two volumes) and 1977-1996 on the BD&D side (that's the second two volumes).

And as of today, I have the fourth and final volume of that set done in a second-draft form (or fourth-draft if you count the original product histories for DnDClassics).

That's a pretty major milestone for me and for my roleplaying histories.

We're not quite at the finish line yet. I have a number of comments I need to incorporate, plus I just sent out the last two books for more comments today. I also want to work my way through all the volumes for a third draft to make them as consistent as they can be.

And I'm also reading through some fanzines (Oerth Journal, Threshold) both to pick up any tidbits I might have missed in other places, and to offer more cross-referencing.

But my first four volumes of the TSR Codex (or Designers & Dragons Origins, or whatever we decide to call it, which will depend in part on the publisher, which is under negotiation right now) are FEATURE COMPLETE.

All the chapters are there, all the words are there. I just need to finalize them one more time.

I'm hoping these will be books #2-5 of mine that are out next year. As for book #1, well more on that in a few days, but I'm about a work day from actually sending that one off to the publisher.

(The pictures nearby just show the first page of contents for each book; comments on them have the rest of the contents for each book.)

PAINT, PAINT

Well, with the lanai paint from Home Depot on what I expect is a long delay, I decided to put a second coat of primer on the new boards on our lanai to protect them from the elements.

I actually had to dodge rain to do so, and then got a little shower after I'd done the first few feet, but that's exactly why I want them better protected.

It pleasantly didn't take too long because I had a wider brush than I'd used previously and it was easier to do them all together. With two coats of primer I'm hopeful that the new boards will now be fine *however* long it takes Home Depot to get in the base color we need. (Because I'd originally planned for maybe just two coats: one primer and one paint, though that'll ultimately depend on how the deck looks after one coat of paint.)

BUILD, BUILD

Also on my list today was putting in some more work on the problematic BoardGameTable shelves. Every time I work on them it's hard not to tally up the poor design (screw holes too big, so there's considerable play and it takes considerable effort to get them all lined up and often requires a rubber mallet after they move at the last minute as the screw tightens; sides are fragile due to poor design of the slots for linking shelves together, and so it's possible to break them with a rubber mallet, something I've done once so far; wood is too soft and so it's possible to keep tightening the screw right into the wood; slight variance on heights, so that shelves don't precisely line up). But I'm hoping they'll mainly fade away as the shelves are complete assembled and in use.

Kimberly is unfortunately feeling ill today, something possibly picked up at the pool where she's started water aerobics as PT again, so I was at the shelves on my own. But I still put together 3/5th of the third row. Another two sessions and it'll likely all be together but then I still have to fight with the horrible doors to get them something close to straight.

And then the great board game reshelving can begin, and maybe I can find some people to invite over to play.

WRITE, WRITE

Most of my writing is done on weekdays nowadays, now that I two to three workdays for my personal projects.

But, I also did a bit this weekend. Mainly because I had some bonus work to do.

As I wrote yesterday, I deconstructed chapter 5 of my fourth TSR book and used half of that to revise chapter 3. It made me happy to do some organizational work that I think is a definite improvement for seeing how everything hangs together, and I got it done just in time, because I had the old chapter 3 (and 4) queued up for preview on my Patreon tomorrow.

Then today I got all of my AtoZChallenge ready to go for RPGnet (which meant lots of formatting but I also did a very light edit through the whole thing as I went. That should (re)appear there in May and June. Total came out to 16,000 words, a pretty big additional bit of writing for last month. As usual, it gave me some great interaction with roleplaying folks and gave me some new points-of-view on roleplaying history, so it was well worthwhile.

Though everything is off to Rose at RPGnet, I also want to put together a PDF of the entire content for anyone interested, so I'm not quite done yet.

It has been a tiring almost-two-months since Kimberly's foot surgery in Oahu. She has needed lots of assistance, which I'm very happy to provide, and we're both hopeful that her work on her foot will leave her more able to walk than she has been in the last four years, but all of that water-fetching, cooler-filling, meal-preparing, and general support is still tiring.

And meanwhile, life on those islands goes on:

Doctors. A few weeks ago, Kimberly and I each got a letter from our doctor saying that she was ending her practice on the island ... as of that day. After three years on the island, she's moving back to the mainland to be closer to family. This is apparently a common occurrence on the island, with people saying that often have to change their PCP every few years, and I have to guess it was exacerbated by the pandemic, with there being at least a year where no responsible person was traveling back and forth to the mainland, except for emergencies. So Kimberly and I promptly made appointments to establish care with a new PCP at Wilcox. Her appointment is in late January, mine early February. (Lots of people over on Kauai FB seem very upset by that lag and don't seem to understand that first-time appointments like this are always very slow, both because they're longer and because they effectively ration new patients).

