Promiseland

[Fetian]

Yeah that's just Nestle under a different name. Bummer. But we can make our own butterfinger ice cream now with actual butterfingers!

[Fetian]

Piled everything I'm taking with me up in one place, shaved and showered, and did some room cleanup. Going to hang out until dinner is ready, then eat dinner, knock off more stuff on the preparation list, then I'm going to go to bed crazy early so I can be up crazy early, finish the preparation list (largely 'move Cael into guest room' stuff but also 'pack toiletries'), and then we'll be off!

[Fetian]

Iiiii think I've done everything I can tonight! Tomorrow I get dressed, throw toiletries in my backpack, move everything Cael will need to the guest room, scoop litter once last time because this will be a good opportunity to see how Oz is doing with bathroom stuff without having to figure out if a urine patty is hers or Cael's, make sure everything is where I said it would be in instructions for pet care, set the space heater to a lower temperature, give the cats a scoop of food to tide them over, bid tearful farewells, and then go

So, a lot of very small things. Estimate a generous 42 minutes to get it all done, so I should be up and at 'em by 5:58, give an extra few minutes to actually get out of bed... I should be going to bed about now-ish.

[Fetian]

I am back from the San Francisco trip! It was a lot of fun and we want to try to do it again next year, either February again if we think we can handle the chance of rain or in a different month if we don't. February seemed to be a good time to do it, though, especially on a weekday -- bit fewer tourists, bit less crowded

So on Friday at about 7 we got on a train, and at about 9 we arrived in Emeryville, at which point we were supposed to get on a bus, but apparently the bus left without us because we didn't go immediately to the area we were supposed to which had no signage or anything explaining where it was (in the parking garage, as it happens, which, was not where we thought buses would be). That worked out, because a bus going to San Joaquin Valley offered to drop us off on the way to San Francisco, and so we got there only a little bit later than we were scheduled. That also was okay because our hotel's check-in time was 3 and we got there at like 10-something.

The plan was to walk toward Chinatown and kill some time there on the way to the hotel, which was a good idea except for the hills. We did enjoy walking around the city for a bit and taking in some sights, then we found a bus and took it the rest of the way to Chinatown. I had the idea before we went to get transit cards and pre-load them with some money so we wouldn't have to worry about getting around -- testing out a couple destinations in google maps told me that public transit for San Francisco was predictably and reasonably robust -- and that came in very handy throughout the trip.

Anyway, we walked a bit through Chinatown and took in some more of those sights before going the rest of the way to the hotel, where we asked if they would pretty please let us check in early, and were told that if we paid a fee we could check in at 1:30, which was still a couple hours away. So we went to a diner nearby with outdoor seating and got some breakfast/lunch. That food was very strictly okay, but it got us through another chunk of day, so that was good. We went back to the hotel and just sat around for a while, in a little nook outside one of the rooms, overlooking a street. We played some game on my steamdeck together, then finally we were allowed to check-in. By coincidence, the room we got was the one we had been sitting outside!

The room was really nice! Extremely serviceable, clean, well-lit, entirely nondescript. There was zero art in it, which was a little weird, and nothing in the drawers except a bible, though someone had left yogurt in the minifridge.

We settled in to rest for a bit, and I turned on the TV just to mess around with it, and we discovered that it was The Worst TV in The World. For a start it had that weird filter turned on that makes everything look like it's a little fast-forwarded? It also kept glitching and data-moshing itself, apparently the signal wasn't great. It had a hearing-impaired accessibility feature that spoke menus and &c turned on, though we figured out how to turn those off pretty quick -- what we couldn't figure out for the longest time was how to change the volume! We tried every button on that remote and every button combination, and in the end it turned out you needed to nudge the 'volume' button up or down to get it to change the volume. Good design, honestly, but extremely confusing if you're used to how volume buttons have worked on every other remote that has existed in the past 70 years

Unfortunately another issue soon became apparent which is that the ability to hook something up to the TV via HDMI cable was disabled, despite having access to the HDMI ports, and the TV recognising that something was plugged into said ports. Possibly it was an issue on the deck's end and not the TV's, but I didn't experiment with it very much and we just didn't ever watch anything on the deck (so we still have a Dungeon Meshi to watch!)

