Don Edwards

You need a nap? I think somebody left one on your bed.
 

The only Chicago-area con I'm at all familiar with is Windycon, which I happened entirely coincidentally to be in town for in 1989 or 1990. I was there for a two-week training program on some new software my employer was buying, and the convention was on the intervening weekend; I found out about it late Saturday evening.
The fun thing was, Mercedes Lackey recognized me in the hall and answered a silly question I had asked her at Norwescon.
That being one of two times I spent even a full day in the Chicago area. The other was in the fall of 1977 around Thanksgiving; for various reasons I can pin that one down precisely.

Baker the cat's ordeal is over! The vet removed his feeding tube today and pronounced him healthy. We don't have to give him any more medicines or anything like that. All we have to do is keep his neck collar on while his feeding tube hole heals up.
We were afraid Baker was going to die on us when all of this began. If it wasn't for a group of great vets and Baker's will to live, we would have lost him. We nurtured that will to live - Mrs. Prof, especially - and now, Baker is back to his sassy self. Thank goodness.

There's a TV show (also lots of episodes available on YouTube) called "Prehistoric Fossil Breeding".
 
I'm pretty sure that "fossil" precludes "breeding".

Prince the Cat
Born: 11/27/2016
Died: 2/6/2019
Hunter the Cat
Born: 2009 or 2010
Died: 2/8/2019
You will be missed, guys. So, so much.

That is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
And frankly I'd like to see us using less fossil fuels, particularly coal because it's so polluting. Oil and gas, my concern there is that they are also quite valuable for a variety of other uses, such as lubricants and chemical feedstocks; on the other hand I think we'll eventually find ways to efficiently synthesize them from air and water, possibly but not necessarily with the assistance of plants - and gasoline and diesel oil still have several rather large advantages over electricity for transportation, at least one of which I expect will continue indefinitely (because it's about the human-interface side of the technology).

I would greatly appreciate it if those with suggestions of how to improve it attempted to implement them!

Insufficiently creative in building a backstory.
The closest thing to a seriously minmaxed character I had was a two-blade Ranger who was all about mobility and multi-attacks. D&D 4E gives a character 3 actions during his turn: a movement, a major, and a minor. He'd move on all three of them and between the major and the minor would get in at least three attacks - routinely. Backstory? Temple dancer. With a lot more going on as well - the name he goes by honors a murdered lover, and he won't name his family, his country, the temple he trained in, or the gods he once worshiped. (And I know why. I could write quite a long story leading up to his  beginning his adventuring career - at one point I had about the first five pages of it written, but it got lost somewhere along the years.)
Insufficiently intelligent in building a character and backstory that makes sense. There's a place for the adventurer with minimal adventuring skills: a campaign deliberately designed for PCs who are beginners and forced by circumstances to become adventurers, rather than choosing it from among other viable options and properly training for it before setting out. But other than that -- sure, a 7th level fighter might also be a gourmet chef, either left over from a previous career or chosen as a hobby and a way to get something more interesting than purple-worm-and-ochre-jelly sandwiches again... but he also needs to have been effective enough often enough as a fighter to reach 7th level, so there's no way for him to plausibly be worthless as a fighter.

I personally never saw a conflict between gamist and immersionist styles in RPGs. I usually did both, simultaneously. A character doesn't have just a class, he also has a particular role in the party which may differ from character to character and party to party, even if the classes and levels are identical. A minmaxer will maximize certain abilities available to the class, and define the character's role to fit; an immersionist will let the role develop and maximize the abilities needed for that role - the result is about the same, with a character whose abilities are well tuned to his precise role in the party.
Where I saw a conflict was when the player had one idea of their character's role in the party, and another player tried to push them into a different role.
(Note: D&D4E categorized classes into roles - but that isn't what I mean as those roles are FAR too general. As becomes apparent when one considers a large party. Your two Wizards will both be effective but in different ways. Your two Rogues will have different specialties. And so on. Your two Leaders, a Cleric and a Warlord, will be vastly different.)

Our cat had no problems with "the vet"... it was the "going to", i.e. getting the critter into the carrier and retaining our hearing and sanity while he yowled his demands to be let out, that was the problem.

Regarding the author's comments: Don't worry, Dan, I don't think you're old.
 

Regarding the author's comments: Don't worry, Dan, I don't think you're old.
 

Geckos, by the way, have much better color vision than ours - but not the same as ours.
In our retinas we have rods for black-and-white vision, including in very dim light, and cones for color vision but only in reasonably good light.
Gecko retinas have only cones, but their cones are more than twice as light-sensitive as our rods (which are about 100 times as sensitive as our cones).
And instead of having r-g-b cones, they have uv-g-b cones.
So, Dan is definitely correct that Nanase losing color vision is something HE added.

Clarification requested: Popcorn waved goodnight?

