Listen to the Rain

So, the down first.

Ever since we came back from Hawai'i, the ground floor unit has had a problem where water was leaking through their ceiling. After a lot of back and forth, checking the plumbing, checking the aircon, cutting into the drywall at various places in various units, on Saturday the bottom floor neighbor came and checked out our unit and they didn't see anything. But! After a few minutes they came back, citing condensation they had seen on the ceiling of the unit below, and when they moved our washer/dryer they found water underneath. So, after they left I pulled out the washer and dryer, cleaned up all the water, put down some paper towels, and waited. When after a few hours the paper towels were still bone-dry, I put in a load of laundry, flipped on the flashlight on my phone, and sat there for the entire hour the laundry ran, checking all the connections and all around the floor every time water went in or out of the washing machine.

Nothing.

Well, the washer is still under warranty, so I set up a technician appointment set up for Wednesday. We'll see what they find.

The good part is that gracielizabeth's 40th birthday party was on Saturday, and to that end Papa came to get Laila and we had a free day to go to the party, and that's good because it took up the whole day. We went to a pizza place where they had free pizza for us, and then we went down to the street to a beer garden (well, literally a beer temple called "The Beer Temple"), and then to gracielizabeth's house. We were out from around 1:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. came back, slept in the next day, and relaxed until Laila got home around dinner time. It's something we don't get to do all that often any more so it was really nice.

The party was 70s/80s themed as well, so there was plenty of color (except for me--I got my goth clothes back out for the occasion).

Today was Laila's first day of the new school year!



( Including her sparkly shoes )

We got her all dressed up and sashagee and I walked her to school, and when the time came to go into school one kid was yelling and crying and Laila once again looked confused--was this going to be a problem? One of the other teachers led her back to her classroom, though, and we walked off. We waited all day for news, none came, and when we went to pick her up she ran happily to us and told us she had a good day. No note was waiting from her teacher, we didn't have any email, and no one was waiting to talk to us after school. And in her backpack we found a piece of paper where she had practiced writing her name.

As first days go, we'll take it. Hopefully it's a sign of a good year to come.

(Still using the 幼稚園 tag because preschool and kindergarten are the same word in Japanese)

Time is going by so quickly. In another week and a bit I'll have a post about Laila's first day of kindergarten, but for now, it's been three months since her birthday.

Speaking of school, Laila is waffling. Sometimes, usually when we walk by her school when out on a walk, she'll talk about how she wants to go back, but then remember that school doesn't start until the fall. Sometimes, when we're comfy at home, she'll look at us and say "No schools any more. Just weekend." We think once she's actually at her school, though, she'll have a good time. When she switched to full-time preschool she cried when she realized that we were going to go home, but one of the teachers led her off and around noon we got a picture of her happily playing with the activities in the preschool room, so that's probably what will happen next week too. When she's actually in school she has a great time.

We got her teacher assignment, and I looked her up and found a video of her future teacher reading a story online. sashagee is planning to show it to Laila--who knows if she'll care. She's not very good at paying attention to people trying to talk to her on a screen (something I'll remember if she ever has virtual school as an option.

On the fashion side, her love of "princess shoes" has, if anything, grown even more. Though we do have to stop her from wearing them so much at home since we're on a top floor, she'll still take every chance she gets to do so. Here's a video of her walking in Aunt wanderluster_kp's shoes (which wanderluster_kp herself hasn't worn since she tore her ACL running):

I showed this to some of my female friends and they universally said she was better at walking in heels than them, especially heels of the wrong size.

Laila's speech is getting better. There are still moments she'll refuse to acknowledge us or answer our questions but I think that has more to do with her being a five-year-old. A week ago, at dinner sashagee wasn't feeling well so I was sitting at the table with just Laila and I asked her how her say was, and she said she got in trouble for throwing her Yoto. Then she paused and said:

"Mama had to blow her nose. A lot.

...when sashagee was down with a cold. When she was younger, we were worried she'd end up a black box, but she's slowly opened up. She's lately been saying "I love it" or "This one's my favorite" when she finds things she likes...including her favorite medicine (the opaque one). She still has her "scripts" as they're called--for example, when she was younger we'd call her "naked baby" when she'd take off her clothes and run around in her diaper, so her word for anyone not wearing a full set of clothes is "naked baby"--but just like her therapists told us would happen, she's putting words together to express herself. It just took a bit longer than we would have liked. But now she tells us what's wrong...when she deigns to, of course. As I said, she's still a five year old.

