Spring Break

The boys have begun their Spring Break, and I'm not entirely sure we're going to survive it. I'm not sure of this because I'm still working, and Beautiful Wife is still teaching. (Her spring break is next week.)

So the boys will spend a week being supervised by their mother (when she's home and not, say, entering midterm grades), their grandparents (when they're available), and bro-sitting (when nothing else is available). Plus, a week off from school is the perfect length of time - using "perfect" in much the same sense as it gets used in "perfect storm", of course. It's just long enough to get them completely off their sleep schedules, but not enough to make it worth scheduling formal activities. Plus, it's coming right after the time change, so it's uniquely positioned to make sure that nobody is on schedule when they go back to school.

And yeah, if I had any sense I'd have scheduled for a week of vacation for myself this week, but... I don't, so I didn't. And honestly with some the things going on at work right now, I really couldn't even if I'd planned to. Capitalism would be a lot easier to deal with if I were ridiculously wealthy already...

Anyway, by the time you read this I'll be back at work and coughing on people. Onward and upward, my friends! Nothing but good times ahead.

Music: Mom's Coming To My House

By Three Dead Trolls in a Baggy:

Music: Wish You Were Gay

Billie Eilish, who is creating some really interesting stuff:


I'm old, and I'm not sure what to make of all of it. But I'm fascinated.

Weekly Blogging Challenge: Favorite Hobby

Once again, I'm participating in the Wednseday Weekly Blogging Challenge. Today's theme is "What is your favorite hobby, and why?"

I'm tempted to start by listing sleep, because even though that's technically a necessity, I feel like I get so little of it that it's more like a hobby...

More seriously: at this point, I'd have to go with Dungeons and Dragons. It combines elements of writing and storytelling with a chance to socialize. (Or, as with last night when I was unable to attend, a chance to have people randomly text me with questions like, "Would Vendril be okay with having one of his eyes replaced with somebody else's eye, or should we let them possess one of the characters with an evil spirit instead? The replacement eye would let the cultists see what we were doing.") It also provides a chance to let of steam in other ways, like randomly murdering a bunch of cultists who really had it coming and taking all their treasure (hypothetically). But the big appeal, and the reason I've actually ranked it ahead of Writing, is that DnD is something that I can set aside a couple of hours once a week and actually, y'know, do.

Writing would, of course, be next on the list, and martial arts would be immediately after that. In both cases, though, I rarely feel like I can spare the time for them.

What? Oh. Yes, we let the evil spirit possess the paladin. The theory was that he was the most likely to be able to resist its influence. We are almost certainly going to turn out to have been wrong about that.

Less Flu, Less Wife

Okay, so: Firstborn is feeling amazingly better and has now been fever-free for a full day, so he's back at school and I'm back at work. Beautiful Wife, meanwhile, is out of town for a conference and is probably sick already. (She was having that thing yesterday where she was just randomly cold, regardless of the fact that the room was at a perfectly decent temperature.) We loaded her carry-on with meds, so hopefully she can get through the week with a minimum of misery.

Meanwhile, I will be dropping the boys off at school, and their grandparents will be picking them up afterwards. This requires us to get out of the house a bit earlier than they're used to -- at least, it does if I'm going to make it to work on time -- which means it's fairly vital to keep the boys moving. To this end, I have instituted a new rule: the television gets turned off 5-10 minutes before we need to get out the door. This has resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the simple fact of the matter is that if Secondborn is watching the TV in the morning, he essentially isn't doing anything else, like getting dressed or eating his breakfast.

So now all I have to do is catch up on everything that I missed while I was out yesterday.

Old friend named Flu drops by for a visit...

So, Firstborn has the flu. (Type A, if you're curious.) Hit him late Friday night, apparently, and kept him in his bed for a lot of Saturday and in his room for a lot of Sunday. He's out of school today, and very possibly tomorrow, too - depends on how long the fever tries to hang on.

We probably should have expected this, seeing as how Beautiful Wife is going out of town this week and it would have been so nice to have a quiet, peaceful weekend to prepare for that.

Instead, well: medical appointments, extra stress, and a prescient anticipation that either of us might very well get horribly sick ourselves. There are a couple of silver linings, though: Secondborn has already had this strain of flu this season, so he should be safe; and we caught it on the very first day, so we were able to put Firstborn on Tamiflu and hopefully speed the recovery process that way.

Still, this is going to figure pretty prominently on my 2019 list of Things I Really Could Have Done Without.

Okay, what if he's just there?

I keep coming back to the book about the necromancer and the plague, even though it's been frustrating me for years now. I have so much of it clear in my head: my protagonist, the various antagonists, a wide variety of supporting casts and backstories, the world in general and several specific settings.

What I don't have, what I'm not sure I've ever really had, is an actual story.

I think that's because I want to do too much with it. As much as I love the world and the characters and the basic conflict, I also have -- and love -- a whole host of specific moments, and I don't think I can set up all of them in the same timeline. (Author Sam Sykes wrote a novella just so he could have a scene where someone gets beaten to death with a bucket full of human waste, and I really understand how a writer could find himself in that sort of situation...) (Fun book, by the way, if you like that sort of thing.)

I want the part where the main character slipped away from his friends and has basically been in hiding for a year, just so he wouldn't have to be reunited with his family. I want the part where he's using necromancy to stop a plague, because magically reanimated corpses are effectively embalmed and don't spread germs. I want the part where, spell-speech aside, he doesn't have any powers; I also want him to have powers. (But, y'know, maybe later on in the story? Or in the series?) I want him to explore the moral implications of having enormous power, but maybe not yet. I want him to be helping a group of kids with serious ambitions, but I also want him to have the kind of nightmares that crawl off and endanger other people. I don't think those two things can happen at once. There's a possible version/piece of the story where he winds up helping the city watch because the creatures that are attacking people are the same creatures he used to have nightmares about, but that requires an entirely different opening and an entirely different storyline.

I'm going to have to kill some of these visions, and probably put stakes through their hearts, cut their heads off, and fill their mouths with garlic. I can't do all of this, not in one story.

But I think I might have found a way to do most of it.

I think so, but we'll see.