February 9, 2025 - bloghan 33

This weekend was hustle. This week actually was pure hustle. I'm beginning to believe! Alright well maybe it was actually a bit of a tough week, but I think I handled it very well. Here's what went down this week:

Tier list of the week

This week's tier list: tarot cards. I got myself a pack just for fun really, but I don't really know what esactly to do with it. Honestly, in the religion I consider myself a former member of it's probably a pretty egregious sin just owning them. I don't care for divination because they are just cards, and all "divination" is just saying things vaguely enough so that they can apply to your life for literally any situation. But I will admit, the cards do look kinda neat. Rider-Waite designs are the ones that I'm considering in this tier list:

Ordered tiers, unordered within tiers. This is based on vibes and how easy it is to tell what's going on with it, or what it's supposed to mean. Divination isn't real, but each card is a work of art and usually art has some sort of meaning to it. For that reason, most of the major arcana cards are near the top, and a lot of the higher ranking cards within the suits of the minor arcana are also near the top, but not quite always at the very very top like they are. For numbered suit cards, they really are subjective, but I can talk about the two in F-tier. Eight of wands is just eight sticks at an angle. That's it. What am I supopsed to make of that? Honestly, the whole wands suit is kinda weak anyways, but I guess there isn't much you can do with literal sticks. Three of pentacles is down there too because those aren't the coins that are supposed to be there! I don't like this card since it breaks the consistency of the pentacles suit. Hmmm.... Maybe I'm a little too invested in this tarot card thing.

Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)

