Thoughts on being a Mom and everything else
I’ve spent most of the week at jury duty, so I’m sharing some photos of Zuko instead of writing anything meaningful this week. At some point in the near future, I expect I’ll share some thoughts on the jury duty process (though probably not the trial itself), as I’ve found it fascinating.
I’ve been participating in Goodreads’s reading challenge for a few years now. My goal isn’t overly ambitious (for me), I’m aiming to average one book a week. I’m ahead for the year, since I’m at 48 of 52 books at the moment, and that may be 49 by tomorrow.
I had a gap last month between review books and picked through some books that had already been added to my Kindle at some nebulous point in the past, so this short list of recent recommendations may include both older books and the occasional something that’s not science fiction or fantasy. My criteria for this list is books I’ve read since August that I gave a 5-star rating on Goodreads to.
American War by Omar El Akkad
This one’s historical fiction about a second American Civil War. What makes it creepy – and effective – is that it shows how the protagonist is radicalized through deliberate decisions made by her mentor.
Consort of Fire by Kit Rocha
An ancient dragon god marries the mortal ruler’s heir every century, and finally meets his match. But she’s adopted and considered so disposable that the ruler had her cursed unless she and her handmaid assassinate the Dragon. This steamy fantasy story does an amazing job at world- and character-building.
Daughters of the Night Sky by Aimie K. Runyan
Historical fiction about the Soviet “Night Witches” who terrorized Germany during World War II. I probably picked it up because of Cheshire Moon’s song, Nachthexen. (https://cheshiremoon.bandcamp.com/track/nachthexen-2)
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
This is the first of McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and having read it, I wonder how I had somehow bypassed her work until this point, especially knowing so many of my friends are fans. I will definitely be partaking of more of her delightful writing.
Goodnight, Sweet Princess by Jason Janes
This novella was published by a friend in 2015. The compressed murder mystery takes place at a Renaissance Faire which Chicago area fans will almost certainly equate with Bristol.
The Memories Between Us by Karen Peck
Another book written by a friend, this is a time travel and parallel universes romance as the protagonist desperately searches for a way to re-encounter his deceased wife.
The Shadow Baron by Davinia Evans
I was delighted with the first book in The Burnished City series, Notorious Sorcerer, when I read it last year, and was equally excited about the sequel.
The Star-Crossed Pelican by Laura Ruth Loomis
This hilarious book takes science fiction lightly with an oversized heap of drama including a “peace-keeping” weapon that forces people to relive their most embarrassing moments.
Our friend Marinda recently lost her battle with cancer and I want to reflect on some of the memories we had together over the years. Our friendship spanned half her lifetime (though not quite half of mine). We met at Capricon, her first time attending a Chicagoland convention and my second year at that particular one. (She went on to chair that Capricon a few years ago.) We hit it off immediately, bonding over gaming, our niblings (we each only had one niece or nephew at the time), and our black cats.
When we met, she did demos or organized tournaments for one gaming company; we both soon joined the demo team for Steve Jackson Games, teaching many people the joys of Munchkin, Chez Geek, and other games. We were fixtures of the daytime gaming room at many local conventions, leaving our evening hours open to attend the parties. When I decided to hold my bachelorette party at a Capricon, she coordinated with the convention to book a room, and she helped me organize my first baby shower (the friends rather than family one) at a DucKon. She was the obvious choice to be my daughter’s godmother, and the only person other than my ex-husband and myself who was told the probable gender of the child before her birth.
Over the years, Marinda volunteered or worked for several well-known companies in the gaming industry, including her stint with True Dungeon that resulted in a middle-of-the-night text message to me saying “I killed Wil Wheaton!” (He mentioned it here.) The funny thing is she wasn’t a Trekkie and barely knew who he was at that point, but knew that I was a fan. She recruited me as her gaming co-chair for the now defunct To Be Continued convention, where we added “gaming with the guests” our second year, selecting games appropriate for the roles the media guests were known for. I talked her into co-chairing Dorkstock the year my daughter was born, knowing I’d need the extra pair of hands with an infant in tow.
We were founding members of The Lady Gamer, a fan-run webzine, and attended the GAMA Trade Show with press badges together in 2004. (All of the content we produced from 2004-2007 is still available.) That year, we also organized a scavenger hunt of GenCon’s dealer’s hall (under the Fantasy Aspirations banner) with prizes from an assortment of vendors; Marinda was the primary contact for the vendors, helping them develop appropriate clues for the hunt.
I’ve only made it to GenCon a couple times since my daughter was born, each while Marinda was volunteering or working for Mayfair Games. She recruited my daughter to pull winning raffle tickets; every player got one for every demo they played at the company’s booth, giving them the opportunity to win… games! She took her goddaughter to Little Wars one year, a convention I’ve never managed to get to.
