My playdate arrived while I was in Melbourne last week! I pre-ordered it when they opened back in 2021, and it was absolutely worth the wait! The hardware itself so solid and adorable and the OS is whimsical AF. It shipped with a couple of games which I am very bad at, but there are 2 massive standouts in the catalog. Recommendation Dog, a game in which people burst in to your office asking for a personnel recommendation, and you need to spin through your rolodex of candidates and recommend one matching their criteria. Word Trip, a game by Shaun Inman, in which you need to travel between words before your fuel runs out by taking three letters of the first word, and one of the target until you can make the target word.

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I am back in Canberra this week, and glad to be back in my home office :D While I do love seeing work people in person, it's nice to have a setup that is actually functional and that I don't need to pack up each night. Speaking of work people, I was able to catch up with co-worker who was passing through Canberra this week, which was really really nice, since I think the last time we saw each other, we were basically saying goodbye to our team as it was being exploded.

One of the things I do miss about the morning commute is being able to sit at a cafe or a park and listen to a podcast. However, a new cafe did open up a few suburbs away and it's a good distance away, so I can take the dogs for a walk in the morning, stop for a coffee and then head back! I visited a couple of times over the week, but on Thursday, their front window was smashed in (for, as far as we know, funsies). Which is super disappointing to see, but the way the community has rallied around them is way more heartening than a few jerks breaking windows. So I hope to go back in the coming days as they get their shopfront repaired and back to normal :D

We also had some yard visitors this week. This Gang Gang pair dropped by for a very noisy break. if you have never heard a Gang Gang's call, I highly recommend you look it up ;)

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