Author Archives: Josh

Update thy bookmarks!

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We have moved! Digitally speaking at least. Please update your bookmarks to point at the new site, https://joshnbev.proehl.us/ and let me know if you find any weirdness. 🙂

Hopefully soon there will be some new news about some other digital changes! Want to get a proper image gallery up, a way to share some videos, etc.

In the meantime, enjoy a couple of pictures of us from Christmas.

  • Merry Christmas
    All that bright natural sunlight doesn’t feel very christmasy.
  • Bevin excited about her new bread whisk
    Bevin is *really* excited about whisking bread dough…

And update thy bookmarks!

“Tabletop” RPG

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Sitting around a table with people describing what your characters do in the world gets a teensy bit more complex when it’s with people from a thousand miles away.

The other two players will be joining us via video chat. We’re trying a new thing where Bev and I are on the same camera, rather than being two different cameras in the chat. We’ll see how it works out.

For some reason I got a wild idea for a cool story to tell, and starting today I’m running two different games in the same world. Maybe the groups will meet up eventually? Either way, I’m excited to see what they choose to do with the story! The adventure of being a writer with characters who are literally writing themselves does keep one on one’s toes. 😂

Sudden Gnome Death Syndrome

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2 minutes ago it was clear and sunny. 30 seconds before I took this image I couldn’t see the house up the hill across the street. Sadly the camera doesn’t really show how much the rain is sheeting sideway. You can see it’s blowing a solid 5 feet into our entryway though. And the water is already halfway up the curb.

But, perhaps most worryingly of all, the sudden wind and rain appears to have caused our garden gnome to give up on life and go facedown in the newly formed pond. Poor guy, he could’ve knocked on the door and come inside.

Let the game begin…

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Session 1, 3 adventurers, having joined the kingdom’s defense force, are sent on their first mission, to investigate wild animal and maybe… Monster?… activity near the border of the dark forest.

The DM is prepared. I think. I certainly have plenty of notes and note cards and plans for the area of interest. We’ll see if the adventurers stick to the script or wander off to start some sort of cow-worshipping commune. Letting the players make choices makes things unpredictable. Especially when 2 of them have never done this, and one of them is Bevin.

Speaking of Bev, her busy morning is completed.

That’s no bread!
It was cheese! Now it’s toasty cheese.
I appreciate that at least *some* green leafy thing was harmed in the making of today’s snacks.

My innocent new gamers are arriving, let’s see if I can make this interesting. 😎

Sunbeam baking?

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I wandered out into the kitchen where Bevin is doing all kinds of crazy things, and discovered this:

Our sourdough, Doughy, (pronounced Doug-ee) appears to have become a cat and is sleeping in a sunbeam. I haven’t seen it do that before. 😂

Retro style SPACEPLANE

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Last night, having sorted all the Legos, it was time to rebuild.

There are several classic sets that I want to rebuild and display, even though it means I won’t get to use some of their cool pieces in new projects.

First up, #1682, the space shuttle. Ish. A classic set definitely strongly resembling the space shuttle, although not quite right since it’s scaled down to fit one minifig in the cockpit, and also missing the crawler transporter, and the crane to lift the fuel tank isn’t a real thing. Also the launch tower looks more like the Apollo Era tower than the shuttle tower.

But hey, SPACESHIP!

While looking through the old lego instructions I found an advertisement for one of the sets I’d forgotten existed!

One of two Technic sets I really wanted as a kid. Although looking at it now it makes me want to design some kind of monster technic shuttle that’s actually even more accurate. Hmmm…

Lego my Tupperware…

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It may not look like much, but it represents a substantial amount of progress! Finally, all the various bins of Legos have been sorted into flats, 1-highs, and 15 categories of “specials”.

Next up in the adventure is sub-sorting to specific sizes, and then possibly color within that, depending on how many there are, and what size of final storage solution we end up with.

Also, there’s still a whole tote full of partials that aren’t getting sorted as I’m planning on rebuilding them, these are just the remaining unused pieces.

And in the foreground, a whole new set of basic pieces in various colors, because Costco was having just too good a sale to pass up.

Never too old for Legos.

Now with extra imagination.

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The table is set, time to roll some dice!

Thanks to Julian being such a lovely person, today’s game will contain 100% more imagination. Figment to the rescue!

Introducing new people to roll playing games is so much fun.

Now if Bevin can just play it straight for once and not have her character become obsessed with baking goblin-cakes or something, we may have a real classic dragon-hunting adventure! The kingdom of Leithold needs heros!

A tiny little vacation?

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We were at the pool last night, paddling back and forth thanks to Bevin’s new nose-covering facemask, when she pops up and says “what’s that sound?”

Turns out it’s the sound of an ice cream truck.

Turns out, if you need to motivate Bevin to jog (in flip-flops!) all you need to say is “well go grab some cash” when there’s an ice cream truck.

End result is us standing in our front yard drip-drying eating soft serve ice cream cones. Which were actually SURPRISINGLY tasty and creamy.

Confusing pains…

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I can’t decide if my legs hurt because they’ve been walking 20,000 steps a day for the last 10 days (slowest day was 4.45 miles) or because they’re NOT walking today and feeling angry about being cooped up at the desk with only 2400 steps so far.

Also, I strangely miss humidity. I forgot how much the AC dries out the air in our house.