July 27, 2025 - bloghan 57
So last week I said that nothing really big happened, and that I would only be able to show you that in small paragraphs. Now it turns out that when I wrote that, I probably underestimated that a little. But this week, this week, this week, this week. This week, I think it actually will be like that. Wanna know if I'm lying? Do you? Don't you? Doon'to you? Well, see for yourself, and feel free message me "liar 57" if I did end up lying:
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: tiles in 'Voltorb Flip.' Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, ordered wthin tiers. The 3 tile is the best to get because it triples your score, and the 2 tile is pretty good too but only doubles it. But getting those tiles is the win condition on each board, so it doesn't matter too much that they give you points, as you win zero if you lose. They're also very nice because they're the rarest two tiles on the board, so whenever you mark tiles as potentially being 3s and 2s, you can really focus in on only the marked tiles at the very end. The 1 tiles are alright, I guess. They don't do anything for you score-wise, but I guess it's nice that they give you information. Like, it eliminates possibilities, sometimes. Now the Voltorb tile... it's just so demoralizing. I can't stand it. I hate this game.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
I had no trouble getting to work on Monday, and it was nice and sunny to boot. My priority was dealing with the fallout (well, it's not fallout but that's the closest word I have to describe it) of the submitted project branches that did not have the proper numbering (which, I MUST REMIND YOU, the managers ALL approved of and said NOTHING about). I had people reaching out to me about what they should be named for the newest new project, people asking me about if I had finished making them in the newest project, and very little from the actual managers running this show about what they should be called. At the same time, I needed to do the reimport soon for the newest project, and I just hadn't gotten a chance to do it because of people telling me to wait. I thought today would be a good day to do it, but the not-manager asked to me to hold off just one more day to let his team put in just a couple more changes. UGH! Fine! I'll wait but I'm unhappy about it. After a quick lunch, there was another meeting with my work rival's team which my work rival had to bring me to. It was yet again surprising to see that his entire team was there (minus a couple people, but close enough), but talk throughout the meeting started to get closer and closer to involving me in some task, something to do with connecting an Absconder thing I made and an Absconder thing my work rival produced, and making it run automatically overnight too. I didn't like where this conversation was going at first because it only focused on my stuff at first, but once she mentioned that my work rival would have to get involved too, that made it a lot better. I was also in contact with the group of managers who had me do that branch task, and I realized that I would have to reopen that old ticket to get the branches renamed or something. When the meeting ended, my work rival's manager asked around the room if any of us have tried the new AI agent that the company had made available to us (it was trained on all our docs apparently, but it's not very accurate in my testing... stopped using it after the first 5 prompts). Once her query was answered and she went back to typing on her laptop, no one else left the meeting room at first, happy to just continue on working there??? Like, hello, meeting's over? Why are we still here? I didn't move because I thought there was something more that was happening, but no, no one started moving until my work rival's manager started moving to leave? I can't imagine why, other than the off-chance that she would say something else but specific to anyone else? I don't get it! It's not even like this is a regular occurrence at these meetings that I'm discovering for the first time, because I've always known it was like that! I've been going to these meetings! But at least once she got out of her chair, everyone else suddenly did too and... wait, what is my work rival saying to his manager right now? Does she want him and another full-time to go to her cubicle right after to talk more about that automation of the Absconder thing? Oh, and should I go too? Oh, well thanks, work rival. We march up the stairs and into her cube, and we have a bit of a talk about our two Absconder things. She wants them to piggyback on those nightly runs that I don't involve myself with anymore, but I tell her I have a way to make it work on just the regular old nightly scheduling system on its own. We reach an agreement that I will get yet another one of my Absconder works running on its own, I guess. Whoop de doo. Back to my desk, I reopen that ticket and request the branches get a rename, and wait for a response. As I wait, I share some of those cinnamon candies I really love with the new compatriot and we talk candy and my sweet tooth for a long while, and I talk with the idealist ofr a bit about a potential final project for me once I return to my home city after I finish work here. Eventually though, those IT support whatever people get back to me on the branch renaming thing: they tell me that they can't do that. They can't even delete them. FINE!!! AAAAAGH!!! I'll just.... I'll just request some new branches with the proper numbered naming. Tomorrow though, because it's nearly the end of the work day. I got back with no issue and spent my time that night looking into the details of that project the idealist told me about, the regular distractions, playing some 'Deltarune' and losing to the chatper 1 secret boss a lot, a bit of bloghan, and my butter chicken with rice. I'm starting to feel real nervous about... well, just about everything. What a great mood to go to sleep to!
I forgot to mention that I went to bed 3 hours past midnight yesterday, so I ended up having to take the later bus and walk the second half to work on Tuesday. It was a very sweaty walk, but thankfully no one was really after me or anything as soon as I logged in. After a quick talk with the rest of the corner cubicle about how silly Mega Dragonite looked, I decided to actually do something. The newest project was not currently passing tests, so I wasn't sure if the not-manager wanted me to do the reimport now, or wait until the tests were passing. He was surprised by this, because I guess he didn't realize that I wasn't just reimporting his team's stuff, but actually stuff that would impact functionality?? While he sorted that out with my manager, I went ahead and made that ticket to add the new branches with the proper numbers this time, which got some prompt responses to confrim which project and asking for my manager's permission. Glad that's finally getting sorted, at least. I also decided to check out the Music Leagues I was part of: in the workplace one, Steve had submitted his votes and I went up to fourth place, while in my one with Blue-haired and Grey-haired, I came in last place (I tried to use a Taylor Swift song to trick each of those two into thinking the other of them submitted it, thus they wouldn't downvote it... apparently, they saw right through it). During lunch (ate at my desk), I got to work figuring out what I would submit for our next category, but right after I had to face some tough questions from my manager about the reimport process, specifically about how I would be doing it and about what the file differences were. It was a bit strange to receive these messages from him at this particular time because it siad he was in a meeting. I would get my answer to that by my predecessor messaging me, as he was apparently in that same meeting. He relayed to me that my manager was now calling me the expert of this whole reimporting process and that if anyone from that meeting had any questions on it they should ask me. NO NO NO NO NO I'M NOT!!! What is this? Some kind of cruel joke? I miss Absconder. Agghhh.... after more messages from my manager and justifications from myself, he ended up asking me to talk to that one full-time from way back in August when I did my first reimport, just to be sure of my process. Alright, well, that's as good of a conclusion to this line of questioning that I'm going to get I guess. After a short little escapade involving how the idealist's pasta lunch that he made smells like cigarettes (and my work rival parading that contianer around, stinking up the whole