A good day is a struggle

Wordle 1,061 4/6

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Yesterday it rained, which made it harder to exercise. I got in the bare minimum number of steps during a gap in the showers and simply pacing around the house, but still, not great.

Instead I put my free time into Warcraft instead of any indoor exercise, and in some unusual ways. A new season started 3 weeks ago, but unlike most seasons there isn't new content or story, just increased difficulty and rewards to match. It's a "breather" season, a "greatest hits" season. I've been making the usual progress on my usual goals, more or less, but yesterday spent time raiding in un-fun ways - wiping on a tough boss and waiting for a pickup group to refill. Not as bad as this, but the same general idea.

The unusual thing is that they've also announced a new, time-limited game mode with a new leveling mode. I ignored it until yesterday, when I found out about a reward in it that actually would interest me. It would require a new character. I'd have to put some thought into finding a new character that would interest me, because I already have so many. I wound up making a spreadsheet of all my characters. This took over an hour. Once I had identified a race/class/profession combination that would be interesting and maybe useful to my other characters on a given server, I picked a name I'd like and started leveling it. I got to level 10, and not in the most efficient ways possible, before remembering that the upcoming event would require a new character. Ugh. The original name for this post, before I included more day-to-day stuff, was "play smarter, not harder".

This morning, like the past few mornings, the kid was grumpy. We've ended the "encourage her to read" phase of parenting and started the "discourage her from reading at bad times, such as after bedtime" stage, and need to be better about that. Dealing with that is obviously not fun. It was raining again this morning so I drove her in, and that's not fun either. After that there was a meeting at the school about volunteering to help out at an upcoming event, and it took 20 minutes longer than expected. I just drove to the school to deliver lunches for Teacher's Appreciation Week, and made the mistake of going through construction. As for work, it likewise has had several harmless but unpleasant annoyances.

I wouldn't say yesterday was a bad day, and it's definitely too early to say for today, but if I'm going to turn things around, I'll have to put some thought and effort into it. I don't mean that in a bullshit "power of positive thinking" sense, I mean more of a "plan how to be responsible and actually do it" sense.

Mother's Day

Wordle 1,059 4/6

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Took T. and the kid to brunch yesterday. It was a midrange place we had been to before, but still, it was nice. After that, a little grocery shopping on the way home. 

I spent several hours after that getting the kid out of the house. At the park across the street for about an hour, just the two of us; simple enough. I called my mom (or rather, tried, to, but she was unavailable so I just had a chat with my dad), watched the kid on the jungle gym, joined in with her a bit, walked, and relaxed. When we had had enough of that, we came home briefly, but as fate would have it, the parents of her friends next door texted to ask if she was available. Yes. I took the both of them to another park. While there, my mom called me back.

We got home around 5. The girls played longer than I was really comfortable with or expected, but T. didn't mind and they weren't doing any harm. Dinner was taco pizza: not fancy or easy, but popular. 

All in all, I feel like I discharged my filial and matrimonial obligations for the holiday. Yay. And it wasn't even a bad day, although it sure was tiring.

The Grubby Season

Wordle 1,055 5/6

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Last week I had a cold most of the week. I was starting to feel better by Friday, but had a relapse when we went camping and conditions were rougher than usual. Not raining much, and not cold in an absolute sense, but highs in the 50s - colder than we'd planned. The trip was very badly timed. In addition to the above, we missed like 5 different things with the kid's school or other activities.

So anyways, because I wasn't feeling well and the weather was bad, I didn't shower; I thought I'd freeze. So I didn't really clean up from Thursday night until Sunday morning. I was gross. 

Except for that weekend, the weather is already summery, at least by Vermont standards, muggy with highs in the 80s most days. Biking the kid to and from school is great for my fitness and avoiding traffic, but it results in more sweat. And of course it's hard to avoid mud, and after this weekend, sand. 

To summarize, it feels like it's impossible to actually get clean this time of year.

A Return to Magic

Wordle 1,047 3/6

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The Background

About nine years ago I played a lot of Magic: the Gathering. Not competitively, but often with friends and at Friday Night Magic. My deck was an archetype called called "Tron", short for "Voltron", a byword for putting together big robots and maybe other monsters and using them to attack. This link goes to a modern version of it, but my nine-years-old version had several key differences due to changes in the game since then. It's fun for me and my personality, and it's relatively powerful too. 

A little less than nine years ago, we had a kid. Babies are tiring and demanding. Hobbies in general became harder. In theory I could have gone to FNM now and then but it wasn't worth it.

About two years ago, T. began to have more of a social life without me. It started as activism for the kid's school, or coordination for necessities made harder by the pandemic, but quickly became more purely fun. Nothing wrong with that. I began thinking of ways to do the same.

So last year, I went to FNM for the first time in about eight years or so. It was fun. I made minor changes to my deck early. I didn't do well at first, but who would? After a few more FNMs of not doing well, I ordered some cards online to make bigger changes to my deck. I spent about $50, but if I had wanted to optimize it, I would have spent more like $300. I compromised between power and expense. Powerful, rare cards can be pricey and I'm still not all that serious about this. I thought I'd try out the revamped deck last month, but I forgot my deck. Of all the stupid mistakes I could have made, that was right up there.

This past Friday I went, and this time I brought the deck.

The Event

Long story short, it went well. 

• Round One: I couldn't have asked for a better test of my deck-improving decisions. I was matched against someone playing a Tron deck like myself, but not a budget version. Were the changes I made actually improvements? Did I sacrifice too much power to stay within my budget? As far as I could tell, yes to the first question, no to the second. He won one game out of three, I won the other two. I'm sure there's an element of luck there, but I almost think the changes I didn't make, the old cards I kept, are particularly well-suited to the mirror match. The One Ring is a powerful card he had that I didn't, but its "protection from everything" effect doesn't help much against my Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre, because of Annihilator.
• Round Two: Played against an Amulet deck. Game one, I lost straightforwardly. Game two, I sideboarded in all my artifact destruction, and he never actually cast an amulet and killed me in other ways. I'm not sure if the changes I made helped or not, but they definitely weren't enough. That is a hard matchup for my deck. 
• Round Three: Another budget Tron deck like my own. He won one game, I won another, and the third game was a draw as we ran out of time. It was fun. The designers of this game have talked about "psychographics", and this was a matchup Timmy could appreciate, with multiple massive creatures getting cast and attacking multiple times before the games ended.
• Round Four: I played against Jund. I won. His deck was old-fashioned, like my own. Not much to say about this. His deck was decent, maybe less updated than mine, and he played it well as far as I could tell, I and mine did just better.

Glad to be back. Prizes are minimal at these things, but the only round I'd say wasn't fun was the second. Sometimes bad matchups happen. The rest of the time, I'm blowing things up in awesome ways.