December 8, 2024 - bloghan 24
Wow we are on 24 of these already? It doesn't feel like it's been 24 weeks since I've moved here. My time here isn't quite halfway up, and neither is the list of things I wanted to do while I was over here. In fact, that list has barely been touched. But that's irrelevant to this week, since this week, I still didn't touch it. Let's see what I did touch (I'm very sorry for the phrasing but I had to see the paragraph through to the end in a consistent way)!
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: weather. This tier list is not so much one where I'm ranking them like how it is to experience, but more like how it is to observe them out the window while in a climate controlled space. Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, ordered within tiers. Based on what I've been saying in the last few bloghans, is the S-rank occupancy any surprise at all? And yes, I do still appreciate sunshine, and while rain is alright, clouds are a bit stifling and boring to me.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
Monday was a productive day. There was more snow falling on the way to work, but a lot of the snow from yesterday didn't stick around. Getting into work, there were some questions about the party, and I relayed some of what I saw there. Apparently, Steve ended up on the dance floor for another hour or so after I left. Poor guy... That morning, I first worked on stuff for Mr. Excited. Since he took a vacation day, I could send him the results without him immediately replying with something giving me more work. After that, I noticed an email from my manager about a tool I needed to update, something he told me about a while ago, but told me to hold off until he got a chance to update something related. Well, today, he did that, so we ended up having some email conversations throughout the day to narrow down if my updates were working, and if they were using the right information. In between those emails, I worked on the director's task, still not having very much success in figuring out where the errors were coming from. The things that coworker wanted to use my laptop space for were done, so I pretended to be one of the more senior staff when letting her know over email, setting up a meeting and asking for her cubicle location and everything. The director actually saw me visitng her cubicle, and I'm sure it looked like I was just chatting and not working, when I was actually asking her what she wanted to do with that stuff she was running. Pretty soon, it was time for lunch, and there were lots of conversations that I didn't really care for. Some discourse on pasta, some on chicken cooking methods, discussion on 'Halation Celebration,' some more talks about what we should do for the last few days of 2024, things like that. After lunch, I put up the next cryptic on the board, but before we got to solving, we were asked to help out with the floor's Christmas tree. We got to the wall where the tree was supposed to go, and started putting it together. There was all this white stuff on the branches that was just scattering all over the floor. I get it was supposed to be snow but what a mess. The admin said it's ok, since the cleaners will take care of it. Once we had gotten the tree setup, with the right pieces in the right places, we started putting up the lights. The floor admin got a new set of lights for the tree, but it was so long, at least 4 meters. It was a nightmare to wrap it all around the tree, with people like my workplace mentor and the director passing by as five people struggled to figure out how to wrap lights around a Christmas tree. Once we had figured it out, the tree looked like it was being completely strangled, and whoever was taking it down would not have a good time. Our work rival walked past, took some of the cookies that were a reward for the people doing the Christmas tree setup, and went off somewhere else. Typical. Next were the ornaments and the long golden sash thing, which were a lot more reasonable to put on the tree. The golden sash was really wide, and made it pretty easy to hide some of the off parts of the tree. Near the end of the process, Steve told me there was something he needed to ask me, so we headed back to our desks. It was about the joint task we had, and he asked me if I knew what he was supposed to with the results of my "leg" of the task. However, that was something only the not-manager could tell him, but the not-manager was just not responding to him. Well, I continued to work, but I also observed the main group solve my cryptic (they gave this one a 9/10), and my work rival was the one who got most of the clues. Very surprising to me. The rest of the day was filled with me getting hot chocolate and stealing more hot chocolate powder, me working more on stuff for my manager and director, and working more on the next 7x7 cryptic. I also heard some stories about how the VP got stuck on one letter of the cryptic, which he did on paper, and also about how someone asked Steve for something that he already did. Towards the end of the work day, I locked in to the tune of my favourites from 'Halation Celebration' and figured out the porting over of the director's task, then headed home right away. I got back, wrote bloghan, made more crossword fills, ate dinner, then did some crossword writing and planning for D&D.