I wake up after my alarm on Monday. By how much? Uh... half an hour????? I stay in bed for another 5 minutes. I wonder, "should I just call in sick or something?" No, I probably shouldn't. Time to get ready. I evaluate in my head what things I'm going to have to sacrifice this morning. Breakfast, tea, headphones out the door: those are getting skipped. I make my sandwich, shovel the snow outside my door (my landlord asked me to do it yesterday, I didn't get the notif until today???), and I run out to the bus station. I make it in time.... I could've made breakfast. I get to work and while I'm not feeling at my best, I do the one thing I probably do the most at work: look at my phone. I do this until I get a message from a coworker. She's the one who's been helping me with just about everything related to this new project and these nightly things I've been asked to do. She's finally read my message where I tell her that yet another person has said to use this one file, and she finally seems to accept it, telling me to use that file. Now, while I have managed to figure out where this file is, I have no idea where I'm supposed to actually use it. How do I let the nightly stuff know that it's this specific file that it needs to use? I let her know, but the subject gets changed on me. Apparently, the team that's directly above us needs some formal results of one of these nightly runs (currently, it is gating their progress), and I've been selected to provide this, takign priority over what she just asked me. Why me? Sure, I'll do it. But why me? Well, I start looking into how I should do this, and I found a document that someone on my team must've made at some point. It's very long, very wordy, and very dense. Luckily for me, apparently there's an easier way? I'm very glad that I asked my go-to on these nightly tasks about that guide before I tried following it. In the call, she walks me through that easy process, which involves opening the email that gets sent when the nightly thing finishes, then scrolling to the bottom and running some command that just shows up there. She tells me to open some other window so I can look at the project, and I do, but not in the window where I'm currently sharing my screen. We sit there awkwardly as I wait for her to tell me what to do next and she waits for me to open it. It's a bit embarrassing when the misunderstanding does get cleared up, but I like to think that I took it in stride (I didn't). She shows me this one fancy tool, and tells me hwo exactly I'm going to use it for this upcoming task. I know I have been getting pretty clear instructions on how to do things before, but this instance somehow feels refreshing. Once the process is clear to me, we end the call and I start the test run. Which fails immediately. I get up to go get some tea from the break room and - wait, it failed immediately?? I got an email from the system as well, detailing why it failed immediately. Apparently, it's because one of the tests that was supposed to get run just... didn't? This test has never showed up before on any other emails. Everything else is in the green, it's just this thing. When I let my go-to know, she asks for my desk number and visits me. I think our little corner is a bit overwhelming for her, with my work rival's very messy desk and my cursed desk, as well as the equally cursed drawings on the whiteboards. I get an explanation on how this whole process works and the difference between this thing I'm giving to that higher up team, and the nightly stuff. I already knew that, but I guess this is important context? She goes on about some more specific things, like the individual tests and all that, and which files and all that control which other things. Honestly, I'm more interested in seeing any sort of reaction to the absurdity of my desk, but the constant eye contact I made revealed absolutely nothing. Hmm... she's good. She leaves, telling me that there's a specific command she can give me so that I don't have to rely on the email, and she leaves. Man, I really like working with her. I try that one, and it also fails. Ok, what is going on now? I let her know, and she immediately figures out why it's failing, and I suddenly find myself getting added to a group chat with her and a whole bunch of managers and other people who have been with this tema for a very very long time. It's a bit overwhelming, and she's asking who is reponsible for some file that's missing. I'm just going to stay silent in this thing, I have no business being here, I guess. Soon it's time for lunch, but I actually kind of want to sit at my desk and watch what's unfolding here, as well as do some bloghan work. I stay at my desk as everyone struggles to find a place to sit, adn eventually they just up and book a meeting room on my floor. Well, I guess I'll go join them then. While there, the group plays 'President' as I respond to my messages. I ask my go-to personally on if there's a deadline for this thing we have to give to the higher up team, and her response? "Yes, today [laughing face]." That took me aback by a lot. What am I supposed to say to that??? I guess she must've saw that I left the message on read and didn't say anything, because her follow-up to that was "hey, don't panic when a deadline is this close, this is just a part pf the learning process [smiley face]." That had me howling. I wasn't worried, since the ball was not in my hands to play, even if it was in my team's court. Pretty soon after finishing my lunch, I headed back to my desk, and ignoring my want to work on something, I ended up reading out the 'Jeopardy!' clues from last week to my predecessor and my work rival, since they missed the event. My predecessor actually got quite a lot of them, many that the other team completely missed, while my work rival got exactly 0. Gee... I didn't know he was THAT bad. Once we had gone through all the clues, the rest of my work day was spent on bloghan and such, but before I could leave, the not-manager asked me to regenerate some files, due to some mismatching order of some entries or whatever. I thought I fixed that... I guess I didn't. I made my fix and reran the relevant Absconder, then bloghan wrote and talked with my coworkers until it was time to leave. Nothing special happened on the way, but there was quite a bit of snowfall. I had been observing the massive flurries through the window all day, with the snow being a pretty common topic of conversation during the various visits I got from others this day. I was enjoying it quite thoroughly as I walked back, and it wasn't all that cold either - perfect. I got home and prepared a cup of hot chocolate, then hopped into a voice call with my random teamamtes for my course. We were supposed to look into some sort of ethical dilemma in human history, and we were first deciding which one we wanted to do. They settled on Chernobyl... ah, great. While there are all sorts of ethical dilemmas present there, I just feel like it's too big to be specific enough about the dilemma we will eventually go for. Also, we were literally advised to not choose big disasters. If I only had some other alternatives things to propose, I would have! But unfortunately for me, I wouldn't be able to think of those until hours affter that meeting, and I had a strong suspicion that things were already looking very "over" for this course. Of course it had to be me. Make me feel like maybe I got a good group, until it falls apart on me right after I feel the height of that elation. Classic. The rest of Monday is all about writing, just catching up on everythign and doing some writing even for some new things, like leaving a whole bunch of comments for my new group members to follow. I know I'm still going to have to go back and proofread all of their work very carefully, but that's just how it be when you are assigned into a random group. I ended up staying up really late for this, and went to sleep extremely drained.