office- typical!), and seeing some of the food he's made for himself and just how AWFUL it all was (at least half have got to be from those terrible food subreddits, right? right? ...idealist, please treat yourself a little better...), I had gotten a little calmed and able to ease back into work. To compound on my luck from surviving my manager's questions, the not-manager finally made a decision on not doing the reimport of his team's files today because of the testing failure of the project so far today. Nice! Then, the ticket support IT whoevers got back to me by saying the new numbered branches were ready for me. Double nice! Finally, that full-time from August confirmed that I was doing things correctly, and when I reported it to my manager he didn't respond, so I didn't have to deal with that more today. Triple nice! I could go back to my place in peace, where I could do cool stuff like help Blue-haired out with getting setup with some Gameboy Advance development and his game idea related to 'Voltorb Flip,' helping and failing to help my sister get a game running (it's because of those NVIDIA drivers, isn't it??? one day she'll get a better laptop I hope...), and finally succeeding at beating the chapter 1 secret boss in 'Deltarune.' Then, I did something I probably should not have done, but decided to do anyways: that meme contest for all the temps was back, and the submissions were due tomorrow. Now, I didn't originally think to submit anything because I wanted to focus on bloghan (see above all the bloghan focusing I was actually doing!), but today my work rival got a giant amount of food vouchers as a reward for submitting one, and the contest deadline hadn't even passed by yet! So, why not throw something in? But I didn't want to do an image like everyone else. No, I wanted to repeat my mistake of making a highly personalized video edit about my experience here, just to have another mini-video project I worked on. Just for my own fun, to prove that I could. I spent hours on this, eating partway through, workshopping the idea with Blue-haired for a bit and learning all sorts of new things about kdenlive (my video editor of choice), but 4 hours and 30 minutes after midnight, I had finished it: a 30 second clip with footage from the dub of the final episode of 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' (the part where everyone says congratulations), with text marking the identity of each person with that of someone relevant to my experience at this company. They were saying congrats to me, who I labelled as only having done three minor things during 16 months (a bit of an untruth, but its for the sake of the funny). Was it worth he giant time investment, the staying up so late, the late rent payment I made during the process, the GIANT clip library that was necessary for the changing text? Honestly, yeah. I had fun making it. I was cackling at the jokes I came up with during the process. I would do it again. This small stupid video edit process was fun. I knew that not many other people would really get it or understand it on the level that I do, but you know what? That's alright. I don't mind it at all. I make a lot of stuff for others, and I make just as much stuff for myself. I think it's only fair. Once I emailed it to myself, I went to straight to bed.
I don't know how I was able to wake up on time on Wednesday morning, or how I made that first bus on time, but I did. I was barely able to walk around though, and felt like I was going to fall over, but that's the cost of putting extreme amounts of effort into the things you want ot make for yourself I guess. I still don't regret last night. The first thing I did was submit my meme to the HR person running it, followed up with some more looking into that Gameboy Advance game devleopment stuff becuase I REALLY wasn't feeling like working today. My predecessor visited me and I told him about the fruits of last nigth labour, and he asked to see it. I emailed it to him, and he told me it was amazing. I know he doesn't like saying bad things of other people's stuff, but I felt that this was a genuine enjoyment of what I've made. That gave me a bit of energy back, so I could get to some work. I asked the not-manager to lock submissions to the new project so I could do his team's files' reimport, and removed the old unnumbered branches from the newest project, replacing them with the proper numbered ones. Then, my predecessor called my cell phone. Huh??? It's surprisingly loud, so I immediately hang up. Why did he do that? He's in the office, he can just call me on the work laptop or come to my desk. I put that mystery aside (messaging him on the aforementioned work laptop) for about 5 minutes, before I really start to think about it. Why would he just call my cell? I text him on my cell, and he lets me know he's trapped in the stairwell. OH! I rush to the stairs and open them up for him, and as we walk back he tells me that he simply misplaced his badge somewhere in his cubicle, and didn't realize he didn't bring it with him when entering the stairwell. He seemed to take my smiles at his story (which I gave because he smiled first) way better than my successor did when she told me a similar story, but I suppose that's neither here nor there. Eventually, we located his badge in his bag, and I went back to my desk. The not-manager still hadn't seen my request to lock submissions, and I was pretty much gated by this. I decided to do a bit of bloghan, and eventually he did get back to me, locking the project and letting me proceed on. I proceeded to not do that for a while because I was tired (read the Tuesday entry to find out why), so ended up doing New Yorker cryptic crosswords to pass time; that is, until I got another message from the not-managaer about an entirely different issue. Apparently, some senior full-time needed to submit something very urgently, but couldn't actually update the files on his laptop to be allowed to do so. The unnumbered branches were still on his device, but when he tried to update them, the auto-removal system wasn't properly taking care of them, and was causing the whole process to error out. He apparently needed these to urgently be submitted, and I was asked to reopen the old ticket with the people who made the unnumbered branches, once again. I didn't do it at first because I didn't realize how urgent the situation was at first, preferring to just try and get a few more steps in the reimport process done before reopening that ticket, but at the repeated (and manager alerting) insistence of the not-manager, I put that on the side and did the ticket thing. I'm doing just swell by the way, thanks for asking! They got back to me real quick asking me to make a new ticket, but by the time they did that senior full-time already made one. I then got pulled into a group chat by that senior full-time (just as I was discussing csv files with the old guy! let me be for just a moment, please! ah, but I guess this is more important), as well as the not-manager, and we had to interact with the IT support whoevers to get this issue solved. I started getting hungry, so I began to eat as I was asked details about the case and what I had been doing recently with the branch removals and additions. Eventually, a call begins, and while the senior full-time can't join it due to back-to-back meetings, I'm there along with the not-manager. I don't even really talk during this meeting, really only bringing up that I removed the branches that the senior full-time's laptop is struggling to auto-remove from his version of the files, and the not-manager is really the one who commandeers this whole thing. That's fine with me, I'm alright with just sitting here and eating, but man I wish I hadn't been pulled into all this. THe IT support guy whoever branch maker man does some funky stuff and runs commands I've never seen before but using tools I've used before, and just kinda... fixes it? I guess the point of the call was to clearly tell this guy what the issue was, because I'm pretty sure that if he got it at first he would've just run those commands and tell us the issue was fixed. The call ends, and that's that. I can get back to talking to the old man, and he immediately tells me to stop what I'm doing and wait for him to arrive and ask about what I'm doing. He does so, and I explain how the reimport works, and he tells me not to touch any csv files. Alright, alright, but what about this whole other giant list of files belonging to my work rival's team (did I ever mention that the old man is on my work rival's team? he's on my work rival's team by the way), and he