Tuesday morning was rough at first, but after laughing really hard to songs like 'GIRLS!!' and 'Infinite,' and having my morning tea, I felt a lot better. Getting into work, I had no important emails or messages, so I just... worked. There was a survey on the holiday party, which I filled out quickly, and all I had left was to restructure stuff to complete the functionality of the director's task in the new project. Speaking of the director, I found out today by an email that he got promoted one rank higher. Functionally, he was still just the director, since he still reports to the same people, but it was pretty cool to see that. Steve told me more and more about how his thing was going, which is to say it wasn't going, but at least it wasn't the fault of the things I provided him to do it. Rather, it was the stuff the not-manager gave him. Later, my Japanese coworker's manager came by our desks, asked if our seats were where all the cool kids sat, looked at the fancy chocolates and the licorice on our table, and told us that the way to keep ourselves fresh on our manager's mind during hiring season is to give them chocolate when you leave. He stayed for a bit then left, and immediately, my work rivla went back onto his phone, which he hid when that manager entered. I worked more, and I didn't realize how much work I was actually doing until people came by my desk to ask if we wanted to go to lunch now. I took my laptop down with me, to keep track of how what I was running myself was going. Lunch was rather boring again, with talk of my home city's apparent propensity to violence, about how the toast on my sandwich may or may not have been toasted, my favourite sandwich meats, and my equivalent's D&D OC. Once my work rival had finished his lunch, he announced he was bored and that he really wanted to do the next cryptic, and everyone went up. My equivalent was still eating, so I stayed with him until he finished. Right after getting upstairs, I went to put up the new crossword, but the group there was redoing the grid since the lines were getting messy with our daily writing and erasing. After that was figured out, and the black boxes were filled in, we began writing the clues. At that moment, the VP walked in, and noted that some people's handwriting was neater than others. I deflected my messy hndwriting onto someone else, a redirection the VP commended. Then, he asked us if the puzzle was ready, and we got to writing. He came back just as we were starting to do the down clues, and asked me how I was planning on solving the January puzzle. I was confused for a bit, but then realized that the person who I got to write the clues today (I was feeling a bit embarrassed at the VP's comment on my handwriting) was leaving the company in January. How was I going to put the crosswords up in a legible without this coworker? I thought for a bit, then pointed at someone else, asking "I thought they were the solution?" It was a witty enough reply, but the VP urged us to finish up the clue writing, noting that since I do them online, I could just get them printed out. We finished, he took his "screenshot," and everyone got to solving. This crossword was special because there was a little theme to it: it involved parts of the VP's full name, which could be broken down into English words. Each of those name parts got their own clue in the fill, and this puzzle was pretty reasonable, with them realizing the VP's name was broken up throughout the puzzle at the very end. They only had one complaint, which I initially did not agree with, but after looking up a word in the dictionary, I agreed that I could've done something slightly different. The VP came by only a couple minutes later, with a little smile on his face, asking if he got it right. He had a very crowded piece of paper to show me, and it had the correct solution on there in the corner, and I told him it was correct. As he walked away, satisfied, I asked him if he like the theme of this one, and he replied with an offhand "yes," so I couldn't tell if he actually saw the theme. He came back again, less than a minute later, telling me that he looked at it again, found the theme (his name, presumably? I'm still not sure if he saw it), and said it was "cute." I think that's a good thing? I went back to my desk, and I saw my work rival there, working on his own 4x4 cryptic... I think this is getting out of hand. After a bit of filling, he was having trouble with one of the clues, and he tried to ask me in a non-spoiler way. I told him it's his first time, and it'll be more useful to him if he just let me in the loop to help him work some stuff out. He showed me his fill, and after some explanation, I saw he committed the travesty of using a two letter word in a crossword. I stil helped him, improving all his clues drmatically, and he went over excitedly to the other cubicle to put it up, while I talked with my Japanese coworker and how he just got saddled with a lot of work. My work rival came back, saying that one of his clues didn't go over well, but that everyone was too cracked at this now, and they immediately got all his clues. I ended up going to the break room to steal another hot chocolate pouch and tp fill my work mug with one form the fancy machine, and when I did, it prompted for a rinse. Another recently promoted guy I've talked with a little bit, now also a director, was behind me, and I felt a bit bad for forcing him to use his mug as the rinse receptacle. He told me not to worry, that it just does that, and I told a story of how I used to clean similar machines to distract him. The rest of the day was spent actually seeing my task for the director working out perfectly, and then expanding on it a little to make it function just a bit better. After all that, it did indeed function a bit better (there's more I could do though), and I headed home. I got home, wrote bloghan, then shaved, then stayed up late doing D&D planning. I have got to stop staying up that late.
