SEP 28

2025

Sunday: had a very nice Washington Walk for our pet supplies; this week, one of the for-sale residences Julie wanted to walk past was holding an open house, so we checked out the unit. The basement was in much better condition than ours, though the ceiling was too low for either of us to stand upright. Julie noticed a couple of dead roaches. The ground level had only the living room and kitchen (plus a very enclosed back patio), while the second floor had three bedrooms and a bathroom, all of which were pretty small. If we were desperate, we could probably make a place like that work, but I'm glad we didn't have to resort to that.

On our way back, I almost suggested we cross the street by way of the Tasker-Morris subway station, as the northeast corner stairway is FINALLY open again. We didn't bother, though.

For brunch, Julie made eggs and sausage, and while I didn't end up bothering to vacuum, I did start Jay Essen Plays Tales from Castle Balderstone, which is the first of Ryan's four major Halloween story-telling anthology games. I've never played the last of the four games all the way through, so I'm excited to see how this goes. During the stream, Julie got started making tortellini for dinner, and we ended up eating with our own entertainments.

After dinner, I decided to finally update Hades 2 in honor of its 1.0 release a couple weeks back, and once I got drivers installed for my PS3 controller, I spent the evening playing. Before I quit, I managed to get to the third major zone on the main route, and I unsealed the warded exit from the Crossroads. (Making good progress on incantations, and I've got four major arms, as well as all four collection tools.) Preliminary assessment is that I still prefer the weapons and boons from the first game, a bit; Hades 2 gives just a few too many options to keep track of, and I feel like I haven't seen any really transformative boons or upgrades. I'm still pretty early, though. I much prefer the talismans in the second game, though.

2024

Saturday: it was an uneventful workday, though I did wind up eating the rest of the spaghetti for lunch. As my shift was coming to an end, Julie went out to pick up more Juana Tamale, since she hasn't had it in a while, and there's a chance they may have to close soon due to a rent dispute. As soon as I finished eating, Julie and I went out to the corner to get picked up by our ride share, as we needed to get to the Mann Center for the evening's concert. This was Vampire Weekend, a band that shows up on Alt Nation all the time, and which usually causes me to change the radio station: they've just been played so much that I can't really handle their sound. Julie would have had a friend come in my place if anybody had been available, but circumstances weren't with us. When we arrived, the opener was playing: a band made up (mostly) of women, called Cults. We were on the lawn again, which was unfortunate since it was raining a bit. We had our rain jackets, so we didn't need to resort to using our ponchos. We set up our blanket at the top edge of the first part of the lawn. While this was a lot more comfortable than the slope we were on last time we came to the Mann, our proximity to the walkway meant that we had to listen to a bunch of young guys who wanted to stand around up there and comment on how much of a banger each of Vampire Weekend's songs were. I found myself unexpectedly entertained as the band launched into a country western sequence, and the zoomers were not happy about it.

When the concert ended, we were excited to see that they'd brought two busses instead of just one, but since they insisted on travelling together, we still had to wait until both were full to get moving. A subway ride later, we were back home, and I treated the cats before crashing into bed, just past midnight.

2023

Thursday: didn't get much done today! Spent a lot of time playing Hearthstone, and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and watching videos. Julie made that spicy stir fry with rice, and I stayed up too late. On the plus side, we didn't spend any money on anything today.