Laila's latest physical activity she loves is scootering. sashagee had been trying to get her to do this for months since Laila was rapidly getting too big to ride in a stroller, but with minimal success. Laila would ask to go scootering, we'd get down to the ground floor, and then she'd give up. But one day she decided to scooter to the gymnastics class when they were having their close-out sale, and then soon after she went off to a weekend at the grandparents, and after that it's been smooth sailing. It's like her potty training where a switch just flipped in her brain and now she can scooter for literal miles--the girls went on a walk together and sashagee told me they went for two miles and Laila could have gone for two more. Now she's constantly wanting to go out on walks to scooter around.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Today is the first Monday back in the office since May of 2022, when the department quietly told us to stop coming in on Mondays since no one else was. I've known it was coming since January of this year, when the new CEO announced the policy and gave plenty of time to prepare. Despite that, it still seems like no one is in the office. The same people I've seen every time I've been in for years are here. The cubicle behind me is empty. The cubicle across from me is empty.

Not that I'm complaining. It's easier to get work done if there's not that many people around.

They're offering a bunch of perks to try to sweeten the wormwood--jeans every day you don't have meetings with external clients, deals with lunch delivery apps, etc.--but obviously none of it makes up for being able to work from home on Mondays. We'll see what affects this has, especially since there are already people I've heard about who get to break the rules and still work from home full-time...

The icon and tag are because Laila woke up at 3 a.m., full of energy and ready to go. sashagee ended up having to spend some time calming her down and getting her to go back to bed. On a normal day, I would have woken up and let her sleep in for a while...but I have to go back to the office, so she's stuck with an energetic Laila. Hopefully their day goes well.

When I was younger, every summer my family would travel out to visit Papa and Grandma Kay, and after a point, my aunt and uncle and cousins would join them. In time, we grew up, my grandparents passed away, and the visits stopped. All this year, though, my sister wanderluster_kp and our cousin lauraforney have been talking about gathering together again in Oregon, this time for lauraforney and my kids to meet and interact instead of our parents bringing us so that we could interact. But as the discussion went on and wanderluster_kp considered buying a house, people thought--why should we go to Oregon, where there is no longer any living family, when we could go to Hawai'i where wanderluster_kp is going to have a house?

Well, for various reasons wanderluster_kp doesn't have a house--it turns out that Hawai'i is expensive even on a veterinary surgeon's salary, unless you want to buy a house where the foundation is literally concrete pillars on sand (she did not buy that house), but she still has her apartment and that reduces the cost, and lauraforney's husband matt.forney.967 works for Alaskan Air and could get a discount both on airplane tickets and hotels, so we switched tracks.

Well, no one was going to complain about spending more time in Hawai'i.

( Monday )

( Tuesday )

( Wednesday )

This weekend brought to you by grandparents. Grandparents who live nearby--the only real parenting hack.

sashagee drove Laila out to her parents on Friday morning and got back later Friday afternoon, after which she made some fried Korean-style beef for dinner and we prepared for a quiet night in since we had an event the next day. But what actually happened was right when she burrowed under the covers, lisekatevans texted me and said she and her roommate and her husband were going out for drinks and would we want to join them. After some persuasion I managed to convince sashagee that it'd be fun so we went out and had a couple drinks and chatted about our lives. I was not expecting it and it was a lovely way to start the weekend.

It did mean that we missed out next day's appointment, though, since sashagee slept in until almost noon, so rather than go to Anime Chicago's summer season anime sampler we layed around the house and later went to spacedragon's party at her house, which consisted of everyone sitting around on a big sofa drinking water and chatting until (before midnight) we all decided to go home. That's what happens in your 40s.

Today, we had a mission to Mitsuwa. The mission was primarily to get some snacks to prep for the flight to Hawai'i, but also to stock up on things that we can't normally get in the city, or at least not easily. We went to the food court first:


Then grabbed a bunch of snacks, some Hiroshima momiji manjū, mitarashi dango, ramen noodles, freeze-dried tofu (had to ask an Asian employee where it was after the other employee I asked didn't know if they had it or not), nikuman, a bottle of sake, pocky, cookies, all kinds of stuff, then drove back home. We were gone most of the afternoon and now we're sitting around at home. Laila comes back tomorrow so one more nice morning of sleeping in. Going to have to enjoy it while we can.

That's what Laila says while she stands in place and swings her arms around.