I woke up Wednesday morning to a very loud howling wind. It was surprisingly loud, and as I got out of bed, I noticed it was really cold in my place. I went up to the window to open the blinds, and saw that my front door was open, and that snow was falling quite a lot outside. I thought that maybe I must have left the door open last night, or maybe that I didn't close it all the way. After making sure to close the door properly, I started making tea and breakfast, getting ready, when the wind kicked up again, and I heard the sound of a door opening. I went up to the door again, and saw snow blowing into my place. Realization hit me then: the wind was strong enough to open my door when I don't lock it. I must have not locked it last night, and just this morning, when I closed the door for the first time, I didn't lock it, just closed it properly. I locked the door, got all ready, then headed out, locking the door behind me. As I was walking towards the work building after getting of my last boss, I realized I was next to one of the full-time employees on my team, and we talked a bit. She assured me that the snow here can get to levels where one can build a snowman, which got me excited, but I could barely hear her over the sound of the wind, which had picked up even more speed. We talked a bit more as we went in, just about the wind and my door troubles, and parted ways after. Steve and my work rival were not in today, and so I worked on reorganizing my work for readability and functionality. I was content, working on making stuff better and watching the snow fall outside my window. Again, I didn't even realize that my regular lunchtime had passed, until someone came into the corner to ask if I wanted to go. I didn't realize how in the zone I was! At lunch, there was a little discussion about current events back in my home city's university, about the snow, and our absent coworkers. Some guys from a different floor had brought 'Monopoly Deal' with him, and we played that for a bit. I bided my time to make myself seem like not a threat, waiting for a turn where I could have lots of different options to fill out property sets. My plan was to pressure the person on my left into giving me their full set, using the targeted rent to force them to pay in property, given they had no cash cards in play. However, I didn't anticipate them playing cash cards, so I played non-targeted rent cards on very low amounts, since they put very high cash amounts into play. Specifically, I requested one dollar from every person, twice in a row, and the player on my left had a five dollar note, a ten dollar note, and two properties each being two dollars (which formed a set, since they were the utilities). My first rent call, she parted with the five dollar note, but for my second one, she couldn't bear to give ten dollars for, so she gave me one of the properties. Incidentally, another player gave me a card so that I could fill out one more set, and so I played my wildcard which I had been holding onto from the start of the game onto the property which becomes a set with two matches, winning overall. The two fumbles from those two players giving me properties only pleased me, and everyone played for second, then for third, then for last. I got some messages from coworkers who weren't there, asking me to send them the day's crossword (they really DO only want me for my crosswords), but I told them that we would time the people who were here, and see if the group who was absent today could do it faster when they came in to the office tomorrow. This satisfied them, and after heading back up, I put up the crossword. I had to put it up myself to avoid my work rival saying "hurr durr if you got someone else to write it they would be solving it as they wrote it and they would have the advantage!!" Well, the group that was here solved it in 7:30.38 minutes, liking the puzzle, but having a complaint about an adverb I used to define a verb. I looked back at the puzzle on my phone, and realized that when I wrote the puzzle, I used the correct verb to define a verb. A clerical error was made, which was a bit embarrassing. During their solve, the VP came in, giving them two answers. For the down clue that he got right away, I knew it was because he was digital electronics nerd, and the group of coworkers who were the usual solvers would never have gotten it. After this, I really just worked until the end of the day, solving issues that my reorganizations caused, and finishing everything I had been assigned: I was really just waiting to hear back on next steps for.. well, all of it. The only thing I could really do right now was to report to the director that I've progressed as far as I can with this task. I instead got up to get hot chocolate in the breakroom, but I felt intimidated by my manager and another manager talking outside the breakroom, so I opted to not take that risk, filling up my mug instead. I was slouching in my chair, oddly bent, while waiting in boredom for my things to run, to see if the small issues I introduced got fixed with subsequent updates, and then that became removing extra space where it existed. In the end, I finally caved and decided to send a message to the director, letting him know of my progress. He left me on delivered, but as I was getting ready to