photo saturday: professor

So what do you do when it turns out that the next DM for the Friday game doesn't want to run Adventure A, as assumed by last week's DnD Character Colouring Book, but instead, wants to run Adventure B.

You make a different character.

And I figured, if I'm doing this... why not actually play the one character class that I've never actually played before, albeit, one that I've struggled to actually get a handle on making an interesting character for.

And this is also not one of the subclasses I thought I would ever want to play. But somehow little Orval just fell into my brain pretty much fully formed. And he kinda knew who he wanted to be. So those are the characters I just run with, because, as a wise woman (by which I mean Barbra Streisand in What's Up Doc) once said... "Listen, kiddo. You can't fight a tidal wave."

So I don't try.

And yes, the look and the outfit are basically a mashup of two previous characters that I will never actually play, but I liked the look then, and I like the look now. I did try out a blue variant, but, honesty, the orange/golden yellow and purple combo is pretty much where it's at.

Like I said, he dropped in pretty fully formed, so I know a bunch of things about him, but there's also other stuff that will depend on where we start out and you know, other stuff. But I'm kind of digging it. And it should be a different kind of character to play, so that'll be good.

I mean, between now and then I fully expect to change his outfit 12 times based on what new gear appears on Hero Forge, but the core will remain.

Anyway.

This week I tried out a new soup recipe, for Easy Creamy Chicken Rice Soup, and mine came out pretty much the same as the photos with the recipe, which is always nice. Although I think I had more celery than carrot in mine, which is fine, because I like celery more than carrot anyway.

But it worked really well. And while I might not lean into this specific recipe again, I will definitely adapt some of techniques to my own soups in the future. And this soup actually taught me the proper way to use cornflour, so that was nice.

I spent various portions of the week sorting out my whole external hard drive situation... copying things across, deleting things, getting shit organised. And then I realised that when I was taking things off my laptop last week, I actually forgot to pull all of my photos from my digital cameras off the laptop. I thought I had, but then I couldn't find the folder... and realised I had been "saving it until last" and then forgot to get to "last".

Tuesday Ma lost her mind. Well, she had a stress out because her internet wasn't working, and I walked her through the things I knew that might do something (switch it on/off, stick a thingy in the reset hole, etc) but it turned out it was the NBN box and she would have to call the ISP and get them to look into it. And she just worked herself up into a tizzy about it.

I thought she'd be fine, but then I didn't hear from her for a while, so I called her back, only to find that we'd hit Peak Tizzy.

So I spent a while talking her down off that particular ledge, and basically got her in a state where she could call and have a coherent conversation with them.

Of course the upshot was, she called, they couldn't fix it over the phone, they arranged to send out an NBN tech on Thursday, he was basically there for like five minutes and it turned out that some previous work on the junction box or whatever had fucked up the connection.

So a whole storm in a teacup in order to get him there, he was there for like 10 minutes and it was all fixed before 9am.

Bless her little cotton socks.

It did partially stress me out during the week, not knowing if the problem was an easy fix. Although assuming that it probably was.

But, once again... Storm. In teacup. I will admit though, it's my preferred kind of storm. Both in size and location.

I also made apple cake... the downside is that I ended up looking at a bunch of different recipes trying to find one I'd seen the week before, and so now I can't find it. But it used oil and Greek yogurt and it was really fucking good. Admittedly, I went off the rails a little on the butter, sugar and cinnamon topping that was supposed to form like a crust on the top... too much butter, which soaked into the cake as it was cooling and was not in any way bad, it did just make the cake fall apart a little and end up kinda sticky and very sweet... although less greasy than I was expecting. It was pretty good actually. Especially with a little vanilla ice-cream.

If I can hunt down the recipe (and remember to bookmark it this time), I'm definitely going to try it again.

Thursday night DnD was good... we lost a drinking contest and therefore lost being able to rub our victory in the face of the shitty NPCs we kept encountering before that. But my boy did manage to hook up with the lovely elven NPC, so that was nice.

But now we're on the road, finding out things about each other... keeping secrets and feeling each other out. And having prolonged dream sequences. And discovering that you're having a shared dream sequence with another character... which is a bit of a shock when there was no pre-existing relationship established between the two characters.

Good though. Fun though. Something to dig into later though.

Friday night DnD was equally good. Not least of all because I got to drop the needle on various things that I've been waiting to do for a while. And finally got to reveal to them what happened to the things they'd lost. And reveal to Fluffy's character what his mother looks like. And retell a story I'd already told from a different perspective now that they know that it's important and to pay attention to it.

What's interesting is how much stuff just rolls off my tongue without pre-planning it. There are whole chunks of this adventure that go a little off book that have just gone straight from brain to mouth. And I very much dig that. Even just pivoting in the moment based on dice rolls and things they do.

It's also all very good fun.

Next session will be a little more back-tracky as they head back to see the first hag, not knowing whether or not she knows that the second hag is dead.

So that'll be a fun time.

Anyway...

Today wasn't much of anything yet again.

We did the supermarket thing, didn't buy a huge amount, but then afterwards we were basically going to call it a day until we decided to head down to see if we could find some kind of trellis/support for my twenty year old parlor palm... yeah, that bitch is old. And a touch top heavy these days. So we'll see how this goes.

There were a few other things we grabbed, nothing overly exciting, just useful stuff. But we then discovered that they'd overcharged us on a couple of items. So back in I went to make them sort it out. Yes, it was less than $10 but it was the principle of the thing.

And that's about it really.

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