ELSEWHERE

Things of minor note! Let's see

My mom sent me a Christmas card a couple weeks ago with a personal check in it, which is a nice gesture but did mean I needed to go deposit it at some point, so on Saturday ash and I swung by the bank to do that. I bank at a credit union which means that I can use any other credit union's ATM but I was unclear on if I could deposit checks at any ATM or if it needed to be my specific union's ATM, and as no one uses checks anymore (I think everyone just uses their phones to deposit them, now, but my bank's app is incompatible with my phone, and I also do not trust banking apps) there's not a lot of information online on the subject. So the plan was to drive ten minutes out to the bank and then swing by the store on the way home, where ash would pick up his groceries and I would go into the store to get mine.

However, once at the bank, we learned that instacart had set ash's store to one half an hour away, so his groceries would be waiting to get picked up there and not at the store five minutes from our house. Part of the reason ash was getting his order as a pick-up was because his foot has been bothering him, so having to drive for much longer than planned was a problem but one we couldn't really do anything about at that point. It turns out that the store near our house doesn't do pickup orders for some reason? I think I've actually tried that as well, not through instacart but the store's webpage, and found out that only specific stores do it. Annoying, at any rate.

One of the things I needed to get was more baby food for Oz -- last time that got picked up for her there wasn't much of the beef, so she's been getting poultry for a while and is clearly tired of it, especially the chicken. Unfortunately the store was almost entirely out of meat-based baby foods and only had one beef, so I'm going to need to go out again to get some more for her soon (I don't like ordering that through instacart because I prefer someone who cares to pick it out, but with the weather like it is I may end up doing it anyway).

We hit real winter yesterday. The funny thing about our seasons is that you'll get into the half of autumn where it's cold but not that cold and there's not much sun but still some clear days, and you'll think it's winter but maybe it won't be so bad. And then suddenly one day it's actually winter and you're like, oh no. This is all there will be for the rest of the season. And this is all there will be for the rest of the season -- cold and gray and foggy.

The power went out for maybe 40 minutes yesterday, which is unusual these days, SMUD usually gets the power back on pretty fast when it goes out. I always think about how blackouts were just a regular thing when I was growing up, every year you could just expect there to be a day where the power would go out for a couple hours. That's just not a thing anymore, at least in Sacramento, and it's just kind of nice to have that very obvious marker of infrastructure improvement, you know? But it also means that when events like this happen we're not really prepared for it

ash and I just sat on the couch with some candles lit until power came back on -- as mentioned it was cold yesterday, so my main concern was with keeping warm over not being able to see. I think ash's main concern was the possibility of having to eat in the dark, but of course the lights came back on before too long. ash had been having a migraine, so the power outage actually helped a little by forcing him to sit in the dark for a bit.

I think it's likely the blackout was caused by everyone suddenly having their heaters on -- we briefly hit 50F in the afternoon but otherwise the temperature stayed in the 40s, which is a real change from the 60s we've been having before now. However, the length of the outage could suggest a physical problem people needed to come out to fix, like someone driving into a pole or something. It was also not super widespread. But who knows, they hardly ever tell you the cause of these things.

 
Sor has been engaging in a silliness where they gift me steam games over a period of days with a line from a parody of The Twelve Days of Christmas in the gift note. We are up to "On the second day of Christmas / My weird clone gave to me" (here quoting two gifts), and due to the way they're picking gifts (just kind of skimming my wishlist for things that jump out at them, mostly) they're ending up giving me a lot of things that I have been wishy-washy about getting myself for one reason or another. For example, Chef Life Restaurant Simulator which has mixed reviews and I was worried about being badly designed jank, but which I have now put 25 hours of playtime in to and am really enjoying! It's a very good casual game because the game doesn't actually care about how well you're playing it, and 80% of play is little quicktime events to prepare food. I feel like I'm playing as a sim, it's very fun.

 
A while back I watched a CGP Grey video where he advocated for seasonal goals over yearly resolutions, and it made a lot of sense to me. It's not yet new year's, but my resolution is going to be to do that for the year -- to make a resolution for every season, and stick to that. And so additionally I have a winter resolution, which is to end January, February, and March below budget. I have not been great with my finances for a bit and I want to get back on top of them. I was paying a bit more rent there for part of the year to help offset Erik's unemployment, and am not doing that after January, so it's a good time to get things on track and try to make some savings happen again

 
Also in self-improvement news, part of my routine for a while has been to listen to a podcast before I fall asleep and I want to stop doing that -- it puts me a bit too much in a 'just one more' mindset until I'm so tired I'm actively falling asleep but trying to push myself to finish the episode, and I also want to reclaim space in my life where I'm not doing anything and can just be alone with my thoughts. I've already made some good strides by making it a rule to not use my phone in the dark and I think I can make it work to not use it in bed (at least, at bedtime; mornings I will continue to use it when waking up). I'll just shift podcasts to before and while I get ready for bed but before I actually lay down and get under the covers.

