photo saturday: icewind dale rangers

Meet the Icewind Dale Rangers. 

And yes, it sounds like an ice hockey team, and very probably they have and/or do play hockey, or whatever the DnD/fantasy equivalent is.

But this is what happens when I start creating back-up characters and don't know when to stop. And it's also why they're rangers by profession but not all rangers by class. Also partially because I didn't come up with some of the actual builds/class for them until later.

Before we even started playing, I'd already been playing around with Chane and Cutter (Cuts Like A Knife)... Chane is a Rune Knight Fighter and Cutter is a Swarmkeeper... because I really, really want to play a Swarmkeeper at some point. And then I wasn't really feeling either of them. 

Next came Snow, and I considered Shadow Monk or Scout Rogue, but then Mr and Mrs decided on monk and rogue for their classes... so in the end he became a Gloomstalker, because what better to plan in a land where the sun never completely rises.

Then, once we were playing, along came Brocc... and I'll fully admit, I recycled the name from a character I half build and never did anything with. And for a while there, Brocc the Artificer and his Steel Defender wolf Ravage were definitely going to be my backup. It kept the "three gnomes" thing alive.

And I don't remember which bit came first, but DM Fluffy and I joked about the fact that given that Quill was a female druid that was part of group of female druids... so, conversely, maybe there was an all male group of rangers that were the opposite of the druids... and that I had enough back-up characters to basically populate that group. I feel like it was all part of the same conversation, but we've had a lot of conversation about the rangers over time.

Then Fluffy decided to a) add in Dreth, the nominal leader of the rangers and b) make Quill's son Kipper/Bo an apprentice to the rangers.

Then Leif just bubbled up in my head and overtook everyone else as the definitive back-up character. I think I was just playing around making a male dwarf, because I've never played a male dwarf before, and the original version just kind of grew on me.

I also couldn't resist adding in a Fairy ranger who was a Fey Wanderer, so that's Thorn... because, why would I not do that. He was never a serious contender for backup, I just wanted to round out the team. And then as part of Leif's backstory and an offhand comment by Fluffy, I came up with one final member who went south and can't get back, plus the apprentice he went to bring back. Bringing the final number to 10. The same as the druids before all the death and desertion and the same as the number of the towns.

I'll talk about it later, but it's kind of strange that they're all officially out there in the game (instead of just Dreth) now as NPCs rather than all just living in my head.

Moving on...

Unpacking.

Unpacking sucks even when you have a plan for what you're doing and know where things are ultimately going.

The only way that it can suck more is when you don't, in fact, have one of those plans.

Guess who hasn't had a plan all week. Yep, this guy.

I started out on Monday morning by going to take the old keys back to the land agent. Well, after I moved a lot of the boxes around, so that I could actually move stuff around in the main room.

But I sent through the email to my old land agent that I'd written over the weekend, then went and dropped the keys off, which was very anticlimactic. I literally gave them to the very disinterested receptionist, told her that I'd sent an email through to my land agent and that was that.

I still haven't gotten a fucking reply to my email though. Not even an "everything was great, your bond is being processed"... or, at the bare minimum, a "thank you for your email" message. Rude.

But because it was just around the corner from Cheap as Chips I went and wandered around there briefly, mostly looking for specific extension cords. Long story short, I went to four different places, took photos of a number of items that could be good, didn't buy anything, came home with just the printing for my new character from Officeworks.

Long story long, I went from Cheap as Chips to Big W, then to Kmart, then to Officeworks. While there was a lot of stuff I was vaguely interested in, nothing caught my eye enough to buy... and also I really needed to work out properly what I need. But it was nice to just go out and wander around for a bit.

Then I came back and rearranged the furniture in the main room for the... third... fourth time. I'm not sure at this point. I think fourth. Certainly the final time. Because, you know, of what happened next.

Next up I started unboxing DVDs... but made the fatal mistake of thinking that I should arrange things differently...

Like that specifically.

And, while it made sense from a practical perspective, having all the DVDs in the same space, It didn't quite... work. Maybe it would have if I'd broken up the arrangement a little more like what I ended up doing later, but all this led to was, essentially, decision paralysis.