Unfortunately, Tuesday morning began exactly like Monday morning. In comparison to yesterday though, I had an extra three minutes! This turned out to be enough time for me to be able to have oatmeal and tea for breakfast, and I didn't have to run out for the bus this time. Now, I may have forgotten to take out the trash, but it was pretty empty to begin with so it's alright! I got to work, and things were just kind of normal: Steve was complaining, my Japanese coworker was busy, and my work rival was not in. I had an opportunity to work a little bit, as the not-manager had gotten back to me about what I gave him yesterday. Something I had previously fixed was back... this is what happens when you have two different versions of the same thing floating around. I really need to just get down to business and figure that out. I started regenerating that, and went ahead with some writing stuff, and some wasting time on my phone. That's basically how the morning went. There weren't really any notable visits at all, maybe a couple conversations about D&D and holes in jeans with various people. My work rival brought some snacks to his desk, ones that the fanatic had brought in this morning, offering me one. This was an act of kindness that I could not let go unpunished, so I started reading out the ingredients in it, then added "whiskey" third last. Once I told him I couldn't eat it because of that, it got him so panicked (he can't have alcohol) that he read the ingredients back out loud. Once he discovered thatmy lie, he pleaded that I didn't tell the others. I won't, not because I suddenly respect or care for his wishes, but because it was kind of low hanging fruit. There's not much to it, it just kinda worked. Up until lunch, I worked on some planning for tomorrow's D&D session, which I continued to do when we went down for lunch. As I ate, some people started playing 'President,' and I started up an incorrectly played game of 'Texas holdem,' where I dealt and everyone who wasn't playing 'President' joined. It was pretty fun, but I think it would be more interesting if we had more than a third of a deck available to us. We headed upstairs, my co-DM accidentally punched my mouth with her swinging arms, and I went back to my desk to write just a little bit more D&D stuff, and a lot more bloghan. Before I could get started on the latter though, my manager called me over to a meeting room. Once I got over the nervousness, I walked in, and he asked how I was doing. When I told him tired, he got curious, so I quickly corrected and said it was because I've been going to bed really late recently, not because of work. He joked about me being up gaming, and I joked back: "I wish!" We started the meeting then, and it was about those nightly runs all over again. In last night's occurence, there were a bunch of errors with things just not starting. It was on me to fix all of them. Oh, wonderful. Well, ok there was one that wasn't on me, but the rest were. And most of them weren't technically for me to fix, just for me to find out more on so we could figure out how I (or someone else) could fix it. Once we left the meeting room, we were still talking. One of the action items I got was to update the version of the flow being done overnight. I asked if it would be as easy as changing a single line in a file somewhere, expressing that I didn't believe that would be the case in the same breath. To my surprise, my manager confirmed it was just one line change. I guess this will be at least a little easier than I thought it would be. I get back to my desk and ask my go-to for nightly questions about what my manager had just tasked me with, and at the same time, she asked me what was happening with my third nightly run. Three? Oh, I guess I remember that the first nightly run thing had another part to it. I guess those were more separate that I though? I told her I'd look into that, then proceeded to not look into that. I started up a test run to see if that "one line change" thing my manager said would actually work, and while I waited for the results, I wrote some bloghan. That's what eventually became the rest of my shift, as I typed bloghan and got into other distractions, made conversation with a lot of others as they visited me, and watched the test run take HOURS longer than it should have. Like, seriously, it was only supposed to be one hour, but it ended up going on for more than 3! All the way up until it was time to leave, which I did without event and with a little frustration at myself for not choosing a smaller test run. Once I get home, I decide to finish off the last of the homemade (workmade?) tiramisu, then on all the writing that I've got: D&D, bloghan, my assignments, so much! That's basically all I do until I go to bed.

