Happy Halloween! Oh and also, I think today or maybe yesterday was the 19th anniversary of this blog! I have coworkers who are younger than this site. Anyways I totally forgot about this bloggiversary, as we used to say, but even so to celebrate, here is a new volume of The Ursus Verses! The Halloween themed volume!

If you are asking yourself how you missed volume II, don't worry, it isn't out yet. It's ready to go, I just don't have a clear idea of the path forard with it as far as print edition and whatnot. I'd like to do a Kickstarter but I'd also like to not do one. You know? But with Halloween fast approaching I wanted to get volume III out as soon as possible. So, enjoy!

 It's Read In Week! I get to zoom or google meet into Naia's class and read to them. The theme for this year is "To Each Their Own Story" so, I wrote something especially for them today- last year I had just written the story "Curse of the Dad Joke" and read it to the class, and they loved it. So, in a similar vein, here is

The Portal To, Uh, Some Other Place

 

Every day Pallas and Naia walked to school with their Dad, and every day their Dad warned them about the hole in the path. Now, ‘hole’ is kind of a strong word- maybe ‘slight dip’ would be more accurate. Nevertheless, their Dad always shouted a warning- “Girls! Watch out for that hole!”

            The girls never fell in the hole. Sorry- slight dip. In fact, even if the girls had tried to fall in the hole they would have found it very difficult to do so. They would have had to put on a show worthy of grade 5 boys playing soccer, trying to convince everyone that they had just been fouled. 

            One day Naia decided to just that- pretend to fall in. “Argh! Ouch!” she cried, and Dad almost jumped out of his pants.

            “Naia! Eyes on the prize or everyone dies!”

            Naia just looked at Pallas and winked. Somehow they managed to make it to school safely every day.

            But then one day- the day of the Halloween party at school- Dad said, “Hey, I know! Why don’t we take the puppy to school today. It’s getting closer to Halloween and pretty soon it will be too dark and cold to take her.”

            “I don’t know, Dad,” said Naia, “every time we’ve tried it before it’s always turned out to be a bad idea. A really bad idea. Remember that time she chased that rabbit and dragged you by your face down the road? What if she chews on my Halloween costume?”

            “Nah! It will be fine,” said Dad, with all the confidence of a middle-aged dad who obviously didn’t remember all the times before when it most definitely was not fine.

            But you know what? It kind of was fine. At least as far as the Remedy. “See?” Dad said. “She’s not a bitey little foofball anymore. She knows how to act right. Wagh!!” Their puppy- Ahsoka- chose that moment to lunge for the hole, yanking Dad’s arms badly.

            Ahsoka disappeared down the hole.

            Dad’s mouth fell open, kind of a black hole not unlike the one on the path, only deeper. Naia called out to him, “Dad! Do something!” 

            When Dad just stood there, staring open-mouthed, Naia and Pallas grabbed the leash and pulled as hard as they could.

            Ahsoka popped out of the hole, tail wagging. There was something in her mouth.

            “What the heck is that?” Dad shouted.

            “Leave it!” Naia said, and Ahsoka dropped the thing that was in her mouth. Which immediately wiggled away in a disgusting, slithery, slimy sort of way that didn’t quite make sense to the eye. But Naia saw it had a face full of tentacles and eeny weeny wings probably too small for flying. Decoration, maybe. It was kind of green, and kind of not. It was definitely gross, though, and if it had just slithered away that might have been the end of the tale- just one of those weird things that happened as one walks to school, kind of a shruggable “what a strange day” sort of story you tell your friends when you’re bored in math class.

            But Dad decided to give the thing one of the treats he had in his little fannypack he used for training Ahsoka. The thing caught the little chunk of hot dog in its tentacles, and Naia was sure she saw its eyes glow red, and it jumped up much higher than you would expect, and flapped its widdle wings and attached itself to Dad’s face. Then it grew humongous, and then it swallowed Dad.

            This was no longer just a strange day. This was a bad day.

            The thing looked down on them with its red eyes. It spoke. “Hear me, mortals. I am a Great Old One, and this whole world belongs to me now.”

“Wrong!” said Naia.

“Wrong!” said Pallas.

“You don’t look so great to me,” said Naia. “But you definitely look old.”

