April 2018 – Philoquialisms

The little dead

My post late last week on all the lengthy writing I’ve done made me want to look back at the so-called “4K corpses,” the novels I stopped writing at some point during NaNoWriMo, switching gears to something generally trashy but easy to write. I thought I’d break down those stories and what I remember aboud them, including why I tossed them aside to write something else.

Lion Rampant, High Above (NaNoWriMo 2010; 4,315 words; fantasy): This was the first 4K corpse. To be honest, I had expected at least one in the 2005-2009 timeframe, but apparently I was a stronger-willed person back then… or I had better ideas. (Sinner Soldier Seeker Saint definitely implies the former, though, because it’s definitely not the latter.) It was to be a fantasy novel where nations were on floating islands in an endless sky, and as they moved around they waged war on each other. As an idea it was all right, but it wanted more plotting than I was willing to give it, particularly given that it was during 1M10 and I was already way, way, way behind on word count. Enthusiasm–or, at least, the ability to vomit words on the page at high velocity–mattered way more to me than high concept at that point, so Lion Rampant went away and I wrote The Golden Band instead.

Apparently I jumped straight to the trash in 2013, but not before procrastinating at the beginning of the month by making a bunch of typo fixes across six or seven short stories from 1M10. (Thanks, revision control, for making these investigations easy!) Was I looking for inspiration or just procrastinating? Sadly, I can’t remember.

Inclusion (NaNoWriMo 2014; 9,860 words; science fiction): This was the Iain Banks pastiche novel I alluded to in the earlier post. I reread what there is of it a couple of months ago, and it’s honestly not bad; the real problem is that I didn’t start it until the 17th of November, and it turned out that being even a quarter as witty and clever as Banks on a two-week deadline is rather too much to ask. It was also even more aggressively a copy of Banks than Second Law is of Egan, but at least in this case that was intentional.

Looking this up led me to realize that I wrote Ridden in less than 72 hours, from late on the 27th until a bit after noon on the 30th. Unlike The Escapist, though, Ridden just drops dead at 50K rather than having a real conclusion, so I don’t consider it in the same category. (Also, it’s much worse.)

The Innocent (NaNoWriMo 2017; 1,725 words; science fiction?): This was my attempt to write the “other side” of The Leftovers, a frankly amazing show in HBO, parts of which I’m potentially spoiling by even writing this sentence, so I’ll stop now. As you can see, I barely got anywhere in it. Something about the subject matter was just too dark for me last year, so I set it aside after a few days. I’m unlikely to continue it, either, given the complicated nature its IP would have; although it would be easy to file the serial numbers off, that seems like cheating, and I don’t really have a passion for the story anyway.

Honorable mention goes to One Less Traveled (1M10; 11,511 words; alternate-history road trip/literary fiction), which while not done during NaNo was definitely in the mold of the other corpses. It had an all right premise, I suppose, but it turns out that this particular picaresque in an alternate history just didn’t do anything for me. And of course there’s Runaway, which I wrote about at greater length in the previous post.

The first surprise to me is that there were actually less of these corpses than I remember. What that probably means is that I had other story ideas on some of those years–2013 is a likely one–but didn’t even write a single word of them down before tossing the idea in the trash. Love in the Time of Data absolutely should have been a 4K corpse, but I toughed it out, and other than the usual “getting all the bad words out” motivation for writing a bunch of words I think I would have been much better off putting that particular novel out of its misery early on.

The second surprise is that while 4K kinda-sorta happens to be close to the actual average length, it’s actually really variable… although with only three real data points I’m not even comfortable making an engineer’s proof about it. I stuck with Inclusion probably longer than I should have, at least partly due to the impending end of NaNo that year, and I tossed The Innocent out the back of the truck before the month even really started rolling. I’m not sure there’s anything to learn from that, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless.

And, of course, my hard drive is littered with many other failed attempts at writing, from a couple of chapters long to just the first ten sentences or so. Such is the life of a writer. Will any of these aforementioned stories get picked back up and turned into something real? I doubt it. But anything’s possible.

Weekly status update [0012/????]

It was a very split week, with Saturday and Sunday in Arkansas, Monday a grueling haul across a third of the continental United States, and most of the rest of the week recovering from said haul back in the comfort of my home. That said, there’s some things worth bulletizing, so let’s do that.

