May 25, 2025 - bloghan 48
Yeah, I don't know abut this week. I think "filled with regret" fits it best? It was raining all week too, so this week was really just not it. Here's what happened:
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: versions of the Windows OS. Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, unordered wthin tiers. I should make it clear that I've only experienced Vista, XP, 7, 8, 10, and 11. I've heard about all the rest. That being said, Windows XP felt great, and while Windows 7 might not have, it looked a whole lot nicer and still worked similarily. Windows 10 though... I'm mixed on it. I think I like it a lot more now than when I first started, but I can't lie that I miss Windows Media Player. Now Windows 8? That was terrible. Windows 11 feels so much worse than Windows 10, and my experience with it is a pre-debloated one courtesy of my current workplace. In my future I know I will be using Windows, but I've slowly (very very slowly) been making it so that I will only have to rely on Windows for certain progrmas that are only supported on Windows, and using Linux for everything else. Not quite there yet though, maybe once I get a new laptop I'll do that though!
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
Monday morning was rough, but it wasn't SO bad. I actually managed to wake up within a reasonable time of my alarm going off, and I ate breakfast within a reasonable time of that too! Now this day off was essentially completely dedicated to catching up on last week's bloghan, but I wanted to also cook this week's butter chicken and mop my washroom floor today too. I passed the morning with writing, and a little bit after midday I picked up my grocery delivery. Once my groceries were all packed away, I got back to writing. That is, until I started hearing some very loud buzzing in my apartment. I paused the video I had playing the background, and looked around. It sounded like it was above and to the right of me, where there was an air duct. Was there a large insect in the vents? That's going to be annoying. Everytime I tried to resume my video and my writing, I would hear the sound, and it kept getting louder. Each time the buzzing renewed again, I would jump a little bit. Eventually, it got loud to the point where I slammed my knee into my desk really hard, and I had to stop everything. Where was this buzzing coming from. Then, I saw it, crawling by a window. A bug the size of my thumb. Just walking around and occasionally flying into the window, then falling. Yeah, nope. I can't handle this. What if it has a sitnger? I retreated, climbing over my couch and hiding in the laundry room. I spent 30 minutes in here looking for something to crush the bug with. My normal tools, socks and shoes, were too close to the bug. The laundry room had some tools, but those had a high chance of missing and angering the bug, leading to a potential sting. I came up with my solution after a lot of pacing: I tiptoed back into the apartment, climbing back over my couch, then grabbed my phone before rushing back into the laundry room. I texted my landlord about the situation, found a folding chair in the laundry room, sat down and wrote bloghan from there. 90 minutes trapped in the laundry room later, my landlord knocked on my front door. I had to answer, so I slowly made my way out of the laundry room, tiptoeing and moving as slowly as possible to open the door. I had lost sight of the bug, and my landlord was asking me where it was, and once I pointed it out to her she bent down and pinched it to death, before discarding it outside. She told me it was some kind of bee (do they really grow to that size???) and lightly made fun of me for retreating to an entirely different room for 2 hours becuase of a bug. I'm just saying, I feel as though I was entirely justified in that. Now that that was all dealt with, I could finally sweep, finish the bloghan, and cook my butter chicken! I did all those things and everything on the to do list of last weekend (mop the washroom floor? no idea what you're tlaking about!). My knee was starting to hurt, and I knew I would wake up to a giant bruise there in the morning. No point in avoiding it though... time to sleep.
