I didn’t get the banking done Thursday, because of the strange stuff going on I mentioned last post. So I had to resort to banking by phone which while more comfortable and easier on the feet is more frustrating because of cheesy hold Christmas music that hasn’t changed since October. Seriously, if he wasn’t dead for over a century now I could strangle Tchaikovsky for writing that music. Do you know how many times they went through it in the 10 minutes I was on hold this time? Five times, five times I had to listen to Sugar Plum Fairies dance this time!
Where was I? Oh yes, complaining about hold music because I couldn’t get anyone at the bank Thursday. Anywho, I had to move a big chunk of money from the lockbox account to the checking account so I could pay to have the tub replaced with a shower stall, and in the process repair the gigantic hole in the wall from when there was a shelf between the tub and the outside wall. Because it is a lockbox account I have to actually talk to someone at the bank to move money in or out of the account.
The idea is I will have money in the checking account so when the electronic withdrawal is done it won’t bounce my account. And normally I don’t keep that much money in my checking account, because I have a bad habit of spending the money if I have it. But I can control myself for a few days if I have to, and all I need to control myself for this time is until February 9 when the job is supposed to be done.
Now there are 2 reasons why we are doing this now, besides covering up the hole in the wall and making the shower warmer. First is Mrs. the Poet and I are starting to have balance problems getting in and out of the tub. She has the back issues making it hard to move her right leg, and I have the issues with my left leg since the wreck, and also starting to develop balance issues that started with the wreck and have just been getting worse and worse.
OK there was a break between the last paragraph and now. I stopped on 2021-01-30 and now it’s 2021-02-01. In the meantime I watched the 24 Hours of Daytona, heck of a race, winning margin of less than a second after 24 hours, and I discovered something interesting about how my brain works now. I discovered how to turn the monkey off and go to sleep without (too much) chemical assistance. I still need something to block the pain so I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, but I can fall asleep now without chemicals if I watch cars going around in circles making noise.
I even figured out how it works. I like motorracing, but I don’t need to use my entire mind to watch it. I watch it for a while and the monkey takes a break and I can lie down and get some sleep. That says something about my brain injury combined with my previous brain problems, but IANAD so I don’t know exactly what it means.
I also attempted to play some Shadowrun, but our regular GM is out of action from changing his insurance and his insurer changing his brain meds and us having to wait until his brain stabilizes with the different medication. The annoying part is this is the same medication at a different dose than what he was on 2 insurers ago. And if we had single-payer health care like a civilized country none of this would happen, his doctor wouldn’t change except for things like retirement or my friend moving to accept a new job. But instead we have a system set up to make a few people billionaires and the rest of us poor and not adequately cared for.
Anyway, in game I spent some karma points to get pilot aircraft level one because we are looking at a run where someone has to be able to fly a fixed wing out of a shopping mall parking lot after repairs for a potential payoff of 2,000,000 nuyen, after we clean the shopping mall of an infestation of infectious goblins. The Johnson says anything we can salvage from the mall we can keep, plus we get 5K nuyen apiece and there just has to not be too big a crater after we remove the goblin infestation, the building has been covered by insurance just in case something like this happened. Apparently infectious goblin infestations are common enough to be covered by insurance… Also my Ford in game is upgradeable for no cost because I’m auto mechanic level 5 and I can make parts from scratch and scrap if I pass an extended roll test. Anywho, the 2,000,000 nuyen aircraft is the reason for the infestation, a goblin was being transported to a lab for study and dissection when it got loose in the airplane and caused it to make a forced landing in the parking lot and then got loose inside the mall where it infected lots of people. The idea was they were going to find a cure for infectious goblins and instead they got a whole lot more goblins.
We got as far as finding out where the run was going to be when we lost another player to brain problems. The pandemic has hit our little group hard. None of us are anything close to “normal” emotionally or brain-wise. I have PTSD from being a Cold War military brat and TBI from a truck or two, one GM has seizure disorders and the other has depression and maybe some other things, one of the other players is autistic and has social problems stemming from that. Basically we are all messed up. And that was before the problems caused by the pandemic.
And that seems as good a place as any to call a halt to the proceedings.
Witch on a Bicycle 