The Cracked Mug v 2.0

[erikavonkaiser]

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[erikavonkaiser]

I think it's just something to power through. It honestly may be that I'm ready for springtime, and my body is waiting for the first sunny day above 40F to stop feeling a little distant and melancholy all the time. So I'll keep going through the motions and hopefully things will clear up.

Welp, "going through the motions" ended up becoming engaging Spring Cleaning mode. This started digitally (working on cleaning up drives/backing them up, pruning my feeds of inactive stuff or stuff I'm not interested in/don't wanna look at, etc.) and has already progressed to my physical space. My apartment is very small, so deep-cleaning isn't super burdensome and I'm probably overdue for a deep clean and a glance through my belongings anyways.

For instance, I went through my dresser really quick and found a stash of those patterned cloth masks from the beginning days of the pandemic, which I'm going to go ahead and donate because anytime I mask up now I just use a KN95. I generally stay on top of making sure I don't accrue too many things I'm not using/won't use, so I don't imagine I'll have a lot of donations, but no sense in keeping something just to have it. Anyways, I'm also taking the opportunity to do those tiny household maintenance tasks that can pile up, like for ages the bottom drawer of my dresser has needed the knob tightened. It took less than a minute but is something I just kept forgetting to do.

All of this has improved my mood almost immediately, though, so I think what I needed was just a little Take Action energy going my way. I'll space out my tasks over the work week so that ideally I'm all done by my Saturday equivalent and can enjoy the fruits of my labors (i.e. relaxing in a nice clean house).

[knightofcups]

“Putting order on my space” is something that I keep on my list of stuff to try when I feel like crap. I’ve noticed that pretty often, something as little as cleaning off the coffee table, or putting away some laundry or something makes me feel like I’m /doing/ something with tangible /use./

I am honestly looking forward to spring cleaning over here. We keep stuff fairly ok overall, but with three humans and 6 animals, it can use a methodical once over coming out of winter.

[erikavonkaiser]

Physical space Spring Cleaning is about 80%, maybe 90% complete? I have a few small things to do but got the big stuff all done, which feels good. I even got groceries yesterday, and while that doesn't count as part of Spring Cleaning it does mean Weekend Erika will be set up for success and that's a good thing. Ooh and I got corned beef on sale so that's cooking right now! I'm gonna just eat it with salad greens because having a full carrots and potatoes meal is way too heavy to eat at work, but still!

Digital space Spring Cleaning is progressing a little more slowly and is maybe at a 60%, although I did get my One Drive cleaned out in-between cases at work yesterday. It was full of video game screenshots and clips, since that's where Xbox automatically sends them, and I was way overdue to go through it. It's not been something I'm comfortable deleting blind because some of that stuff I wanted to preserve, so I had to take the time to perceive everything briefly and decide if it gets archived to keep or yeeted into the void. Next is tidying my Google Drive, and then over my weekend I'll give my laptop files a once-over (I don't have many on there) and back everything up onto the external. Then I'll be set for a while! Digital space clean-up isn't something I do often, because I generally maintain it well, but maybe once a year I like to button everything up and make sure important files don't only exist in one spot.

Okay, time to either work on a project or doot around in Final Fantasy 14 for a bit depending on how I feel, exercise, and get ready for the work day.

[erikavonkaiser]

Weekend achieved!

So far I have slept in as long as Baby Dog would let me (about thirty minutes more than usual), took her to the park, tidied up a bit, boiled some eggs to pickle, and have played video games. I'm about to take what I usually call a "touch grass break" where I move my body around a bit before I play any other video games or do any other in-front-of-computer tasks. I think I'm going to go ahead and exercise, and once I get cleaned up from that will likely spend the day alternating between creative/fun stuff and aforementioned touch grass breaks.

This evening I have an "art party" I'm hoping to attend, which is a Final Fantasy 14 thing where a bunch of players meet up at a specific place on a specific server for a party where there's usually a theme or dress code and you hang out and draw. Should be fun! If I'm not digging it I'll shmoop around a bit and then flee back to my own server. I'm also still running through Elden Ring with Greggo and Gears of War with Masque, so I have a lot of options when it comes to what combo of hanging out and video games I'm feeling.

Okay, away I go to exercise my meat shell!

[erikavonkaiser]

Finished Gears 1 with Masque last night and started Gears 2!

Our goal is to play through the original trilogy, plus Baird's side game. Maybe Gears 4, but definitely not Gears 5. I'd take Masque through it if they really wanted to, but that one did not spark joy for me.