Solar. We lost our solar power a few weeks ago. The most frustrating thing is that no one told us. Our solar people are suppose to be monitoring our system, but they went 5 days without noticing that we were generating 0 power from our panels. I only noticed because there was a power outage in our area and so I popped into the app to see how our system was doing. (Turns out the blackout hadn't hit us, else we would have been down due to that lack of solar power.) When I contacted our solar company they pretty quickly declared our inverter was toast, which made me happy that I'd negotiated up to a 25-year warranty on it. But, island life and all, it'll be 10-15 business days before they have a replacement inverter for us, but at least we've gotten a tentative appointment scheduled, assuming it arrives on time: October 20th. So, we'll be paying Hawaiian electricity prices again for a while. (In fact, our September bill has come in, and was $45, including the very start of this problems; that's infinitely higher than our last three months of power, as we'd run positive all summer.)

Costco. Other things I learned recently: our mayor shops at Costco and likes the bacon-wrapped chicken. Small island.

Biking. Here's one other change since Kimberly's surgery: I've been taking my bike out a lot on my free Saturdays. Twice I've been to the Kapaa bike trail, in large part because Kimberly needed to get Nellie's brakes replaced, as they came out of the surgery toast (hopefully no foreshadowing there!!!). She thinks the docs may have dragged Nellie all around with the brakes on, but she'd also been rattling around in the back of Julie a lot in previous weeks. So there's a bike shop out by the Trail that said they could deal with Nellie, so I took her out there once to look at the scooter, and then a bit more than a month later to swap in new brakes, after their order finally showed up. (With that horrible global shipping situation, they told me 1-6 months, and said it'd only be quick if someone happened to have one of those brakes sitting around, and fortunately someone did.) Nellie's brakes still suck because the way the wheels are set up they just can't use good brakes like disc brakes or even calipers, but they now lock correctly, which they didn't after the Oahu surgery trip. One other bike tripe was to Mahaulepu. The dirt trails there are fun to ride. And a fourth was up to Kokee. I didn't like that ride as much because the road I took was rock-studded dirt that was dangerous and hard-going, though I did get further distance than I had previously riding, and got to see a new perspective of Waimea Canyon.

COVID. After our politicians decided they were just going to let COVID run wild on the islands, we had our worst outbreak ever, much of that in the last two months, and sacrificed another 100 people or so to allow tourism and the economy to continue. For a while, Kauai was actually the worst of the four main islands. It seems to have finally settled down, but boy have I learned how tourism rules these islands over the course of this pandemic, how it's raised up over the lives of the people here. But the bright side is those self-same people saw it too, so we are starting to see changes that could lead to better controls over tourism rather than just blind, constant increase.

Writing. My writing continues, though my schedule hasn't been great for the last two months. I'm on the verge of having finish about four books worth of content since the start of the pandemic. That fourth book will be my elf book for RQ, which has certainly taken a huge bite of my time since the start of the year. I was originally planning to have it done by the end of September, and then October, and at this point it looks like I might be content-complete by the end of the month, but still requiring a bit of editing. I'm thrilled that the book will hopefully be an official RQ release after running elf material down a few different paths over the last 20 years, but I'll also be thrilled to have my creative time back.

Cats. Still not sure the cats are 100%. Lucy has just had one of her strange incidents in the last month or so, but we need to get a weight check on her to see the next step. Meanwhile, Callisto hasn't been eating great in the last few weeks, so it might be time to get her back in to the vet. Sigh. (She's been eating well three nights in a row though, so making her tummy is finally settling, fingers crossed.)

And that's just some of what's going on at the moment ...

Life continues to be a fast flurry of activity.

Cats. We've thankfully not been to the vet for a week now. It took Callisto about two more days to be fully back to her old self, but now you couldn't even tell she ate a lizard (or whatever). She's wildly meowing for food, clumsily leaping into laps, and happily head butting hands. Lucy also hasn't repeated her really weird behavior, but it was always sporadic.