The writeup on all the major writing I’ve done hasn’t had any responses, which is sad, but it refreshed my knowledge on all of that stuff, which was nice. Still a lot of garbage, though.
I’ve watched a lot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine this week. Too much, to be honest; I binged it for a couple of days, a thing I’m trying not to do any more with TV. But the show has a lot of episodes, and they’re so popcorn-y, that it’s hard to resist. I’ve slowed down my consumption rate to just a couple a day now.
I finally caught back up on GameNight!, unquestionably my favorite YouTube show about board games. I’m actually bringing CrossTalk to a thing tomorrow, along with a deck of 11 nimmt! cards we can use to play The Mind, which looks absurd and amazing.
I haven’t talked about Colemak in a while. I’m still using it exclusively, except for once a week or so when a password gets dangerously close to failing out due to my typos. I haven’t cracked much more than 65wpm, but I also haven’t been pushing myself to type faster, either, thanks to the whole Wrist Situation. I should work on it more, though.
Speaking of which, my wrists are much better behaved than they have been in ages. I actually spent most of today without them on, even typing some, with no discomfort. I wear the braces a lot now, and I think they’ve helped a ton. I may be able to roll back down to just wearing them to sleep.
Did lots of puzzles, mostly sudoku, as I’m getting near the end of another book I’ve been working on for years.
Not a lot of reading, though. I haven’t picked my Kindle back up since the end of the trip. I need to keep on with The Wheel of Time before it all slips out of my head. The size of that series is intimidating as hell, though.

The long trip was the perfect combination of “great to go, great to come back,” and I suspect I won’t be doing any serious travel again until the holidays, although you never know. Nice thing about retirement: if I decide to head off and drive around for a week or two, I can do that. Nice.

Words about words

[Warning: This post is long. But buried somewhere in here is a link to an actual story I wrote. I won’t tell you where. Cue evil laughter!]

I finished rereading the Culture series on my Kindle while I was in Louisiana. Before I started something new–the Wheel of Time books, which I’ve never read and apparently contain approximately three point seven billion words, because I hate myself–I took a bit of a detour and reread a few of my own stories.

I do this fairly regularly, actually. Most of my books are relatively short, right at 50,000 words due to the requirements of NaNoWriMo, so they’re a quick reread for me. And while I’ve never done any serious editing on any of them, I still catch typos and malapropisms and fix those as I go. (Yes, of course they’re all in revision control systems meant for software, because I am a geek through and through. Subversion, Bazaar, and finally Git, if you must know, charting my own usage over the last decade and a half.)

Because people have asked me over the years, I thought it’d be worth cataloging all of the major writing I’ve ever done. If nothing else, it makes this an easy blog post to point back to in the future. Note that a non-trivial amount of my stuff is “personal”, by which I mean it was written for me and me alone. The longer works will still be listed here, but don’t bug me about the details. Demon exorcism is never pretty work.

(Most works have given word counts. For reference, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is about 46,000 words long, The Catcher in the Rye is 74,000ish, and The Hobbit is around 95,000. Mumble mumble War & Peace mumble lots more.)

Anyhow:

Cycle’s End (ca. 1991; ~20pp.; science fiction/fantasy): I started to consider “that writing thing” when I was eleven, and this was the result, the first twenty or so pages of a singularly awful novel written in a WordStar clone (StarWriter, I think? [Days-later edit: After doing some research, I’m pretty sure it was just a pirated version of WordStar.]) on an IBM XT clone my father bought on the cheap back in ’89 or ’90. Given the time period, perhaps heinous is a better descriptor. On the other hand: eh, I was eleven. Somehow my oldest sister kept a copy of this around for over 15 years and returned it to me, missing the first couple of pages; I “lovingly” transcribed it. It’s even on the Web, although I won’t be pointing you to it. It’s bad. Real bad. Then again, eleven.

A thirteen-year fallow period ensues, during which maybe I wasn’t really into “that writing thing,” other than a couple of terrible short stories in high school. I did write a metric crap-ton of semi-professional videogame reviews in this period, but they’re all awful, and non-fiction besides.