The Gears of War games are classic dudebro shooters but honestly I think they're genuinely quite good from a writing perspective; we were talking about how they do a great job of bringing you into the world without stopping to info dump. There's no big "X years ago, when the Locust first emerged, [long exposition dump]" and there's no stopping to explain the characters and how they met or what their deals are. Things come up organically as you play, but otherwise you're thrown into the world. Some things the characters know, some things they don't, and as you go along you figure it out with context clues. Or you don't! You can just blaze through the game knowing nothing except the very basic premise, which is that humanity is on its last legs after being invaded by another species and you're part of the military group that's trying to win the war.

(They do have supplemental materials with more backstory information, a lot of which is included as bonus features within the game. You can unlock side comics, concept art, etc., and access them all from the in-game menu. I wish more games did that, it seems like kind of a dated/retro thing now.)

Anyways, as unsubtle as the game is (famously your "bayonet" is a chainsaw fixed to the bottom of your gun), it manages to worldbuild with a lot more subtlety than I see in most media (especially video games) these days. That's me old man yelling at cloud a little bit, but I do get exhausted when I can tell writers do not trust me to comprehend the story they're telling.

[erikavonkaiser]

Also I slept horribly last night (just lots of nightmares and general restlessness) so today I'm taking it easy. I'm also a bit scatterbrained because aforementioned poor sleep, so I'm gonna type out the things I need to get knocked out this afternoon:

load of laundry
take out trash
get the chewy package from downstairs and refill Baby Dog's food
go on a run
possibly take a quick trip to the corner store for a meal prep thing I need but I may table that until tomorrow morning when it is less gross outside

Okay, lemme go take Baby on her afternoon potty walk and get things started so I can sit back down and rest more afterward. D&D tonight and I wanna make sure I've restored a few spell slots (mine, not my character's) before then.

[erikavonkaiser]

load of laundry
take out trash
get the chewy package from downstairs and refill Baby Dog's food
go on a run
possibly take a quick trip to the corner store for a meal prep thing I need but I may table that until tomorrow morning when it is less gross outside

Got all of these things done except for the corner store trip, which I did indeed decide to table until tomorrow morning.

D&D went great! I'm having a wonderful time playing as Rex; as a character thing I'm going the direction that Merillian has been teaching him how to use magic, but Rex isn't very good at it. Functionally this means he's an Eldritch Knight and when he uses anything that's not a cantrip he has to roll on a wild magic table. The first time he cast it went super well for him and he got a bonus action, but the second time he lost all his hair. It'll grow back in twenty-four hours, though.

I've also been using D&D time to draw, since it's something I can do with my hands in-between turns that doesn't take my full attention away.

Okay, I'm gonna tidy up a few things, take Baby Dog out for her last potty walk of the evening, and then I may turn on YouTube and try to get some writing done for the last bit of my Sunday equivalent. Maybe play some Ni No Kuni if I'm feeling it -- the remastered version is on Game Pass and I've never hit the download button so hard in my life. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it, it's a delightful Studio Ghibli game where you're a little boy who goes on a magical adventure and I adore it to pieces.

[erikavonkaiser]

Tough night's sleep again! I had more nightmares/stress dreams, this time about travel stress and my mother.

(Pause to sidebar because I don't actually know if there is a difference between types of nightmare but I think of the word "nightmare" as being more traditionally horror/scary, so I tend to use "stress dream" to describe what most of my nightmares are. It just feels weird to be like "I had a nightmare ......... about being lost at an unknown airport!" like okay, and? Anyway!)

Most of the dream involved being stuck at an airport with messed-up flights and not being sure how to get back home; I actually don't remember anymore how my mother was involved but she definitely was. I think my sleep hygiene and conscious brain stressors are all at normal levels, so I'll just keep trying to take care of my body while I wait for my mind to sort out whatever it's sorting out. Probably there's a better way to handle that, or something more active I should be doing, but eh! There's definitely a threshold at which I would change my tune, but for the most part when this sort of thing happens I just try to ride it out. Sometimes trauma brains wanna trauma, or something.

It is my Monday equivalent so I'm going to work on writing for a bit and then exercise and generally go about my day!

[erikavonkaiser]

Amazing what I can do with a full night's sleep!

I woke up without feeling gross about it for the first time in about three days and managed to grab groceries and do some meal prep first thing (I baked some frozen salmon and also whipped up a recipe I've never tried for ginger sesame cucumber salad -- turned out tasty!), then got my exercise knocked out. I'm sitting down with some lunch post-shower and still have about an hour left before I need to walk Baby and start getting ready to leave for work in earnest.

I may play some more Ni No Kuni or I may just sit at my desk and space out on some YouTubes for a bit. I should probably write (still struggling in that department). Maybe I will. Either way, away I go!