technonaturalist

The year started off great with 16yo and I getting our jobs back at the kids’ gym (they’re “just” volunteer jobs but won’t be too much longer). A lot of stuff has changed, a couple of things are really not great, some stuff is fantastic, and some stuff is kind of wait and see. As well as being put on for an introduction class and a group of level 3s, she was allowed to help with the Kindergym classes seeing as she wants to get into childcare. This is going to make up the bulk of her homeschooling program alongside the monthly assignments. She’s been registered for OLNA and we should hopefully work out where she’s going to sit it as that’s happening sometime in the next couple of months.

I missed posting last night as I was up til 1am finishing off lesson plans.

I like to joke about how it’s taken me three days to write the lesson plans. Most of the time taken was actually refining a few things with my Obsidian lesson plan templates once I actually started using them, and then having to work out a format for my notebook when I transcribed them.

I think I’m going to have to put the drills and their equipment requirements in a table to save space but that’s more formatting issues that’s getting kicked down the road to deal with next week.

I really don’t like repeating work. As a result it was super easy for me to get distracted world building for a playtest of that system I made (it’s currently called Skill Monkey because the way I designed it, eventually long running characters will probably have a very long list of Skills).

I decided on “notShadowrun” as the setting ie using something similar but different to the dystopian cyberpunk Shadowrun universe but also casually doing a lot of our own thing. Currently only 18yo and C are playing, and both have nicely provided some world building as well (which I kind of want to encourage with this type of game with this type of system, at least when I’m running them) or at least very good direction for their characters’ origins.

I am going to do the down in two systems and I am most likely going to regret it. The big downy feathers (which aren’t called that but I can’t remember what they’re called) were finished not long ago, they are topside and underside but they look pretty much the same.

The render actually isn’t terrible at a distance.

As is normal for us, November kind of slowly ground to a halt as there was a rather large thing to take care of and then we focused hard on/got roped into helping with end of year stuff, and December was pretty much a write-off.

15yo worked through a Netflix documentary series about F1 racing as her boyfriend is really into it so she was trying to learn a little more about it. I watched a couple of episodes with her and she told me a bit about the boyfriend’s favourite team and favourite driver and a few of the other drivers, saying that now she at least knew who he was talking about when he was excitedly babbling about them like they were friends she should know. We also marvelled at the pit crews basically disassembling and reassembling a car in seconds.

And I very nearly missed it (okay technically I did miss it coz it’s now after midnight but shhh x_x) because I’m trying to get used to a modified schedule and there was a bit of stuff on today and also the usual not being sure if I should bother postinng because I don’t feel like I’ve made enough progress.

But first one of the year and I am trying to get back into the habit of weekly progblogs.

13yo continued on his dessert presentation experiments, jumping on the Halloween bandwagon with this “vampire” themed one (the bananas were meant to be fangs), and the goblet was a prop we’d bought some other Halloween).

Towards the end of the week where we’re running out of stuff and need to do more grocery shopping, there was this much simpler but still very delicious fare (can’t go wrong with peanut butter as long as you’re not allergic to peanuts).

I don’t think I’ve ever had a last month of the year run according to any semblance of a plan and that may or may not have something to do with my persistent delusion that I can somehow continue doing the same thing plus all the extra time consuming things in the same amount of time.

Pro-tip: it never works.

The end of year display was great, and I had the “brilliant” idea to film the whole thing (I did get permission from the head coach to do it first) and edit them all together.

I got a little busy. Some of it was getting overexcited about my notes (which is so far working wonderfully), a lot of it was comp season, some of it was basically being told to upskill because apparently they need me to upskill which I went ahead and did as I had been intending on doing it anyway (just fast forwarded as the plan had been for next year, and hopefully it won’t turn out to have been a waste of money as I may have been shadowbanned), some of it was getting swept up in roleplaying notes (I get really excited about worldbuilding and trying to craft stories around my players’ characters) including the CoD PvP PbP Discord server (very slow because I still need to read books so can’t get 17yo’s Hunter started, and C who got started is taking his sweet time responding, and T and S who are idling on that server haven’t even made characters yet, I don’t think these kids are the best at pbp XD) and a newly created Pokemon server (playfully referred to as Pkmn PvP PbP but is actually called Frontiertown and I have beeen having way too much fun coming up with character names) where I’m attempting to test out a system I wrote (also very slow as none of the three players I have in there have made a character yet).

This month was just as action packed as the previous one. There was one more excursion with the parents, extended family and Up Close and Local Tours but minus 17yo (who was feeling a bit run down and decided to play it paranoid) to Bunbury, where we stopped by a little cafe with its own little adorably put together food garden.

After that it was off to the Dolphin Discovery Centre.