01-02 October 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	2:53
	Gamer Mom	1:52
	Blogging	1:41
	Ruddigore	1:33
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	1:32
	Comics	1:31
	TV	1:30
	Helping my father take down the sukkah	0:40
	Writing a letter	0:04
Notes:	Over two months ago, I wrote a blog post without an ending and promised I would continue the post when a continuation presented itself. Over Shabbat, a continuation presented itself. This was the subject of both the blogging and (in a more roundabout way) the letter. I've been working on a particularly complex section of my game Gamer Mom which I've been calling a "knot"; I did a substantial amount of work on it today. I practiced lines and music for Ruddigore. I have had to date only two rehearsals, but I've learned a good deal of my material and am looking forward to my first proper meeting with the director of the play tomorrow. I got a few more green stars in Super Mario Galaxy 2, which continues to be engaging long after reaching the "ending". After the week-long Sukkot holiday, my father needed help taking the sukkah down, which I offered until my brother-in-law Gilad showed up with his more capable muscles.
Performance review:	Marvelous. This time allocation table is a declaration of priorities. I respect the amount of self-control it takes to pull off a stunt like this, and I think it's a very elegant way to start a new month. Though the wasted time rose above all the other activities, it stayed under the 3:00 line. If this much self-control can be exercised every day, this will be a very good month.
Score:	10/10

03 October 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	7:20
	Mundane activities	2:52
	Blogging	2:15
	Listening to music	1:13
	Reading comics	0:58
	Gamer Mom	0:29
Notes:	I continued the blog post Multiplayer from July, as promised. I went to Jerusalem for my first rehearsal with director Robert Binder, after an hour of practicing at home. It went very well. When I came home, it was too early to go to sleep but I didn't have the energy for any activeness, so I listened to Steve Reich's Variations. Why that CD specifically? I have no idea. I browsed the web a bit while listening.
Performance review:	The music is iffy, since it's debatable whether the browsing (classified as a "mundane activity" or the music was the dominant part of the experience, but I'll let it slide this one time. Otherwise this is a fine day.
Score:	9/10

04 October 2010

Time allocation:	Creating a database	7:12
	Mundane activities	3:22
	Gamer Mom	1:24
	TV	1:15
	Comics	1:00
	Finding a better BitTorrent client	0:30
	Wii Fit	0:11
Notes:	After the weekly game nights at Avri's house, he always puts the scores into his online session reports. I've decided to take on the formidable task of making a database out of them. Avri's too busy, and I think it would be neat to have. But my only experience with database software to date has been on the user's side. So I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to use OpenOffice Base. With a little guidance from Avri, I eventually made the data entry form I needed and put in the first few months of scores. (There are three years of weekly session reports.) I'm finding that OpenOffice Base isn't nearly as usable as Microsoft Access was (Not enough flexibility with the keyboard shortcuts, for instance.), but I'll make do. The BitTorrent client I was using, Deluge, wouldn't work properly no matter what I did. So I switched to TopBT, which is basically Vuze. I finished up the logic for the Gamer Mom knot; now I'll need to put what I've learned back into the script.
Performance review:	Back to data entry? Interesting. I'll have to see how this story continues, though, because it seems like the sort of activity that could get very old very fast.
Score:	8/10

05 October 2010

Time allocation:	Games night	5:13
	Organizing comics	4:54
	Mundane activities	1:54
	TV shows	1:13
	Gamer Mom	0:39
	Trying to get my new BitTorrent client to work right	0:28
Notes:	I've decided that, in the absence of any money with which to buy my friend Harel a wedding present, I'll give them a CD collecting the original comics for their respective favorite superhero characters, Iron Man and The Tick. (They're huge fans of the later incarnations, and have never read the originals.) I am not taking this job lightly: the scans available of The Tick are of a very low quality, so I'm editing the image files page-by-page to make them look cleaner and crisper. That'll be several hours of work right there. In addition, there's the small matter of finding all the issues on the internet, confirming their quality and organizing them into a collection at least as respectable as my own personal discs. The wedding's only two weeks away, so I realized I'd better get started.
Performance review:	Once again, the focus of the day is a surprise. And mundane activities at under two hours- that's impressive. That makes the fourth very good day in a row.
Score:	9/10

