Wooo!!! 
Well-done!!! 
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I’m convinced that the best tool for judging remains the spreadsheet…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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My 7 yo daughter was being grumpy so I offered to play a board game with her. We’re still teaching her games like chess and she wanted to play simple games like “Taco cat goat cheese pizza”. I introduced her to Tokaido and she loved it. I’m happy she is progressing in the world of board games. I have so much to show her.
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A dual layer throw blanket I own has developed a split seam along one edge, and the two layers are only attached at the edges. This actually makes it better as a lap blanket or for keeping my legs warm on nights that are too cold for my main blanket to be enough on its own, but not cold enough to justify a second full-sized blanket being unfurled as instead of having to tuck the edges under, restricting my freedom of movement and having to worry about leaks around the edges, it’s now effectively a very wide, but short sleeping bag that I can sttep in to and pull up to my chest. Also, this adds a third pleasant fabric texture this blanket provides as well the fleece layer has the same texture on both sides, the Sherpa layer has a drastically different texture on the side that was previously sealed inside the blanket.
Also, got another trio of clean boil egg peels yesterday and opened a fresh container of lemon pepper today.
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I’ve always had arachnophobia that is embarrassingly pathological. It’s weird because I like most bugs. I’ll pick beetles up all day long. But spiders just have always made me have this involuntary physiological response that I hate. My mother said that when I could barely talk my first nightmares were about spiders. I tried flooding myself to get over it-- my senior thesis in college was on sexual dimorphism in spiders (Take-home message: it’s a hard old world for male spiders). My head knows how awesomely good they are. But I sometimes cry when I even see a spider of a certain kind (black, bulbous, hairy).
However, inspired by @inventor200, I have decided to have a relationship with a spider, since I’ve met one that is staying in its lane. It’s a red orb weaver, it’s larger than I generally feel comfortable with, and it has set up shop on the deck across from where I like to sit and read. Normally I’d have Tom remove it, but it seems pacific and I always know where it is, so I’m going to try to learn to appreciate it. Here’s to making new friends and trying to overcome ingrained biases.
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Fun fact: Some orb weavers use their webs as distributed microphones to hear their surroundings better. It’s thought that this is to track larger animals, and get some early warning if a web evacuation is necessary. (Non-jumping spiders are usually blind, and can only see ambient light level; hearing ability is everything)
So while you’re sitting there reading, and being very wary of the orb weaver, the orb weaver can probably hear you moving around or turning pages, and is equally-wary of you. Both of you are giving each other nervous side-eye, but are choosing to co-exist in the space anyway.
Also I’m proud of you~ 
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A few things that have happened over the last few days:
My weight loss has reached the point I can sit in my bathtub without feeling like I’m squished in like a wad of play dough and might need help to get out. As a result, I enjoyed my first tub bath in years… Tub is still too small in every dimension to be fully comfortabl(though as someone cursed with over 6 feet of height, I haven’t encountered a bathtub that was long enough since I was a child), but at least I feel like I have an option other than showering or skipping.
The top level folder of my Firefox bookmarks is the shortest its been in a very long time, down to just the bookmark for Gmail, two other semi-permanent bookmarks that don’t fit in any of my bookmark folders, one short story I’m in the middle of reading, one recently uploaded chapter of an on-going web serial I need to read, and three bookmarks of long things I’m in the middle of reading(1 novel-length fanfic, 1 Light Novel series translation, and number gossip). Still have probably a few million words of stuff in my Unread folder, but if I were going to make a smile/metaphor to physical reading material, this is the closest I’ve gotten to the end table of my reading nook being vacant I’ve gotten in a very long time and I’m pretty close to having no choice but to take things down from the bookcase of stuff I haven’t started… Bonus, the one recent serial chapter was just published yesterday, so I’m not even far behind in that regard… Of course, I haven’t done my daily check for new uploads yet today.
I’ve cleared all the sub-40 minute videos from my backlog of recent YouTube uploads, and have only 6 in the 40-50 minute range in said backlog… Hoping there aren’t many new uploads when I do my daily check of bookmarked YouTube channels this evening so I can knock out a few of thoes 40-50 minute videos.