Tuesday morning was basically perfect, even if only a little rushed. At work, there wasn't too much for me to do other than start up the A,B,C,D file task again. I mean, there were some conversations with people who visited like my predecessor or the work rival or the fanatic, but if I was being honest, most of my focus was either on the task or on reading more 'One Piece.' Nothing interesting really happened until lunch (well ok, that's a bit of a lie: Steve had me join him to help out his replacement in the cell, who was having quite a bit of trouble with his assigned computer being unable to use our tools and access our project files, which we completely failed in helping him with... ah, but he's not my replacement, so I don't really consider it all that important? Then again, I've put so much in between this set of parentheses that I probably should've mentioned it outside them! Oh well...), where we went downstairs to the first floor lunchroom. We did our poker game with Steve, the cable guy, the compatriot, the fanatic, my work rival, and two new people (one full-time and the new temp who will be replacing the compatriot). It was a pretty long game, but the compatriot's replacement was playing really well, slowly cleaning out everyone at the table along with Steve. He got pretty lucky sometimes, but most of the time he was able to hedge his bets and strategically fold when the others typically didn't. Also, some people just went all-in immediately so they could eat. Fair enough. In the end, it came down to Steve vs. the compatriot's replacement. It was a tense couple rounds, but Steve went all-in on the final round, prompting his opponent to do the same. The result: two pair against two pair, with the replacement for the compatriot having the higher one. His second week here, and he's already cleaning his seniors out! When I eventually got back upstairs, I worked mostly on organizing and rewriting the meeting notes from last Friday. I know it wasn't really a formal meeting or anything, but I wanted to play into the bit a little more and have it actually be a useful summary of what we discussed. This actually took quite a while, at least a couple hours, because the notes I originally took last week weren't very complete. I occasionally collected feedback from the others around me and visiting me, but at one point I needed to ask the fanatic something. This led me to find him in the cell, and I was also joined by my work rival and the gregarious too. I got them to review what i had so far and they all approved, eventually leaving. From here I spent the rest of the workday with my successor, talking about various things. It opened with her asking about my weekend, and I shared with her about how terrifying yesterday was for me, and she just laughed at me and called me "weird" (I will talk about this word choice later). Then, she shared her own story of being trapped somewhere, but I thought her smiling and giggling throughout the story meant it was alright for me to laugh during it, because that's how I shared my story where she laughed. As in, the story was from motnhs in the past and now it is being recounted with the light of hindsight, so it is told somewhat humoursly to highlight some of the silliness in the story. However, she felt a litte poorly at my laughter of the way she was telling the story and told me that her smiling and giggling through the story was a... coping mechanism? I mean, I guess?? It felt a little unfair to me, but I guess I tell all my stories in just about the same way, so it's not unreasonable to assume that other people would do things in a completely different way than I would. I'll have to try and keep that in mind for the future... not everyone can will themselves into a laughing fit! During the story sharing I got a message from a senior employee on my team, which redirected our conversation in to the kinds of things she was being assigned. And that was: reading!! Just a bunch of documentation to read. It is important material, don't get me wrong, but it is quite dense and I don't think reading all of it is really necessary for what the temps do on our team. Her mentor did tell her to try running some of our tools, and I took the opportunity to work with her to try out one of them, teaching her along the way about the kinds of things that we test for on this team, and what different teams are responsible for. As we're in the middle of doing this, my manager messages my successor (we share the same manager if that wasn't clear) about scheduling a meeting tomorrow and getting her to start running one of our larger scale tests. This is one of those things that we typically run overnight, but he wanted her to run it on her computer to see if she could get it to match the results of last night. I helped her out with setting that one up, but you already know we often got sidetracked as we talked. In between stretches of getting that set up and rehashing some of the lessons from last week, I shared about the Bald Podcast I will start one day and a little about the texting patterns of our team, and about how judgemental she was being about my leg hurting due to the bruise I got (compared to a different temp getting sore legs from working out - my legs have a more justifiable cause of pain!). As we were slowly getting things running, people started to leave the cell to head home, with the fanatic and work rival occasionally visiting until they left the office too. At the end of it all, it was just me and my successor in there, and just as I finished up my final explanation, my predecessor walked in. It was back to us 3, the latest generation of temps on our subteam. There wasn't really anything interesting that we talked about per se, a lot of repetition (the kinds of things we do in our work, my horror story from yesterday, my successor's own story of being trapped a while ago, the Bald Podcast - you get the gist). It was nice, having just the three of us here at the end of the day. Soon it came time for me to catch the bus, and man it was so nice! Once home though... well, I was beginning to feel the tiredness set in, and it was hard to focus on any writing. I really needed to get started on my presentation, but I was already behind on bloghan too. After writing all about Monday and eating dinner, I just couldn't take it anymore, and went to sleep. Surely, I'll get a lot done tomorrow. Surely.
