Author: Lena

I tried to garden and while being inept I got a tiny bit of glass in my finger. To encourage it to escape my flesh I wrapped my finger after applying a baking soda paste.

Now I have a true friend and confidant.

I played Ticket to Ride (the app of the boardgame) on Monday with my friend Joseph. The game has a basically unusable chat feature and while I enjoyed the game it highlighted what I was missing (hanging out with my friend) more than it scratched my itch to game. It did reignite my desire to game.

Last night, I played Die Crew on weird unwieldy software mostly in German (http://brettspielwelt.de/Community/Download/) remotely with friends in both Madison Wisconsin and New York City. We paired the software with Google Hangouts for voice and face viewing. The game is a cooperative trick taking card game with a space theme. I like it! And I look forward to playing it more.

Today I played two player Tsuro, which is a wildly different game at two player. With more players (it plays up to 8 beautifully) and it is light but feels much more like chance than strategy. Two player gives room for deeper strategy. I played this with card board bits face to face with my husband creature and it was wonderful.

This evening we began playing a legacy game which we bought back in 2018 after Joseph described it with such glowing praise that I bought it before the conversation was finished.

How did the first game go? Well we (ET, Rose and I) messed up and didn’t actually play the first legacy game, we just played normal pandemic. We won! Winning was wonderful. I look forward to playing more.

Is it in bad taste to play pandemic during a pandemic?

These appeared on my porch. I think they are local, but they may be invasive?

I don’t know what to do if they are a breeding pair? I’m worried about exponential gnomes.

But mostly I feel loved and seen and understood. And deeply deeply curious as to the origin story.

Mystery gnomes!

My electrician found me a tuck pointer and I’m feeling hopeful. I got a few bricks trying to escape and my chimneys are grumpy.

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I am hopeful it’ll get fixed in a couple weeks. Home owning is exciting times.

I cried real hard. Snot escaping at velocity hard. I want to see my friends, I want to go out, I want to be able to focus. I feel guilty about how good I have it. I hate that I feel like I’m buying my safety from a supply chain that doesn’t support the people doing the hard work, I’m meaning Amazon and instacart but also parcel delivery folk and grocery store employees.

Today is going better. The stuff getting to me is still getting to me, but crying loosened something in my heart and I feel better for it.

My dad’s shrinks office called and he can have a telepresence meeting with him. This is good news as now would not be a good time for him to be manic (which is how he got a shrink).

All my previous new hair pictures were from before I re-did my hair dye. Which I did because I said I would on this blog.

I really like that on camera my hair looks pretty much like it used to, but in person, whoa, punk rock.

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Pet worms. In my kitchen, but sometimes they go on field trips to my office. Today was bring your worms to work day!

Working from home is weird. I don’t think I would mind it if it wasn’t a pandemic.

Vermiculture is cool. I checked Worms Eat My Garbage from the open library. I got a early edition https://archive.org/details/wormseatmygarbag00appe/mode/2up

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I said, I want to shave my whole head. Rose said, nah you should shave it diagonal, want me to do it now? I said I have a meeting in 10 minutes.

I was on time to the meeting. It was good use of a break. Working from home is weird.

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I have something sometimes that feels adjacent to fun. But there is too much worry and sadness and distraction for it to count as fun. I have moments of calm and hope. I have moments of joy and I have gotten to have a silly moment now and again in these last two weeks, but fun has been elusive. I love boardgames. There are numerous online and physical options I could play with my housemates, but my brain is too full. I think fun for me requires something that is between focus and let the world shrink to the activity at hand.

I do have some cool new pets. Well, “pets”, I’m doing vermiculture and have worms to give my compostables to. That has been fun. They like Apple cores. They wriggle and seen to be flourishing. Trying to craft an ecosystem is cool.

I pride myself on my ability to sleep. I’m good at sleep. I’m good at going to sleep and staying asleep. I don’t like pandemic. It is bad for my sleep.

Super early morning shower means my hair looks good.