Listen to the Rain

Back in Japan I used to go view the cherryblossoms every year, multiple times a year. I remember sitting by the banks of the Motoyasugawa with friends, tons of people all around us on blankets at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and drinking sake and eating kushiyaki while we chatted for hours at a time. One time we all went up to Shōbara and had a picnic in Ueno Sakura Park, where a bunch of us rented rowboats and went out on the pond. Halcyon days.

Well, we can't get that experience in Chicago but we do have cherryblossoms here, planted down in Jackson Park. The last couple of years the weather has been cold enough that they didn't bloom, and this year the weather was also pretty changeable but the blossoms were out, so on Saturday morning after sashagee and I woke up late and ate breakfast, her parents brought Laila back from her grandparents stay, and then we all drove down to the Garden of the Phoenix to look at the blossoms. What blossoms there were--Chicago weather being what it was, a couple days prior it had been 26°, it was now 10° with chill winds. What's more, the day before there had been a strong rainstorm that had washed a bunch of blossoms off the trees, and they were on the ground and in the lake when we got there. Some trees were almost devoid of blossoms entirely! Despite that, there were still some trees to be seen:


The most interesting trees were right near the parking lot as we entered. We walked around the lake, where there were some trees but only a couple with enough blossoms to bother looking at, and then when sashagee asked me about the festival that was supposed to take place that day I said it wasn't until 1:30 p.m. (it was 10:15 a.m.), so sashagee's parents drove us all back home and after hanging out with Laila for a bit, they left.

We put Laila down for a nap but she did not take one, and she had enough energy later in the day that she kept demanding we go for a walk, so we went. The temperature had gotten a bit warmer, helped mostly by the sun finally coming out, but that meant when we went to the park there were a bunch of people there and Laila asked to leave after only ten minutes. She still wanted to go for a walk, though, so I kept walking down to Broadway and we went down to the other park further south, and Laila ran around for a while. She told me she wanted to leave once and then changed her mind, and it turned out to be fortuitous because after we had been there for twenty minutes, some of Laila's classmates from gymnastics showed up! I actually got to see Laila play together with some other kids. The cutest part was when two of them were on either end of the seesaw, and the second-cutest part was when Laila was beneath the playground equipment and two of her classmates were up top, and they were all looking for each other. When a bubble-shooting gun came out, they all got distracted and Laila eventually got tired and we went home.

The next day was a lazy day most of the day, but in the evening I had an invite to worldbshiny. I was also invited to go to see The Sinners in the afternoon, but I already wrote about why I didn't go. Since I handled most of that, I took the evening off and walked down to the bar where the party was being held, arriving a bit later, but it turned out that it wasn't too late because poor worldbshiny had her car towed while she was in the movie and had to move the time back. But once I did get there, it was lovely--I spent a while talking to lisekatevans's housemate about sightseeing in London, we all (except me) discussed The Sinners, I had a couple drinks and listened in, and after two hours I called it a night and went home. It's how I used to spend multiple nights a week that way.

I listened to Gorgeous on the way home, just like I used to on summer nights, all those years ago.

Just got back from the work popup of Tandoor Char House, previously written about here. Last time they gave me free dessert. This time I paid for dessert...but they gave me a free samosa. I'm not sure how they plan to make money if they constantly give away free stuff but I'm certainly not going to complain.

We got sick from the wedding we went to the weekend before last. At least, I assume that's why--we felt a little bad the day after, but while I recovered on Monday morning, I started feeling worse and took Tuesday off and worked from home on Wednesday. sashagee never felt better and it cumulated in us going to the doctor a couple days ago. Laila and I waited out in the waiting room, alternating between Laila being nearly comatose and laying on my lap, and her wanting to run around the waiting room only to give up and want to go back and sit down when I took her outside to give her more room to run (and also not disturb all the other patients). After an hour of waiting for both us and sashagee--she was updating me on her time just sitting in the exam room in back--a doctor came in, did some checks, diagnosed her with bronchitis acquired after a week of coughing, and sent us off with prescriptions for an inhaler and a couple medications. We went across the street to a place that had both burgers and shawarma, able to satisfy all parties concerned, and when our food came it is ludicrously large portions. None of us finished our food, but we ate what we could, took some takeout boxes, and went on our way.

