Sunday: up early enough to continue working on my outline. I'm getting close to the point where I can stop outlining and go back to working on a first draft. Once my focus started to fade, I finished the last of the cereal for breakfast, and Julie and I headed out for our long weekly walk. We took Broad up to Washington this time, then came back down one of the parallels. 16th? 18th? I can't remember.
We ended up having a long talk about the various ways in which we've adapted to negative childhood experiences, and in the ensuing conversation, I ended up explaining some of the conclusions I'd recently drawn using a Bob's Burgers episode to illustrate my reasoning. Disregarding the silly subject matter, I felt like it was an effective way to both reassure her and to demonstrate my commitment to the both of us getting the most out of life that we can. Her response surprised me a bit, as I figured she'd be resistant, but I wasn't expecting one of her justifications to be that she "hadn't earned" that level of understanding. There's still more to consider, but I found it to be a very productive conversation.
Julie had directed our return path down this road so that we could stop into a couple of open houses. We missed one of them, but we were able to step into a place on west Morris, which honestly would have been perfect for us, if not for the fact that we probably couldn't satisfy a sufficient down payment, much less handle $2k more a month in our housing expenses. It's been on the market for a while, though, so maybe it'll come down a bit in the near future. Maybe I can pick up some extra income before we need to talk to finance people. Maybe a Sphinx will fly down and ask me a real obvious riddle and grant us a house in exchange for my answer! The possibilities are endless.
Once we got back home, we ate lunch before going to the front porch to read again. I had a serving of salad to eat, and I found myself watching Joseph Anderson's first try at Mina the Hollower, which isn't good for my interest to get back to that game. I managed to finish the Perry Mason novel; after that, we got into our workout attire and did the rest of the exercise DVD Julie had picked up yesterday. The Butt routine was a lot more varied than the version from the 90s, though it achieved that variety by swapping some of its exercises with the Thigh routine. When we finished with the last of the four routines we hadn't done yesterday, I spent a little time working on my flexibility, and we got cleaned up for the evening.
For dinner, Julie cooked the hamburger meat she'd gotten on sale, along with potatoes and corn on the cob. Feels like it's been forever since I had something sandwich-like, though actually I had another burger as recently as last Monday. I was on the computer while I ate, and once dinner was over, I logged into the work laptop to clean up the last of my groups from Friday. It wasn't very long ago that I would have dreaded trying to get through multiple headquarter groups in a single sitting, but I managed to get through five or six before I signed off.
The tentative plan this week is to shave on Tuesday morning, call the doctor Wednesday morning (and reimburse myself for the eye doctor expenses that I paid with my other card), and maybe get a haircut on Thursday, if it seems warranted? I think Julie's trying to encourage that outcome.
Saturday: went to Taco Bell and the store. They're having a block party nearby, so I had to avoid parking on Juniper. We cleaned up the apartment, gathered the litter, etc., but I didn't get around to taking out the trash until Tuesday for whatever reason. Was this when Julie made tofu and vegetable curry for dinner? I think that's what she was doing when the Jay Essen Plays: The Little Match Girl 5: The Hunter's Vow (Part 2) stream was going. We watched more Enterprise while we ate, and I think I played Vampire Survivors.
Friday: Quite a day of ups and downs. The power went out overnight, and while I woke up early enough to schedule my doctor's appointment for next week, I didn't really have time to hit the store before Julie's arrival. I picked her up from the airport; while she liked Louisville well enough, the trip had been exhausting and stressful. We grabbed lunch at Taco Bell before stepping into Acme for chips and other supplies.
Once we got back home, we had a little time to decompress before David called. After that, Julie had a hair appointment at 5, and I probably should have cooked the meat while she was gone, but I spent most of my time struggling with the cemantle puzzle for day 795. (The closest I got was "bisection" at 97.9% semantic match.)
After she returned, we walked up to Ray's Happy Birthday Bar for Amy's birthday, though we stopped by an ice cream truck, where I got a black-and-white shake. A bunch of Julie's bocce teammates and other players were there. I was partially successful at matching the names Melody, Julianne, Mike, other Mike, Sarah, and Rachael to their corresponding faces, though any spelling errors are my own. I was having trouble hearing, so I mostly just perched on a chair in a doorway and tried to make sense of the films they kept flipping between on the big tv. (The films in question included The Spirit, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, and the director's cut of Clive Barker's Nightbreed.)
As 9 PM approached and passed, we were getting pretty hungry, so we left to find a local pizza joint, where we each grabbed a slice and a can of soda. The pizza was fine, though the uber driver behind us could not stop stirring up drama with his requests for freebies or something, so we were glad to get out of there.
We stopped into POPE to reconvene with the bocce crowd. I talked with Rachael for a while, but my voice was not keeping up, and I got pretty tired of standing up. I perched on a wobbly stool by Julie until she was ready to go, and we returned home, where after satisfying the cats' nightly treat routine, I wrote this update.
Wednesday: we've been dealing with bad air in the northeastern states for the past couple days due to wildfires in Canada, and it was particularly bad today. Julie said that they actually cancelled the baseball game today because of it, which means we were lucky to see the game on Tuesday. I started an update on the website, but I would fail to post most of these details until days later.
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I played Overboard! and considered writing a guide for it, because no real guides for it existed at this time. I didn't get very far in my plans to do so, though.
This is the last time I played Heaven's Vault before clearing it off my laptop for storage reasons. I got two different endings, didn't I? I'm pretty sure I did.
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Thursday: it seems I'd identified the three "worst days of my life" as all occurring within a 13 month span stretching from the end of my senior year of high school to the end of my first year at KU. Two of these were consequences of being emotionally out-of-my-depth and unable to maintain a relationship because I was so trapped inside my own head. The third day was an instance of food poisoning at KU. (Prior to November 25 of 2023, I couldn't have even told you that I had food poisoning while I was at KU. It left no long-term impression.) These details were recorded in an otherwise unreadable entry in my journal at 1:57 AM today.
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