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One Of Those Wednesdays
Jun. 25th, 2025 11:53 pmYou know a day is not going to go great when, right before you have to leave for work, your hairbrush gets caught under the little hook at the top of your dress and you have to get your mom to help you free it because you can't actually see how it's hooked and you can't wiggle it free yourself. *sigh* Yeah, today wasn't the greatest day, I fully admit -- in addition to that and some work-related nonsense (you'll see that in the write-up below), it was also another blazing hot day, with the thunderstorms that they said would herald a change in the weather never actually showing up, ugh. AND we had to deal with a surprise ant swarm in the living room after supper (going after the crumbs my dad drops by the fringe of the living room rug -- Mom managed to vacuum them all up, at least, and she and Dad are going to get ant traps tomorrow). Not exactly fun!
And, as usual, I'm wrapping up this write-up later than I intended, so let me get this sorted so I can get to bed:
Work – It was a fairly quiet Wednesday for the most part – I did the morning reports; I looked at some returned mail; I got through the daily obituaries; I updated someone’s credit card for them; I had the biweekly Useless Credit Card Processor Check-In call; I scoured around for other roster maintenance tasks to do; and I sneakily did some puzzles. All was well –
Right up until about 3:30ish, when someone called in asking about a particular anonymous gift they’d helped a friend send in to help get their parish up to goal, which they hadn’t seen posted yet. Sending me on a trip to try and figure out what had happened to this damn check (and also taking a credit card gift from the person on the phone, because why not). I’ll spare you most of the details, but suffice it to say that what I thought was a case of “the check is lying around at our processing center because they are ALWAYS behind on our shit” was actually “the check was actually cashed at the beginning of the month and the money sent to a specific elder services organization connected to the Diocese because the anonymous donor included a note indicating that’s what they wanted to do.” *facepalm* So yeah – spent the last hour or so at work stressing out about that, and now I have to talk to my supervisor about it in the morning to see what he wants to do.
...And then I walked out of the building into the heat to find another fucking dance recital being held in the auditorium behind our main building, meaning the parking lot was swarming with parents and their kids and cars trying to pull into the spots the employees were vacating. It took me FIVE MINUTES to get out of the parking lot because I had to keep stopping to make sure I didn’t run over anyone or crash into anyone – hell, at one point I got to the exit, only to have to BACK UP because I had to let someone into the parking lot so they could let someone coming up the street in the opposite direction go! And then had to sit there as a bunch of other cars pulled in because I had nowhere to go because the street was absolutely fucking packed with cars parked on the side! I am very glad I had the windows up, because by the time I got out, I could not resist the urge to say “fuck” about fifty million times. *growls* The actual drive home wasn’t too bad, but fucking HELL. Whoever manages our parking lot for these events has to be fucking fired. *heavy sigh* I really hope there’s nothing like this happening on Thursday...
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “D&D But... Everyone's a Flumph! | Oxventure!” We wrapped up the adventures of the flumphs trying to find The Kindly Ones to help stop a hostile gentrification of their portion of the Underdark with –
A) Daisy The Rapid (Luke), Grapvine The Nonchalant (Jane), and Dockleaf The Scary (Mike), being confronted with a giant badger, trying to use their color-changing abilities to try and signal to the badger that they were poisonous to eat – this was only moderately successful (causing them to flash yellow and black – Luke assured Johnny this had nothing to do with bee(ples)), but fortunately the badger was much more interested in the dead goat the previous flumphs had killed anyway. Lucky flumphs.
B) The trio then successfully linking their eyestalks together to form a non-lethal collar around the badger’s neck (Johnny was like “HOW” in response to their dice rolls), hoping to thus ride it past a nearby village to a cave they suspected was the home of the Kindly Ones...only for Dockleaf to then ruin things by attempting to use his stink gland to “encourage” the badger to go in the direction they needed and accidentally spraying the badger. Which, naturally, reacted poorly and, in trying to find the source of the attack, managed to chomp both Daisy and Dockleaf in half. Leaving Grapevine to nonchalantly but quickly float away. XD
C) Fennel The Pious (Luke) and Jasmine The Decisive (Mike) joining Grapevine on her journey toward the village, only to encounter a bunch of tweens looking to tip some flumphs! Jasmine’s decisive stink-spraying went off poorly, as the kids were easily able to avoid the spray (one kid tackling another to save them) –
But Grapevine psychically influencing the kids to implant rumors of a love triangle in their midst (with Tween 2 liking Tween 1, but Tween 3 liking Tween 2) worked MUCH better, as Tween 2 was so intent on proving that they didn’t like Tween 1 that they punched Tween 3 unconscious before having a very awkward argument with Tween 1 where they refused to admit the reason why they did that. XD Grapevine and Jasmine took the opportunity to continue onward, while Fennel stayed behind to lecture the children on their wicked ways...and promptly got ripped in half by Tween 2 looking desperately for a way to distract Tween 1. XD Luke was not sorry to see him go.
