With the Thursday DnD group winding up our current campaign book, talk had started about what the next thing will be.
And, potentially, depending on what we end up playing, I have a few options... at the time it was four different characters... but there was some shade being thrown about whether they were all halflings. And none of them are. So I had to remind my beloved Thursday friends that I've played more races than them.
Also, that I've played every race (although, not subrace) in the Players Handbook, except for half-orcs.
Because generally speaking, I've never been able to come up with a half-orc concept that I really like.
And then Hero Forge dropped a full jester outfit, complete with big dumb hat, on April 1.
So this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is what happened when that outfit plus half-orc started living in my brain.
Brother Jinx started out as playing around with the outfit (with a totally different name) and ended up being an interesting character. Partly because I was digging into some of the lore around the Orc gods and found a couple of interesting bits and pieces that I could have built a very different character around... but in the end I invented an order of the human god of endurance and suffering. But kept some of the orc god stuff for background flavour.
It would be a weird character to play honestly. I already worked my way around some of the issues... he puppet is a re-skinned shield, the bells are all silent, he's a Trickery Cleric, which isn't connected with Ilmater, but, fuck it, I hate sticking to the recommended lists a lot of the time.
I work on clerics by Pirates of the Caribbean rules... they're more like guidelines anyway.
Also, they have him listed as being connected to the Twilight domain, and that makes no damn sense to me. So fuckkit.
I do need to come up with a better in-universe reason for why he carries the puppet around though.
However, as much as I was obsessed with the particular character at the beginning of last week, by the end of the week, my favour had moved on to a different character... or the ongoing development of a character I designed previously, abandoned, redesigned, considered, re-redesigned and is probably at the head of the queue for potential new characters.
But that's going to have to wait a couple of weeks before it gets a debut...
So now I have five potential characters... but only three of the five were in the original four. If that makes any sense.
Moving on.
Oh... I had to make a brief trip to Officeworks last Sunday, so since I was already out and about in the car, I went, fukkit and went off to Burnside Village (and yes, the opposite direction, let me live my life okay :P) to the bakery.
Coming out of the bakery, I looked up to where I could see the old apartment and went... yeah, fukkit... let's go for a little walk. So I took a wander and went and peeked in the window of the old place. Well, first I looked at the For Sale poster outside, then I went up to be nosy.
I understand what a stylist is supposed to do, from a real estate perspective. Create an... atmosphere. Make people envision how they'd live in the space, but at the same time, doing it with the minimum of actual furniture and also, the blandest possible option. And there's always a Donna Hay cookbook and some sort of fruit or vegetable. At least when they take the photos.
But I generally imagine that real estate stylists just have a garage full of Kmart/Ikea furniture and really ugly paintings, a box of Donna Hay cookbooks and a lot of fake plants. Also, a bed that I am convinced is actually made of cardboard boxes.
Honestly, though, I don't get some of the stylists choices. Like, why that gigantic standing lamp with the huge black shade? And why is there a bottle of "champagne" and two glasses out on one of two small circular coffee tables? Why is the "orchid" (I assume they're all fake plants, honestly) on the dining table off centre? Why did you put a folding chair next to the toilet?
Important questions.
Oh, and they did install yet another set of those horizontal blinds in the kitchen window, so now the only window without them is the little window in the bathroom. Good luck cleaning that shit new owners...
But honestly, I couldn't see a ton of that through the windows... a lot of it I saw in the real estate photos when I looked them up just now.
It was a little weird actually heading up the stairs, knowing I didn't actually live there anymore, but looking at the photos really just hammered that home. Given that I know every inch of the apartment in those photos (not counting the dumb temporary furniture), it's an odd feeling, but not a bad one.
Weirdly, while it seems like it's basically a done deal, as the apartment is "under offer", the actual listed price is lower than I expected. Honestly, I have no fucking basis for comparison, but it seemed... cheap. Totally out of my price range, but, cheap, relatively speaking.
Moving on.
Well... Soup Season 2022 has officially begun.
And, honestly, it was a pretty good start. The only issue was me using a little bit too much bacon grease... because I had a bunch of it left over from various bacon cookings, and had intended to use it on the first potato and bacon soup of the year.
Which I did... but perhaps I should have only used a bit of it, rather than all of it. Because all of it was a tiny bit much. Tasty... but... you know.
The only downside was the fact that it took much longer for it to come to the boil... but, there are ways around that.
Also, it was a relief not to have to actually cook at all for the rest of the week.
