photo saturday: masts

This is what would normally be described as a short week... but nothing I really did this week was affected by Easter Monday or Anzac Day on Thursday.

I do need to remind myself next week that Easter Sunday is an actual thing, where the shops are shut and everything. And to get myself supplies for lunch when I'm shopping the day before. Because that was somewhat of a pain in the ass.

Otherwise, DnD was on Monday night as usual... it has been a while since I ran that module, and while it's better then the preceding two, the end is fairly lame.

Wednesday, the comic shop was expecting a tradie in, so we decided to wait around for an hour and then take ourselves off to the gaming shop and play there instead. I have no doubt at all that one of two things then happened... either the guy never showed up, or he showed up around the time we would have been packing up and leaving. Because of course. It did mean that we could spread out more than usual, which was nice.

The evening game wasn't the usual evening game, because fuck my friends. Well, most of them anyway, including the DM. But the couple who's house we play at were happy to still host, and he got a couple of "ringers" in from his usual group (one of whom is someone I really like and don't get to play with or on their table anywhere near often enough, so that was really nice).

And we played later than usual, probably because of the public holiday the following day, which was nice.

Then Thursday's game my other group finally finished off the trilogy we've been doing for a while, although one of our group was missing and we had a ringer (yeah, that seems to be a word I'm using today) who was actually pretty good, especially for someone coming into a group where everyone knows each other and we're doing the last part of a trilogy.

Afterwards a couple of us grabbed a drink at Pancake Kitchen and chatted about stuff, then I drove one of them home. Which was weird, if only because I'd literally been thinking about how it would be nice to spend a little more time with him outside of the gaming table... then than happened.

Otherwise, not a lot to report really.

I did make an amazing minestrone soup on Sunday though... I mean minestrone in so much as I made the recipe up, but it was really, really good.

This week I'm reattempting chowder, since that worked out pretty well last year, so we'll see.

Today, Ma was off having her hair did, so I went shopping on my lonesome. Well, just me and The West Wing Weekly podcast.

After I got back here I just hung out til Ma got here, then we went down the road to Big W and I got some glue to finally finish off a bookbinding project and some other random crap. However the thing we actually went for they didn't have. Isn't it always the way.

So then we did a brief trip to the (under renovations but much less interesting than it used to be) Target on South Road before giving up and heading back here. Well, we did stop off at Haighs to check out "broken" Easter eggs (and like last year, they have the little chocolate ducklings with their heads ripped off, but no actual broken/cheap eggs), we may have to try again next week, since Greek Easter is this weekend.

And that was about it really.

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photo saturday: white rabbit teaparty

Can I just mention that while I'm mostly used to standing up running DnD, standing up for a little over four hours, barefoot, in my own house while running a game was kind of exhausting.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I made potato, leek and bacon soup this week... with cheese... which was really, really good. So good that I could probably have eaten it cold. In fact, due to the fact that this week was ridiculously hot for this time of year, I almost did a couple of times (in that I kind of started eating it cold, and then changed my mind at some point).

"Normal" DnD was only three games this week, two of which I ran. The Monday game was okay... mostly because the modules I'm running at present are a little m'eh. But I want to run them so that I can move on to the later ones from that season. So we finished in around 2.5 hours (but then it was a 2 hour module).

Wednesday's day game was much better... partially because of the party, but also because it was just a much better module. And it's nice when you can make callbacks that the people at your table get.

The evening game was small... only three of the regular players. I almost pulled the plug on it given that one of our group couldn't be there, which meant one of the others wasn't going to show up (it shouldn't be how it is, but it just is), and I wasn't sure I could even be bothered, but it seemed like one of the other players really wanted to play, so I decided to just "say yes". And it was okay... I mean it wasn't the worst game ever, and we didn't play for that long and we didn't do a ton of stuff. But it was okay. Better than not having done it.

The Thursday game got moved to this coming week, so I ended up not bothering to go in, mostly because I didn't want to end up running again, and there really wasn't a game going that I was interested in.

