JAN 12

2026

Monday: got up a bit after 6 this morning, and I logged into my humnan monk in WoW to work on the progressive Timeways achievement, which today involved doing three timewalking Burning Crusade-era dungeons. My group handled them so efficiently, we stayed together for all five instances. After that, I switched over to Lemix and prepared a night elf warrior; I only have four classes left to level up before the end of the event next week.

I clocked into work 30 minutes early and worked through as many groups as I could. It's been a very peaceful set of workdays lately; as hectic as the Resolutions phone lines have been, Accounting doesn't need to help out that much, so I've been able to get a lot of my project done. On breaks, I had a NieR: Automata playthrough on in the background, and I got to try adding chicken to my salad for lunch, which was fine. Doesn't do much for the flavor, but I have to admit that it's more filling. I tried to stay a little later to finish the group I was on, but didn't really have enough time to do much more; it feels like there are a lot of deadlines this week, but I guess that's more a consequence of Legion Remix ending and the imminent Hearthstone release than anything to do with work.

My new debit card finally arrived, so I activated that before we left. It's Quizzo night again, and we were seated at the high-top table in the garage room next to a loud group. Since we're not going to Santucci's this week, we had pizza at Stogie Joe's. Unfortunately, we didn't do so well during the trivia. (The electric sewing machine predates the electric kettle. Wonder Woman's lasso of truth is made from a piece of Aphrodite's belt.)

During one of the picture rounds (about naming the football teams in the playoffs based on their logos), Julie turned in one of our sheets and made me fill out the other one, using a very patronizing tone whenever I got one right or needed a nudge. We tried to come up with a comparable challenge for Julie to take on, and the closest comparison I could come up with was identifying the Final Fantasy Yoshitaka Amano logos. Soon, though, I became preoccupied with trying to draw as many of the logos as I could think of from memory; I was roughly correct with the first one, though I forgot the Warrior of Light is depicted facing to the right. I couldn't remember the second, third, fourth, or fifth. On the sixth, the outline I drew for the MagiTek armor more closely resembled the sprites used in-game for the armor ridden by the player characters; I forgot that the image of Terra lounging on her armor was just concept art, and the rider in the actual logo is brandishing a sword. I got the seventh logo basically perfect, and while the shape of the eighth was off, I captured the basic idea of "two people embracing", even if they're not recognizably Squall and Rinoa. I got the crystal in the ninth right as well, and I did okay at conveying the basic layout of Yuna's Sending in the tenth. I didn't even try to do the eleventh. I got the gist of the twelfth, but I had Gabranth holding a sword overhead instead of dual-wielding, and I got the big paint stripe on the wrong side.

In any event, the music round was a grab-bag of old tracks with which we had no familiarity, so we ended up in fifth or sixth place. Back home, I logged into work for an hour or two before bed.

2025

Sunday: an uneventful workday, though I spent a while napping on my break. We finished the leftovers and pursued our own activities in the evening. I was able to log into FFXI for a while to continue the main story missions for the base game.

2024

Friday: vacuumed and did laundry after finishing the second half of my Newbold sandwich. I wasted time in the same way I did yesterday, though I also got back onto a bit of a The Beginner's Guide kick. I made cheeseburger soup for dinner, and we ate it while rewatching the last episodes Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, since that's been Julie's preferred distraction while she solves puzzles. I got to bed a little earlier tonight. I did not get myself to work on my project today.

2023

Thursday: the work week resumed. We finished the potatoes with roast pork and played Civ VI, me in the office and Julie in the living room. First game we tried barbarians on in an inland sea map, and the excess space meant we were heavily besieged. I called for a restart less than 30 turns in. Second game was no barbarians on a pangaea-style map, and while things started fine with some nice mountain ranges protecting my eastern borders and heavy commitment to exploration, three nations declared war on us in rapid succession. I wrote my long blog post from yesterday.

2022

Wednesday: we're like six people short in my department, and as soon as we hire replacements, more folks quit or are fired, so the workload isn't improving. It's the beginning of the year, so we're moving directly into tax time, which means a ton of people who never bothered signing into online banking when we first converted are now trying to get set up, AND all the people who complained about the platform and stopped using it are coming back to continue complaining and ask why their specific requested features aren't available yet. The extended wait times make them all angrier, which means they have to spend the first five minutes of every call shouting about the wait time and asking why we didn't bother picking up faster, which means the other people on hold aren't getting helped any faster. All this frustration we're confronted with makes the work experience even more unpleasant, so folks are more likely to quit or do such a bad job that results in their firing, so it's a vicious cycle that we haven't been able to escape for eight months, now. It's exhausting. Coinciding with these issues, I keep getting pimples in weird places like the rim of my nostril or the inside of my ear, and I can't stop bothering these sites and scratching the skin off. Most of this is probably just misplaced aggravation that I can't get FFXIV yet. I've had two dreams on the subject so far, so I seem a bit preoccupied. Trivial annoyances are vexing.