 
Not much planned for today. I have been wanting to work more on something in Inform but don't really have anything in specific I want to be writing in it, so I may spend some of today reviewing the documentation. I also am almost finished with my corpse piece, so I should actually finish it and send that off to Erika

Finally a youtube video with actually decent puppetry

aaaaaaaa it is so cold in the kitchen

aaaaooww my bones

 
would it, now.

When life gives you Adele, make Adelaide

I can't really hear the fireworks tonight very much, but Cael sure can because he's hiding under the covers. Oz also spent most of the night out in the living room, in one of the entertainment center cubbies. She feels secure in there, I think, even though it makes her accessible to literally any of the animals in the house who might want to harass her.

Also cute: Erik was separating ground beef into servings for later cooking, earlier, and Oz smelled it and then went into the kitchen to investigate. She did not quite beg Erik for meat but she was very interested in what he was doing. Unfortunately, Ivy was very interested in what she was doing, but Oz has gotten less skittish around her.

I slept all day. I've been pretty tired the past few days so I thought getting some extra sleep might help. It's probably the weather -- it is characteristically cold and foggy and overcast, and tomorrow we have rain in the forecast. It was also a pretty down day aside from that -- internet videos both alone and with ash, dinner, bed.

I hope everyone's new years start off strong but not too strong

I made mochi today! It was stupid simple and I'm looking forward to doing it again. Today was a test run of just your bog-standard basic mochi, so next I will be doing a lot of experimenting with flavours and fillings

I also had a real rough time waking up today, I was dead asleep until Cael started getting impatient about his breakfast. After I did get up, I played Chef Life on my steamdeck in the living room while ash played it on the xbox, which was fun. We also watched a Gastronauts while eating dumplings -- I am unfortunately just not really enjoying the tone the show has taken on in the second season, the guests all feel kind of antagonistic and there's not much chemistry between them, and it feels like there are production assistants just offscreen going 'do a bit! do a bit!' the entire time. It's very forced. The episode we watched had great chefs, though, they actually did have chemistry and helped each other finish their dishes on time.

I have also finally been following through on showing ash the Adventurous Adventures of One Direction, which I have been threatening to do for years, and to my delight he finds it funny! Stupid, but funny, which is in fact exactly what it is. It's interesting how slow-paced it feels now compared to modern internet humour. I keep thinking about a video I watched recently about how Sesame Street has changed, one of the changes being a much faster pace with more camera angles.

Also noted, which I also have negative feelings about: a change to a cleaner and more polished looking set (compared to the sort of run-down look of the titular street in earlier seasons) and a change to focus more on the muppets than the children. Basically a marketable-izing of the show.

We also played some more of Last Term, which I think I mentioned we stopped before because we thought we were running into a bug. It turns out to not be a bug but just poor design, and we were able to get pretty far this time! Including brute-forcing a puzzle to let us get to one of the endings (it takes So Long to get enough pieces of the puzzle and if we stopped there we would have had to start over completely, so I have no compunctions about cheating)

And now ash is in bed, so I'm going to watch videos and play more Chef Life and generally chill

ash and I went out to the library today to renew our library cards! Glad to finally have that done, and now I can read some of the books I've had queued up in libby for a million years.

I started playing Ghost Trick Phantom Detective or whatever it's called last night and got two chapters away from the end before I really, really needed to go to sleep, so after we got back home I finished it. It was fun, the overall mystery was pretty well constructed and while I figured out what was happening probably a lot earlier than most people (I have seen a lot of people talking about having the 'oh my god!' moment when the game outright tells you) it didn't feel cheap and rather felt very well set up to lead you toward the correct conclusion. I did need to look up a walkthrough for, I think three different levels which is not bad and one of them I knew the solution but getting to it was so annoying that I wanted to confirm it actually was the solution before committing to it

ash and I also watched the first half of this year's Taskmaster New Year's Treat and then the James Acaster Ultimate Episode because he talks about some interesting behind-the-scenes stuff that I thought ash would find neat. And then we finally started Resident Evil 3! Despite getting pretty lost very early on I am actually enjoying it a lot so far and am looking forward to exploring the police station more. I like a lot when sequel games put you back in a setting you're really familiar with, it's very fun.

I think next week everyone is back to their usual schedules and I am looking forward to it

Fun money this month is going to books -- there's a new Vermis book up for preorder, and a couple conlanging textbooks came out not too long ago, so I've ordered those. I like having a little mini-library of The Conlanging Books and I'm also quite pleased that new books are being written to add to it

What's killing me with my Japanese review right now is that you use one particle when you meet up with a person and another when you wait for them

僕はアシュに会いました
I met up with ash (I met 'toward' ash)

僕はアシュを待ちました
I waited for ash (I waited 'on' ash, except I actually can't really get clever with the translation here because を is the particle used when a verb is acting on an object and English doesn't really have object markers outside of a couple of pronouns -- so, actually we could say that one is "I met up toward he" and one is "I waited on him")

Anyway 'wait for' and 'meet with' are just such similar concepts that it's hard for me to remember that one of them gets special particle rules apparently and the other one doesn't (yes, even though they also get different prepositions in English -- they don't feel as similar in English as they do in Japanese)