Killing some time 11/15/23
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I'm sitting in the basement of a church. It's a baptist church, but it
doesn't much matter in the context of this post. It's a Tuesday, and
my son is attending a game night for his home school group. The lady
organizing it is a member of this church, and they're kind enough to
let us use their space.
They have wifi here, the network is named "Freshwater". There's no
password and no active portal, you just connect and use the network.
Apparently it's left over from the congregation that used to be in
this building. No one ever got rid of it. They have their own access
point with a password and such, but they leave this Freshwater one
running too. Maybe they don't know where it is?
There are a bunch of teenage guys here, two moms, and myself. No
teenage gals showed up, perhaps to the chagrin of the teenage guys,
but I don't know. They seem happy enough. Maybe it's easier this way,
no one has to put on a show. Heck, they never have put on a show that
I could see anyway. But maybe...
I say basement, but it's really just the lower level. It's not
cave-like or anything, though the ceiling is a little low. It's well
lit, there's a big seating area down here for meals it appears, and a
kitchen, a few hallways with classes and bathrooms, and a drinking
fountain.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but the two moms are chatting, and I'm
sitting here. One of the moms is my wife, so it's not as awkward as it
could be, but I'm kind of the odd man out. I didn't sleep well last
night, so I'm really tired, and the lights are making my eyes water.
Maybe I look emotional, who knows. I don't feel emotional. My left
lower eyelid is twitching, and has been for a couple days. I read
online that stress can cause that, and dry eyes, and a few other
things. I'm not supposed to be concerned it seems, and I'm not.
Last night was odd. We were going to watch a movie with the kids, but
the kids didn't like the movie we picked and they ended up watching
Anastasia, the 90's animated film. I wasn't interested, so I made some
wassail. It wasn't quite strong enough (probably didn't steep long
enough), so I added a bag of herbal tea to mine, a blend called Bengal
Spice. It has a lot of cinnamon. I feel like, for whatever reason,
that drinking this wassail/tea blend right before bed made it hard to
fall asleep last night. I usually don't have trouble sleeping, falling
asleep or staying asleep.
My original plan, for this event, was to turn on vnc and do some
remote ham radio on my system at home. I started up the server, but
something isn't right and I can't connect. It's not the janky old
network, as I also can't connect on my phone's data. And so, here I am
on gopher, sharing useless information about minutia. Who knows, maybe
it's not useless. Maybe minutia is OK sometimes, and big, grand,
important things are tiresome if they're always the focus?
As part of her conversation, my wife just said that she felt like this
year was the first normal year after the pandemic. Is she right? Where
we live, they never really got too extreme with precautions, mandates,
and the like. They tried, but no one cared, and so much of the
pandemic was a lot of signs and requests. Somethings did change, of
course, but those haven't changed back. Maybe she just meant the
general feeling. I won't interrupt, the stream of their conversation
is more rapid than what I'm doing here even.
A couple evenings ago, I took my two boys to a soccer complex west of
the time that I live in. There's a municipal airport out there, it's
very flat and open. My youngest son likes throwing boomerangs out
there, and I sometimes do a 2M ham radio net from that location. This
last weekend, we played a game called Kubb. Fun game, throwing wood
batons at wood blocks. I destroyed my two sons in game one, the second
game went on until we had to leave, and we called it in their favor
(they had the most kubbs on their field).
The one thing I don't like about that soccer complex is, there are
vehicles that will come and just park and hang out there. It's not
random, it's the same folks each time. One is a late model suv, white.
There's another one or two that are sometimes there. I don't know what
they're doing, but my guess is that they're selling drugs. They're not
there every time, but often enough that it's obnoxious. I'd call the
police, but what could they do? It's not illegal to park your car at
the park, after all. And they can't just search cars because tfurrows
doesn't like them. In the end, I just wear a gun when I hand out
there. Probably don't need to, of course, but it makes me feel a
little more comfortable.
Well, it's time to have some of those nice grapes that someone
brought. Be well, gopher space. I hope your evening is wonderful.
