How? How is it already almost August?
I had started this year feeling like I was going to have the time to dive into a lot of Hive posting, and that has definitely not been the case.
"The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men. Gang aft a-gley."
But, plans going awry or not... it has been a good year thus far. The baby is officially, as of today, 1 year old! Our eldest is about to turn 7 and the middle kiddo is a very big 4-year-old who has no problem telling us her mind.
We've had a ton of visitors this year, which has been a lot of fun. We got to see my cousin for the first time in person since 2019, and another friend who long ago moved to Ontario made a trip back for the summer.
His son promptly puked all over my van on the way from the city to my place. Thankfully, we had a new little cleaning unit that did a wonderful job taking care of the last of that mess, and the van is no worse than it was prior to that, haha.
As usual, we spent a week up at the lake relaxing and having fun. It has become our annual tradition, and with the exception of one year during COVID (when the park was literally closed), we've gone every year since 2018.
I've been slowly working my way through Rabbits by Terry Miles (pictured above). It is a stand-alone story set in the same universe as the podcast of the same name - which is fantastic. It was my summer reading while we were at the lake and I'm just over halfway done. I've really enjoyed it. It combines ARG with conspiracy-theory-sized mystery and a dash of maybe aliens, and it's all done very well.
What was I talking about before I got distracted by my own photo though? Ah, right. Generally being busy.
Well, that theme is likely to continue here for the next while. I've been running around so much and just dealing with typical homeowner/father of 3/life stuff, and I've not been even keeping up with my worldbuilding prompts on 
I'd really like to get back to at LEAST weekly blogging, if not daily. I'd like to get back to creative writing, and reading through fun TTRPGs I have, and adding more worldbuilding for my setting here... but I typically get about an hour or two per day at most and usually it's at 10pm once I'm just mentally and physically burned out from the day, so I end up playing something easy or bite-sized like Idle Champions or Caves of Qud.
They've both been a lot of fun. I've recently gotten further than I've ever been in Caves of Qud - passing the first Great Filter of the game by defeating Golgotha. It's a bloody nightmare to get through, but as it turns out... a lot easier to handle if you have some face-melting gas mutations and wings. I keep thinking I should record some of my Caves of Qud content and put it on 3speak but I need to ensure I have about 30m per session of uninterrupted time for that. So far, surprisingly hard to come by!
I'm also working right now at making a side-cutout style map of one of my main cities in my D&D campaign, since elevation is a major part of how the city is designed and there's no good top-down way to really showcase that (or if there is, I'm not familiar with it enough to draw it yet).
Once I get that done, I'll be updating the post here with the new map. So far, I've found that using Hive as a bit of a wikipedia-like repository for my D&D setting has been pretty easy to manage. I've updated quite a few of my prior posts to reflect new content as we've gotten through more games and as I've developed or refined more stuff. I thought it'd be a pain to manage, but it has been surprisingly simple and I'm able to keep track of which pages are on Hive pretty simply in my Obsidian notes, which makes everything really handy.
Using the inbuilt sql-like query options, I can very quickly get a list of every post with a hive tag and its associated link.
I notice immediately that I've not got a link to my Session 9 Recap, so either I didn't post it or I didn't properly associate the tag.
Looks like I just didn't tag it properly since the Session 9 Recap does exist here. Easy to fix!
And a good example of why this is still just such a useful, amazing tool.
Anyhow, that's it for me today. I've got kids yelling at each other and my lunch break is about to end. Take care folks, hopefully my next post won't be a month from now lol.