D) Juniper The Hungry (Luke) then joining Grapevine and Jasmine as they traversed the village on the way to the cave! On the plus side, the village was having some sort of giant fete, so Grapevine and Jasmine were very easily able to disguise themselves as party balloons by inflating themselves and drifting among the regular balloons; on the minus side, the fete included a giant pot of stew, and Juniper couldn’t resist floating down for a look – only to be caught by the stew vendor, who attempted to blow them up, thinking they were a balloon. Juniper exploded; the stew vendor got covered in horrible stink gland stuff; and the stew was ruined. XD The kobolds from the previous episodes would be proud!
E) Belladonna The Psychedelic (Luke) catching up to Grapevine and Jasmine then and joining them in floating over the rest of the village as a “balloon” and to the entrance of the cave...only to insist on taking a “souvenir” and attempting to devour an unknown plant to see if it would get her high. Johnny ruled that this turned her inside out and then imploded her. XD It’s how she would have wanted to go!
F) Perrywinkle The Teenytiny (Luke) floating up to the gang – just in time to see Jasmine, having advanced into the cave a little TOO decisively, shredded by one of the Kindly Ones’ “puppies” – who, strangely, seemed to be all skin folds…
G) And finally, Perrywinkle, Grapevine, and the newly-arrived Silkweed the Gentle (Mike) managing to make it past the “puppies” and to the Kindly Ones, who were quite disturbed to see the flumphs so upset...and quite eager to meet these intelligent-sounding land developers ruining their cloister. They thus brought the flumphs back to the usual tunnel connecting their two sections of the Underdark, where they cleared the rock and emerged into the new construction zone, full of people getting ready to build the luxury apartments –
And immediately slaughtered the lot of them. Because, as it turns out, flumphs often live near colonies of MIND FLAYERS. And their pet intellect devourers. XD Meaning the one-shot ended with the flumphs happily feeding off the joyous psychic energies of the mind flayers and the intellect devourers as they feasted on the investors and the construction crew. ...To be fair, I don’t think anyone is going to miss those assholes. XD Excellent one-shot – I suspected that the flumphs were going to be asking something incredibly evil for help, but I thought it was going to be an eldritch monstrosity! Which, I guess mind flayers kind of ARE, but I was thinking more straight-up Cthulhu. *nods* But I’m not sorry about how this ended at all – it was great. :D Still got a few one-shots to get through, but next week, I think we’ll start watching Wyrdwood! Season 2 is coming up, after all, and I still gotta get through Season 1...
2. Edit the second draft of Gig’s gift fic: Check – and yes, after thinking about it, I decided to switch gears and edit the gift fic tonight instead of continuing with “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland!” Reason? I felt like where I left off in LB:DQ yesterday was a good place to leave the story for a bit, AND I wanted to take the opportunity to start rejiggering my writing schedule. Because, well, if I’m going to do “Fallout 4 Fridays” for the summer, that means I’m going to be updating the FO4 Playthrough Progression on Fridays. And that means I gotta redo my schedule for my other two stories. Which led to me doing the gift fic tonight...so I can get five whole days of working on “The Van Dort Vacancy” as I transition from writing on it Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays to Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. :D Yaaaay~
Anyway – yes, did the second draft of the gift fic tonight! Again, won’t say much because spoilers, but while it took a minute to get going, I think I wrestled it into an acceptable shape. :) Looking forward to posting it next Monday!