On the downside, I've been constantly administering meds to both the cats. For a while, each day has been antibiotics for Lucy in the morning, and antibiotics and prednisone for Lucy in the evening plus prednisone for Callisto. This has gotten very old. Callisto, at least, continues to be mostly fooled by the pill in the food trick, but Lucy got wise to that, so I've been pill-shooting her for about a week. She has a spectacular ability to spit the pill out even when it's way back in her throat. She and I are also totally over the liquid prednisone she was prescribed. For a while I could hide that in her food too, but these cats are wily, so now it's liquid syringe, and then she goes and hides. Bleh.

At least, Lucy's pilling is done of this morning, and Callisto is back to every-other-day, also as of today. Finally, Lucy is going back to the vet on Monday for a recheck, and we'll need to see if the prednisone is doing any good and if so we *have* to get it as compounded treats, like we had for Cobweb. Because the daily liquid application and the unhappy cat is killing me.

Doors. Because Kimberly has been recovering from her surgery, we haven't been over to my dad and Mary's house for Sunday gaming for the last two weeks, so those Sundays, my dad came over to help me with the spray painting of the doors for Kimberly's closet (the remaining two doors that is, we got the first two, which Kimberly and I had painstakingly painted up the first time he was over). We thought we had them done after last Sunday, but when I reviewed them in the light of day when they were dry, one not only still had streaks, and still had dust.

The dust has been a constant problem with these doors and the *)(@#$*)(#@ Rustoleum 2x paint we're using. My dad was able to diagnose it as something wrong with the nozzles, and so sometimes they spray dust instead of paint. Which requires much brushing off of the doors and sometimes sanding and starting over. So we thought all of our spraying was clean last time, but I found some of the darker dust on one of the doors.

My dad is *great* when he's working with me: he does some of the work and shows me how to do it and then has me do some of the work. So after working on those two Sundays, I feel confident about using his technique to put another coat on the remaining door. I just haven't had *time* to do so since Tuesday when I noticed the problem.

Why not? Well Wednesday was gaming (New Frontiers now on BGA!), and then the other two days had other commitments.

Oahu. Thursday was take-Kimberly-to-Oahu day. Or take her to the airport at least. So I got up early, took her to the airport, came home, worked a little bit, ate lunch, napped, worked a little bit, and then went and picked her up from the airport. I'm sure my day felt very short and hers felt very long.

She was over on Oahu for the follow-up with her doctor on the surgery. All good so far, but the ultimate test will be when she's able to try some walking, and that probably won't really be until after her follow-up appointment, in six weeks.

Water Heaters. Friday I got to help my dad at his house, which we hadn't done since before they had their trip out to California. (I too remember being places other than these islands!) It was a pretty small task, getting a water heater into place and then connecting it and wrapping it. But the getting it into place was tricky because it was about a hundred pounds and we had to get it into a not-quite-big-enough pan without crushing our fingers. Fortunately, he had two pallets and we had our ingenuity. So, we rolled it up on a pallet, and then up on the stand, and then up on a stacked pair of pallets and then from there could maneuver it down into the pan on the stand. Whew. My dad did the connecting, and then we were able to get the wrapping done.

Taxes. Meanwhile, the idiot-tax-demands continue, as Hawaii continues to try and hold us up for a large sum of money that's not theirs because we paid it to California. Last week I got two letters the same day, one from the hospital asking for the second time for a bill that's been paid and one from the Hawaii Tax idiots, saying that the third(!) amended return that I sent them wasn't valid because we hadn't signed the form. Which we had. I told Kimberly that the message for the day was that Hawaiian organizations were really crappy at bureaucracy.

As far as I could tell, the problem was that we'd done what our accountants advised us to, which was sign the new N-11 form that we'd sent in, but Hawaii was upset that the original N-15 which the N-11 replaced, was unsigned. It was a copy of the original form, not an official ammended form! Whatever. Our accountants said: just do what they want. So we gave them some electronic signatures. (This is the whole, replace not-full-year-residents with full-year-residents change that was required because their tax computers couldn't deal with us not being full-year residents last year, since we were only off by a third of a day or so.)

We'll see if that works, but meanwhile yesterday we received the newest missive from Hawaii and it was a threat: they let us know that they were going to start confiscating our federal refunds if we didn't send them their money. That's not theirs. Ugh. )(*@#ing Hawaii.

Biking. But in the beautiful Hawaii category: I had a nice bike ride up at the Kauai Path today and got some nice writing done.

