Week 26 of 2026: heat

Last week was very hot and ended in a thunderstorm that flooded our bike parking and the rest of the ground floor of our building. But cancelled plans lead to other plans and although I don’t consider weather above 30ºC “nice” anymore, I still had a great summer week.

Read

The book about sign language is not finished, but I just didn’t get to it this week. I guess motivation is less now that I have almost finished all the chapters about grammar, and now that the only deaf person I know stated that he does not actually use the grammar, but the word order of spoken Dutch. I read a bit in the other book though, and I still want to know more about Dutch sign language.

• continued In Deeper Waters by F.T. Lukens

Played

On Tuesday I ran the fourteenth episode of my ongoing Mausritter campaign. This was a weird one: for once I had prepared a storyline because some players gave me the feedback they wanted to “get more done”, and I knew they would be there this week. However, they did not seem to want to do what I hinted to was the “main content”, and went the complete opposite direction on the map. It ended up to be a very hot evening of improvisation and looking up old notes, but it was fun nonetheless.

On Wednesday I played Big Gay Orcs, a Grant Howitt one page RPG and it gave everything we wanted. The climax of this game was my character catapulting another player’s character into the opposing warlord with their new found partner – both of them sharing a wish to die on the battlefield. I somehow rolled three sixes (on 3d6) on the roll to aim and pull the pin. It also turned out me and another player’s orc had the exact same Reputation, Motivation and Secret – another virtual three sixes on 3d6 – so we found love in the end too. An unexpected happy ending.

On Saturday I played Trophy Dark instead of running 28.3km (see “Running”). I knew nothing about this game, including the fact that I had signed up for the other table at the event, but due to cancellations it made more sense for me to even out the tables and to play this one. It turned out to be from the same publisher as Brindlewood Bay, but now we were a bunch of members of an occult organization in 1902, trying to summon some creature. Weirdly enough, it turned into a bit of a contest in the end and my roll was the highest, so I guess this is the first time I “won” an RPG? It was still fun though.

Ran

Since I already had the suspicion the Midzomermarathon would be cancelled, I did a bit more running than I originally intended. On Wednesday morning I ran 6.7km on an easy pace, but I was already greeted by a lot of heat and my heartrate was way higher than usual.

On Thursday, I ran back from volleyball in a 2-1-1 tempo run. I did not run the 2, 1 and 1 km at 4:15/km as planned, because it was still super hot and 4:45/km was good enough for me. Runna put my place back for future runs because of this, but I don’t mind.

The 28.3km run during the Midzomermarathon on Saturday was indeed cancelled – there would have been more ºC than km, and on this kind of distance, that’s significant. Instead, I ran a half marathon to Scheveningen from my parent’s house in Leiden. Thanks to getting lost at Wassenaarse Slag it turned into a 22.6km run, which is the longest distance I ever ran. The last 6.5km of it were on the beach with a strong headwind, which was way tougher than I expected, but I made it to the Pier in the end!