goes through all the items and lists exactly who I need to consult for each of them. Thanks old man! You're old! I begin asking around using that list, building up a list of what I should reimport and what I should leave untouched, and never before have I felt so connected with the people on this team. Well, I guess my work rival's team, but still. It's nice to get all this help from them, to split the load put on me, to maximize the efficiency of this reimport process together.m Oh, and also the not-manager confirms that I don't need to check with anyone about his team's files, I can just go "ha ha reimport all don't care" with them. Somehow, this feels way better. I would've been able to piggyback on a bunch of other reimports from other subteams too, but my momentum was stopped by two things: first, my successor visiting me to tell me about her friend of the same ethnicity as me, looking for a guy to date. I learn more about how she gave her my last name and my picture but not any of my social media or anything like that, but as soon as I hear that this friend of my successor is 5'1" I lose interest immediately. I mean, I didn't really have any interest in the first place because I'd rather not start any sort of romantic relationship when I'm about to leave this city in a bit over a month. The second thing that kept me from that reimport task is a meeting that I didn't know we were going to have: a meeting with my subteam about the newest project! We haven't had one of those since the summertime. I head up to the meeting room with my predecessor (my successor, weirdly enough, was not invited to this meeting, but eventually she showed up to it online? I guess that means it must've been a mistake on my manager's part), and take my seat in the very corner. I focus all my time during this meeting on the reimport process, getting more information from my work rival's team, and actually starting the process for the not-manager's team. I get asked a single question during this meeting, and all it has to do with is the progress of the reimprot process, so I just say "yeah, it's going right now" and the matter is settled. My successor makes a small blunder when it's her turn to get asked a question about a different thing, thinking they were asking about her breaking stuff with the newest project last week when in actuality they were asking her about the general process of regenerating that one file I made a whole fuss about last week. That's all that I really cared to pay attention to in this meeting (most of my work with the newest project is setting it up, even as people are actively working on it.... thanks guys...), and I head back downstairs nearly silently. I do get stopped by that one full-time from August asking me how the reimport process is going and advising me on a small subsection of files that I was just going to manually check, and our elevator ride down is awkward with silence, so I guess I'll just do as he says. As all this was going on, I provided a list of files for review for all of my work rival's team, and they go in and mark which ones I can reimport and which ones I can't, so that's really really convenient! Of course, it's not as simple as I'm making it sound, but I know that at least I'll be understand the combination of my mini-notes and theirs in the end. I think. Maybe. We'll see... As I work through this list, I get an email, saying the reimport of the not-manager's team's files being done! This email is filled to the brim with error message after error message, but I'm personally fine with this, and ask him for the next steps. He tells me to run the regular functionality tests to see if anything broke, and I do so, thinking that this would just pass and he's being a bit overcautious. After some more talking with my work rival's team, pushing them to give me just a bit more info on what I can bring or not from the last project to the newest, I get a message from my managaer, asking me to go to his desk. Uh oh. What now? I sent him a list of files that I was going to look into reimporting, ones that would be relevant to what our mutual team would be affecting... is it about that? I go there, and yeah. It is. He seems a bit confused about what I'm doing and why things are taking so long, but when I explain to him my plans, he gives me an alternative plan which I'm going to ignore, because my way will be much less of a headache for me. Things felt so weird with this conversation in the first place, because I feel as though I've explained this all to him yesterday, but I guess the message just didn't get through to him. Whatever man, it's almost time for me to go home, so once I get back to my desk I begin to pack. Before I do though, I take a curious peek at the testing run the not-manager put me up to: it... failed??? And almost immediately after I started it too. Yeah, no, not dealing with this. I'm too tired and I've got too much to do with my own stuff, and... yeah, I'm just going to go home. Once there, I spend my time on bloghan, a little, yes, but way more on setting up the Gameboy Advnace devkit on my laptop to help Blue-haired learn why it's not working on his, then trying and failing at the alternate way to beat the chapter 1 secret boss in 'Deltarune,' along with a morbidly unhealthy amount of the usual distractions. This combination keeps me up until 3.5 hours after midnight once again. Yeah, no, after my activities last night, and my lack of activity on bloghan, I don't think I should push it any farther. I'm going to move my work from home day from Friday to tomorrow, and not bother with catching that early bus. I'm exhausted and it's all my fault...
Somehow, I wake up late to working from home on Thursday, but only by a couple of minutes. It takes me a while to get all ready to face the day (barely, barely able to face the day mind you), and I end up cooking a breakfast with eggs and bacon a little late, but I eventulaly get into the relative swing of things 30 to 45 minutes into my shift. Right before I left work yesterday, I let the not-manager know about the immediate fails, but he hadn't said anything, so I start looking into it on my own. That came to a halt pretty quick though, because I had no idea how to approach these errors. I decided to rerun the tests - maybe yesterday was a fluke? - but the same result of immediate failure greeted me. It was at this point that I had to contact the not-manager once again, asking him to help me take a look at these errors. He gets back to me pretty quickly and tells me that the reimport tool missed a file?? What?? So you're telling me it can take a file form an old project and put in the new project even when it's already been changed in the new project, but that it's straight up missing files sometimes on top of that- oh wait. Is that what the error-filled email form yesterday was trying to tell me? He asks for the command I ran, and I provide it. He takes a while to repond, giving me time which I use to do some bloghan and distracted scrolling on my personal laptop, but once he does respond, he lets me know he brought in some of those missed changed on his own. Time for me to rerun the tests once more. At the same time, I have a bit of text message dialogue with my work rival about some plans that we have with other temps today. The plan is just to hangout on his apartment complex's patio for a nice little bit of time together. I ask him when I should plan to be at his patio, and he retorts with an accusation that I'm not unwell, just lazy (context: my email about working from home today said I was unwell). I retort back with "I've been staying up until about 4 hours after midnight for 5 days now," and succesfully get him to tell me the start time of the plan: "I don't know." Well, that's just great. I'll ask later. It's then that the not-manager asks me to call him, and I do, a bit confused about what's going on. He opens by asking how I am, and I hesitate a little bit because I'm SUPPOSED to be unwell right now. And right now, that's kind of debatable. I choose the worst possible dialogue choice and say that I'm still getting used to the heat here because it's not as humid in my home city, and he laughs a bit at that (oh he knows that I'm not traditionally unwell right now, huh?), relating to me through a story of getting his AC fixed within the past week. Did we just do a bonding thing or something? What? He gets down to business right after that, telling me that there's just way too much stuff missing from the reimport, and he asks me to go back to where I first ran it so we can examine if anything went wrong. We go through it line by line (even surprising him with some files from a decade old project showing up- thye weren't the issue though, but cool to learn the history of the team I guess), and then that error-filled email comes up. I sheepishly show him that, half-pretending like I didn't think it was important (I full-thoughted that it wasn't), and based on our entire analysis of this reimport tool, he tells me that we should just. Do it again. Oh. Ok? Ok! Yeah, actually, that would do it huh? We could either get the same errors or not get them. He thinks there were errors because yesterday there were some company-wide glitches in the file storage/versioning system that might've impacted the reimport tool, so we can just rerun it today and there should be no issue. I begin to retpye the command by memory, but he stops me, telling me I can just "simply use the history command" to see the last 20 or so commands I've run and copy and paste from that. Wow! This is so useful! Why didn't anyone tell me about this MONTHS AGO???? On that note, the call ends, and the new reimport begins. I get another hour or so to work on bloghan which I mostly spend on watching random videos or helping out Riko (remember Riko? my friend from my home city) with his communications course stuff, and that behaviour doesn't really change when the regular Thursday meeting for that one project starts up. I join it online, but I'm so irrelevant to this specific project that I just don't even bother to pay attention to it. I don't know why I still go to this meeting in all honesty. At least my successor saved my regular seat in this meeting room, the one in the very corner that's just behind a whiteboard. Thanks for that, I really appreciate the gesture. Three hours after I started the redo of the reimport, I get the email of its succesfull completion, and this time? No errors to be seen. Guess it really was yesterday's glitches. The not-manager doesn't waste time in telling me to run the tests again, but tells me that it's ok if one specific one fails quickly. I ask him why he's expecting that one to fail and he gets mad at me. He's not expecting them to fail, he's just ok with it because there could be a licensing issue. Ok, ok, I'll watch my wording... I think I just lost all the goodwill I built up with him today. I started to rerun the tests, but I got some quick failures once again, although this time they weren't immediate. That's a good sign! In the error logs, I note a couple files that referenced the old project. These were already supposed to be changed, but I guess the reimport tool saw there was a difference between the two projects when it came to these files, and made an incorrect assumption about which one was the more up to date version? Even so, when I change their references and rerun the battery of tests, I get quick fails once again but with new errors, ones I hadn't seen before. These also did not point to a specific file at all, so I was stumped. I get the not-manager to look into that, and I don't hear from him for the rest of the work day. What, then, am I doing on my laptop? Well, on my personal one it's s bit of bloghan and way more distraction-esque stuff, and on my work laptop its a conversation with my work rival about how the patio plan is starting to fall apart. The gregarious said she would be going to it all week, and decided just today to not show up to the office, so there goes one ride that people could rely on, and it also looked liek Steve wouldn't want to go. I gave my work rival an easy solution to the latter though: just tell Steve there will be food, and this seems to work. My work rival is still being dodgy about the event's start time though, but luckily my co-DM is there to talk to. She also can't give me a concrete time, but she gives way more useful information. She does ask if I'm ok, but I tell her the same thing about the lack of sleep and that I'm still good to go to the patio. The plan was to get food first, then go to my work rival's place, and I predicted that if they told me the restuarant location in about an hour, I would be able to take the bus to the restaurant. Otherwise, I'd just go straight to my work rival's place and ask someone to bring me an item. Either way, I had enough time for some ice cream, some bloghan, and some getting ready to go (I'm unwell so that makes it ok). The hour came and went, and still no mention of a restaurant. My co-DM must've talked to my work rival at some point becuase she said the plan was always that I would go to my work rival's place first (I guess I didn't tell him the updated plan of me potentially going to the restaurant...), so that's what I decided on doing. I said "see you soon" to my co-DM (and received basically the same message from her back), shut off my laptop, and headed out the door, just with my headphones, a copy of Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing,' my phone, and the garage door opener I'd need to get back into my place. Now I know there's one item that seems a bit out of place there. Why on earth did I bring one of The Bard's plays? Well, I wasn't sure when everyone else was going to arrive at my work rival's place, so if I got there early I would be locked outside. So might as well bring something to do that's not on my phone! As I walked outside in the warm sunlight, I wondered to myslef about how many people would be there, and who I should ask to bring me some food that I'll pay for later. At the bus station, I decided to call my work rival to ask him about the food plans. He was already at some food place with a couple others, but the first thing he mentioned was that apparently my co-DM dropped out of the plan last minute, asking if I was surprised. To be honest, at this point of knowing her, not really, no. Still though, I was caught off guard enough by it to only give an awkward laugh at his annoyance. He told me that I should contact the compatriot about getting food for myself, because my work rival's group had already left the restaurant they went to, then specifically instructing me to be at his place precisely at 10 after the next hour mark. Alright then, I will. I got on the bus, quite packed, but felt like I got off the bus just as soon as I got on. A symptom of how close I live to my work rival, I guess. Then began the walk to his place, which felt worse than I remembered it did. It felt longer? It felt more like my spleen was trying to say something? Is that even the right organ? The spleen? Probably not... The wind was blowing opposite to me as well, and a little bit of dust was getting in my eye, but listening and whistling to my little long songs made it feel better at least. That, and texting the compatriot about food, but he just kinda told me that they were still deciding. He'll let me know later, I assume. The walk to my work rival's place has become a memorized thing for me at this point, and for all the razzing I do of him, I do admit I like spending time with him.
Man, I hate that guy.
I get to the outdoor courtyard of his place precisely 10 minutes past the hour mark that was appointed, and I see it then: the perfect opportunity to read a Shakespearean comedy. The little bench with a little overhang, the slight sun now hiding behind slighter clouds, the rather nice view in this courtyard..! It seemed great. It wasn't, for one reason: the wind. It had picked up significantly, and that made it very difficult to keep my page. I felt more often like I was fighting the wind all constant, as I'd not have it. An unfavourable weather, most unkind indeed, but whether the affliction could be weathered! Aye, therein lies the conviction of one's own hand, I say! OK, that's all the Shakespearean talk you get out of me (and it wasn't even good, oh well). I really do love reading 'Much Ado About Nothing,' and something I didn't realize about this particular book I was reading it from was that it was actually partly a guide for a young actor who is cast a role in this play. As someone who once was involved in drama and theatre back in high school (though not a full-on thespian), it was actually rather fun to do all the little exercises mentioned on the left-hand page as I read through the right-hand page. Of course, all in the the theatre of the mind, not actually out in this courtyard with the dogwalking guy and that lady arguing with someone on the phone just aft of me. Wait, not aft. Left. What's that in ship terms? Port or starboard? She was... I'm guessing portside of me. As time went on, the wind got stornger and stronger, until I was spreading my hands across the frame of the pages to keep the book down and the page set. This was also made harder with the fact that I needed to keep an eye on my phone to watch for a text from the compatriot, so I could make sure I could actually get some food down the line. His group went to a pizza place, and I asked them to bring me one of the meatier slices. I'd say that 7 or so minutes after that, 7 or so minutes of reading, that's when my work rival showed up. The people in that car looked at me oddly, wondering what I was doing at this bench, but they went to the parking garage. Well, only a matter of time now. I read until my work rival yelled at me from his complex's front door to come inside. I had half hoped he would come up to me to collect me, but I understand that right now he didn't want to play my games. On that patio were the idealist and my work rival's situationship, some random annoying guy I don't really know but claims to know about me from my home city, as well as two of the new temps, the two girls who weren't my successor. The ones that my work rival would say are "attached at the hip." I don't really see it as a bad thing though, I imagine that it's nice to have a single friend you stick to if you just joined a big company and you're working your first big real job. I don't know if this is their first big real job, but if they want to always be around each other, well why not? I was more fascinated by the fact that my work rival convinced the pair (oooh, the pair... that's a good nickname for the two) to even come to this gathering. I mean, they seem like people who don't really want to come to our events, who'd rather do their own thing. That's kind of what was happening right now actually, as I was sitting at a table with the pair and the idealist. These three were all eating food, some Vietnamese, but the pair were very absorbed in their own conversation about grad trips. The idealist would hop into that conversation every now and then to add some comments, but for the most part it was just those two. One of the two tried to involve me in the conversation once or twice, but each time I bungled that with a joke. I didn't really mind though, since I was still reading my play and having a great time. Eventually, the idealist started to really focus in on his food, and then he just kinda casually called one of the people I went on that Switzerland trip with??? Hello???? It was the one who had put a beer to my lips and nearly made me drink it, so I wasn't extremely excited to see him, but I wasn't displeased either. It was just a "oh, hi! how've you been!!??" type of deal, and when we reached the end of our awkward little conversation, the idealist continued to talk to him for like a minute before hanging up. Now I was thinking about myself from the Switzerland trip and the myself I had within me right now, about how much had changed- ah, but now I mark my Japanese coworker, the existentialist, the new compatriot, the newest new guy, the cable guy, the compatriot, some other full-time on the fanatic's team, and the fanatic too. To be honest, I don't know how many of these people were already on the patio and how many just joined, but I didn't mind so much. Now I had food! Two slices of pizza? I thought I only got one with the five bucks I owe the compatriot. This is great! A 2 for 1 deal! I put the book away and began to eat. From here on out, people were sort of in and out, going to the washroom or to go pick up other people as they arrived (I thought we were all here already??), just chatting around the two tables on this patio in two different conversations of different sizes (for example, I explained why the compatriot and my work rival strongly strongly disliked the traitor to the point of talking about this plan around him and "forgetting" someone as they listed who would be attending... they were shocked, I thought it was really funny just how spiteful they got over very slight offences). We were only waiting for my predecessor and his wife who were bringing board games, and then we could really start the event. During our conversation, the fanatic started to complain that he didn't bring food and that he was starting to get hungry. Did he... did he not get the memo? We were to get food before coming here. He manages to convince that full-time on his team, the existentialist, and my Japanese coworker to go with him to a local restuarant somewhere to get food, and so we were still activityless, but with less people. What to do... what to do... my work rival suggested 'Mafia,' and hey! That sounds like fun! I haven't played it since junior high, but why shouldn't I play it once more now? My work rival tried to do a big explainer of the rules and how the game works to everyone, but I think he ended up just confusing people. Now, I didn't help much with this. During his little explainer speech, I was sitting on the back of one of the table's chairs, with one elbow rested on the table and one elbow on my leg with my arm curled up towards and around my face, laughing during almost all of his explanation. I like to think that my explanation of the rules (that was cut short by that annoying guy who I don't really know) was better, but in truth they were roughly the same. Now even though an activity was announced, no one was moving because we are all sheep that needed to wait for my work rival to identify a spot for us to sit, so I started to get up to follow him to wherever he would point. The compatriot stopped me though, as there were still people who needed slight rule cliarifications and I needed to farm more aura in this pose I had found myself in. It didn't really occur to me that I was kind of sitting in an aurafarming sort of way. I just thought it would be neat? I wanted a temporary different way of sitting, I guess. Eventually though, I got up and so did everyone else, and they all sat on the grass. I told them there would be two mafia members (ended up being the new compatriot and my work rival) and one guardian angel (one member of the pair), but the annoying guy started complaining about how there weren't any investigative roles or anything of the like. I am really starting to get sick of this guy, but the group manages to convince itself to keep it simple. I was selected as the narrator because people knew I did the DMing for two D&D campaigns, and I think they really were glad with that choice. I dressed up the game as them all being interns at a tech company, but the mysterious part is that they only communicated with their managers online, and they had to stay in building premises constantly. Also, there were two arts students among their midst (the mafia) and one biomed student who could save one person per night (the guardian angel). The first kill was on my work rival's situationship, and that immediately made everyone think it was my work rival. He tried the "I'm the guardian angel" defense, and the actual guardian angel didn't say anything during this, only casting slight shade towards him. That interaction essentially defined how the rest of the game would go: my work rival would be executed by the "townsfolk" first, but then the remaining townfolk had no idea who the other one was. That "other one" though, well he took that initial shade casting and somehow carried it along to both of the pair being suspicious, taking one out overnight and convincing the town to execute the other. Also, random quiet people just got executed for being too quiet, and they didn't bother defneding themselves becuase that "looked guilty." I see what the annoying guy meant by the lack of investigative roles making things a bit more guesswork-y but to keep him satisfied, I let him describe all the town executions. They were not good in the slightest. They totally disregarded the small little world I had built up, all the lore and rules of my setting which I clearly laid out, and really just didn't make all that much sense. But whatever, it kept him shut up. People began to get bored of the game near the end, getting up to "stretch" and never rejoining the circlem, and the mafia won the game right near the end. I felt a bit disappointed with my own performance; if it had been better, more riveting of a story, people would've stayed immersed and wanted to see how it ended more, but I am glad that the pair seemed to enjoy my storytelling a lot. Thanks girls. It was aorund this time that the four who went out for food returned, and with them they had brought very dark and stormy clouds on the horizon. Things shifted back into people just hanging out and talking in small little groups, but I was more focused on the approaching storm. You could see lightning strikes off in the distance, and my Japanese coworker claimed