Corner of Bourbon & Division

 I played Stardew Valley today for about an hour and a half and then had to call it quits because poor Peggy started howling in abject misery at being left on her own.

There's been a massive new update to the game (just before Christmas) and I have been trying to get to the new stuff, but between work and, well, *gestures vaguely* I am still in "Year 1" of my current playthrough, and the new stuff is mostly geared for after "Year 2."

SDV is a game I keep coming back to. It's a sweet, gentle little game that pushes all the right buttons for me. It's billed as a farming simulator, but there is so much content. It's got a super weird undercurrent of monsters and magic, obviously has had a lot of world building put into it, and was all written, designed, and programmed by one guy. It's very obvious that the game developer has Opinions about some things, but I've never come across anything so objectionable as to make me completely nope out of the game..

It's a nice escapist fantasy for me, too, since I can't actually live out my dream of purchasing a hobby farm. Instead I get to play a video game in which a kindly grandpa leaves me his derelict old farm in a town I've never heard of, and not only do I rebuild the farm from scratch, I also basically re-build the entire local community and economy single-handed, which is a heck of an ego boost, I'm not going to lie. There are story incentives for socializing with the townsfolk (you learn more about them and their families as you increase friendship levels), and game mechanics incentives for people who are less story-motivated than I am (they send you stuff in the mail or give you recipes).

I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is that the writing doesn't make every NPC a perfect person. There's a lot of small town stuff going on: people with secrets, with less pleasant personalities, people struggling with addiction and PTSD (there is a war veteran in town), and a man who has chosen to live outside the restrictions of society but who is nonetheless a part of the community. 

Anyway, it was a nice interlude in my day. Peggy has been winding down so I may sneak upstairs and get in another few minutes before bed. She's snoozing on the sofa, so she can just as easily snooze on her nice comfy bed in her crate.

Tomorrow I go back to work. I'm not dreading it, but I'd rather stay home and play Stardew Valley, not going to lie.

It's a statutory holiday here today, so that means I get to wear jeans to work! I have come to deeply loathe and resent having to wear "business casual" office clothing, so God help me if I ever end up having to work in a regular office setting again. Right now I only have to wear the hated clothes about five days a month, often less, when I'm working day shifts during the week, and the rest of the time I can wear comfy jeans, which is my favourite thing to do.

Not much has happened since I last posted. I have been procrastinating like crazy on unpacking the house and doing anything remotely productive when it comes to keeping my life together.

Instead I've been playing Stardew Valley, which is entirely the fault of fearsclave , who, as usual, is a terrible influence. It's a horribly addictive little farming sim game, which is normally not at all my bag, but on top of the farming there is a significant emphasis on social relationships and community building in the game: the goal is not just to become good at farming, but to integrate a small community and become a respected member of society. The village, called Pelican Town, is also disturbingly realistic in some ways when it comes to depicting small town life, and the otherwise cute and lighthearted game has gotten dark on me a few times. There are characters with depression, suffering from isolation and alcoholism, people on the fringes of "civilised" society. Anyway, it's been weirdly compelling, and it has occupied a lot of my free time in the past three weeks. I finally reached some of the artificial goals the game sets this past weekend, so hopefully my fervor for it will die down a little now, and let me be productive in other ways.

I took Sergent to the vet last week for his shots, and also for our third ride on the "Does the Dog Have Cushing's Disease?" merry go round. I was worried because he's been having accidents in the house ever since I moved. I had attributed it to stress at first, but since it had continued for a month after (though with diminishing frequency), and he's been presenting with other symptoms (panting, less energy, whatnot), a lot of the signs pointed to something else going on. $1,000 later, and the good news is that he still doesn't have Cushings. The bad news is that I'm almost out of savings now. *sigh* I have a new vet, one who is much closer to home, which is much better news for both the pets, who hate being in the car for extended periods, and for my sanity, because my previous vet was an hour away by car, which meant that a vet visit before this meant basically writing off the entire day. It will be nice to be able to do other things on Vet Days now.

In more uplifting news, my new friends L. and J. managed to sell their house, and as of last week no longer live right next to the people who harassed them and made their existence a living misery for two years! I'm so excited and happy for them. They're still looking for a permanent place to live (they both suffer from severe mould allergies. which means they have to be very careful about finding a new home), but at least they now don't have to orchestrate their lives around making sure a vehicle is always parked around their home and that they're not alone for extended periods of time. They no longer have to wear their hoods up to keep their faces covered, or be afraid to leave their house during the day (they did most of their moving in the dead of night), or have their neighbours rev their truck engines at them half the night or point floodlights at their house at all hours, or leave threatening notes on their car windshield. In short, this is fantastic news for them. They sold their house to a heterosexual white couple who already have ties in the neighbourhood, so they're confident the new people won't also be the target of harassment, so it's good all around.