We're also 2/2 on Middle Eastern places hearing that our daughter's name is Laila and giving us free baklava.

After her first couple swimming classes where she was very wild, Laila got very timid all of a sudden. Her next class she barely wanted to swim at all, just wanted to cling on to the instructor, and the next couple classes after that she tried to get out of the water. The instructor told me that they were going to work on Laila's confidence, though, and yesterday during the lesson she was a little wild but she managed to swim a bit all by herself and I was told she was talking more and did a much better job at swimming. She's slowly getting to the point of being independent--which is good, because we want to put her into preschool this fall and she needs to be conditioned to deal with other kids and with adults she doesn't know telling her what to do. She doesn't have a lot of experience with either of those right now.

Alright, post took me a few hours and now that work day's done. Time to head home. I got a transceiver ping from Laila at 9:30 a.m. saying she misses me so I'm sure she'll be glad to see me when I come home. Have to treasure Laila running to the door to say hi to me for as long as it lasts.

Last year most of the Jewish holidays were on weekends, so I already had them off. That's not true this year, but the bonus is that many of the High Holy Days are on Thursdays and Fridays, so in October I only have one full work week and three four-day weekends. Not bad.

Wednesday night was Erev Rosh Hashanah and Mishkan did a livestream, but since Laila was awake I missed most of it and by the time she was asleep there were only thirty minutes left, so I skipped it. The next day, though, we woke up bright and early thanks to Laila, ate breakfast and got dressed, and took the bus out to the Copernicus Center for Rosh Hashanah services. While the last time we all went, we were able to go into actual services because Laila was small enough we could hold on to her and she could enjoy the singing, that was never going to work this time. We went for the Rise and Shine service (for kids 0-4), and then went over to the "Museum of Awe" where Laila immediately ran over to Toddler Town and started trying to grab all of the stamps. She was full of energy, so we didn't stay very long, but we did say yoni-labow-5693413a and whoolia45 with their new baby! They were heading in to services with a very asleep baby, just like we had been a couple years ago, but we chattered with them a bit and then headed out to lunch at a drive-in diner that also had Korean food (I got a teriyaki chicken pita. It was delicious) before heading home.

The next day sashagee wasn't feeling well, so while we originally all planned to go to the second day picnic, it was just Laila and I who went. I packed up a lunch for her and we got on the bus to go to Welles Park. We arrived just in time for the Shema, and while she initially squirmed a bit she calmed down once the singing started. Once it ended and the rabbi started talking, though, she immediately lost all interest, so we left the main area and went over to the part of the park where the kids activities were. She really went in on the activity sand, and while she still doesn't quite know how to interact with other kids, she waited her turn until she could get close and played very nicely with them. She even took a turn at blowing the shofar! When we got back home, sashagee was asleep, and while Laila woke her up when we ate lunch, she went right back to sleep when Laila laid down for a nap. She was really wiped out, so I took Laila to the park for a bit and let her rest of the day, and when Laila went to bed so did she.

There is one other thing we did, though. We didn't get to stay long enough at Welles park for the ritual of Tashliḥ, the symbolic casting away of our sins, as it is written:

Who is a G-d like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.
You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
-Micah 7:18-19

So we went to the lake to do it. Laila loved the actual throwing of the bread on the water, but she wasn't interested in anything else. She didn't want to run around on the grass, she didn't want to look out over the water, she didn't do anything. She did smile briefly for a picture, but that was it:



And then we went home.