06 October 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	6:50
	Mundane activities	3:44
	Organizing comics	2:38
	Working with the Games Night database	1:18
	Watching TV	0:49
	Gamer Mom	0:37
Notes:	I went to a rehearsal of Ruddigore that I knew I wasn't actually needed at. Binder told me I could come late, but this turned out to be a mistake: the part I most wanted to be there for was done right at the beginning. High points of the rehearsal involved meeting more of the cast. Low points included lying on the floor "passed out" for a while while the chorus circled around me, singing insults and pointing jeeringly. (It felt a bit too much like elementary school.) I finished working on two more The Tick comics, one of which was particularly challenging. On Avri's request I started including his descriptions of the games played in the database I made. Entry was slow, so I tried (and failed) to find a way to make it faster. I'll give it another go at some point. I watched the overdue and delightfully strange return of the TV show Caprica after a "mid-season" hiatus. (It feels more like a new season, for so many reasons.) I went to sleep 46 minutes later than I should have, adding mundanity for no reason at all.
Performance review:	The day is mostly in service to other people: the chorus of Ruddigore, Avri, Harel's fiancée Rachel (whom the Tick comics are for). The way this time allocation table reads is that in all that activity my own preferred activity got pushed under the one piece of escapism in the day. I don't like that message, but the fact that such a coherent message can be found is in itself an indication that this is a highly focused day, other than the wasted time at the end.
Score:	7/10

07 October 2010

Time allocation:	The database	2:55
	The blog	2:48
	Watching TV	2:37
	Composing	2:01
	Mundane activities	2:01
	Reading comics	1:59
	Ruddigore	0:30
	Writing a letter	0:03
Notes:	I figured out a very awkward but manageable way to do what I need to do with the database. I started the second post of I Am Not Myself Today. During the middle of the day I felt very tired and sleepwalked over to the piano where I figured out how one of my unfinished compositions needed to continue and couldn't stop until I'd finished that section.
Performance review:	Mundane activities are impressively low, and active stuff overwhelmed the passive. But beyond that, this day really doesn't stand out much. It's not interesting that the database was more of a focus than the blog. The other way around would have been preferable. And these same activities, day after day, are starting to get tedious. More gaming is called for. Move around a bit!
Score:	7/10

08-09 October 2010

Time allocation:	Going to see the movie Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World	4:00
	Mundane activities	2:42
	Composing	2:12
	Ruddigore	1:18
	Reading comics	1:10
	Watching TV	1:09
	Gamer Mom	0:39
Notes:	I went to see Scott Pilgrim with Tamir, Coren and Eli, even though it was showing at Globus. I was not wrong about Globus, but it was a fantastic movie. (I look forward to seeing it properly on my computer.) I finished copying the Gamer Mom knot into common English. I wrote a letter to Robert Binder where I argued that the way he'd had me playing Robin wasn't supported by the script. This adds a great deal of pressure for tomorrow, when I'll need to demonstrate my alternate interpretation. It feels like auditions all over, but I'm convinced I understand the character well enough to convince him. I think. Oh dear.
Performance review:	Some unusual activity here, plenty of competence... but I'm concerned about the music. There's more there today than yesterday. I'm just concerned that it may take over my life, and I really don't have time for that right now. There's a reason I've been avoiding the piano.
Score:	9/10

10 October 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	7:25
	Mundane activities	3:18
	Watching a movie	1:32
	Composing	0:54
	Gamer Mom	0:30
	Watching TV	0:25
Notes:	The rehearsal took a lot of preparing, and then a lot of time and energy. I'm not quite sure how it went. I think I've gotten to somewhere halfway between what I thought I needed to do and what we'd already been doing. I'm not comfortable being in the middle ground, and I felt confused throughout the rehearsal. Is this what progress feels like? All the progress thus far in my life has been done on my own. Maybe it's different when there are other people involved. To relax, I watched the documentary film Helvetica (about the font), which was fascinating. I finished the piano composition I was working on, and continued Gamer Mom
Performance review:	Finishing a composition is an occasion, I guess, regardless of my concerns about music in general. But that's less than an hour, out of fourteen hours. This day is decent enough, but it's not very tight and not very interesting. I'll repeat my comments about the desparate need for some gaming to liven things up. This character is rapidly getting stale.
Score:	7/10

11 October 2010

Time allocation:	Hanging out with Moshe	5:35
	Comics	3:44
	Mundane activities	3:19
	TV	1:27
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	0:44
Notes:	Moshe came over, and we finished off the first Phoenix Wright. I edited a particularly tricky issue of The Tick. I couldn't get it to look as pretty as the other issues I've cleaned up, but I did what I could. The mundanity was mainly on the piano.
Performance review:	Adequate.
Score:	7/10

12 October 2010

Time allocation:	Games night	5:30
	Blogging	2:43
	Comics	2:00
	Ruddigore	1:30
	Gamer Mom	1:04
	Data entry	0:53
	Mundane activities	0:30
Notes:	I feel like I have a lot of things that ought to be done as soon as possible. So last night, I created a comprehensive schedule for today (Blog until 2:00, Ruddigore from 2:00-3:30, etc.) that would allow me to cram a lot of productivity into a short period of time. I spent 11 minutes less on Gamer Mom than planned, and 7 minutes less than planned on the data entry, but those were my only deviations from the schedule. At games night I won a few games. I finished writing the second post of I Am Not Myself Today. The 2 hours of comics are all The Tick and Iron Man. Mostly The Tick. I was unhappy with my work yesterday, so I spent a long time fixing the four pages that were subpar. (That wasn't a straightforward thing to do.) Then I edited the following issue, which was a lot easier. Believe it or not, the hour and a half of Ruddigore was all about one scene of dialogue chosen more or less at random. At the end of it I was still very unhappy with my performance, but it's much better than it was before.
Performance review:	30 minutes of mundane activities? Wowsers. That's got to be a personal record. I like the balance between the many different kinds of productivity, and the game night. Normally I just look around the game nights, but I think here it prevented a loss of sanity. The pre-planned schedule is really cool. I wouldn't mind seeing more of that.
Score:	10/10

13 October 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	5:24
	TV	3:34
	Mundane activities	3:30
	Looking for a font	3:02
	Improving the TheBuckmans.com index page	0:34
Notes:	The rehearsal went well, because it was just singing and not acting. I watched all the shows that were left over from having been so productive yesterday. I looked for a better font to present my blog in than Arial, and couldn't find one.
Performance review:	It's weird, that's for sure. There are two activities past mundanity, in the proper order. But then, it's hard for anything to compete with a trip to Jerusalem for time, so I don't know how much that's worth. I guess I can't complain about over 3 hours of TV, in any event, since it's a direct result of the productive streak yesterday. I would have liked to see Gamer Mom for a few minutes.
Score:	8/10

14 October 2010

Time allocation:	Comics	9:37
	Mundane activities	2:46
	Changing the font on the blog	1:32
	IM chat with Benjy	0:47
Notes:	It turns out, I couldn't find a font that looked decent because the display settings for fonts were messed up. As soon as I changed that, I was (relatively) quickly able to settle on a font I liked: Antique Olive Light. I read comics and searched for comics and organized comics and edited comics. I finished the The Tick collection, and got eleven issues into the Iron Man part. (There are another fifty before I'm done.) If it weren't time to go to sleep now, I'd like to keep editing for another few hours.
Performance review:	Nine hours is perfectly fine when we're talking about an activity set as diverse as this. Comics can switch from active to passive (or vice versa) at any moment, so that one activity is in itself already balanced. The font-switching added a touch of weirdness to the day, and overall I'd say it was quite successful. I think I'm ready for Level 3, but there are still 14 days to go. So let's see how long we can keep this good day streak going.
Score:	9/10

