July 21, 2024 - bloghan 3
It's time for bloghan 3! Writing this with a little trail mix snack and orange pekoe tea, and also an orange freezie once those are done.
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: playing cards. This isn't for a specific game, more just a preference I have for the card's Bicycle deck design and how excited I tend to get for certain cards throughout the various card games I like to play the most. I think my favourite card game is definitely 'President,' with the added rule of suit strength (D > H > C > S).
Ordered tiers, but unordered within tiers. Organized within each tier by number.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
At work, I've finally been given a large task that, if done incorrectly, could set the team back a bit, or give my boss a minor headache. I didn't manage to finish it on the day it was given to me, so I hope it wasn't that urgent of a task. Work is finally starting to pick up, and I find myself starting to do more and reach out to more senior members of my team. In other work-related news, they took us out to an amusement park on Saturday. I haven't been to one since the summer of 2019, and this one was so much larger and bigger. When I got there, I met up with my work friends, and then went right in. I was convinced to ride a rollercoaster for the first time in my life, and it was as bad and as good as I thought it would be. The feeling of falling and falling fast: I hate it. THE worst part. The twisting sections and the loops? Also the worst. The parts where you're just going up and up in anticipation of drops? I wish they didn't. But honestly, if I close my eyes and imagine nice things, it's like I'm not even there (and the wind on my face just means that my mind palace is in a wind tunnel). I tried a bunch of rides, something myself from a year ago would've been appalled about. The water rides were my favourite (completely soaked on one, completely dry on another), and the really twisty one where you hang from rails was my least favourite (it hurt my neck, my throat game is NOT like that). The provided lunch was pretty good, and I was surprised at how tired I was at the end of it all. This is a yearly trip with my workplace, and I'm kind of excited to go back next year, something I would not have said about an amusement park before.
This week I also got an invitation to a dinner party with my friends from work. I usually don't get invited to stuff like that, so I was really excited. I expected it to be like dinner parties my parents brought me along to, where it was a bunch of adults talking for an hour, then dinner, then another 2 hours of talking. It wasn't at all like that. Since I was the first to arrive (I was early by about 2 hours), it was a good amount of talking, but once everyone got there? The hosts broke out board games. Through the game 'Wavelength,'I accidentally called someone's wife racist, and discovered that people tend to overestimate how wondrous mountain climbing is (send them to Liechtenstein and see how they like it). We also played an NSFW edition of 'Poetry for Neanderthals,' where you have to describe what is on the card you hold with only one syllable words. I expected that I wouldn't do so well, since I'm a very innocent boy (clearly), but the reality was speaking in one syllable words only isn't so bad of a restriction. I think my time with writing poetry and translating song lyrics helped with that. Also, I feel like if someone says 'back' as their clue, me saying 'shots' right after is 1. not a super egregious 'dirty concept,' and 2. actually a very good guess given the NSFW edition. After dinner (very good, somehow I finished first, even though I thought I was a slow eater), we played Dutch Blitz, which I hadn't touched since high school. I expected that I would lose each round with 7-9 cards in my blitz pile, but somehow I won the overall game? We played about 10 rounds, and I blitzed twice. Maybe it's because it was a 9 player game, instead of the 2v2v2v2s I'm used to. After a bit of ice cream cake, it finally went to a period of time just talking and laughing, before we called it a night and I headed back. That whole night was full of my dinner party expectations being broken. I really didn't think it would be as fun as it was, I didn't expect to eat as fast as I did as a historical slow eater, and I didn't expect my success and luck in the games we played. The most shattered expectation though was how I was treated. I'm still not really used to being treated as a like-minded adult by others, but I really appreciated how I was included in those conversations. No "your innocence must be protected," or stuck talking about school, but actual adult conversation. I know I talk a lot about being treated as an adult, and how I don't always feel like one, but this dinner party was a lot more impactful on me than any of the other people there would think.
Future plans
I had a mostly productive week, but I also had a more social week. I'd like to say it's because of that socialness that I didn't do everything I set out to do. Here's how those plans from last week are going:
- Cooking: Made a bunch of new pasta dishes involving alfredo, tried some new ingredients in fried rice and noodles (shiso is better than I thought!) and went far out of left field with quesadillas!
- 'Delicious in Dungeon': I forgor.
- The to-do page: It's almost fully realized! I have the completion page ready to go, it just needs to be made reachable. It also needs some more entries.
- Hanging up pictures: All my pictures are hung up except for one, which I realized I cannot hang up until after my mother visits and leaves.
- Door: I did not make new plans. I did not enact the old plans. It's just a bit intimidating, I guess.
- Downtown: I didn't go downtown becuase I forgot this weekend my workplace would take the employees to the nearby amusement park.
Future plans! I'll be re-cooking my recipes from last week, adding some new stuff (garlic sausage, shiso, bell peppers) and figuring out ways to speed up the process. Surely this week I will finish reading 'Delicious in Dungeon,' and update the to-do page and its completion page. This week the door will be figured out. I just have to suck it up and do it. I believe I will be going to archery tag some time this week (also through my workplace), and I'm thinking I'll give a try to day 16 of the 2022 Advent of Code, nearly one year later. Also, Nico Yazawa's birthday is tomorrow! I'll celebrate it somehow.
Song of the week
'THANATOS - IF I CAN"T BE YOURS' (https://youtu.be/nK0VnHQ2kRI) is the song of the week. You wouldn't be able to tell by the sections above, but this week was a bit tough when it came to my feelings on relationship things (not the friends and family kind). It's not really something I feel like discussing too much today, but I found myself really considering this song's lyrics this week.
Call for suggestions
Here we are at the end of bloghan 3. Reach out with other features you want to see in bloghan or on this site in general! Also, in the time it took me to write this, I have decided I won't have that orange freezie after all.
- bubbler