Lying in Arcadia (NaNoWriMo 2004; 105,036 words; science fiction): When I decided to really start writing again, hoo boy, did I do it in earnest. I pooped out a 100,000+ novel in 28 days. It’s awful; the beginning uses a bunch of dumb words I made up to try to make myself seem smart, and the plot barely holds together, but it’s got a beginning, middle, and end, which is more than I can say for most of my later writing. Sigh. Exactly one clever thing came out of this novel, a solution to a near-the-end predicament that I had set up without realizing it 100 pages back. It’s the sort of thing I figured clever writers went back and inserted into their novels to make them look smart–hiding Chekov’s gun back in the third chapter–but it just happened naturally. It was a bit of a sea change in my mind as to how much conscious control I really have in this whole writing business.

Sinner Soldier Seeker Saint (NaNoWriMo 2005; 70,046 words; weird fantasy but actually science fiction): Lying was basically completely unplanned. For S4, I actually did quite a bit of thinking about the setting, the characters, and the plot before November. The result… was terrible. The characters are wooden, the writing stilted–6,600 of the words are a glossary of the made-up words scattered throughout the novel like rat turds–and the story unengaging. I started hating it at about the 40,000 word mark, really loathing it around 55,000 or so, and finished it off as best I could without really resolving anything. A hot mess that turned me off of preplanning for NaNo for years.

The Escapist (NaNoWriMo 2005; 51,819 words; science fiction): That’s not a typo. I was super unsatisfied with S4 and my family all disappeared on Thanksgiving evening, my mother and sisters to go shopping at an outlet mall a few states away and my father to a long hunting trip, so I decided I’d write a second novel for NaNoWriMo. This is a personal one, so no real details, but it’s important for two reasons: it’s followed by Second Law, below, and it’s the single fastest novel I’ve ever written. I finished that Sunday afternoon, having written over 50,000 words in around 67 hours. Yes, they included meals and sleep. No, I am not a robot. Yes, it’s a much better novel than S4 despite having been vomited onto the page with great force.

The Trees Near Podkamennaya (NaNoWriMo 2006; 43,372 words or 50,047 words, depending; “literary” modern-day “romance”): Having proven that I could write two novels in a month back in 2005, the next year was a time for stuntin’. I had written what amounted to science fiction my entire life, so I thought: what would be the most different thing possible? I know! Semi-literary first-person modern-day romance!

Somehow, it’s… actually okay. Not great, not awful, but okay. It’s too short; I finished the story at 43K, so ended up going back and adding framing chapters around the real tale to have it crack the magical 50K for NaNo, but were I to ever publish the novel (I won’t) I’d toss those chapters entirely. The title is about 75% too clever for itself, which… is in grand lit-fic tradition, I suppose. But it was nowhere near the disaster I expected it to be, although I hated it at the time.

The Worldbreaker (NaNoWriMo 2006; 53,380 words; gonzo science fantasy): Yeah, another year where I wrote two novels. Don’t worry, I got over that. The setting for this came out of a “game” I “invented” which was a bit popular in the NaNoWriMo IRC channel for a bit, a sort of “yes, and” improv jam thing but for setting design. I decided to actually write a story set in the world of the very first game session. It’s pretty nuts, and the story ends at what is clearly the Act I break in a three-act play, but it has some clever bits. I think it’s fundamentally unsalvageable, though, not least because the rights to the novel would be a damn mess thanks to the collaborative nature of having come up with the setting. Thanks, copyright law!

And the Heavens on Fire (NaNoWriMo 2007; 54,556 words; science fiction): A return to form for 2007. The novel is basically my own take on the idea of the Great Filter. It’s actually not a bad first act-and-a-half, but it’s got some fundamental structural problems that came from it needing more pre-plotting than I was willing to give my NaNovels at the time. It’s at third place (of three) in my list of “novels I might actually be willing to rework into something that isn’t total garbage for publication,” henceforth the List. It’s the first novel of mine that I reread back at my Mom’s house.

Second Law (NaNoWriMo 2008; 50,728 words; hard science fiction): My take on Greg Egan’s brand of hard sf. This was the second novel I reread back at Mom’s, and I have to say that it’s a little too Egan-y, bordering on “creepy fanfic” territory rather than really staking its own claim. It’s also missing acts three and four and half of the fifth and final act, which is a problem. That said, the core of the novel is actually solid, the characters are interesting, and I actually quite like some of the little details scattered throughout. It’s also a (distant) sequel to The Escapist, which I’d totally elide in a rewrite, since that novel is never, ever going to get published. It’s in second place on the List.

