A restorative week, with the play recharging me about as much as the work paid off.

Shipped

At work I keep leaning into the part of the job that suits me best, which is spotting where things could connect better and then doing something about it. There are a lot of small teams here moving fast on tight timelines, and each one solves its problems in whatever way works for that team on that schedule. Stack enough of those together and you end up with the same job being done several different ways, with real gaps in between. I’m new, but I’m also one of the older hands in the room, and I’ve been handed a lot of latitude to make it easier for everyone to pull in the same direction. Last week it was the Welcome Center; this week it’s been beating the drum for shared patterns and good documentation wherever I can find an audience. I’m thriving on it.

I also found some quiet time between features to point a few of the newer AI models at my test coverage for the LocallyGrown.net API endpoints. I’m the only consumer of that API right now, but that might not always be true, so a real test suite matters. The business logic lives in a separate service layer that’s had thorough tests since the start. The API layer, though, the part that checks the shape of the data going in and out and decides what happens when something unexpected shows up, was mostly bare. Now it isn’t. I still don’t trust these tools to write code for me on their own, but they’re surprisingly good, and getting better, at writing tests around code that already exists.

Played

After months of playing a plagueherald in our Gloomhaven group, I finally hit my personal retirement goal and got to send the character off. Plagueheralds are a swarm of insects with a single hive mind, able to pull themselves into a humanoid shape, and they’re built for spreading pestilence around the map to soften up enemies so the rest of the party can finish them. I named mine Cricket, after the character on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and by the end I had the whole approach dialed in: the right mix of abilities and gear to race out ahead of the group and hit hard enough to leave enemies reeling before anyone else arrived. The retirement goal itself was a strange one. I had to become exhausted, the game’s version of going down in a scenario, an absurd number of times, so my whole strategy was to charge in, deal tremendous damage, and not particularly care whether I survived. I’ll miss that bag of bugs, but honestly it had gone formulaic by the end, and I’m ready for something new.

For my next character I went through the mercenaries we’ve unlocked and landed on Hail. She’d been an NPC until now, someone we dealt with to set up scenarios and move the story along, but a recent expansion turned her into a fully playable character. I love her personality. She wants to learn everything about everything and quietly resents that doing so means putting up with the real world and all its inconveniences. She’s cranky and curious and odd, and I find a fair amount of her relatable. We’re getting close to the endgame, so she’ll probably be my last mercenary before we wrap this campaign and move on to the sequel, Frosthaven.

A boxed game character mat headed ‘Class Notes’ in cream text on dark maroon. The notes explain building up Resolve tokens and playing persistent Irritation actions, with a small inset card labeled ‘Interesting Specimens.’ A row of ability icons across the bottom reads Target, Range, Move, Jump, Teleport, HP, Damage, and Heal, above three trait words: Chaotic, Educated, and Resourceful.
Hail's class notes. Her whole deal is not bothering to try, right up until she decides it's worth it.

There’s a chain of game stores called Level Up, with five or so locations around Georgia now. The big one is in Duluth, the Atlanta suburb I’ve mentioned before for its incredible run of international markets and restaurants. I have far too many games at home already and nobody to play them with, but I still love going just to soak up the room and browse. It’s where I found the mercenary pack with Hail in it, long sold out online. If I lived closer to that one I’d be there constantly. They recently opened a location here in Athens, on the same side of town where my group meets for Gloomhaven, so I stopped in after our last session. It’s smaller, and I don’t feel the same pull to haunt it the way I would the Duluth store, but the selection is impressive and there are rows of tables set up for players. It’s a great resource to have in town.

The covered brick entrance of a game store on a rainy day. A blue sign overhead reads ‘Level-Up Games’ in white lettering, and two glass doors sit under hexagonal ceiling lights, flanked by tall Magic: The Gathering banners on the front steps. Rain spots speckle the lens.
The Athens location, the rainy afternoon I finally wandered in after a session nearby.

I also picked up the complete Mass Effect series on the Xbox for five dollars, most of it covered by rewards points I’d been sitting on, and started poking around. BioWare’s Dragon Age is my favorite series for story, with Skyrim and Fallout close behind, but I’d somehow never touched Mass Effect. From what I hear it’s a lot like Dragon Age with the fantasy swapped out for science fiction, which sounds exactly like my kind of thing.

Cooked

I made a big pot of leek and potato soup out of that CSA haul I wrote about last week. This is a soup I can make with my eyes closed, and like the stone soup in the old story it’s a fine excuse to use up whatever odds and ends of vegetables and mushrooms are loitering in the fridge. Every batch comes out a little different from the last, and I’ve yet to make one I didn’t love.

Noticed

Tiki Taco Tuesday is in full swing again, and I’m glad to have my summer Tuesday evenings spoken for through the season. The tacos are good and the tropical drinks are better, with a fresh Rum School lesson most weeks for anyone who wants to actually learn something.

Eric, a bearded man in glasses and a colorful tiki-print shirt, smiles as he holds up a green ceramic mug shaped like a snarling anglerfish, its toothy mouth open and a small lit lure dangling on a stalk out front, a wooden straw poking from the top. Behind him a dim bar is lined with shelves of liquor bottles, strings of colored lights, and a glowing cluster of round lamps overhead.
Tiki Taco Tuesday, in the correct uniform. The Creature from the Black Lagoon mugs are waiting their turn.

A grey-and-white cat with green eyes and a pink nose reclines against a folded cream blanket on a bed, one white paw tucked forward, looking straight at the camera in warm low light.
Piglet, being his usual couch gremlin.

Thinking About

I’m still working on getting my work and life back into a better balance. It isn’t out of control, and it’s honestly probably healthier than it was at the old job, but I want to settle into a rhythm that leaves room for all the things I like to do outside of work. It’s been far too long since I kept a steady release schedule on my Random Recipe Project videos, for one. LocallyGrown is more responsible for that than the day job is, though it all runs together in the end. There are only so many hours in a day.

What’s Next

A few days in Austin, in the office to meet people face to face, tour some labs, and absorb as much as I can while I’m there. I booked a hotel within walking distance of the office and deliberately picked one with no nightlife anywhere near it, so there’s nothing to do but focus on why I came.