Since I went to bed an hour earlier last night, I managed to wake up ten minutes earlier, which is enough time to shave. I already feel so much better. I get to work and sit myself down to look into the thing my manager asked me to do. It had finished running last night, and I could go over the errors. Before I started solving, I got a visit from my co-DM, telling me about what she printed, and we ended up talking about Sri Lanka for quite a while. When she eventually left, I solved a couple of those errors pretty easily, and while I waited for other things to run to verify my fixes, I read 'One Piece,' finishing the 'Punk Hazard' arc in its entirety only an hour before we went down for D&D. Yes, yes, I had lunch at my desk, and some other requests and errors to go through (my go-to wanted to know why one of the nightly things wasn't running anymore, and I found out why: because of a missing file...), but overall, I literally spent most of my work day just reading 'Punk Hazard.' Now from the media I'm reading, I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe, chemical and biological warfare and weapons are a pretty bad thing. This arc was just plain cool (and hot). Slaying of dragons, samurai, setting up hooks for all kinds of alliances and for villains. It's all just so exciting. I think my favourite part of this arc was not necessarily anything in it, but just the things that it has been setting up for. Kaidou, Wano, Momonosuke, Zoro's katana from Wano, and of course the closer stuff like Doflamingo and Dressrosa, Law and Kid coming back too, as well as all the callbacks to things that had previously happened: Smoker and Tashigi teaming up with the Straw Hats in Arabasta, Luffy's bullet bouncing technique - so much good stuff! I'm really excited to see where things go from here, especially with this alliance (I'm sure Law is beginning to regret it now...) and Doflamingo's rage, but I do think I need to take a big break from 'One Piece.' It completely absorbed all my time, even though I got some work in during the side-scrolling streak. Once I had finished, I worked on a bit of bloghan up until it was time for D&D. We had to wait a long while again, but this week it was because of my Japanese coworker being trapped in a one-on-one meeting with a team member. After waiting for him to finish for a little bit, we ended up just going downstairs to the meeting room to get set up, and start levelling up characters and explaining new features. Once our group had become whole, we started the session. Now, my co-DM and I didn't really plan this one out together too much, where I mostly planned the start and she planned mostly the end. I ended up taking a little too long for the beginning of the session (I just wanted to show off all my cool NPCs!! That I made too many of...). My co-DM also set up a little symbolism moment in the middle of the session, involving some crows, but the players were so sure that it was some sort of adventure hook that they began to investigate the area for a long while. Eventually, they made it to the quest hook at the capital city, and they got to try out their new combat abilities in a short but tough gauntlet. The paladin and fighter were dealing huge damage, the rogue wasn't getting hit at all, and the artificer was being a menace at range. Now, each player had some things to say about the way they're playing: the fighter felt like all he was doing was using the most consistent option all the time, the paladin felt like he had no choice but to kill, the artificer felt like he was lagging way behing in damage output, and the rogue felt like he wasn't utilizing all the skills he had chosen way bakc in character creation. I don't want to say those issues are their fault for the way they play the game, because while they do control their characters and are not choosing from other options, sometimes it's hard to explore other options when you're just not as aware of them. The next session will not be combat heavy, and hopefully that satiates some of their concerns. We stay for an extra hour compared to the last session, and on the ride home I collect feedback. When I do get home, I know that I should be doing some writing, just some thing... but instead I ended up just rereading segments of 'Punk Hazard' and thinking more and more about the story so far. I ate the last of my biryani after losing a fight with myself to choose the better option of doing something useful, and went to sleep.

Thursday was a more productive day. With me getting really lucky with bus timing, I got to the office before the fanatic did. This day, I was motsly focusing on work. My manager was kind of hounding me to make sure I was working on clearing up those errors, and I submitted one of my fixes for it too. I delved into trying to figure out another set of things that were supposed to be running but weren't, and I also got a message back from a very respected staff guy on our team. My manger told me to connect with him for a certain couple errors I saw, but I didn't get a response from staff guy then. Now though, he was available to talk to me, so we called. He asked me how things were, and I shared only about half of my typical response (it's not what I expected coming out of school but what I have been doing makes more sense and is cooler anyways!) before he interrupted. He goes on this whole tangent about how he even does not do a bunch of things from school and about how the school system failed me especially.... uh, alright, I was about to say that I really enjoyed this different perspective and skill set that I've developed here, but ok go off I guess. He asks to see something on my screen, but as I got to activate it, I realize I never actually ran the tests myself to enable it. He sees it too, and tells me to message him once I have run the correct thing. After offering me some criticisms of the way I orgranize my device and telling me to come to him with any questions, the call ends. I feel a bit embarrassed about this, so I focus on another set of errors to examine in the meantime. I eat lunch at my desk too, taking a bit of a break to just be on my phone, which ends up going on too long. The rest of my workday consists of me balancing conversations (work rival and fanatic and compatriot wanted to talk money, gacha, anime, and 'Jeopardy!'; predecessor and I talked work and the errors we were both working on; co-DM and Japanese coworker talked JavaScript and just how weird some of the stuff we find at work is) and also continuing to track down this error. I spend hours looking for where it's happeneing: I eventually track it to some sub-flow in the overall nightly flow that's suppose to read and supply data to the tests inside, that seems to not be doing that. Because of this lack of data, those inner tests just give up and don't go through. Further tracing than that though, proves very very difficult. I just keep running into walls when trying, up until it's time to leave. Well... I guess that's a problem for tomorrow, maybe Monday. I go back to my place, whistling loudly as ever, and after standing still in the middle of a road while crossing it (it was only for like 7 seconds), and checking my grade for that infographic assignment (61/70... way better than the 49/70 that I was expecting), I get back to my place. No time for rest though! It's time for 'Jeopardy!' This is with my friends from my home city again, and I'm playtesting this board to see if it's good. Also, these guys just really liked this little game, so they were down as well. The game goes well, and it has a lot less contentious stuff in it too. That research I did in organizing 'Jeopardy!' categories really contributed to that, and being a little more selective with what kinds of categories I used helped make the board feel less repetitive. This game also saw them not just blank out on as many questions, and rack up quite a lot of money. The final round was also made not too difficult like the last time, which was a needed change just for the excitement. However, it's still enough to be tricky, and one player lost everything while the other gained $6969. After this, we had a little feedback session (interrupted by some classic 'HamuHamu' and 'Shadow the Hedgehog: Reloaded' playthroughs as we waited for one person to come back), and we ended the call after that. Following this, I prepared some pierogies for dinner and spent awhole bunch of time starting up a new 'Jeopardy!' board (they wanted a tiebreaker game... oh boy), and playing some games and catching up on some videos. It ended up becoming really late, so I slowly got into my bed, feeling drained.