“Yeah and anyways we are even greater young ones and we banish you to, uh, some other place as long as it’s far away from here!” 

“Either that or you can just explode, we don’t really care. But let our dad go!” Both girls held up their Halloween costume props, which were just sticks they had found at the park and stuck some glitter gems to make them like wizard staffs or whatever.  The sisters had coordinated their Halloween costumes so that they looked like twin sorceresses, Naia in a black robe, Pallas in a white. They had planned to be superhero space robots but had run out of time, so. Witches! Or whatever.

The Great Old One shrank back from the dual assault. “The Staff of ulhuhtC- where did you get that??? How dare you command me? Ouch! Ok ok just don’t poke me with those staffs, they are very poisonous to Great Old Ones.”

Naia and Pallas looked at each other, with their sister power looks that only they knew how to read. They winked, and together they threw their staffs at the monster. Who exploded. Such a mess- Esther Starkman School and the Remedy café, and everyone in the vicinity -including all of grade 5- were covered in chunks of brown-like green-tinged goo. And at the centre of it all sat Dad, nearly unrecognizable beneath all the slime. He looked at his daughters. “What just . . . did that… that thing didn’t just poop me out did it?”

“No Dad,” Pallas replied. “Naia and I made it explode. We rescued you!”

“OK, um, thank you. Uh. Wow. Anyways. We are late for school so we should probably get going.”

“Sure, Dad.” Naia said. “Just watch out for that hole. It’s deeper than it looks.”

 

 

            

 

 

An almost perfect Sunday morning- five stars! But the smoke takes away a star, maybe two. Three? A two-star Sunday morning! Ahsoka liked it fine though. We always stop at this bench in our neighbourhood and sit and look out on the little lake and watch the birds. There's bluejays and meadowlarks and redwing black birds and all kinds of waterfowl. Sometimes waxwings. And there's coyotes and jackrabbits and muskrats... I just love it. Five stars! Just thinking about it has moved me to tears. No, wait, that's the smoke. Two stars!

 

I'll be hanging out at my neighbourhood flower shop- over on 23rd ave you know, Swish. Selling my book and chatting with anyone who comes by. I hope YOU come by! See you there!

Clearwater

Here is a story I wrote a couple of months ago for a monthly contest called Furious Fiction. It's pretty fun and free and open to anyone in the world, so, you should enter!  This was for April's contest, I believe. The prompts were- in 500 words or less, write a story that begins in some kind of queue;  have the words CROSS, DROP and LUCKY; and it must include a map. Oh and you have like 55 hours from the time the contest opens to close. I basically wrote a fictionalized version of some true stories that happened to me back in my hitch-hiking days. At the end of the story I'll show how I changed things up:

Clearwater

Two days of not seeing a soul, and now there was a queue to thumb a ride. Where did they even come from? We were in Northern British Columbia, far away from anything except bears and trees. I’d slept late, in my little tent, off in the bush, and now I returned to my spot on the side of the highway to discover that I was third in line.

And number one didn’t look eager to share.

“You have to wait your turn,” he said. “I was here first.” There are many beautiful adjectives one could use to describe this man, but in that moment I could only think of two: big and scary.

“Actually, this is my third day here. It’s really dead. I had to strike camp so...”

He strode over with calamitous fury, grabbed the cross hanging around my neck and snapped it off. Shit. I held up my hands. “You’re right. You were here first. I’ll wait.”

I took my backpack and sat down a short distance away. The other guy, number two, had watched the whole thing impassively. 

A truck approached, and my ‘friend’ stuck his thumb out. The truck pulled over. Unbelievable. How lucky could you get? That should’ve been my ride. Number two catches my eye, and we shake our heads.

“You’re up,” I said.

“There’s a Greyhound due, I’m gonna flag him down. Driver takes cash if you wanna come.”

“Thanks, but I’ll wait.”

The bus shows up as promised, and number two exits stagecoach right.

Eons later, a ride. Young guy, rusty Datsun, loud music. Perfect. Immediately he started talking as if resuming a conversation we’d been having for years. I did my best to keep up.

“Space elevators presuppose a technology that doesn’t exist,” he said. “But electromagnetic catapults could drop shit right on the moon for a fraction of the cost.”

