JUN 17

2026

Wednesday: though I woke at 6, I snoozed with cats until a little past 7. Worked on my draft, then signed in early to ensure my new password would cooperate at work. This was a much more productive workday than yesterday, as I caught up all my new groups, all my reworks, and took a big chunk out of my groups to review. Listened to a lot of Toby Fox music on my breaks; I guess folks are excited about the imminent release of Deltarune Chapter 5. (It occurs to me that I need to replay the prior chapters, since my save data is scattered across multiple devices.) Julie reported digestive distress, so I went through an 8 Minute Abs routine by myself, followed by 8 Minute Arms and some ad hoc stretching.

In the shower, I asked her if she thought she might go through a sudden collecting phase the way her father and grandfather had in the coming years, but she insisted that the inexplicable drive to collect is a feature of the Holt Y-chromosome. She asked why I'd brought it up; I was curious, because I feel like I've been going through my own midlife metamorphosis, though in my case it was driven more by a desire to avoid the negative outcomes that are likely to come about due to my immaturity. That triggered a long conversation about our respective attitudes toward immaturity. I think of myself as immature because I have frivolous tastes, and because I struggle to relate to most adults, whereas she considers me mature because I don't allow myself to be bothered by anything I don't consider worth being bothered by. She held up Vulcans as the exemplars of mature behavior, which astonished me a bit. I had to point out that the downside to her vision of maturity is that people like me can tolerate things that shouldn't be tolerated, necessarily. As Tuvok demonstrates, Vulcans still feel their emotions, even if they suppress their outward expression. Still, I appreciated the insights.

For dinner, Julie seasoned some quartered potatoes, cooked a slice of brisket, and boiled four ears of corn. We ate half of this while watching more Resident Alien. Once it was after 9 PM and we'd reached a stopping point, I did the dishes and treated the cats. I came into the office to write this update, and now I'm just sitting here in my underwear, staring at all the scabs and scars I've collected from Grey Goose's kneading on underprotected flesh. I suppose I'll post this update and try to get some reading in.

2025

Tuesday: spent the morning at the city courthouse, though I can't provide many details until after the weekend. I did get a lunch break in which I ended up wandering around Chinatown before stopping into Crown Chicken. When I got back home, I changed before we finished the leftover porkchops for dinner, but I overstuffed myself a little while watching more Deltarune videos. We took the subway back up to Locust for a Sarah Millican comedy show. Felt like I was just as underdressed for this performance as I had been overdressed in the morning. Pretty entertaining, though; we brought home buttons. (We both selected "Late Bloomer" buttons, rather than the "Eager Beaver" alternatives.) Tried to watch the Grinding Gear video on their familiarity with the Final Fantasy franchise (as part of their coverage of their design to play through each of the games they haven't finished, chronologically), but it was getting pretty late, so Julie encouraged me to come to bed.

2024

Monday: my schedule is changing: I'll be doing two hours of calls every weekday morning (Monday through Wednesday), an hour and a half of calls at the end of my shifts, and project work for the time in-between. (My Saturdays and Sundays do not change.) This seems like a nice change, because I no longer need to request assign time to get my project work in.

After Julie's shift, she stopped into the grocery store and picked up a lot more snacks than she'd intended. Once she got home, we got cleaned up for trivia and went to Stogie Joe's. The place was packed with people watching the baseball game, so there were only a few teams present; we had to be seated at the bar. Not bad seats, but for some reason the soppressata pizza tasted a little worse than usual. Once the trivia started, we had a strong start and we stayed in contention for the top spots for the first few rounds. By the final music round, we were in a three-way tie for second place... but alas, we only identified five of the artists in the music round, so we wound up in something like sixth place. We treated ourselves to soft serve at the corner shop before coming back home, and after treating the cats, I accidentally locked Mim in the bedroom. I couldn't figure out how to unlock it again, so I just took the doorknob off to get in. Once that was reassembled and the tools put away, I came in here to play a little Hearthstone with the temporary addition of Genn and Baku back to Standard, and then I posted this update.

2023

Saturday: my grand plans to start a M-W-F schedule of updates are already backfiring, as the weekend was memorable, yet it wasn't exactly sequential. This may not be the right order, but here are some of the things I recall happening during the weekend: we took the kittens to the vet Saturday morning. I'd forgotten that this was the plan, so I was not very well rested, and after dropping off Julie and the cats, I parked on the next street over and watched a couple construction workers who were knocking bricks out of a 2nd floor wall with hammer. After we returned, I think we had our leftovers for lunch: Julie finished the goulash, while I finished the fish paste spaghetti. We went shopping—I remember we drove straight to the store, for once. I picked up lunch stuff and the components to make our beloved scalloped potatoes. The drive back on Snyder mocked the hubris of my decision to follow a bus as we proceeded to stop at every intersection whether the light was red or not. Who could have predicted this. After our return, we resumed our earlier game of Civ in which I was on-track to get my religious victory and pretty much played until I won. Later, we walked to Cantina Los Caballitos for dinner; the weather felt perfect. Probably not a coincidence that their open-air seating was packed, but plenty of space remained inside. The beef quesabirria satisfied just as much this time as it has before. We detoured by the soft serve ice creamery on our return trip: Julie had a swirl in a cone, while I had a swirl in a bowl. Since the weather was still so nice after we finished our ice cream at home, we plugged my power strip into the outlet by the door and sat on the porch to start a new game of Civ. I enjoyed the huge Earth with true starting locations map enough the first time that I put that in again, this time planning for a cultural victory while Julie aimed for science. While my Greece was able to take out Alexander of Macedon on the first turn, neither of us were having a very successful time at our chosen strategies, and once Cleopatra declared war on us, we called it quits.

Looks like I had a better grasp on Saturday's timeline than I thought. I thought I did wind up playing Zelda on Friday night, but it doesn't look like I got very far. All I did was continue the goron questline, cresting the summit of Mt. Doom, and quitting basically as soon as I approached the entrance to the fire temple.

Steam:
Sid Meier's Civilization VI - Nirvana
Sid Meier's Civilization VI - Armor of Faith