- All Praise the Lunch Ladies - Do you remember any of your school lunch ladies? I remember our 5th grade lunch lady would give extra peanut butter crispies (basically Rice Krispie treats with added peanut butter) to kids who stayed in from recess and helped wipe down the tables.
- TELEPHONE - "TELEPHONE is a game played by artists. It works like the children’s game of the same name. A message is whispered from person to person and changes and evolves as it is passed from player to player. In our case, we pass a secret message from art form to art form, so a message could become poetry and then painting and then music and then film, throughout all possible forms of art. We also assign each finished work of art to two or three other artists, so the game branches outward exponentially like a family tree." Such a neat concept! There's a tutorial page that will help you navigate through this project.
- Office Mimics - a set of Office icons with Mimic variants!
Christmas was a quiet one this year. Best Son came over and we had a holiday dinner, watched TV and visited. No present exchanges - I've given up on buying gifts for people. I never know what to get, a lot of people in my life are downsizing and/or just don't need more *stuff*. My good friends and I long ago gave up giving each other birthday/holiday gifts. We hang out and enjoy each others' company, instead. I do things for people throughout the year (always buy breakfast when Mom2 and I go out, get Best Son random things at random times) but I think I'm pretty much done with dedicated holiday giving.
I've been playing some more Everquest2. It's Frostfell in Norrath which means there's special crafting going on. Frigyth now has a set of Snappy Purple raiment and also a set in Frosty Deepice. This is appearance garb only. She's wearing other stuff for stats. She's tradeskill level 49 and just hit adventure level 50 while running faction quests in Everfrost.
So I'm a weird one and play a MMORPG but I hate when other players try to interact with me. I want to play alone! Besides, I don't remember the commands to talk to people and end up shouting throughout the zone or doing something stupid. Not gonna lie - there have been times someone tried to interact with me and I just zoned out on them. Last time I played I was killing goblins in Lavastorm and some player came up on his dragon mount and just stood in front of me while I was hacking away at groups of Heroic goblins. Like, just stood there! It was kind of uncomfortable. He finally turned away and said, "I wish this was a PVP server." Ummm .... ok? So you can kill me while I'm killing goblins? Wasn't quite sure how to take that. For a half-dead game, I end up getting more interaction than I want sometimes.
Speaking of games, Best Son shared a Bluesky post where someone was highlighting Steam sale games that are older, obscure or weird. There are 100 games in this thread. The ones that caught my eye were: Card Sharks, Kingsway, Conquests of the Longbow, Starship Titanic, Dungeoun Encounters, Heaven's Vault, Last Call BBS and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.
I don't know if anyone checks out my Updates page (which I've been bad about keeping up but there's an update this week!) but I've been busy! I made a Jokes page, added a section to the blog header corraling all the tiara posts and added both a couple of cookie recipes and some food-related links to the Recipes page. I also updated the Blog Links section, where I keep a running list of the 3 links I share at the top of every blog post. I'm thinking I might separate that list out by year and start a new one next week for 2026.
Listening
Some podcasts I've listened to this week:
- In Our Time - Feathered Dinosaurs
- 99% Invisible - Mini Stories vol. 21
- Search Engine - A Perfectly Average Anomaly
- Absolute Units - A Radical History of the Commons
- Absolute Units - Rural Riots, Raves and Robin Hood
Reading
I have finished both The Hippopotamus Pool by Elizabeth Peters and The Taiga Ridge Murders by Skyla Dawn Cameron. The first one is the 8th book in a series and it's just more of the same - mysteries set in Egypt with the Emerson family starting in the late Victorian era. These are comfortable books with not too many surprises, definitely cozy reads. The second one is the one that I wanted to keep as a daytime read because I'm a weenie and get scared. I kind of saw where an element of the story was going and it went there but then veered off in an unexpected direction. This was definitely NOT cozy and got uncomfortable at points. Kinda felt like the author was maybe working through something! That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, though!
Currently I'm reading Candace Robb's The Lady Chapel, the second book in the Owen Archer medieval mystery series. I would really like to read T. Kingfisher's Hemlock & Silver but I'm on an interminable waiting list at the library for that. I'm actually on 2 waiting lists - one for the e-book (where I'm 33rd in line) and one for the actual book (3rd out of 4 people waiting). I decided to play the odds with that one. I'm thinking the actual book might come up available first!
Watching
The Call the Midwife Christmas special was on PBS over the holiday and I caught up with that last night. I think our lag time is about 6 months or so between when these shows are aired in England and when we get them here. The rest of Season 15 won't air on PBS until March. Kind of mean giving us a taste of CtM and then making us wait months more! This show is a wonderful warm cozy blanket. I love it even though it's so terribly sappy. Fun trivia: the actor who plays head nun Sister Julienne also played Jessica-6 in the 1977 SF classic Logan's Run!
While looking for something else to watch on PBS, I fell into watching Royal Flying Doctor Service. I work in healthcare. I do not like TV shows that have a healthcare setting. Part of it is annoyance at things like seeing chest x-rays thrown up on the lightbox backwards, CT images being called MRIs and doctors doing *everything*. Ha! I think part of it is also that I watch TV to escape and I don't want to escape into more work. But this show hooked me and I've watched the first of 3 seasons so far. If you want to read up on the RFDS, it's pretty interesting!
That's about it for this week! Catch you on the flip side!
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