- So, we’re at quarantine week… 10? Is it 10? Let’s just say 10 for the sake of the argument. I have no idea anymore without consulting a calendar.
- I seriously don’t know whether it’s time to buy fireworks or a snow shovel at this point.
- Is it a bad thing when you’re cleaning out the attic and hear baby birds chirping from the piping leading from the bathrooom fan to the outside?
- I am proud to say that I removed the sentence “If you told me the sky was blue, I would look up” from a professional email the other day.
- Is it a bad thing that I’m half a decade away from retiring from the day job and I’ve already picked out the date for my retirement party?
- I was bored enough the other weekend that I took all of our dry goods out of the various shelves, cabinets, and tubs, then sorted and organized them. I was surprised that we had quite a surplus on peanut butter, applesauce, and canned beans. I was even more surprised that we were short on canned tomatoes of almost every variety.
- A quick trip to Kroger and the restaurant supply store corrected that.
- Irish Woman has returned to work after being off for about two months. In her time at home, she power-washed, repaired, cleaned out EVERYTHING, put in the garden, done landscaping, filled in one old goldfish pond, rebuilt another, put in a fountain, painted, trimmed, and home-schooled our sprog.
- I’m not saying that going back to work will be less strenuous for her than not going to work, but since she first went back to her office, she seems much more relaxed.
- My “I’m just going into the office for a couple of hours so that a technician can update the office software on my laptop” turned into “I’m going to sit here for six hours waiting for the bloody thing to reboot”
- Since I work in a semi-secured building, I couldn’t even take in a tablet to read. And, of course, I forgot to pack a book or notebook.
- Heck, I even forgot my coffee on the way to work this morning. I am really out of practice on this whole get-out-of-bed-and-go-to-work-in-another-zip-code thing.
- Every single thing Boo was looking forward to doing this summer has been cancelled. At this point, I’m about to buy him a copy of the improvised munitions field manual and let him loose just so he has something to do.
- This would be so much easier if we had the same rules for kids as we did when we were young.
- “Bored? Here, take your BB gun and this pocket knife and go entertain yourself for a while. Don’t forget, you need to burn off all of those fireworks from last summer before we can buy more.”
All posts for the month May, 2020
Musings
Posted by daddybear71 on May 27, 2020
https://daddybearsden.com/2020/05/27/musings-342/
Review – Rimworld: The Rift
Jim Curtis returns to his Rimworld universe and takes it in a whole new direction in The Rift:
Danny Ortega was a failure. He couldn’t tolerate the implant to be a starship captain…
But Danny Ortega has run his deep space research vessel Ghost alone for years, flaky AI and all, mapping the most unstable and unexplored regions of the Rift for the Cartographers Guild. When his latest mission lands in a mass graveyard of ships, including some ships out of legend, lost for hundreds of years, the guild isn’t happy with him.
He picks up a misfit crew out of the asteroids and the games begin!
Turns out he’ll need them not just for research and salvage, but to help him keep his ship! As word gets out that he has artifacts and is returning remains, Danny finds he’s gone from chasing a prize to becoming one himself…
Unfortunately for his enemies, Danny didn’t get his own ship by being an easy target or giving up. His odd connections and crew have plenty of surprises up their sleeves, too!
The Rift is a much more detailed, character-driven story than the other books in this series. While there is action, Curtis took his time and developed the main character, Danny, from a loner to a leader, from a lonely man to one that learns the meaning of family.
That’s not to say that the story moves slowly. This is a page turner crafted by a master storyteller. The plot rolls smoothly off the page, with believable and engaging twists and turns. I found myself losing hours to this book as I kept reading just one more page.
Unlike a lot of books in an already established series, a new reader could pick up this one and enjoy it. It resides in the same universe as Into the Green and Militia Up, but don’t inhabit the same space.
The Rift is definitely recommended for summer reading, especially if you’re in the mood for something different.
