Reporting from the field, just before battle
Sat 2025-05-31 12:41:57 (in context)
Well, guess what: I did not sleep well Thursday night. Woke up all night long. Finally gave up on sleep around 5:45, had a shower and the rest of the morning routine, and got to work on the writing dailies.
It was like pushing a boulder uphill.
So was the remaining drive to Boise, despite it only being four hours and change. Between the two consecutive nights of deeply inadequate sleep and the much warmer weather on Friday, I was struggling to remain awake and alert pretty much all afternoon.
When I finally got where I was going, I needed a nap. Well, Thank goodness for small blessings: My room at the Arcadia Hotel was ready early, and I could have that nap pretty much immediately.
The Arcadia is a self-checkin style accomodation, its rooms locked by numeric code pads, the code to which you get texted to you the day before. It's laid out like a motel, each room opening onto a second-floor walkway on either side of the parking lot. This is not a place to stay if you need accommodations for limited mobility, or if you're hoping not schlep your stuff up a flight of stairs.
The rooms are absolutely adorable! But you would not guess it from the outside. Also, they're kinda tiny. Well, mine was, anyway. Not that I needed a lot of space for my nap. Just a bed. And that bed is super comfortable.
Once I'd recovered a bit, I went out to hunt up some food (meatballs and pizza margherita at Black Moon) and then to make a visit I'd been wanting to make since my previous weekend in Boise:
Yes, that deserved its own paragraph. It's just that fantastic. It's a bookstore that serves alcohol. Alternately, it's a bar that sells books.
Plenty of comfy chairs and table space for enjoying both types of purchase. Seems to be a popular meeting place for writing groups and book clubs. The decor includes antique typewriters, local artist exhibitions, asynchronous community discussion prompted by a question on a chalkboard ("What do you want to do before you die?"), and of course bookshelf after bookshelf stuffed with books for decoration, books for purchase, books, books, books.
So I sat up at the bar with a rice lager and my laptop, drafting the Friday Fictionette originally scheduled for April 25th into its final form. Then I went back to my room at the Arcadia and watched all four extant episodes of MURDERBOT on the big TV. The fourth episode is AMAZING.
Anyways, now it's noon on Saturday. I'm writing the bulk of this at Roots across the street - that's an organic/natural/local/bulk grocery with a deli counter and a lot of table space. I'd walked down to the river and peeked in at a couple restaurants and coffee shops, and was disappointed to find those that were open to have lines out the door and nowhere to sit. Resigned therefore to making myself tea and sandwiches in my tiny hotel room and getting to work in there, I found Roots to be a delightful surprise.
Might have to proof, link, and upload this later, though - I gotta get ready to go to the tournament venue.
P.S. Games streaming at Good BOI Studios!