Then yesterday I prepped for Saturday's game. More on that shortly... but the prepping not only included reading the module, it also meant that I made 72 mini sausage rolls and stuck them in the fridge ready to throw in the oven before the game. Which meant that my fridge was basically full of sausage rolls, because while I have a catering size oven, I only have a tiny wee fridge.

Today we did the usual supermarket thing... this week I'm aiming for minestrone soup. I say aiming because I'm kind of going to make up the recipe as I go.

We did the shopping, then came back here and killed some time before the DnD game. Which was a special game... given that it was Ma's first real actual game. After running a game for just her at Christmas, I got her hooked on series 2 of Critical Role, so she asked me the other week, in a round about way, about playing a "real game". And I knew immediately the three people I wanted to have come and join her.

So I set about making it happen. I picked out three of my friends who I knew would be excellent for her first game and we arranged it for Easter Saturday (or as I discovered this year, it's also known as Holy Saturday, who knew).

I filled the oven full of sausage rolls, then headed out to pick up the trio in town, leaving Ma to keep an eye on the oven.

I will just say that at no point in the entire time that I have lived in this apartment (or possibly the apartment before this one), have I ever had that many people in the place at the same time. And it was only five people including me. But it felt like a lot.

And I decided to finally crack open that plum, nectarine and tomato relish I made back at the start of February. Holy fuckballs. Yes, it's incredibly sweet, yes, it's also still very vinegary... but damn it's tasty.

Anyway, between the five of us, we polished off all but about a dozen of the sausage rolls (half of which I gave to Ma, the other half I ended up having for dinner) and about half a jar of the relish. And everyone seemed to have a good time.

Whether this becomes a regular, or even just a semi irregular thing, I don't know. But it was fun. I just need to work out a much better way to actually run in my house, since I don't have a dining table as such. I mean I have a table, but it's tiny and square and not appropriate for playing on. We'll see.

But that was it... I dropped two of the trio in town and took the third home to his place, and called it a day.

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photo saturday: studs and bricks

The first soup of the season was successful. I mean not thrilling necessarily, but tasty and filling.

I then spent what felt like the whole week going through my books or dusting... because I have a lot of surfaces... and those surfaces have a lot of tchotchkes on them... and a lot of those tchotchkes are made from Lego.

And when you dust Lego it requires a fucking paintbrush.

But seriously. The fact that I've been eyeballing my books for a couple of weeks at this point and thinking "Why do I still have that?" finally culminated in me going through all of my books and separating out the ones that, to use the phrase of the moment, "do not bring joy". So on Monday I started going through them all. Partly it was also because I wanted to clear my little dining table of all my DnD stuff and actually put it on the bookshelf, but I also needed to sort through the shelf where I just piled all my remaining books two years ago when I moved in here/moved books to as I needed space... because it was ridiculous.

I got there though. I moved things around, I pulled out the stuff I no longer wanted/needed and ended up by the end of the week with four of those foil/cooler shopping bags full of books and magazines and whatnot.

And I readjusted a couple of the shelves to make everything look a little nicer. But you can't empty bookshelves and reorganise them without dusting the shelves. And then you can't just dust half of the shelves on two of your six bookcases.

Hence the paintbrush.

I will say that everything feels a whole lot nicer, and I did manage to get all my DnD stuff, packed into IKEA magazine files, slotted into one of the bookshelves. And even if I hadn't done anything else, that was what I really wanted to get done.

So Monday was reorganising and some dusting, Tuesday was dusting the rest of the shelves, including the bookcase on the opposite side of the room, Wednesday I was out all day, Thursday I did the top of the bookcases and then realised I was going to have to dust everything in the whole goddamn room, so kept going around the room, and Friday was the tables with the TV and sorting out all the stuff that was left over.

It's not like that's ALL I did each day, but it did take up a big chunk of the day.

Otherwise, DnD was good... Monday was the usual game, and while I have in the past ad libbed a bunch of stuff leading into the adventure, I hadn't really planned anything out this time, but just started talking and spun this whole story, which was kinda cool.

