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Feeling better today, not quite right yet, but better. Took Henry to the beach in the morning and he played in the water for two solid hours while I read HP7. Lots of interesting things happened in the story, but of course I’m not going to say what! No spoilers here. I’m about to start chapter 34. In an effort to escape from the sun, I wore jeans, my sun protection shirt (from sungrubbies), my panama hat, my sunglasses and some sunscreen on my face, draped Henry’s towel around my shoulders, and held my parasol over my head. It worked pretty well — I can feel a slight burn on my nose and my eyes, but it’s not too bad.

So then we came home and I fed Henry a homemade burrito after he had a shower, then I had a shower, and then we went out to do errands. Shipped things at the Mailbox place (Kevin, the owner, is a whiz at packing things safely!), bought some groceries at Trader Joe’s (they’ve expanded again!), and a few things at Stater Brothers. Came home and Henry hauled everything upstairs for me, which of course gave him a quest to turn in on Chore Wars!

Hmm.. I haven’t mentioned Chore Wars yet, have I? Wonderful site. It’s a little hard to explain, but very simple to get started. You make a character, RPG-style. Your character joins a party, which could be your family, roommates, officemates, etc. Then you create Adventures, which can be anything that needs to get done. We’ve got a number of Adventures so far: Washing Dishes, Tidying Bathroom, Removing Dead Animal, Making Bed, Fixing the Internet, etc. You can assign experience points, monsters, and rewards to each chore. Then, when a party member claims a chore he gets experience points and rewards. You want to tailor things appropriately — a simple daily chore like Brushing Teeth should give low experience and gold, while a particularly time-consuming or obnoxious chore, e.g. Removing Dead Animal, should give you a lot of experience and rewards. When your character gets 200 exp, he levels up and his class might change depending on the skills needed for his most frequently-performed chores. It’s tremendously fun! Henry loves thinking of new Adventures to add, and coming up with appropriate monsters and rewards. And he also loves claiming adventures, which means he’s actively looking for chores to complete! He VOLUNTEERED to clean the litterbox today! YAY! I think our party is visible to the public: Shalpargon. Give it a try, it really is loads of fun!

So anyway. This afternoon we cleaned the Turtle Tank (20 exp each) and discovered that it was leaking even worse than we thought, so we ran out and bought a new one which cost a lot less than I was expecting ($44). Then Dan got home and he and Henry ate a quick dinner and went off to the Rush concert in Irvine together! So I’ve got a quiet evening at home to finished HP7 and knit and watch girl movies. And I suppose I should eat something. There’s leftover spaghetti from last night, and I could make a nice sauce with lots of peppers and some sausage. Yum. Or I could just eat apples and cheese and trail mix.