This past weekend ended up busier than any other time since I moved. I ran D&D on Saturday for the first time in over two months, and it went pretty well. I planned a non-combat session for my players: a solstice festival which would allow them to roleplay and just have some fun without worrying about getting killed or having larger moral decisions to make. It was a good way to get back into the swing of things, and give me a bit of breathing space to try to plan out the next arc of their story. In a way, Levels 1-5 were there to help them figure out who their characters are, but now I want to try to start pulling things together and introducing them to the larger world I've been creating. It would likely help me if I worked out more of the details of my world, I guess. :P I don't know if they'll make it all the way to Level 20, but I have plans for them if they do, that's for sure. I just have to figure out what I want to see happen in the interim, and how to make it as much fun for them as possible, too. I have a lot of their backstories to play with as well, which ought to be fun.

Sunday I went to Meeting, after missing two weeks due to work. Now that I'm a Member I'm finding it more difficult to arrange my life with so few free weekends. I'm the clerk of First Day School, which means I feel obligated to lead FDS at least once a month, which means I have only one Sunday a month to attend Meeting, and therefore that's usually the Sunday I will sacrifice if I have to make other plans (like go on a trip, or what have you), but it means I sometimes won't attend Meeting for several months, and I feel really bad about that. I have no good solution to this, unfortunately, short of finding a job that doesn't require me to work weekends, or winning the lottery so I don't have to work at all anymore. :P

Meeting was more stressful than usual, too, because we had an elderly Member become unresponsive during worship. I feel especially bad, because I noticed early on that he appeared to have fallen asleep during worship, and was drooling a little at the time, and I debated with myself if I should go check and see if he was okay and decided against it. This happened to him last year (the only two times I've ever seen him attend Meeting, for that matter), and I wondered if it might not be happening again, but I worried about overstepping my bounds, as I don't know him at all. If I end up in a similar situation again, I'm damned well not going to worry about being told to mind my own business, so long as it means I'm not possibly sacrificing someone's health and safety in the name of social delicacy. It was a poor decision on my part not to interrupt Meeting to check on him, and I regret it.

When worship was over, it became obvious that something was wrong, and people were oddly reluctant to call for medical help for the man. A few of his friends said they would just take him home, and so I stepped in then and put my foot down. He was slumped over in his chair and completely unresponsive, his skin was clammy, and his breathing was extremely rapid and shallow. "I'm calling an ambulance," I told them, and then got them to move chairs aside so the paramedics would have room to work, and employed my best crowd management techniques to get well-meaning but unhelpful people and the looky-loos out of the way. An ambulance arrived within about three minutes, which was great, along with a policeman, who was helpful in getting people to move back and also to have someone to act as a point of contact with the gentleman's family, whom we were having trouble contacting during the emergency.

The funny thing is, because I was the one who essentially took charge of the emergency, everyone at Meeting decided I must know everything there was to know about the gentleman who'd collapsed. People kept asking me what his medical conditions were, if I'd contacted his children, all sorts of things, when the truth is that I didn't even know the guy's name. I'd never met him properly: I just knew from last summer, when he'd also collapsed at Meeting, that there was a history of this happening. Anyway, in light of this latest event, I approached the Meeting clerk and told her we should suggest that everyone volunteer to give us emergency contact information, for cases such as these. We got lucky that a few of the Members in attendance that day not only knew the man, but had phone numbers for his children in their cell phone contacts, but those Members could just as easily not have been there that day, and then the children would not have found out for hours or perhaps even days that their father was in the hospital.

Everything turned out okay, as far as I know: the gentleman was already awake and more responsive by the time the ambulance took him to the hospital, so I'm sure he will be fine. Still, it could have gone much better, and I have learned quite a few lessons from what I did wrong yesterday.

Back to better news: I'm slated to go to a fandom convention next week, which I'm really looking forward to. It has changed names, from Wincon to Confabulation, but it's basically still the same con. I'm looking forward to seeing all the friends I made there last time once more, just to hang out and geek out about fannish stuff. It's a convention run by fans, for fans, with no celebrity guests, which keeps the prices mercifully low, and lets us have panels and round tables to discuss all of our beloved things in depth, which is one of my favourite things to do! So I'm pretty psyched about it, even though it's coming at a time when I no longer have the kind of money I thought I'd have before going, due to unexpectedly having to move and two very hefty vet bills in a three-month period. Still, I can swing it, only because I'd been carefully putting money aside for this convention since last year. I just wish this year had been less expensive.


And that's it! Things are starting to happen in my life again, so with any luck I will be around more and posting.

The children didn't turn up until very late today for First Day School, so I got to sit in Meeting for almost half an hour instead of trying to wrangle them all. It also turned out to be only one out of the sibling set of three, the cooperative eight-year-old, so it worked out in my favour, since I only had to entertain her for about twenty minutes. We made gluten-free Rice Krispy squares, which turned out reasonably well (somehow mine always turn out super fluffy instead of dense the way I'm accustomed to them being when other people make them).