Writing. I again chose some smaller topics this month, to again try to get my work (and my stress) back on track. It's working better this month than it did last month, with our constant trips to Oahu. I finished up the last big chunk of my intended history writing today out at the beach (with editing still needed). That means that if I want I can spend the rest of the month on the elf book for Chaosium (along with my tech writing, of course), and maybe get that close to done. I've already talked with the folks at Chaosium and got a month delay and the ability to go over in word count if I want. So, that's all looking pretty good. (I just have to resist the urge to write a second history for the month, as there's another that would go very well with the first. But If I finish the Elf Pack, I'll again have more time for everything else again.)

Lucy. So Tuesday Lucy was acting weirdly agitated and throwing up, then on Wednesday she was throwing up again and wandering around squatting in every box and on every piece of paper she could find as if she was trying to go to the bathroom. We talked to the vet on the emergency number at our local practice, and he seemed confident she'd be OK overnight, so he told us to bring her in at 8am the next morning.

We did. I was displeased when I got there to see they're still not letting humans into the vet office, which was understandable over a year ago when everyone was massively overreacting to COVID, to the point where almost every business on the island was closed down. Less so now. I was even more displeased when they whisked Lucy off and told us they'd call us at some indefinite time in the future because they were doing surgery all morning and then would squeeze her in between appointments in the afternoon. (Asked Kimberly: why didn't we just keep her until the afternoon?)

We chose this vet practice, I should note, because it's super close to our house, something we found very useful in a similar situation back in Berkeley. But, that closeness starts to become less relevant if we can't actually expect to see anyone anytime soon if we need to bring a cat in suddenly.

Anyway so we went home and I was very encouraged when the vet called me within an hour, apparently between surgeries, and told me that she was not constipated, which was definitely one of my concerns with the weird behavior the night before. But then he dropped a bomb shell: she'd lost a pound since we'd brought her in the previous year. Now Lucy is a petite cat. I assume this means she dropped from 5ish pounds to 4ish, but of course I don't know because I'm not in the office.

He suspected hyperthyroidism, which Kimberly and I looked up and matched a lot of Lucy's symptoms over the last year or more, including weight loss, agitation, increased appetite, and more. I could have told him this, but we of course weren't in the office, and by the time Kimberly and I looked it up, I wasn't on the phone with him any more. In any case, he asked for the OK to do blood tests, and I gave it.

A long day followed, and I wasn't super productive, because my cat was in jail at the vet. I actually haven't been super productive on my own projects all month due to various stressors. Eventually it got to the point where I was getting ready to call to see if they were going to give me back my cat before they closed, and the vet called.

All her blood tests came back normal. Normal thyroid levels. Normal kidney levels. Nothing to explain the loss of a pound.

Here's the part that really upset me.

The vet told me he was calling in a prescription for a constipation medicine. I puzzled over that for a bit and finally came up with the right question to ask: "Oh, so you did see some evidence of constipation?" Because he hadn't hours before. He said, "Well, you said you saw hard, dry stools." Which I never had. But this is the stupid phone game that we're playing when they're refusing to let us into the office with our cat. I explained no, that wasn't the case. I repeated my description of the previous evening. I told him if anything, the opposite was often the case (which as it happens is another symptom we saw that matched hyperthyroidism).

He thought over that and said, "Well maybe I shouldn't call that in then." (You think??) He then immediately bounced to his next idea, which was "Well maybe her colon is inflamed, so I'll prescribe her some prednisone." I said sure, because one of our beloved cats no longer with us, Cobweb, had that exact problem, and it presented as weight loss. So it seemed reasonable to me, but then after I'd hung up, I realized that the vet was just pulling things out of his ass. Yes, this totally could be right, but I'm sure not hearing any scientific process, other than process of elimination.

We got the prednisone at Walmart yesterday. It's a weird, weird world where we get our cat prescriptions from the human pharmacy. It's an oral formula so we've traumatized ourselves and Lucy twice by giving it to her. She got most or all of it yesterday, less today. We're going to see if mixing with food tomorrow helps or puts her off the food, because giving it with a syringe isn't working for anyone. (I don't know if it's Lucy or me who is most traumatized, I'm suspecting me.)

For Cobweb we got her prednisone compounded into treats, and that worked great. We gave them to her for the rest of her life, and she gained back her weight, and all was well until she started having kidney problems a couple of years down the road. Obviously, that's what we should do for Lucy, except we're just giving her this prednisone based on a wild guess. It's crazy.

