Musings & Thoughts for Sunday, April 7, 2024, or: Weekend Update, Part the First – How I Spent My Saturday

Late Morning/Midday/Early Afternoon, Sunday, April 7, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Greetings, folks! It’s a chilly – but not freezing – early spring day here in my corner of Carroll County. Currently, the temperature is 44°F (7°C) under mostly cloudy conditions. With humidity at 56% and the wind blowing from the north-northeast at 10 MPH (16 Km/H), it feels like 45°F (7°C). Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies and a high of 49°F (9°C). Tonight, the skies will be mostly clear. The low will be 25°F (-4°C).

Weekend Update, Part the First – How I Spent My Saturday

Yesterday I decided to mix some work with a lot of (relative) leisure. As you know, I lost a writing day on Thursday due to two weather-related power outages. I managed to write a complete scene for Chapter 14 of Reunion: Coda on Friday, but I needed to finesse the rough draft a bit, so I spent about an hour checking the scene in question and making the necessary changes. The scene was mostly solid, but I realized it needed more dialogue to clarify a few of the narrative details, so I went ahead and wrote an exchange between my protagonist/narrator, Jim Garraty, and his new love, Maddie that presented the information in a more lively and entertaining way.

After that?

Well, I can’t say that my Saturday afternoon was the most exciting I’ve ever experienced, but it wasn’t boring.  I spent it as I do most of my weekends: I hung out on social media (mostly blocking misogynist creeps on Twitter who are disrespectful toward women, especially strong feminist women); I listened to music on my Amazon Music app; I watched a bunch of YouTube videos; and I killed time playing Solitaire.

Kicking Things Up a Notch with Regiments

Late in the afternoon, I played a session of Regiments on Medium difficulty. Until recently, I’d been playing on Easy skill level, which is challenging in its own right, but I decided to see if my experience as a Regiments commander had given me enough tactical savvy to kick things up a notch and allowed me to tackle a more aggressive AI opponent in this Cold War-turns-hot game of armored land combat in an alternate version of 1989 divided Germany.

Apparently, after a year and a half of playing this real-time tactical sim from Bird’s Eye Games and MicroProse, I am a decent armchair commander. Not good enough, say, to be given a commission in the U.S. Army and command of a combined arms battalion-sized task force, but certainly good enough to get some cred as a Regiments player.

Yesterday, for instance, I played the Runway variant of an Attack Skirmish (single engagement) on, as I said earlier, Medium difficulty. I chose to have the game assign an AI Allied unit at random rather than choose one myself, gave myself just 30 minutes to accomplish my goal of occupying and holding all eight Objective Zones (OZs), and (again) allowed Regiments to assign the Warsaw Pact RED Force at random. Ditto for time of day and weather conditions, even though I’m not fond of Skirmishes that take place at night.

And, even though the AI is craftier and more aggressive on Medium difficulty (I do not recommend that first-time players of Regiments try playing the game at this level unless they’re either in the military or highly experienced wargamers), I did remarkably well. I managed to capture all of the eight OZs with the assistance of a West German unit controlled by the AI, and I did it with five minutes and 49 seconds still on the clock. And although I suffered casualties – I have yet to play Regiments on any difficulty level and finish a Skirmish without losing any vehicles, helicopters, or soldiers – they were low (six tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, plus two AH-1F Cobra attack helicopters), and I inflicted more losses(52 kills in all) on the Polish-East German defenders of the NATO air base I was tasked with liberating from the Warsaw Pact occupiers. And as a bonus, I had the highest Kill/Loss ratio I have seen since I bought Regiments in August 2022: 3.44.

After that well-earned victory, I made my way to the kitchen, where I made some English muffin pizzas for dinner. By then, the sun had set and, of course, I was hungry and a bit tired (especially my eyes – eye strain is a constant with me since I spend much of my time at my computer). I’m not sure if I wolfed down my supper – modest as it was – because I had not eaten a big lunch (I rarely do anyway) or because my English muffin pizzas were delicious, but I did. (I thought about accompanying my homemade pizzas with my last Heineken but decided against it; it’ll be a while before I ride out to North Conway to buy more beer!)

I then watched some of the behind-the-scenes stuff from my 2012 Alien Anthology box set; I managed to get through half of the making-of documentary about Alien, but I was tired and sleepy, so I turned it off well before I got to the bits about how the cast – especially Sigourney Weaver – was chosen for the 1979 sci-fi/horror classic.

As I said…my Saturday wasn’t the most exciting I’ve ever had – I’ve had better ones, trust me, especially in Miami – but…it wasn’t a bad one, you know?