It worked out well for me, since I slept pretty badly last night and was not really in any kind of shape to chase after the older boy today. I spent all night waking up from nightmares induced by playing way too much 7 Days to Die with my friend V. I'm doing much better in the game now, although I'm still not very good at it. Yesterday we played up until just past the "Blood Moon," when the zombies in the game all swarm and go berserk and try extra hard to kill you, and we made a mistake trying to secure our temporary shelter. We thought we were safe, and suddenly we were being overrun from almost all sides and it was all extremely stressful. So my subconscious took hold of that and ran with it all freaking night long. Thanks, brain. :P

Otherwise, Meeting went well. Today was potluck day, and I met several new people. Two were visiting from a Meeting near Philadelphia (lots and lots of Old Quaker Families™ there), and the others were new attenders, so I tried to be as welcoming and not-overwhelming as possible with them. They seem really nice, and so I hope they decide to come back. My Clearness Committee was there, too (minus one member), to meet up and finalize their report for next Sunday's Meeting for Worship for Business.

For those of you unfamiliar with Quaker process, I applied to officially become a Member of the Meeting last month (I submitted a letter to the Meeting which was read out loud at Meeting for Business by the Clerk), and they decided that I should then take the next step, which was to meet with a Clearness Committee, which in my case consists of three people. There's no set number of people, but it's usually 3-4, I think, unless the Meeting is too small to accommodate that number. A Clearness Committee is there to help an aspiring Member discern whether their Leading is truly to become a Member, or whether they need to wait and learn some more, or maybe even reconsider.

Leadings and discernment are another big part of the Quaker process: everything is done with great deliberation, which I must confess appeals to me a lot. It will not surprise most of you when I say that I myself am not a person who makes decisions easily: I tend to weigh as many sides of a question as possible before coming to a conclusion, and the more important a decision, the longer it will take me. That's not to say that I can make small decisions quickly—just ask anyone who's ever gone out to a restaurant with me. :P

I met with my Clearness Committee last Wednesday, while I was in the midst of Landlady Woes™. We arranged to meet at someone else's house, since one of the members of my committee is allergic to dogs. We spent nearly two hours talking, during which they asked me lots of questions about my spiritual path, and why I was drawn to the Quaker community to begin with. It was very intense, and all three women on my committee are very passionate about this, which made for a great conversation. One of them, amusingly enough, kept coming to my "defence," as the other two kept getting excitable and interrupting me. She kept telling them to let me finish my sentences, which was almost as distracting as the interruptions themselves. Eventually I had to—nicely—tell her that it was okay, that I could advocate for myself if I really needed it, and we ended up having a laugh over it. All in all, I thought it went very well, and I'm curious to see what they've put in their report.

And that concludes this week's adventures.

( Off work for a bit longer )
What have I been doing in the interim? Well, for a week or so I stayed in, napped a lot, and did a lot of gaming. I've slowly been crawling out of my shell to venture outdoors again, and visiting the vegetable garden a bit more, and mostly trying to reset my brain back to normal parameters.

The veggie garden is doing beautifully.( Veggie garden update, picture-heavy )( Gaming stuff behind the cut )

So toughlovemuse introduced me to video games last night. She showed me a game called, I think, "Dragon Quest," and let me play it for a while. I think she was a little amused by many of my reactions.

1- Let me start out by saying that it was a great deal of fun to play. I am glad I don't own a gaming console or a computer powerful enough to play games, because you'd never see me again.

2- The game went counter to most of my upbringing. toughlovemuse kept telling me to run places, and it made me twitch, because, well, running indoors is bad. So I kept trying to walk places, except that walking is more unwieldy than running thanks to the gaming console.

3- Apparently being a hero in this game entitles you to rummage through other people's stuff and break their things if necessary. You are encouraged to go into people's houses and public places, and just go through their stuff and take whatever you want. toughlovemuse laughed very hard at me when I cringed and didn't want to do that. After all, the game NPCs are very understanding about the fact that you're the hero and can do whatever you want.

4- NPCs have extraordinarily short attention spans in this game. Mind you, since I've only played a few hours of WoW apart from this (I refuse to count the one time I tried playing Resident Evil and couldn't get my character to do anything except walk into a wall and get eaten by a zombie), I have no idea how much I should expect out of any given NPC anyway.

In conclusion, though, it was fun, and I'm looking forward to trying to get to the end of the story at some point. Or at the very least get to the end of my current quest. I've already died twice, once because I hit the wrong button. :P

Okay, now I'm *really* going to get breakfast, and then I have to get some writing done. I have 45,000 words to get written, or thereabouts, in the next two weeks. Wish me luck!