Kimberly is asking for recommendations on Facebook for a vet who might be better, but the top recommendations so far have been for the vet we're using. Maybe we just caught them on a bad day, due to our emergency drop off? But they seemed largely unconcerned about finding the cause of the weight loss, and the fact they're just guessing and that we're all playing stupid telephone games is putting me off.

I've also got the phone number of the relative of a friend that the friend was kind enough to give me, who works at a vet on island. Maybe that friend-of-a-friend is really the way to go in this environment that we're still learning about ...

So, this is all an ongoing problem but not a crisis, but it's happening when we just have too much going on ... .

---

Projects. My Blockchain Commons work continues fine, but that's because it (and my other tech writing clients) gets top work/energy priority. From there, I've had trouble keeping up this month.

I've been doing bits of my more creative writing, but it's been hard writing a relatively small history for Designers & Dragons and my other big projects, my elf book and my TSR Codices, have been going by in just little bits at a time.

But the work that's really suffering is my home-improvement projects. I think I've done two very small things in August. I'm clearly old, because I'm very excited that I got a good-quality pressure washer. I got a lot of mold and mildew off the lanai, which was great, and had somewhat less success cleaning the upstairs windows, which I'd hoped I could do because it's been an ongoing issue. But I haven't dragged it out to wash the car (which was the other main goal, since our low water pressure atop the hill just wasn't doing it) or clean the downstairs windows or the front steps ... I've also gotten one set of curtains up in our bedroom, after some work filling and painting holes left by the previous curtain rods.

But there are more curtains to go up, more walls to touch up, boards on our lanai to replace, steps out front to repaint ... and most importantly I need to finish painting the doors for Kimberly's closet and finish reflooring my office as part of our big downstairs-improvement project. I got to the hard part of my office, where I need to start scribing around closet doors and such and sputtered out, not just because it's hard, but because everything else got too busy.

(I'm hoping to put in some work in the morning; we'll see. I've also planned to do it a number of days after work, and was always too tuckered out.)

---

Taxes. Speaking of stressors, though this one is less bad because it has a clearly defined, albeit very expensive, worst case scenario. But our accountant talking with an inside person at Hawaii's tax agency thinks they've figured out the problem as to why Hawaii is demanding a large sum of additional payment instead of giving us a big refund.

They all think that their computer is unable to understand us simultaneously moving here on January 1st, filing as partial-year residents, and having large deductions due to taxes paid in another state (for the sale of our house in California, which obviously occurred after we became residents of Hawaii). So the Hawaii tax insider has instructed our accountant to refile for us as full-year residents.

(Said I to him, "One of the factors in moving her on January 1st was I thought it would make taxes easier." Which was true, though there was also a nice symbolic feeling to starting the year with that huge change. Said him, laughing, "You made it a lot harder." Hopefully he's correct, and that's what's going on.)

(What I get out of this: 1 in 365 residents who move to the state have problems because their computer system can't understand partial-year residents who moved on January 1, in our case arriving at 9am or so that day.)

So he had his people redo our taxes with the different form for full year residents and he sent me every single form including ones that Hawaii might not even want because apparently they insist on having everything in an amended return even if it hasn't changed. So my printer is now working hard to print out 92 pages. Hopefully I get time to mail it out on Monday.

---

Walking. I think one of the reasons I've been feeling overworked is that it's been three weeks since I got out and had a quiet day on my own. Two weeks ago, Kimberly and I were in Oahu for a mini-vacation, which was great, but is a different sort of R&R, and one week ago I ended up feeling too overwhelmed by writing that needed to get done, so combined with the fact that it already was going to be a short day, I just sat around and wrote (and did a little bike ride, which was nice).

Today I finally got back out, just doing my quiet walk from Poipu to Mahaulepu and back. It was good. That's twice I've been to Mahaulepu since the scumbag ATV company did their Disneyland walking tour there. I dunno if my complaints had any effect, but I'm hoping they're not doing it on weekends or not bringing them to the picnic area or something as a result. I dunno. At the least, I now know they're not going to be out there ruining the quiet every weekend.

---

Next. So in three days we're heading back to Oahu. Hopefully. Kimberly hasn't actually gotten her required COVID test back, as she was supposed to today, and an asymptomatic case of COVID is something that could totally ruin our plans. And we have been off-island twice in the last two weeks. So, fingers crossed that we're headed back to Oahu, because we booked a nice two-bedroom place with a no-refund policy and have first-class tickets back, all to make sure that Kimberly has the best experience possible post-surgery.

