On Friday I had a bunch of ethics classes about the Witch Hunt topic. I’m also asking the kids about their Halloween plans and the differences are interesting. Most of the kids not in the US/Canada don’t really have any big plans. Most of the ones there do, but not all – there were a couple of immigrants who don’t do anything, and one kid said he didn’t do anything for Halloween because it was his mother’s birthday.
I joined in online board games early in the evening because my wife and I decided not to go out for dinner. I just made some pasta at home, which gave me ore time to play games with friends. We played some Jump Drive, and one guy won all three games handily, which was okay as he doesn’t normally win that game, so he was pretty chuffed.
Then inspired by the upcoming US election, we tried Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game as a bit of fun. It’s actually an interesting abstract strategy game and I thought it was fine, but I think you’d need to play it a bit to get the strategy. Then we played Draftosaurus, which I won, and Vaalbara, which I never win because I haven’t figured out the strategy yet. We finished with a classic, Settlers of Catan, which we hadn’t played for ages. That game took a while, but I managed to win that one, so had a pretty successful night overall.
This morning I got up and had breakfast while my wife and Scully slept in. I planned to go out for a 5k run, but when I went into the bedroom to wake my wife up I bent over and hurt my lower back. I’ve done this a few times before and knew the horrible feeling when the muscles spasm and the pain shoots through the nerves. I quickly went and laid down on my front to calm the muscles down, and my wife got me an ice pack. I felt okay after a bit, but when I moved to try to stand up I could feel that it was going to be tough doing it without overwhelming pain. So I had to take it very slowly and struggled up after several minutes of tiny shifts.
Once standing, I could walk around and do some very gentle stretches to loosen up. The main problem is doing anything that might cause the muscles to spasm again, so I had to be super careful, all day. We’d planned to got out driving for the day, but had to nix that as I didn’t want to risk folding up in the car. I basically spent the day walking around slowly to relax and stretch the muscles and just avoid anything risky. Which made it hard to get much done in terms of things like writing comics or whatever that I’d wanted to do.
We went for a few short walks with Scully. Walking is the one thing I could do that works to help the muscles calm down and recover. For dinner we decided to go up the street to a local Szechaun place that we like, but where we haven’t been for a long time. I tried the sweet and sour pork for the first time (I usually get chilli prawns), and it was very good.
New content yesterday:
- Irregular Webcomic! rerun annotation #2648
- Square Root of Minus Garfield #5638
- Comments on a Postcard #5732
New content today: