DEC 20

2025

Saturday: loving my new sleep schedule. I was up around 6:30 AM and posted yesterday's update, and I spent the morning getting my beast mastery hunter to max level through timerunning. I had on Joseph Anderson's "first day of YIIKmas" stream in the background while I played. By 11:00 AM, we were ready to go do our weekly errands, and Julie discovered that the trick of putting the PetSmart order in before they opened was a pretty effective way of ensuring it would actually be ready by the time we wanted to pick it up. After getting the cat treats, I made the mistake of turning on Washington; I should have just taken Broad down to Snyder or Oregon instead. I did eventually get us to Taco Bell, where we had to order from the kiosk since Julie's card won't work with the app, for some reason. (I still haven't received a replacement for my expired card from the credit union. I keep forgetting to call when they're open.)

With lunch complete, we proceeded to Acme for our grocery shopping, though we started by getting wines for the Christmas get-together. (Can I remember which wines we bought? a Sauvignon Blanc, a Cupcake moscato, and some variety of merlot, though I forget which.) Among my weekly groceries, I got the ingredients to make pizza (for dinner Sunday night), as well as a package of whole fat string cheese (as a partially unjustified response to this article suggesting a correlation with decreased risk of Alzheimer's for roughly 85% of the population). Still getting yogurt and pistachios as my snacks to get through the week, but I should probably get more breakfast cereal as well. I think I might be working toward the idea of making myself breakfast sandwiches, which is a very delayed response to watching this BDG video, but I'm not ready to commit to buying ingredients toward this end just yet.

After our grocery trip, I brought us to the neighborhood Acme so we could pick up our respective prescriptions. At home, I changed out the litter on the udstairs litterboxes, but I'm not ready to vacuum the office until I can do laundry at the same time, and I don't want to move the laundry baskets until the landlord has figured out whether he needs to get an electrician into the basement. We did a deep clean on the bedroom, though, including vacuuming under all the boxes that Mim likes to perch on or shred. I took a shower in the late afternoon, and I picked up Sid Meier's Civilization IV on a deep discount through the Winter Steam Sale for both Julie and myself. We put Futurama on while we ate the last of the sausage and cabbage with pasta, followed by a game to figure out how Civ IV multiplayer works. Everything was pretty intuitive, though we both felt like we didn't know what we were doing in terms of pursuing goals. I forget who Julie played as, but I was the Aztecs, and once Russia conquered my capital, we decided to call it good. I switched to playing more Proverbs, which has been a nice routine while watching TV, but I soon started to fall asleep. I treated the cats with the tuna John prefers before going to bed, though I stayed up long enough to finish an Agnes Digital career in UmaMusume before I fell asleep again.

2024

Friday: I'm back to work after my long weekend. Did we catch up on Ghosts and Lower Decks tonight, or did we just entertain ourselves? The latter, I think; we just had my leftover chicken meatballs and ziti. I played some games. Typical Friday.

2023

Wednesday: had a worse time getting to sleep last night than I had the night before. Once we were up, we had eggs and bacon and prepared for our day. Six of us went out to the National Museum of World War II Aviation; those involved were my parents, my uncles Jim and Steve, my cousin Jacob, and myself. All the aircraft in the hangars had been restored such that they were again air-worthy, which was pretty apparent based on the oilpans underneath each plane. Once we'd had our fill of looking at the exhibits, we went to Red Lobster for lunch, and I picked up a Caesar salad and some bread rolls for Julie, though she reported from the house that she was just eating her leftovers from Edelweiss. Once we got back home again, it wasn't too long before my cousin Mike showed up, followed shortly thereafter by Kelly & Joe and their girls. Mom prepared chicken and rice casserole for dinner, which we had along with some of Amy's salad, and after we finished eating, I spent the rest of the night entertaining Adalyn and Brinley with Dad and Julie in the basement. "Entertaining" in this context meant pretending to be the Grinch and stealing their "presents", which started out as imaginary boxes before being replaced by the box containing an airbed pump. At one point, Adalyn insisted that I complete five forward rolls while she timed me; I managed to avoid hurting myself, but I should probably do gymnastics more frequently before I try to compete in any races.