For once, for once, I've been smart enough to not try and fit going to Oahu around my Blockchain Commons work. I'll probably being doing little bits of my own work, but hopefully mostly relaxing so that I can take care of Kimberly without already being stressed out.

Hopefully by the time we get back we'll have a vet we can take Lucy to for another opinion, and hopefully Kimberly can get us the blood tests we've already had done so that we can start from a knowledgeable place, and not have to get hundreds of dollars of tests done again.

As my dad says, we can be thankful that we can afford this, whether it be yet another trip to Oahu or yet another visit for Lucy, and we can. So, very thankful for that.

L. and I finally got back together today and did our long-planned hike of the north side of the Powerline Trail.

First up: wow it's a long way up there. I mean the total distance would only have been an hour's drive if it was good traffic. (It was more like an hour fifteen, including two different places where the traffic on the highway went one-lane-in-one-direction-at-a-time due to utility work in one place and I dunno in the other.) But I was shocked it was 29 miles past the airport. We're only 14 miles west of the airport on our side, but I guess the difference is that you go up the whole east side of the island, and then halfway across when you start heading west.

Google inexplicably had the Powerline Trail marked as closed, so I was a bit wary (and had a backup hike in my back pocket), but it turned out to be totally accessible, with the (very limited) parking right where it was described. It's not maintained. The signage is pretty clear on that. But it was open. Bad Google.

We went two miles out, which is what all the recent descriptions led me to believe would be the case. The path was wide, somewhat rutted, and with occasional ponds, but it's used enough that whenever there was a pond, there was a path around it. At the one mile point, as promised, we had a sudden vista of the Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge down below. It's a beautiful valley with a river flowing through it, and waterfalls visible here and there. Worth the trip, and I dearly wish that had hiking paths there (but there's just one that heads up above it, as far as I can see, which was the other trail in my back pocket). Lots of nice views of mountains and Hawaiian foliage along the path too.

At about two miles, suddenly the path turned into a river. This was pretty much what we saw at the south end too. Not just a pond, but water flowing along the path as far as you could see. So, I don't think we're ever going to walk the Powerline Trail end-to-end. I think it became impossible at some point. Old posts I saw talked about fighting with foliage to get through the middle, but the water flow, which could easily be 10 miles from north to south, appears to be a newer thing, alas.

(For all the huge empty spaces on Kauai, it's shocking how few trails there are, and how poorly some of them are maintained.)

Along the way up the trail, we'd seen a number of sidepaths, some of which had hand-crafted wooden signs. Just before the path turned into a river was one labeled "Nubs & Sticks". L. was eager to explore, and I was too having reached the end of our original path, so we did. It turned out to be (as far as we could tell) part of a whole network of trails created by Mountain Bikers!? No one there today, which was good, because the trails were relatively narrow (but quite well constructed and maintained).

We hiked most of the way back to our cars on those trails, seeing a variety of signs that labeled different parts of them. (One was the "String Trail", another the "Sunpower Trail".) Sometimes they ran pretty close to the main path, sometimes they spread out in a lot of different directions. We climbed down "Jawdropper", which looked like it'd be death on a bike, and got turned around at least twice, once to the point that we started heading in the wrong direction when we got back on the Powerline.

Overall, it was a lot of fun. Though I love my solitaire hikes, it's been great to have L. for an occasional hiking buddy, especially since it's encouraged us to do more adventurous things, like hike all the way out by Princeville.

---

MEANWHILE.

It generally has been busy, busy, busy for at least the last few weeks.

I've got Elf Pack on my plate now for Chaosium, and I'm struggling to find the time to write 10,000 extra words a month. (I did maybe 5k in January, but I started late in the month.)

The busyness is also because Bitmark, who usually gives me less than a day's worth of work each month, is preparing for a major release, and handed me a day of work last week alone.

And in two weeks I'm going to be supporting our first virtual salon for Rebooting Web of Trust, which is going to eat up a day and a half of time: half for the salon, one to document it.

So basically I've got my two extra clients (other than Blockchain Commons) both having work for me, just when I signed for some extra work of mu oen.

I can make the time by dropping back on my Designers & Dragons work: my only definite commitment is to my patrons, that I have a new history a month. But it's tough to set aside, especially for something like next month, where I've got an article prepared, but there's also a second one I could write, that's closely connected, that'd make a great combo.

So, we'll see how I find that balance.