New doggie!  Mickey is eight or nine years old, and his original owners had to give him up because he had bladder stones and they couldn't afford the surgery to remove them.  He went from the Anti-Cruelty Society to another rescue, to Young At Heart, a place that specializes in older pets.  And thus to me!  He has to be on a prescription diet so he doesn't make more stones, but as a vet, I can at least get that at cost, so it's not as much of a burden as it would be for most other owners (that was a stumbling block to getting adopted at least a couple of times).  He's sweet, and energetic, and loves walks, and is very snuggly and loves everyone.  He is a bit shy of other dogs, but not in a biting aggressive way, just a moving-away way; and now that he's settled in he tends to bark at new people or opening doors a bit, but not to a point it's a problem.  I feel very, very lucky to have gotten such a great dog!
(He's also one of the reasons I haven't been on as much for a bit, but we're settling into a routine now and despite going on more walks, which also makes me happy, I think I'll be keeping up with the boards better now!)

Nanase and Ellen,
Diane and Lucy,
Catalina and Rhoda,
Grace and Tedd Tess,
Ashley and Elliot (mall female Elliot)

Is guaca-mole made with avogadros?

Nanase and Ellen,
Diane and Lucy,
Catalina and Rhoda,
Grace and Tedd Tess,
Ashley and Elliot (mall female Elliot)

And then there's the old story of Eric and the Dreaded Gazebo.

On September 24 in History:
768 - Frankish king Pepin the Short dies. I hope his sons are up to the challenge or this kingdom could fall apart really fast.
787 - A bunch of dudes in funny hats gather in Nicaea (again) to discuss how to Christian. On the docket: veneration of icons. On the one hand, pretty sure there's a relevant commandment about that, but on the other hand, hells yeah!
1572 - Túpac Amaru, the last king of the Inca, is executed by the Spanish. Conspiracy theories that he's still alive about, though admittedly become less and less credible with each passing year.
1830 - Two distinct culture groups stitched together Frankenstein style form the provisional government of Belgium. This will work splendidly.
1877 - The Battle of Shiroyama cements the new order in Japan over the old samurai traditions. Contrary to popular belief, Tom Cruise was not a samurai, and the "last" refers to the group (plural) he fought with.
1890 - Mormons officially denounce polygamy (though a small number continue to practice it on the DL for a while longer) because they really want Utah to be a state.
1948 - The civic-minded Honda Motor Company makes an accord with the public to sell them fit automobiles that will shuttle them about the city. I am so sorry.
1957 - President Eisenhower has had it with Arkansas governor Orval Faubus's bullshit.
1973 - Guinea Bissau declares independence from Portugal. If you read these regularly, you'll know they'll need to wait almost a year before they get it. South Ossetia plays the world's smallest violin.
1991 - They brought in the experts from medical college, who doctored and nursed with all of their knowledge. They tested with chemo and lots of bed rest, they tried litting puffbeezers sit on his chest. But no matter the method, there just was no answer, Theodore Geisel has perished from cancer. And think now of this, and think of it well, for just one cheap laugh I'll now be roasting in hell.
1993 - Norodom Sihanouk is crowned king of Cambodia, a position he himself abdicated and dissolved 38 years prior. In the interim, he has served as Cambodia's prime minister, leader of its single ruling party, official head of state, leader of its government in exile, right hand figurehead to Pol Pot, leader of an exiled resistance group, head of state again, and finally president. "I wish I knew how to quit you, Cambodia."
2014 - India is the first nation on Earth to put something into Mars orbit on their first try. Unfortunately, the best joke I could think of for this would probably be at least a little bit racist.

Double retirement parties for Mrs. Prof yesterday. She had her official retirement lunch at a Mexican food place. Lots of people attended, including myself and my son (who drove me over there). After work, her contacts at a major international shipping company (that will remain nameless) took her out to a little German/Austrian food place near our neighborhood. Just three representatives, her, and I attended. She got some very nice gifts from the second group, and some very delicious food from the restaurant. Great dinner reminiscing, with her at the center and me just kind of guiding the reps through the best parts of the unfamiliar meal (case in point: not much sauerkraut was left at the end of the night). Mrs. Prof enjoyed the evening immensely.
I can't say exactly how long she's worked there, unfortunately. She (and I) started in the summer of 1982, but with seasonal employment, layoffs, and other interruptions to her service time, I can't calculate her exact time off the top of my head. Just let it be said that she worked there for a long time, and when the end of the month rolls around, she's going to reap the benefits.

You have offended someone.
We won't say who you offended.
We won't say what you did that was offensive to them.
We won't say what you must change before we will change our judgement.
Now stop doing the things so objectionable that we can't even say what they were.
…
Criticism at its most constructive.

A fractured metatarsal is not what any of us had in mind when we thought, "The Prof deserves a break."

Quick duckduckgo says

WHAT AM I, CHOPPED LIVER? (hey, can I have some?)

Less than a negative quantity of fun?