15-16 October 2010

Time allocation:	Super Mario Galaxy 2	4:09
	Comics	3:56
	Mundane activities	3:09
	TV	1:32
	Blog planning	1:11
Notes:	I'm getting close to actually beating Super Mario Galaxy 2. I'm also getting close to finishing the wedding present. I thought about the blog for a while, to come up with an idea for a new post. At first all the ideas I had were worthless, so I dug deeper. I reread some earlier posts to get a sense of where I was coming from, and I analyzed where I am now. An idea for a new arc in the blog is slowly taking shape. I'll give the idea a day or two to stew, and then I'll see where I am.
Performance review:	Mario being over four hours allows the comics to take a lot of time (as is needed for the project to be finished in a matter of days) without the day feeling like a rehash of yesterday. It's been a few days since Gamer Mom progressed- there will need to be a day soon where that's the clear focus of the day.
Score:	7/10

17 October 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	9:51
	Watching a movie	1:44
	Mundane activities	1:33
	Listening to music	0:43
Notes:	After waking up, I had 35 minutes of not being able to get a tune out of my head (and fingers). It's a disease, I tell you. Finally I pulled myself away from the piano to practice Ruddigore for several hours in anticipation of my first rehearsal with several actors. The rehearsal didn't actually have those actors, because they didn't show up, and the scenes I'd memorized and worked on were not the scenes dealt with in the rehearsal. A more frustrating aspect of my co-stars not showing up was that it was just me and Rob sitting in a room going over the minutiae of what he wants for hours. At first it was going well, but three hours in I was tired, cranky and all-around unprofessional. I had a long phone conversation with Moshe on the bus back, to recover some sanity points. When I got home I listened to Eliezer's concerto, and then I listened to Eliezer's concerto again. I ended the day by watching How To Train Your Dragon (Finally there was a decent copy on the net.), which was terrific.
Performance review:	Simple and elegant. There's weirdness, there's balance, there's focus, and there's little else. I'm impressed that the music only lasted 35 minutes, and didn't threaten the entire day. That's what I call progress. I'm taking off a point for Gamer Mom being absent too long.
Score:	8/10

18 October 2010

Time allocation:	Comics	5:52
	Hanging out with Moshe	5:49
	Mundane activities	2:08
	TV	1:32
Notes:	I finished the comics disc. Moshe and I watched Fantasia, watched a cartoon version of Ruddigore Rob lent me, and played a section of Phoenix Wright: Justice For All. It was fun. The whole day was fun, except for fighting with my computer. It wouldn't overburn the comics disc no matter what I did (an operation I did on my old computer all the time), and I couldn't get it to read the Fantasia DVD. Both of these problems could be inadequacies of Linux, glitches in the specific software I'm using (and all the alternatives I tried today), or flaws in my DVD-ROM drive. I don't know which. But the result was a tremendous amount of time wasted on nonsense.
Performance review:	Eh. Mildly unusual isn't going to cut it- the narrative is just dull. Lots of passivity, finishing up a project, and still Gamer Mom is nowhere to be seen. Technically there's nothing wrong here: diverse activity sets, low mundanity... but I can't call this a very good day when Gamer Mom is still gone.
Score:	6/10

19 October 2010

Time allocation:	Gamer Mom	5:24
	Games night	5:23
	Mundane activities	2:07
	TV	1:11
	Wii Fit	0:28
Performance review:	Carry on.
Score:	10/10