Wednesday morning mostly sucked becuase it was cloudy. It looked like it was about to rain, but it didn't start doing that until midday. My focus at work was drawn back to the demands of the not-manager, as apparently there was a mistake in some information he gave me. Also, for the output of another Absconder thing that I didn't necessarily make for him, there was something that seemed like an error. So, I guess we're debugging that AGAIN, huh? There wasn't much to the morning other than that. There was a visit from the cable guy's replacement temp, I guess? I gave him a sticker, and he seems more chill than I intially thought. There was also a couple talks with some others, but I was mostly focused on all this. I had to rerun all the Absconder again for the not-manager, and then check out what was wrong with another part of it. Lunch also didn't have very much going on, just another poker game that went on for a very long time. There were no new temps joining, but hey! My co-DM did. My work rival is convinced she hates us, but really I think she's just busy in and out of work. There were some pretty crazy hands, such as my work rival getting a flush randomly out of nowhere (but he almost gave it up because he thought he had a two pair), or my Japanese coworker succesfully bluffing his way to win with a high card against two different two pairs. We actually stayed down there for quite a long time, and in the back of my mind I knew I was spending way too much time down here. When we went back upstairs, my work rival was not done with the cards. For some reason, he got caught on the topic of blackjack of all things, wanting to talk about it and the strategy behind it. My predecessor visited us and taught me the rules, and then my work rival decided to do a little experiment then and there. He wanted to test if his personal instinct would lead to more winning rounds than the table of recommendations that one would use to decide if they double down, hit stand, and whatever else you can do in that game. My predecessor dealed a couple hands to us, and my work rival did about 5 trials (we got the paragon of the scientific method over here) just to determine that his instinct almost always tied with the table, and rarely did worse, but never did better. I don't know if anyone learned anything from this exercise. He's not even allowed to use his money to gamble so I don't know what the point here is? After my predecessor left to, y'know, do some work, I followed suit, turning back to my work to try and figure out what exactly the not-manager was complaining about. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that my work rival had begun playing blackjack against himself, I suppose to continue his little experiement. Honestly, it fits him. The day continued on, and eventually I got to a point where I was just waiting for results to come in. Perfect time to start reading more 'One Piece,' but just a few chapters. I'm in the Wano arc still, just under the 1000th chapter mark, so I'll just read a couple, then maybe write some bloghan or do a bit of the A,B,C,D file task. And I do that for a little bit but.... agh! I need to know what happens next, So, I'll just read a couple more chapters, then maybe write some more bloghan or actually do a larger chunk of the A,B,C,D file task... ok, there's no need to keep this bit going I just read straight up to Chapter 1000. As much as I want to tell you what I think, I want to save it all for once I reach the end of his arc. Just know that this is keeping me occupied and that that last scene in the 1000th chapter felt glorious. 'One Peak,' I'm sure someone says on a faraway subreddit somewhere. It's around this time that my successor visits me at my desk in a very nervous state. She's got her first meeting with our manager today (well, her first formal one on one with him), and she wants to know what kinds of questions she's going to get asked. I'm sitting there all like... it's not an interview? In my meetings, he just asks what I've done so far/this week, how I'm finding things so far, and he might give me something to do, but he might just promise to give me something eventually. He's definitely not going to quiz me on what I did (well ok.. with me hie might because he wants to know how I reached a certain conclusion, but for your first couple weeks? no...), and when it comes to learnings he doesn't really ask me for too much specifics. I'm sure for my successor, the same will apply. Though, considering how my manager and I have a stranger, more "hands off" dynamic with each other, maybe I'm just receiving different treatment and feeding my successor faulty and inaccurate information...? NAH! I'm sure it's fine. After calling me "weird" again, she leaves, I did a little more reading, writing, working, and visiting unitl it was time: D&D. My co-DM was busy at the moment the 4 players and I headed down, but she promised to join us this time, just later. The players had to catch me up on the shenanigans I missed last week, and I was pretty impressed with what my co-DM had come up with last week with the information I had given her about what I told the players. She had made some quite interesting sidelore that felt really consistent with the world as well; based on what the players said, I think she's