We saw Marinda outside conventions too, of course. There was a year when I was working part-time from home and she was renting an apartment a couple miles from our house when we’d randomly schedule lunches. She had a key to our house, and I knew if someone randomly let themselves in during my work day, it was her. When I bought this house, she extended her visit by a couple days and supervised an electrician doing some rewiring while I was at work. She’d pretty much help anyone who needed it, even when it was physical labor that her illnesses, including cancer these last couple years, should have prevented her from doing.
She is everywhere around us. I went to Walgreens the other day and realized we had stopped at that McDonald’s across the street once, after exploring an area park for Pokemon Go (me) and Ingress (her). On my drive home, I passed a forest preserve that we had ventured into for similar reasons (where a guy passing on a bike asked if my daughter and I were twins), and the restaurant, Harner’s Bakery, where we took her to lunch when she visited in June before dropping her off at the nearby Metra station.
There are cat toys she brought over scattered about – one in particular that was rejected by her cat, Kelethin, and excitedly received by all four cats here. There are toys and board games she gifted us, yarn choices that she weighed in on for my never-ending crochet projects, and postcards from her travels reminding us that friendship is not limited by geography.
She’s in my kitchen every time I make an omelet, which she loved, joining the memories of my father who taught me how to make them. The brands of pizza sauce and mustard, carefully selected to avoid her pepper allergy (hint: paprika is made from peppers, and frequently disguised as “spices” on food labels) remind me of her. She recommended our rice cooker, with a locking lid, for slow cooking after Arwen discovered she could open our Crockpot. There’s a slight smile when I put the cast iron pan into the microwave – to keep it safe from cats while cooking in the oven – remembering Marinda’s freaked out expression the first time she saw me do that.
Marinda is gone now, her internment is this weekend. Our memories of her live on.
Though the website never got updated this year (the logo wasn’t ready until a couple weeks before the convention), we had a fabulous time at Dorkstock, hosted again at the delightful Gamehole Con. We had a good assortment of scheduled games, some pick-up games, and the perennial Dorkstock coloring table which included this year’s logo in black and white. Here’s a copy if you missed out on coloring it at the convention:
This year’s Dorkstock included our Munchkin Block Party once per day – multiple Munchkin flavors running at up to three tables (depending on registration numbers), with an overarching half-hour rule that affects all tables (and change every half hour), and the new addition of stretch goals and rewards for achieving them. For example, one stretch goal was to defeat a monster while cursed; one half-hour rule was a +2 bonus in combat if you were wearing long sleeves. (It was pretty chilly in the Dorkstock room at that point, everyone had long sleeves on!)
For player convenience, we use a board from one of the Deluxe sets even if that Munchkin flavor doesn’t have one, which is how I ended up running Munchkin Grimm Tidings with a Crazy Cooks board. And just for fun, I asked the players if they wanted to use the cartoon figures I bring for Frag. It turned out to be a great game, with a lot of player interactions – well, Munchkinly ones, like messing with other people’s combat and asking for help against difficult monsters. Amusingly, the winner was the only player at level 8 when they kicked open the door and found a monster they could handily defeat. Another player slapped an extra monster onto the combat – one that could join that particular monster without a wandering monster card – and a third player forced the level 8 player to accept her help in the combat with a card, not realizing that defeating two monsters would give him the two levels he needed to win.
We also welcomed 9th Level Games to Dorkstock this year, celebrating their new version of Kobolds At My Baby! with a frequently crowded table of players shouting “All hail King Torg!” We also had Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrödinger’s Cats on our schedule, followed by an impromptu Knuckle Sammich (also including random “All hail King Torg!” shouts). Immediately following the convention, they launched a Kickstarter for Scurvy Buggers, described as “a found family RPG.” It’s fully funded and they’ve already hit their first stretch goal, so now’s a great time to pick up an easy-to-learn pirate RPG. I look forward to playing it at next year’s Dorkstock.
Our life-sized games: Warhamster Rally, Escape from Dork Tower, and Kill Doctor Lucky, were located just inside the dealer’s hall, and I’m happy to report that Doctor Lucky was in fact killed in all four runs. (It was really close on one of them, there were less than five minutes left when Doctor Lucky finally died.) Alas, I did not get any photos of the life-size games this year. I did, however, take a photo of this cute owlbear at the Imagining Games booth. (Yes, one came home with me. And yes, I’ve hugged an owlbear today.)
If you don’t speak French (I don’t), today’s title refers to Montreal’s Convention Center. Having visited there recently for a work trip, I checked into my hotel room and looked out the window to see a brilliant array of colorful windows. I wondered what the building was – maybe a museum? – until I opened Pokemon Go and realized that’s where our convention was being held. I didn’t capture the evening photo, when the colored windows projected their colors onto the office building across the park, making it appear that the offices had colored lights.
In addition to the colored windows, there was a clear effort to include some unusual seating in the public areas. The exhibit hall and session rooms themselves were fairly standard for a convention center (and they need more bathrooms), but someone made a clear effort to include cozy seating. In addition to what’s pictured below, I noted one table with six swing chairs attached to it, and several other colors of the blue table set-up.
