Bill Roper's Journal

It was New Year's Day and I went over to a friend's house for a few hours in the afternoon to play some games, which was a good time. Gretchen stayed home because her knees have been bothering her greatly in the last few days. With luck, that will improve tomorrow.

K has to head back to school on Sunday and there are things to do between now and then. Mostly, this involves picking things up and putting them away. We *may* decide to take the tree down on Saturday when there will be more hands to put everything away. Ok, mostly there will be more younger knees to carry things up and down from the basement. :)

I have started work on the Dodeka taxes for 2025. I'd like to get these filed early this year for a variety of reasons. We'll see how it goes.

And the long-range forecast is for high temperatures in the mid-40s in Chicago next Thursday. If that forecast holds, my chances of being able to get off to GAFilk with minimum weather problems are excellent. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

The annual New Year's Day font sale at Comicraft has already started up. This is when you can buy any font in the catalog for the same number of pennies as are in the new year's date, so this year it's $20.26.

I have limited myself to two fonts this year. It is easier to limit myself when you consider the number of Comicraft fonts that I've already tucked into the collection. If you're doing graphic design on your computer, having choices of display fonts is a fine thing.

The Amy & Me cover uses the Comicraft Merry Melodies font and the Story So Far font to good effect.

Anyway, in and around your New Year's Eve activities, it's worth checking out. :)

The Eighth Notes headed home after lunch today. Finn was good enough to drive them down to Hobart to meet their mom for the trip back to Noblesville, which was good, as I really wasn't up for a multi-hour drive today. Everyone seemed to have a good time and the dogs adored the attention. :) The next step in cleanup is figuring out where to store all the parts of the new blender...

I have an appointment with the opthalmologist tomorrow afternoon and we'll see what he has to say about my eye. I am hoping that this was a random, isolated incident, but long-term diabetes is not good for these things, so we'll see. Well, I *hope* I'll see. Right now, the vision in my left eye is actually pretty good except when I'm looking at a white computer screen and the cruft in the eyeball becomes *really* obvious.

And I finally launched the second half of the APBA baseball season for the computer division today. The good news is that it is *much* faster to play games on the computer than it is with cards and dice, so we should be able to catch up fairly quickly.

The best part of the day was meeting up with Steve, Dorotha, and their son Tom who were in town visiting relatives for Christmas. We had a lovely lunch. And then I had to hit the road to Hobart, Indiana to pick up assorted Junior Midkiffs for Eighth Note Fest. We got off a bit later than I'd intended, because lunch ran longer than anticipated, but it turned out that we were trying to meet at two different McDonald's that were about 25 miles apart. Oops. We got that fixed.

While we were waiting, I noticed that the Speedway next door to the McD's had gas at 2.29, so I headed over there to fill up. It was at that point that my left eye started bleeding internally. Not a lot, but noticeably. It wasn't bad enough to keep me from driving and I really didn't want to turn K loose on the Borman and the Tri-State under these circumstances for her first experience with serious highway driving, so I drove us home.

Meanwhile, Gretchen tried to contact United Healthcare to see if I should just go to the ER. If United Healthcare's phone tree hadn't kept transferring her phone call to places that rang and hung up on her, maybe we would have found out what they thought. Maybe.

So I just drove to the ER, handed the keys to K, and headed in. Some four and a half hours and an ultrasound later, I headed back out to where K had returned to pick me up, not necessarily a lot wiser about exactly what was going on, but assured that nothing too horrible had happened so far.

I have a referral to the on-call-tonight opthamologist and will, with any luck, get an appointment for an exam with equipment better suited for the problem on Monday.

*sigh*

Meanwhile, the dishwasher has broken. Tomorrow, I will go buy a new dishwasher.

*Now*, I will go to bed. :)

It was a lovely Christmas Day here. We got up at a leisurely pace, opened gifts, had some lunch, and eventually started on dinner. We had a great rib roast (two bones consumed so far, which has made the dogs *very* happy), mashed potatoes, and green beans, along with homemade bread that Julie made and a key lime pie that K made.

We are very full.

And everyone is happy, which is good.

It is December 23rd and all of the Christmas gifts are wrapped, unless we missed something. This may be a new record. Mind you, if Gretchen and the kids hadn't agitated to get it done, I would still be dilly dallying.

Having had to poke around in Square, I took the completed inventory from the basement, combined it with the Square inventory, and have now made a good start on the 2025 taxes. There is still a lot to do, but they are *started*. Our sales are up this year, largely on the back of having issued two new CDs. This is not a trick that I can do every year, so we need to figure out some more ways of boosting sales, which may -- in the current environment -- be impossible. The number of titles on the table that appear to have sold zero copies in the last year is distressingly large. And that's distressing to me as a seller of CDs, but also as a maker of CDs among other makers of CDs who would like me to buy some more of their stock because there's really a limit to the amount of insulation that they need in their garage, it's *also* a bad thing. Sales are driven by new products, but the folks making CDs are doing a better and better job of capturing more of the retail sales, which is admittedly good for them, but bad if you're trying to move product for them in places where they aren't.

There's also streaming, which is good for the artists if they can manage to capture some revenue from it, but not a solution for keeping the dealer table running. And figuring out how to capture revenue from streaming is a black art, I think.

Ah, well. This is not a problem that will be solved tonight.

Instead of finding a solution to this problem (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), Gretchen and I watched "Thunderbolts", which turns out to be yet another Marvel movie that I was just as happy to have watched from the comfort of my living room rather than paying to watch in a theater. This is a problem for the theater owners that is remarkably similar to my problem with the dealer table...

We did a lot of cleaning in the family room today, assisted massively by the kids. Many things were dispatched to where they belonged, as opposed to where they were, which was mostly "in the way". This is a good thing.

This evening, Gretchen and I watched the new Fantastic Four movie. I did not like it as much as I did the new Superman movie, but I also didn't go to a theater and pay to see it, so these things average out. All things considered, it was better than I had expected. The bits online that had complained about Sue being the leader of the Fantastic Four were, in my opinion, wrong. She was leading the Future Foundation, but that's a diplomatic function as set up in the film and that's really not Reed's area of interest. And Sue's invisible force field has always been one heckuva weapon, so it was nice to see her making good use of it.

And the retro setup, with the FF being the only superheroes in the universe, was handled nicely. Obviously, this is going to stop being a thing (no pun intended) since they are coming back in "Avengers: Doomsday", but that seems to be a big cross-universe adventure. When it's over, I expect the MCU to be thoroughly mix-mastered with the Avengers, FF, and the X-Men all operating in the same universe.

But we'll see.

This is Chris Conway's fault. Sort of.

Chris has been working on his new album and has been posting about the various things that he has been doing to "Song 13". I finally asked him if that was the title of the song, or its position in the track list, or what. It turns out that it's "what", in that it's the thirteenth track that he's been working on in succession for the project.

I had an ulterior motive when asking: it seemed like "Song 13" was sort of a good title for a song. I wasn't sure exactly what the song would end up being, but it was a good title for a song. :)

And now I have a song to attach to the title, which you will find just below. Some things just get numbers, I guess. For Love Potions, it's Number Nine. Or maybe Ten...
( Lyrics inside... )

So apparently, Oracle is officially part of the consortium that is buying the U.S. operations of TikTok.

The market, at least, seemed impressed by this, as the stock went up $10 / share after hours. We'll see what it looks like in the morning. :)

I moved a bunch of money around over the weekend. This meant that I could pay the property tax and K's latest tuition bill today.

The happy news is that the money was there. :)