become a pretty good DM. That, or she's become a DM that is really good at innovating on top of my style, even though my style has a chance of actually being a terrible DMing style. It's... probably the former. At this point of the campaign we needed to stall a little bit since the team had somehow split apart again (mostly due to my Japanese coworker), and we really needed to get the players all together again. In addition, we needed to actually figure out the final boss to a point more detailed than names and vauge ideas, and also for the group to meet up with some allies. Clearly, the answer is a dome, and of course the most humourous response to this was my Japanese coworker. He complained a bit about some things that happened today - his character grew to giant size while sitting on a tree, and was surprised that I rolled to see if the tree would withstand that weight (it didn't and he took fall damage). His complaint? "Where did the mass come from? That's against the laws of physics." ...what? This whole game is against the laws of physics!! Were you ok with magical things like Firebolt or squid creatures made of shadows and runes that let you "transfer" damage between living things? But magical weight gain breaks your camel's back???? Eventually the players all cught up and ended up in combat (an encounter I put there to stall further), and that's when my co-DM joined us. And man! I had forgotten how much more fun this campaign is when my co-DM and I are working together! She's got a lot of knowledge and lot of good ideas, and her fresh persepctive actually makes things more challenging for the players in a better way than I would have for sure. She also made great use of an iPad to keep notes and to have stat blocks and such open as we managed combat. This was probably the most fun I've had in a D&D session in the last 2 months or so. Now our strategy wasn't quite perfect yet... the enemies we had the players fight were not as interesting as they could be, mostly feeling like damage sponges that could very rarely land a very hard hit, and with an easy to hit attack that just made things inconvenient for the players. I'm sure we cna figure it out for next time though! By the time we were done it had become quite late at night (bene a while since we stayed this late!) and it had fully started raining, hard. My equivalent and my co-DM didn't want to risk my co-DM losing her driver's license by packing an additional person into her car, so he ended up walking back ot his place (he lives close, it's ok) as the rest of us got driven back. At home, I was beginning to feel the mass tiredness of the week once again, and after barely doing any bloghan and any coursework, I went to sleep. This weekend is going to suck bad, isn't it?
Thursday morning was rainy once again, but it wasn't as bad as last night. I came into work to - you guessed it - messages from the not-manager about the Absconder stuff I produce for him potentially being incorrect. I panicked at first, but when I actually looked at the stuff he was complaining about... he was completely wrong. For example, he said there was something (let's call it "Item A") appearing in two versions of a file, but "Item A" was only meant to show up in one. When I looked a the specific lines he was talking about though, they weren't even talking about "Item A." There was no error at all! I'm really getting tired of him constantly doubting my work. All that I've made in these few Absconder things for him are all very hardy, and working just fine too. But even so, I still have to assauge his fear, prove to him it works. One saving grace is that there's that project meeting today, so I can at least get some stimulation from that. Its been scheduled earlier today and moved to a different meeting room, so I head to the cell to pick up my successor. However, it turns out she's not there. Huh, weird. I wait in there for a while with my work rival and my predecessor, because I saw her online for a couple moments, but she was offline now. Is she working from home? But I didn't see an email... We're supposed to let the team know if we're doing that on a day that isn't Friday. Well, she's not really important to this meeting, so it's alright! The meeting is mostly boring, and most attendees are online. It's just myself, my work rival (who isn't invited to this meeting becuase they want to keep it small but showed up anyway because he thinks he's SOOOOOO important), my predecessor, and my work rival's replacement in one corner of the room, and three different levels of management on the other side of the room. The meeting opens with an argument between the director's director and a senior on my team, but I'm just here on my side of the room working on Absconder verification. At the end of the meeting, my predecessor and I escort my work rival's replacement back to the cell and there's a short chat that takes place there that I don't really pay much attention to. I don't go join the others for lunch when they start heading down, becuase I really need to catch up on all the work I need to do, because I haven't been doing it!! This is so bad. However, I barely get any work in on bloghan or my course because I keep getting distracted, even at work. Once I finally start getting some in, people begin to come back