“Very true. Yes. I agree.” And so it went. Finally he remembered to ask:

“Where you headed?”

“Edmonton.”

“You’re going the wrong way!”

My stomach dropped for a second, but no, east is east and west is west. I knew the way. Space Elevator was equally convinced he was right.

I pulled out my map. “You came from Clearwater, yeah? Here. And picked me up by Vavenby. East. See how the river is to our right, just like on the map?”

He didn’t see. He careened around a slow-moving tractor as if he had been catapulted to the moon. I wrestled with my conscience. Every minute he remained unconvinced was another minute closer to home. But. Poor kid. He was heading away from his spaceport.

I tried one more time. Karma. “Look, that sign says Avola, 23 kms. The map shows Avola east of Clearwater.”

“Oh shit, you might be right. Hey, there’s another hitch-hiker, let’s ask him!”

It was my old friend Number One. 

“You know what? My mistake. We’re going the right way.”

I smiled and waved as we passed.

END

Alright, so. Let's see. I really did catch a ride with a guy who was going the wrong way, and I really did have to pull out a map to show him. But I didn't do any dick moves, I just was honest, which kind of bit me in the butt actually. Lol. He picked me up in Clearwater and wound up dumping me on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, which is where I was stuck for a while. Eventually I caught a ride up a ways to the next exit, which is where I did find myself sharing the road with two hitch-hikers in front of me. But the highway was so dead I wound up going into the bushes and setting up my tent. And later that night the much bigger of the two fellow hitch-hikers stomped into the bush and loudly tore off a branch of a tree and I thought for sure he was going to club me to death. Instead he . . . didn't do anything that I could tell. I have no idea what he did because I was hiding in my sleeping bag and never heard or saw from him ever again. Phew! So in real life he never got into any kind of altercation with me but I definitely remember that feeling of helpless terror.

Oh! And the conversation about the space elevator- a version of that really did happen with a hitch-hiker that I picked up one time near Houston, BC. See, the teeny tiny BC town Houston has the same name as the huge Texan city where they do space stuff so buddy thought Canadian Houston should contribute likewise.

 Air and Nothingness' new anthology opens for submissions today. Are you going to send something? I can say that I am working on something. I think I will be able to finish it in the time allotted- although it's a little more ... ambitious ?? maybe than anything I've attempted before. Kind of space operatic, and as much as I love space opera, it's not something I've really tried to write before. But I have a pretty cool alien organism and setting and even a way to fit the spiritualism aspect in, so. Just do my best, right? 

I've been running again, back up to 10 kms now. I've found that running that distance is pretty consistently reliable for activating the really good creative mindflow that happens sometimes, where you're not fighting it, where the words just come. You can see the story, and how it needs to be written. I wish that could be done with just having a second cup of coffee, and very occasionally it does- but not in any predictable  or reliable way. And so I run. Urg! No, it's good. It's got all the benefits right? It's just so hard. Like writing. Urg!

I wrote a story earlier this year for an open call that didn't get picked up. It was for the theme of Industrial Revolution. Industry is a thing I know about, right? And my mind was kind of thinking about the River Styx and Charon because of Megaflora, so I wrote a story about the Styx and stuff. It was fun to write, and I think successful, and it was about a very specific thing- should I talk about a story that is unpublished and unavailable? I see how that isn't the most useful thing to read about. Hmm. Well, you can always stop reading right? No trouble at all. Ok, I will keep writing about this. I guess spoiler alert for a story you have no way (currently) to read. 

The theme of this story is very easy- it can be boiled down to a thesis statement: progress should have cured death but instead it optimized killing. I even say that right in the text at the end, disguised as poetry. I bring this up because it's useful to have such a thesis for a story, it points you where to go and how to write it, but sometimes I don't always have a theme, or at least something that can be said in one simple statement. This current story, doesn't have that. But it does have a central big theme. It's just too big! How to boil it down. Or how to figure out if it needs to be boiled down, or is just asking some big questions ok? I know the answer to that one. Urg! The answer is the same as it always is- write the damn story and then rewrite it so it's good. Sometimes I wish it was just easier! 

Urg!!!

Here is my modest little Nathan Waddell shelf in my library. The Nathan Waddell Library! More volumes coming soon, I hope.