After sitting for a while we headed out to go be tourists at the wharf, taking two buses to get up there. It was a little chilly, and overcast, but otherwise pretty nice out, and for a bit we just wandered around looking at shops. We did end up at the aquarium, but opted not to go in. We wandered back the other way, toward the penny arcade museum, because that was something I really wanted to see again. On the way we found a Mirror Maze and went in, which was extremely fun and well worth the $10, and then we found a candy shop (after passing up several other candy shops) and came out of it with two pounds of taffy, because taffy was on my list of things to get while in San Francisco. Speaking of which I should get that out of my bag and put it away

On the way from there to the museum we were stopped by a sticker guy who was very charming and recognised we were dating despite the risk of offending a couple of guys by suggesting that they're gay. I gave him a dollar mostly to gracefully get out of the conversation, which is how that kind of thing operates, but I did get a couple of stickers and a good time out of it, which, you know, worth a buck

Museum! Extremely cool, it's a bunch of antique penny machines ('Put a coin in the slot to watch the animatronic wiggle', 'Squeeze the handle to find out what kind of lover you are', 'Watch a strip tease film from the 20s' sort of things), and a bunch of more modern arcade machines, all kept in operating condition. There were a number of player piano sort of machines that kept the building very loud, but it was fun despite. At first I threw my last couple dollars at a change machine and was carefully selecting machines to try, but then ash decided fuck it and threw more money at it and we spent about an hour or so watching all the machines go. We got a fortune each from every fortune-telling machine that dispensed a physical fortune, and I won a couple of rubber ducks from a 'a prize every time' claw machine because when it dropped the first prize it didn't register it. One of them I gave to ash and the other I will give to Sor when they visit

When we left, it was getting late-ish, so we started walking to the restaurant I'd picked for us -- the original plan was to eat there, but we were getting tired and especially tired of walking, so we decided we'd order take-out and then get a ride to the hotel to eat it. Eating in the hotel sounded fantastic at that point. I had picked a little italian-seafood place that advertised extremely fresh fish, and I'm glad ash was okay with going to it despite some misgivings about seafood because I was looking forward to that. He got a fancy flatbread pizza and I got some blackened snapper, and both were extremely delicious. I also got some fries, and those were delicious and continued to be when they cooled off, so that restaurant gets five stars from me and I hope we can go back next time we're down there!

We played some more video games before we went to bed, and then we went to sleep. The bed was hard, there weren't enough blankets, the pillows were awful, and the heater was both very loud and was incapable of keeping the room at a reasonable temperature -- it was either too hot while it was on or too cold while it was off, and setting it to auto left too long a gap between them -- so sleep was not great (for me, ash seemed to sleep okay), but I did sleep and we got up a little before 9 without issues. Everything else about the hotel is worth the bad sleep experience for me, honestly, I would still happily go back. Though there is another hotel in that neighbourhood that might be worth trying

We played some more games before getting up to pack, packed, and got out the door in time to check out at 11, leaving us about five hours to kill. I found us a restaurant to get breakfast at between us and our planned destination, which had better food than the previous restaurant but at much worse prices. From there we got on a bus, and then promptly got pretty lost! We walked for a bit, continued to be lost, ash detoured into a pharmacy to get some ibuprofen (or whatever), we got onto a different bus, we finally found our way to Japantown! There's a little indoor mall that we wandered around for a while, windowshopping and browsing, and trying (and succeeding) very hard not to knock anything over with our luggage (not, like, suitcases -- I had a large backpack and ash brought a satchel).