A little like when I fell in a hole before the move because I couldn't see my way past the choice of a moving company. Even though I already had one booked.

So, after a conversation with Ma... one of many throughout the day on Monday, I reorganised the shelves, reorganised the DVDs and got things in much more of an appropriate structure, even if a lot of it was very similar/the same as the way I had it laid out in the old place.

At least it got me past my decision paralysis.

After that, I unboxed my CDs (I think there might be some in one of the other boxes still honestly), put them on their little skinny shelf, had dinner and started unboxing the books. While also working out all of the books that... I just don't care about anymore. It pretty much started when I opened one of the book boxes and there were those very famous books about a boy wizard. And, given certain behaviour by the author of those books, I realised that I just didn't care about the books anymore.

The movies are different, if only because those are the product of many people's effort and energy.

So they went into the donate box. And were followed by other things that just, in the words of a very wise woman, no longer sparked joy. But maybe they will for somebody else.

I did start off trying to put things on the shelves as I unboxed them, but I realised that I really needed to unbox it all and then work out what I wanted to put together together.

By the time I was finished unpacking all the book boxes, it was getting late, so I called it a night and started again in the morning.

There were some bits I knew... Elfquest books go here on the far left. Superhero graphic novels go there on the far right, other graphic novels go just under them. DnD books go in the centre section, right under the space where Lego R2D2 will go. Discworld books go all across that shelf, overflow on the next available shelf.

There's a system.

But beyond that I ended up grouping the books in ways I haven't before. The detective and mystery novels and the Penguin books went with the Discworld overflow, this shelf is now vampire/Gaiman and other odd-themed fiction... we'll call this shelf "made into/book about a movie/other media" shelf. Gay fiction goes over here... oh, and these two shelves... yeah, okay, that's the "whatever is left over" shelves.

Not all of it is perfect. I know that there are vampire novels on the "movie/media" shelf, some of the books on the vampire shelf should be on the media shelf... but I don't really care.

I do like the way the shelves came out though.

As you can also see from the photos, I did also move a shelf full of DVDs from the wide shelf on the left to the wide shelf on the right. Just because there weren't any DVDs on that bookcase and it just looked... odd.

And because I essentially got rid of a whole wide shelf full of books, it allowed me to have more shelves for decoration, and put all my DnD and other things of that nature across the bottom of the shelves on the left. Plus I have a spot at the bottom on the left for my small board game collection. Granted there's only Thornwatch down there right now, because the others are still in boxes.

There maybe be some minor adjustments in the coming days/weeks, but as things start to make more sense to me or I realise I need slightly more space in other areas, I can adjust shelves up and down as needed.

I like it though.

And unsurprisingly, once I had the bookcases sorted, the place felt more like it was mine. Partially because it had more of my STUFF visibly in it.

Then Tuesday night I got my biggest surprise.

Because I'd rearranged the furniture and had decided to take a break in order to watch Critical Role, as has been my Tuesday nights for some time. And because the chairs now face the window, I happened to glance through the window as the sun was setting and notice what I thought were birds... but it was very late for birds. Then I realised, not birds... bats.

The new apartment is directly in the nightly flight plan of the grey-headed flying foxes as they set out from their roosts in the Botanical Gardens and go hunting.

Fucking magical.

As is always the case, whenever I encounter bats at dusk, I instantly go back to the first trip we made to Sydney and standing at traffic lights on Oxford Street and seeing them fly over the top of a gothic looking church.

So, now I get to watch them flap their way past my front door on the regular. Love it. I will say that as much as I love the big languid fruit bats... I have a fondness for whatever the tiny little bats are that accompany them and fly around like they're overly caffeinated.

Wednesday... Wednesday was a lot.

I started on the kitchen on Wednesday. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I don't get putting food in kitchen cupboards. I get a pantry. I don't get cupboards. Because you end up putting everything in and then you can only see the stuff at the front, and I hate it.

