Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

Gamehole Plush Monster Island

Every year, John Kovalic designs a new plush for Gamehole Con, the parent convention that hosts Dorkstock. A couple years ago, it occurred to me that I could combine those plush into a Monster Island game, a game I’ve owned for a couple decades now. The hard part, beyond retroactively acquiring a second set of most of the plush (the owlbear, alas, is no longer available), was coming up with their stats and special abilities while keeping the variety of creatures somewhat balanced in game play.

Plush Bulette faces off against plush Rust Monster on a green fabric mat with a blue fabric pond near a plush rainbow food truck. Assorted meeple are nearby, presumably fleeing from the battling kaiju, not unlike the Bulette who was strategically retreating.

Among other things, I needed to take into account that some abilities just wouldn’t be useful against other monsters. The cute orange beast pictured here, for example, is a Rust Monster. But the other monsters don’t wear armor! They do, however, have the ability to pick up and throw several crocheted food trucks and garbage cans, all of which are theoretically made of metal. While it would have been amusing to let the Rust Monster just destroy those items, it seemed better to let is recover health by consuming them, though playtesting went through a couple iterations of what that restored health value would be.

Preparing for a battle of four plush monsters: Rust Monster, Gelatinous Cube, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Kobold. On the green fabric play area with blue pond, in addition to the monsters, there are three crocheted food trucks, two crocheted trees, three crocheted garbage cans, and a scattering of plastic meeple.

But I didn’t make the food trucks just for the Rust Monster. Food trucks are part of the Gamehole Con tradition, adding food options beyond the convention center selection. And if there are food trucks, well, there have to be people (OK, meeple) gathered near them. This was one of the places where I tweaked the Monster Island game mechanics… each monster has two special abilities, and they’re activated by consuming meeple. That includes the Rust Monster’s ability to heal by consuming metal… they lost in the last playtest round because while they were in reach of a metal item, they were out of meeple. Oops. (The pictured kobold is a stand-in from 9th Level Games’ Kobolds Ate My Baby!, since the kobold is this year’s plush.)

While both scheduled Monster Island events for this weekend are sold out, the rules and plush will be available in Dorkstock’s games library for play in the room (Waubesa – up on the second floor of the convention center) for anyone who feels a need for a silly kaiju battle.

Mulberry trimming

Most years, after the mulberries are done for the season, I do a quick trim of the branches I can reach that are extending too far over the lawn. A couple key phrases in that sentence were “most” and “I can reach”… I am not particularly tall, and I never quite got around to bringing the ladder out each year to trim the higher branches. That resulted in quite a sprawl, particularly at the higher levels, that I didn’t really want to deal with myself, and a fruit tree that was taller than we wanted, primarily because we had no way to reach so much of that fruit.

A view of the back yard and house focused on a sprawling mulberry tree before it was trimmed.

If you’ve never had mulberries – and I personally have never seen them available uncooked in stores – you might be wondering why we didn’t just collect them when they fell. Mulberries are quite juicy, while resembling a small blackberry. I assume this juiciness is the reason for the lack of commercial availability; they don’t keep well. It also means that when they hit the ground, they immediately collect dirt. To be fair, this doesn’t stop the birds, rabbits, and other critters from eating them… we’re just a bit pickier.

A view of the back yard focused on a sprawling mulberry tree during the trimming process, with trimmed branches on the ground.

I decided earlier in the summer to hire someone to trim the tree, rather than having to find the time to trim it and get the branches down to the appropriate size for the township’s branch pick-up. As you can see in this photo taken during the trimming, there were some sizable branches removed. Conveniently, my neighbor had hired a company, Paulo & Sons Tree Services (who can be reached here), mid-summer, when his branch overhanging my driveway cracked near the trunk. I kept their contact information, promising to reach out once the mulberry harvest ended for the season.

A view of the back yard and house focused on a the significantly reduced mulberry tree.

To be clear, our mulberry season usually finishes in July, nicely timed with our next wave of raspberries and strawberries, affording us the opportunity for some triple berry dishes. This has been a strange growing season in our garden – I picked a ripe strawberry today, in October, and saw another recently formed flower – and our mulberry harvest didn’t actually wind down until mid-September. In fact, the timing worked out nicely for the tree trimming to happen in cooler weather; it was still in the 80s last week. I’m hoping the raspberries are about done, so I can trim them before the branch pick-up ends for the season. (Edit: the raspberries said “I’m not dead yet!” So I ate some.) I’m happy with the trimmed mulberry, and glad someone else did the work.

Temperature blanket update and ideas

A crocheted patchwork blanket with one square representing each day's temperature, beginning with a mixed blue and white in the bottom right from February, progressing to the far left row in October with 5 red, 1 yellow, and 9 orange squares.