from lunch and ask if I ate. In my rush to get things done while sitting alone at my desk, I had forgotten to actually eat at my desk while doing so, which was my original intention. But this reminder came with its own issues, as it ended up drawing me into an even more distracting conversation. ARRRRGH! I am so frustrated with myself at this point. What's worse, there's no time to extricate myself from this to get something done, since my mentor (who is working from home today AND sent an email about it) needed my help with something right away. He's been swamped recently with work from both my team and my work rival's team (he's transitioning between the two) and he just needed me to finish off some work he had to do by tomorrow. It was pretty simple, just go to a website to see some things that need to be waived, then track those things through our project files to make sure they can be waived based on my Absconder stuff waiving other things. It's not hard to do, just tedious, and it needs to be done by tomorrow. Alright then, let's get started. I work on it for a bit, submitting my work at the halfway point, but soon after I notice something dangerous: my work rival is sitting at his desk, bored, and he just put down the phone. If he starts up some sort of distraction, I would not get get this done on time. I had to act: I asked him if he wanted something to do, then taught him how to do this task I just learned. We had to work in parallel at first, because my changes that I submitted at the halfway point didn't seem to go through and save, but once I resubmitted all that work (lucky I took a screenshot), we worked together to take care of most of them. People visited us to talk about things, but aside from my work rival trying to invite people over to his patio next week just one time, we managed to stay on task and at least finish most of it! As he started to leave for the day, an hour before I leave, I had a thought. What if I just went home early today, and work an hour from home at the end of the day? In truth, I didn't want to walk outside in the rain when it was colder, so I quickly packed up and headed out with my work rival. As soon as we got on the elevator he started talking about all the new temps, discussing how some of them felt fake, others disinterested in interacting with us, and some being chill and "inviteable." Even though it was cloudy and slightly rainy during our walk, I was enjoying it a lot. I could laugh at his jokes, now that we were out of the eye of the others in the office, and I didn't care if I was laughing too loud! I humoured him in his thoughts on these new coworkers, and as we walked to our bus stop I began to think a terrifying thought...
Ah, shoot.
I'm going to miss this guy.
You've gotta be kidding me.
This walk out of work together? This was great. He's actually pretty enjoyable to talk to when he's not telling you about his opinions on politics or human rights. I might even make this a habit, to leave a little early on Thursdays so we can do this. We were still talking about the new temps once we got to the bus station, and his impression of one of them (for reasons I shall not disclose, I will call that new temp "the stoned" - it's a 'Balatro' reference, I swear) actually scared away someone already waiting at the stop. Once we were on the bus, he asked me right away about if I would have another 'Jeopardy' board ready soon ("HA! NO!!"), and my rejection of that convinced him to ask a slightly different question: which of my 'Jeopardy' boards was the best. Ah, you're making the deliberate choice to ask me to rate my work, hm? Well, too bad, buster! You're going to get the only correct answer: my most recent work. I mean, it makes sense that my best work turns out to be that, since it's the stuff that has the most amount of improvements and learned lessons embedded in it. After a bit of silence, he turns the topic once more to this upcoming summer, reflecting on the past summer we shared. He asked if that last summer was in my top three summers. Sometime during the workday, he was apparently sharing pictures of last summer with all the new temps, and it caused him to really think about just how much we packed into that summer. And reflecting on it? Yeah, it's easily my best summer ever. Switzerland in May, that transition period in June, all the fun I had with my coworkers in July and August with beach trips and amusement parks and carnivals - man, those unironically were the days! I'm doubtful that we can replicate that this summer, since there's less people willing to drive now, a lot of people are opting to hang out on weekends less because they are busy, and us not having as many people good at planning events. But if we can (once I'm done this course), I'd love to have another crazy summer just like that. The time came to get off the bus though, and take my connection back to my place. Want to take a guess what I did that night? (Hint: it wasn't a call with Blue-haired and Grey-haired because they let me know that night they couldn't make it). If you guessed "absolutely nothing useful except a tiny bit of bloghan," you'd be wrong! Because I also did a quiz for my course and started on the outline for my presentation (like 2 sentences)! So I only did 3 tiny things! Ha ha! OH it's so over...