leave, I got a message from both him and the not-manager. I decided to leave the director on delivered until the next day, but read what the not-manager said, which was that something I made for him was not working as expected. As I read the issue, I knew exactly what I would have to do, and started doing it, but then I realized that I migth miss my bus, so I rushed out of there. I walked out, and was sruprised to see that it was snowing, not quite as hard as a snowstorm in my home city, but still enough to be considered a snowstorm. I really do look like a lunatic to any drivers in this city here, as they pass by me, seeing a very wide grin resting on a face that's constantly angled upwards. Getting off my first bus, and heading to my second, I decided to try something I haven't done on the snow-covered sidewalks in a while, even in my home city: sliding across the snow like I was.. I don't know? A speed skater? Shadow the Hedgehog? I don't really know what to call it, but it probably did not look like those two latter things at all. Instead, it probably looked really stupid and really pathetic, but I didn't mind it! It was fun. I underestimated how much I missed doing that, so I kept doing it, until I was out of breath. Not to sound like a broken record, but I'm sure the drivers on that road must have been very concerned seeing how I was laughing as I was running (sliding?) down these sidewalks in the middle of the first real snowstorm of the season. I make it to the next bus, stop get jumpscared by an old lady, get on the next bus (it had someone in the back yelling, which was kinda cool, I guess), then got off by my place, waiting for the crossing signal so I could get there. I didn't feel like putitng on my gloves for such a short walk (from the station to my place), so I snapped them to keep them warm, in time with the music I was listening to. I wish I hadn't though, because just as the crossing signal said I could go, I noticed there was someone right behind me, and again, I was a bit embarrassed at what I must have looked like. I did some more sidewalk sliding in my neighbourhood, got inside my place, went right back out, and began shoveling. It was still snowing, but shoveling a bit now will make it easier to shovel the rest tomorrow. Once I had finished that and had come back inside, I made myself some hot chocolate, wrote bloghan and attempted to write a 12x12 crossword fill (I wasn't satisfied with what I got), then did another recording session with my friend from home while he played 'Superstar Saga.' It was an alright recording session, and there wasn't really anything that special about it. I got to share some stories and make a single bad joke, but again, it's an RPG and I really felt the effect of the dead space and how much I struggled to fill it. Once we had finished that sesison, we had a discussion on how to make a reference (of course, looking at stuff that Ian Flynn has contributed to) and if I would be coming back to my home city for the holidays (no). We ended our call then, and I followed it up with a snack, then dinner, more bloghan writing (with 'Sea Shanty 2' playing, occasionally), then finally, bed. And this time, I made sure my front door was locked.
I woke up late on Thursday morning, and I only made the bus with 3 minutes to spare, instead of my usual 7-10 minutes. The sky was clear, but there was still some snow falling. Getting into work, I started working on the issue that the not-manager had brought up, but one of the things that I was using for the deliverable I had developed had quadrupled in length. I brought it up with him, and he asked me to show him where it was. While he left me on the read for the next couple hours, I kept trying to figure out what was going wrong, which I did with better error handling, something to catch the original problem the not-manager had, and a little bit of work to ensure that things wouldn't be needlessly duplicated. I started running into a weird issue though: when doing the stuff related to this task, my machine would freeze up from too much memory usage, and eventually just terminate things once it reached unreasonable levels. I had to start using memory management tools I've never had to in this position, and even in my entire education. We all ate lunch by my desk, pulling out the side table that was in our corner. It was pretty good for me, since I could keep track of the things on my computer, to see if I could narrow down the source of these memory issues. We had some short discussion on finance and on stocks, on the assassination that had taken place that morning, how my work rival would do in the timed cryptic contest today. After lunch was just more work, and more things just not working: I sometimes ran into the memory issue, and sometimes I didn't, even when I used those memory management things. I got to watch my work rival and the other no-shows of yesterday flounder at yesterday's puzzle, with the same thing happening where they make one early incorrect guess that continues to screw them over for the rest of the solve. They took way more than 7:30, and while i didn't want to give them any unfair hints, the people who were here yesterday wanted to get to today's puzzle, and they gave up hints to get to it faster. So many full-time employees passed by us as we were solving both the puzzles, watching us do no work, but it probably costs the company more money when the VP looks at the puzzle for one minute compared to 7 of us new hires doing it for 15 minutes. Once that was finished, I was able to get a result for the not-manager, but I still intermittently ran into the memory usage error. With that reported, I decided to finally open the message from the director, who I had left on delivered yesterday evening. I quickly realized that I probably shouldn't have left him on delivered, as it asked if we wanted to have a quick meeting today, but today was already more than half over. I told him that I could meet him anytime in the next two days, in person, and waited for him to respond. At that moment, the not-manager finally got back to me, telling me that I could delete some of the info I was analyzing, which happened to be the new stuff I had noticed this morning. Well, that would return the original functionality to whatever I was doing, so I began to start on that, but my manager then asked if we could have "a short meeting" in 15 minutes. He always asks like that when he has a new task for me to do, just out of the blue and with on details, but everytime he does, I always get worried about what he's going to tell me. Sure, every single other time it was about a new task, but what if this time is the time where he tells me that I'm slacking too much, or that I'm doing poorly and will be receiving less and less things to do because of it? He scheduled the meeting to start in 15 minutes, and I got there 5 minutes before it started. Just as my manager walked into the meeting room we booked, I got a message from the director, asking if he could come by my desk now. Perfect timing from all parties involved, really. I relayed the craziness of the last hour or so to my manager, told the director about this unexpected meeting, and left the not-manager on read, and then paid full attention to what my manager was telling me. I was right in that this meeting was not meant for giving me a task. It was instead meant to give me two tasks: one related to the thing he didn't get back to me on last week, and one related to documentation of something entirely unrelated, but not something I was totally unfamiliar with. He talked a bit more about how if I was really busy with what the director and the not-manager had given me, just to let him know and he would give it to someone else, but I told him those things should be winding down. He was coughing really rough the whole meeting, and the entire area around his eyes was dark. He started to ask me the usual questions after - how I was doing, how I was finding the job, all that, but then he asked me if my position here was what I was expected. I thought for a bit, and gave my answer, which basically just said "I thought I was going to do one type of work, and ended up doing a bunch of others things too, which initially frustrated me, but now I see that it's taught me a lot more and has kept me interested and engaged more than that which I originally thought I would be doing." He liked the answer (I think), and after a bit more awkward rambling, we called it there. We went overtime by 15 minutes, and while I had told the director that we could meet right after, I wasn't sure if he was still willing. To my surprise, he was, and he came by desk within 2 minutes, asking about my progress. I shared that with him, and how I wasn't sure if my results were correct, and he began grilling me on what I had done - how had I changed the work that he did, where did my results suggest to me that something was off, which things I had actually pulled from when doing this. He laid off a bit when I gave mostly complete answers, but told me that I could just go back to his still-functional work to see if my version was doing everything correctly. I hadn't thought of that. He told me he'll check in on me later, and with that, it was the end of the workday, so I headed on back to my place, but not after listening to some of my coworkers discuss how they wanted to make PCBs for a new mechanical keyboard project, to which I said I wanted to get better at PCB stuff, and would like to join them in that course of action. That extra PCB chat almost made me late for my bus, but I ran throuhgh the snow which had started to pick up again, making it just on time. The walk between bus stations felt way shorter this time, probably because I didn't tire myself out sliding on the sidewalks on the way. I got back to my place and wrote some bloghan, and prepared for D&D, which was meant to be the last session of this adventure. Unfortunately, we didn't end up playing due to one member's circumstances, but we did end up doing a bunch of little activities anyways: a guessing game to see what the "Woke Detector" Steam curator rated various Steam games, a couple rounds of 'Plate Up!' (how did I end up serving customers in fast food again???), an interlude of some Amazon browsing, and another couple rounds of 'Is It Woke?' ft. the Woker. I was really excited for the D&D session, having actually planned a boss fight with more than just story beats (a record for me), but this night was really fun anyway. After we had wrapped up the night, I got distracted from writing more bloghan and went to bed at a very late time, yet again.
