You always loved this time of year

Last weekend we went to bunny_hugger's parents, our first visit since Christmas. This because, you know, we haven't been visiting them enough and we like being there.

Her mother, who'd been looking pretty worn and exhausted at Christmas, was considerably better. The visit included several instances of having bunny_hugger try on a pair of gloves her mother's been knitting for months, and that she'd despaired of ever making progress on again when we last visited. So that's a very good development.

In the evening we started the much-delayed next chapter of Mice and Mystics. And this one brings a new menace with it. Every other chapter if we failed --- as we'd done the first time out --- we just restarted and tried to act wiser. This chapter explicitly says that if we fail, we fail and that's that, go on to the next chapter where this has some lingering effect. Unnerving to start with and then made worse when we got a series of bad luck events. The villains getting shuffled on top of the initiative track, for example, so they got hits in before we did. Or a bunch of unlucky rolls that got our mice and/or mystics captured. (They come back, but particularly, Nez the warrior lost all his armor. This returned him to being a glass cannon, so named because what thing is more fragile than a twelve-foot-long, three-inch-thick tube of glass?)

So after a bad start things ... kind of held out okay. We had to pause partway through, and while we're not in great shape it's ... not implausible that we'll get through the chapter. It would really help if we got some lucky rolls or card picks to push back the deadline we're under, though.

Now, here, I'd like to give you some pictures. But Livejournal hasn't been accepting photo uploads for the last several hours and I'm done arguing with it for the night. They'll be along sometime and that's that.

Trivia: Boston Town Hall had a gilded cod hanging from the ceiling until the building burned down in 1747.
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky. (I take this to be a carving of one, but, who can say?)

Currently Reading: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cartoon Animals, Jeff Rovin. How ... how does he have this much to say about American Rabbit? Or, more, how does he have more to say about American Rabbit than about Andy Panda, who's as dull but at least appeared in like 35 cartoons? Also, the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters? I don't know, Rovin's description makes it sound like the premise was a little iffy.