Friday had me wake up just on time for work, and work was just finishing off the task my mentor gave me yesterday. There was something weird about it though... it looked like none of the work my work rival and I did yesterday had been submitted!! I asked my mentor and his response? "Please check with the not-manager" (I hope it's clear he didn't say "not-manager" but used his actual name, which I am not going to share). Ah great. As I waited for the not-manager to respond, my successor got back to my message to her yesterday, apologizing for not responding and that she worked from home yesterday over nausea. Oh, ok. Once I let her know about the whole "you should email the team" thing, we ended up on a call because she wanted to discuss what happened with her meeting with my manager. He had given her a task to fix some of the errors we were seeing with the nightly runs on one of our team's projects, but my successor has no idea how to actually find out what was wrong, or even understand it. Apparently, in that meeting my manager had just taken her laptop and just opened a whole bunch of things, explaining away the things she didn't understand with "you're smart, you'll figure it out." As I explained to her some of these errors and told her who she should get in touch with because they have more experience than me, the call got disconnected 2 separate times. The headphones provided to us at work have a little USB dongle attachment on the end of them, and this dongle has a button you can press to end calls. My successor has not disconnected that thing from her headphones, and accidentally pressed it twice. On the third call, she turned on her camera and showed me that she was removing the dongle. That had me cackling! We ended talking a little bit outside of this discussion on her first real task, just a bit about my current tasks and my weekend plans and how I'm not allowed to have alcohol, and just before we ended the call, she promised to bring brownies for me next week as thanks for all my help so far. I don't think I've been all that helpful (at least, I've been more annoying for sure, no?), but I'll take sweets anyday! The call ended for the final time today, and after a quick lunch I got my response from the not-manager: "what are you talking about, it did save?" Apparently in the link that I use to submit those waivers, there's a timestamp that shows you the waivers at that point in time. When you submit the waivers you add, it doesn't update that timestamp, just takes you back to the timestamp you entered in on. Thanks, not-manager's team. I worked on finishing off those waivers, and once I finished I thought that I was basically done with work for the day. Maybe I can get back to working on catching up on... everything else? But nooooooooo, of course not. The not-manager needed me to re-run my Absconder for him, AGAIN! Why? This is the third time this week! It already runs every night too!!! Is that not enough??? Do I need to run it three times daily???? AGGGHGGH. I started running it, but there was an error with one file that Absconder took in as input, that being it was completely empty. And when I brought it up with the not-manager, he intially denied it! Eventually he admitted it was because of some update he was doing himself, and once he fixed it I could finally run the stuff I needed to. When my successor inherits this specific Absconder thing... well, I'm sure she'll feel just as strongly about the not-manager's dependence on it like I do. At this point in the work day, I'm starting to get really sleepy. Like, "unable to sit up in my chair" levels of sleepy. Well, nothing to be done about that but to sleep, right? Half an hour should be enough... I tuck myself into my bed, set a timer for 30 minutes, and close my eyes.
I wake up. I'm... confused? I've never woken up confused before. Something feels... off. It's dark outside... but isn't it spring/summer right now? Even though the blinds are closed, there should be sunlight peering through the gaps. Also, why am I wearing a shirt? I sleep shirtless... especially in summer... I grab my phone, and see "11:30," and get even more confused. Huh? How is there no sun just before noon???? It can't be that stormy and cloudy. I look around my apartment, and I notice that my laptop keyboard is glowing, and my work laptop is still out on my desk. Wait a minute... I rush out of bed, surprised at how refreshed and energetic I feel. I check the time on my laptop. It's PM. My half hour nap was 5 hours.
Well, that's just great. That's 4.5 hours I could've spent on bloghan or my presentation, gone. It's pretty frustrating, but what's done is done. After briefly considering just going right back to sleep, I opt to instead finish the rerun thing on my work laptop (good thing the not-manager didn't say anything after I fell asleep!),, write the tiniest amount of bloghan once again, and go to sleep. But now that I've slept for 5 hours already, I can't go to sleep once again for a while. So I'm just lying there in my bed for what feels like even more hours. I wish I was one of those people who could just fall asleep as soon as their head hits the pillow.
Then again, I wish I was a lot of things. I wish I was a lot less like me. As much as I like me, and being me, I can't help but think about how things would simply be easier if I wasn't me. But I don't really have a choice in that, so there's not really much use in thinking about that sort of thing. I have to make the best of what I've got, no matter if what I've got isn't all that optimally set up for what I think success looks like.
