March deadline: shifted priorities, hospital visits, and no charge for April (Patreon)

TL;DR: Nothing got (fully) finished this month because priorities shifted to a sick baby and helping my girlfriend hand in her PhD in time. Thus, no charge for April as promised. Also, our baby, dog, and cat are on the pictures (as requested) and the bug from my last post has been fixed by Adobe Acrobat.

Another month without any updates and still no new version? You probably guessed it already: I didn’t finish in time what I set out to do. There is no new version ready yet, as I haven’t (even) finished updating the sheet’s base code to accommodate the new rule options introduced with the latest publications. I did manage to finish some changes to make the life or artificers and other (sub)classes with scaling companions better, but that’s about it.

Instead, this month my priorities had to shift to a sick baby. See, I made the mistake of thinking that going to nursery would allow us to have time to work on stuff. And although that was true for the first day, my daughter brought home some disease that floored the three of us for a week. We even did a COVID-test, but it turned out to be something else.

The second week of this month went pretty well, three days of both of us getting some work done.

But when the third week came around everything changed. Our daughter got sick again and wasn’t allowed back to the nursery. Her nose has been constantly blocked so much and so quickly after each cleaning that she couldn’t sleep for more than an hour. This all accumulated in a emergency room visit this weekend and her being admitted to the hospital for three days. It was heart-breaking seeing her hooked up with oxygen and all the wires for measuring stuff. Luckily, we could come home yesterday, because for a while there I was sure I was going to have to write this post from the hospital. She is doing much better now, although sleeping for longer stretches is still not an option as we need to keep her airways free.

I guess it is all part of becoming new parents, but it certainly messes with your schedule ;)

Talking about schedules, this wasn’t the only thing ongoing this month. My girlfriend had a much harder ordeal. She had until this Monday to finish her PhD thesis and progress was already (expectedly) slow during the months of being pregnant and while on maternity leave. Also not having this last month to finish the final stuff was really increasing the stress levels.

Thus, I decided to stop working on the character sheet and instead take care of our daughter as much as I could (not that I could do everything, men have some certain anatomical disadvantages when it comes to feeding babies). This gave my girlfriend the needed time to finish her writing, but she still ended up sending the final version from a hospital room. Any time I did have to work on stuff, I spent helping with the layout of the thesis and not on the character sheet.

April promises to be a lot less stressful, because at least not both of us are faced with a deadline. Do I feel a bit dumb self-imposing a deadline like this. I would be lying if I said no, but I would do it again, because I know how much everybody has been looking forward to the next updates and you deserve to be able to play around with all the new shiny stuff! Heck, I started playing an College of Eloquence Bard in a campaign and can’t even use my own sheet to properly stat him out, which is just silly.

As promised, there will again be no charge for April 2021. I will continue on my quest to get the sheet compatible with all the missing content and fully intend to get this finished over the next few weeks.

Does that also mean that I will pause this Patreon again if I don't finish before May? No. Even though I'm confident that I can get this done in done, I'm not going to promise there won't be another baby-related curve ball that causes a shift in priorities.

If you are wondering why this post comes with an image of a baby, a dog and a cat, that is because some people have been asking me for pictures of the new additions to the family since my post back in December and now it is time to deliver. The pictures are a bit old, as our four month old daughter is only three weeks old on her picture (but it is such a great picture, I couldn’t not use it), the picture of the dog is the first week she was with us, and the picture of the cat is before we had our own garden and would take him for a walk on the leash every day (yes, he loves to be cared around by me like that so he could look over the hedges).

In other news, the bug in Adobe Acrobat that caused the older versions of my sheet to crash (v12.999 and older) has been fixed after listening to my bug report (this almost never happens).

Probably none of you are still using the old versions, but this news does mean that you can again import a character from those old versions into the latest version of the sheet without any problem. Just make sure to update your Adobe Acrobat DC Reader (or Pro/Standard) installation to the latest version.