Saturday we had two things scheduled but neither of them was until later in the day, so we had a nice slow morning where we all got to eat breakfast and sit around watching Kiki's Delivery Service until closer to 11, where we walked to the bus and went to Lincoln Square for Applefest. I went to it back in 2019, and then in 2020 and 2021 there was no Applefest, and in 2022 and 2023 we were out in the suburbs on both weekends, but this time we could go and a bunch of our friends were there too! The festival was twice as big as the last I was there, from Lawrence all the way down to Sunnyside on Lincoln, and the weather was beautiful but that meant it was a sunny day and I was carrying Laila for blocks up and down while we looked at the shops and got a bit of apple pie, some breakfast sandwiches--sashagee wanted a smashburger, but we were warned that it was a thirty-minute wait time so she got a breakfast sandwich too--and ate them while Laila ate her apple waffles. We got apple cookies and looked at the artisans, and chatted with our friends--Laila was obsessed with spacedragon's dyed hair and kept asking her to hold her--until 2 p.m. came and we needed to get home to rest for a bit. It was already too late for Laila's nap, but we could still go home and rest.

Around 4:30 p.m. we left again for our second event, thosesocks's housewarming, with apple pie and Laila in tow. We went out to the bus and the tracker said "no scheduled arrival times," so we had to walk all the way there--it was only a mile or so but it was a long way after all our earlier walking and while carrying Laila. When we got there, sashagee talked to thosesocks while I chased after Laila, which proved to be the theme of the evening--at one point Laila went out on the balcony and ran up and down, since it was laid out lengthwise along the entire building. She did that a couple dozen times, full of way more energy than I expected, except for some brief interludes to dip a cookie in ranch dressing and eat it and trying to steal chocolate-covered pretzels. After an hour or so, right when thosesocks was concerned about Laila being so energetic, it was time for us to go (Laila needed an early bedtime since she skipped her name), so we said our goodbyes and went home. We didn't get a slice of that apple pie but the chocolate-covered pretzels were delicious.

Sunday morning was a fast day, Tzom Gedaliah, so I woke up before anyone else to eat breakfast before the sun came up. When I was done, I opened the door so Laila could escape her room, we all got ready, and I took Laila out to Hebrew school. This time went better than the first time, where she was overwhelmed by all the people. She still wasn't very interested in the songs, but she was much more focused on the crafts. There was a craft to make a "Bug Sukkah" and that was what Laila focused all her energy on:


Sadly, it did not survive the trip home on the bus. While Laila wasn't interested in the songs, she did stay at the craft tables for much longer than many of the other kids did, who got bored and wandered off to sit with their parents and read books or something. She really loved those bugs, and we stayed through the closing songs and then left to go home...except the bus wasn't coming for 35 minutes so I walked most of the way home, carrying Laila the entire way, and then spent much of the rest of the day sitting down because she's heavy. She's a big girl now!

This coming weekend is Yom Kippur, so even more holidays ahead.

Mentioned before I had some things planned for the weekend and I did get to do most of them!

Saturday morning I woke up early and went out to the park to meet up for another dive into the Siddur with Mishkan. Last time we looked at the Aleinu, and this time we looked at Kaddish, the prayer now currently most associated with mourning that famously never actually mentions death or grief. The two lines are:

יִתְגַּדַּל וְיִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא. בְּעָלְמָא דִּי בְרָא כִרְעוּתֵהּ וְיַמְלִיךְ מַלְכוּתֵהּ בְּחַיֵּיכון וּבְיומֵיכון וּבְחַיֵּי דְכָל בֵּית יִשרָאֵל בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב, וְאִמְרוּ

Glorified and sanctified be G-d’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will.

May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

The rest of it continues in that pattern. It turns out (I did not know this), Kaddish was originally said after what we would now call a "sermon" as a way of praise G-d for the knowledge learned, and then it was said after the deaths of those who gave those sermons as a way of remembering the people who gave them, and then that expanded out to everyone who died. So we talked about the place of a text that doesn't mention death and why it might be comforting= and about how the requirement of a minyan forces you into community at a time where you most want to isolate yourself. There was also a Baby Shabbat happening about fifty feet away, but since Laila is out with the grandparents, I just went home afterwards.

Around 3:30 p.m. after spending some time with sashagee, who really wasn't feeling well, I left again and went down to XMarket Food Hall where tom.hen.12 had invited me to a board game night, and when I got there, they had the board set up for Wingspan:


When I came in I was very confused, but it turned out to be a lot of fun with a lot of moving parts.