At some point I must have succesfully fallen asleep, so I managed to wake up mostly refreshed on Saturday. A nice breakfast into some bloghan writing and watching an e-sports tournament at the same time, and a visit from my landlord telling me someone would come to tour the apartment later today. The tournament was pretty cool, but mostly just showed stuff I already knew about the game. Just standard stuff. That is, until the very end, where a Chinese team reverse swept the South American one that was projected to win by a margin of 80-20. The drafting was just awful on the Chinese team's side, so it was a match of skill against skill and on-meta picks. Somehow, they pulled off the reverse sweep through some really strange picks and even stranger builds for each pick, and it was so funny watching the reaction of the crowd and the stream chat to the absolute massacre of a comeback. Once that was done, I had about half an hour before my apartment was due to get toured, and that's why I decided to finally, finally, finally- mop my washroom. I had 30 minutes, an extended mix of 'Doctor' from 'Homestuck,' a vacuum, dish soap, and a mop, and I mopped in the fastest time I ever have. A shame that I didn't leave enough time for it to dry, but I'm sure my landlord will understand. It's been way too long since I moppeed that place, and it made me wonder once again how I had let myself live like that for so long. My landlord was the one who led the tour when that potential tenant came in, and I was just working on bloghan. Right before she brought in the potential tenant, I told her about the mopping I did but when I heard them go to the washroom I also heard some exclamations of surprise. Afterwards, she gave me a lesson in how to properly dry the floor after mopping. Fan + air dry is apparently not good? Good for next time, I suppose, though I feel a little bad for making her have to show off a completely wet floor to the new tenant. It wasn't until late night that I finally finished catching up on bloghan. I should've been better about it all week, but at least I got it done, right? As much as I have more important things to do, I would fele bad if I didn't get these out on time. I need to prove to myself that I can do this much, to write about every day of my life for year. It's made me better at staying consistent to writing, at the very least. I cooked myself dinner (butter chicken on stir fry noodles without stirring or frying the noodles isn't actually too bad!) and finally got to work on that presentation. I didn't get the chance to make much headway on it, not even managing to finish the outline. On Sunday, I think I'll be able to get the outline and the script completely finished, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do in the rest of this week for the actual slides themselves... So on Sunday, I did as much as I could. While I watched the finals of that e-sports tournament, I got this bloghan all finished up. The rest of the day was dedicated to the presentation. I worked on it for quite a while, but near midnight I realized something. My original idea was to do a presentation titled "How to Play Hearts," but for the requirements of the assignment I realized that this topic would not fit well. So, I'm going to have to work twice as hard now, pivoting to another topic: how to cook chili! Things are going to be really tense this week, huh..?
Future plans
This week definitely had some more ambitious plans, so here's how they went:
- Butter chicken: Made a giant batch, and I still have some even a week later.
- Door: no progress
- May 18 bloghan catchup: Somehow managed to get it done on Monday.
- Mop washroom: Did it on Saturday, so definitely not last minute.
- Presentation assignment: oooh, yeah so I did most of it (on the weekend) becuase I slacked off this week too much.
- Clean kitchen counter: I kinda did this? I only did it halfway to be honest.
This week, I need to finalize that presentation ASAP. I have no choice. Do or die, now or never. As soon as it's done, I need to do the next set of quizzes and start on the next assignment: a proposal (informal report). Oh, and also another 20 chapters or so of 'One Piece' of course! Finally, Blue-haired and Grey-haired also want to do a 'Deltarune' playthrough on Thursday and Friday... busy week, it seems.
Song of the week
'We Are! ~STAMPEDE Ver.~' (https://youtu.be/dEVpGaKAggg) from 'One Piece' is the song of the week. Yes, this is because I read the 1000th chapter of 'One Piece,' and yes, it did make me fanboy out quite a bit. To my knowledge, this song played when the anime covered this 1000th chapter, and looking at the clip it belongs to, I think this is one place where I think the anime outshines the manga. Honestly, I feel that way about 'One Piece,' but only in isolated moments. What I mean by that is that anime really displays the events of the story really well if you watch a clip of that moment. The anime mostly suffers from the additions they put in, the filler, which drags out the pacing. I've only felt like the manga pacing dragged a couple times, but I can't imagine watching the anime and enjoying this series as much as I do. OH yeah we're still talking about this song right? Well, other than its whole nostalgia portion and all, I don't really think I should spoil much more. Sorry!
Until next time
No time to lose... well, I'm really good at finding ways to lose time actually, so we'll see just how well I do this upcoming week. It's... not looking bright though. See you then.
- bubbler