Wednesday was a little confusing... well, other people were confused and confusing, I was fine. But I also ended up reorganising the room, splitting people up and running a game, because I'm tired of tables of 7+DM. Then Wednesday night, our DM was... I don't know, having a feeling... so he was there, but he didn't want to run. So someone else stepped up, the DM that kinda brought us all together as a group to be honest, and it was good to have him back in the driver's seat to be honest. I mean he nearly kicked our asses with two green dragons, but still good.

Thursday's game was (mostly) the same people as last week, same DM, second part of a trilogy. The additional person was nice enough, if a little... useless maybe isn't the right word... but by level 5 you should know how the fuck your character works and what you need to do on your turn. The only problem with the Thursday games is that there three of us who are high level role players, high level players really (even if one of them has only been playing in AL for less than a year)... and then there's one, who is, to quote someone on every season of RuPaul's Drag Race since it's inception... "not at our level". And it's just frustrating. He's just not someone I especially enjoy playing with, but he just keeps showing up.

Anyway, enough whinging...

Friday was also Chiro Day... which was good after a week of bending and stretching and carrying and moving in less usual ways.

Today wasn't much of anything. We did the shopping thing in the morning. This week I'm returning to potato, leek and bacon soup, and will ensure to keep all of my fingers.

Then we stuffed around at my place for a bit before we stopped off at Oxfam to offload the books I'd spent the week accumulating. We really didn't have a plan after that, so we ended up having a drive down to Glenelg, stopping at the Orange Spot Bakery for a pie and then heading down to the beach to eat it. And then we came back to my place, with a brief stop at Haighs.

That was completely it.

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photo saturday: be-leaf me

Every year around this time I mentioned that there's usually a week where I start out in shorts and a teeshirt and end up in trackpants and a hoodie...

This week was the exact opposite of that. Cold to start and then way to warm at the end. The whole world has gone topsy turvy.

Otherwise it wasn't a particularly exciting week.

I'm back to four DnD games at week at present... And oddly, although the point of Thursday was to be able to go back to playing whatever random character I felt like, I've ended up playing a regular character on Thursdays (at least for the next few weeks). That does tend to happen though... you go through stages of characters... and some end up falling by the wayside, others you keep wanting to come back to.

On Monday one of my players gave me a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana book as thanks for being his DM for the last year or so. It was incredibly sweet, but thankfully it was a book he'd gotten secondhand/cheaper than retail price, because otherwise it's a far too generous gift.

Wednesday was interesting or frustrating or both, I don't know. I've started playing a big dumb orc character who is basically very sweet but very dumb, and I love playing him... and he's the only character I've ever played who has elicited people telling me how much they love him, but also two different people spontaneously drawing him during my games with them. The downside to this week was that I was playing on a table of 7 people... which is never ideal. Honestly we should have split into two tables.

The Wednesday night game was very low key. Which absolutely wasn't a bad thing.

Thursday was a... curated session. And I say that because it was a small group, handpicked by the DM and a couple of us had asked her to run certain adventures so that our characters could adventure together again. I'll be honest, I was excited about three quarters of the players (myself included), but the other player isn't... as bitchy as this sounds... on our level. But it's not my table, and he's not a massive disruption, so I'll put up with it for the time being.

Otherwise it wasn't an overly exciting week.

I did discover on Friday that we missed the Port Adelaide Wonderwalls Street Art Festival last week. Disappointing, but it's not like the artworks are going anywhere, but it's something we'll have to put on the calendar before too long.

Today wasn't much of anything either honestly.

We've reached that time of the year again... Soup Season. Or at the very least I'm going to try it out this week, see how it goes. To be honest, I'm just tired of trying to make decisions about what the hell to make for dinner, especially since I'm currently out three nights a week.

So we'll start with vegetable soup and move forward from there.

It also meant that today's shopping was a little on the sparser side, which is as it probably should be.

After shopping we really didn't have much of a plan, but Ma wanted some thing in the city, so we headed that way and had a wander. I completely and totally forgot I wanted some glue (for a project), not that there's any rush on that, but still.

And that was about it. Now all I have to do is actually remember to make soup tomorrow .

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