Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, February 18, 2024, or: Weekend Update, Part the First

Mid- to Late Morning, Sunday, February 18, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hi, all. It’s a lovely but frigid late winter morning here in Madison. Currently, the temperature is 18°F (-8°C) under partly sunny skies. With humidity at 55% and the wind blowing from the southwest at 4 MPH (6 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 23°F (-5°C). Today’s forecast calls for mostly cloudy skies and a high of 32°F (0°C). Tonight, we can expect partly cloudy skies and a low of 18°F (-8°C).

Weekend Update, Part the First: What I Did on Saturday

Aside from writing my daily blog post on WordPress and tweets on Twitter, I stuck to my weekend rest and recreation (R&R) plans and didn’t do much of anything. I stayed mostly in my office; being in my still-incomplete bedroom – my media towers are still mostly disassembled, and none of my artwork is hanging on the walls – is somewhat depressing, so I don’t spend much time in that room. When I am there, I only watch movies late at night to fall asleep. So, by default, I spend most of my waking hours in my office, which is also incomplete, but at least my PC is up and running and I can keep myself entertained at my desk. (It’s not ideal, but there’s nothing I can do about it.)

So…how did I spend my Saturday?

Well, I didn’t read much, even though I have some of my books on the assembled sections of my IKEA bookshelves. I had a To Be Read stack – a literal one, at that – in my former residence in Florida, but none of the books I was reading before we started packing in November are available because they’re still in Home Depot and Lowe’s moving boxes in the garage. I’ve tried to start a new TBR stack, but (a) I have not found a nice “reading spot” like the ones I had down South in my former home (particularly, the couch in the family room), and (b) I keep wanting to find books that I know are in the garage but can’t get into.

Amazon Music (by Default)

I did, however, listen to music – mostly classical cos I only listen to pop/rock when I’m in a good mood, and yesterday my mood was, at best, meh. Since I was on my PC, I opted to stick to my Amazon Music app. I have many CDs, but I hate the DVD-ROM drive on my PC because it’s set on the left side of my Lenovo all-in-one PC, and I was used to the one I had on my previous PC (also a Lenovo “all-in-one”) that had the DVD-ROM drive on the right-hand side. DVD-ROM drives that pop out of the side in vertical positions are – at least for me – harder to use than the ones on PC towers because the trays are so fragile, and I’m afraid I’ll someday break the tray on my PC while inserting a CD or DVD.

I do have a small portable stereo system with an AM/FM radio and a CD player, but – yep – it’s in a box…in the garage. So…unless I go to my bedroom and use my 4K UHD Blu-ray player as a CD player (which I’ve only done once in the two months that I’ve lived here), Amazon Music is my default source of music.

This is what I listened to yesterday:

• Romantic Moments with  Mozart, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra (Silverline, 2007)
• I Lift My Lamp, featuring pianist Jacqueline Schwab, a talented lady who is perhaps best known for her contribution to many of Ken Burns’ documentaries, especially The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994). (Sono Luminus)

War & Love Don’t Mix Well…or Do They? (Regiments and Leap of Faith)

Aside from that, I played Regiments for about an hour. As always, I played as the NATO Blue Force commander and chose the best U.S. Army unit in the game (the 1^st Brigade of the 3^rd Armored Division), with the AI commanding a West German allied unit to assist me. The enemy AI-controlled units were both Polish, but they were well-equipped with both Soviet and homegrown equipment.

This time around, I chose a scenario (Raw Power) where the Warsaw Pact is occupying a nuclear power plant (I’m not sure if it’s in East or West Germany) and is therefore the defender. NATO, of course, is the attacker (cos, you know, it was an Attack skirmish), so I braced myself for a tough slugging match with the Pact forces (I didn’t know they were Polish till I was halfway through the mission and saw that there were platoons equipped with weapons and vehicles unique to the Polish army mixed in with Russian-made T-72 main battle tanks and BMP infantry fighting vehicles.

Because the game’s developer, Bird’s Eye Studio, has been tweaking the game as it readies its first pay-to-play downloadable content (DLC) expansion (Winds of Change), the Warsaw Pact units tend to inflict higher casualties on NATO units, at least in Attack missions where the Red Force is the defender. Lately, I’ve been winning my battles, but usually with so many casualties that my victories would be considered pyrrhic.

To my surprise, yesterday’s skirmish was decisive and less costly than usual. The unit I commanded earned a decent Kill/Loss ratio of 11.03, and the 1^st Brigade of the 3^rd Armored only lost three Vulcan air defense vehicles.

After that, I played a part of a single “episode” in one of my adult visual novels (Leap of Faith, which has the saddest storyline of the “sexy” games I sometimes indulge in). I only played that for 20 minutes, though, and stuck mainly to the “sad” and therefore not very sexy part of Leap of Faith.

And, that, folks, is how I spent my frigid, cloudy, and sometimes snowy Saturday.