Friday was planned to be me running my Star Wars roleplaying game one-shot adventure but I had to postpone it as previously mentioned. Instead we did a regular board games night. I offered to remain the host, but another friend volunteered his place so he could attend – he had to look after his kids, so couldn’t leave home, but he was fine to host board games. SO we had an extra player that way.
We played a new game for me: Bark Avenue. It’s a dog-walking game, played on a map of upper Manhattan, around Central Park. There is a deck of dogs, who live in various neighbourhoods and need different amounts of walking, come in three sizes (small, medium, and large dogs), walk at different speeds, and have different favourite activities (sniffing hydrants, playing ball, or splashing in water).
You need to pick up dogs, walk them around, perhaps picking up other dogs along the way, and then return them home after they’ve been walking for enough turns. Each dog walked is worth a varying amount of cash, plus you can get extra tips for taking a photo of the dog while out, letting it engage in its favourite activity, or making sure it poops. You have to be careful planning a walking route, because you need to pick up and drop off dogs in the right neighbourhoods, and various blocks have different activities available. Here’s a close-up of Darwin the beagle, showing the poop token to indicate it’s done its business.
It was pretty fun, though I came dead last! After that we played Codenames, and by that time we were done for the evening. Also on Friday I did the usual grocery shopping and teaching five online classes.
Today I made a Darths & Droids comic, and went for a 7.5k run. It was warm and sunny, not my favourite weather for running, but I managed it.
In the afternoon, my wife and I went for a walk over to Greenwich Hospital, to do some sketching of an old building there. Pallister House is an 1892 Late Victorian Filigree country home, which was later used as a girls school, then a girl’s orphanage, before finally becoming part of the hospital. When we got there, we found it very conveniently had several wicker chairs scattered around the area, so we grabbed two and set them up in front of the building to sketch it.
Later in the afternoon and into early evening, I started cleaning things up. We’re engaging in a huge spring clean prior to repainting the home in late October. We started weeks ahead because we have a lot we want to do. My wife has gone through a bunch of her stuff and cleaned it out, freeing up a stack of storage boxes, which I moved a lot of my Lego bricks into, which in turn freed up some plastic storage drawers. Into those went all of the tools from our under-the-skitchen-sink toolbox: screwdrivers, a hammer, spanners, hex keys, various plumbing tools and spare parts, screws and nails, tubes of glue and other stuff, and so on. The space freed up under the kitchen sink we’re planning to use for a new, smaller kitchen waste bin, to save space currently used by the large waste bin which stands on the kitchen floor. We still need to clean it out and rearrange things for optimal storage and then we’ll buy a new bin to fit the space.