to see where the rain was (it hadn't reached here yet) but I couldn't see it. My work rival was beginning to get a bit nervous, because this weather was unexpected and people were beginning to talk leaving early. I understood his panic, but there wasn't really anything to be done. As the dark clouds got closer and closer, as we could feel the charge and the rain in the air, the pair, the idealist, and the annoying guy left in a rideshare, just as my predecessor and his wife appeared. They were around on the patio for maybe 5 minutes before we all started walking back inside, and as we did the rain started up. Only a couple drops at a time though, nothing major until we actually got inside. My work rival's initial plan was to take us to the pool area of his apartment, but we managed to convince him to take us to his actual apartment. People said it was going to be unreasonably warm in here, but it wasn't really, not to me. Once again, things started off splintered into just random conversations, with a backdrop of heavy rain being provided just outside his balcony access. Some people even went out to his balcony to talk and to comment on my work rival's mini tomato garden, while some of the others seemed bored. We were waiting for my work rival to get back from wherever he went to go pick up the situationship because she had just disappeared somewhere. No one said anything about it when he came back alone. Though, looking back, it's possible I misinterpreted the situation entirely. Maybe he was just seeing her off as she had to head home early? Yeah, that's probably it. Once my work rival joined us and successfully got the guys off the balcony and back into his apartment, we could start with some games. First was 'Wavelength,' and our two teams were old temps (me, work rival, cable guy, fanatic, compatriot, Japanese coworker) versus the full-times and new temps (predecessor, his wife, existentialist, newest new guy, guy on fanatic's team, new compatriot). The only thing I can really note about this game is that my predecessor's wife would constantly suggest me for everybody's clues (when explaining the rules of the game, she even used me as an example with the prompt "harmful vs harmless," putting me close to harmless... but not all the way), and that we consistently nailed our team's responses, basically sweeping the other team. Although, I also learned that I've been playing this game wrong the entire time too? Apparently, you're supposed to spin the choice wheel first without seeing it, then see where it lands, and choose your clue from your category based on that random position. What I've been doing is picking my category card, thinking of my clue word, then moving the wheel to fit that word. I never realized that it was supposed to be the other way around, but uhhh.. live and learn? Everyone played pretty well except for the newest new guy, though there was one very notably hard one. My Japanese coworker got the prompt "big number or small number," and he gave "2.0," fully pronouncing the decimal point and the zero. That was a bit confusing for us, but eventually our team got pretty close. We won really fast though, so I did not end up getting a turn. Fine by me, because our next game was more fun. My work rival seemed to agree, as he perked up with those classic panic mannerisms of his when people talked of playing 'Wavelength' again. The next game we were to play was 'Poetry for Neanderthals: NSFW Edition' and I think that I'm pretty good at this game. The teams were mixed up compared to 'Wavelength,' but I was on my predecessor's team, and not on the one with my work rival, my predecessor's wife, and the newest new guy. Speaking of the newest new guy, he was up first (the way this game works is that you get a card with one phrase and a harder variant of the phrase, and you have to describe one of those phrases only in one-syllable words, losing points if you ever use higher amounts of syllables), but that big game he talked before we started evaporated quickly as he passed on basically every card. He ended up not getting a negative score, but a score of 0 wasn't all that great either. As the turn passed, people tended to struggle, but get better at it. There were a lot more point losses as it went to the compatriot and the existentialist (they both tripped up on "water"), but as it went to the cable guy and my Japanese coworker we landed on a streak of zero points, though my Japanese coworker did pretty well on some of the cards! Then, it went to my work rival, and he was SOOOO proud of himself for getting the 1-point phrase on 6 cards in a row. So of course, I had to show him up, ending up getting the 3-point phrase on 4 cards in a row with fluid sentences, double his score. I got really lucky with it though, because I drew "pillow talk" right after "pillow princess," making it easy for my predecessor to guess. Not one word that was more than one syllable either!! People were very surprised by that, but I like to think that my experience with teaching people in years under me helped out a lot with that. My predecessor's wife and the guy who's on the fanatic's team did pretty well, racking up a couple more points, but it was at this point that the new compatriot pointed something out: the newest new guy was giving guesses for both teams! A couple of our points came from him guessing our stuff. Well, I'm not complaining and we're not doing a recount for this friendly game between friends. The new compatriot got his turn and he struggled to even get one card, just straight up skipping cards en masse and not scoring at all. Then, my predecessor: for some reason, me and him somehow synced up mentally and I just nailed his next 8 cards within the first 5 or so words he would say for each. It was rapid-fire, me just guessing and him continuing with the next card upon me getting it right. During the turn, my work rival exclaimed in wonder and frustration at how the two of us on the same team at work were totally in sync but I had to shush him so that I could hear. After that, we had a dominating lead on the game, and our team won easily. Well, that was great fun!! We all kinda sat around in silence for about 10 seconds before people got up to start leaving. I mean, yeah, it was getting pretty late and it was about time for us to leave I suppose. My predecessor's wife offered me a ride, which I happily accepted, and as we headed out I observed my work rival ask my Japanese coworker if he had fun, and that he put this all on for him. Well, he is leaving next week. It made a lot more sense why he was a lot more distraught about people leaving and dropping this plan. I made sure to tell my work rival that I had a lot of fun too, and that I would've still showed up if no one else did- because I would! Because I would. After we all awkwardly made it down to the ground floor and my work rival accidentally bothering some random other renter in the elevator with our huge crowd, I headed out to the parking garage with my predecessor and his wife. They were driving me and the fanatic, but I was getting dropped off first. In the car there wasn't much time for conversation due to how close I live to my work rival, but my predecessor's wife made the most of that time. She talked about bringing me to karaoke yet again, asking when I could go to one. I told her to just "give me a date" as we pulled closer to my place, then realizing that I should probably clarify with her that I meant "date" as in "month and day" and not the other common defintion. She told me that she knew, and asked if I would really ask her to help find me a date. I told her that I wouldn't, and that I'd rather ask my predecessor, to which she countered with the fact that she probably talks to more women than he does. To that, I had no true counter, so I attacked her character and joked "yeah, but you scare me." This got a bit of a laugh, and she asked the fanatic (they've never met by the way) if he thought she was scary. He gave a rather noncommittal answer, and so did my predecessor, and then I was back at my place. Wha ta fun night! Also, it's very very late right now. Still though, there was one more thing left to do before going to bed: a call with Blue-haired and Grey-haired! We had already agreed to delay this call by a couple hours because we all had things in the evening, but for te short amount of time we were together, we talked about our future plans for when I come back to my home city, talked about our Music League, and watched Grey-haired do another drawing stream. Soon after that though, was 'Balatro,' then bed. I would have to go to work tomorrow, after all.
