"Dread Nautical" is a cartoony turn-based RPG-lite set on a cruise ship where a restful cruise has turned into a battle against weird malevolent mutations. You have to battle your way up the decks of the ship to find an answer to what is going on. As RPGs go this is simpler to play than many. As you fight and scavenge you get food to keep your characters alive, scraps and tokens to mend and upgrade your weaponry and your characters. There is a fun range of weapons to be employed, and locales on the ship to do battle in. With observation the battles are not very hard, the last boss fight is the hardest. You will need to work out your enemies' vulnerabilities. Cowardly whacking a foe in the back works well. Each deck has quite a number of areas to explore but you will find there may not be time to explore them all before making your way back to the lobby each time. Spend too long on a deck and you may get swarmed by monsters appearing. The tone is very tongue in cheek, the characters make amusing comments now and then, and the bad guy behind it all has a line in suitably menacing voice overs. Not profoundly deep gameplay or story but fun.

The Dumpling Tree is a Chinese restaurant but a Chinese restaurant that serves different Chinese dishes to the normal Chinese restaurant in the UK. I like having their "dirty dozen" which is twelve varied dumplings.

In "Reset" a university student is on her way to a bookshop when the bus she is on explodes killing everyone. Unfortunately time loops back and she has to die again and again. Getting off the bus is difficult enough let alone stopping the time loop by saving everyone on the bus. I like dramas involving time loops and time travel and this is one of the best I've seen. It's a story about ordinary people in an impossible situation, trying to solve a complex problem and unravel a mystery. All the people on the bus are fleshed out real characters, not 2D stereotypes. The scenes are varied: the claustrophobia of the bus, interrogation and investigation at a police station, a secret cat lover's lair, animation fan events, down at heel neighbourhoods. The action moves along without feeling forced or repetitive. I was gripped by this drama, investing myself into the story and people in the story.

"Milo and the Magpies" is a very charming game in which you assist poor lost cat Milo back to his home, evading the magpies which pester him. The creation of solo artist Johan Scherft (with a little help) the hand drawn scenes are delightful yet familiar. The game is not too hard (I finished it without help) though one puzzle I wasn't sure how one was meant to solve it. I also didn't find all the hidden objects which are not necessary to finish the game. You don't play Milo himself, rather you poke objects and see what happens. At times you pick up objects and use them (a different mode of gameplay). Get it right and Milo can be prodded to move from garden to garden. As Milo moves from garden to garden you get to learn a little about the people who inhabit the different houses. The ending is sweet. I found myself clicking round each scene trying to discover objects which could be poked. Some of the objects are animated which helps finding what to poke. Solving the puzzles requires careful observation.

I'm moving my personal website from being hosted by Dreamhost to Hostgator. This move is for saving money alone, "Dreamhost" have been satisfactory otherwise. The only real issue I've had is with mailboxes filling up and having to be destroyed and recreated. A little fun moving to "Hostgator". At first hiccups using "ssh" - I didn't understand til now that existing public keys in ".ssh" (I'm on a Mac) can complicate things. Also "Hostgator" don't seem to have a facility for bulk editing email forwarders like "Dreamhost" do. Switching the nameservers over was stressful. My personal website started giving certificate errors and 404 errors (page not found). I think I hope it's stable now. And that I recreated all the email forwarders correctly. "Apple Mail" also behaved badly - so as not to lose emails they all had to be saved in folders on the local machine. It is also prone to crashing out afterwards. Perhaps I need to destroy and recreate the accounts.

Covid is still around two years after we all started wearing masks and social distancing and undergoing lockdowns. A lot of people have died. A lot of people have been seriously financially impacted. But Virginia and I have not caught Covid ourselves (yet), nor have we suffered like others. I can only write about our experience of the Covid years. 2020 was my last working year. I was expecting to have my work colleagues gather round my desk on the last day. There would be a few speeches, there would be a few gifts to unwrap (and I would be surprised by how generous everyone was). I would make a difficult speech about farewell and please keep in touch. Instead we all started working remotely, and coming into the office required management approval (an inconvenience as I had asked for packages to be delivered there!) I also used the office as a place for offsite backups, I've now switched to the cloud. There had been times in the office I wished I could work from home - but actually doing so was lonely. Even if they were just work colleagues I missed being with them. They did the best they could with Microsoft Teams for when I retired, but my career finished not with a bang but a whimper.

We had a week on the Isle of Man, seeing Manx cats and ruined abbeys. Poor Virginia had an accident on the ferry back to Heysham.