I reviewed Upon A Twice Time on Goodreads which I'll copy and paste here- feels weird to review a book I'm in but I don't mention my story so:
 

Quick- name four fairy tales! Don't google it, just off the top of your head. Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Sure! What? Frankenstein is not a fairy tale! It's tricky, a little, right? How about just two? That's the impetus behind Upon A Twice Time. Take two fairy tales and mash them together, and also add the genre of your choice. Science fiction? Check! You like fantasy? It's here! What about culinary memoir? Didn't see that coming, did you? But it all works wonderfully well. So so good, this whole collection. Full disclosure- I wrote the story Megaflora in this anthology, so I won't discuss that one. And indeed I can't discuss every story here but there are some amazing and fantastic and beautiful stories here. Some should be nominated for awards in their genres. What is the governing body for the culinary memoirist's guild? They need to be contacted! (The Gala Tea Celebration Cake, Milton Rockwood)

There's dark fantasy here as creepy and lush as Neil Gaiman's Snow Glass Apples - Jenni Meade's A Dance of Birds and Men.
An aching and hauntingly romantic tale called The Swan and Bellerophon, by Leo Otherland.
A story about Pinocchio that I don't want to say anything else about, but it's brilliant! The Queen of Hearts Interrogates Pinocchio by Gabriel Ertsgaard.
Goldilocks is represented as well, with a big bad wolf chasing her. Rule of Threes by Rebecca Hardy, a story that hopefully will be expanded into a novel at some point. 
A pleasure to read and an honour to be a part of. 16 stars actually, but Goodreads limits me to 5.

 

It came! Started to see some Americans say they got their copy of Upon A Twice Time but I just figured mine would be a while yet. Did you know Americans get mail on Saturday? Weird! I think we did too but not in my lifetime. And my lifetime stretches back a ways now. Anyway, I took a themed photo of the book next to a flower to go with my story, Megaflora, which is written in the genre of Victorian travelogue and  mashes together Jack and the Beanstalk with the creepy and relatively unknown fairy tale "The Queen of the Planets". 

I originally had the idea of mixing Jack and the Beanstalk with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the genre was still the Victorian travelogue idea. I’ve always had this thing I would say at work when someone was tempted to do something stupid (that someone was often me)- Some things aren’t worth going to hell for.  Seemed like a good idea to explore in the context of Orpheus, and I wanted to mix it up and make Eurydice the brave soul who goes to retrieve their lover. But a quick check with Air and Nothingness confirmed that myths didn’t count as fairy tale, and so I was happy to move on with my life. Oh well, right? 

But. 

The editor tweeted at me that he was eager to see what I came up with. Urg! Now I had to write something! Urg!!! But also, so thankful. Let me say working with Todd Sanders, the publisher and editor was absolutely wonderful and a real pleasure and honour. Without that encouragement I would never have written Megaflora. And it was relatively easy to reconfigure as I just imagined that this was the next episode in that same travelogue, so that Orpheus- Sir Orphean here- had already had his misadventure and Lady Eurydice had decided to travel on. It took some digging to find a good fairy tale to use as the second ingredient for the mashup, but a friend pointed me to the whole online catalogue with ATU numbers and everything and I found The Queen of the Planets and …. Voila! Megaflora.

Oh- and that first story never got written but I did scribble a few things down as a rough prototype and one paragraph I did like and regret not getting to use - 

The locals have a name for the type of cloud that obscures the top of the beanstalk, in translation the expression loses something, but it is rendered, roughly, ‘Steam from the giant’s cauldron.’ They say that the thickness of the clouds is an indicator of how many Englishmen the giants are cooking.

And finally, the name for this fictional country they were traveling in, where the beanstalk is situated, I don’t think it made the cut, but it made me laugh. So, for posterity, I can tell you it was Hanselvania. Enjoy!

Update: another of the authors in the book, Rebecca Hardy, made a playlist for every story in the anthology! Very cool!

New phone! Got a tax refund so I spent it on something I sorely needed. Back in October my front camera on my iPhone 7 stopped working, probably for no reason whatsoever, but possibly because I dropped it. That seems unlikely but the only other thing I can think of is ghosts so. 

