JUN 20

2026

Saturday: slept in a bit, but still managed to put a couple of hours in on my first draft. Once my focus started to drift, I started on the project of copying all of Julie's old tweets to this website, since it's unlikely she'll ever log into that service again. I've gotten through all of 2012 and the first half of 2013 so far, but an old facebook post suggested that she should have had tweets dating back to 2009. I don't see any that old when I go to her profile, so either the post was wrong, or a bunch of her tweets are have disappeared. (Decided to check my own tweets. Sure enough, the oldest entry I can see is from July 2 of 2012, but I had the service as far back as 2009. I had requested a data download and performed several archival processes over the years, so I might be able to find mine, at least. That's a task for another day.)

Took a quick shower before our grocery run, which I started with our usual drive to Taco Bell. The car thermometer read 90 degrees Fahrenheit, but it felt warmer in the vehicle. At the restaurant, I continued my Wild Legend climb in Hearthstone; my Demon Seed Warlock deck wasn't holding up as well this month, so I switched to Aggro DH instead. After lunch, I brought us to the store. They've gutted one of the buildings on the west side of the access road we take for this leg of the trip, but it's not yet clear whether they're going to redo the interior or take the whole building out at this stage. There had been a sign on the corner that said "office space available," but it feels unlikely that this is connected.

We didn't need much from the store this week, but we did pick up more batteries on the expectation that our Just Dance routines will continue. Sunflower kernels are still hard to find. After we finished, I drove us back home via Tasker, as Julie keeps giving me grief about how much I prefer to come back by way of Reed. She finds any route that passes the Acme on Passyunk to be a huge headache, but I would rather deal with that than the corner on Tasker by the smoke shop that's always low-visibility due to cars parking on the corners. I must admit, though, that the trip back home today was easier than the Reed equivalent would have been.

Once we were home, I started some laundry, scooped the litter, and vacuumed the bedrooms. We considered working out, but Julie's running out of time on her audiobook, so we spent the afternoon reading on the porch. I'm working on Dr. Emily Nagoski's "Come As You Are", and I got maybe a third of the way through before we decided to go back inside. I moved my laundry and started on dinner.

I'd planned to make skillet chicken meatballs with pasta and broccoli. My usual approach with pasta prep is to do all the vegetable prep first, start the water boiling, and only then start following the entree recipe. I'd forgotten that this recipe has a longer stovetop cooking step than either the broccoli or the pasta, which meant that both of those were finished well before the meatballs went into the broiler. These timing issues did at least afford me the opportunity to wash more of the bowls and knives before dinner was ready.

Since we'd ended up watching TV together last night, Julie asked if I'd like to eat in the office, which I think she appreciated as it meant she could spend more time with her audiobook. Dinner tasted as good as I'd hoped, and after I watched some random Community reaction video, I continued copying Julie's tweets until 10 PM. I realized I'd never posted a proper update for the day, so that's what I'm doing now; I've also just treated the cats, and I've folded half my laundry while the remainder is in the dryer.

Nobody has asked me this, but the calendar entries you're reading raise an implicit question: why am I going to the trouble to transcribe all this? Why am I documenting day after day of the same basic activities? Is it just sentimentality that drives me to preserve even the most mundane details of my life? No: I have beef with the functionality of human memory. Recalling something is a deceptive process: the more often and the more clearly you remember something, the more that memory becomes distorted by the act of remembrance. If you don't remember something clearly, though, you just don't remember it. You're damned both ways.

Faced with this conundrum, I choose to take notes. It's a futile endeavor, but it's mine to undertake.

2025

Friday: in the morning, I woke up around 6 AM and got prepped for the day's endeavors.

First up: I took the subway back to the courthouse for the conclusion of the trial on which I've been serving as juror number 12. I was hoping we'd finish our deliberations and be released before the NarraScope events started at the Arch Meeting House at 12:00, but our trajectory indicated we were heading toward a hung jury outcome. Fortunately, the defendant ended up pleading guilty to a lesser version of the charges we'd been deliberating, so we were let out at a quarter until 5 PM.

I rushed to the NarraScope showcase, but the buses weren't cooperating, so I walked most of the way. I arrived just as they announced the showcase winners. Since nobody was wearing name badges yet, I relied on my intuition to identify a couple of parser devs who I would probably recognize from the intfiction.org community forum. The group was moving to Queen and Rook for the after-party, so I walked down to 3rd and South Street. I spent most of the time talking to Phil, Pinkunz, and Pell, though I did get to chat a little with Doug O. about game streaming there at the end. My voice couldn't hold up to the level of noise our group was producing, so I decided to call it a night and walked home. (I treated myself to a gelati from Rita's; I got blue raspberry with vanilla. Probably should just get an Italian ice next time.)

Once I was home and got cleaned up, I treated the cats, then logged into FFXIV, only to discover that the free company moved the Occult Crescent session to Saturday night. I still played long enough to get to knowledge level 20, plus the last of my Cruiserweight gear upgrades. Now I should go to bed due to the early morning we're going to have!

2024

Thursday: after Julie got up and started her morning, I moved from the office to the bedroom. I ended up sleeping until after 1 PM, after which I went out for groceries and lunch at Subway. It was supposed to be 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Philadelphia today, and I don't doubt we reached that temperature. At Subway, the wall decorations were all portrayals of everyday objects constructed with sandwich ingredients: a heart made out of bread halves, an open book made out of Swiss slices, Saturn made out of a meatball ringed by sliced rings of onion. At the grocery store, I got through in record time, and the guy in line gave me a coupon he had that he couldn't use which was about to expire, so I got $15 off my total. Back home, I vacuumed the bedrooms and hallway before watching Lauren's stream at 7. She's currently finishing Undertale Yellow, and this has been a musically satisfying backdrop with which to post this update.

Since John has been so insistent on sleeping under the bed in the bedroom, this feels like kind of a meaningful behavior change, so I scheduled a vet appointment for the week after next. It could just be that he's looking for places he doesn't have to deal with the kittens, but maybe better safe than sorry. (After posting this update, I did the dishes, and then I stayed up late reorganizing my google drive and updating my project directory. I'm feeling more ambitious about new projects, despite the fact that I'm about to go hog wild over the new FFXIV expansion.)

2023

Tuesday: my calls at work are pretty slow for how early in the week we are. The scalloped potatoes made their first appearance on the leftovers menu for the week, but they'll be back again before long. Julie complained of a problem she thinks might be a cyst, so she went to bed early, and I jumped back into Tears of the Kingdom, in which I picked up as many ingredients as I could afford, cooked up a couple dozen healing meals, and tried to get into the fire temple. It turned out to be further away than I'd expected. I'd been watching too many videos earlier in the day, and I wound up wasting devices on several builds that seemed more practical than they turned out to be. I called it quits once I was actually inside the temple this time.