I wake up on Friday morning, feeling very very rested. Ah, it's so nice! What time is it... I see... 45 minutes after I'm supposed to start work... what. Wait wait wait wait wait oh no. I jump out of bed, yank my work laptop out of my bag, turn it on, rush to wash up and get some water boiling, sit down and make sure I didn't have any messages needing me. I had two, one needing me for something, and one with just information. Well, could be worse. Good thing today was a work from home day. My manager needs me to make some update to that diagram and spreadsheet, since some people noticed a very subtle little thing. It wasn't a mistake with my documents per se, just something being overridden that no one had noticed. Sneaky, sneaky..! Once I finish my update and my manager tells me to leave a commment so other see that I made the change, I turn to my laptop and begin to work on some of the writing I've been missing out on. Before that though, I go on my phone, curiously opening some of my apps to check things out. Upon opening Amazon, I realize that my order actually arrived a day early, meaning that my original plan of picking the stuff up on Saturday would actually mean they'll get returned! Oh no... I've got to step out of work for a while, and head to the locker. I quickly get ready, and once I have everything and update my status to show I'm going out for a bit, I walk out. It's a very sunny day, only a little cold. I get on the bus and make it to that same pizza restauarant, dodging the van that almost hits me in the parking lot by not even observing it or reacting to it at all. Thankfully, my package isn't in the top shelves this time, and it's neatly in the middle in some brown paper wrapping. I decide to grab some pizza slices for lunch, and I walk out of the place with a choice: walk back to my place around 2.5 kilometers for 30 minutes, or wait 10 minutes for a bus that'll get me back in another 10 minutes. 2.5 enjoyable kilometers later, I make it back right before my status of "back in 45 minutes" becomes an untruth, though at this point I don't start doing more work. No, actually, I'm mainly working on writing up Thursday's entry on this bloghan, since I didn't write any of it on that day. Before I can make much headway on that though, my randomly assigned group members start messaging each other, asking if we have everything done. I haven't looked at our first assignment's progress in a while, but when I check it, it makes me wish that this was a solo project, because what is this?? Where's the thinking? This is all just repeating facts, repeating history tidbits, but no actual attempts at analysis. This assignment isn't even meant for us to actually do the full analysis of things, just to start opening the process of that analysis and showing that we do intend to analyze in the first place. I bring this up, and realize I could do a little manipulation here to take a little more control over the project. I subtly tried to throw one person under the bus for the low quality writing, then offered to take over when he conveniently told us he wouldn't be able to work on it for a while. Building up some false rapport with the others was easily achieved by going off topic to talk about courses I knew they struggled in. Then, I made some new ideas for the section I was taking over, so that they would feel like they got a choice in what I wrote about. Do get them to actually choose though, I phrased it as something for them to review and go over, which they were already doing to some written work that actually needed to be reviewed. This got them to choose an option, solidifying myself as the one in charge of that little part of writing. Man, I really do love being evil. Once those negotiations were done with, I had a quick conversation with my comp sci friend about a different kind of ethics: work ethic. Oh, and I guess also about freedom and Kanye West and about what one does with freedom. Fun convo, would have again. The rest of this work shift ended up being me getting distracted by something on my regular laptop, with only a little bit of bloghan writing actually going on. Mostly, it's talking with friends or watching videos play out before me. Man, I really need to whip myself up into shape huh... Once I'm done with work and close my laptop (don't worry, I worked an extra 45 minutes to make up for the morning), I fully dedicate myself to working on bloghan. Actually using my "lock in" playlist I made a while back is actually making my fingers fly off the keyboard as I type and type away, managing to catch up all the way and even do some other sections. I even get enough time to catch upon the thoughts section (I am so glad I didn't commit to doing them daily) and finished off another 'Jeopardy!' board. After cooking, I worked hard on the assignment, but because of various distractions and a great desire to not want to do this, I pushed myself to stay up extremely late. This was actually the latest I had stayed up yet, to almost 5 in the morning. The actual work done was only like an hour really... I went to bed feeling drained and not fully happy with what I wrote, but I knew that I could fix it up tomorrow.