Have you seen a more memorable convention center?
I have several things I wanted to write about this week, but alas, this cold I picked up in Montreal is knocking my socks off (well, if I usually wore socks around the house). So you get cat photos! The first is a rare occurrence: all four cats resting on the sofa. It’s rare because Diane usually growls anytime she notices Arwen trying to settle near her, even when Arwen’s actually trying to curl up nearby with June.
I have multiple hunt & feed style feeders for the cats. Diane, being a more dignified (and slower) eater, will not compete with the other cats for food, so she gets her bit of dry food separately while the others get to work for it. In this case, they’re hunting in a light bulb-shaped toy that wobbles.
I was traveling for work this week and have learned over the years that it’s useful to bring an element of home when staying in a hotel room, especially if it’s for more than one night. And while the hotel does allow pets, I doubted my cats would be enamored of flying or being stuck in a hotel room while I’m at a conference all day. I opted for other comforts instead.
For my hotel room, I packed a small teddy bear (named Kane) and a travel Wiccan altar. The miniature altar fits in an empty Altoids tin, and includes symbols for earth, air, fire, water, as well as man and woman, with the bonus of a cat. While the layout of the elements is directional, the cat goes wherever it wants. Both of those items are in my checked luggage, while a lotion bar and its tin – screw top, so it’s won’t randomly flip open in my bag – travel in my backpack. Airplanes, convention centers, and hotels all tend to be fairly dry.
In addition to these pictured items, I also have a travel nightlight and mini-humidifier for hotel rooms. I loathe stumbling to an unfamiliar bathroom in the middle of the night and having to turn on a garishly bright overhead light simply because I’m unfamiliar with the layout. The humidifier stayed home this time since the weather was warm; I find it more necessary when the heat is running.
And that’s how I almost make up for having to sleep without my cats.
On a recent morning, after feeding the cats, I noticed how dark it was outside, a combination of the early hour and the overcast sky. I turned off the kitchen light and stepped outside, standing just in the entryway – calling the area a “porch” would be too generous – listening to the pitter patter of the much-needed rain.
There’s a lot of green in our yard now, more so with the recent rain that has revived the lawn. Amidst that green is this small patch of brown and a growing patch of yellow – a recently cleared flower bed and a single mum. There are multiple little things to appreciate here:
The grass was cleared using my neighbor’s sod remover, which made the task far shorter than if I had been working with just a shovel.
The sod I removed ended up near our back compost pile, mostly yard waste, helping suppress weeds.
The mum itself was a gift from a different neighbor, delivered a couple days after I had cleared the sod. Our front yard is visible from their front window, so hopefully she’s enjoying its growth as much as I am.
If you’re wondering why it’s alone in the flower bed, it’s because we had already purchased bulbs to plant there, which should emerge in the spring. If our timing was good and the winter somewhat mild, the mum may still be there.
Well, actually, it’s a WNDR Museum – drop the vowels in “wonder”. It’s an interactive, one-way art museum, where you proceed along a marked path from entrance to exit. Technically, it’s one of four: there are locations in San Diego, Boston, and Seattle, as well as the one we visited in Chicago.
Admission is purchased online – if you arrive, as we did, without tickets, there’s a QR code to scan where you can select the date and time for your tickets. As you’re admitted, you also have the opportunity to purchase drinks to take with you along the path. There are also QR codes along the path to explain how to interact with some of the exhibits. We scanned a couple, but didn’t feel a need to scan every one. Here are some of the photos I took in the time we explored the museum.
In addition to the exhibits, several of which were reactive to movement of one sort or another, there were two poets stationed in the museum who were writing poems on the spot for whatever topic you threw at them (they had tip jars), and a magician near the end performing some stunning sleight of hand (no tip jar there). And, of course, a gift shop.
Somehow it’s mid-September already and, as expected, the temperatures have started dropping as we near the end of a strange growing season. It started off cold and dry, we had a couple weird heat waves (also dry), with most comfortably warm weather in the middle – warm enough to have the air-conditioning on during the day with windows open most nights. Now we’re at the point where the windows can be open during the day, with just a couple cracked open for fresh air at night.
We haven’t had a frost yet – probably won’t for another month or so – but the cooler temperatures have slowed down the garden growth. The potato plants began fading last week, so I dug them up this morning. While it’s a small crop, far smaller than the last two year’s potato harvest, the potatoes were a late planting from store-bought potatoes that had sprouted. The Red Alabama okra may be done flowering at this point, and I’m probably safe harvesting every three days instead of every two.
The tomatoes and raspberries, and even the strawberries are still ripening steadily. Our tomato supply has been smaller this year, partially because some of the plants are intertwined with pumpkin vines, which are both overwhelming the tomatoes and can be a bit scratchy when harvesting through. (No, we don’t need to discuss my catnip. Really, it’s fine, it’s a perennial and we’re never running out.)
What was your best garden crop this year?