Oh, and my dad and I have started flooring Kimberly's office with the same vinyl planking we used at his house. It's gotten four afternoons of work so far (ripping out the carpet, tearing the floor, and then two days to fill most of the main part of the room with planking). So, lots of lots of lots stuff going on.

---

I'm hoping that things will quiet down as February becomes March, but if not I need to reassess my schedule.

OK, it was only a minor disaster, but the new year started off with a bang.

(Actually it started off with obsessive and mostly illegal bangs, which began around 6pm in the old year, and continued past midnight. In fact the disaster started in the old year, our old friend 2020, too.)

I came home from a walk out to Mahaulepu on New Year's Eve and the lights at home were flickering and dimming. They got worse after I prepared dinner and we sat down to eat while (finally) watching The Rise of Skywalker. The TV turned off 3 or 4 times during the movie. The lights dropped out a similar amount of times.

I looked at our Tesla app, and it told us that there'd been six blackouts that day. I figured that's what we were seeing, and I was annoyed that our solar power system wasn't dealing with them, because we were supposed to see brownouts as little flickers, nothing more.

---

Next morning, the lights were still dim when I turned some of them on. So I dropped a line to our solar engineer. Despite being New Year's Day he responded quickly and told me he'd filed a service ticket and asked them to look at it.

I waited all day: no response.

(Why do these problems always happen at the start of holiday weekends!?)

When I walked with my dad that evening, he said that it was probably the voltage fluctuating, that I could check that by looking at my UPS, and that if it was running low that could damage appliances.

And after I got home, things were even worse. We tried to watch TV that evening, and it was turning off every minute or two. We eventually ate without entertainment, and then Kimberly and I huddled in the living room all night under a flickering light.

When I went downstairs to look at the voltage on my UPS, it was running 100-110V, which is out of spec. (Research on line also agreed that motor-driven appliances like refrigerators can indeed be damaged because low voltage means high amperage, but that newer ones are better at watching for their motors being overheated.) Afterward, I started unplugging things. But I couldn't unplug our two main motor-driven appliances (the refrigerator and chest freezer).

Oh, and we learned that our house could no longer really support power for two rooms at a time: when I was downstairs working with the UPS, the power problems had gotten worse upstairs.

---

The next day I mailed our solar people again to let them know that I hadn't heard from anyone the previous day and that the problems were getting worse. I let it sit until lunch time, and then I started get contacts from folks at the company.

Within a few hours, the problem had worked its way through the entire solar-service infrastructure and then out to Tesla, and we learned that we were getting bad voltage from our utility company!!? Our engineer said he'd never seen anything like it; my other main contact said they'd seen one other situation like this recently.

My best guess here: the power outages had preceded the voltage problems and had somehow knocked something out of kilter.

---

I'm often paranoid about calling people about a problem unnecessarily. I'll double and triple check something is really a problem before I start asking for help. And I make darned sure that I'm talking to the right people.

But this time, I had no qualms over having dumped it on Rising Sun Solar. I mean, they basically rebuilt our electricity system, and they were the one who could actually assess where the problem was. (Big plus that I stayed super friendly the whole time, though, never even hinting at my frustration.) So I felt entirely proper having contacted them, even when the problem got punted to KIUC.

---

KIUC took my report and dispatched a technician almost immediately, despite it now being the Saturday after New Year's. He was here and gone within an hour, and I wouldn't have even known he was here if I hadn't chanced to see him outside and grabbed him (well, from 20 feet away) to verify the problem was solved.

It was.

(No explanation though.)

---

Which isn't to say there weren't repercussions.

First, a few hours later, I discovered our oven making weird churning sounds ... and the door was locked! That was just before my dad came over for swimming that evening. I hadn't even been able to figure out how to turn the darned thing off, but he pointed toward the circuit breakers. Aha! I turned it off, and that stopped the churning. Turning on the cleaning cycle, and then canceling it then got the oven door unlocked. As best I can guess, it was in some type of infinite locking cycle, probably due to the uneven voltage.

Second, a brand-new LED light bulb blew out during the uneven voltage. That doesn't make me feel great about what else might have been damaged, but most important things were behind surge protectors, and I also had unplugged a lot when I'd verified the voltage issue. (Thankfully, it wasn't a smart light; I've wanted those since we started smartifying our house in Berkeley, but our first actually smart bulbs arrive in a week.)