I did tell the director I would work in-person on Friday, but waking up in such a daze, ten minutes after my alarm went off, I wondered if it was too late to change my mind and not go. I did go though, and I figured out that I can work on bloghan while on my phone, so that was what I did while wiating for busses until my fingers got cold. I get into work and try to finally get the not-manager's task done, finalyl addressing the complication he added onto the scope, without the added baggage of the memory issue. Honestly, I was way too stressed about this task than I really needed to be, but listening to 'The Concept of Love' on loop helped a bit (I still don't think I'll ever understand the concept of love, but I think I do understand 'The Concept of Love' a bit better). I got visited a couple times by people asking if I would be putting up a 6x6 or 4x4 crossword up that day (I was planning on doing a 6x6), and when I wanted to go for lunch, and the coworker who has the same name as my landlord brought cupcakes for everyone who came in. This specific coworker was also the same one mentioning PCBs for mechanical keyboards, and how she wanted to make one, and I told her about the little maount of research I had done last night, and she specified more what she was thinking of making, and what the costs would be, but the whole concept of "dropshipping" went over my head (just like a certain other concept...). I did not end up bringing a lunch that day, and so we did our usual waffling about in a cubicle before finally breaking for lunch. I went downstairs to the building restaurant, and got the same chicken wrap as I always do. I'd try one of the others that interest me, but I'm not sure if there's any chicken in it, and I'd rather not pay the same amount of money for a wrap with no chicken. After a bit of a wait, I got my food, and headed upstairs, where we ate in mostly silence. There was some conversation about plans for the future, on soda and tomato juice, Canadian cities as compared to other Canadian cities, the assassinated CEO, but it was a pretty quiet lunch. I got critiqued on why I ate my fries one at a time,, gave my explanation of needing processing time, and they were mostly satisfied with that. We wrapped up lunch, but I didn't put up the crossword right away, since everyone had a meeting upcoming in less than an hour. I went back to my desk, and just worked more, trying to work out all the little bugs, trying to create 7x7 number 4, and keeping what I wanted to do over the weekend in the back of my mind. Eventually, 3 hours after lunch, everyone was ready for the crossword, but they sent the msot demanding member of their group to fetch me for it. On the way there, I saw my equivalent at his desk, at which he was not sitting this morning. I realized that just before my meeting with my manager yesterday, he had asked me if I had a little time to talk to him about Absconder, and I told him I would after my meeting, but he had already left by the time it was done. I took this opportunity to talk to him, and figure out what he needed. He was a little confused about one of the tools provided by Absconder that I use the most out of all Absconder toolls, since he could see that other members of his tema were using it, but in the doumentation he had on Absconder, he didn't have it listed there. I looked at the documentation he had open, and it had vevry few pages, only about 10 or so. My copy of the documentation was about 150 pages, and I shared that with him. He looked around the files a bit more, and found this full documentation, finding what he was looking for. I also shared with the name of the Absconder developer who worked in our office, and also a link to some alternate documentation for Absconder and an invitation to show him some of the Absconder stuff that I've worked on. I was quite surprised that he didn't really have much work with Absconder, even though he's told me his team uses it a lot. I guess that when he said those things, he meant that his team had all that absoncder stuff inplace, but now that he had to do his own Absconder things, he was a little out of his depth. After that little meeting, I finally put up the crossword, but just as the group started to solve it, I got a request from my workplace mentor for a quick call. I rushed back to my desk, aaccepted the call, and he shared that he had been given a task that could be solved by Absconder, and if I had anything that might help give him a leg up on the task. What he described was almost exactly the same as the thing I was working on for the director, just applied to a different part of the project. I told him where he could find and look at my work, and that I'd let him know when it was basically done and checked. He asked if I would be willing to work together on his task once he got to it, and I agreed. He thanked me, told me he'd figure out what I was doing with my task and go from there, and ended the call, but not before calling me our team's "Absconder expert." It made me laugh a bit on the call: these full time employees are calling me an expert on something I've only worked with for a couple months? I'm pretty sure I'm still on "The Peak of Mount Stupid" when it comes to Absconder, but it's a nice to be thought of as an expert all the same. I got back, and saw that the crossword was already filled out, and that everyone actually liked all the clues, even the ones that I thought were pretty iffy. After that, guess what? More work! I eventually got everything all working, in theory, but in testing I kept finding all these little clerical mistakes that forced me to rerun it over and over again. Since it had a very long runtime, the end of the day quickly came without me actually being able to verify full functionality. Oh well, guess it's a Monday problem! I said bye to everyone on the way out, and made it back to my place, where I really only did a bit of cooking (spicy stir fry noodle), generating multiple 7x7 grids at once, and bloghan writing, before going to bed at the latest possible hour again (starting to pick up on a pattern here?).