I don't want to write this page. I cry even now as I write these words. I cried Virginia and I cried on Amelia's last day and the days after. Now that we don't have Tabitha and Amelia there is a hole a void in our lives. It hurts it really hurts. We gave Amelia "Thrive" as a treat - she would scatter it over the floor and eat it off the carpet. I would clean the litter trays and then she would immediately use them again. The mats by the litter trays ended up in a tangled mess and the litter everywhere when she used the litter trays. She liked going into the enclosure after midnight, zooming up the cat tree, and refusing to descend so I could sleep. She liked walking across the board when we were playing Scrabble, and was skilled with her back legs on scattering the tiles. She could hide when we were going on holiday or wanting to take her to the vets. She could retreat inside the spare room bed and refuse to be bribed out. Once we though we had lost her and went searching round the neighbourhood only to find her hiding there. She would come downstairs whining for attention then return back upstairs when she had successfully disturbed you. Once she escaped over our back fence. Her claws were sharp and her teeth left marks. Despite all this it was a godsend to have her in our lives. She added life to our lives. She bound us to the world around us. What matters is not what other people do for us, but what we do for others. Thank you Amelia that I was able to look after you for so long.

Wagamamas is a chain of restaurants in the UK which offer up Japanese style food. Sometimes nearly all the offerings on the menu seem to be infected with chilli, and I don't need my tastebuds ignited like some do. At its best a nice change of cuisine to other restaurants. I like the "banana katsu" dessert.

"The Sound of Magic" is pure poetry, pure magic. Abandoned by her parents, assailed by debt collectors and overdue on the rent, a schoolgirl attempts to balance school and part-time jobs and looking after her younger sister. Against herself she is drawn to an abandoned theme park and the mysterious character living there who claims to be a magician. Despite the rumours about him and a missing schoolgirl. A confident and wise short series about the power of magic if we believe in it to redirect lives. The power of magic to make us believe in magic. The power of magic to help us come out the other side. In common with "The Sound of Music" there are musical numbers in this (in the middle of the final credits the cast do a little number as an encore). Creative and entrancing.

A cruise around the Western Med, seeing Gaudi's art in Barcelona and Gibraltar again, taking a land train in Nice.

"Cardpocalypse" is set in a school under attack by a mysterious purple goo. Your character Jess starts off her first day by getting the Power Pets card g Came banned, but it is by playing Power Pets that Jess will be able to save her friends and stop the purple goo taking over the world. Cartoon style visuals, simple but effective graphics as you visit various rooms in the school. There are plenty of side quests and stories to uncover. Gameplay is set over a number of days as you learn what's behind the purple goo. The various quests, and trading, helps you to build up strong decks which you will. There are optional battles you can fight but the game is well balanced. The main storyline battles are not impossible but feel good to win. The card decks themselves are inventive and colourful. As you play you can change the rules of the card battles to some extent for extra interest. Great fun.

Sooner than expected we now have another cat living with us (or we're living where he is). It is a he and I keep saying she after all those years we had "Tabitha" and "Amelia". A 7-year old male Ragdoll called "Bandit" was listed as needing rehoming on a site Virginia visits. It was too early the first time he was listed, but after he was listed for the third time we thought of offering him a home. As did other people so we had to go and be interviewed by "Bandit" to see who he chose. And he chose us. Cass who was looking after him in her cat palace was very generous and gave us some toys and a barrel cat tower. Virginia however didn't want any criminals in the house so after a little thought he was renamed "Jasper". Poor "Jasper" had an awful journey to our home, we got caught in the tailback from a burnt out car accident. "Jasper" is very energetic at times, a shock as we were used to living with elderly cats of course. "Jasper" is also more of a daredevil - jumping up to inaccessible cupboards, perching on narrow bannister rails, and even braving the noisy monster (otherwise known as the vacuum cleaner). Tabitha and Amelia ran and hid from that. When "Jasper" first arrived we could hear him mewing but not see him - he had jumped onto a kitchen counter. We ordered some new toys for him - I was disappointed large parcels that arrived before my birthday were for him not for me! Still experimenting with what food to give him, he doesn't seem to eat much of the wet food Cass told us about. We'll see. "Jasper" will see.

Virginia and I travelled to and from London by prebooked cab. This worked fairly well. The guy who took us down was 20 minutes early, not a problem. He insisted on dropping us before the Strand outside the Savoy Tap pub, and had us tell Panther Taxis to get the one who fetched us to collect us from there. The guy who collected us still did it from outside where we were staying so looking back this just added confusion and worry. A very friendly guy, not sure of his ethnicity, we had a tour of his East London homeland. I was also unsure of his driving where there didn't always seem to be a hand on the wheel.

The cake Virginia did for Noah's dedication.

My guide for my safari in Tanzania was named "Good luck", and with that good luck I saw cheetahs and lions and leopards and many things. And heard hyenas laughing at 4am.