Yeah... kitchen unpacking wasn't fun. I also broke a bowl. So, I emptied a lot of boxes, I folded a lot of packing paper and a lot of bubblewrap, I had stuff covering the counters. And in the end, the kitchen is still a disaster, I hate the layout of everything. Plus I've kind of ended up two two kitchens. The one made up of the pantry shelf and things on the left side of the room and the actual kitchen on the right side. With a Great Wall between them.

I'll get there. I'm not there yet. And about half of the cupboards are empty because a) I don't want to have to get on a ladder every time I want X item from the top shelf (a problem that I overcame at the old place by only putting stuff up the top I really didn't care about).

Also, once everything else is unpacked and things are in wardrobes and cupboards and places... then I can pull things out of the kitchen cupboards and work out what works for me. And by then I should have worked out what does and doesn't really work for me in that space.

It's annoying, because if the kitchen just continued along the back wall of the apartment and didn't fucking stick out in the middle of the room, I could have arranged things much more to my liking.

But it is what it is.

When I was done with the kitchen I think I ended up going through all the cards in my wallet and updating my address everywhere that I hadn't thought about updating it already. And that was an exercise in trying to log into websites I haven't logged into in upwards of 5 or 6 years. So that was... a lot.

I got most of it done though. There are some bits and pieces that might occur to me later, but overall, it was time well spent.

Thursday... mostly, I spent Thursday slightly in a huff.

Because we were supposed to be doing our Thursday night DnD return... but someone couldn't make it and people wanted to go ahead anyway, and I was like... just wait the extra fucking week. It's not like we were in the middle of anything. But I figured that we would go ahead anyway... and I wasn't about to sit there and debate it throughout the day. So I closed the laptop and continued unpacking.

Only to discover that a consensus has been agreed to in my absence that I was right. Which I always like, but by that point I'd finished shaving my head, taken a second shower, put on "going outside pants" and was assuming I was leaving the house. Turns out no. Which was also fine, I was tired, clearly cranky, and it was probably better all around that I didn't go out.

Otherwise, Thursday I unpacked more boxes... nothing major, a few bits of decor, like Lego R2D2, made things a little more organised, and generally tried to make space so that I could move around more easily.

It's a work in progress.

I also got through the majority of the YouTube videos I had in my To Watch list... because I just ended up watching the same three or four things essentially on repeat during the last few days at the old house.

And I made bread dough. Just plain. I need to work out the new baseline before I start fucking with it in the new oven.

Friday... Friday started with a trip to the Chiro. Which meant the first trip into the city on the bus. A little more of a walk, and I need to cross a couple of roads, but otherwise, easy enough. And I'm closer to the city now, which means a slightly shorter journey.

After the appointment, I did some shopping with my Christmas money. Actually, I started off by making an appointment to speak to somebody at the Apple Store about the issue I was having with my iPhone Calendar no long syncing with my Google Calendar.

Because I'm not dumb, I did that first, and then went shopping, because I knew that I was going to have to wait. So, let's shop.

I went and bought tiny folding scissors from Lincraft. They look... less well made that my memory of the ones I used to have. But what is weird is they look very much like the ones that Ma has. So either mine were slightly better quality originally... or my memory is faulty... or the correct answer occurs somewhere between those two thoughts.

But I now have tiny folding scissors on my keyring for the first time in 12 years. Woo.

I also picked up a Dungeon Masters Guide at Greenlight, along with one of those gemstone d6 dice from Level Up. Now I have all three core books from both 3e and 5e.

Then I went to Games World with the intention of getting a set of dice. Because I've spent a lot of time browsing in that store, and I kinda wanted to buy something for a change. Turns out that the specific dice set I wanted were masters of stealth. Supposedly they had two sets in store. And neither the guy behind the counter nor myself could actually find them.

So back to Greenlight, where I knew they had the dice I wanted... because I'd already seen them there. What I didn't realise is that the Nebula Spring dice had glow in the dark speckles through them, so that was a nice surprise.

They'll also be useful for both Leif and as my DM Feywild dice for Wild Beyond The Witchlight.

Sadly, at that point, I'd done all of my shopping, but the Apple Store wasn't ready for me... I mean, who is... but I wandered around a little more, and ended up just sitting outside for a while.

And after all of that, the answer was... delete the connection and reconnect it.