ash got oversocialed by the crowds, so we got some takoyaki with matcha soft-serve (I got a matcha and and black sesame swirl) and went outside to eat it. It was good! I liked the black sesame better than the matcha, and it was my first time having takoyaki which was delicious. I also got a free newspaper that I thought was in Japanese but just has a couple pages in Japanese

From there we headed to Chinatown again with an aim toward finding a knockoff shirt with something funny on it, though when we got there we discovered every souvenir store just had the same shirts. After that we started heading back to where we would catch the bus back to Emeryville, where we detoured for a bit to try (unsuccessfully) to find a bathroom for ash. We did determine that we had the right spot to catch the right bus, at which point it was twenty minutes to our departure time, so we went inside to sit for a few minutes. It was not raining, per se, through most of the day, there was just kind of a mist hanging in the air, but it was also cold, especially as it started getting later.

While we waited inside some kind of transit area, I looked up at a marquee near the ceiling that I realised was saying "My hair is happy My skin is happy My skin quivers' and realised I wanted to get a video of whatever the fuck was happening. It went on to say things like "My suffering is useful", "A woman talks to her thigh", "It is only", "I envy you. Every moment", "Thing indescribable", "Out of suffering", "Were I able to shut my eyes ears", "Goddess of matriarchy", "Your bones", and much more. I recorded for about five minutes and then we had to head back out, and I'm very sad I didn't see it loop, nor what other weirdness it had to say.

Shortly after we got back to the bus area, a completely unmarked bus pulled up, and we were like 'is that our bus?' so I walked over to the driver who was scanning tickets and I was like 'Is this amtrak?' and he was like 'yes', and I was like 'To Emeryville?' and he was like 'That's the only place it goes', and I was like, uh, okay, and was confused because, those buses also go to San Joaquin, and when we got off of the bus when we arrived there were people waiting to get on and saying something about San Joaquin, so. Confused and a little annoyed but we did get onto the bus and we were successfully on our way back home.

The rest of the trip is largely inconsequential -- we got off the bus, we got on a train, we got off the train, we got a ride back to the house. I brought all of Cael's stuff back into my room, and also discovered the ceiling fan in here got turned on while I was gone and left on, so now I'm worried Oz was in pain the whole time. She also did not eat as much as she should have despite having the room to herself, possibly relatedly. But both babies are alive and I'm glad to be home with them. Oz did use the litterbox as much as I would expect her to, so that's good -- Cael's litterbox was absolutely full of poop and pee but that is to be expected when every other cat in the house also had access to it. His bowl was also full of litter which is concerning but he would have had access to other water in the house, I suppose -- hopefully he doesn't get sick.

Anyway! Home! I should eat dinner and finish unpacking. I hopped onto the computer asap because Chewy wanted to autoship Oz's old food and I needed to cancel that. So that's done, this has been written, and I can do some more settling in. Trip was a success, and we can plan on doing it for another day or so next time

[Fetian]

I am done walking forever

[Fetian]

Some of my care instructions were also not followed, but hopefully nothing important was missed

[Fetian]

Cael has drunk a truly insane amount of water since I've been home, but there is in fact water in the kitchen so if he hasn't been drinking because his bowl was dirty then it's his own fault, unless he ended up locked in the guest room for some reason. I didn't leave instructions on water for him because I didn't exactly expect it to end up filthy over the course of thirty-six hours

Sure hope he doesn't start developing urinary crystals, or a UTI.

[Fetian]

He's also convinced he's never eaten before, I assume because he's been getting the same amount of food as usual but in two meals instead of four, or at least that's what he should have been getting per instructions. Eating less often means eating less, of course

[Fetian]

I did not in fact continue unpacking

[Fetian]

Touch-typist problems: I just now realised that the reason you hit ',' to step back a frame and '.' to step forward a frame, in youtube (and video editing software), is because they're '<' and '>', or an arrow back and an arrow forward

Still not sure on the significance of 'j', 'k', and 'l' aside from them just being some keys on the home row