OK so I shouldn't have played 'Balatro' last night because I ended up waking up late and having to take the later bus to the office on Friday, walking the second half of that distance once again. Once I got in, there was really much for me to do but continue on with the reimport, sorting through all those files and waiting for the not-manager to help get the functionality tests passing. But... ah, I don't know. I was feeling pretty tired and unmotivated with both tasks, so focused bloghan initially. I think I'm getting super close to catching up, but eveyrtime I think so I just falter right near the end of the week. I decided to go downstairs for the first time in a while for lunch, and it was pretty fun! What started out as talking between the present parties (my co-DM, the gregarious, the compatriot, the existentialist, my Japanese coworker, the fanatic) eventually grew into my co-DM pulling out her decks of cards and us all playing 'President' against my will. I don't like playing 'President' with this group because I still don't like the rules around the poker hands and the playstyle that encourages, but they pulled me into it for the first round. I had a pretty good hand, I thought. Well, I was wrong, or I played it suboptimally, because I got third last. That's ok though, because my target was to place higher than the gregarious (who I had been play-fighting verbally with today) which I did with the existentialist's help. As the second round began, I pulled out of the match to work on something else: the next Jeopardy board. I had a feeling that the next Jeopardy night was going to have to be next week so we could properly say goodbye to him, and I was deadset on making sure that this Jeopardy board was one where he'd actually know a good amount of answers and have fun with. I researched and wrote my clues as they all continued to play 'President,' where I'd sometimes interfere and help out the gregarious or sort other people's cards for them, or even do a fun little thing where I removed 6 cards from the deck and "auctioned" them off to each of the 6 players to help them complete poker hands. We even got the new compatriot to involve himself in the game, and we all ended up staying down here for lunch for around 2 hours. Pretty bad of us, I know, but the people who were going to be busy had alreayd gone back upstairs at this point so... it's alright! In the end it was just my co-DM, the existentialist, the compatriot, and me left, but two others had shown up in the breakroom rather recently: the pair. Now I was about to go back upstairs, but I had to stay when I saw what was about to happen next: an arm wrestling match between my co-DM and the existentialist. Now the existentialist has a bit of arm muscle and my co-DM appears to have none, yet I was pretty surprised to see them mostly tie, neither really able to force the other to move. I'm not sure how it happened, but it did. Next up was the compatriot and the existentialist, which also similarly ended up in a tie. Also, I should note that the existentialist moved this arm wrestling "tournament" to be right next to where the pair was sitting for some reason? I was about to head upstairs, but all of them wanted to see me against the existentialist. I tell them that I'm just going to lose, that I have absolutely no strength to speak of at all, but they encourage me. Well... I know I'm going to lose, I know, I know, but for the people? Yeah, I'll do it for the people. I sit down. Take a breath. Stance up. Do the weird elbow grip thing with the offhand. Clasp our rights. The compatriot counts us down, and I push as hard as I can. At first, we're evenly matched..? Huh, yeah, the existentialist's arm is vibrating just as much as mine, but it's resisting my pushing with just the same amount of force as I'm exerting. Now, I did say "at first." That's because the existentialist looked me in the eyes, than up at the crowd and said "oh wow, you weren't lying." That's when he immediately overpowered me and brought me down to the table instantly. Well shoot. I guess that's just how it is. Now I wanted to go back upstairs and continue on with my Jeopardy writing, but one of the girls in the pair, the slightly shorter one that was guardian angel yesterday really wanted to try arm wrestling against me. Ah, I see she wants a confidnce booster, huh? Well, I meet her challenge, and this one was slightly more close. Slightly. She wasn't holding back at first like the existentialist was, she was trying from the start, but she was slowly slowly slowly pushing me farther and farther down until my arm got to about 10 degrees above the table, where it stalled for a bit. I was the one who got tired first, and she pushed me down onto the table. Now I can head up. Always happy to boost the moods of others, I am, I suppose. Well, it's quite alright for me to be so weak I think. Perhaps one day, I'll find someone who will be strong for me when I really need it. That'll be the day. I go upstairs and resume my work on the Jeopardy board, often visiting the crossword cubicle to help out with the planning for my Japanese coworker's goodbye event. Sometimes the existentialist or my co-DM would even visit me to discuss those plans further. This all came to a head nearer to the time where I had to leave for the day. In all our planning we had decided on getting catering from that burrito bowl place and generated a list of all the people who might want to come (thanks to the compatriot for doing so twice and giving each potential person a weird nickname while at it), and that list had nearly 30 people on it. Now, I COULD run a game where each team had 10 people on it and it would be fun for sure, but I now that sometimes with these larger teams, quieter people will often jsut not say anything and just watch as the louder ones play, and the event kinda sucks for them if it does happen. With smaller teams, you get more conversation and more interesting moments. Way more hype and excitement and "whoa I didn't know you knew about that kinda stuff!!" moments, and honestly? People seemed to have more fun in smaller groups. It was marignally more fun for me too, not just because of the omre fun energy that came with smaller groups, but because it was a bit easier to manage noise and interference and all that with smaller groups. We brainstormed a couple ideas of what we could do, with the 3 teams of 10 idea starting off as unpopular: should we maybe do a tournament style where everyone splits into 4 teams of about 7? No, the tournament would take a very long time to run, and people would miss out on Jeopardy content I took a lot of time to prepae. How about we have some people who don't want to play just observe? Well, maybe, but that would get boring fast for those people. Then, the existentialist suggests that we split into 6 teams of about 5; what we would do is that 3 teams would play Jeopardy while the other 3 did board games or something, then they would switch when the former 3 teams finished the board. I honestly didn't know what to think about this. I didn't know which was the best choice. Each choice was fine for me really, it didn't really affect how I would run the game that much, but... agh!! I don't know what's best for the players, the people I'm doing this all for! I ask my predecessor for some advice, but he just gives me some wishywashy advice that really ammounted to "I would be happy with wahtever you choose, and I think whatever you choose will be the better option." Gee, thanks. Well, I guess that just goes to show how tricky this problem was. Unfortunately, that hesitiation I showed ended with me not being the one to decide the format in the end. The existentialist got tired of waiting for me to decide, and decided the 6 team format for me. Well, shoot. The last hour at work this day was spent on finally getting that reimport done for the not-manager's stuff. I messaged him once more during this hour to ask how he was doing with this task. Earlier on in the day, I had received messages from the newest new guy and the old man asking about when submission to the newest project would be unblocked, and I had to tell them that it was still being worked on. I had offered to help the not-manager with it before, telling him to let me know if he needed any help, but he just left that on seen. I guess he didn't want me getting in his way. When I checked him with him now though, he said that he had cracked it. All I needed to do was prep a few files for submission, and that we should be good! Yes!! Oh, and run the suite of tests one more time, just to be safe. I started those up and asked him what the issue was. It was all very simple stuff according to him, and I really appreciated how he laid out every single little error that was there. These errors were not my fault at all, just awkward holdovers and merges done by the reimport tool. He reassured me that while these were very simple items, there was no way for me to have known about what had changed in order to fix it all. Well, I guess that does make me feel a bit better. I headed out soon after that, and once I got back to my place, I focused in on some 'Balatro' and a WHOLE lot of bloghan, staying up to the dark moment of 5 hours past midnight.