Posted by daddybear71 on May 27, 2020
https://daddybearsden.com/2020/05/27/review-rimworld-the-rift/
Musings
- Irish Woman was furloughed from her job a few weeks ago, but she’s been keeping herself busy by undoing a lot of the landscaping and redoing it.
- She tried to tell me that the new gas power washer could count as her Mother’s Day present. I told her I wasn’t looking to die that soon.
- One of the goldfish ponds in the front yard has been filled in. There were no fish in it, but several rather large and stubborn bullfrogs had to be ejected into the remaining pond.
- I’d like to say that Boo has adjusted to this, but I’m pretty sure he’s scavenging scrap wood from the house to shore up the roof of the tunnel he’s digging through the back yard.
- I’m tempted to warn him that the septic tank is back there.
- The search for the new house has ground to a halt for the time being.
- In the area we want to move into, our choices are either a $200,000 hovel that needs a few hundred thousand dollars worth of work put into it before it would be livable, or a palatial estate that costs more than the GDP of some small countries.
- Other areas aren’t any better, and Irish Woman has made up her mind about where she wants to live. I’d argue with her, but I’d rather be happy than right.
- I must admit to a small amount of panic buying a couple weeks ago.
- I purchase the coffee I like by the case from Amazon. I get a new case automatically sent to me every couple of months.
- Normally, that means I’m drinking from one case, with one or two cases on the storage shelves at any given time.
- With me being home and working stupid amounts of hours, my coffee consumption has reached back into the “Working mids shift and having a newborn baby in 1992” range. I soon found myself opening my last spare case with no coffee inbound from Amazon. I was also out of cups for the Keurig.
- When I went to order an extra case, my coffee was out of stock, so I ordered two cases of my second favorite and another case of assorted KCups.
- So, I’m drinking my way through one case, have two cases of almost-as-good coffee, a case of “I need a cup of coffee, but don’t want to make an entire pot” fixings, then Amazon dropships a case of my favorite coffee on my doorstep.
- If I can get a muzzle onto the monkey riding my back, I should have about 6 months worth of coffee.
- Irish Woman looked at me crossways over this. I just shrugged and pointed to her bourbon collection.
- Boo and Irish Woman have started making a batch of homemade vanilla extract using $25 worth of vanilla beans and a bottle of good Finlandia vodka.
- Friends tell me that making it with brandy or rum is also excellent. We’ll try that next time.
- Yes, they used good vodka to make vanilla extract. Yes, I approved. Vodka and I have the same agreement I have with tequila – Everyone leaves everyone else alone. I use it for cooking, and it doesn’t try to get me in trouble on the Moscow Metro again.
- We finally broke down and hired a plumber to come in and fix several small and a couple rather large problems we’ve had.
- I know my limits. I don’t work on things that could burn down or flood the house.
- Even with them doing us a solid and only charging time and material, that sucking sound you hear coming out of Louisville is my wallet.
- The plumber said that he’d do some of the easy things first, then tackle the hard things. Little did he know that there are no easy things to fix in this house.
- Is it a bad thing to hear the pleasant, mild-mannered man working on your plumbing stop, swear under his breath, then start hitting something with a hammer?
- On several occasions today, he and his helper have told me that they’ve never seen anything like what we’ve got going on. Hey, the plumbing is original from the late 1940’s and was put in before building codes reached this far outside of the city limits. You’ve got to expect a few surprises
- I didn’t mind spending money on a 30 yard dumpster to clean out our house, garage, basement, and attic of all of the extraneous stuff we’ve accumulated over the the last 20 years.
- I did mind, however, giving up space in the dumpster for stuff we found that the original owners had left behind.
- It’s amazing how much stuff we have that only took a second or two to decide that it didn’t make the cut.
- The battle with the honeysuckle continues. I’ve resorted to the unilateral use of chemical agents against the foe. If that doesn’t work, there’s always incendiaries.
Posted by daddybear71 on May 5, 2020
https://daddybearsden.com/2020/05/05/musings-341/
DaddyBear
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