Saturday dawned cool and grey, although a bit of sun poked through on occasion. The forecast was for late showers, leading into a rainy Sunday.
Late morning I went for a walk with my wife and Scully, doing our usual bakery/marina/park loop. Although cool, it was humid and quite sticky by the time we got home.
There was an email waiting for me. From the organisers of tomorrow’s market, where I planned to have a stall to sell my photography prints. They said they’d received many concerned emails about the weather forecast, and consulting multiple weather sites they noted that the forecast for Sydney tomorrow is heavy rain and thunderstorms during the day. My stall is indoors (I chose is specifically to avoid inclement weather), but most of the market is outdoors. So the organisers were writing to say they had decided to cancel the market, to avoid damage to stallholders’ products, and to avoid wasting time with a low buyer turnout.
I understand why they did it, but it’s disappointing to have yet another delay, with all the COVID cancellations. And it’s also annoying because I had to book a hire car via a car share company, because my car isn’t large enough to transport all of my stock and equipment. Because the cancellation is less than 24 hours before pickup, there’s no refund. 😕 At least it’s tax deductible. Assuming I ever make enough money form this caper to pay tax in the first place.
This afternoon my wife and I played a couple of games of Codenames Duet campaign mode. We tackled Monte Carlo, which for those who know the game means 9 turns with zero bystanders allowed. The campaign games are starting to get tough – the previous city, Sydney, was 9-1 and it took us four attempts to win it. But we managed to knock of Monte Carlo in just two games today!
The first was a bit of a debacle, with some really tough clue combos. I had to clue the words TRUNK and BARK, but without cluing the word MAPLE, so that kind of ruled out any wood/tree based clues. And I had to clue GERMANY, while ALPS was an assassin (instant loss if guessed). There were other issues as well which I forget – let it suffice to say we lost badly.
The second game started terribly. I clued LAWN to indicate GRASS and BERMUDA, but my wife’s first guess was YARD, which was a bystander, so we instantly lost a turn. But we pulled it back together with consistent strong 2-cluing, and in the end it came down to my wife having to clue two words to me with the final clue for victory. She gave the clue HARD 2. Which was truly inspired, and straight away I realised the answers had to be YARD (as in “hard yards”) and NUT (“hard nut to crack”). I guessed them and we won!
That completes all of the 9-turn games in the campaign. Now we shift to the 8-turn games, which ratchets up the difficulty again. It’s getting challenging, but is a lot of fun.
New content today:
