9/19-20/20, a weekend of family fun

 It's been a while since I did one of these. Sorry for being gone so long. This was a fun weekend with my family. My aunt, uncle, and PepperBC came down to see me on Saturday. They're into a lot of the nerd stuff I'm into, so I had them down to my condo to enjoy the nerd paradise I've created. We spent probably an hour just giving them the tour. They enjoyed the video store that I live in, and the videogame nerd cave. My aunt took a lot of pictures to send to my other aunts. After the tour we went out to lunch. It was a good lunch at a restaurant I haven't been to before. After lunch I took them on a tour of my city, showing them the river and my work. My uncle really wanted to see the river, and everyone enjoyed seeing the building I work in. After the tour we went back to my place and played ms pacman for an hour or so.

On Sunday my parents came to see me. We went to church first, and then we started to fry things. We fried broccoli, bell peppers, pickles, onions, green beans, cheese, and ice cream. It was quite a day. After frying we watched the Rugrats Movie, since my mom remembers Rugrats from my childhood and she kept getting the Rugrats media mixed up. We watched Rugrats in Paris, select Rugrats episodes, and now the first movie. Before dinner mom and I took a walk to the park by me that has a bunch of pokestops, and we needed the walk after eating all the fried stuff. Since we had a bunch of fried things for lunch, we had burger patties and lettuce for dinner. It was a really fun weekend, and a good last hurrah for my bachelor lifestyle and bachelor pad. Later.

3/27-29/20

I had a 3 day weekend. What did I do on my 3 day weekend? Well because we're all in quarantine not much of anything. On Friday I recorded a podcast with Bio, something I haven't done in a while because we just had a lot of scheduling conflicts, and personal challenges. I played Animal Crossing New Horizons, because I just got it and it's quite fun, though it's not quite as time consuming as previous games, at least at this point. I did some laundry, cleaning all the bedding on my bed. Since it's been so long since I made brownies I decided to get a dozen eggs and make a pan. Because "everything's in high demand" I had to pay more than normal for eggs, but it's OK. The brownies turned out pretty well. I played some videogames and watched some TV, and it's OK. I did some exercise going up and down the steps of my condo in my weight vest. I video called my mom and grandma on Saturday, and called my grandpa on Sunday. I cleaned the long stale and inedible cinnamon sticks from my fridge.

One thing that happened was I got REALLY stir crazy and wanted ice cream, so I walked the the McDonald's that's a block from my house. Of course because COVID I wasn't able to go into the dining area, so I had to use the drive through. They didn't pick-up on me when I walked to the order microphone, so I walked up to the window. The girl at the window started chuckling as I walked up and said "I'll need to get my manager." The manager said "we're not supposed to take walk up...oh I don't care, what was it you wanted?...OK walk up to the next window." As this was happening 2 guys were peaking from behind the corner, because I'm sure they wanted to see "did someone REALLY walk up to the drive through window?" As I pick-up my ice cream the guy at the food window had a big smile on his face and said "here you go, stay safe out there" with some pep. I have a feeling I brightened up everyone's day at that location.

3/1/20

Not much to talk about Saturday, so I'll just talk about Sunday.

I basically spent all Sunday with my parents, doing fun things. They came down to my place around 8:50 and we went to church at my church. After church we played Monopoly Empire. It's a really fun take on monopoly. After monopoly we went to lunch at big boy. Dad and I each had big boy burgers and my mom had chicken tenders. After lunch we decorated a gingerbread house I got on sale months ago. It didn't come with candy, so we raided my stash of expired candy, and it turned out really well. After the gingerbread house we played ms pac man on my arcade machine. It was a really fun day. Later.

1/12/20

Ahhh a relaxing day. I woke up after a long and restful night of sleep. I went to church like normal, though I had to brave the elements since there was a major ice storm before and everything was frozen over. I still managed, and I played DDR as my exercise later in the day. I finished binging 10 Things I Hate About You, and it was a good series. I also watched The Fate of the Furious before it expired. It's a good movie. I resumed my penny sorting, and it's fun. I made beef and vegetable soup, which was good. I might do a little bit of cleaning of my nerd cave later, but we'll see what next. Later.

1/11/20

Today was productive. I mopped my garage, because I haven't done it in half a year and it needed the cleaning. I also got into my nerd cave and the main thing I did was go through my college "things" bag. What did I find? Half a dozen or so plastic twist ties, HDMI caps, an eraser, 3 pairs of sun glasses, an aluminum bar, a brass bar, loser lottery tickets, Toys R Us rewards card (RIP buddy), GameStop rewards card, cards from care packages, candy tins, eye glass cleaning cloths, my impromptu Halloween costume of a normal distribution, a dozen or so safety glasses cleaning wipes, a pair of safety glasses, the screws from the light switch panel I replaced, the pendent for my honors fraternity, and $91. I'm a regular sitcom character. I also baked a pound of bacon. I also started rewatching 10 Things I Hate About You on ABC Family/FreeForm. I remember watching this 10 years ago as it was airing and loving it so much because it was Moze from Ned's Declassified, and the principal from Max Kebles Big Move, and teenage challenges that, while not directly relatable because I didn't partake in those kinds of shenanigans, I still found the situations understandable and myself in some of the characters seeing that I was the same age as the characters. I also never really finished the series for some reason I don't remember. I think it had something to do with changing the time slots and lack of reruns. I also watched Fant4stick. It's a terrible Fantastic 4 movie, and a terrible super hero movie...but I don't think it's an all out terrible movie. I think it's a passable sci-fi movie that has some super hero elements. There was also some really heavy rain that I used to clean my car (free car wash), and flooded the road trapping me in my condo all day. Later in the evening I was able to go to the bank and deposit the $91. Later.

12/26/19

Today was a simple, crash back to reality type day. After a mostly restful night sleep, my one smoke detector started chirping at 5:30. Luckily it was one of my "low ceiling" smoke detectors, so I only needed my step stool to reach it. I was able to change it, and then went back to bed for another hour and a half. When I woke up for real I had my breakfast and watched some hulu. I changed the rest of my low ceiling batteries with the batteries I had, then later in the day I bought some more 9 volt batteries and filled a prescription. I was able to pay for it with one of my Christmas gift cards, and so I told the people that gave me it "I used your gift to buy my health and safety," which they enjoyed. I processed my food gifts from Christmas so they are in their proper spots pantry organization wise. I also started charging my new cordless handheld vacuum and cleaned my stairs. It is the ONLY way I can get them clean, and for that reason I have never cleaned them in the time I've had this place. The dust bin was really full by the time I finished. I played some super monkey ball (new game) and Days Gone. I also watched 2 fast 2 furious, fast and furious Tokyo drift, and furious 7. The weird thing about furious 7 is I watched a DVR recording from FX and they rated it TV-MA, even though the movie is rated PG-13. I guess because it's pretty violent it's on the edge of PG-13 and R, and TV is a little more strict than movies, but it was still weird. I also needed to check my TV stands for the one my grandpa can use for his new TV, and I thought I would need to somehow get one of my nerd cave stands out with the help of my brother or someone, but then I remembered I have my DDR TV in my garage and that is the largest stand I have, and I can handle it myself, and it's a little too big for my garage, so it's perfect. I also wrote most of my Christmas 2019 blog, which won't come out until all my Christmas festivities are over. Later

12/23/19

Today kind of sucked. I set-out to get some chores done, mainly clean my cast iron pan and prepare and prepackage the vegetables for my beef and vegetable soup recipe while I watch Durarara. First the cast iron pan. Since I cooked bacon in it there was some pretty stuck-on grease, and since you can't use soap on cast iron I decided to loosen it with boiling. Well it got out of hand and started boiling over. I rush it to the sink but still spilled a lot of water. That was a mess I didn't want to clean up, but I did. Well then to dry it good I decided to use heat, aka put it on the burner and boil off any water. Well something was still on it because it started to smoke, REALLY bad to the point that it set off the smoke detector. When this happens I get the pan out on my deck where it can cool and smoke go off into the sky. To get rid of the smoke I turned on my air filter and set-up my window fan and turned on my furnace fan (just to suck-up the smoke and send it to the filter. Well the window fan kept falling out of my window and making a BIG noise on the table it kept hitting (it also dented the wood of the table, which sucks).

Now for the vegetable prep. Chopping up the vegetables wasn't a problem, but I put a lot of the onion and garlic skin and carrot and celery tailings down my garbage disposal. Well that ended up clogging my disposal, to the point where water wouldn't go down. Trying to work the disposal did something to it where it started leaking out the bottom, so now I have a leak under my sink. I put one of my 2 gallon buckets under it to catch all the water, but it was really annoying. I bought a pipe snake and tried snaking out the drain, but I couldn't find the part that went to the piping and where the clog was. I tried using a plunger on it, but the clog was SOOO tight I wasn't able to get any pressure down it. I poured drain cleaner in the backed up water, and fished out what I could with the snake, but it wasn't doing any good. I would turn it on intermittently but all it seemed to do was spin water around. Eventually the clog loosened up and drained, and now it seems to be working, but it was touch and go for a little bit, like I thought I was going to need to call a plumber over on emergency. At this point I'm just not going to use that side of the sink until after the holidays and I can get a plumber to fix it.

Now what of Durarara? Well something happened with the hulu app on my TV and the episode got caught in a loop, resulting in me watching the same episode like 4 times. Since I was a bit preoccupied I didn't really notice, and I thought it was one of those "we're stuck in a time loop" things, but no, I watched episode 19 like 4 times, and on the 4th time I said "OK, I know I've seen this episode before," and when I went to the show page it took me to episode 20. I'm tired. Later.