3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – I got to YouTube late (who is surprised), so I hit up Proxy Gate Tactican’s channel to watch another one of his shorter videos – “10 Types of Baldur’s Gate 3 Players!” A list of all the different types of players attracted to everyone’s favorite CRPG, from the weirdos (including people who make bizarre-looking characters, people who do weird self-imposed challenges, and people who want to finish the game as quickly as possible) and the modders (all those who want to add more hairstyles, more spells, and more jank to the game), to the explorers (those new to this genre of game, and possibly D&D itself, who spend their time poking around and appreciating the small stuff) and the veterans (who came into all this with a PLAN, damn it, and know EXACTLY how to get the most out of any given playthrough), and all the delightful folks in-between! Well, except the “I Can’t Read But I’ll Play A CRPG Anyway” crowd – Proxy was like “if you don’t want to actually read the dialogue and follow the story, why are you here?” (“Oh, right, because you’re chasing trends and will soon abandon this game for Cyberpunk 2077.”) As for my own category, I’m an Explorer (because I am new to this type of game – I’m not entirely sure Fallout 4 truly counts as a proper CRPG) with a very healthy dash of Modder (I want my extra spells and fun goofiness – and, most importantly, for Smiler to look right, damn it). And eventually I hope to be very happy with those playstyles. :P (One of these days I will figure out my mod situation...)
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – just Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight, and I was able to get most of my queue for the rest of the week done:
A) For Thursday: a reblog of a picture of Hostess Meltamors (a ready-to-eat lava cake snack) from PolyamorousMood, a blog I read sometimes, with the original poster, “papercranesandpride,” wondering who told Hostess about polyamory terms and then said they could use one for one of their snacks (referencing the term “metamour,” used for a partner of a partner) – I had to reblog this with tags referencing how Smiler would see this and INSIST on buying them – or at least showing them to Alice and saying “hey, new term for each other” XD
B) For Friday: a reblog of a post by “esamastation” about how you think you’re gonna do just a tiny snippet of something, and then that snippet grows completely out of control (this is a mood, as we all know how wordy I can get about shit)
C) And for Saturday: A reblog of an old Song Saturday featuring the Poets Of The Fall song “Love Will Come To You” because I saw that I hadn’t reblogged it in six years and I really thought it deserved another go-round (this is the one that isn’t done – didn’t have time to do a proper write-up – but at least it’s in the right time slot!)
Other: Got a comment on “A Murder Shared Is A Murder Thirded” from reader “LizzieAdamsTookAnAxe” asking: “Do you intend any sequels to this? Wonderful work.” Which made me crack up because, well, if you know me, you know that I have ALL THE IDEAS when it comes to the Valicer In The Dark verse. I let her know that I had 35 extra ideas waiting for me in the ideas doc XD (and then, a touch more seriously, let her know that I was currently working on the third installment). Fun!
*nods* All right -- let's go ahead and hit the sheets. Here's hoping Thursday is a) cooler and b) a little bit less of a clusterfuck. Night all!
And, as usual, I'm wrapping up this write-up later than I intended, so let me get this sorted so I can get to bed:
Work – It was a fairly quiet Wednesday for the most part – I did the morning reports; I looked at some returned mail; I got through the daily obituaries; I updated someone’s credit card for them; I had the biweekly Useless Credit Card Processor Check-In call; I scoured around for other roster maintenance tasks to do; and I sneakily did some puzzles. All was well –
Right up until about 3:30ish, when someone called in asking about a particular anonymous gift they’d helped a friend send in to help get their parish up to goal, which they hadn’t seen posted yet. Sending me on a trip to try and figure out what had happened to this damn check (and also taking a credit card gift from the person on the phone, because why not). I’ll spare you most of the details, but suffice it to say that what I thought was a case of “the check is lying around at our processing center because they are ALWAYS behind on our shit” was actually “the check was actually cashed at the beginning of the month and the money sent to a specific elder services organization connected to the Diocese because the anonymous donor included a note indicating that’s what they wanted to do.” *facepalm* So yeah – spent the last hour or so at work stressing out about that, and now I have to talk to my supervisor about it in the morning to see what he wants to do.
...And then I walked out of the building into the heat to find another fucking dance recital being held in the auditorium behind our main building, meaning the parking lot was swarming with parents and their kids and cars trying to pull into the spots the employees were vacating. It took me FIVE MINUTES to get out of the parking lot because I had to keep stopping to make sure I didn’t run over anyone or crash into anyone – hell, at one point I got to the exit, only to have to BACK UP because I had to let someone into the parking lot so they could let someone coming up the street in the opposite direction go! And then had to sit there as a bunch of other cars pulled in because I had nowhere to go because the street was absolutely fucking packed with cars parked on the side! I am very glad I had the windows up, because by the time I got out, I could not resist the urge to say “fuck” about fifty million times. *growls* The actual drive home wasn’t too bad, but fucking HELL. Whoever manages our parking lot for these events has to be fucking fired. *heavy sigh* I really hope there’s nothing like this happening on Thursday...