Anyways so taking pictures has been a challenge- the zoom lens still worked, so as long as I was at least ten feet away I could still take a photo. But only if I opened Twitter and used the camera icon while tweeting. The Camera app would just be a black screen.

 Yeah. I made do but it is so nice to be able to take pictures again! Nice ones. Yay! Here is Ahsoka looking like an instagram influencer. 

I missed Star Wars day but honestly, every day is Star Wars Day over here at the Woods. I did start building a V-19 Torrent micro fighter, which was super easy to build once I found all the parts. Microfighters are tons of fun, love the chibiesque aspect. I have a bunch that I bought, but also some that I cobbled together out of spare parts, hence the whackadoodle colours on some of these. The instructions for all Lego sets are available on their website, so as long as you have the parts (and for bigger sets you almost never do!) you can build them. And the V-19 as seen here was never put out by Lego so I found a great YouTube channel and followed his instructions.

The V-19 Torrent is one of my fave Star Wars ships. Introduced in Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D Clone Wars micro series which is now available on dsnypl+s. It also showed up in the 3D Clone Wars show, but has never made a live action appearance as far as I know- could be an Easter egg in one of the new movies idk. I have a 3.5" scale Hasbro version as well, not Lego. Lego did make a non-microfighter of this ship but I don't have it. And they made a sort of microfigher but not in this style, so. I need some Clone Pilot minifigs!

Happy Gojira Day! May you get strong and embrace the world. Loving the new album so far, still learning it. It's 100% Gojira with their chug chug chug weeerrowrow riffs but also a lot of new stuff too. A Wilson Phillips cover? Not quite but I did think my phone had went on shuffle the first time I heard Hold On.

In light of this auspicious and beautiful day I move that we extend the tax deadline to next month. All those in favour? Hello? Hello?

I know I have been pretty quiet this week, just been working away. April was a good month for writing for me. Entered two contests, lost both of them! But the stories I wrote are fun and may see the light of day in some other venue. One was about hitch-hiking, and the other was about mining. Two things I know a little about. Then I wrote the flash fiction I posted last week- more of a bonus than anything else. Also wrote and submitted a fun story about the River Styx and am just now working on yet another story about a cthulhu-esque monster. I was worried I didn't have any more of those in me but it turns out I still got one or two! But not done that one so I guess that will count towards May's writerly output. How are you doing? Urg now I need to do taxes.

Started the next Natalie Goldberg book, Wild Mind, and also started a new notebook for my writing warmup/practice. Naia got it for me for Xmas! In today's chapter of Wild Mind, Natalie said to write the first sentence of a story, and just keep going. So I did, using the cover for the inspiration. Came up with a fun and quick story, presented below:

She taped a sign that said “Super Great Ideas” and sat back to see what would happen. It was one of those community-wide garage sales and she had secured a table. Many people wandered by carefully avoiding making eye contact, but she didn’t have to wait too long for a curious customer to come by. 

“How much for one super great idea?” asked the man.

“Ideas are free,” she replied. “It’s putting them into practice that’s costly.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Alright, give me a super great idea.”

“Hmmm. Let me think. For you, the super great idea is to go home and clean out your garage.”

“That… doesn’t seem like a great idea to me. That just sounds like hard work.”

“Yes, it will be hard work. But once you’re done you will be able to use the garage for something super great.”

“Like what?”

“Sorry, one super great idea per person.”

“Ha. You know, I’ve always wanted a home gym, just been too lazy to start…” The man wandered off, dropping a five dollar bill in the tip jar on her table.

The next person who came by also asked how much ideas cost.

“It’s pay what you want. Ideas are so relative, what I think is a great idea you might think is just really bad advice. I don’t want to make anyone angry.”

“So, I can pay you after you give me the idea,” the woman said, nodding thoughtfully.

“Yes. Or! You can choose not to pay at all. Paying me zero dollars totally counts as pay what you want.”

“Ok, I’m ready. What you got?”

She thought for a second or two. “My idea is a combination coffee maker and poetry dispenser. But you have to write the poems.”

The woman raised her eyebrows and looked away to her right, squinting and thinking. “I’m not totally sure I can make it work mechanically, but with a little tinkering… maybe a little fudging on the actual delivery system…. I think I can make that happen! Thank you.” She dropped ten dollars in her tip jar.