I woke up on Saturday to a buzzing noise. Oh no. Not again. I was already struggling to get myself out of bed, but now I had to deal with another flying insect? What if it was a hornet again? Or a giant bee? I couldn't see anything by the front door, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there at all. I eventually got up after I rolled over in bed a little bit and rotted on my phone, and carefully approached my desk, where the buzzing had shifted to. I looked and walked ever closer, and then I saw it: a regular housefly. Oh. Well that's not so bad. Then it started flying around all over the place, and I knew that I was not going to be able to deal with this at all. I spent the first 2 hours of my morning after getting up from bed hunting down this fly as it landed on the same few locations in my apartment. I tried the vacuum, but it managed to fly away just before the nozzle got close enough everytime. After using the vacuum to do a little cleaning, I switched to using a shirt of mine as a whip, trying to strike it while it rested on a window or the desk, but it managed to dodge that as well. I next resorted to throwing my shirt like a net, trying to trap the fly underneath the shirt so I coul violently crush it. And this seemed to work! As it rested on a window, I tossed my shirt at it, and it got totally enveloped by the shirt as it fell to the floor. I took up my shoes and just started whaling the shirt with the shoes, just battering it completely and totally. I didn't hear any buzzing before or after this beating, and I thought that meant I had gotten it. I lifted up the shirt to confirm the kill and the fly flew away. AAAAAAAAAGH!!! I just couldn't take it anymore. I sat down in my chair, disturbed. Needing comfort. Barely coping, no, not coping at all. I couldn't get rid of this fly. I couldn't kill it. I was going to have to bait it with another sticky sly trap, or wait for it to get slightly tired and hungry to get it to slow down, or or or or AHH! You WIN! I had one last idea that I didn't really like, but I decided to give a try anyways. I opened my front door. The only thing separating me from the multitude of bugs outside was the screen cloth that hung in front of my door. I waited for the fly to land on a window, then scared it in the direction of the door, succesfully managing to get it to land on the screen. I could then slam my front door shut and boom! Trapped fly! I was content with leaving it there, but then I realized that if I ever needed to leave my apartment, I would probably let it back in. So, I opened my front door just a smidgeon, and flicked my screen door until a small gap opened between the magnets lining its middle (you separate the magnets to open the screen, and join them in the middle to close it). After scaring the fly a bit more, it finally figured out where I had left a little opening for it in the screen door and flew off. Rot in hell. Now that that was taken care of, I could focus on my 'Balatro' runs (I'm on Checkered deck, after finishing off Anaglyph and Magic and Painted deck!) and bloghan for the rest of the day and well into the evening, only letting myself get distracted occasionally by Grey-haired asking if she could practice tax filing by filing mine next year (sorry, my dad already does that for me) and preparing my grocery order for tomorrow (the plan is Italiain sausage and pesto pasta). Later on in the night (we're talking about 2 to 3 hours after midnight), I switched gears to writing more of the Jeopardy board and talking to some other friends from my home city about potentially meeting up next week, as well as my sister requesting we watch some 'Love Live!' tomorrow (sure, let's do it). After going to bed 4 hours after midnight on Saturday, on Sunday I woke up late in the morning and focused more on finishing the Jeopardy board than writing bloghan (though I got to it nearer to the end of the day). Then I got a phone call to go pick up my groceres, but as I went outside to do so I ran into a slight problem. The garage was completely blocked! I haven't really been mentioning it, but over the past 3 weeks random stuff has been piling up in the garage which I use to leave and enter my apartment from the street. I'm talking furniture, huge stacks of books and files, clothes and porch accessories, chairs and whatever other household junk you can think of. But today, my exit was blocked. Luckily (or unluckily) for me, my landlord and that old guy who's been hanging around her a lot were currently in the garage, and they had picked up my groceries from the shopper for me? And gave it to me? I feel like some rules of the delivery service were broken there, but I just wanted to be out of that situation and back at my laptop typing away, so I grabbed it and went. I did increase the shopper's tip though, for having to deal with the confusion. I got back to it, and later that evening started to prepare the Italian sausages for later this week. I am very very worried about eating raw meat, so I looked up about 5 tutorials on how to cook them properly, eventually settling on cooking them in water on medium-high for about 30 minutes. My pan was small though so I had to do it in three batches, and I ended up doing it at the same time I cooked some stir fry noodle for dinner too. Somehow, I managed to burn the outside of a couple sausages eevn though I was literally cooking them in water, but it did smell pretty good. Honestly, I was kind of excited to eat these sausages, but tonight was not the night for them. Prepping them was not as grueling as I thought it would be, especially as I did the second and third batches with a little bit of practice from the prior batch, so I'll let you all know how those turn out. After I ate the noodles, stowed away the cooked sausages, and finished the Jeopardy board for this upcoming Friday less one category and the final round, I could take on the final item on the list for this Sunday: spending some time online with my sister. She wanted to watch the dub of 'Love Live! School idol project' with me, something we had started before I left my home city to work here. She missed me I guess, but I never really realized how much she missed me until she started using certain language to describe how she felt about it when we were on call. Words like "ditched" and others that I'd rather not share. I felt kinda bad. Kinda sad. I never realized she felt like I ditched her. She seemed to feel a bit better after we watched two episodes though, and it has been quite a while since I last rewatched 'Love Live!' so you know what? I'm glad I did it. The plan wasn't even to watch two episodes, just one, because I really did want to get my bloghan caught up this weekend, which I probably could have done if it weren't for this talk with my sister but... ah, she'd be so happy if I watched another episode or two with her, so I did. Apologies if I don't seem to be as thorough with descibring interactions with my sister as I do with other people mentioned on this blog, but I do prefer to keep my direct family matters way closer to the chest than any other interactions. But once me and my sister both said bye for the night, I finished off one more week's worth of bloghan, published it, and went off to bed at a very late hour. Oh I'm REALLY going to feel this one tomorrow folks, you already know it. But you also already know that I wouldn't change a thing about it. I live for myself and what I like to do now, and burning away the candle of youth to do so is the whole point. I'm at my most free. But man, being free does make you feel so restrained too, and all by your own hand. My choices this week gave me lots of fun and enjoyable moments, but they also led me to be behind on work and bloghan once more.
How much more can I really take?
Future plans
Here's the results of last week's plans:
- 2 bloghans in a week: I came really close, I really did, but ended up just short, losing the lead by another week. AGGH!!
- Door: no progress
- 'Fantastic Four': I decided not to see it due to time concerns, unfortunately. Maybe later, maybe not at all.
- Biryani: if I didn't have time to go see a movie did you really think I'd have the time to cook biryani?
My number one priority should be bloghan, but... nah, my Japanese coworker deserves my attention more. I need to prioritze getting a Jeopardy board ready for his last day, but also to get it ready for Blue-haired and Grey-haired to test on Thursday. As for the planning for that event, while I expect it will mostly be my co-DM and the existentialist doing it, I intend on helping them out too. I also need to get my Music League choices pre-planned out so I can get that all ready for both my game with Blue-haired and Grey-haired, as well as with my coworkers. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that two friends from my home city (not the ones with hair colours) will be visiting next week? I guess I shoud discuss with them, figure out something...
Song of the week
'When I'm Back On My Feet Again' (https://youtu.be/2y1kbJPJbYo) by Michael Bolton is the song of the week. I really feel down right now, just like there's a whole non-existent load bearing down on me that's self-inflicted. I can't let it go ignored either, because there's now external loads starting to pile on. Things to do with my final project coming up soon, things with work heating up too, and events with my friends too, whether they be the ones in my home city or from this one. Right now, I feel like I can barely stand, and barely walk. My movements are halted, my motion is strange and stilted. I'm like a puppet on a string, mayhaps? But I can taste it. Oh, it's so close. Soon. Soon, I'll be able to stand on my own once more. Soon, I can be as free as I want, once I unshackled myself from teh freedom I temporarily bought months ago. Soon. Geez, is there ever a song of the week section where I don't go off the rails? Not one in recent memory, I think.
Until next time
This one was frustrating to write. Just seeing how I was throughout this week, how powerful I felt when really I was a lot closer to powerless; it's hard to see your past self like that. And if you read this and didn't come away with that conclusion, well... I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do. But what I do know? I have an alright chance to see you next week.
- bubbler