Well, it was certainly a break from work and school.  It was also cold and we got some snow, so it felt like winter.  Can’t complain about that since I live in New York, so we expect that weather.  Been fairly dry the last few years, so we were do to get some rapid fire snowstorms around here.  Of course, it hit when I was the only one around to shovel, so I’m sore.  My son tried to help, but a little guy with a large shovel can only do so much before he goes to play.  I’ll take what I can get since he could have refused to help in general.

With there being no work, the week was primarily video games, television, Lego sets, and relaxing.  We watched ‘Godzilla: King of Monsters’ to get ready for ‘Godzilla vs Kong’, so now my son loves Mothra.  Kind of hope that one makes an appearance in the next movie for his sake.  I introduced him to ‘Dragon ball’ too.  The original with 11-year-old Goku and we’ll work our way up to ‘Z’, ‘GT’, and the newer one that I know nothing about.  Got some episodes of ‘One Piece’, ‘Fairy Tail’, ‘Dr Stone’, ‘Pokemon’, ‘Yugioh’, and ‘Animaniacs’ too, which makes it sound like we were always in front of the television.  Most of those are the night viewing before bed, which helps him relax a bit.  The rest are breakfast or lunch because he won’t sit still to eat.  A family dinner is the only time we get him to stay at the table.  Oh well, it’s winter break.

Speaking of Lego sets, I bought my son the Lego Super Mario Starter course.  This is a set based on Super Mario and you need to get this one before getting any of the others.  That’s because it’s the only one with the Mario, who has Bluetooth, a scanner on his bottom, digital eyes for expressions, speaker for sounds, and a chest screen for coin and power up display.  Yeah, this was high-tech.  I had to put an app on my iPhone, which was a major battery drain.  That was the only way to get the instructions, but my son liked how he could move the images around to get a better look at what he had to do.  It records the coins you collect since several pieces have barcodes that Mario responds to.  Also, he acts like he’s fallen into lava if you put him on anything red.  It’s pretty fun because we couldn’t figure out why he kept making the noise until we saw he was placed on the red rug.  I also bought the Bowser Castle Boss Battle, which you add to the overall set.  That took 2 days to put together since we were shoveling as well.  Needless to say, my son loved it and played with it all the time.  The pieces are all over the floor of his room though because he can build different courses.  Have to tread carefully when I check him before I go to bed from now on.

I finished Do I Need to Use a Dragon? last weekend, which I’ll talk a bit more about tomorrow.  I’m at the point where I need to figure out how to gather the rest of the pieces such as beta readers and cover/interior art.  Never did interior art before, so I’m not sure how to include that into an eBook.  Do I put it directly into the Word file and hope the formatting doesn’t mess it up?  I’ll ask that again tomorrow.  When I wrote the post for tomorrow, I was exhausted.  Still, another project is done and I’m aiming to finish the outlining of another series this weekend.  That clears the deck for fresh outlines at work and getting ‘Tales of the Slumberlord’ into its final outline stage.  Fingers crossed that things work out.  We’ll see what happens though because weeks after breaks are either quiet or chaotic.  There is no in-between.

Did I mention the exhaustion last weekend?  That was because I got the second Covid vaccine shot last Saturday.  I thought that the achy arm and feeling a little sleepy that evening were the common side-effects people talked about.  Nope.  It was around 10:05 the next morning that I was hit by a fatigue like a bus coming out of nowhere.  This was in the middle of working on Do I Need to Use a Dragon? and I was determined to finish that project.  It took me all day with several pseudo-naps and a slight bit of masochism where I pushed on the injection spot to send a jolt of pain through me.  Coffee makes me drowsy and I had nothing else in the house.  No way I was driving either.  I think I was annoyed at being nearly laid out too, so I fought to finish the project primarily out of defiant spite.  Who or what was I spiting?  I have no idea, but I can through in time to have a big dinner.  Then, I promptly laid down to . . . Not be able to sleep because the fatigue wore off and I found myself wide awake at midnight!

Any new anime by myself?  Just ‘Goblin Slayer’ and ‘Maria the Virgin Witch’.  I struggled through the second one because of the fatigue.  Really enjoyed the first even though it’s incredibly violent and the first episode is a shock to the system if you’re not ready for what happens.  They set out to make you despise goblins within the first 5-10 minutes.  Now, I’m working through ‘Samurai 7’, which is based on the ‘Seven Samurai’.  It’s an older anime and not as exciting as I’d expected.  Slow pace, but the characters are keeping me going.

Goals for the week:

1. More April blog posts.
2. Finish outlining ‘Ruins of the Zodiac Gods’.
3. Divide my stories into idea books to decide on next collection.
4. Try to find an artist for Do I Need to Use a Dragon?
5. Start outlining ‘Tales of the Slumberlord’?  I might wait on this in case next week is crazy.
6. Biking a bit more
7. Puzzle time when stressed
8. Really should make a blurb of War of Nytefall: Savagery.  Maybe I’ll do one later today and have it be tested in March.  I’m definitely being lazy on this whole thing for some reason.  There’s excitement in me, but I just can’t muster a lot of physical pep lately.  Weird.