So, 15 minutes on the timer as I again attempt to grab hold of the routines that made my life a lot easier before we got Mephostophilis. I just finished a 30-minute tidy and I actually got to the point of rinsing and stacking the dirty dishes. I haven't been able to find the space to do that in weeks. Our kitchen has been a pure disaster area, and !Mike! has been the only person doing any dishwashing.

I have a bit of a get out of chores free pass as I am babying my back and my sciatic nerve as much as I can. I had a really bad flare-up with the nerve a few weeks ago, as bad as it's ever been, and I'm still recovering. It was bad enough that when I saw this tacky as hell cane going for $3, I bought it for the next time I can't walk. There's something very sad in buying a cane so I can simply walk at 29. Ahh well. Not much more I can do about beyond taking it easy, doing my physio exercises and accepting that this is where I'm at.

I've been using the pain as permission to spend a lot of time on Y!PP. If I can't walk, I can certainly sit and sail around a virtual pirate world.

I'm a Captain of a wee tiny crew on there, and it's been such a great fit for me. I was miserable as anything as a pirate in a big crew, I'm too independently minded. So I quit that crew and went on to make my crew, Wings of Aesthir. (10 points if you know how I found the name for it!) I trained myself up to where I felt I could handle other people, and then started taking jobbers. In the weeks since that point I've had 8 people join my crew and 3 leave it. I have a right hand man from one of the first mates to join with me. It's so much fun and it feels damn good to have people actually following me.

So I'm now thinking about making up a website for my little crew to put on all the various things and items of useful info. So far the only thing I have written up are the ideals of the crew. I think I may sit out in the sun for a bit today and write out the way we'll handle money -- personal and crew. We'll see what I end up with.

I want most of all to have a crew of people that have their own goals, their own ideas held together by the ideal of helping each other out under the crew name.

And that's 15.