As you can see from the image, there are three "tracks" where you can place birds. Different birds have different habitats and every bird has a special ability, and you can either place bird (at a cost of food) or activate a track. My vulture got me extra food whenever anyone used a bird with a hunting ability, my barn swallow let me trade unwanted birds for points (though less points than the birds were worth, indicated by the feather on the card), and my loggerhead shrike let me stockpile points if anyone took a mouse from the food stockpile. There are also secret randomized goals each player has--you start with one and can gain more if you play the right birds--as well as public randomized goals everyone knows about. That's why I had so many eggs played on my water bird, because the first round goal was based on how many eggs you had played on a water bird.

Despite my initial confusion it was a lot of fun! When I initially saw the vulture I was worried there was going to be PVP--use a predatory bird special ability to eat other people's birds, for example--but while it was competitive, we were all just doing our own thing and trying to win. I got a great horned owl in my hand within the first round, but I never played it because there were no mice to draw, which incidentally meant I never got any points from my shrike. Instead, I played a crow that gave me extra food whenever I activated its special ability and, because it was on the central track, I spent most of the game doing the 'lay eggs' activity repeatedly, using that to get food, and using that food to get more birds. Sadly, tom.hen.12 let me down--he was the only one with a hunting bird and out of the dozen or so times he tried to hunt, he only succeeded once, so that strategy didn't pay off. I also didn't get to use my shrike, as I mentioned, so I had to kind of scramble for points at the end of the game. And I got pretty close, but I couldn't manage to win. I lost to tom.hen.12 by 1 point, with classicvintagedetail two points behind me. eafeder came in last, almost twenty points behind classicvintagedetail even though she had a giant stack of food on one of her birds. I would say "we shouldn't have assumed she was a threat" but it wouldn't have mattered, since there's very little ways to affect each other's progress. The only obvious way was that people kept rerolling food so they wouldn't have to pick mice and give me points, but they also were in situations where they didn't need the mice anyway. It was a minor sacrifice.

A ton of fun, I'd be glad to play it again. tom.hen.12's wife also came even though she didn't play, so I invited sashagee, but she was taking a nap and didn't see it. Alas.

On Sunday I was originally going to go to an art meetup with friends but sashagee was feeling awful, so while the original plan was for both of us to go, in the end, neither of us went. We stayed home and I helped sashagee recover and today she's feeling much better, so it did work! If only it had happened a day earlier.

Currently it's just at home, since sashagee and Laila went out to visit her parents in the suburbs. Both sets of parents have been wanting a weekend with Laila, but since we're switching her to a new medication we didn't want to leave her without us until we're more sure how she takes to it and if there will be any side effects. So far she seems to be mostly her normal self again, which is good--at the beginning she seemed a bit like a zombie and would barely talk, but that faded away after a couple days. Now she's back to being much chattier. B"H.

A few months ago, I signed up for SakuraCo's snack box at sashagee's insistence, since we used to get a snack box from a different company but that company went out of business due to Plague Years-related troubles. In some ways I like the old box better--for one thing, they put two of every snack in the box because they correctly assumed a lot of the boxes would be shared and so you wanted a full snack to yourself--but there is one way in which the box beat out the old one:



Warabimochi.

If you're not familiar, warabimochi is a Japanese summertime treat, with roasted soybean flour dusted over the top and served cold. Chiyoda occasionally had a warabimochi truck that would travel along the back roads playing its happy warabimochi truck song:

"Warabiiiiiiiiii mochiiiiiiiii beep beep beepbeepbeepbeep *musical jingle*

I haven't had it in over a decade--I've been able to find momiji manjū, a Hiroshima regional specialty (名物 meibutsu), much easier than warabimochi, and it was lovely. I'll stay loyal to SakuraCo just for that.

I haven't actually done that much, though. I texted a couple people to see if they were free but no one was, so I worked on Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead modding content and played Final Fantasy XIV in my free time, but I also cleaned the whole house, which is a lot easier when there isn't a rampaging toddler determined to make everything messy again after you've been cleaning. They're coming home later today, through, just in time for Shabbat, and when Laila sees all the clean, uncluttered floors who knows what she'll do.