And so it went, all day. She dispensed many super great ideas, and brightened many people’s days. She even made over a hundred dollars, which she donated to the women’s emergency shelter that this community sale was in support of. She walked home, which wasn’t far at all, and her Mom was there to greet her.

“How did it go?”

“Really good,” she replied. “That was a super great idea, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

 

I've found a bit of a rhythm the works for me as far as writing goes. In the past I did all sorts of things, especially sitting in a coffee shop. Or the library! I haven't been to a library in over a year... 

But these days I sit at home with my coffee (BB-8 mug!) and read from a book on writing. Writing Down the Bones is a good one, which I just finished today. More about the writing life rather than how to write, exactly. No one really knows how to write, I think. I certainly don't! I find I have to relearn for each piece. Especially when you have an idea but no clear route to get there. It's kind of like being dropped off on a completely featureless plain and told to find your way home. You know where you want to get to, but not how to get there, necessarily. 

So I write longhand, kind of like a journal but not one that chronicles my life, just talks about what I'm working on. What I need, what I'm unclear on. Then I will take another notebook and do a quick prototype, as they say in board game design, just get something to the table, don't worry about how ugly it is. Can always fix it later if it's worth fixing. This current story I'm working on I think I did mourner five rough prototypes before I finally figured out my way forward. Once I have a pretty confident idea I'll write up a neater, more precise draft in yet another notebook, often switching between notebooks and writing notes and revising and adding stuff.  

Finally I'll open up a document on the laptop and start typing. By the time I get to the typing phase I'm pretty confident that I know how to finish and that it will be a good story, at least a story that I would want to read, which is the only metric I really know how to judge my writing by.

It's not the most efficient, but it works, and it is robust enough that a lot of quality control kind of happens in the process. I do miss the days when I would just open up a new blog post on this very blog and come up with a poem or whatever in like an hour. I have a story in 40 Below Volume 2 that I wrote in one sitting and it didn't require any editing afterwards. I have no idea how I did that! Writing is a complete mystery sometimes. No one really knows how to write and if they say they do, give them a hug (or a virtual socially distanced hug) because in an hour or a day or a week, they will be crying because they will realize they have no idea.

A year ago today I took these photos.  22 Loader, its electrical cabinet fried, retired. Shovel 10, parked and retired. Might still be right where we left them, I don't know. Maybe they were dismantled and sent away or scrapped. Oh and a photo of me, wearing a shield when all the pandemic stuff was still new and weird. Now it's old and weird.

 One day I hope to have an entire shelf of books I've written or contributed to. So far I don't quite have enough but slowly slowly. Other than The Ursus Verses there's three anthologies and a beer can. This one will soon be added:

I think it's looking good! The publisher says it should arrive sometime in the summer. Here's the Table of Contents:

Meantime I'm just writing away, little of this, little of that. You know. Having fun.

 Happy Easter! We are all just being chill. Taking Ahsoka to the park. Watching the Sam and Bucky show, maybe some King Kong Vs Godzilla later. Yay kaiju! Anyways we made Easter eggs and mine are (of course) a tribute to Gojira. Not the kaiju, the band. Here we have The Link:

And The Way of All Flesh:

 

Pallas and I have had a standing date on Sunday afternoons to play games. In the before times we loved to go as a family on weekends to any of the great local boardgame cafes, like Tabletop or BoardNBrew. But playing at home is always fun too. Yesterday was Roll For The Galaxy, a game I've had for a few years but only played once. So I had to relearn it.

Learning a game is like jumping a hurdle- and once you are on the other side you know how to play. You get it. But there's a barrier before you can get there, and getting over that barrier can be easy or hard. The best way, I find, is to get a hand from  a friend who is already over the barrier. But friends are a limited resource in this pandemic so, the second best way is to.... well, that depends on the kind of nerd you are ;)

 I'm the kind of nerd who will download rulebooks from boardgamegeek to read for fun. I like figuring out games this way! A well-written rulebook is, maybe not a joy, but at least... I actually don't know how to finish this simile. They are not for everyone, I get it. That's why they have How-To-Play videos on YouTube. I developed the reading-rulebooks-habit when I was working at the mine where I didn't have access to YouTube.

