3/9/25

Happy daylight savings time, spring forward was a little rough. This week was the week where mskate and I did coffee and donuts at church, so we basically rolled out of bed and went to get the donuts. We picked them up and went to the social hall, got the donuts all set up and made the coffee and tang. We left some things to set-up for our partner who goes to 11AM mass, but the maintenance guy decided to finish things up for us. Oh well. We went to mass and had a good time with God, and afterwards we served coffee and donuts to parishioners. After all that we went to BJs to get gas and diet coke. After BJs we went to Macy's because we have a gift card that needs to be used and after seeing a store with a going out of business sign we figured we need to use up the gift card soon. We got a cardboard page book for my grandma to read (she has dementia and likes to read things, but can't do too much so toddler books are good for her). After Macy's we went to Chuck E Cheese since we have the 2 month pass. Today I cleaned out my wife's car, folding the blankets and removing all the garbage and vacuuming the crumbs. For my "work on creative works" thing today I uploaded my review of Last One Laughing Canada. Between commercial breaks of Animation Domination I read my bible passages. Later.

3/8/25

OK, time for a very busy day. First thing first, I went to get my allergy shot. I got very far behind but now I'm all caught up, and having stayed over at the in-laws made it very easy to get there. Afterwards I watched some episodes of Cobra Kai with IRA before going to the party with my mom's best friend and her son's family. We drove about an hour and a half through the construction detour. We were the 2nd there. The son has a 6 month old baby, and she was kind of fascinated by me. When she noticed I was around she just fixated on me taking it all in. I don't know if it was my beard, hat with sunglasses on them, or my high viz jacket with a cartoon dinosaur on my shirt underneath, or some combination of all of it, but she always looked at me very inquisitively. Some times she reached out to me but then when I got close she recoiled, so it was like she wanted to see me and didn't. Later on she saw my rings (highschool, college, and grandpa), and I let her grab at them while I kept my fingers curled to make sure they didn't come off. Mskate was concerned they would fall off but I assured her they were on secure. Later on she was reaching for them again and I said "you can play with them when I can be sure you won't choke on them." We had pizza for lunch and I took on the task of figuring out the best topping combinations based on what everyone likes. Once the baby was taking a nap we played a game where we had to fill in the blank and try to match with someone else. Dad and I were neck and neck but then he won the "next point wins." The drive home was pretty tame, but when I got home I was quite tired. I did manage to do some cleaning, get a video out, and read my bible (though I'm getting this blog out the next day). Later.

3/6-7/25

Whoops, got really busy these last 2 days and now I'm writing this on my phone kind of like how I'd write entries on my ds browser and emailed to myself through hotmail. Thursday I did the cleaning of my house and reading the bible for real lent and wrote a lot with the September blog story. The thing that got away is mskate and I went to chuck e cheese and try to figure out what we're doing with my great aunt's passing. We got the chuck e cheese 2 month pass after having a good time with it over the summer. We go an hour or 2 before it closes since they close at 9 or 10 and most parents don't go to chuck e cheese at 7-10 at night, especially on weekdays. It's just less weird to do it at that time, especially since "that's when the weirdos come out" and one can't get too upset when "the weirdos come out." Strangely tonight, there was a 6 year old birthday party at 8:30 PM on a Thursday, not a very big party, but an official party that they got on the loud speaker saying "if you're with the party come get your pizza." Whatever.

Friday was kind of wild. We had to basically leave immediately after work because the funeral home visitation was an hour away without traffic and like 2 hours with traffic. As I was going home from work there was a train at the 2 crossings on my way home. I have 2 normal ways home, 1 through the downtown and 1 through the backroads. I normally take backroads since it tends to be less crowded, but if a train is at the crossing I'll take the downtown. Unfortunately there's also a train crossing at the downtown route, so I had to take the twice as long avoid the train route. Mskate made me a peanut butter sandwich because Friday of Lent. Mskate drove up to the visitation so I spent extra time reading my bible passages since I wouldn't be cleaning the house tonight. Read through 3 chapters of Jeremiah and all our devotions for lent in our little black book from church. The visitation was really nice. The funeral home was really big, and we got to see aunts and uncles we never see. Mskate has been scanning in photos from my grandpa's photo albums and brought some scanned photos of the aunt that passed. The relatives enjoyed seeing the old photos. Afterwards we stayed with the in laws since we were going to be close to a new thing tomorrow. IRA and I watched Cobra Kai since we both enjoy it, and I helped him get a wrestling game. Later.

3/5/25 Ash Wednesday first day of Lent

So with Lent I'm going to do work on my "big projects" every day, not necessarily a "Lenten sacrifice" since I enjoy this and it's just "don't be lazy about your ambitions," but it's like a "new years resolution" if you will since I have lots of projects I need to finish, and in these next 48 days I'm going to work on projects and get some of the big things done, and because I have this daily blog I started in college and kind of stopped using when I got a full time job with NDAs and not a whole lot else happening after that except for things worthy of full blogs, I decided I can talk about the things I doing here. With that out of the way, here's what I did after work.

So last night I watched the Presidential Congressional Address (or whatever the "not state of the union" is called), and I stayed up late to watch it. I slept in today and went right to work. I would have had one of my other paczkis but they're messy so I had toaster waffles with peanut butter since those don't make a mess and could be eaten in the car. When I got home I started my cleaning sacrefice. I don't like cleaning and I'm going to clean at least 15 minutes a day. Today I went through a pile of junk mail for 20 minutes. One chore I had to do was hard wire our printer and scanner; mskate needs to scan in things and our wifi printer is struggling to connect to the network, but it's close enough to the router that it wouldn't be unreasonable to run a cat-6 cable from the router to the printer. I went through my random computer cable box and found 2 6-foot cables that combined would probably reach the printer, and all I had to do was find my cat-6 coupler from my time in college. This wasn't in my random cable box, rather it was in my plastic shoe box container that I keep a roll of electrical tape and duct tape in under my one dresser. That description wasn't "I had to tear apart my house to find, why on earth was it there," I knew exactly where it was because I'm a cartoon character and that's just where I keep them. I was able to hard wire the printer and scan a test image, yay. For dinner mskate and I had our fasting dinner of perogies and broccoli. Later in the evening we went to ash Wednesday mass. Father talked about how he took a flower arrangement class in Japan to fulfil an art requirement or something in his homily, and how he can tell the difference between a bouquets that was assembled and arranged with purpose and a bouquet that was just just thrown in a vase. I'm going to remember that for when we have flowers in the church again at Easter and ask him for his analysis on the arrangements we have. I worked on my "fall blog" that is about my grandparents having problems, a cedar point trip, and family reunion in Evansville. I got 2 paragraphs done, and tomorrow I'll do even more. My great aunt also died, which is kind of wild. I wasn't very close with her but she always liked facebook posts I was tagged in, so there's that. The services are going to be this weekend and we'll figure out what we're doing probably tomorrow. Later.

1/4-5/2025

Pretty fun weekend by myself. Saturday I did a Masterplan Tycoon world record speedrun to submit to speedrun.com. At the time of writing it hasn't been approved yet, but it was a fun 7 hours, 11 minutes, and 55 seconds. The night before I got a pizza combo so I would have easily ready to eat food since I knew this would take a while, and it all went well. Hopefully speed run accepts my run so I can be the fastest recorded speed to beat masterplan tycoon.

Sunday went pretty well as well. After mass I went to Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum for the final day at it's current location. The strip mall it's a part of is pretty empty, and I suspect the landlord was like "I want to bulldoze this and make condos, you can either buy the building or go somewhere else."  Marvin's isn't dying though, they're just going to go to a new location. Mom was going to join me but then it was super busy, like I was bumping into people and tripping over kids all the time, which would have been bad since she isn't super into all this stuff. This did make it so I could watch the penny arcade shows with other people paying for it; like I watched the guillotine, Spanish inquisition, wine drunk, and marionette show. I spent $10 and that lasted about 3 hours. I also played some of the ticket games and got enough to win a little skateboard and tootsie roll. It was kind of crazy because they weren't putting more tickets into the machines and that caused some frustrations with people, but I was happy to just play. The top accomplishment I have is that I beat the Japanese import Disney Tetris game. Normally I would have taken a lot of video of this like I did 2 years ago, but mskate has the video camera on her trip with her family and my phone died so I couldn't take video on that. Oh well, there were plenty of other vloggers there taking video so I know the final day is preserved. Later.

1/5-7/24

It's been quite a while since I posted here, but I had a little story that's not "blog worthy enough" to make a full blog about.

At some point I hung up a stuffed animal hammock for all of mskate's stuffed animals. She kind of collects them and they were taking up a lot of floor space, but now they're organized in a corner of our room. I did have to buy a new battery for my drill since my original wouldn't hold a charge, but whatever.

Friday night my mom had her party with her old college friends, which also meant the kids of the friends who are around could also join, and with the only other "kid" being the oldest who's in the army with 2 kids of his own, my brother and myself, it was primarily vikingpolak and I playing with the 3rd generation kids (a 7 year old boy and 5 year old girl). The party was at my mom's house so we pulled out some of our old toys to pay with the kids. We played with the marble run and some legos. When we were playing with the marbles mskate called them "balls" and the boy said "that's sus" (he was trying to say "cuss" but it came out as "sus"). Mskate later asked me what "sus" meant and I told her the meme lore of Among Us. I also "played chess" with the kids, but they didn't really know how to play so it wasn't much of a match before they got board and left. Later in the night the kids and I did some rough and tumble play, which mostly consisted of me picking them up and dropping them on the couch. They REALLY liked that and kept saying "again, again." I remembered how much fun I had with my uncle doing that at their age, so it was great being on the other side of that play. That was basically it.

Mskate also had her 13 year anniversary of having diabetes on Saturday, and we went out for a fancy lunch in a neighboring city. I had a waigu burger and sidewinder fries, and mskate had some special gluten free pasta. I also had a top gun cocktail (which came with a little rubber duck), and we shared a crembrule. Afterwards we went to a health food store where mskate got some mini muffins for her up coming trip to skating nationals and waffles for home, both gluten free. Since we were in the area I got some perogies from the perogy and crepe restaurant to have later. Since I was pretty full from lunch I just had a happy meal from the McDonald's that's down the street (and now have enough points for a free happy meal in the future). I like getting kids meals at fast food places because I try not to eat a lot of fast food and the kids meals have just enough for "satisfy enough to get real food later" and also come with a toy I try to sell on ebay (and I'm pretty successful), or add to my own collection if it's a promotion I or mskate likes such as Disney 100 or pokemon or squishmellows. This is squishmellows right now (which mskate likes) but already had the one she got, so we added it to the santa bag of stuffed animals she and her mom are going to throw at nationals. I also dropped the drink and my fries while walking home, which was really annoying but oh well.

Sunday was pretty low key, just catching up on Deamon Slayer while going to church and getting the Christmas bins from the storage locker. I also had 3 of my perogies, 2 of the potato and onion and 1 of the pizza (because I got 4 potato and onion, 4 sour kraught, and 2 pizza on Saturday, the perogy place has some unique flavors and I would have gotten cheese burger and taco but they didn't have them this time). I also made a beef stew thing, which is stew beef, onion, potatos, salt, and bullion cubes. I also got some Wendy's on my way back from the storage locker, mosty to get mskate a baked potato and the free Jr. Frosty tag for 2024. just a relaxing day. Later.

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.