Realized I would run out of sugar and shrimp bouillon before my food stamps come in, but had the funds to spare to reach wal-mart’s $35 order minimum they’ve started enforcing on grocery orders in the last few months… pretty sure I can now save my Food stamps for my big grocery order when my SSDI comes in at the end of the month. Did have to splurge for some things I wasn’t planning to buy to reach the $35 threshold, but I eventually found options marginally healthier than buying a tin of butter cookies and a bar of white chocolate in addition to replacing the gallon tub of ice cream that was cancelled for out of stock from my last big order… so I have some pepperoni to add to my pasta and a few microwave pizzas to go with my rotini.
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It’s Father’s Day here. I got some lovely presents, but the most special one was a book my daughter wrote and illustrated for me. It brought a tear to my eye. It was beautiful and wholly of her own impetus.
We went to the kite day and I failed to get our stunt kite in the air. We had nice tacos and danced to the very loud music.
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Oh man that’s the dream, indeed!
My dad-related positive thing is that for the past week or so, my son has getting increasingly demanding about wanting me to tell him bedtime stories about the adventures of a superhero I mostly invented, Gravity Goldfish (he was visiting some cousins a bit ago and some random YouTube video with an evil goldfish with gravity powers came on, and he kept asking me questions about what the deal was with this goldfish, so I came up with a backstory and redemption arc and after that we were off to the races). Today we circled back to a like fifteen-minute version of his origin, then did another fifteen minutes on a mission Gravity Goldfish had to rescue a bunch of kitties who mysteriously all got stuck in trees at once; I was expecting he’d lose interest over time but instead it feels like he’s getting more and more into it as we keep building out the mythos. It’s been super fun, even if it’s not exactly conducive to getting to sleep on time.
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Possibly a Gravity Goldfish IF in the works???
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I get stressed to some degree when my kids clamor for an original story, because I want to captivate them and usually can think of nothing at all. So go you!
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In other news, my wife and I just got back from a child-free Alaskan cruise. Amazing time!
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In other news, I just had a request from someone if they could translate Prince Quisborne into Czech. I wonder if they’re going to abandon ship when it sinks in just how much they’ve bitten into, but it’s fun to know that they asked, and are trying…
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// Daughter’s book
How wonderful. That will be a keepsake for the ages.
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Both of you will cherish the bedtime stories.
My youngest son had a terrible teacher in 1st grade that made him read in front of class. It terrified him so much that he regressed substantially. He and I interactively read the Box Car Kids series together for quite some time. We still remembers those days fondly.
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My Dad told stories about Motor Baby, who could fly when making a continuous raspberry sound with her lips. I remember a great deal about Motor Baby, so just imagine Henry in 50 years telling people about his Dad and Gravity Goldfish.
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Finally finished a quilted art piece that’s been giving me fits, and it turned out great.
Also made a cream cheese pound cake. So, so bad for you. So, so good with whipped cream and berries.
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I woke up Tuesday morning to find the left earpiece of my earphones completely dead, that pair was apparently the spare from the last time I bought a pair and a spare for earphones, and the only other pair of earphones I had at the handy where some earplug style earbuds that are physically painful to insert into my ears. To make matters worse, I spend basically every waking moment with either a screen reader or audio media playing over my earphones and my left ear is my dominant ear, and the ear clip style earphones I prefer are impossible to put on the opposite ear from intended, so I spent 3 days barely being able to hear things in my off ear even with the audio cranked up and added difficulty when I had YouTube videos playing at the same time my screen reader is talking.
As such, it was an absolute godsend when the new earphones I ordered arrived while I was making lunch today… and thankfully, the $35 order minimum with walmart doesn’t apply to orders with only shipping items, so I didn’t have to wait until payday to buy new earphones.
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Just had a very fun coincidence while out on a stroll!
I tapped on this song as I left my building, noting the cover picture:
And only a minute later, I walked past this window:
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Our younger budgie Hugo, who has been very timid, finally flew over and landed on my head, then flew down and perched on my laptop for a while.
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