Day 33 – Goodness, Gardening and Games

We all had a good sleep and a long lie, and then got busy for the rest of the day. Some of the morning was spent tidying and then we went into the garden, with a brief break for lunch.

Later in the afternoon I hosted an online Dungeons and Dragons session for Alexander and his friends while Lucy and Tracy made dinner and pampered themselves.

Caught Being Good

Lucy hit a treat level with her caught being good marks (she asked us to copy what they do at school). So she got a reward of some chalk pens, and we drew on the windows together.

Gardening

We were out the front today. Amongst other things I re-fitted the head to a hoe. It had snapped off, and I needed to taper the end of the handle to fit the old head back on. It went on well, although I almost stabbed myself in the palm of my hand with a screwdriver trying to fix it in place!

Tracy and Lucy built the second wicket planter. This is the twin of the one we did a couple of days ago. It’s on the other side of the steps. Like the other one I took a wheelbarrow full of clay soil for the bottom of it and then dug into the rich topsoil in front of the hut for the next layer. What I discovered a couple of inches down was more concrete path. So there’s probably more to move there before we try to repave it.

Alexander and I took turns with a pickaxe, and at one point a saw, to dig out some roots from the border at the back of the drive. It was hard work, and raised a sweat. We didn’t quite make it clear, but we made progress.

While we were out in the garden I spotted a bird swooping about a lot. There was also a lot of chirping coming from the eaves of the house. During a short break I realised that there is a nest in the edge of my roof. A fascia has come off the end of the roof and some birds (Starlings I think) have taken advantage of it.

Games

Ever since they watched Stranger Things Alexander and his friends have wanted to play DnD. So I’ve been running sessions every couple of months or so. You can read some of the write ups on https://www.cold-steel.org/.

Today’s session was shorter than usual. Mostly this was down to the scenario and the usual friction of getting a session going. Our online setup was Roll20 for character sheets and discord for voice and video. Not everyone was able to make these work all the time. So we had some pauses. We also only used video to share my tabletop with the map and figures on it.

I’m not entirely convinced that this is the best/easiest way to play. There’s a tactical element available in Roll20 that lets players interact with the map. However it takes a bit more preparation than I’ve managed. It also means that when the players want to divert from the plan you need to pause until the next session. Usually I just extemporise at that point and hand draw a map as we go along.

For the next session I’m going to try and adopt an approach we used for the Full Moon games. I’ll use the asynchronous chat to progress from where we’ve left off until the next conflict point and then prepare the map for a session on that.

Getting Ready for School

After dinner and a short walk for some exercise it was time to put away the Lego that has covered the living room floor. It all went back in the boxes and returned to the shelves. I did leave the bungalow as built, and I’m sure it will be back out tomorrow, but it’s sort of symbolic.

Day 23 – 9th April 2020

Both Tracy and I were working today, I started super early to clear as much as I could before needing to look after Lucy and Alexander. However they were both quite good at amusing themself.

My work involved quite a few meetings today, evenly split between zoom and straight phone calls. More than usual as both my peers were on leave as was my boss, so I was covering everything that couldn’t be delegated. Our remit is evolving and becoming clearer, and we’re plugged in to most of what is going on. So I spent the day directing traffic. I also did the quiz at our team meeting with the extreme close ups we took at the weekend. The team did really well with them, I only had to give extra clues on four of the ten. Only one wasn’t guessed.

Lego Houses

Lucy had taken out conversation during last night’s walk about building to heart. She started building modular rooms and then connecting them together.

It was a very iterative process for her, because the 3d joins weren’t strong and stable. So bits came crashing down from time to time. I was quite proud though that she didn’t lose her temper with it and instead rebuilt it afresh, usually with quite a different design.

She had a few attempts at making a video to explain it, and shared one of them with her cousins via WhatsApp. She was also very patient with me in meetings. When I got off the call she would ask how long until my next meeting. When there was more than a few minutes I’d get taken through the latest remodeling. It was rather like some of the construction projects I’ve worked on, although with a much shorter time between the highlight reports!

After lunch Lucy began watching YouTube videos about Lego friends construction and room design. The house was progressively moved from the table into the floor and it became a bungalow in style because that reduced the complexity of her build.

By the time Tracy came home from work Lucy was on videos showing her how to modify Lego friends figurines to make them into child sized figurines. That’s her next thing that she wants to do. I suggested that she asks Alexander to help as he has a track record of customising Lego figures.

Food

For lunch Alexander and I had paninis made with the bread rolls he made yesterday. We also took the cover off the patio furniture and had lunch outside. We decided that it must have been the self-raising flour that made it rise, because there was a very tight crumb, like a cake. The bread was also very dense. It tasted nice, but definitely not a sourdough.