Invisibles (NaNoWriMo 2009, plus a lot more in 2010; 99,076 words; science fiction): A personal novel. Trash, but wordy trash…

…because in 2010 I embarked on a crazy journey to write a million words before the end of the year. I very much didn’t succeed, managing 308,801 by December 31st. That’s still a hell of a lot of words, but it’s also quite short of the goal. That said, quite a bit came out of that year. There were a bunch of random vignettes and short stories, my completion of Invisibles, stuff for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign (yes, I was stretching for things that counted as words), and…

The Organization stories (~15,000 words; modern-day science fiction/horror): I wrote several stories in the same milieu, heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation. One was about vampires, one about mummies, and one a weird take on Chernobyl. Like Second Law, they’re probably too close to the original inspiration in their current form, but the mummy story in particular is actually pretty good.

Runaway (15,179 words; science fiction/mystery): This will forever be “the one that got away.” It’s the first third of a gritty near-future mystery story with aliens where I had the key hook in my head, forgot to write it down, and put the story aside for too long. I can’t for the life of me remember whodunit, although I do remember how, and am still pretty pleased with that. I’d like to take another stab at the story, or a different one in the same setting, at some point, as the world I painted in it is still one of my favorites, something very different than anything else I’ve written. As is, it’ll never be finished. Sigh.

The Treehouse (32,957 words; historical literary fiction): A personal novel, notable only because it’s a relatively long work I finished outside of the confines of NaNoWriMo. The only such work, unfortunately.

The Fable of the Little Robot (1,909 words; children’s science fiction): I’ll let this one speak for itself.

The Golden Band (NaNoWriMo 2010; 51,026 words; science fiction): A direct sequel to Invisibles, and equally personal.

I wrote a short story or two in December, but that was the end of 1M10.

Rewind (NaNoWriMo 2011; 36,719 words or some barely-over-50,000 word count; science fiction): Number one on the List, and my return to pre-planning for NaNo six years after S4 soured me on the idea. I started with a single mental image: a young person standing on a street corner, taking a long drag on a cigarette, and then rewinding time so that they don’t actually get the lung damage. I spent a lot of time pre-November on the metaphysics of time travel, and I think it shows in the novel. There’s a lot more going on in the story, but given that it’s the book I actually plan on rewriting for publication in the near future, I don’t want to get into too many details. Like Trees before it, I finished the story without hitting 50,000, so there’s a lot of filler text that I don’t consider actually part of the story. Unlike Trees, I actually could add a bunch of stuff to the story before publication to make it the length of a real novel. We’ll see.

I failed NaNo in 2012, mostly because I was so stressed out about my impending departure from Louisiana and move to North Carolina that I couldn’t concentrate on writing. I cheated and “won” by transcribing dialog from TV shows I was watching with my Mom until I hit 50K, then revoked my win a day later. I’m not proud of that.

Darkly (NaNoWriMo 2013; 50,151 words; science fiction), Ridden (NaNoWriMo 2014; 40,757 words plus guff to hit 50K; science fiction): A pair of personal novels. Neat settings, both, but terrible stories. Technically Ridden is in the same setting as Invisibles and The Golden Band, but that matters to precisely one person in the universe.

Love in the Time of Data (NaNoWriMo 2015; 50,644 words; modern literary fiction/trainwreck): One thing I’ve elided from this already way-too-long chronology is the littered “4K corpses” of NaNoWriMo. I often start a given November with a bright idea, write one to five chapters, then absolutely hate it and throw it away. Many of the personal novels come from those years, when it’s easier to switch over to something just for me than come up with another idea or fight through the misery of that first failed one. Love in the Time of Data is the result of not letting myself drop yet another 4K corpse in 2015. It’s a fictionalized account of working in the tech industry, littered with asides that are fictionalized accounts of events in the main character’s life, and you’re reading “fictionalized account” as “thinly veiled version of myself” then give yourself nothing because it’s the obvious conclusion. It’s awful to the max, but damn it, it’s one less 4K corpse on the NaNoWriMo road. Never again, though, after this one. Never again.

Super (NaNoWriMo 2016; 50,355 words; superhero fantasy/romance/humor): I actually really like this one, even though it’s incomplete and needs some heavy reworking. The core concept is “B-lister superhero has to pick up the slack when all the heavies are out of town”, which has been done before, but I’ve reread Super a couple of times and actually laughed out loud at some of the bits, something no other novel I’ve written can manage. It has a fundamental publication problem, though, in that the main character’s superpower runs on something that is Not Family Friendly. If I ever wanted to go the self-publishing route, Super would move up to number one on the List, but as-is it would require a whole lot of rewriting to make it salable. That puts it at fourth place on the real List, but unfortunately that list only has room for three novels. Sad trombone.