Like last Saturday, I mostly dedicated myself to course work today, finishing up one section that needed fixes. I had a couple calls in the middle of all this with one of my teammates, just discussing what things would need to be changed. This day, I ended up fixing two sections: both of them had good content, but the problem was that they sought to answer the wrong questions. Sure, they followed the rubric (the instructor generated the rubric with AI, which I think led to some confusion), but they didn't follow the rest of the document which told them what to write about!! It took me a long while to do, and I had to go back and forth with my group members to convince them that this is what the assignment wanted. It took me from the morning to the evening to do this. It was quite a bit of effort, but I managed to manuever myself to take full control of the group assignment. At one point I actually got up and laughed out loud at how easy it was to manipulate them. I love being evil and unwholesome, actually. Once that was all taken care of, and the assignment submitted, I had a very long extended conversation with a friend from my home city. Now I won't say what we were doing, since it was a little "game" that we used to "play" way back in 2022 that's kind of girly and humiliating for me specifically (and a secret game that we agreed to keep secret), but I must admit... as terrifying as the game was, it's just as much fun as it was back then. Following this was an unboxing of my Amazon package that I did with a different friend form my home city, where we easily got distracted by turning on our cameras and talking about random things (how people hold rods, 'The Fantastic 4: First Steps' poster using AI, random stuff about cards, music like 'Not Like Us' and 'Fingers In His A**,' and some history of tarot cards). I got her to help me with making the tier list of this week too! We wrapped the call after about an hour, which genuinely surprised me. It really did not feel like an hour, I thought we were just talking for like 30 minutes. After this, I made some dinner, using the last of the barbeque pork for my fried noodle. I need to thank Steve for suggesting that I get some... it tasted so good! Soon, it was time to wind down for the night, and after I submitted my grocery order for tomorrow, I headed to the washroom to brush my teeth and go to bed. Except... I saw the bottle of hair removal cream that I had moved into the washroom. Well, I did say I was going to try doing it this week. I wasn't expecting to have to work as much on my course this week, but I might as well try the test patch this late at night. I rush out of the washroom to grab my phone, since I need a timer, and squirt a bit of cream on the provided scraper. It smells nice, but I know that these things can be dangerous. I take a deep breath, and smear it in a small circle on my left thigh. I wait two minutes, just scrolling on social media on my phone as I wait. I feel a tingling sensation on the spot, though I'm not sure if it feels like burning or just tingling. It doesn't hurt though, so I don't immediately get in the shower and rins it off. Once the two minutes is up, I scrape some from the side to see that no hair got removed. Huh. Re-reading the instructions, it says that it's ok to leave on for a little longer if nothing happens, but not longer than 6 minutes. Ok... I smear the stuff on the scraper back onto the spot, and give it another 2 minutes. The tingling remains, but I think it's a good sign that it doesn't seem to get stronger or anything. Once time's up, I scrape and there's now a small circle of skin with no hair. I really can't believe that it worked. I mean, I know it's literally made to do that but... it worked! I don't think I've ever seen my skin like that. Looking closesly, I can see there's still a little bit of hair there, so maybe I need to do it for 5 minutes? I rinse my leg vigorously after this, as the consequences of leaving it on do kind of terrify me, but wow! This stuff seems to work pretty well. It's honestly really exciting, and I can't wait to use it on more of my leg. And the other leg too. I've got to wait a little bit though, just to make sure I don't develop any sort of rash on that circle. It says wait 24 hours, but I think 18 hours should probably be enough. I head to bed, thinking to myself that it was a pretty good day overall, even if I had to do a bunch of work for others.