The last time I wrote about exercise in general was December last year, after my physical, and I'm pleased to say that I still keep up my exercise regimen. I do at least five nights of exercise routines and walk for at least four miles every day, though I've been increasing that over time. On days when I'm in the office I generally walk at least five miles just at work, not counting walking to and from work--I used almost all of my lunch hour on walking.

The main reason I've been stepping it up is that I still haven't gotten back to the level I was at before my appendicitis. I used to be able to do dozens of pushups (in sets of 10) and after a couple years of trying to work back up to that I was having no success, so I thought that I needed to step things up. I've been seeing some results but not as much as I'd like, and having looked a bit into it...apparently I'm not eating enough protein. I put my daily limit at 100 but the standard advice is more like ~2 g per kg of body weight, and I can tell you that I don't weigh 50 kg. בשר בחלב makes it impossible to put extra cheese on a burger or have a side of yogurt dip with meat curry, but I think I just need to eat more meat. I'm almost entirely vegetarian nowadays and while I have no complaints about it, it's true that I was stronger when I ate more meat.

I was also stronger when I was younger, though. That's a big confounding factor.

I've also been trying to get more sleep. I am...historically not good at that, but I went to a work seminar about sleep that drove home, once again, getting enough sleep is critical to basically every single aspect of your physical and mental health and if you don't get enough sleep and feel okay you're fooling yourself. I've been trying to get to bed earlier but lately Laila has not been obliging--she's been waking up at 5:30 a.m. and crawling into bed to cuddle with us. This is very cute and I'm happy to accommodate her, except she's not actually sleeping, she's drawing with her water pen. Today she didn't come in until 6:30 a.m. but I also didn't manage to make it to bed until 11:45 p.m. because I was cleaning the kitchen and prepping my lunch for tomorrow. Need to get better about that.

I finally used up all the beyond beef in the freezer by making a big vegetable scramble, and I've been putting some eggs and feta on it and bringing it to work. I don't think I was deliberately avoiding my usual salad due to all the worry about parasitic diarrhea, but now that I write it down, it might have slightly been a consideration. At least we get all of our greens from a CSA that comes from farms in Illinois. I'd hate to get sick before we all go visit my sister in Hawai'i at the end of the month.

I've been reading Worlds Without Number recently and of course, as I do with basically every gritty fantasy setting that I find, I think, "Oh, I should convert the mechanics over to Exalted 2e! This is a game where an ambush could take out even a well-equipped but unprepared party, where every spell is a puissant working, and where bizarre monsters and hostile creatures abound! Perfect for Exalted." It works for years for Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Anyway, this isn't as much about that, it's about the way Worlds Without Number does fantasy races. The default setting is Dying Earth, so far in the future that all records of the past have been totally lost--the book drops hints that it's the same continuity as Stars Without Number, the sci fi game from the same company, but enough time has passed that the star-spanning Terran Mandate is no longer remembered even in legend. Humanity was confined to the homeworld and ruled by capricious aliens collectively called Outsiders, who placed most humans in subterranean "Deeps"--the worldbuilding excuse to have dungeons to adventure in--and experimented on others. Fantasy races, then, are the descendant of these experiments.

Worlds Without Number then does all the traditional fantasy and sci fi niches with these. Dwarves are humans adapted to underground Deep living and with a deep psychological commitment to a particular ideal they call their "Plan"--I assume the author has borrowed this from Dark Sun dwarves' Focus. Elves are self-reincarnating immortals, who are reborn as another elf when they die and in extreme circumstances can commit identity-suicide and call on a mighty warrior or powerful archmage prior incarnation to slaughter their enemies. And orcs are the "Anakim," warriors engineered by the Outsiders to kill as many humans as they can.

It's obvious that the game is going for orcs that you can kill on sight without any moral questions, and so the background is that the Anakim were engineered with what they call "the Hate", an instinctive and overpowering revulsion and disgust response when in the presence of baseline humanity (and human-similar demihumans). Couple this with reduced inhibition and increased aggression, and it means that Anakim react to nearby humans with unprovoked brutal violence. Peace isn't possible because only the strongest-willed Anak can even be in the same room as a human without immediately trying to murder them. The only reason they aren't a larger threat than they are is because all of that poor impulse control and violence means that Anak society is a patchwork of squabbling tribes led by the strongest and most violent leader whose leadership only lasts so long as the rest of the tribe is afraid of them. Warlords who can manage to unite multiple tribes are rare and have to lead the Anakim against the hated humans before one of their underlings pulls them down.