Dinner was a defrost and heat meal, I worked until after six. We had chilli con carne with tortilla chips and a side order of breaded chicken from the freezer. No preparation, just applied heat.

After that we got our daily exercise in, three times round the green with Lucy and then down to the Merstham rec and back for Alexander and I to get us up to 10k steps. We chatted about the d&d campaign and also about subverting tropes when you design stories or games.

Washing Dishes

We’ve been getting our dishwasher and washing detergent from Smol. They post eco friendly detergent to you in demand. It’s a just in time sort of system, and like most other just in time systems of late it’s got a bit disrupted. I also didn’t get Tracy’s reminder to get dishwasher tablets when I was at the supermarket yesterday. So we’ve run out.

However we have plenty of washing up liquid. So, only realising when I’d filled the dishwasher with dirty dishes I had a moment. I decided that I’d just squirt a bit of washing up liquid into the machine. I gave it what I’d usually put in a bowl if I was washing by hand.

When I got back in from my walk I realised that there’s a reason why we use dishwasher tablets.

Day 4 – Saturday 21st March 2020

Today was our first non work day of self isolation. Even only a few days in it’s a hard gear shift. There’s not the usual work/life delineation. Both my wife and I work from home now and again, but the bulk of our work is in the office (or on a hospital ward in my wife’s case). Either way today didn’t seem that different from the last few days.

In the morning we had a slower start than normal, no alarms were set, and we resisted the urge to go downstairs when we finally woke. I did get drawn into fixing the mail server though. It turned out that ufw had blocked the mail server. So I turned it back off after I’d checked the logs to make sure that it hadn’t been switched on before I’d tried to install jitsi meet.

Gardening

A big chunk of the morning was spent in the garden. Or more accurately for me in the hut. I pulled some of the things we’d piled up inside in the autumn out. Then I cleared and swept the work bench, throwing away a load of old fragmented plastic and some other rubbish that had accumulated. Once I’d done that I sorted out the seed trays, some potting compost and got it all ready so that we can start some seedlings. I ought to have remembered to take a photo of that, but my phone didn’t charge overnight so I’d left it in the house.

While I was sorting out the potting shed my wife took the hedge clippers to the left hand border and chopped down the overgrowth that we never quite manage to get rid of. I’m not sure what is growing there, but I do know from last year’s effort that the reason it always comes back is a network of roots about four inches down. The patch that I dug before planting the olive tree was relatively clear. So tomorrow we’ll be doing a lot of digging in that border. We also have some more digging to do in the front to keep the borders clear enough that the things we want in there aren’t overwhelmed by the weeds.

D&D

Laptop with Roll20 on it next to a D&D Monster Manual
Moving from pencil and paper to online roleplaying (photo: James Kemp)

Before things all went they way they have we’d arranged for Alexander and his friends from school to play some more Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Originally this was going to be the usual face to face session. However we converted it into an online game.

We used discord for a mixture of voice and text chat. It mostly worked OK, but there were some feedback issues with the kit people had. It was also difficult to follow when the boys got excited and all tried to speak at once.

We also had Roll20 for the maps and dice rolls. This is where we got stuck the most, but that was because we’d not really used it properly before. It took us about an hour to get everyone logged in and to level up their characters to the right level. It needs more prep than I usually do for a tabletop game. It’s a lot harder to spontaneously generate an encounter. Often I hand draw the map while describing it and throw some enemies down. My prep is usually about knowing the rough size and capabilities of the adversary and what their objectives are. With Roll20 I’m going to need to plan the locations in detail as well. I also need to generate some tokens to replace the assorted miniatures and markers I have.

Mother’s Day prep

Earlier in the week Lucy did a plan for how she wanted Mother’s Day to go. We did it together and I ordered the things she wanted to get her mum for Mother’s Day. Thankfully the box arrived this afternoon. So when I’d finished with the gaming we went upstairs and annoyed Alexander, who was playing the newly released Doom Eternal.

The kids had an animated discussion on the plan, which resolved in Lucy’s favour. So they had a bit of a competitive card construction, and made their mum a card each. After what seemed like an age, they finally wrapped the presents and tidied up a bit. Just in time for dinner, which spent some time on hold in the oven while they did it.

After Dinner

Alexander disappeared upstairs to carry on with Doom Eternal on his Xbox. So no family games tonight.

Lucy spent the afternoon and evening in a cat costume that was passed to her by the older girls. She pretended to be a cat, including a saucer of milk, while watching Puss In Boots on E4.

While that was on I was in a WhatsApp chat with some of the other cub scout leaders at 5th Reigate Scouts about what we could do as an alternative if camp is cancelled. We threw some options around and came up with a back garden camp. We need a bit more work on it, but in concept we’d do a programme for cubs to camp in their own garden. We could loan tents to some, and provide some online content for activities, and maybe even a campfire.