Finally, Sunday. I woke up later than I wanted to, but I think I can still do all the things I want to get done today. Opening the blinds and seeing the sun and the falling snow is comforting, at least. The morning starts first with breakfast, using up the last of my bacon, and first bit of the afternoon are all bloghan and distractions slowing that last item down, but I manage to catch up once I realize that I accidentally got distracted well into the afternoon. Once I caught up, next was to catch up on another thing: sweeping the floor. It's been an embarrassing amount of time since I last did it. First though, I grab a box in my recycling bin and an extra plastic bag, and fashion a little garbage box. Reason for making it: the trashcan I use is much bigger than the bag, so dust from the dustpan falls into the bin, not the bag. This box fits the bag much better, so I'll just transfer stuff between the bins when needed. I begin to sweep, and I'm just collecting so much dust and it's pretty disgusting. I make the mistake of shaking one of my carpets on the floor, making a sound like gravel on the floor. I move the carpets outside and shake them there. Back inside, I put water in a mop bucket to step in, to keep my feet clean of dust. I realize that I should probably also have a thing to dry my feet with after stepping in the water, so I grab some sweatpants from my laundry hamper. I did it a bit too roughly though, and actually end up collapsing the hamper. Oh no. This isn't my hamper, but my landlord's, and I've got to at least make some sort of temporary fix. After quite a bit of tape engineering, I make a very temporary fix that could honestly explode at any time, but as long as I have tape that hamper will stay standing. I finish off the rest of my sweeping, and I'm very surprised by how little dust appears to be in the bag. It took me an hour to get to a level of cleanliness that I was happy with, and I felt like I was getting a 0.5mm thick layer of dust everytime I swept stuff into my dustpan. Afterwards, I cooked a lunch of pierogies (washed dishes at the same time, why is the soap not lathering??), did some laundry (the hamper's still holding up for now...), grabbed my grocery order (why is everyone wearing jackets? it's sunny outside), and caught up bloghan. My landlord started shoveling outside though, so I temporarily stopped typing away to food up some clothes and pretend like I was sweeping more. She can see in my place when I have the blinds open, and I had a feeling that she wanted to talk to me about something. Eventually, she knocked, and we had a conversation about if it was wamr enough inside for me, about the groceries she got, and warning me to be more proactive about shoveling outside. All fair, all fair. I really got lucky with landlords, huh? I finish my fake sweeping (I found some stuff to actually sweep), then went for a shave (not my legs, my face). Once this finished, I went ahead and stripped my bed of its sheets and threw those in the wash, then finally mopped my bathroom after months. I was anticipating it taking a long time, but it actually took less than an hour to sweep the floor (mounds of dust, more than the rest of my floor), clean the sink and toilet, mop the floor, and rinse the shower floor. If I had known that it would take less than an hour, I would've been doing it more often! Once I was finished, the washing machine was still going, so I wrote more bloghan and got some snacks as I waited. Just as I finished those snacks, the washing machine finished, so I put in the thickest sheet, started both the extremely squeaky dryer for the last batch and the washing machine for the new batch, and finished off bloghan and the dishes from lunch, in preparation for the chili I would make tonight. Once all that is done, I beign to prepare my lunch meat for this upcoming week, taking some flaked chicken and cooking it in cilantro for use later. At this point, I'm running out of things to do. Should I cook chili then remove hair? Or remove hair then cook chili? I choose the chili, decking it out with onion and cilantro. I also grab my big sheet out of the dryer, but it's so big that the inside is still a little damp, so I run the dryer again, opening and restarting it a couple times to rotate stuff. That finished, along with the chili around the same time, and after one last late night visit from my landlord (she's going grocery shopping tomorrow, so she'll buy my shopping list for me if I send it to her!), I eat and make my bed. And then, it's finally time. I'll spare the details of how the night went, but here are my observations and other notes, in no particular order (including chronological):