The book does say that there's a certain kind of player who, when confronted with this, will make it their goal to cure the genetic engineering in the various "Blighted" species, like the Anakim or the Houris (who are beautiful and graceful and never suffer from old age but experience immense contentment and satisfaction from obeying orders, no matter the content or issuer of the order) or the Zakathi (who are immensely strong but need to completely exhaust themselves with physical labor every day or wither away and so usually die in their 50s when their bodies give out). And it is possible--one group of Anakim slaughtered their Outsider overlords, stole their tech, and managed to modify their psychology using it and selective breeding so the Hate is expressed as contempt against the unruly humans and their aggression is all social status-jockeying rather than an axe to the face. These Anakim call themselves the "Aristoi" and think they're better than humans. Maybe your PCs could do the same thing! They can certainly try.

I really like this approach because it sidesteps most of the questions players ask about always-evil orcs--they weren't created by the gods and they aren't naturally evil, they were created as an anti-human weapon by asshole aliens and they used to be human--and provides an epic goal for players who are bothered by this. And if they're not bothered by it, they can just attack first because almost every Anak they see will attack on sight with no quarter asked or given. And it explicitly says some Anakim do have the willpower to resist the Hate, so there's room for backchannel dealings, accompanying a merchant clandestinely dealing with some Anak warlord looking for an edge against other tribes, etc. That's excellent worldbuilding that is directly applicable at the table, and we can always use more of that.

For most of June it's been cool and rainy, and we've only really had to run the aircon for a couple days. Well, now we have this:



It's only for a few days and then we get down to 27°C, but it's hot. Even at 8 a.m. when I left this morning it already felt like 35°C. And of course it's happening on the two days that I'm going into the office. Definitely not walking on the riverwalk today.

I do have to bring the CSA box home, though. Going to be rough.

Didn't realize until I checked my calendar that I hadn't posted in over a week and making that post about DDA made me think I should write about what else is happening.

I wrote a while ago about our attempts to stop Laila from waking up at 5:30 a.m. and I am pleased to report that it's working! She'll often wait until 6:45 a.m. or 7 a.m. to come into our room now, all pleased that she waited until "Jake said wakey wakey!" She's then very insistent that we get up, but that's fair--it's just us upholding our end of the bargain. Even on days where she doesn't make it, it's not as bad as before. Today she came in at 6:05 a.m. and I had to remind her to wait for the alarm, but it's still not 5:30 a.m.

We started her alarm off at 6:15 a.m. and have been gradually creeping it back. Not too far back--she's five, she's going to wake up early--but we also tell her that she can play in her room or go potty or whatever she likes, she can't just come to get us too early. Just need to keep hammering in the message.

The weekend before last (13th and 14th June), Laila was out in the suburbs with both sets of parents, so we had a lot of free time. I went to services on Friday evening, sashagee and I went out with lisekatevans and afschifler on Saturday night (after my long walk), and went to Midsommarfest with rubyleon1090 and her wife, though we spent most of it either at a bar or at a pizza place. And then sashagee spent the next feeling not so great even though she passed off her extra drinks onto me. But it was a great weekend! And it reminded me once again that I actually do really like pizza as long as it doesn't have a lot of sauce on it.

Just got back from a building event where they gave us all free ice cream. It was actually pretty nice, with a toppings bar nearby and a full-sized cone for free. Unlike the previous time I went to the ice cream popup on the south plaza (where they had disappointing gelato), this was extremely good soft serve. So good that it started melting immediately and I had to gulp it down before it just turned into goo. I do feel bad that the previous experience manager for the building seems to have been let go and they turned to An App but we have gotten more free food since we switched to The App. On the other hand, they no longer do online meditation on Thursdays, which is annoying. It's just not the same watching videos or listening to An App. The human element is why I made it a point to go to Mishkan's meditation group before the Plague Years.

The weather has been mostly lovely for the past week. It's currently 19°C, which is around what it's been the whole time. On the other hand, it's been pretty rainy, with multiple flood warnings and plenty of standing water. A couple days ago I took Laila out to splash in puddles and we ended up going to the park and I watched while she tried to clear off the water droplets from the slide. A passing worker commented how much he missed those days, which is a comment I get a lot when out with Laila. A couple days ago she gave sashagee and me a hug and said "You're the best!"