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “D&D But... Everyone's a Flumph! | Oxventure!” We wrapped up the adventures of the flumphs trying to find The Kindly Ones to help stop a hostile gentrification of their portion of the Underdark with –
A) Daisy The Rapid (Luke), Grapvine The Nonchalant (Jane), and Dockleaf The Scary (Mike), being confronted with a giant badger, trying to use their color-changing abilities to try and signal to the badger that they were poisonous to eat – this was only moderately successful (causing them to flash yellow and black – Luke assured Johnny this had nothing to do with bee(ples)), but fortunately the badger was much more interested in the dead goat the previous flumphs had killed anyway. Lucky flumphs.
B) The trio then successfully linking their eyestalks together to form a non-lethal collar around the badger’s neck (Johnny was like “HOW” in response to their dice rolls), hoping to thus ride it past a nearby village to a cave they suspected was the home of the Kindly Ones...only for Dockleaf to then ruin things by attempting to use his stink gland to “encourage” the badger to go in the direction they needed and accidentally spraying the badger. Which, naturally, reacted poorly and, in trying to find the source of the attack, managed to chomp both Daisy and Dockleaf in half. Leaving Grapevine to nonchalantly but quickly float away. XD
C) Fennel The Pious (Luke) and Jasmine The Decisive (Mike) joining Grapevine on her journey toward the village, only to encounter a bunch of tweens looking to tip some flumphs! Jasmine’s decisive stink-spraying went off poorly, as the kids were easily able to avoid the spray (one kid tackling another to save them) –
But Grapevine psychically influencing the kids to implant rumors of a love triangle in their midst (with Tween 2 liking Tween 1, but Tween 3 liking Tween 2) worked MUCH better, as Tween 2 was so intent on proving that they didn’t like Tween 1 that they punched Tween 3 unconscious before having a very awkward argument with Tween 1 where they refused to admit the reason why they did that. XD Grapevine and Jasmine took the opportunity to continue onward, while Fennel stayed behind to lecture the children on their wicked ways...and promptly got ripped in half by Tween 2 looking desperately for a way to distract Tween 1. XD Luke was not sorry to see him go.
D) Juniper The Hungry (Luke) then joining Grapevine and Jasmine as they traversed the village on the way to the cave! On the plus side, the village was having some sort of giant fete, so Grapevine and Jasmine were very easily able to disguise themselves as party balloons by inflating themselves and drifting among the regular balloons; on the minus side, the fete included a giant pot of stew, and Juniper couldn’t resist floating down for a look – only to be caught by the stew vendor, who attempted to blow them up, thinking they were a balloon. Juniper exploded; the stew vendor got covered in horrible stink gland stuff; and the stew was ruined. XD The kobolds from the previous episodes would be proud!
E) Belladonna The Psychedelic (Luke) catching up to Grapevine and Jasmine then and joining them in floating over the rest of the village as a “balloon” and to the entrance of the cave...only to insist on taking a “souvenir” and attempting to devour an unknown plant to see if it would get her high. Johnny ruled that this turned her inside out and then imploded her. XD It’s how she would have wanted to go!
F) Perrywinkle The Teenytiny (Luke) floating up to the gang – just in time to see Jasmine, having advanced into the cave a little TOO decisively, shredded by one of the Kindly Ones’ “puppies” – who, strangely, seemed to be all skin folds…
G) And finally, Perrywinkle, Grapevine, and the newly-arrived Silkweed the Gentle (Mike) managing to make it past the “puppies” and to the Kindly Ones, who were quite disturbed to see the flumphs so upset...and quite eager to meet these intelligent-sounding land developers ruining their cloister. They thus brought the flumphs back to the usual tunnel connecting their two sections of the Underdark, where they cleared the rock and emerged into the new construction zone, full of people getting ready to build the luxury apartments –
And immediately slaughtered the lot of them. Because, as it turns out, flumphs often live near colonies of MIND FLAYERS. And their pet intellect devourers. XD Meaning the one-shot ended with the flumphs happily feeding off the joyous psychic energies of the mind flayers and the intellect devourers as they feasted on the investors and the construction crew. ...To be fair, I don’t think anyone is going to miss those assholes. XD Excellent one-shot – I suspected that the flumphs were going to be asking something incredibly evil for help, but I thought it was going to be an eldritch monstrosity! Which, I guess mind flayers kind of ARE, but I was thinking more straight-up Cthulhu. *nods* But I’m not sorry about how this ended at all – it was great. :D Still got a few one-shots to get through, but next week, I think we’ll start watching Wyrdwood! Season 2 is coming up, after all, and I still gotta get through Season 1...
