Tuesday: couldn't really remember my dreams by the time I'd gotten up and eaten my bowl of cereal. I just logged into FFXIV for the "Heavensturn" event, which involved leading a little unicorn around to various celebrants in honor of the Year of the Horse. Work was pretty good, and I am once again trying to alternate between new groups and reworks to some degree. On breaks today, I watched Grinding Gear take on the final chapters of the Arcadion series, plus Zepla's completion of the 7.4 MSQ. I accidentally only bought one bag of croutons for my salads this week, but I'm pacing myself and it seems to be going okay. For trivia, I changed into my nice jeans, my old HankCo t-shirt, that maroon AeroPostale pullover I've been wearing again this season, the blue winter coat, and the shoes we bought in Michigan last year. Something's weird with the right shoe, though; it feels at all times like I'm standing on a crack. Santucci's was much emptier this week, so we got the table we prefer, and we enjoyed the same pizza as always. For the 80s theme, we played as "It's my party, I can quiz if I want to." We were one point behind first place for the first three rounds, but in the last round, we pulled ahead by half a point, winning the competition! The subways seemed crowded to me, but at least the ride back home didn't have any solicitors. John seemed to be satisfied just laying in bed with me, so I didn't treat the cats tonight. I finished the Scorpio Cup with a silver medal while working on my UmaMusume dailies before bed.
Monday: snow's coming down, but it's my figurative Friday at work. (Julie was not much of a fan when I referred to it as my "figgy Friddles", but if I'm not giving her cause to regret our marriage, am I really pulling my weight in the relationshp?) I asked her if she felt like we should go over early, since the place has been so packed the last couple of weeks, but she guessed that they wouldn't be nearly as crowded today. Her guess proved correct! I suggested we revisit our classic combo of the Caesar salad and soppressata pizza, and this change was very gratifying. While we had decent performance in the trivia, we did miss a couple of questions that we should have been able to figure out. (Most egregiously, "What's Tuesday in French?" I felt really foolish when we found the answer.) By the end of the night, we were tied for 2nd, but we did not perform well in the tiebreaker.
Saturday: back to work. A thing I don't enjoy during WAVE season is that I'm scheduled to provide chat support on weekends, but on Saturdays, there are usually enough people in or adjacent to leadership that they reassign me to take calls for most of the day. After my shift, we had the rest of the pizza for dinner while watching Saltburn, since Julie wanted to send me a bunch of the memes she's been finding online, but they wouldn't make sense to me until I'd seen the film myself. We then watched some more Murder, She Wrote, but since today was also the date of the Tokyo FanFest for Final Fantasy XIV, I was eager to watch the keynote introducing the new pictomancer job and giving the first look at the new female hrothgar character models. I don't love the complete version of the Dawntrail cinematic trailer, which feels feels like it's doing too much, and several of the character models look off compared to how they looked in the Endwalker trailer or in-game. However, pictomancer looks excellent, and I'm very excited now that we've seen our first look of the "Solution 9" player hub.
Friday: much the same routine as usual, finishing the ziti with onions for dinner while we continued catching up on Bob's Burgers. During our Civ VI game, Julie's Australian cities had a hard time developing. I played as the Cree. Things went decently for me: no loyalty issues, steady cultural advancement, although I did have stagnant population growth as I didn't prioritize building farms often enough using my first few Builders. My score wasn't great, and both my tech progress and my military was awful, but I had plenty of envoys to city-states, and I was a top contender in the World Congress. I was at 15 of 20 diplomatic victory points as we entered the last 50 turns of the game, but Julie decided to go to bed, and a turn afterwars, Norway finally declared the surprise war I'd been expecting all game but never really did anything to prepare for. I was eliminated around turn 247.
I also received an unusual email this evening. Remind me to talk about the contents of this message in a few years.
Steam:
Sid Meier's Civilization VI - Envoy Convoy
Thursday: at some point this afternoon, I created a dreamwidth account for myself and posted an update, which is reproduced below. Immediately after making this, I completely forgot that I had done so. The original entry:
It's January of 2022, which is the start of the second new year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. I turn 40 in March. Since I've never been able to picture what life in my 40s might look like and since the passing of years has worn down my recollection of even the most recent of events, it seemed prudent to resume making notes about my daily experiences. By focusing on only the most trivial of occurrences and observations, I hope to prevent this blog from becoming another artifact of my history that I find unbearable to revisit.
Let's establish a baseline: we're living in the too-small second floor apartment on the west side of Wichita. Besides Julie and myself, we've got the seven cats: Koop, John, Isabelle ("Piggles"), Mosaic, Mama ("Mimmles"), OJ, and Earl Grey, the latter two being the kittens we rescued from the parking lot last summer. ("Kittens." They're as big as any of the other cats now, and far more dense. Still, the exuberance of youth sets them apart.) Mosaic's age and infirmity means we're manually expressing her bladder at least twice a day ("squazzling"), and the apartment is littered with training pads and old towels in the areas she frequents. I'm still at the bank, and Julie's still at the collections agency, although she could leave at any point. The plan to move to Philadelphia in May is pretty concrete now, but we have a lot of details to work out over the next few months.
Most of my free time lately goes to YouTube. Ever since I played through Outer Wilds and 13 Sentinels, all I want to do is watch other people play these games, and sometimes I'll watch such a streamer's other playlists. I have been playing a bit of the Steam version of Gloomhaven occasionally, and I need to either start a new project or put out an update to THE EXIGENT SEASONS before I lose the inertia I built up last fall.
Next post: talk about food.
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Wednesday: on google's chat client, Jason let me know that they had an extra MAGFest ticket, which he offered to me. We'd spend the next couple weeks planning, since I got the go-ahead to do it.
I really like Spelunky, but I'm too haphazard. Anyway, this was the last time I'd play it on Steam for eight+ years. (Likewise for LISA, though I'm less excited to try that one again. I recognize its qualities, but it's just not as much for me.)
Steam:
LISA - Let's Find Her
LISA - Hint Guy
LISA - Annoying Guy
Monday: our step aerobics class took a lot out of me thanks to class being cancelled for six months, combined with a head cold I was experiencing. Fortunately, Dee is supposed to be back starting next week, so the routine should be closer to what I'm used to.
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Thursday: throat hurts due to a cold.
Wednesday: kept meaning to post an update on LJ about the holidays and stuff, but we've been too busy with our new cat. Also, I think that I broke my toe.
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PRENATAL FETUS TIME, BAYBEE