Third, a GFCI plug in the garage got reset. I hate those things; maybe they'll stop me from being electrocuted some day, but in the meantime, they've caused me problems at least a dozen times over the years. And I don't even understand why that plug in the garage is GFCI, because the next one over isn't. Oh, and it's the plug with our new chest freezer on it. My dad and I had actually checked the freezer the other day, and it seemed cool. But it might have been defrosting even then. By the time I found it, it'd been off for at least 20 hours, but maybe as much as 72. Joy. Everything was entirely defrosted, though the stuff at the bottom was still somewhat cool. I doubtless could have saved some of it, especially the stuff frozen from the refrigerator like lunch meat and cheese, but I didn't feel like starting off the new year with a game of Frozen Roulette. So I threw out a few hundred dollars worth of food from our newly stocked newly purchased chest freezer.

So, hello 2021. But maybe we can blame this all on 2020's last gasp. Maybe? Please.

---

Today was my first day back to work. Well, I did yard work, including the much-hated hill. (I found the defrosted freezer when I realized my tool batteries weren't recharging.) My buddy, the Cattle Egret joined me again. Kimberly says his name is Egor.

And tomorrow I head back to the office. Well, my office, downstairs. I've actually done a great job of having 10 days or so of downtime, not continuing my work obsessively into the evening like I tend to. That'd be a good pattern to stick with, but we'll see how it goes. I really like the creative work I'm doing, so it's hard to hold it back into just my creative workdays. (Especially since I only have at best, three of those a week.)

Friday I had one of the sorts of days I'd dreamed of before moving to Hawaii. I got up, showered, and headed to my office, where I did a morning worth of work. It was Designers & Dragons work, on the third of the three OSR histories that I'm planning for this month.

Then I took Kimberly out to lunch at some food trucks in Koloa. Actually, it turned out only one food truck was open, but it was Mexican, so we were entirely content.

Then I came home and worked through the mid-afternoon.

Afterward, my dad came over, we worked on our Eternal Shelf project, and afterward we picked up Mary, and went down to Poipu to swim.

That's what I hoped life would be like in Hawaii, after I finished up my Skotos work, and dropped back to working on my own projects (with a bit of tech writing mixed in). Freedom to work on my own priorities, but also an ability to rest, relax, and enjoy myself. And it's been mostly that way for a month or so, albeit with the occasional medical issues we're dealing with, such as our recent trip to Oahu.

---

I'm creating patterns now, and so one thing I'm really trying to do is make sure I develop a discipline for working on my own projects. So when I get up in the morning, I head down to my office to work.

And sometimes I migrate to somewhere more comfortable to write, like a chair or a couch. In the future I hope that'll include the pavilion at the golf course and perhaps the beach. I don't need to be in my office to work, I just need to have the discipline to write.

But it turns out that my office is pretty nice too. It took me a bit to figure out the optimal setup for writing, but it turns out to work pretty well when I sit at my desk typing on my laptop and use my desktop computer with the huge screen to look up references.

---

Of course our entire time in Hawaii has been colored by COVID-19. We're mostly open now, though no one really knows what's supposed to be allowed and what's not. But the fact of the disease is certainly keeping us from further exploring the island, as I was in our first few months here, and as we would under normal circumstances.

So that trip out to the food trucks was our first experiment with a new food place since the shutdown had started. (And as I said, the other three or four foodtrucks at that locale are still closed.) And we haven't been trying out new food in Lihue.

And I'm still not gaming at the game store. Sure it's open, but I know how often I've gotten sick from gaming (almost any time I've gotten sick in the last few decades, I could track it to the game table), and I don't feel like I could responsibly do that and also see my folks regularly, so, choices.

And that also means that we're not making new friends here. No gaming. No plays. No community centers. No Habitat for Humanity. (Though I've told my dad to put my name in for a friend who is going to have a house built.) We've been cut off from pretty much all the ways that we could better integrate with our local community.

---

Still, we're very pleased to be in Kauai instead of Berkeley for the duration of this pandemic. It's safer and we can do more. The people here are more responsible about protecting the community. And given the masking requirements it's a lot more comfortable to be driving than walking.

---

And we're still very pleased to have moved to Hawaii generally. I think these are likely to be the most extreme circumstances ever for both physical and personal isolation, and we're doing fine.

So as things open up, as we feel more comfortable traveling the whole island, as we meet new people, as we're able to actually leave the island for workshops, for vacations, and for visits to California, things will be even better.

---

Now if we can just get a vaccine and a president who isn't a moronic and malignant narcissist by the end of the year!