I'd love to say that we had great weather for the weekend, with sunny skies and warmth, but it would be a complete lie. It was cloudy and rainy for the majority of the weekend, with even the least-rainy day (Saturday) still having some rain. Sunday it thunderstormed for most of the day, and there was rain the middle of the day on Monday too. sashagee spent a chunk of the weekend lying down with a headache, but thanks to her parents taking Laila for a ton of fun adventures, we had a baby-free weekend and plenty of time to ourselves.

Saturday, we went to cillic and heather.eisele's Memorial Day barbecue and in the evening, to afschifler's birthday party at lisekatevans's place, and on Monday we went to maptekar and her boyfriend's place out in the suburbs for a last-minute barbecue. A lot of travel involved--train and bus to the fist barbecue, bus and train (actual rail) to the suburbs, and some walking--but worth it.

There's not a lot to actually write about here, though, because most of what happened was "we talked with people and had a lovely time." One of the people who came to the Saturday barbecue was married to a Japanese man, so she brought a soba noodle salad that was delicious (disadvantage of most barbecue--I can't eat it since if it's not pork, it was probably cooked together on the same grill as pork), as well as a farro salad and a bunch of fresh fruit, plus some delicious seven layer bars inside. At the birthday party, while joseph.harnden was telling sashagee how much better I looked now that I was wearing more colors and how she was such a good influence on my fashion, hazel.flowersmccabe was talking to me:

Hazel: "You're wearing...colors."
Me: "Well, I'm a dad now, I changed up my style."
Hazel: "You can be a goth dad."

at the barbecue on Monday, we met someone that maptekar had met through Bumble BFF (which I didn't realize was a thing). She was very reserved, but she's also Romanian, so I figured it was just her being from Eastern Europe. maptekar's boyfriend made some chicken with a honey and vinegar glaze and I had it with a bunch of salad. We would have stayed longer, but since it was a holiday weekend they were running holiday trains, so we had to get back to the city on the 7:32 p.m. train. Next time we'll be able to stay longer.

We were asked at one point if Memorial Day barbecues were a tradition in my family and I said no. But maybe I should reconsider.

And we all survived. Even Laila--somewhat to my surprise, she's still asking for matzah today after the holiday is over. By name, too! She just really loves matzah.

Last night I went to aaronhparker's combined post-Pesaḥ ḥametzathon and birthday part at Piece Brewery and Pizzeria in Wicker Park. I'm not usually much of a pizza person, but the pizza choices aaronhparker made--a standard red sauce and cheese one, sure, but also a mushroom white pizza and a margherita pizza. The white pizza went first with astonishing speed and the margherita pizza wasn't that far behind, and I even liked it! I told sashagee that she would have liked it, and that she should have come. It was just me since it took place at a brewery, but I guess the pizzeria part took precedence because there was a baby changing table in the men's bathroom. It could have been pizza for the whole family! As it was, I spent a lot of time talking to yoni-labow-5693413a, who was very interested in whether I was watching Tokyo Vice. I told him I had read the book but not seen the show, he encouraged me to watch it, we talked about kids (he and his wife are expecting a baby), we did vodka shots, it was a lovely time.

We went to two Seders as well. Last Monday we were at britshlez's place with just a few people for a small First Seder, and last Tuesday I went alone to aaronhparker's for another Seder. For the first one we didn't really do the after-meal portion of the Seder but we did for the second one, so I got at least one full-on Seder experience this year.

Laila spent most of the weekend at her papa and nana's while sashagee and I repainted the sun room, but the experience was somewhat marred by her having another seizure. This was much more worrying to us than to the doctors--it's been six months since her last seizure, and she's grown quite a bit since the last time her medicine was upped. By the time she was being checked out at the hospital, Laila had already gotten 100% back to her normal self--the doctors said that it can take up to 24 hours sometimes, so her recovering after only a few hours was a very good sign--and since she responded well to all the seizure tests they sent us home, with a prescription for a higher medicine amount. We even gave Laila back to her grandparents to finish out the weekend since it wasn't a serious problem, just scary in the moment. My mother said, "I'm too old for this" when we met them at the hospital.

