WEDNESDAY (Wichita trip for Peter's wedding)
1043: got up around 6:25, barely conscious. I think I got my last items packed successfully, and Julie set out all the extra cat food and water stations. Expensive ride share to the airport, but it was an electric vehicle—"ioniQ", I think? Which was kind of interesting.
Got through security easily thanks to the lack of any laptop or game systems or playing cards. I had a sandwich from Subway for breakfast, while Julie got something from BK. We flew on Southwest, so we were seated in the B groups, and we ended up in the back of the plane with small children on all sides of us. Predictably, I spent the whole flight in my middle seat asleep, except for when my Dr Pepper and "Remy's Grahams" were distributed.
We just landed in St Louis, where we had to almost run from one end of our terminal to the other just to make our boarding time. We're seated in the emergency row this time, and it should be a short (but bumpy) flight.
1723: landed again in Wichita, where we had a speedy trip through the rental service to pick up a car. No satellite radio this time, so we're just listening to local radio. We cruised through our old neighborhoods, where we saw that the Shade Lane apartments were under new management, so "Georgetown Court" is now "Westwood Flats". Seems like rent went up $400 more per month, and they'd replaced the landings and staircase. We were startled to see various closures: our old Pizza Hut, our IHOP, the business that replaced Ecclesia, the Cornhole Cave, Hobbytown USA, the McDonald's at Central and Edgemoor... A couple of Warhammer stores opened around town, but the neighborhoods still feel like home.
Once we finished our loop of the city, Julie drove us to Richard and Glen's, where they and Jerry were waiting to greet us. We had toasted cheese sandwiches, soup, chips, and a couple of cans of Dr Pepper for lunch. Once we had caught up on recent events, we moved to the living room, where I lay on the floor next to the chair and a half. They put the football game on, but I just played a little bit of Animal Crossing followed by Vampire Survivors on my phone, but mostly I snoozed. They were watching for the Beyonce half-time show. (The performance was "cowboy blanc" aesthetics, perhaps.) After that, I plugged my phone into slow charger while we debated dinner arrangements, and I wrote this update.
2202: after the halftime show, we discussed dinner plans. The initial selection was to eat at The Hill, but it was too crowded; Richard didn't want to wait. Instead, we went to that Thai place where Ryan and I ate once or twice before. Julie confirmed the Tiger Cry Beef dish was identical to her favorite order from Siam before it closed. Took a really long time for my garlic and black pepper beef to arrive, but a good meal nonetheless.
After that, we returned home, and Jerry headed back to McPherson. I played some more on my phone while charging it in the kitchen, but once 9:30 rolled around, we all headed for bed.
Monday: seen today on tumblr from user genderfluid-druid: "hurr hurr I'm a huiman body hurr hurr I'm gonna solve all my problems using mucus"; "'I require more fluids' well what did you do with the fluids I already gave you. hmm? did you make more mucus with them? you made more mucus with them." A timely post that corresponds with my current lived experience.
I woke up at my usual work time before going back to bed until after 1 PM. I spent the day taking in fluids and catching up on holiday events in MMOs and lounging with various cats. (Watching a lot of northernlion and rarran lately on youtube.) Julie made this soup that I can best describe as, what if Korea tried to invent chili? She went real easy on the spice for my benefit, but she would have preferred something with a lot more heat. I should go to bed before it gets much later.
Christmas Weekend
Sunday: since we usually shop on the weekend and there was possible impact due to the holiday, our plan was to get up early on Saturday (the 24th) in hopes that a lot of people would have left the city to travel. It was supposed to be extremely cold, so we packed on the layers, including both long underwear and multiple jacket layers. I was alarmed to discover that the pocket of my leather jacket has torn such that my gloves were just sort of stuffed into the lining, but as damage goes this is pretty minimal. We wound up needing to go by both the Giant and the big Acme store for all our supplies, as we had lots of cooking plans for the weekend.
After getting home, we finished the tortellini for lunch, and I started putting peanut butter on crackers toward the goal of making Mom's chocolate-dipped cookies. It was a messy process, possibly in part because I was paying more attention to a Super Mario Galaxy Let's Play than to the crackers themselves. We thought half a package of chocolate would be enough, but I found the coating only worked well if I didn't let too much drip off before putting the cookie on the wax paper. After I finished with those, Julie made chocolate chip cookies with a recipe similar to Mom's, followed by the cabbage and sausage stir fry we've enjoyed with some frequency. We had that for dinner while watching Glass Onion on Netflix.
Since Cliff hasn't gotten as much wet food as he's accustomed to, I prepared plates for all the cats, but I probably used too much. Cliff didn't really seem interested in the wet food, though. Orange Juice and Grey Goose cleaned up probably a plate and a half each.
I double-checked my email, and it turns out Square Enix had removed my security token, which meant I was able to log into FFXIV for the first time since my phone died. I really wanted to finish the Shadowbringers patch content this weekend, but I didn't reach the second credits sequence either Saturday or Sunday. In fact, I wound up falling asleep on the living room floor on Saturday night, thanks in part to John curling up on my jacket.
Sunday was even lazier than Saturday was: Julie watched a bunch of DS9 while I continued working on Shadowbringers. Eggs, toast, and bacon for brunch; a shepherd's pie made of lentils for dinner. I peeled the potatoes and did a load of laundry. After dinner, we played around 100 turns of Julie's first game of Civ VI. Still haven't really gotten our heads around the changes they made to V's formula. Anyway, it's back to work tomorrow, though I should have a couple days off later in the week.
Steam:
Sid Meier's Civilization VI - Voyage of the Mayflower
Saturday: this is the last date on which I played Gloomhaven before I deleted it off my laptop to make space for something else. I found it discouragingly hard.
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Tuesday: for Christmas, we had dinner with Richard and Glen, and their alcoholic punch knocked us out. It was magnificent.
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Sunday: we'd had other plans, but our Christmas this year turned out to be dinner with friends and extended snoozing. Friends in this case referred to Richard and Glen.
Friday: we went to have a Christmas overnighter in OKC yesterday, so we got back home by 9:50 PM today.
Thursday: at 1 AM today, I had Julie and several cats lying on top of me on top of the papasan.
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Friday: went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie with friends and family.
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