how are you supposed to get the area under your legs?????
wow I really should've scheduled 6 hours for this, not 1
I can't even reliably get the underleg how am I supposed to get the glute area???????
my shower floor looks like the floor of a barbershop right after I get a haircut that's 6 months after my last one
large swaths make it go by faster, but require you to play fast and loose with the time you leave it on
cream, please do not jump to other organs and limbs
that cursed technique which caused me to never wear shorts again is proving very handy to remove hairs that the scraper can't
why don't people shower with glasses on??
so it feels like shaving your legs is not something you should be doing every 20 years, but maybe a little more frequently
WHY DO I HAVE TEXT IN AN INDIC SCRIPT BURNED ON MY LOWER LEFT LEG??????
oh that's why people don't shower with glasses on
the scraper actually does seem to have some utility, even when you switch to hand application
too much water seems to dilute the cream too much, but I need to frequently apply water to rinse it off
I am so glad I mopped the bathroom today
I'm going to need to do a round 2 application tomorrow

Once that was all done and taken care of, I set a motion forth to my internal scheduling system to do this again tomorrow, and get every last hair then. It was getting extremely late, so I dried off, dried off more with my space heater, published this bloghan, and went to bed. And man. Those coworkers were right. Fresh sheets do hit different when your legs are (mostly) bare.

Future plans

Yeah so I ended up end-loading things again, and I know for sure that I didn't get everything that I wanted to get done, done. Soooooooo here's how last week's goals went:

PCB stuff: no progress on the one-bit adder project, no progress on the keyboard
Door: no progress
'One Piece': finished the 'Punk Hazard' arc. Very enjoyable, very cool, and very indicative of where we're going with this series! Love it, excited to see more.
That one assignment: Finished it with a little help
Cryptic crossword: made one this week: Original Mini Cryptic 16
'Yohane the Parhelion: NUMAZU in the MIRAGE': no progress made
D&D prep: more asynchronous planning for this week, should be a bit simpler compared to last week though.
Hair removal: did it and it just feels so good... maybe not "right," but good all the same

This week, I'm going to read some more 'Homestuck,' work towards a bit more of that 100% completion of 'Yohane the Parhelion: NUMAZU in the MIRAGE,' and make another cryptic mini crossword. I don't want to set too much right now though, because I have the feeling that something will hit me and hit me hard, adnt hat I'll need to prioritize it right away.

Song of the week

'GIRLS!!' (https://youtu.be/SjVV0EmimzA) from 'Yohane the Parhelion: SUNSHINE in the MIRROR' is the song of the week. I'm a guy, but I've always felt like I've been in this strange middle spot where I'm too masculine to be something of an analogue to the feminine, but not masculine enough to really fit in too well with the concept of "men." I mean, I am male, sure, but I don't really display the comon traits of them, you know? But I'm also not female, and I don't really have feminine physical traits, just more feminine behavioural ones? The thing is though, I don't really have a lot of those behavioural feminine traits, or those behavioural masculine traits, while leaning more physically towards male traits than female traits, but on a scale that's more like 60/40, rather than 90/10 or something. What I'm trying to say here is that my leg shaving experience this week has really opened my eyes. Wow.... this feels so comfortable. I love it so much. Now I'm pretty secure in my gender identity (I like to think), but maybe I shouldn't be so scared of embracing more feminine things. This song is something of a reminder to me about that. I mean, it literally opens with the line (lyrically translated by me) "It's so much fun being a girl, you know?" While it's not something I'm too interested in fully adapting in my life, it would be mad funny if I embraced it just a little bit more than I already do.

Until next time

Next week will probably be a tough week, but honestly looking at my work ethic throughout this week, I think I'm going to make it. Also, having these (mostly) smooth legs will be helpful, I think. Surely it will. In some way. Maybe. Uhhhhhh... see you next week?

- bubbler

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