Fun fact. I officially unpacked the last box on Monday. Well, the last of the moving company boxes, anyway. Woo.
And it consumed quite a bit of the day. Because I unpacked everything, went through everything again, then started putting things into the last two drawers. It worked out pretty well, but then the following day I went through a bunch of the folders in the bookcase by the door and cleaned out a bunch of shit I didn't need to be hanging onto.
Instructions for things I no longer own, rental inspection sheets for the old apartment... many old and unimportant things.
And culled out a whole folder's worth of stuff. Or rearranged enough of the stuff that it all fit in one less folder.
I also gave all the stuff in the bedroom a stern talking to, moved most of the artwork that was still packaged up into places where it was out of the way (wardrobe, behind the bed and next to the external pantry shelves respectively) and unwrapped one of the big pieces and just leaned it against the wall.
There's still some mess... although some of it I just shoved into a storage box during the week, since I had no idea what to actually do with it, but at the same time it wasn't stuff I could just throw away.
So we're getting there.
Moving on.
There was no Thursday DnD this week. Because of possible close contact stuff, it probably would have been perfectly safe, but yeah, not taking the risks. Thankfully I'm not the only one that has that opinion which is good.
Friday was... a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things... but still an annoyance.
Basically, I ordered a thing, the thing was being delivered on Friday, so I knew it would probably arrive early, since that's what happened last time. So I dicked around tidying things up... no delivery. And when I checked the tracking, they were all "we couldn't deliver it, soz"... and I was understandably annoyed because I was in my fucking house.
Turns out the delivery driver couldn't read simple numbers and got confused and tried to deliver it to one of my downstairs neighbours who weren't there. So, they got a slightly angry comment in the "please redeliver" webform.
And I don't get my delivery until Monday. Sadface.
Friday night DnD was... mostly us being frustrated by an obtuse puzzle. And there's a lot of that in DnD... puzzles that are simple when you know the answer, but the puzzle and the environment (by which I mean the adventure designers) don't actually give you the tools you need in order to work the puzzle out.
Granted we'd also totally fluked a door trap that could only be overcome by a very specific spell earlier in the same area, so... swings and roundabouts.
Also DM Fluffy then had both a magical anvil and a weird insectile Ice Devil hit on my character. Well... the anvil was just creepily horny... the Ice Devil however, was definitely hitting on my good sweet dwarf boy.
Granted we then let Mr's character in to talk to the devil and he's always the one who's going to do the dumb thing and make a deal... which seems perfectly fine in the moment... and maybe never comes up as an issue in the game itself... but it's still an issue in the world.
Basically, I should have just fucked the devil, it would have been quicker and less messy in general.
Moving on.
Today was... a lot of going places.
Well... a lot of driving between places really.
We did the supermarket thing, I bought the ingredients for the Halfling Tomato Soup I was so very fond of last year. We came back here, I unpacked, which somehow seems to take forever at the moment. Maybe that's just because I'm putting certain things in other containers other than the ones they came in. So there's that.
Then we took some books and stuff into the Oxfam Shop in town... only to find they were having a book sale out on the footpath again. And as much as it might have been fun to peruse what was there, I just got all of my books to a perfect balance, which may now mean one in, one out for a while... so... no more new books right now.
Ma had decided on the replacement microwave she wanted, but, of course, she needed me to schlep the box and get it out and move the old one. So we headed to the Kmart nearest her, which is in a shopping centre that I don't think I've actually been to in... maybe 15, 20 years. It's just not a place I ever need to go for any reason. So it was weird, because the whole thing has clearly been done up and expanded and developed since the last time I was there, but there were still some bits of the layout and architecture that I kind of recognised. Which was weird.
So, microwave in box, box in car, car on road.
Cut to Ma's place, and box out of car, microwave out of box, other microwave in the car, new microwave in spot.
And then it took me like three tries to set the clock. Mostly because the first two times I was doing it like my microwave and that wasn't how it actually worked. Once I looked at the instructions, first time, baby.
Then we took the old microwave to Bunnings to dump it in their e-recycling bin. And had a bit of a wander around and I ended up grabbing a little succulent... so we'll see how long that survives.
Granted, I feel like I would have said much the same thing about the parlour palm and that's 16 years old.
Essentially Ma drove to my place this morning, we drove to Kmart, then to her place, drove back to my place via Bunnings and then she drove home again.
Good times. Good times.
That's pretty much that though.
Current mood: