Yesterday, I picked up my Onyx Sojourner badge, having hacked a portal daily for 360 consecutive days. The biggest challenge there was at FilkONtario when I was at a hotel with no portal and had a phone with no data access. Fortunately, the Montana restaurant across the parking lot had both free Wi-fi and a portal, which meant they got a lot of my business. :)

Today, I added a Silver Explorer badge, which is not nearly so impressive, but which indicates that I've hacked 1000 different portals. This was most recently on the back of our trip to Balticon, which managed to add about 70 or 80 portals to my previous total and put me close enough that I was able to make it with the three new portals I hacked tonight while Gretchen drove us to dinner after Katie's softball game.

Which Katie's team won, 3-0, with Katie scoring two out of the three runs. Run, Katie, run!

We had a late dinner with some of our business partners tonight, which meant that I ended up leaving the Loop pretty late. I had originally intended to take the El back out to the suburbs and have Gretchen pick me up, but after looking at the time and the fact that I had spaced a bit of the Loop El architecture, I decided it was just as well to hoof it the rest of the distance to the Metra station and take the train back to my car, allowing everyone to get to bed a bit earlier.

And being on a local meant there were opportunities for Traingressing that aren't usually available to me, so I now have a number of newly visited and captured portals along the route, despite the best efforts of speed locks built into the game. Mostly because the train stopped at every station, but still... :)

It was a beautiful, clear, and relatively warm December day today. While Katie was at a cookie party at a friend's house and Julie was playing Minecraft, I took advantage of the opportunity to head out and play some Ingress, heading to a local park and blowing up the little froggie fields there that were getting in my way. Then I picked up Katie from her friend's house, delaying to have a nice discussion of football and comic books with her friend's father, the latter prompted by my seeing a copy of BackIssue sitting on a chair, this being a magazine that only serious comic geeks read. :)

After dinner, we went out to look at Christmas lights. We went first to the display in central Arlington Heights where I did a bit more Ingressing, throwing the last field necessary for silver Mind Controller, then glyph hacking just enough to grab the gold badge for the latter. And the lights were very pretty.

Then we went prospecting for more pretty lights in the nearby neighborhoods. Much to our surprise, we tripped over an animated display with FM radio accompaniment on Haddow just a little south of Euclid. This was the first time we'd run into this sort of coordinated display and we enjoyed it a lot.

But eventually, it was time to head home. :)

We're getting less accomplished around the house than we might hope, but progress is being made. Christmas decorations are going up all over, the major ones for today being the installation of inflatable Olaf and Minion Dave in the front yard along with a string of large decorative lawn stake bulbs to mark them off.

Katie's last dance class for the year was today. Had we known, we would have gone to watch, but we didn't. *sigh* She is probably going to drop the dance class in favor of being able to play spring softball, because the scheduling is completely incompatible.

While Katie was at dance class, I spent an hour out playing Ingress. I have closed to within 30K AP of level 10 and have 6000 MU of active fields which may make it to checkpoint. The latter is pretty much unheard of in this neighborhood -- I think that the high-level player on the other side is either out of town or taking time off. (I can't say that I'd blame him on the latter -- I think his phone was constantly on to ping him with attack alerts. That would make me insane in short order.)

The weather today was sunny and near 50 degrees, which is bonus material for December. We took advantage of it by grilling tonight which got some more stuff out of the freezer. :) Tomorrow, it's leftover pizza as we clear some more stuff out of the fridge; last night was turkey pot pie, which pretty much finished off the Thanksgiving turkey.

I have a goal of eating the contents of the freezer. We'll never quite achieve it, but maybe we can thin it out a bit...

We had hot water this morning. It was a happy thing.

daisy_knotwise had a hair appointment this afternoon, so I picked up the girls from school. Report cards came today and the happy results should make for an easy meeting with the teachers on Monday. (There are a couple of things I want to ask about, but it mostly is my commentary on Katie's occasional anxiety attacks over homework. Either she isn't paying attention to the explanation of the assignment or she's not understanding it, so I want to see what's needed to fix it.)

When Gretchen got home, I ran over to the park and spent an hour playing Ingress, because I had so many weapons in inventory that it had become imperative to burn some off. I rolled up 143K AP in an hour, largely due to the 2x multiplier for experience that's in effect right now. So I'm over halfway to level 10, which won't improve my medal position, but is always nice. :)

I left the park just as the snow started to fall. And it fell. And it fell.

