JAN 25

2024

Thursday: last night and this morning, I spent a lot more energy than I should have trying to mediate online drama. I don't know that I actually made the situation better. To cope, I bookended my day with time in FFXIV, and since I"m a lot closer to achieving my goals than I thought, I tried to knock as many of them out as I could: I finished 6.4, took out a big chunk of 6.5, discovered (to my dismay) that I hadn't actually finished the role quest capstone for Shadowbringers and ran through a bunch of ARR and Heavensward EX trials that were prerequisites to the story's finale, finished the Maiden's Rhapsody event quest that had been in my log for over a year, etc. Between sessions, I went to the store for my usual groceries, plus a box of Cheez Its for a change of pace. I plan to make goulash again tomorrow night, with double meat and double bell peppers. I had a long and kind of disappointing lunch because of the aforementioned online drama, but I did play a little Hearthstone, which was enjoyable enough. For dinner tonight, I picked up pizzas from LaScala's Birra, and it wasn't too rainy. Tomorrow's going to be my productive day.

2023

Wednesday: still groggy from the previous night's sleep experiment, Julie woke me at 10:30 to point out that the weather was trying to rain, or possibly sleet. After dressing, I grabbed my leather coat, since that's the one that usually contains my gloves, but for some reason I wore neither a hat nor a hooded jacket underneath my coat. I guess I figured that, since I was driving, I'd have more environmental control than I had Monday night. Having grabbed some shopping bags, I took the car across town to get lunch.

I should point out that chain restaurants are only grudgingly tolerated in Philadelphia. Sure, the fast food franchises usually have holdouts near the highways, but the Philly attitude toward national brands hovers somewhere between disdain and disgust. The problem for me is that I don't go to a restaurant because I like the restaurant; it's because I found one particular dish that I plan to eat for the rest of my life. Take Wichita's Playa Azul, for example: their Jalisco Special is a DIY tortilla dish of steak, chicken, and shrimp with peppers and rice, drizzled with a melted cheese that I suspect is queso Oaxaca. (There's probably more to it than that? I'm not sure.) I have been assured that the Mexican places around here are fantastic, but that's immaterial to me because they don't serve this dish, so there's no way to compare them. I have to find a new dish, and I don't like how much I have to spend on what is essentially gambling. I don't know why "predictability" is such an important characteristic for my food to have, but it has easily been the hardest part of the move so far.

Anyway, all of that is just to say that for lunch, I went to Blaze Pizza, which was one of the restaurants I visited the most in Wichita this past summer. I spent probably an hour and a half there, slowly working my way through a salad and a pizza and a few games of Hearthstone. I also picked up lunch supplies at the store and a few other odds and ends. After Julie was done with work and we'd spent time catching up and talking about taxes, it was time for leftover soup for dinner and more Civ VI. This time we played on an Earth-like map with authentic starting locations; I was one of the only indigenous American civs in the match, so I was stranded by myself in South America for most of the game, while Julie in Portugal was in the thick of things with European and Asian neighbors. We were in a strong position, but we had to cut things off around the halfway point to go to bed for work. Then I got carried away watching videos for another few hours before spending yet more time putting updates for yesterday and today together for this blog! Geez, get it together, Jason!!