Week 88 — Dogs, birthdays and raiders

• It's been a while! The last few months have brought many a change. I won't go in to details but it has been a busy few months. Despite everything, the world keeps on spinning and so another week passes! Let's get in to what happened;
• Last week of parental leave before getting back on the wheel! I am quite excited to get back and catch up with work peeps again!
• Big week for the dogs. Barkly has a lump on his spleen that needs to come off as it's teetering on too-big-to-leave. He also has some liver enzyme issues that we tried to get some insight in to a while ago, to no avail. On the plus side, we might be able to get some answers while the spleen-related surgery is happening so we can better treat the little boy.
• On Sunday, both Barkly and Crumpet got in to the nappy bin, tore apart some nappies and ate some of the absorbent material. So that was a fun trip to the vet to get them to bring the nappy parts up! What made it even better was that the folks were understaffed (boo) and I had to manage the spewing dogs, trying to catch whatever they were bringing up. Thankfully, it was all pretty quick and I was out of there with some lighter, and happier dogs.
• We had Sebastian's first birthday at the zoo! Can't believe the little man is already 1! The day itself was a little rainy, so we didn't get to wander too much, but the little guy had his first babychino and a play around on the playground / swings <3
• I've been trying to collect some of the poems that have been on my mind lately at /poems.
• I've been playing some paper Magic online with Spelltable and it has been surprisingly effective! Even when a card looks illegible on the video I am seeing, the software is still able to parse it just fine. I reckon there must be some shenanigans happening that has the card recognition happening locally on the other machine before the video is compressed and sent to me when I click a region of the table on my screen. If not, then suuuuper impressed at how it's able to recognise cards that look blurry on my end.
• I've been playing ARC Raiders a bit this week and I've really enjoyed my time with it. I'd never played extraction shooters, but I totally get the hype about the genre now. For those unfamiliar, an extraction shooter has you load in to a map with other humans and computer players. The humans can choose to be friendly and team up to take on the computer players, or be hostile and take more rewards for themselves. You load in to each map with a selection of things that you've collected in previous matches, and if you don't make it out safely, you lose everything. As a chronic hoarder of in-game items (you know, in case I need to use that potion later), it took a bit to get over using all the things I have collected and risking my good things™ but after losing stuff once or twice, the fear of loss has subsided, and the game is just a joy now.
• I've been continuing my journey through the works of Haruki Murakami, now about 1/3 of the way through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. So far a slow start, but there has been plenty of time to build such a rich and interesting set of characters and world. I'm digging it.