Katie and Julie have already built ginormous snowmen, with a little bit of lifting help from me. This is tremendous packing snow.

I am so not looking forward to (carefully) shoveling it tomorrow.

I needed to get out and get some exercise, so I spent a couple of hours walking around the local park and ran up 125K AP, which was pretty good.

Not as good as the members of my team who threw a field tonight that covered almost all of Illinois and a large chunk of Missouri, but... :)

The local Enlightenment team (read "frogs") have a park about a mile from my home where they like to establish a farm for gear. As the newest level 8 Resistance agent in the area, I am now on the list of people who get asked to make it go away. :)

I hit it today on the way to lunch, so the timing doesn't quite work, but...

Dimucci Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down.
Firing off my bursters like the rain
And I think I'm going to take it
And they took so long to make it
And I know they'll have this recipe again.
Oh, no!

Hey, another day, another 40K AP... :)

Due to a bad scheduling confluence, I ended up planning to go to both tonight's Cubs/Tigers game and tomorrow's Cubs/Braves game. Sadly, I couldn't find anyone to go to the game with tonight. This turned out to be just as well, as I left with the Cubs trailing by four runs in the bottom of the fifth when the Tigers starter went down with an injury. The replacement pitcher was going to be given as long as he needed to warm up and it was already nearly 9 PM.

I was really tired and I figured that it would be just as well to go home and put the girls to bed and try again tomorrow night.

Given that the Cubs lost 15-8, I think this was a good decision.

However, I did score 50K AP in Ingress on the way to and from the ballpark. And I created the largest field that I'd ever created linking off Ernie's statue. And I upgraded my first portal to P8.

That last means that I finally made it to Level 8 a couple of days ago. :)

So I stopped on the way to the Capricon meeting today and spent fifteen minutes or so running a simple Ingress mission in a nearby park. As it happened, when I finished, I discovered that I still had portal keys to the pool a couple of blocks away on the other side of the street from when I watched Katie and Julie at their swimming lessons there, so I tossed enough small fields to push myself over 800K, which puts me a third of the way to level 8, which is when you get the biggest and best toys to play with.

I called tollers on the way to the meeting to see if she had anything to report. (Answer: no. We're in the slow part of the filk cycle for Cap.) So we did a bit of Ingress chatting. And after the meeting, I got to talk to a couple more folks on the Cap committee who are playing Ingress and compare notes.

If the weather weren't so abominably hot, I'd take Katie out to do some hacking, but I think this will wait until it's at least a bit cooler.

daisy_knotwise has strep again. Dr. Bob was good enough to call in a prescription yesterday for a Z-Pak in an attempt to knock the thing out and Gretchen is slowly starting to improve after having spent most of the last day and a half in her recliner chair. In any case, she is very tired of having strep.

The upshot of this was that I volunteered to take Katie and Julie to their swimming lesson this morning. Since the temperature outside was 59 degrees, I was not greatly surprised to arrive at a pool that was thoroughly closed and locked shut. Thus, we came home and little girls fell into a Minecraft frenzy.

Later, I ran out to McDonald's to pick up lunch for Gretchen, Katie, and Julie; then on to Five Guys and a quick trip to Home Depot to pick up some replacement switch covers. Had I but realized that I would be going there again today...

The guy arrived to look at the attic fan that we'd had installed a few years ago and pronounced it most likely dead. Although it's under warranty, the process of getting the warranty honored is going to cost far more in stomach lining than it's worth. Also, the guy is coming back tomorrow to install a replacement fan, so it's important to actually have the fan when he gets here.

Well, I'd gotten the original at Home Depot. I could certainly get another one. So after consulting with Gretchen, we piled into the van and started north to Home Depot, intending to continue on to Old Country Buffet for dinner where I could bring Gretchen soup and things like that.

The plan collapsed about three minutes after we left home when Gretchen suddenly realized that Julie had tumbling tonight. There was just enough time to go to Home Depot and get the fan. Then I dropped off Katie and Gretchen and took Julie to her tumbling class.

And while she was tumbling, I walked around the park playing Ingress and racked up another 40K AP, which puts me over halfway to level 7. Afterwards, I picked up the rest of the family and we went over to Sweet Baby Ray's for dinner.

Now, it is finally time for bed. :)