I’m not gonna hold my breath that anyone’s gonna toss money my way, but figured that a ko-fi doesn’t cost me anything to set up, so I did it. It’s currently a button in the footer of my site. I’m lucky enough to have some money still coming in, though it’s nowhere near what it was since while boss is arguing that we’re essential because we print for a couple of the local hospitals and a few other places, a lot of our other customers are closed because of Covid-19. I’m only coming in intermitently for half days, and it depends on what’s waiting for me to print.

I’m lucky enough to have a savings account that was intended to get me back into a car again. I had been at the point where I thought I could afford to pull the trigger on that, and then all this shit blew up. I probably could have done it sooner if I was willing to buy a junker, and maybe I should have, but I really didn’t want to go back to a crappy car that I didn’t drive unless I absolutely had to go somewhere, because I didn’t trust the damn thing.

Because I was mostly a homebody anyway because of the lack of a car, this shelter in place crap isn’t a huge change for me. It mostly just means less having to go into work, and extra precautions when I go grocery shopping. I’ve only done that once since this started, but may go back for another run sooner than I otherwise should since I really want to make more bread and they didn’t have yeast last time I went shopping. My bread still comes out ugly, but it’s delicious, so I’m good with that.

I’ve also been experimenting with cold brew tea. I’m pretty sure I like my ice tea warm brewed better, but that might be a matter of finding the right teas for the cold brew technique. So far, the Victorian London Fog and Russian Country are okay cold brewed if I add almond milk to them, but I’m not as happy with them without it. Next up to try is one of the teas I recently ordered: Pomegranate Oolong, Raspberry Mojito, and Black Currant Ice Tea. The Pomegranate Oolong is nice hot brew, so I’m hopeful it’ll make a nice delicate cold brew. We shall see, but gotta finish the current pitcher of the Russian Country cold brew.

Other thing that’s happened is I’ve managed to find bandwidth for small stupid shit I should have been doing before. Things like mending clothes that got a tear or needed to be brought in because “standardized” sizing doesn’t even really fit the apex of the bell curve, and I sure as fuck ain’t the apex of the curve. And I’ve started to poke again at a TTRPG idea I’ve been juggling for a while — a Call of Cthulhu game based upon the HP Lovecraft Historical Society’s parody musical, A Shoggoth on the Roof. I need to refresh my memory on CoC rules, and figure out what other trappings I need to plan ahead of time beyond character stats for the pre-gen player characters and NPCs, and a rough plot arc that I want the players to encounter if they don’t go off and fuck behind the potted plant. If I get those Shoggoth in a row, I want to attempt to run it over VC on Discord.

I did file my taxes today though, and realized I was getting a small refund. If I’d had my head on straight sooner, I would have at least figured that out earlier in the year. The last couple years, I’ve owed money to both Feds and state, so I wasn’t in a particular rush to deal with that assuming it was going to be the same. My witholdings are usually pretty close to what I owe, so it’s usually a non-issue each year I file outside of when I forget to the last minute and get stressed over it. Technically today was last minute, but because of the Feds’ incompetence over this Covid-19 shit, that date got pushed back. So.

Edit: I wasn’t happy with how the ko-fi WP plugin was behaving, so I instead just put a link in my menus, which also makes it easier to spot on the site. <3