Fuck. Because, as I'd assumed, you no longer need to do the CalDiv thing, you just connect your Google account the calendar and go from there.

I think maybe why I used to do it the other way is that I used to sync my work calendar to my Google Calendar, and then that used to sync to my phone. Or... work calendar to phone, then to Google... something.

Was it worth the wait... based on time spent, no, not really. Based on result. Absolutely.

Then I headed home, realised that there were other buses I could have caught, but would have had to walked up from the Parade. So, we'll file that under "things that are good to know for later". But when I was almost home the landlord called about some maintenance things I'd logged with the land agent via email over the weekend. Good to know it's a fast turn around time. Also that the land agent is basically useless beyond being an email redirection.

But, he's going to come and look at/fix things on Tuesday.

I did a little more unpacking on Friday afternoon and then Fluffy arrived to do the Session Zero for Leif before Friday night DnD.

Like the Session Zero for Quill, it was good to get a handle on who the character was before unleashing them at the table.

Most of what I learned about Leif came from his interactions with Quill's son.

Also, the first bread cooked by electricity and not gas was... actually a pretty good success. What I discovered (and would have known if I'd thought about it for all of about 8 seconds) is that when the timer goes off on the oven, it cuts the heat off as well. Which is super useful, especially as I left the bread in for another five or so minutes, and it actually browned up beautifully and the crust went really crusty. Which was lovely.

So, not a disaster, put a check mark in the success column.

<brief pause for dinner>

And right on time, here come the bats. Hello babies.

So, Friday night DnD. It was good to be back after a week off. And I enjoyed introducing Leif to the others. The accent I worked out came and went a little. I wasn't trying for anything super thick, so it might waver a little until I dial it in properly. My keys to remember are "30% deep, 30% accent #2"... you know, the one that's a little bit Russian, a little bit non-specific Eastern European, a little bit Mediterranean Sea. But that was also the accent I did for Nightingale. But that was the lighter, female version.

Like I said, it's a work in progress. I need to remember to keep it deep though. Because dwarf.

Otherwise it was fun watching the fallout from my decision two weeks back. And catching them up on information I learned during my Session Zero.

And DM Fluffy got his DM rocks off by having an invisible creature steal from the party and nobody be able to work out what was going on. Worse still, my animal companion failed to work out something was wrong by failing the check by 1. Yep, a single unit of measure. Grrr.

Oh well... this isn't the Puppies and Rainbows adventure... and at least everyone is still alive. We all just feel real fucking dumb right now. Oh well.

I also took a set of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and dukkah that Ma gave me for Christmas... a couple of years ago. And we polished it the fuck off. It wasn't the best dukkah I've ever had, but the oil and the vinegar was quite nice. We also polished off a whole plate full of bread before we even sat at the table.

So that was a success.

Today wasn't much of anything honestly.

We did the supermarket thing, came back here, I wrangled Ma's iTunes in order to work out how to put her ring tones back on. Why they didn't come back over when mine did, I couldn't tell you. But that's fixed now.

Then we headed to Officeworks to print something for Ma... which turned into a disaster when the PDF refused to print the details that Ma had entered into the form. Like, it did some of them on one of the three pages, but not the rest of them. So that was frustrating.

After spending far too much time doing a job that should have been five minutes at most, we headed off to Kmart to take another look at some of the stuff I looked at on Monday.

But the Kmart we went to was a different one from the one I looked in on Monday, and they seemed to have about half as much stuff. A common problem in the world right now. So we didn't really get anything beyond some shades for my car and a pillow for Ma.

You could call it a completely wasted trip... but nothing on my mental shopping list is super urgent, and I probably want to do an IKEA run before making final decisions on a bunch of things.

On the upside, a bunch of empty but useful boxes, used packing paper and bubblewrap is now out of my house.

And I'm down to four large green boxes and two small green boxes. Plus another five or six random boxes, and the art that was in boxes from the old house. So I'm going okay. If only I didn't need to get rid of at least one piece of furniture before everything settles down into it's final spot. And my knee is much better, but not completely so, plus my bruises are fading to that yellow/green stage.

All in good time.

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