JUL 19

2025

Sunday: woke up from dreams of paintball politics. I pushed myself out of bed at 10 AM. The big plan today was the World Cup gathering at the Baker residence; Julie drove us down, but we stopped in at a Goodwill to find more cruise supplies. She found some of the stuff she was looking for, but the haphazard store layout vexed us both. (The books had zero organization. The clothes may have been divided into "men's styles" and "women's styles," but the shoes didn't adhere to that categorization.)

At Denise and Larry's place, they'd moved the grills to the driveway so that they could set up a second theater outside the garage. The seating area was encircled with national flags for the countries that participated in the tournament; the cooler was behind the outdoor TV, which is where we unloaded the cola cans we'd brought. It took no time for Denise to have us overburdened with appetizers, snacks, and entrees: soft pretzel sticks with various dips, ham and cheese sliders, stromboli bites, scoop-shaped chips, Emily's spicy dip (and her homemade limeade), cheeseburgers, hot dogs... I soon lost track. We staked out a couple of chairs against the far wall of the garage as the crowds grew.

Out of all the various games played during the course of the World Cup this year, I only spent any time watching this one. Spain vs Argentina; most of our group was rooting for Spain. Despite my attentiveness, I still spent more time than not paying more attention to the conversation, my food, and my phone. It was good to catch up with the latest post-wedding gossip, and of course we spent a lot of time coordinating our plans for the cruise. Our excursion commitments now include the Blue Lagoon, the Golden Circle, a particular waterfall that I didn't catch the name of, our behind-the-scenes ship tour, and a walking tour of Reykjavik for just Julie and me. Excitement is high.

After Argentina failed to catch up with Spain and the game ended, people began drifting away, and soon Julie and I joined the exodus. I drove us back home, treated the cats, and got too carried away with Zero Parades.

2025

Saturday: it was rainy enough that we brought our jackets with us to Taco Bell, which turned out to be an invaluable defense against the restaurant air conditioning. I got a late start at the store, since I was distracted with cleaning all the rotting leaves out of the car's trunk seams, and as a result, I didn't pick up my snack nuts or cereal this week. I think I'll pick those up on Monday. Back home, we cleaned up the litter and took out the trash. I played a little Umamusume before we left for the Weird Al show at the Mann Theater. Pretty fun mix of attendees; we were well positioned to view one of the screens opposite the trash cans, but the downside of sitting behind the walkway is the congregating crowds, even in the vicinity of the garbage. When we got bakc home, I stayed up too late.

2024

Friday: I woke up early again, and just like yesterday, we had to start with a trip to the vet. This time we were bringing Mim, but despite her issues for the last few weeks, she had a clean bill of health. After bringing her home, I picked up lunch from Newbold Cafe. While we were eating, I read up about the Crowdstrike outage, and my boss had me sign into my laptop long enough to verify I could still access everything. My device had been offline and disconnected, so I had no issues. I ran a load of laundry and did the dishes, after which I prepared dinner of vegetable rotini with feta. I've nearly finished watching Preach's Dawntrail MSQ videos.

2023

Wednesday: I got up early enough to go to the gym! It was wet out: not so much raining as much as "I keep walking into these suspended water droplets." I tried to set up interval biking with 1 minute of high intensity alternating with 4 minutes of recovery, but this was enough of a departure from my usual "mountainside" routine that I couldn't tell whether I'd set the resistance level appropriately. On the bike, I bounced between Her Story reviews and blog entries from figures in the IF community.

Since I was up so early, I was able to shower after my gym session and go pick up lunch with plenty of time to spare. To undo all the work I put in at the gym, I got Chipotle for us both. The route back home drove over peeled roads where new asphalt hasn't been poured yet. Once I arrived, we discovered they'd been out of salad lettuce and thus they'd also omitted Julie's dressing, which was a disappointment, but at least I had plenty of time to eat.

Once my shift started, I was back on my weekly project. Great progress today: I'm 2/3 done. Julie went out for Quizzo in the evening to a game cafe, but she and Grace weren't impressed by the experience. (She attributed it to a poor trivia subject, inconsistency between the cafe info on the website versus the actual schedule and products available, and disappointing levels of professionalism from the staff.) While she was gone, I finished the sausage/veggie medley. I was planning to go to bed early again tonight, but I got carried away working on my browser extension. I was able to get maybe 70% of the webpages and scripts set up, though in this context "set up" means "present, but broken". The browser extension button and the pop-up are the only parts that work so far. I spent another hour just writing up everything I've put together so far for folks at Select Button to review. If they can't give me any guidance, I'll stick the broken scripts on Github and see if IF people can help instead, but I'd prefer as few people look at these awful files as possible.

2022

Tuesday: in today's training session at work, we finally got some login credentials to several of our systems. I also made notes about our sales strategies and stateroom availability.