JAN 27

2024

Saturday: a good start to my work week as I had the first Saturday in a while in which I didn't have to take calls. Before my shift, I spent a little bit of time playing with the Sandboxels site. For dinner, Julie was meeting up with her coworker Emily at a restaurant that was supposed to be too spicy for me to handle, so I stayed home and had the last of my pizza. The upstairs neighbor was celebrating her 30th birthday, so the noise level was a little high, but I don't mind as much as Julie does. It finally occurred to me that as long as I hang out in the living room, John won't be desperate to get my attention, because I think he considers it his own territory.

I've been growing out my sideburns for some reason, but apparently Julie can't handle looking at me now because it's too funny. We'll see how long I keep them.

2023

Friday: another typical workday, though I had a much higher than normal number of math problems to solve today. Went to the gym after work, but rather than continue The Sot-Weed Factor, I just caught up on some of the blogs linked on my index. Back at home, we finished yesterday's casserole and played an almost immediately abandoned Civ VI game, but our second round was much better. We got 75 to 80% finished, and Julie's on-track to win a diplomatic victory, assuming we can forestall a last-minute computer player revolt. I got stuck with Denmark again. (We've been seeing too many matches with Denmark, lately.) Still, some lucky early developments gave me a huge reserve of faith which I probably should have used to pursue a religious victory, but instead I built my religion to pump up my cities' effectiveness at generating various currencies. The secret society I adopted allowed me to spend this faith reserve on special 'cultist' units that deplete other cities' loyalty, and while this wasn't very useful for actually working toward victory, I was enjoying causing loyalty problems for my neighbors while I tried to generate enough emissaries and diplomatic influence to catch up to Julie's lead. We saved the game before quitting nearing 2:00 AM, thinking we might try to pick up again tomorrow.