Tutelage (NaNoWriMo 2017; 50,267 words; science fiction): A personal novel, written after yet another 4K corpse that was going to be my take on a particular story related in the last episode of the TV series The Departed. Unreadable garbage, both the corpse and the novel.

Phew. That’s, by an order of magnitude, the longest blog entry I’ve written here so far, but it’s a pretty thorough examination of most of the fiction I’ve produced over my life. I haven’t asked for reader feedback in ages, and I doubt anyone will actually read this entry all the way through, but if you do: which of the works described here intrigues you the most? Why?

The pleasures of simplicity

I’m back in North Carolina, and glad to be back. My reaction actually surprised me; I opened the door to my house with a bit of trepidation, but it smelled like–felt like–home from the moment I stepped inside. I’m still not fully unpacked from the trip, but I made a start of it last night, and already did the necessary errands around town this morning to get my mail, buy another clipboard after I left mine at Mom’s, and so on.

That said, it was a wonderful trip. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this trip was pretty much designed-slash-planned to be neither designed nor planned. Back in Baton Rouge, I saw people who put forth the effort to contact me after an initial “hey, I’m in town” blast to old friends and coworkers, and didn’t worry about the rest. There were lots of days spent lazing around my mom’s house, solving puzzles or watching Broadchurch, and I ate out probably half as much as I typically do when I visit.

There were a lot more lunches and dinners at restaurants in Fayetteville, but the visit was still pretty low-key. Dan and I spent a lot of time playing couch co-op Diablo III, which is just about as non-committal as you can make a videogame. Any less thought involved (at the low levels, at least) and you may as well be “playing” Cookie Clicker. The only really planned outing was to Crystal Bridges, and the plan for that changed several times throughout the week as other things came up. In previous times that would have stressed me out. But, no, we went on Sunday and it was really nice. I could have stayed for hours and hours more; I love museums. But it gives me something else to look forward to on the next trip to Arkansas.

All along the way, my general response to any planned outing, get-together, or choice of meal was “sure, why not.” Back in Louisiana, the few evenings with Stuff Happening were strictly first-come, first-serve, rather than my previous attempts to satisfy as many people as possible, even if it meant shuffling a lot of things around.

And the lesson? That old way is for chumps. Cutting scheduling down to the barest minimum doesn’t just make things less stressful, it makes them more fun, because there’s room for spontaneity when before there was too much “oh, no, I’m meeting whoever at whenever, I can’t do that”. Keeping it simple also kept it pleasant, and when your trip has God-awful drives all around it, you can do with as much pleasantness as possible.

(Also, no matter how much I kvetch about the drive, it’s still better than flying. You lose a day either way, but most airlines don’t have the ability to satisfy a craving for a Blizzard, or a desire to just get out and not be moving for a few minutes, at 30,000 feet.)

So my future plan, even for the Big Holiday Visit, is to keep it low on planning and high on “yeah, sure”. I’ll try and make sure the one big game night happens, but that’s about it, and if even that falls through I won’t be too sad. Heck, I played Concordia four times while I was in Baton Rouge, which is roughly infinity percent more than I expected, and half of those games were spontaneous ones with the neighbors. Who knows what other fun I’ll discover later this year?

Home plate, damp

Just a quick note that I made it home from my multi-state journey after a grueling day of driving. I don’t recommend fourteen and a half hours in the rain. My constant companions were two podcasts: 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back and The Dollop. Highly recommended, both.

Weekly status update [0011/????]

The majority of this week has been spent with an old coworker and his family in Fayetteville, AR, just hanging out. It’s the last leg of my vacation before I head back to Lenoir. As such, here’s a quick list of some stuff I’ve done:

Ate a bunch of tasty food. Fayetteville has totally respectable Thai and Vietnamese, an excellent grilled cheese shop, and not one but two good frozen custard/concrete shops. Yum.
Played a lot of Diablo III with said coworker via couch co-op on the PS4. It’s good, mindless fun.
…not a whole lot of anything else. A bit of puzzling, a bit of reading, even a game of Concordia, but for the most part it’s been a nice, quiet, low-key visit. Which I’ve very much enjoyed.