2. Edit the second draft of Gig’s gift fic: Check – and yes, after thinking about it, I decided to switch gears and edit the gift fic tonight instead of continuing with “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland!” Reason? I felt like where I left off in LB:DQ yesterday was a good place to leave the story for a bit, AND I wanted to take the opportunity to start rejiggering my writing schedule. Because, well, if I’m going to do “Fallout 4 Fridays” for the summer, that means I’m going to be updating the FO4 Playthrough Progression on Fridays. And that means I gotta redo my schedule for my other two stories. Which led to me doing the gift fic tonight...so I can get five whole days of working on “The Van Dort Vacancy” as I transition from writing on it Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays to Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. :D Yaaaay~
Anyway – yes, did the second draft of the gift fic tonight! Again, won’t say much because spoilers, but while it took a minute to get going, I think I wrestled it into an acceptable shape. :) Looking forward to posting it next Monday!
3. Keep up with YouTube “Subs”: Check – I got to YouTube late (who is surprised), so I hit up Proxy Gate Tactican’s channel to watch another one of his shorter videos – “10 Types of Baldur’s Gate 3 Players!” A list of all the different types of players attracted to everyone’s favorite CRPG, from the weirdos (including people who make bizarre-looking characters, people who do weird self-imposed challenges, and people who want to finish the game as quickly as possible) and the modders (all those who want to add more hairstyles, more spells, and more jank to the game), to the explorers (those new to this genre of game, and possibly D&D itself, who spend their time poking around and appreciating the small stuff) and the veterans (who came into all this with a PLAN, damn it, and know EXACTLY how to get the most out of any given playthrough), and all the delightful folks in-between! Well, except the “I Can’t Read But I’ll Play A CRPG Anyway” crowd – Proxy was like “if you don’t want to actually read the dialogue and follow the story, why are you here?” (“Oh, right, because you’re chasing trends and will soon abandon this game for Cyberpunk 2077.”) As for my own category, I’m an Explorer (because I am new to this type of game – I’m not entirely sure Fallout 4 truly counts as a proper CRPG) with a very healthy dash of Modder (I want my extra spells and fun goofiness – and, most importantly, for Smiler to look right, damn it). And eventually I hope to be very happy with those playstyles. :P (One of these days I will figure out my mod situation...)
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – just Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) to worry about tonight, and I was able to get most of my queue for the rest of the week done:
A) For Thursday: a reblog of a picture of Hostess Meltamors (a ready-to-eat lava cake snack) from PolyamorousMood, a blog I read sometimes, with the original poster, “papercranesandpride,” wondering who told Hostess about polyamory terms and then said they could use one for one of their snacks (referencing the term “metamour,” used for a partner of a partner) – I had to reblog this with tags referencing how Smiler would see this and INSIST on buying them – or at least showing them to Alice and saying “hey, new term for each other” XD
B) For Friday: a reblog of a post by “esamastation” about how you think you’re gonna do just a tiny snippet of something, and then that snippet grows completely out of control (this is a mood, as we all know how wordy I can get about shit)
C) And for Saturday: A reblog of an old Song Saturday featuring the Poets Of The Fall song “Love Will Come To You” because I saw that I hadn’t reblogged it in six years and I really thought it deserved another go-round (this is the one that isn’t done – didn’t have time to do a proper write-up – but at least it’s in the right time slot!)
Other: Got a comment on “A Murder Shared Is A Murder Thirded” from reader “LizzieAdamsTookAnAxe” asking: “Do you intend any sequels to this? Wonderful work.” Which made me crack up because, well, if you know me, you know that I have ALL THE IDEAS when it comes to the Valicer In The Dark verse. I let her know that I had 35 extra ideas waiting for me in the ideas doc XD (and then, a touch more seriously, let her know that I was currently working on the third installment). Fun!
*nods* All right -- let's go ahead and hit the sheets. Here's hoping Thursday is a) cooler and b) a little bit less of a clusterfuck. Night all!