Alright, Laila didn't take a nap today. Back to work.

Friday morning sashagee went out to her parents, and I followed after work. And then Saturday morning, we woke up at 6:15 a.m.--well, Laila woke up at 6:15 and so we also woke up--we all ate breakfast, and then we piled into her parents' care to travel to Indiana to go visit her family. The last time we were supposed to go, I got what turned out to be COVID and stayed home while sashagee and Laila went, so I hadn't yet met most of her cousins and their children yet. She gave me a bunch of warnings that they were loud and might be overwhelming, and was I ready?

The car ride went fine. It was Laila's first long car ride as an aware being, since the last time she was seven months old and just slept the whole time, and she did okay. We stopped once at a place called Fair Oaks Farm just off the highway and let Laila run all around while we bought milkshakes (or at least, I bought a milkshake and sashagee's stepmother got ice cream), and then got back into the car and finished the drive to Muncie. We went over to sashagee's birthday grandmother's for a few minutes and then borrowed the car to visit her mother and other grandmother, which is where we spent most of the evening. sashagee's mother had broken her foot a few weeks ago and wasn't mobile at all, so Laila was a bit bouncing off the walls there, especially since sashagee's mother has two small dogs. Laila kept trying to grab their toys, climb in the cage, wandering around her small apartment, and it was only when the paper and pens came out and she could color that she finally slowed down.

When we got to sashagee's grandmother, sashagee was at first worried she wasn't home because she was so used to other people always being there, but there was nothing to worry about. Her house was very homely, laid out length-wise so you could see from the family room at one end through the kitchen to the living room at the other, and it just screamed "Grandma's house" will the jars labeled "Flour" and "Sugar" and "Tea" and the pictures of descendants framed and placed on nearly every flat surface.

At this point Laila was slowing down, so she spent a bit of time running around but started to get tired, and we spent the last half an hour watching Ponyo until we knew we had to get back to the hotel. Even with that, Laila did fall asleep on the way back, though B"H she woke up when we got back and didn't fuss while we prepped her for bed. Back at the hotel I spent an hour in the hotel's exercise room getting in all the Apple Watch exercise time that I had missed out on during a day of driving and visiting, and fell asleep not that much later.

This time Laila slept in until 8:15 a.m., and we all got ready and then went out to eat the hotel's complimentary breakfast of scrambled eggs, French toast, bagels, and coffee/tea (the tea was awful, the rest of the food was fine) and then went back to sashagee's birthday grandmother's before we split off again to go to visit her mother and other grandmother and drop off USB drives containing every picture we've taken of Laila for the last three years--both of them have Android phones and thus aren't on any of the photo albums--and then head back to the party.

The warnings were unnecessary! I didn't get interrogated and it wasn't as loud as I was warned, though apparently this was also because of the circumstances. sashagee said that one whole branch of the family was basically out sick, so there's another two dozen people who could have showed who didn't. I had some nice chats and spent some time chasing Laila around, but we only ended up being able to stay for two hours. sashagee's estranged sister was there too, but I didn't talk to her at all--she didn't talk to anyone in her family until sashagee's father tried to talk to her, which apparently didn't go well--and even ignored Laila when Laila went up to her. Well, her loss. The rest of the party was lovely!

Very different from my small family but a fun time. I'd be happy to go back again.

I had multiple tabs all set up to read the posts I missed when I was sick...and then Firefox crashed. I didn't lose my tabs, but they did all reload to the latest setting, which means I missed about a week. Sigh. And to think for years I never missed a single post--having kids really does reprioritize all your time.

Laila won't be here this weekend, because she'll be spending it with both sets of grandparents, sashagee's from today to Sunday, and mine from Sunday to Tuesday, which means we'll have a long child-free weekend. We don't really have any plans, even for a massive cleaning, because we already did a massive cleaning this week after everyone finally started feeling better after being sick.

Hopefully after this weekend I'll have an actual post with actual things I've done.

Laila is asleep, sashagee is napping, it's grey and misty outside, and I'm still here at work. The Shabbat candle-lighting time starts right when work ends. We already did our Shabbat cleaning yesterday. Not much to do now.

sashagee is feeling sick--she's been sick, off and on, for about a month at this point. Laila can tell and she's not happy about it. She has tons of energy, always moving and always climbing and always wanting to go fast, and it means she's constantly testing boundaries and trying to get away with things and sashagee just does not have the energy to deal with it a lot of the time. I can play with Laila after work, but that still means most of most days I can't do much. sashagee already contacted her doctor to try to get some more tests done, and hopefully they can adjust her medication or do something else to help her get her energy back.

After the small number of games I played last year, I decided that this year I would try to beat one game a month and so far I'm...very behind. I haven't even started a new game this month at all and I have less than a week left. Fortunately, the game I want to play is the NES Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which takes maybe three hours to beat and which I ran through probably a dozen times or more during my childhood, so I just need to sit down and actually put in the time. We don't have any other plans this weekend so this should be the time to do it.

Lately I've been into the RPG Break!!, which I kickstarted last year (when the kickstarter happened at the end of a 10 year design process). The game looks gorgeous and while I'm usually not a big fan of OSR games because they're not fiddly and complicated enough for my tastes, Break!! has some things in it that are almost always emphasized but rarely actually given mechanical weight--for example there's a whole section about marching order and how it mechanically affects what you can do! Plus the world it takes place on is hollow, the outer surface has no sun and while it used to have a "sun machine," the machine broke and crashed down to earth and so the world is divided into the Blazing Garden, the Twilight Meridian, and the Whistful Dark. In the far past, the world was ruled by capricious beings called the Unshaped (shades of Exalted), until one of those Unshaped took inspiration from the prayers of mortals and became Regulus, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFUEz-8phDc&t=311s>First Hero</a>, leading mortals to victory. There are cat people who are actually aliens and arrived on a crashed spaceship. It looks like a ton of fun and I can't wait until I get the actual physical book. We had a bunch of snow back when I posted about how cold it was, and since then the weather climbed up to 6°C and it's been raining almost nonstop for days. The streets are wet and glistening in the streetlights now. Alright, Shabbat in a few minutes. See you on the other side.

Last week, yoni-labow-5693413a and whoolia45 invited us to their Ḥanukah party. I asked if I could bring Laila, and they said yes, and we were prepared for that. Then sashagee suggested that Laila spend the weekend at the grandparents, so we could paint the kitchen cabinets, and since her parents hadn't had a Laila weekend in a while.

Well, long story short, we did not paint the cabinets because when we went to the paint store, they mentioned that cabinets with a veneer need special paint and prepping that's more expensive than just "buy paint, put on" and since we just bought a whole new set of kitchen appliances we decided not to go through with it just yet. What happened instead is that I spent most of the weekend playing Genshin Impact trying to catch up with the story to finish it in time to do the new event quest because it suggested that I do the story before doing the event, which was a lie and I should have just done the event and beaten Hollow Knight instead so I would have hours of my life back. Anyway, it was fine. The longer I play the game--which I still play because it's basically the only game sashagee plays these days--the more the parts that are specifically designed to be elaborate money-extraction machines make themselves obvious. Dailies, events that feature particular characters that just happen to be available to pull for, the inability to skip dialogue animations (in spent in-game directly correlates with money spent), etc. I'll keep playing it for the moment because like I said, it's basically the only game sashagee plays now. But I'm getting closer to flipping the table.

Once I did that, though, I got through the White Palace and the delicate flower delivery in Hollow Knight. I need to beat the Coliseum of Fools, finish up the Grimm Troupe quest, find a couple more ghosts to finish up the Dreamnail story, and then I'll beat the game. My review should be up before the end of the year.