The temperature blanket continues, of course, with another three months of warm weather added in the latest six rows. In this photo, that’s the left side, which has the occasional yellow (65-74) with more orange (75-84) and red (85-94). Fortunately, dark red’s only appearance, for temperatures 95 and above, was on the last travel day shown, when we flew back from Portland, Oregon as they started a heat wave.

When I started this blanket, I was working on the concept based solely on word-of-mouth, having heard the idea from friends at various points, including one who started her blanket in January. I recently stumbled on a Temperature/Weather Blanket group on Facebook and am in awe of the variety of different ideas for the same basic concept. Beyond the basic rows or granny squares (like mine) are the expanded ideas with lows and highs, sometimes as half of the same row, which makes for fascinating color blends. There are rows or squares as month dividers, special colors or add-ons to mark significant dates for the blanket’s owner (not necessarily the person doing the work), and squares per week or month, building out to longer rows later in the square. And it’s not all squares! There are hexes and flowers and circles all joined in appropriate ways. One layout I’m considering for the future is a calendar design – in addition to the squares for each day, there are filler squares to finish out the rectangle for a monthly calendar, along with a top row indicating the month, and then the months can be joined to form the larger blanket.

And that’s just the blankets! There are also weather snakes… same basic concept, a row per day of a crochet plush snake, which I have to say, is tempting for some future year. There are also embroidered designs, from a dozen cat silhouettes in a variety of colors to a daily temperature tree, which is available as a kit here. I am seriously considering that one for 2026, as a good way to improve my embroidery skills. Once I have more practice, I may consider an embroidery chart for something like the cats.

Which creative temperature idea fascinates you the most?

The return of the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show

In a whirlwind of political controversy, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show, a late-night talk show, was suddenly suspended “indefinitely” last week, then just as suddenly restarted, airing again on Tuesday, September 23rd. The cancellation was evidently a response to the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appearing on a conservative commentator’s podcast and threatening the company that produces the show. (His threats went over so well that fellow Republicans were criticizing his comments as attacking free speech.) This sudden turnabout was undoubtedly due to the financial setbacks experience by the parent company… someone called Disney… as consumers took a stand, cancelling streaming subscriptions and vacations, apparently to the tune of several billion dollars lost in less than a week.

Until this week, I had never watched the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show. The entire concept is antithetical to my lifestyle… “late night” is something that I usually only experience at conventions, and I generally prefer to read news rather than watch it. Don’t get me wrong, I only altered half of that… I watched the episode on YouTube the morning after it aired. According to YouTube’s count, so have 15 million (and counting) other people, so I’d say it’s doing fairly well.

I almost feel bad for The Onion, faced with the outrageous reality that they’re competing with, and yet that same outrageous reality makes it easier for the late night comedians, including Jimmy Kimmel, to find easy targets. And with malfunctioning escalators (allegedly sabotage, rather than the reality of an emergency stop triggered by his own team) and teleprompter (again, run by his own team), you’d almost think this administration is trying to provide fodder for those late night shows.

What we saw was a successful boycott with a specific target – restoring the show – influencing a mega-corporation. Imagine what we could accomplish as a country if all of those consumers who have a strong opinion about free speech would vote.

The Return of Mount Mulchmore

As I mentioned recently, we needed a bit more mulch before the winter weather hits. After a couple weeks, I cancelled my Chip Drop request – I can always enter a new one – and bought some mulch after my garden planner said these magic words: “If we don’t mulch it, we need to sod lift the whole area.”

Yeah, I’d rather mulch it. Here’s the work in progress, starting with a perimeter mulch path at the edge, then a combination of sod removal and mulching. The areas where grass was removed are destined for more immediate planting of somewhat tall plants. We briefly considered a metal edging for the perimeter plant, so the mulch doesn’t wash into the neighbor’s grass when it rains, but realized how expensive that would get given that the entire north edge has a bit of a slope into his yard. We’re looking at a plastic edging instead.

A new pile of dark brown mulch – about 10 cubic yards – on our driveway, the day it was delivered.
A 2-foot wide line of mulch along the edge of our property in the northwest corner of our yard.
A mulched area around the lilac, with a small portion where we did sod lifting instead for upcoming planting.
A view from the side patio to the mulch pile, showing the recently mulched area and the remaining grass for the northwest corner, which will all be mulched over or removed.

