I took a few days off. I didn’t have any particular reason nor much in the way of goals (though I had some of those, mostly unmet). My boss keeps reminding me that I use the least PTO of all employees so, here I am, having burned a few days’ worth.

So what did I do?

• Read John Scalzi’s new novel, Starter Villain. Like Kaiju Preservation Society before it, the book’s kind of a fluffy fun romp. It’s not part of a grand space opera or anything like that. Heck, it’s only sci-fi on the same level that, oh, to pull a name completely at random out of a metaphorical hat, something like James Bond is sci-fi. Now, while it’s a fluffy romp it has a few things to say, in its sly tongue-in-cheek way. I enjoyed it.
• Played a bit more of Palia while it’s still in open beta. (I’m starting to suspect that “open beta” is really just “soft launch” but boy howdy does it have some bugs to work out, so believe that “beta” tag, okay?) It’s a pretty good “Stardew Valley but make it a 3D MMO” riff but one wonders how long the current content will hold folks’ attention. There are only a couple of main zones and a few small event zones. What’s the long-term game plan (as it were)? I guess we’ll find out. Hopefully.
• Finished, finally, after a ridiculous number of years, watching Oban Star Racers. (I have the Kickstarter-backed Blu-ray boxed set.) It’s a French/Japanese joint project, and if you’re thinking, “That sounds absolutely buckwild,” you’re not wrong. Visually imaginative through and through, at heart it’s still basically an animated show made for a young audience. Not that it’s fully sugar-coated; among other things, there are layers of politics that ring darkly true. It’s an interesting show overall, and a visual feast besides, though the ending had me going a bit “wut?” (well, they had to resolve a certain running plot thread somehow, I guess).
• Chores. The AC units are out of the windows, thank everything holy for the end of summer, and this morning I moved them back into the outside closet on the deck. And swept the deck clean of most of the plant bits and dirt clumps that accumulated during the hot summer of casual gardening we engaged in this year. And I vacuumed the carpets, a long-overdue task. (Sigh.) Plus the usual laundry, dishes, garbage removal, and so forth.
• Took a brief walk through part of the Tualatin Hills Nature Park, which was almost unpopulated (by humans anyway) after a modest bit of rain. It looks like this autumn and winter they’ll be working on replanting after last year’s sewer work required them to bulldoze away a large swath of plant life. I hope to see the improvements in years to come.
• Oh yeah, and I swapped out the power supply unit in the new computer after iBuyPower shipped me an “advance RMA” replacement. Mind you, what came in the original rig was an 850W non-modular unit and they replaced it with a modular 1000W unit, so the replacement wasn’t as tidy as I originally hoped. On the upside, no more ticking noise. (I confirmed once the old unit was removed that all it took to make it “tick tick tick” was to blast the fan with compressed air.) Also, since I didn’t need all the power leads and the new unit’s modular, I was able to leave out almost half of the possible cables, leaving a tidier interior overall.

Tomorrow morning I “go back to work,” insofar as I “go” anywhere in particular. You figure the team will have missed me?