A few weeks ago, my wife’s mother had back surgery. She had a brace put in to support her spine. We are the only family my mother-in-law has in this area, so Wifegrit has been with her a lot. For hours, daily, in the hospital for the first surgery, and then a second surgery a couple of days later to fix a problem from the first, then in the rehab center, then in another rehab center. Her mom’s recovery progress has been up and down, some good days, some bad days. Then this weekend she went back to the hospital for some tests to determine why she was having so much difficulty. Turns out she has a fracture in her spine, and it became infected.

So she had another, (a third), surgery to fix this problem. Now she’s having to start the recovery process all over again. This has been a long and tiring process. Draining for Wifegrit both physically and emotionally. Wifegrit has not only had to help her mother with direct personal assistance, but she’s had to deal with hospital and rehab center personnel and decisions.

I’ve helped as much as I could, even if just being moral and emotional support for Wifegrit, but really, she’s borne the majority of the responsibility and work with her mother. I hate seeing my wife stressed out. She’s handled it pretty well, considering, but still, I see it wearing on her over time. And knowing that this is all restarting because of this latest surgery makes me sad. I want her mom to get better, and I want my wife to get her normal life back.

I’m going to plan a good vacation for us, just the two of us, sometime in the later summer. Maybe I’ll take her back to Disney World, her favorite place. She definitely needs a little peace and relaxation and fun. A respite from all this stress she’s had over the past weeks.

Bullgrit

Calfgrit8 leaves his socks everywhere around the house. When he comes in from school or playing, he whips his socks off and drops them where ever he happens to be at that moment. Then when it’s time to go outside again, he runs upstairs to get another pair of socks. By the end of the day, there have been as many as half a dozen extra socks lying about the downstairs area.

We usually make him go back downstairs and round them all up himself, but sometimes Wifegrit and/or I will collect them and put them at the bottom of the stairs for him to take up when he goes up for his bath at the end of the day. And every single time, he will run up the stairs, often stepping on the socks, without picking them up. And then we have to tell him to go back down again and pick them up. He sighs and whines about having to go back down and then come back up.

That picture above — that’s one day of socks for him. Some of them might have been worn for only an hour before being removed and dropped. I found them scattered about after bedtime, so I just tossed them all together on the bench. I don’t know how he doesn’t run out of socks every couple of days. There must be a few dozen socks in his drawer — fortunately for him, with small feet he can have that many stuffed into one drawer.

Bullgrit

The biggest fan I’ve ever seen.

Bullgrit

I’ve mentioned over the past several months how my boys and I have fallen in love with Minecraft. Well, I’ve just discovered the “adventure” mode for this game, and now my love has turned to an addiction, an obsession. In the adventure mode, I can start up a server, modify it — create dungeons and other types of adventure quests — and then let my boys loose in it. Adventure mode restricts the mining the players can do, so it’s all about exploration, discovery, battling monsters, and any other concept I can think of. I’ve downloaded a world editor, and I’ve begun to experiment with creating various locations for adventure exploration. I am totally thrilled and hooked!

I’m just learning the skills for Minecraft adventure map design, and I have limited artistic talent, so my first attempts at seriously creating in Minecraft are relatively basic. But here’s an example of what I’ve done:

It’s supposed to be the front face of an abandoned evil temple.

This feeling of creating a world, (just a small part of a world to start with), and a dungeon adventure is like being a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master again. But this is better than just that. I mean, I’ve played D&D and DMed campaigns several times in the past several years, but this creating an adventure world and dungeons for my boys to explore is more like what I did 30 years ago with and for my friends. This exercise is really taking me back to my RPG roots. Back to my classic feelings for adventure gaming.

As much as I love the gaming aspect of adventure role-playing games — the sitting with my friends around a table, with the books, dice, miniatures, paper, and pencils — what stirs me at a visceral level is simply creating a dungeon. Drawing out the map, coming up with a theme/story/quest for it, and then populating the rooms and corridors and caverns with monsters, traps, tricks, and treasures.

I still have notebooks full of old dungeon maps I drew up back in my teens, (when I had so much free time for such “unproductive” activities). The notebooks are stashed with all my old D&D game books and modules, and are some of my most cherished old gaming material. I haven’t thrown away any of it. Here’s the map, (two levels), for a dungeon I made circa 1985:

The above dungeon was one I not only mapped, but wrote up and DMed for my friends at the time. But I’m still drawing up dungeon maps just for the hell of it. Here’s a dungeon map I drew up within the last couple of years:

This is something I drew while wasting time, here and there, over weeks or months. Note that the label says, “Level 5”. That’s right, there are at least four other maps that go along with this one. But I’ve never put any text, (or thought), to this megadungeon, it’s really just a doodle. But it’s doodling I really enjoy. And this is why I’m so excited about designing “old school” dungeons in Minecraft for my sons to play in, like I did when I was their age. This is a truly exciting revisit to the most imaginative days of my life.

Bullgrit