Feline goodness

The internet has been fairly vile this week, with videos of two different murders that occurred in the United States circulating: a violent stabbing in North Carolina and a targeted shooting at a college campus in Utah. You’ve probably seen more commentary about the second one, despite another school shooting in Colorado mere minutes later, because the person in question was famous/infamous (depending who you ask). Either way, most of the comments you’ll see online about it are pretty terrible, with many people celebrating the death and conspiracy theorists on the other side somehow naming every person who votes for the Democratic party as a murderer, despite not knowing who the murderer is or their motive. For anyone who thinks that way, please pull your collective heads out of your collective asses instead of painting a diverse group of people with a single label. Whatever the method or motive, senseless violence is wrong.

Ideally, I would have segued into a photo that involved both a head next to an ass here, but I typically don’t take photos of the cats in those particular poses. Instead, here’s a spattering of more delightful cat photos, in the hopes that they offer you a smile today and a brief refuge from whatever you need to hide from.

June, sitting on a blue tub next to our gaming table, with a plush Flying Spaghetti Monster lurking behind her.
Zuko lounged on our Gamefold table – folded, leaning against part of our games library.
Two cats, Arwen and June, sitting on a Hello Kitty blanket on the sofa.
Diane, mere inches from a water bowl, perches with front paws on the edge of a full bucket on the shower mat to drink.

Mount Mulchmore

One our perpetual summer projects is acquiring and distributing mulch around the yard, to help with weed suppression and generally improve the appearance of the yard. Earlier in the spring, I had a request in with GetChipDrop.com for wood chips, hoping to get a free (or close to free, with optional donation) supply of wood chips to mulch the yard. ChipDrop partners with local arborists and gardeners to mutual benefit: the arborists get somewhere local to drop the wood chips, and the gardeners don’t have to call every tree company or outright purchase mulch. It’s a simple process, but it doesn’t mean the availability of wood chips is sporadic. Each request is good for a month, and when we returned from the Canary Islands without having received wood chips, I bit the bullet and ordered mulch from a local supplier. (To be clear, their mulch is fabulous… but mulch is not cheap.)

A pile of mulch - approximately 10 cubic yards - in the driveway — Mulch pile 3-May

A smaller pile of mulch - maybe 5 cubic yards - in the driveway — Mulch pile 3-May

The initial distribution wave went quickly – from delivery on May 3rd to the second photo on May 10th, we probably distributed half of the mulch. This was the easy phase, re-mulching areas that were mulched in previous years. You can see how good the fresh mulch looked around the raised vegetable beds. We have a large yard and progressed fairly quickly through those initial 10 cubic yards. I was quickly becoming concerned with other areas of the garden I wanted to mulch as I ran through the pile.

So, before clearing the entire pile, I placed a new request through GetChipDrop.com on a Friday… and received a response Saturday morning asking if I wanted a 15-yard delivery. Woot! It wasn’t until partway through distributing the refreshed pile that I named it “Mount Mulchmore.”

The process inevitably slowed, between some intolerably warm weather, my wasted time at PT, and our discussions as to which areas needed weeding before mulching and which should have landscape paper set down first. I expanded the back border to put more distance between myself and the poison ivy lingering under the neighbor’s white mulberry tree. And then, in mid-August, after mulching around the strawberry bed, I cleared the rest of the pile.

I need more mulch. Yes, I have a request in.

The Paramount Theatre presents Come From Away

Come From Away just opened at the Paramount Theatre, and it is, as expected, fabulous. It does, however, need warning labels if you are unfamiliar with the plot, and in some cases, even if you are familiar with the story they’re unfolding on stage, particularly if you’re of an age to remember the foundational event: September 11th, 2001. In that case, it’s likely to bring up memories, shared these so many years, of near misses, such as the friend who was late for work that day or family members who flew out of New York the day before, or of the ones who weren’t so lucky.

Cropped theatre tickets for Come From Away at the Paramount Theatre on August 23, 2025

Come From Away is not fundamentally about the disaster that occurred. Rather, it approaches this historic event from the town of Gander, on an island which is part of Newfoundland in Canada. If you can’t immediately place that on a map without help, don’t worry, neither could I. Or most of the people whose flights were stranded there – 38 planes were rerouted to Gander when US air space closed because of the terrorist attacks.

The story told is primarily about how Gander rallied to host these stranded travelers whose presence almost doubled Gander’s population, and the friendships that were formed in those handful of days. Instead of replaying the disaster details themselves, the horrors of that day are portrayed in the cast members’ reactions, particularly the desperate attempts by the travelers to reach family and friends back in a time when most of us weren’t carrying cell phones everywhere. The creators made a good effort to break up the serious moments with odd bits of appropriate humor, so rest assured, you won’t be crying the entire time.

There is a brief glimpse of the beginnings of the Islamophobia that spawned from September 11th, but the story ends before reaching the infringements on our constitutional rights from the Patriot Act and the blatant imperialism of the wars the United States launched in revenge. Instead, the story manages to end on a high note celebrating the friendships forged in Gander.