The party was lovely! There was a "Dreidel Corner" with dreidels and markers and paper and yoni-labow-5693413a and whoolia45's nieces and nephews and we totally could have brought Laila, but we still had a nice time. I didn't really know anyone else other than the hosts, so we spent some time talking with each other until I ended up talking with yoni-labow-5693413a and sashagee talked with one of his bowling buddies. We ended it talking with whoolia45 about the true meaning of Ḥanukah--a civil war between religious and secular Jews that the secular Jews lost, the king who called himself "The God Manifest" (Ἐπιφανής) that the Jews punned into "The Madman" (Ἐπιμανής), conquering neighboring countries and forcibly converting the inhabitants--and how of course because of that we're like "THE OIL BURNED FOR EIGHT DAYS IT'S A MIRACLE." It's also about avoiding forced assimilation, and that's why we remember it. But I'll wait until Laila is older before we talk about the other parts.

A bit over a week ago, after finally crystalizing that I will never go to a gym because 1) I don't want to pay for a gym membership and 2) I will never in a million years wake up early enough to go there before work, especially on days when "before work" means making matcha in my kitchen before I sit down on the couch, I ordered a set of resistance bands. I used them previously to do curls and ended up fine, but yesterday I used them to do squats (3 sets of 20--all the advice I found said to do more reps if using resistance bands vs weights). This morning I felt a little sore but mostly okay until I had to climb the stairs down from our home and then again to get up to the L platform. They still hurt even now as I'm sitting at my desk. Well, I'm going to keep it up so that doesn't happen anymore.

I'm going to pick up a custom-made dress shirt today. I have a noodle-limbed CLAMP character body, so finding any sort of clothing that fits me is a struggle. Shirts are okay compared to pants, though, and I just noticed that the pants I'm wearing now have a small rip on the knee. In the time sashagee and I have been together I've gone through like six pairs of pants and all of them because the knees gave out. It's hard enough for me to find pants and now I have to deal with this? I'm going to see if Suit Supply has any pants that aren't dry clean only because maybe I could get a set of pants that actually fit me and won't rip basically immediately. Those are difficult to find at the best of times.

sashagee is feeling much better now and has taken to domesticity--to wit, she has acquired a sourdough starter and now is baking every day. Well, baking is a little bit of a misnomer. She certainly has baked several breads, apple bread and banana bread, but a lot of the sourdough starter goes into making flatbreads. She takes the discard, fries it up in a pan in butter and puts Trader Joe's everything bagel seasoning on it, and then we eat it. I put labneh from the Middle Eastern Grocery Store on it, which goes perfectly with the extra sourness of the discard. I'd honestly never thought of sourdough flatbread before, which is a little weird because of course it was the original flatbread.

Tonight begins the holiday of Sukkot, the eight-day end of the High Holy Days where we are told to dwell in a temporary structure. There's a huge variety of laws about how to build this structure--the roof must be made of plants that are disconnected from the ground, and they must be thick enough that the inside is shaded but thin enough that rain can get through, and there must be walls on three sides (but not the fourth side), but none of it applies to me because living in a fourth-floor condo there's no way I can build a kosher one. It's common to put sukkot out on a balcony but that requires a balcony that's open to the sky, since a kosher sukkah may not have a roof over it, and the balcony out back is completely roofed over. As such, tonight we're going to a picnic in Wicker Park where Mishkan is going to have a sukkah set up, so Laila and I can go into the sukkah and perform the ancient ritual of shaking the lulav and the etrog. Last year when we went Laila really charmed a older couple that was there, and I'll bet she'll do the same thing again.

I went to a wedding but haven't had the time to really write about it, so there'll probably be a backdated post showing up in a few days.

I started playing Hollow Knight again as well, and in an hour and a half or so over the last two nights I've beaten the Enraged Guardian and finished off the Crystal Peak and then gone back to the City of Tears, climbed the Watcher's Tower past the guardian knights and found the last of the Dreamers. I think that means I could technically go beat the game, but I still haven't found whatever lets me pass through those black smoke pillars or done any of the DLC stuff. I haven't even beaten the Mantis Lords! I wanted to finish this before October but I guess it is technically a spooky October game so if I finish it in the first week, that'll be good enough.

Alright, it's almost dinner time. We're going to a picnic but for Laila-related reasons we're eating first and only bringing dessert. It'll still be a lovely time.