As mentioned before, I plan on being back in Lenoir early next week, and hope to resume a more regular posting schedule then. See you soon!

(P.S. Still not bored.)

Bears, naturally

Just a quick note that I made it to Arkansas safe and sound yesterday and am enjoying myself quite a bit in the company of old friends and new acquaintances. Other than the obligatory Friday post, I likely won’t be resuming the more-regular posting schedule until I make it back to Lenoir sometime early next week.

Weekly status update [0010/????]

As the number above creeps into the double digits, I’m still in Louisiana, planning to head to Arkansas this coming Tuesday. I’m very much still taking it easy, so enjoy this (relatively) shorter synopsis.

Binged the first two series of Broadchurch with my mom; we’re about halfway through the third. The first was still the best, but it’s an excellent show.
Finished my reread of the Culture series and decided, against my better judgment, to start reading the Wheel of Time; I have a combined eBook of all of the books in the series from when it was up for the Hugo. My Kindle hasn’t moved from 1% on the progress bar. It’s intimidating.
Took a couple of hours to reread two of my own novels, both science fiction. They both had some clever bits, and the writing itself was actually quite a bit better than I remembered, but they’re also both woefully incomplete.
Ate at a local Vietnamese restaurant not once but twice. It was the first time my mother had ever had such cuisine, and I think she’s hooked. If you’re ever in Baton Rouge, check out Dang’s. Their spring rolls and pho are both amazing.
Taught my older cousin how to solve both sudoku (at her insistence) and fill-ins (because I could). She seemed to really like the latter. It felt good.
The usual free-to-play videogame grind.
Managed to play card and board games with the neighbors; I’ve already played Concordia four times on this trip, which is more than any given previous six-month period in my life. It’s so good.

Now to get some sleep. The weather’s been amazing the entire time I’ve been here, cool and not too humid, but tomorrow’s going to be a total mess with thunderstorms. I knew it had to happen before I left. I’m glad it waited so long.

All the comforts

Being back home has been very nice.

Part of it is that my obligations here are pretty low-key, bordering on nonexistent. I’ve had several meals with friends and family, played some board games with my neighbors, and watched some movies with my mother. But I’ve also played quite a bit of Let It Die, solved a ton of puzzles, continued reading the Culture series (I’m up to the last one, The Hydrogen Sonata), and watched plenty of Twitch. These last are, essentially, the same things I fill my days with back at my house in Lenoir.

In earlier years, I would have felt a little guilty about that. I used to cram as many different restaurants as possible into every visit, coordinate visits with the maximum number of old friends and acquaintances, spend as much time as possible with family. But now? I know I’ll be back for the holidays, and then again sometime later next year. And when I visit I know I won’t be time constrained. So why force it?

Because of that, I’ve been enjoying it a lot more. It was always nice to visit, but there was always an undercurrent of maximizing the efficiency of my visit–even of some of that was “spending as much time as possible watching the new season of Black Mirror with Mom”–that made it all more exhausting than it should’ve been. Not so much this time.

I’ll be leaving Baton Rouge to visit a friend (and fellow early retiree) in Arkansas early next week. I expect that trip to be a little more packed, a little more stressful… and that’s fine, because it’s not home. Home should be easy.

And, for the first time in a long time, it really is.

Weekly status update [0009/????]

A quick one this week, being not at home and all.

Watched several movies with Mom, a few that I had seen already (Get Out, Hidden Figures) and a few I hadn’t (John Wick 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, Lincoln).
Finished up Matter, which came close to crashing my Kindle thanks to the weird table at the end. (Great book, though.) Next up is Surface Detail.
Lots of puzzles. I even got my mother an introductory book for sudoku, which came in today, and I plan on showing her how it works this afternoon.
Several meals with family at yummy local restaurants, because if you’re in south Louisiana and you’re not eating out on the regs, you’re doing it wrong. Also, y’know, family.
I brought Concordia with me from North Carolina and managed to get a game of it in on Monday. I hope to make it happen at least one more time before I leave.
Not a lot of videogaming, although I’ve managed a bit more Let It Die than usual.
Being allergy free is awesome. And the weather’s great too. But it’s a short-lived period here in Louisiana, this spring, and I got lucky with my timing.