Anxiety exists for a reason.

In this particular instance, I’m referring to my anxiety related to nests inhabited by stinging insects, particularly wasps. You may recall a couple years ago, I had a terrible Saturday morning when I accidentally disturbed a yellowjacket nest on the east side of our house, safely tucked between an empty planter and our shed. This past Saturday, I was talking to my neighbor about our plethora of balls in the deck box, specifically in relation to something his puppy could use. (The deck box moved to this house a couple years ago and had not been sorted through in that time.) I had already handed him an old volleyball of mine that was stored under a nearby bench, but flipped up the lid to show him how many other balls we have. As we stood there talking, I noticed movement in my peripheral vision and realized that there was a hornet’s nest on the underside of the lid.

A blurry photo of a wasp or hornet nest (I don't really distinguish between aggressively stinging insects) on the underside of our deck box lid. I wasn't getting closer to get a non-blurry photo.

I swore, and we both immediately moved away from the box, him in response to my action before he noted the nest as well. We both took a few more steps for safety, and he offered to lend me the wasp spray he owned, though we both noted that it should wait until evening – wasps tend to be active during the day and dormant at night, so the ideal time to spray a nest is when most of them are clustered on it, resting. I sent Cassandra a warning to avoid the side patio and after lunch, we wandered off to an Arts & Crafts Fair at Morton Arboretum.

As the afternoon wore on, I noted that the impending thunderstorm might interfere with my plan to spray the nest that evening. Before the rain started – splendid rain, bringing about four inches of water to our yard – we had some high winds that caused me – after it started raining – to pop out the side door and see if the lid to the deck box was still open. Upon discovering that it wasn’t, I stepped out under the overhang and carefully flipped the lip open again, thinking that when the opportunity arose to spray the nest, I didn’t want to disturb them with the motion of opening it again.

A little while later, the rain let up, so I popped outside, grabbed the can, sprayed the nest thoroughly, and promptly ignored it for the rest of the evening as the rain came and went. Come morning, I verified that the nest was empty, noting several corpses in the deck box. I used a plastic bag to grab the nest, tied it off, and dropped it into our garbage can. I then emptied the entire box, organizing as I went… and much to my dismay, discovered a trio of yellowjackets tucked into the palm of a rather wet softball glove. The dismay was augmented when I dumped them into the grass and they began moving! Fortunately, they were the only ones, though I did proceed carefully in case there was another nest buried in the box.

Once the box was empty, I hauled it onto the grass, scrubbed it down, and left it to dry. In the afternoon, we started to refill the box, though we left some damp items drying nearby. We closed the lid… which turned out to be a mistake. When I went back out to put other items into the box, there were a few hornets at the spot where the nest had been, presumably trying to rebuild. I left the lid open again and retreated. When I returned a while later, they were gone, and I sprayed the area again to discourage them from returning.

A couple days later, with no evidence of hornets in the open box, I finally closed the lid again. So far, so good.

Thoughts on Wednesday: Season 1

Yes, I’m late to this game, primarily because we don’t have a Netflix subscription. I’m a bit too young to have been original audience for the first Addams Family TV show in the 1960s and far too young for the debut of the standalone single-panel comics – started in the late 1930s – that inspired that show. My introduction to The Addams Family came through the movie in the early 1990s, when a group of friends walked from campus to a nearby movie theatre in that day or two between the ending of finals and everyone heading home for the holidays. Based on IMDB’s search results, I’ve apparently missed some iterations since then. But I heard of Wednesday when it aired and recently checked the library to see if the DVDs were available.

Wednesday Addams is the quintessential macabre goth girl, both in appearance and her general approach to life, clearly highlighted in the opening scenes where she walks into a normal school in her usual attire and through a quick sequence of events, proceeds to drop piranhas in a pool where the boys who were bullying her brother are swimming. As she proceeds with her family to Nevermore, the boarding school her parents attended, her regret regarding the piranhas is that she will be seen as a failure, having been expelled for attempted murder. (Rumors, of course, are flying regarding the new student, and nobody there realizes she failed in her murder attempt.)

While that sets the mood, Wednesday is about more than just some macabre goth jokes. Clearly intelligent and curious, she immediately becomes embroiled investigating what appear to be serial killings in the area, as well as a long-dormant murder accusation against her father. She notices minute details overlooked by others, assembling the pieces together while adjusting to her new school and the possibility of actual friendships. Ultimately, the first season is just as much about found family as it is about the mysteries she is trying to solve.

I look forward to Season 2… you know, some day, when it reaches DVD or we pick up a Netflix subscription.