Saturday was rough upon waking up, and as soon as I woke up, I made a simple breakfast (peanut butter toast with tea!) and finalyl fully caught up on bloghan! After that, I played a bit of 'Papa's Freezeria Deluxe,' recreating my sister as the player character so she'd be stuck in foodservice forever, then considered going to the grocery store. I looked outside, and saw that once again, it was snowing quite a bit. After some fooling around watching stuff and making crosswords and lunch and all that, I finally went outside to the grocery store. I decided to spend a little more than I usually did to grab a few extra items, just for later addition to what I was planning to eat this week, and also just for some fruit intake. I did notice that the packaging of my chicken was wet, so I knew that as soon as I got back, I should move the chicken into a plastic bag. That had the side effect of making my bags heavier, but the snowfall was pretty light, and it wasn't fully dark yet, so things were alright. I got back, put my groceries away, then started moving the chicken to the bag, but when I opened its packaging, a whole bunch of that raw meat juice got alll over my counter. Once I had put the chicken away, I had to start leaning the counter, which is when I realized it was also all over my kitchen floor. I started to clean the counter with a new sponge and soap, and the floor with a mop, when I saw that my electric cooktop was pretty dirty: it would be good to tap it a bit to remove some of the food that was between the grills, and also to clean underneath it as well. I brought it over the sink, and tpaped it lightly, and a whole bunch of rust particulate fell out, into the sink. I put the stove down right away, and cleaned the spoons and pot that were in there. I then spent the next half-hour cleaning the sink, pulling out a new sponge, and using dish soap, baking soda, the jet module on my faucet, and the kettle and a whole bucket of water, trying to make sure each little piece was gone. I had to get rid of my wooden spoons, since now they had all these little rust pieces stuck in them, in addition to the previous damage with loose bits of wood. So, I'll need to get some nice and new wooden spoons, which is quite lovely. I have also "retired" the shallow bowl, low-quality pot, and tablespoon that I had in the sink. It's a bit frustrating, but it's not so bad, and it made me look into getting some vaccination booster shots as well, for tetanus and COVID. I did some more D&D planning (I realized that I probably overplanned characters and not enough on story... tale as old as time for me), had a quick shower, and finally put away everything that I got in the birthday package sent to me by my dad (why did he send me a manicure set???). Then, I settled on shoveling outside in the middle of the snowstorm just a bit before midnight and finalized plans with my co-DM to plan the campaign. The rest of the night was walking back a lot of the stuff I had planned for the upcoming campaign, getting stuck in rabbit holes of literary analysis of 'Evangelion,' then heading to bed. Sunday was a day where I woke up way later than I wanted to, and I helped my dad redo setup stuff for the smart thermostat, due to my recent password changing spree. I made breakfast, did laundry, played some games, shaved, did a bit of D&D planning, and had that meeting with my co-DM to really fill out what each arc of the story might contain. We were in that call for a lot longer than I thought we would be, and we did quite a lot more than I thought as well. We redid a lot of stuff that I had orignally came up with, and made something that was really cohesive, to me. After this, I took some time to finish off this bloghan and to remake my player survey. I ended off the day with a gift from my landlord of buckwheat chips, and a warning that I might get consulted about universities by the people living upstairs in the coming few months, and after cooking myself dinner, went to bed.
Future plans
A repeat of last week, when it comes to getting things done. I really want to do more, and now that it's December, I think my time will get freed up slightly.
- PCB stuff: while this week I didn't get started on one, I did start collecting info on another I might make in the coming months.
- Door: no progress
- 'A Court of Thorns and Roses': oh yeah I was supposed to do that this week huh. Whoops. Didn't.
- Cryptic crossword: My pace has slowed down by a lot since I've moved to 7x7s. I may have to start going back down to 6x6s. You can try the ones I made this week with these links:
- New D&D campaign: A lot more planning!!
- Home D&D campaign: Just one more session I swear, just one more session. But, like, again.
- Library violin: Didn't end up doing it this week, it snowed most of the weekend.
This week, the plan is simple, and repeated, slightly: finish 'A Court of Thorns and Roses,' make a PCB for the first time in months, finish the home D&D campaign, make a special 12x12 cryptic after finishing some 7x7s, finish and start sending out interest forms to my closest coworkers, and cook butter chicken.
Song of the week
'Supporting Me' (https://youtu.be/iqPAVCtRO3I) from 'Sonic Adventure 2' is the song of the week. I've been in the "locked in" state at work a lot, and this song is usually the one I do it to. This is probably my favourite song from the franchise as a whole, since I love the way it has its verse vocals style, almost imitating murmuring, like rumours and hidden talks buried deep in the past. The instrumentation is on point as well: the drums and their beat really help to build anticipation, and the hints to the main theme of the game throughout are cool, both in the synths and in the lyrical content. The remix done for the newest game in the series is great, yes, but without the vocals, and with a style closer to metal than to electronic, I think the original is the better one.
Until next time
I actually can't believe that this week I had a weekend that wasn't just all bloghan! I know I haven't had a weekend like that in 3 weeks, but it still feels so good. See you next week!
- bubbler