JAN 24

2024

Wednesday: woke up around 5:45 today from a vivid nostalgia-dream in which I revisited a heavily-reinvented version of the school I attended for college. I cannot shake the feeling that my dreams have been depicting a more thoroughly-realized vision of the world than the one I can assemble from my actual memories.

Once I was awake, I went into the office to reblog some Tumblr posts about how much I oppose the idea of the United States going to war with Yemen before I logged into FFXIV. I'd purchased a "One Hero's Journey" level boost for Scholar yesterday, as I was tired of leveling healers and just wanted to finish the Shadowbringers role quests so I can resume the Endwalker patch content, only to discover—I had already completed the healer role quest, apparently!! I have barely any memory of this, and I didn't think I had Sage at sufficient level to accomplish this, so I'm a little puzzled. In any event, I was able to finish the magic DPS role quest with Red Mage, and thus I could also complete the quest "Shadow Walk With Me," so I have (at long, long last) resumed the MSQ. Now I'm about to go into work, so I should have another update later for how the rest of my day goes.

Work wasn't as bad as the rest of the week: I had a lot of meetings and briefings, and I made a LOT of headway on my accounting project reworks. It was a pretty good day. Afterwards, we finished the scalloped potatoes (for real this time; I guess there were more than I thought there were) and resumed our trek through Trailer Park Boys. We're getting into the episodes where their budget is getting better, and the guys themselves managed to make a little money.

2023

Tuesday: While Julie was at work, I ran a few errands around the apartment—litter, sweeping, taking trash out, refilling the cat food bin, etc. She arrived in the afternoon with Phil and Cliff, the former of whom was on his way out of town. Once Cliff was situated, we went to the gym for an hour, where I started rereading The Sot-Weed Factor. After getting back home and showering, I prepared flavor burgers and roast broccoli. The burgers were better than ever, but I only had three slices of bread to use as buns, and I had too many florets of broccoli to fit in the mixing bowl at once. I tried just spreading the glaze directly on the florets while they were on the roasting pan, but it resulted in a very uneven distribution of oil and other toppings. It still averaged out to be a satisfactory meal.

After dinner, we played more Civ VI until Julie found her energy levels lower than anticipated. I'd wanted to go to bed as well, but I found myself once more diverted by the Pyre soundtrack like the night before. For some reason I thought I should try to work toward a biphasic sleep schedule by taking a few hours of rest in the office before waking up and going to bed in the bedroom properly, but I'm not sure what the logic of that would have been since I wouldn't be getting good rest without my CPAP machine, and I wouldn't have the wherewithal to accomplish anything during the brief period of wakefulness in the middle. Still, that's how the night played out, more or less.