20 October 2010

Time allocation:	Harel and Rachel's wedding	5:25
	Super Mario Galaxy 2	4:07
	Mundane activities	2:49
	Comics	1:30
	TV	1:29
Notes:	In Mario, I tried to complete the game. Turns out, that'll be a bit harder than I thought. The last star (called "A Perfect Run") is long and difficult, it has no checkpoints, and you lose if you ever get hit once. At the wedding, I sat at the kids' table and talked with anyone who'd talk. I didn't dance much. It wasn't particularly exciting for me, but I'm glad I was there.
Performance review:	A wedding is interesting, though this is just the wedding of a friend (as opposed to the last wedding, which required active involvement). I don't think that's enough in this case to make the rest of the day not matter. Also, remember that it was a passive activity. So if Mario had overtaken the wedding (and if the game had really been completed) I think I'd look on this day more favorably. And a little bit of Gamer Mom would have gone a long way. But as it is, there's way too much passivity.
Score:	5/10

21 October 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	5:57
	Digital: A Love Story	2:02
	Comics	1:52
	TV	1:39
	Blogging	1:33
	Gamer Mom	0:41
Notes:	Lots of piano, lots of web browsing.
Performance review:	Lots of blecch.
Score:	2/10

22-23 October 2010

Time allocation:	Super Mario Galaxy 2	2:54
	TV	2:53
	Mundane activities	2:45
	Baking a cake	1:30
	Halas & Batchelor cartoons	1:28
	Hanging out with Sariel	1:27
	Comics	1:15
	Gamer Mom	0:23
	Delivering Harel and Rachel's wedding present	0:04
Notes:	I completed Super Mario Galaxy 2, for real this time. It took a lot of practice to get to the point where I was comfortable with playing the final level, and shortly after that point I succeeded in procuring the 242nd star. I watched a leaked copy of the pilot for The Walking Dead (a zombie show from the guy who did The Shawshank Redemption), which was very good. And then I thought, you know, everything AMC Studios makes seems to be really good! (They make Mad Men.) So I tried the pilot of their show Rubicon, and that was good too. For my mother's birthday Dena made dinner, with Miriam's and my help. My job was to bake a cake. It turned out fine. The DVD Rob lent me of the Ruddigore cartoon had other cartoons on it, so I watched them. Sariel's a musician, and I showed him what I'm up to on the piano, also trying to come up with new takes on two old themes he likes. This went (of course) into me showing him that I could play a tune of his on the ocarina in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and then... I got a bit carried away. (He had played the very first Zelda years ago, and didn't know there were sequels.) I regret nothing. My father left the country for a week. This shouldn't affect my life too much.
Performance review:	Lively and weird.
Score:	9/10

24 October 2010

Time allocation:	Mundane activities	7:11
	Ruddigore	5:49
	Comics	0:20
Notes:	I was very tired, okay? Last night I went to sleep late, and even though I woke up a bit late this change in my sleep schedule left me with no energy for the whole day. I had a big plan of things to do, actually, but I didn't do any of it. At the end I tried to finally do some database work, but I couldn't access the site so instead I watched pointless YouTube videos.
Performance review:	My word that's an atrocious day. If at the beginning of the day I find myself with no energy, I should immediately go back to sleep for an hour or two rather than spend the whole day tired. This lack of self-control is absolutely unacceptable.
Score:	0/10

