Blog
2025-07-27: Day two with family was good. We made a trip to a nearby town to meet some of my dad's friends, and they were delightful folks to have lunch with. We later got some time in their resort's pool, and had plenty of time to catch up and reminisce.
I left with enough time to get home, do some meal prep for the week, and get some laundry done. I am glad to have had a fairly calm couple days with them. They're prone to over-planning and making things more stressful than they need to be.
2025-07-26: Yesterday was a bit of an adventure. I went to my old hometown to bring my shitbox old Honda to my mom and dad's. I have a cousin who's needing an affordable car while they get through some financial strain. They've had a couple cars fail on them lately, and all the failures have been engine and transmission related. All very expensive repairs that they can't do. My Honda isn't much of a looker, but it's got a good motor and transmission, and it should get them through the next year or two.
I let them test drive it last night, and it'll be at my mom and dad's to get a closer look. They'll also be seeing if they can get the money together. I wish I could sell it to them for less, but my discretionary/benevolence budget has basically bit the dust after needing a new bed, mechanic work, and helping out my friend this last month. I gave him the minimum I can take without getting myself in a bind. Here's hoping it's something they can afford, and something that will help carry them through a tough time.
My parents are also coming to visit. They got a reservation at a nice resort near my place, since they wanted access to a nice pool. Hopefully the rest of this weekend will be chill, instead of being an outrageous rush like yesterday!
2025-07-23: Trying to install Bazzite on my gaming PC while sick was a mistake. I am feeling better now though, and my computer is working again too!
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2025-07-21: Totally zonked after measuring and putting together some shelving. Still a lot more work to do tomorrow. Getting some personal research done after leaving it on the backburner too long. Definitely gonna turn in early tonight.
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2025-07-20: I have picked Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 up again for the first time in a while. As I write, I have a World War II-era transport plane flying from Upper Michigan to western South Dakota. I will make an aviation shrine for my site one of these days, mark my words.
Every couple years or so around early August, I follow the route of the 1929 Women's Air Derby, from Santa Monica, CA, to Cleveland, OH, as a personal commemoration of that event. It is something I got to learn about, and even handle parts from a participating plane(!!!) at a previous job. These women flew ~2,800 miles in wood-and-cloth open-cockpit planes at a breakneck pace. I have a ton of respect for the early pioneers of flight, and many of the women involved with the race were pioneers in their own right.
If you want to learn more, I highly recommend the book Powder Puff Derby of 1929: The True Story of the First Women's Cross-Country Air Race by Gene Nora Jessen. While you're at it, look into Gene Jessen's story. She was an aspiring astronaut, training to participate in the Mercury program before the rug got pulled out from her and 12 other women by some top brass. Aviatrixes in the early to mid 20th century were incredible spitfires, and deserve to be known.
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2025-07-17: Well, I am at an impasse. I cannot seem to get the sidebar to display how i want, and I may have to move on from the template I'm using to *gasp* make myself actually learn enough HTML and CSS to make things act how I want them to. I was hoping I could get a sticky sidebar working, that would stay put while you scroll back and forth. And while using the position:fixed parameter, it *does* work, but it clips into the webpage header and overshoots the height of my other content.
This is not something that I am going to solve at 1 AM. But I hoped I had found an ezpz solution that I would be happy with. I kinda hate having this enormous sidebar devoid of content except for the navigation menu. I probably need to get some Web Dev 101-level knowledge built up before I can tackle that.
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2025-07-14: Just added a new Blog Archive to the page. That should let me keep this thing managable.
I may or may not have slept in far longer than I expected. I must have been running a helluva sleep deficit. Things went fine otherwise. Got my downstairs bathroom cleaned up from the water mess earlier this month, thankfully not seeing any more water leakage issues. Did a bit of reading, did a bit of gaming, watched a couple edutainment videos, altogether a chill, lazy Sunday.
Should this be an entry for the fourteenth? It's after midnight so it's technically correct.
I expect to be somewhere between zonked and zooted tomorrow after starting training with a new intern. I doubt I'll be back on here to make any changes.
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2025-07-13: My review of Girls' Last Tour went up yesterday afternoon! I had been wanting to find a good space for media reviews and essays and the like, but YouTube sounded like a waking nightmare. By comparison, a handful of paragraphs with pictures and gifs on my silly little website feels just about perfect.
I have also found myself checking for signs of engagement ever since posting it. Nearly two decades of social media habits die hard. Reddit and Tumblr don't pull that bad habit out of me nearly as much as, say, Facebook, but I am also prone to obsessing over watching numbers go up. The dopamine rush of getting positive attention is a whole thing.
Otherwise, yesterday was a pleasant day. I got groceries in the morning, wrote my little review, listened to some records, and enjoyed a quiet aftermoon. I then installed some new fixtures in my bathroom. Felt good to see those projects pan out. Now, I sit tonight in comfortable quiet, candlelight flickering, the only noise stemming from the keystrokes on my laptop. I hope tomorrow goes well too.
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2025-07-10: It's been a while!
The last week or so has been a whirlwind. The ridiculous water situation from my last post has been resolved. Turns out, a leaky toilet seal upstairs was the culprit. Plumbers got that taken care of, and now I am waiting for word fro my landlord about remediation. Thankfully we caught it early and I was able to dry it out, so it didn't become a worse issue.
I spent this weekend with family. My parents took me to their favorite Italian restaurant, and my grandma sat with me on her porch while we visited late into the night.
Work this week has involved preparation for a lot of facilities changes. I have needed to help folks get a lot of things figured out and moved, and I have been pretty drained from the whole ordeal. Hopefully we are taking steps toward a better setup.
I finished a really unusual anime a few nights ago, called Girls' Last Tour. It's a cozy slice of life set in the apocalypse(???), really mystifrying little show. I have weird, complicated feelings about it, which I plan on fleshing out in my first swing at a media review!
I have other things I want to do with this site too. I'd like to add some buttons or blinkies just to really 2004-ify it up a bit. I also want to do more media review and things like that. My media habits a a bit goofy, and I'd like to tell you all about how much I enjoy finding the media equivalent of the Arby's Gyro. More to come on that later.
But for now, I am tired. My emotions have been all over the place since this afternoon, and I think I am hitting a point of tiredness where emotional regulation is getting a bit dicey. Here's hoping for some good rest tonight, and a good day tomorrow.
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2025-07-02: Well. It's been a long evening. I spent most of it getting a bedframe put together after discovering my previous one was unable to be taken apart and moved without irreparable damage. Lo and behold, the new bed came together just fine!
Shortly after getting that done, I discovered a big bulge of paint, displaced by water, above my downstairs restroom vanity. My landlord is going to try and get someone scheduled to get it taken care of tomorrow. It is the last business day before a three-day holiday weekend, so I have no idea what that will entail.
I also have work obligations involving a meeting dealing with significant changes requiring all hands on deck, and someone who is in from a long ways away, who's been on my schedule for weeks. I had to let all parties involved know about the situation, and ask for a great deal of flexibilty. Hopefully we'll know more in the morning about what I need to do, and it can get taken care of while leaving as few people as possible in the lurch.
Outside of that, I hope to put a bit of personal reflection out on a movie I watched with friends for my birthday. Stay tuned!