MAR 06

2025

Thursday: one of the team leads advised me today that I needed to take a training class on an external platform we'll start making use of in the near future. It was all I could do to stop myself from telling her that the coaster on my desk just happened to be a memento of my time as my department's designated specialist on that very platform at my last job. After my shift, we strolled to the gym, and we both agreed that we're ready for the temperatures to start improving again. Once we got cleaned up, I opened up the overhead light in the bathroom to replace the burnt out bulb, but it turns out that these CFLs use a two prong connector rather than the usual screw-in design, so Julie's going to try to find a replacement online. We finished the chicken/yams/asparagus for dinner, and in discussing our recent meals, we had to conclude that Julie had cooked back-to-back chicken dinners, which is why we were having such a hard time remembering what we'd eaten on Friday and Saturday last week. I'd had a few ambitions about working on interactive fiction after I finished eating, but the only productivity I could muster was to finally adjust the background and foreground colors on this website. As much as I enjoy Ethan Schoonover's Solarized color scheme for dark-mode applications, I wanted something with stronger contrast, particularly when browsing on light mode. I cleaned up some of the links on the front page, as well.

Before I went to bed, I decided I wanted to finally figure out how to use the World of Warcraft API to extract my achievement data, and I wanted to sort that data by month and date, to simplify the process of importing it to this website. I didn't expect to be very successful, and by some standard, this data file is still pretty raw. For my purposes, though, it's going to be perfect. Now I just need to remember that the data is only valid through March 6, 2025.

2024

Wednesday: real glad to be on the last day of my workweek. Still watching Preach get through Heavensward on my breaks and lunches (he just finished The Vault on the video I watched today), and afterwards, Julie and I decided to clean up the basement, as the shop vac bags we'd ordered were finally here. Once we'd mopped and vacuumed the dirt out of all the corners (which will probably be back in less than a week), we came back upstairs to clean up and eat leftover shrimp fried rice for dinner. I spent some time catching up on my my project, played a couple of rounds of Hearthstone, and continued pursuing Manderville storylines in FFXIV. (I finished the "Nashu Goes East" series and moved on to the Endwalker quests.) Up too late, so I'll go to bed now.

2023

Monday: the building we live in had once been expanded to add a kitchen and divide it into six residential units. What this meant for the basement is that they knocked a bunch of the bricks out of the back wall and left a crawlspace where they put the plumbing in. I don't think they even put any concrete down; it would explain why there's so much dirt in the rest of the basement. They floored over the original staircase, so the basement has a weird, decaying staircase that you cannot climb because it doesn't go anywhere. It just runs right into the ceiling. I knew about all this.

What I didn't know is that, underneath this pointless ruined staircase, the renovators had left a four foot long, two foot wide, one foot deep pile of dirt, sand, cement dust, gravel, old clothespins, brick fragments, and other debris, and in the intervening years, some number of cats (my own, obviously, but likely earlier cats as well) had doubled the size of this pile with their now-petrified excrement.

Anyway, Julie and I took an hour or two getting as much of that out of the apartment as we could.