Anyway, I would give Roll for the Galaxy's rulebook a failing grade. The game is great! Simple and engaging and lots of room for figuring out strategy and such. You should play it! Just don't read the rules, watch one of those videos.

"But Nathan, I am stuck on some kind of boat in the Suez Canal and we don't have YouTube! But there's a whole container or ten of boardgames here so we decided to bust out this one."

OK well, the rules start out with too much information and also not enough. A good, concise "This is what we're doing" paragraph- using dice and tiles to build a galactic civilization. But then it's "setup like this and this is how you play starting with roll your dice and then choose what phases you want  to do."  I simplify, but just to show how it is. I think I would have started it like this:

Same introduction. But the player board could use a detailed explanation right here. Just say, "Although dice are your workers and how you will accomplish your goals, this player board is how you will manage everything. We have two spots for tiles- one is a tech that you can DEVELOP, denoted by this diamond which has a corresponding Dice-face and game-phase, and a world you can SETTLE, which is a circle, again with corresponding Dice-face and game-phase. The numbers inside the icons show how many dice with these icons you need to buy these tiles to place in your tableau. We will explain that part later."

And explain the Citizenry and money track, and now you can go through the Round Structure.

That's how I would have done it, anyway. We muddled through a few rounds and then it clicked. We got over that hurdle! I even won. You might think it unseemly to boast about beating my young daughter but she really skunked me the night before in Voyages of Marco Polo. I have yet to beat her at that game. Speaking of, that rulebook is...

 Shoot- I missed International Puppy Day yesterday. I was unaware there was such a day, as I was unaware of so much when it came to dogs. I'm learning though. Here is a live shot of our puppy right now, but even if you are reading this a year from now, it is probably a pretty reliable indicator of what she is doing:

Last night she was frightened of the coyotes. Something had riled them up and they were howling, not even that close to our house, but she could hear them. I let her out and she stood on the deck in high-alert mode, but then quickly turned around and ran inside. Poor little puppy! I wound up sleeping on the couch so she wouldn't have to go back in her crate. Well, I tried putting her in the crate but she was too agitated to settle and would have barked all night maybe. Urg.

We have her in Puppy School right now, and that's helping a lot.  Obedience training or whatever you call it. Last week she was so tuckered out from it that she slept all night, giving me three whole uninterrupted sleeps last week! The streak has not continued this week but maybe tonight will be ok.

I stopped walking her to and from school with the girls, and that's made a big difference in my relationship with my daughters. Our walks to and from school have been so good for connecting and we had lost that with also having to deal with Ahsoka. And we need a reset to teach Ahsoka how to walk to heel, which is coming along with dedicated training walks. We are all learning! 

It's ok to not be ok sometimes, right? I'm sure I've seen that somewhere during this pandemic. Even with all that is going on in the world I sometimes feel like my life is this idyllic perfect thing, but also at the very same time I also think everything is just terrible. A little cognitive dissonance never hurt anyone, right? At least for me a decent night's sleep is still enough (I think) to reset the levels to the "happy" side of the dial.

During my mornings where I try hard to be a writer, to mixed success, I have been rereading some of the classic writing books, trying to glean inspiration and better my technique. The current book is Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. One of the writing prompts she suggests is to steal a line from  a poem and write it down, continuing from there. And for me, the single line that has really resonated for me (other than all of Gojira's lyrics lol) is the line that, though written by Roethke, really belongs, in my mind, to local writer and photographer Shawna Lemay, from this post. The line is "you are required to make something beautiful". So I wrote that down and then just continued and this is what I wrote, with the plagiarized line omitted :

You must tend to your soul like a garden

Lovingly, with tenderness, be the guardian

Against all that would exploit, consume, destroy

And that is not enough: you must encourage

growth with water and all the sunlight you can find

No one blames the garden for weeds or pests

It is the gardener who is responsible for the garden

Ah, but this metaphor breaks down when one points

out to the poet:

The gardener and the garden are the same, here

But are they, though? As the poet in question, I’ll say plainly:

I don’t fucking know but I wish that I did 

The metaphor holds up in another way, though, I think:

You won’t know what you have until the end of the growing season