Killing some time 11/15/23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.