25 October 2010

Time allocation:	The blog	4:36
	Little King's Story	4:01
	Mundane activities	1:56
	Gamer Mom	1:04
	Going out for dinner	1:03
	Ruddigore	1:00
	Wii Fit	0:47
	Arguing with Avri	0:30
	Wii stuff	0:10
Notes:	I wrote an introduction for the eventual Ruddigore post (still months away from publication), came up with (but didn't program) the beginning for a new interactive post, and reread some posts from the past few month to get a better sense of where the blog stands right now. The new Bit.Trip game came out. As soon as I found out I went to the Wii shop to buy it, but I'm back to not being able to get in again (thanks to Nintendo's inane anti-piracy schemes). I started working to get it back up, but then I reconsidered. It would take hours, if I could get it to work at all. I remembered that there were other Wii games I hadn't gotten around to, that I could play in the months before an illegal (and more importantly, obtainable) copy of the new Bit.Trip shows up online. So I went back to Little King's Story after neglecting it for most of the year. I chose not to continue my campaign as "King Mory", but instead to start over from the beginning as "King Dearest". I had a blast, and got farther than I had before. It's a better game than I'd given it credit for, though I can see why I had trouble with it- the interface is extremely awkward. My mother took me out for burgers. I went back to Wii Fit and found that there are even more fun activities I hadn't touched yet. (Wii Fit is enormous!) Avri's been hosting the games night session reports on Google Groups, which has just discontinued the feature he uses to do so. Now he wants to move to Google Sites, and I tried to convince him that we should make a site from scratch instead of relying on the mercy of Google. (It worked for me!)
Performance review:	Wow, so much coolness. I don't know where to look first! A new game comes out of nowhere and dominates the day, overtaken by an interesting set of blog-related activities. Gamer Mom and Wii Fit make respectable showings, as does Ruddigore of course. Random activities are sprinkled through the day, and mundanity is at a minimum. Now, I like that the blogging is looking far ahead, but I don't like the idea of letting the blog just sit around and get stale while that's in progress. Thankfully there's I Am Not Myself Today, whose posts are simpler. A new chapter of that could probably be churned out in just a few hours. Anyway, this is an amazing day. It's so fresh and unexpected, while also pushing lots of storylines forward. Encore!
Score:	10/10

26 October 2010

Time allocation:	The blog	4:14
	Games night	4:13
	Mundane activities	1:50
	Gamer Mom	1:45
	TV shows	1:44
	Data entry	0:51
	Wii Fit	0:23
Notes:	I wrote a new chapter of I Am Not Myself Today, which took me over three hours. Then I continued the early work on the next interactive post.
Performance review:	Impressive control.
Score:	9/10

27 October 2010

Time allocation:	Ruddigore	9:53
	The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time	3:22
	Reading a book	1:40
	Mundane activities	1:03
	Wii Fit	0:10
Notes:	I practiced a lot of Ruddigore scenes on my own. Then I joined two Ruddigore castmates -Aviella and Jordan- at Aviella's apartment and we worked on our scenes together free of any intruding authority figure. (I think we all improved tremendously.) Finally all three of us went to the actual rehearsal, which was very fun because I felt like I was prepared for it. The activity at the rehearsal was actually quite varied, between the singing and the stage direction and the dancing. I played Ocarina of Time some more, taking notes as I always do. Today I went through the Spirit Temple, and discovered (as I did with the Fire Temple) that it's way more clever and artsy than I'd ever given it credit for. It's a great game that can still surprise me like this ten years after I first played it. At games night yesterday, a regular named Eliezer lent me the book Otherworld by Tad Williams. I read 30 pages or so, which was a frustrating experience because it's in the wrong medium. It's clear to me that what the writer had in his mind as he was writing was a CD-ROM with film, exploration, and prose, but all the book has is prose and it feels like it's not using that medium properly.
Performance review:	That is one eclectic collection of activities. For any activity to go for nearly ten hours while still being fun and exciting at the end of it, that's pretty darn impressive. The only passive activity on the list is the book, and considering how critical an approach to reading was taken I'm not entirely sure that's passive either. The book is coming out of nowhere, and Zelda makes its first appearance in the month other than a cameo on the 23rd. So the weirdness quotient is accounted for. Next to no time at all was wasted. I think this would be considered a ten-pointer even on Level 5!
Score:	10/10