Alright, time to go home.

For most of yesterday sashagee wasn't feeling well, so I had a lot of free time. Around 4 p.m. I thought it'd be nice to go for a walk, so I put on some flip-flops, walked out the door, and headed for the north side of the lakeshore trail. I started walking, kept walking, kept walking, and, well:


It's something I've always wanted to do, to walk along the lakeshore on a warm summer evening, but there was never previously a good time. This weekend, Laila is at the grandparents and sashagee, so I finally had the time. I initially only planned to walk to Belmont, about half that distance there. But around Belmont I thought, "Oh, I could walk to Fullerton, it's only a few more blocks" and then when I got to Fullerton I could see the skyscrapers of downtown in the light of the setting sun and I thought, "...you know, those don't seem that far away. I bet I could make it there without taking too much time." And so I walked the entire way.

After I had been gone an hour and a half sashagee texted me asking if I had met up with someone and I was like "Nope! Still walking!"

I took the bus home and got back around 8:30 p.m. (the Red Line had a lot of weirdness since it's not running underground on weekends currently). sashagee was really worried that my feet would hurt the next day, but they don't. After I got back, we went out to a bar with lisekatevans and afschifler and afschifler was astonished I did it in flip-flops, but as I answered, feet are made for walking.

Maybe I'll do it again later this summer. I should get new flip-flops, though--I've nearly worn holes through my current ones.

Last night as I was prepping my breakfast for the next morning--getting the rice in the rice cooker to sit overnight, cooking the salmon, etc--I realized that I couldn't do my normal salad for lunch since we didn't have any lettuce or spinach or anything, since sashagee used it all last week to make a giant dinner salad to stop it the CSA greens from going bad like they had the previous year. So I opened up the work food app to check what the pop-up restaurant was going to be the next day to see if it was worth just ordering that, and I was happily surprised to see Teranga was listed. Terangais a Senegalese restaurant that's up by where we live and I've been meaning to go for a while, so this was the perfect opportunity.


Tilapia filet with peppers and onions, with a bit of spicy sauce, jollof rice, and an extra--fried plantains, which I hadn't originally ordered but when I got up there the guy told me that I got to pick and extra side. I mentioned that I lived nearby the actual restaurant and I'm glad they were there so I could try it, he gave me some spicy sauce, and it took it back to the AMA part of the building to eat.

It was delicious. The sides were actually the best part--the fried tilapia was tilapia, and as the culinary advice I've seen goes, tilapia "takes on the flavors of what it's served with" meaning it's tasteless. The spicy sauce helped a lot with that, though it was pretty spicy with a slow-heat spice. The jollof rice was flavorful and a bit spicy itself. I did notice that the Teranga menu had a lot of fish on it, though, so I'd love to try again at the actual restaurant. Definitely going again if they come back.

Did some training of a new employee today. We're working on a specific project that isn't really like the other projects--there's a lot of redundant data that we're just skipping past, so we had some time to chat. It turns out she watches anime...just only Solo Leveling and Kaijū No. 8. Not what I would have expected for a woman in her 30s. Solo Leveling has never interested me in the slightest but Kaijū No. 8 did look kind of neat. If only I had time to actually watch much of anything.

Congratulations, Laila!


It went pretty well, all things considered. There was a cute dance performance to Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" that Laila sadly did not get to participate in--we saw her just sitting in the audience and weren't sure why she wasn't on stage until we remembered that she had a fall risk and wasn't even allowed to climb stairs herself without someone holding her hand until the end of May, so dancing and spinning on stage is definitely something that the school wouldn't have let her do. She did okay watching the performance until the certificate ceremony started and she noticed us in the audience, then she wanted to come sit by us and started crying on stage. But she got her certificate and came over to us after. She had a little school bus toy that the bus driver must have given her in the morning.

For a little bit she was shy with her teachers, but she gave them all hugs before we left. Her teachers asked us if she was going to be at the same school the next year and we sadly had to tell them that she wouldn't, since we don't live in the school zone and we'd have to put her into the lottery and try to get her in. They tried to tell us to ask the principle for a special exception, but it's really nice to be able to walk Laila to school and have school be just a few minutes' walk away. And Laila did have a good time at her old school, but I'm glad she had such a good time at her new school for the short time she was there.

Now to Laila's first summer vacation!

Bonus: Two of Laila's classmates, Malachi Faust and Lottie Cornelius, should team up to fight crime.