Cav's Place

I actually managed not to write any personal posts last week, so let me start with last Tuesday, when, shortly after I got back from buying a few other things, I was called by the shop I had ordered The Slow Regard of Silent Things and Sword of Destiny from, letting me know they had arrived. So I said I’ll get it all over with in one day and made my way there to pick them up, also being pleasantly surprised when they only asked for 87 RON, waving it away when I said there should be some change on top of that even though the receipt listed the price as 87.61.
Admittedly, that was the price of the order after I had reminded them that the previous time when I preordered something I was told the lowest price between the moment of the preorder and launch day applies in such cases and Sword of Destiny had dropped from 51.79 to 49.70 when I sent the message, but then it continued to drop after that, ending up at 49.12 a few days later, where it stayed until the release date. For a difference of 0.58 RON I didn’t bother to send another message and the price of the order wasn’t changed again, but having the change waved away meant I was actually charged 49.09 RON for it, seeing as the other book wasn’t a preorder and therefore its price should be fixed.
Somewhat frustrating is that a little while later I learned that they’ll attend the science fiction and fantasy fair that’ll take place next weekend and are almost certain to also have these books on offer, the cover of Sword of Destiny in fact being the image at the top of the post announcing their participation, so it’s likely that I could have gotten them at a discount if I’d have waited a little longer. But I didn’t know about the fair at the time and even if I would have known about it I wouldn’t have thought they’d be there, since I had a quick look last year and neither they nor any others that bring books from abroad were present.

Either way, since I had it and it’s so short, I started reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things the next day and finished it on Friday, when I also posted the quick review for it. Was actually a bit of a struggle not to finish it Thursday, but I stopped in time to leave something for one more day. Don’t plan to move on to Sword of Destiny too soon though, and may actually wait until May, depending on how something else works out.

Now this was supposed to be a quick personal post which should have been followed by a Sunday update detailing how planting trees went, since that was supposed to happen tomorrow. However, due to recent rains causing the area to be partially flooded, the action was postponed until next Saturday, when we hope the conditions will be better. This will inconvenience a number of people though, so now let’s see how many will still come and how that will affect any existing preparations, but a message posted today says there are more volunteers than they need for this event and some may want to bring others as well, so it should still be all right.
What worries me is that they insist on communicating by phone, and I had two calls, which I obviously ignored, before I saw the replies where they were telling people that’s how they’ll contact them. When I sent a message to complain, they said they don’t e-mail or post because many don’t reply to that, though at least they didn’t call again after that… But now they’re asking volunteers to send the coordinator an SMS to confirm, which I couldn’t even if I wanted to, since my credit expired long ago. Sure, I could charge it again and I do mean to do so before going there anyway, in case I’ll need to contact dad for some reason, but was planning to do so that day, so I won’t waste days for no reason, while they ask for this confirmation before March 30, so I’m not sure what will happen.

Moving on, finally managed to finish Tropico 4 yesterday, and I’m linking to that bundle because it’s the only one that includes everything as a single entry. If I’ll review it, I’ll need to file my review under it anyway, since it’ll cover the whole package even though Modern Times is an entirely separate thing that doesn’t add anything to the original campaign or, in fact, even to nine of the ten DLC missions, the only one that takes its presence into account being Megalopolis. Still, to return to the review issue, while at the moment it seems to be the only non-personal thing I may have as this week’s second post, I don’t find writing it over the weekend particularly likely and wonder if I’ll even write it at all.

As for running, last week’s was Friday, to give my knee time to recover after the week before, and the time was 21:26, with intermediate times of 4:45, 10:11 and 16:36, respectively. There was a, shall we say, unusual moment as I was coming back though, when I heard a woman call me from behind, just as I passed her. I quickly checked myself, realized there was nothing I could have dropped, but was worried, so stopped and looked around for a moment to give her a chance to call again if she’s serious. When she did, I turned and she asked if she could hold on to me to get home, since she was feeling ill. And since she lived only a little farther than me, that wasn’t a problem in itself, even if I was worried about missing ski jumping. The fact that I had some stranger right next to me and who also seemed to want to make a bit of conversation sure was a problem, however, and I sweated far more because of that than because of running…
Either way, this week’s run was Monday, as I wanted to make sure I’ll have time to recover before Saturday, when I thought I’ll be planting trees on pretty much no sleep, and the time was 21:00, with intermediate times of 4:36, 9:58 and 16:11, respectively. Now, for the same reason, I’m planning to run again this coming Monday as well, though I guess Tuesday may also be an option, depending on the weather, when I’ll wake up and how I’ll feel. The knee’s still a bit of a concern, however, as it actually hurt again towards the end of last week’s run and for some time after and wasn’t entirely fine at the end of this week’s run either, though it didn’t continue to hurt after I got a bit of rest. Something didn’t seem set quite right there, so had to step carefully in order not to let it slide around in ways it shouldn’t and that seems to be doing the trick now, though I’m not sure what it means in the long term.