28 October 2010

Time allocation:	Comics	6:11
	Mundane activities	3:17
	TV shows	2:23
	Rewatching a movie	1:32
	Facebook	0:18
	The blog	0:17
Notes:	I haven't been organizing my comics collection recently because with all Marvel series tying together and some storylines taking a year or more to complete, I didn't feel confident in my guesses as to how they fit together chronologically. But enough time has passed since the beginning of this period that I'm starting to get a sense of what the discs will look like. So I got to work on that. I got my mother to watch How To Train Your Dragon, and while she was watching I decided to watch with her, because it's a fun movie. I've tried to send e-mails to Erika, but she never responds so I doubt she's seen any of it. I figure she probably has another address which I'm not aware of. She has a Facebook account, so I made myself an account and sent her a message asking for her address. I hope she responds soon, so I can deactivate my account quickly. I found the site offensive: the internet should be a welcoming place where you can go anywhere and see anything, not an old-fashioned society of cliques and outsiders!
Performance review:	So dull.
Score:	3/10

29-30 October 2010

Time allocation:	TV shows	6:55
	Mundane activities	5:42
	Listening to a concert	2:05
	Reading comics	0:32
	Trying to contact Erika	0:17
Notes:	I got hooked to Rubicon, and watched one episode after another until late into the night. I went to a local classical concert, a trio playing Dvorak and Mendelssohn. I found a current e-mail address for Erika, so I hastily deactivated my Facebook account and wrote her a letter. She has not responded.
Performance review:	An entire day dominated by passivity. Mundane activities are through the roof, and the most mundane of non-mundane activities has overtaken it. Blecch!
Score:	0/10

31 October 2010

Time allocation:	Gamer Mom	3:05
	The blog	2:58
	Ruddigore	2:40
	Mundane activities	1:36
	Data entry	0:47
	Little King's Story	0:47
	Listening to music	0:39
	Wii Fit	0:23
	Reading a comic	0:20
Notes:	I had to go against my habits for this one, with no more justification than that it seemed like a good idea. Generally on a day with aRuddigore rehearsal, I spend the early hours (early for me, anyway) practicing and on the long bus rides I go over lines, music and directions in my head. Today I instead worked on Gamer Mom early in the day, and the blog on the bus. I did a lot of standard writing for the game, but I also did some research into World of Warcraft for a section of the game that I don't feel comfortable writing yet. This research was supposed to include actually playing the game in its trial version for a few minutes, but it would not run on either my computer or my sisters' computer. (There's still my parents' computer to try, at some point.) When I went to Jerusalem I took a pad of paper and a pen, and on the bus I brainstormed and wrote down many notes and outlines for new blog posts. I'd like to get started on the actual writing as soon as possible. The rehearsal was decently fun. When I came home I wound down by listening to Beethoven's seventh symphony.
Performance review:	The month ends as it began, with a declaration of priorities. The differences in the list show how much has happened this month. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is finished and replaced by Little King's Story, Wii Fit is back in the routine, data entry has become a regular activity, and music refuses to be left out. But with all the changes, the top three activities are the same: the game, then the blog, then the play. This isn't just a microcosm of the month, it's a sign that this whole game is working.
Score:	10/10

October 2010

Average score:	7.27
The month in review:	There were no adventures this month, but the day-to-day routine became a bit more engaging. Little time was wasted each day, with a standard emerging of mundane activities under 3 hours. The actor moved from activity to activity with confidence, keeping each day fairly unique and fresh despite drawing from a more limited set of activities than in past months. A wedding present was made, a new hobby was started, and Ruddigore starts to get serious. There's a lot here worth praising. There are also some dark spots, though. There should never be a zero-point day. This month had two of them. Part of the problem was the knowledge that the month was going so well it wouldn't matter. And indeed, 7.27 is a passing score, so after two failed attempts we'll be moving on from Level 2. But I'm afraid there's a problem in attitude here. A low-scoring day is not fun, it is tiring and unpleasant. So when the question is asked, "What can I get away with?", who exactly is being taken advantage of? Something to consider as we go in to Level 3, where such problems will be tackled head on.
Verdict:	LEVEL UP