"The Next BIG Thing" is a classic comedic Adventure game in which you play alternately as Liz and Dan, two mismatched reporters investigating mysterious goings on in the monster film industry. Allusions to spot, inventory and dialogue puzzles to solve, great range of locations. Only one puzzles caused me grief, one in which you have to click the right flowers in the right time to get an orchestra playing dance music. Not sure how I managed to blunder through that. Witty dialogue, imaginative scenes, reasonable puzzles, a fun play.

Browns is a sedate restaurant nestling in what was the old Addenbrookes outpatients department. I like as it is a nice relaxed place to eat, it feels civilised out of the hustle and bustle of the nearby streets. The service is classy, the food normal European stuff but reasonably priced on the lunch menu.

Jasper unlike Amelia and Tabitha didn't need persuading to enter his carrier as we took him to "Cozy Pets Hotel" before driving down to West Sussex for a few days. There was congestion on the M25 but apart from that an easy drive down into the lovely rolling hills of the South Downs. We stopped at South Mimms to patronise "KFC", and took a Chinese meal for two to have when we arrived at the Stable Cottage at Brookfield Farm. Inside a nice supply of biscuits and nibbles, nice high beams so no danger of banging my head, plenty of space. The hot water ceased to be hot after a minute or two for me so I didn't manage to have a shower or a bath, the "Stable Cottage" is right on the road so you have people and traffic shooting past the windows. The code for the entrance gate is the same as for the key safe and I wondered if it was the same for the other cottages on site.

"Return to Monkey Island" is a blast from the classic past of Adventure games. But a modernised blast at that. The plot sees the blundering Guybrush Threepwood, would-be mighty pirate, once again facing off against the demon ghost pirate LeChuck in a quest for the Secret of Monkey Island. It is a better sequel to the first two games in the Monkey Island series than the next two games so labelled. The great humour returns as do many of the old characters like Stan the Salesman and Murray the talking skull. The game is very referential and allusive, not just to the Monkey Island games but also back to the dawn of Adventure games. The puzzles are fair I felt, and there is a good hint system built in. There is also built in a checklist of what you should be trying to do, and you can optionally collect trivia cards about the Monkey Island games. I tend to avoid such achievements when playing games. The game is in four chapters, the most open and biggest chapter being the last one. A great game, a great return to Monkey Island. The thing I liked least were the graphics.

I've done an advent calendar for Virginia as an amusement, both for her and for myself in the doing of. All the boxes can be opened apart from in December when they have to be opened one after each other, and only when you've reached that day. Clicking an opened box gives a larger image, clicking the penguin closes all the boxes, clicking the polar bear opens them all if it's not December, clicking the Arctic fox gets to this webpage. There's a YAML file specifying the layout and images and dimensions. A Sinatra app enables editing the layout in a HTML page. More Ruby generates the deployable HTML and images and Javascript code to make the show work. HTML web storage is used to locally record what boxes have been opened in a browser.

"Armikrog" is a spiritual successor to the famed "The Neverhood Chronicles" (1996) game. The big winner in "Armikrog" is the world itself, a plasticene masterpiece with a logic all its own, dripping with whimsy and idiosyncrasy. The game is worth playing just to experience that world. The plot has Tommynaut and his doggy sidekick Beak-Beak crash landing on a strange new world, and needing to escape. Tommynaut does collect items but automatically uses them when needed. You also need to play as Beak-Beak who can get to places Tommynaut can not. The puzzles I thought were fair, requiring observation of the environment and pulling and poking. A beautiful game.

Back to the Thursford Christmas Spectacular after a 2-year hiatus. We were worried we would get there too early, glad when we were held up by farm vehicles, but when we got there the joint was already heaving! Virginia had to locate a table we could share while I joined a slow moving queue for food in the marquee. Coaches had already arrived, and plenty of cars. The show was pretty much the same as before, the comedian who said he was Armenian was cleaner, there were jugglers and circus performers as a diversion, the doves still flew across the theatre at the end. Impressive but not the shock of the new for me. Santa's Magical Journey was the same pretty much, what was new and welcome was a light display outside which Virginia wisely had us tour again in the dark after the show. The jacket potatoes we had for lunch were fine, but the pie efforts we had for dinner didn't agree with me. Google Maps led us both astray going (wanted us to turn too soon into Thursford) and coming back the route out of Thursford was suboptimal.

We went to see the Christmas illuminations at the National Trust Wimpole Hall site, along with quite a few others. Happily the weather was warmer than it was a week ago when we were first supposed to go. They had done a lot of work to Wimpole since we had last been. Where we parked was new. A good variety of illuminations on the circular walk from the Stables at Wimpole Hall, including a 'laser' walk which was spooky. And there were plenty of stalls to help the famished traveller. We had hotdogs to show willing.