Meghan and the bambina made onigiri today. The bambina has been loving Japanese class so far.

Finished reading Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, a delightful story (or, really, three stories) of crime and family, set in late ’50s and early ’60s Harlem. Highly recommended.

Meghan’s brother died of cancer on Tuesday night. It was expected, but that doesn’t make it easier.

Finished reading My Real Children by Jo Walton. The book started very bluntly, but became much more nuanced well before the halfway point, and was heartbreaking at the end. Not a perfect book, but I very much enjoyed it.

Lots of debris in the neighborhood from yesterday’s moderate windstorm.

Tonight’s kitchen victory: bibimbap.

The trees have been especially lovely this fall.

Finished reading Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, one of those niche books I sometimes read about the history of role-playing games. This one focuses on TSR from before its inception to the ouster of Gary Gygax. It was mostly just sad: The two principal figures (Gygax and Dave Arneson) come across as bitter, insecure, and emotionally-stunted grudge-holders; the story is fascinating (with much more detail than I’d known before), but their animosity left me with a bad taste in my mouth long before the end of the book.

The dude and his friends came in last place in trivia night.

Finished rereading The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian, book 6 of the Aubrey/Maturin series. As foreshadowed in the previous book, the backdrop is the War of 1812. This one shines a spotlight on Maturin’s spycraft: It played an important role in the previous books, esp. H.M.S. Surprise, but Maturin is uncharacteristically the more active character for much of the novel.

Finished reading Where the Wild Coffee Grows by Jeff Koehler, about coffee and its origin in the Ethiopian highlands. Well-written and -structured, it covers (among other things) history, economics, biology, sociology, and climate change, but somehow isn’t too long. I’ll be thinking about this book for a while.

The dude wore his full marching band uniform for the first time tonight, including kilt and sporran. He dug it.

My day off: walked to Northgate, caught light rail to Capitol Hill (12 minutes station to station), walked Pike and Pine, got espresso and lunch and a haircut, walked Broadway, got a decaf espresso, caught light rail back to Northgate, walked home: almost ten miles.

Walked to Carkeek Park and back, something more than ten miles. It was a great day for walking, cool with just a couple brief sprinkles.

Finished rereading King of Sartar by Greg Stafford. It’s something of an anthropological study of Stafford’s RPG setting Glorantha, which inevitably reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. But while the vast majority of game designers aren’t Greg Stafford, it’s also true that Stafford wasn’t Le Guin. I enjoyed the book, but can only recommend it to a vanishingly-small slice of readers.