Chores A-Side Effect

Given we have a long weekend, it was time to buck up and finish our Christmas decorating. This year we're missing the enthusiasm to decorate and have only made do with the main Christmas tree in the living room - no wreath in matching colours, no additional Christmas decor sprinkled all over the place.

So, today's plan was to at least have the Christmas wreath up on the front door grille.

Only...if it was as straightforward as that.

First up, remove the decoration currently on the door grille. This has been up for most of the year, so the grille's all dusty. And rusty too... So. Remove the plastic wrapped around the grille's (to prevent the decorations from scratching the grille). Wash the grille (Daiso's range of microfibre cloth with plastic handles make the job a bit easier), then spray some WD40 on.

Let it air, while cutting up new plastic sheets (we use book wrappers) to cover the grille (because the wreath has a wire base).

Next up, the main door and the door frame itself. A year of dust has been caught on the door and frame (since we get the wind blowing into the front of the house - the porch is littered with leaves every day ugh), so we've to wipe all that off.

OK now that the grille's dry, wrap up the grille bars that will be in contact with the wreath. Tape them up, and it's time to hang the wreath and decorate.

That part is pretty straightforward. We'd already set aside the ornaments meant for the wreath so it's just a matter of randomly hanging it about.

Now throughout all this we've been walking in and out of the house, and it's been very dusty so we'd to keep washing our feet every now and then because we do not plan to mop up today. Still, this meant the toilet's wet and we notice it's been a while since it's been washed.

Get the bleach, get the plastic broom, a quick scrub, and we're done.

Christmas decorating? 15 minutes.

Associated chores? 2 hours.

Cumulative Upkeep

We have so many games to play, and a fair few of them have daily check-in rewards or timers (due to their nature of being free-to-play) that it's sometimes ridiculous how much time we've to check in the games now.

But then most of the games are entertaining, which is why we still play them.

At this moment we have:

• Tiny Tower (started replaying since their 5th Anniversary Update)
• Pokemon Go (now with the daily rewards)
• Magic The Gathering Puzzle Quest
• Fantastic Beasts: Cases from the Wizarding World

Tiny Tower doesn't take much upkeep, so long as we check in once a day and tap to launch fireworks. Pokemon Go is a bit more challenging as we ought to get to a Pokestop at least once a day - we missed it once and now our Pokemon caught and Pokestop check-in streaks are 2 days apart.

The biggest culprits now are Magic The Gathering Puzzle Quest and Fantastic Beasts: Cases from the Wizarding World - these two games seem to eat into a bulk of our time now. With Fantastic Beasts, while we are limited by the amount of energy available, the energy recharges fairly fast that we can play every hour or so if we wanted to. As as for MtG Puzzle Quest? It can be endlessly engrossing as the game model keeps giving you freebies. It doesn't really lock away any cards from you i.e. pay to obtain rare cards, although it is slower when getting them through the in-game events or challenges or daily rewards.

That means we actually do end up spending a few hours in a day playing these games. Looking at the games right now, we're likely to stop Tiny Tower once we've built all the floors, and Fantastic Beasts when we've finished all the cases.

Pokemon? Hah. Just heard there's going to be an update with more Pokemons.

MtG Puzzle Quest? Even worse. This is the most Magic we've played (Magic Duels is just hogging up space on our iPad), because the quick game time works for us (hey, match-3). The gameplay flavour does match the card game mechanic and flavour (like colourless mana being colourless gems and how the Eldrazi interact with them).

The only way we're going to wean off these two games is if we have no Internet access at all for a good period of time.