Spring has sprung

2025-Apr-29, Tuesday 15:43
dorchadas: (Chicago)
After the frozen winds of this weekend, today is sunny and 21°C. Yesterday it was 26°C! That's Chicago spring weather for you. I took a walk out on the riverwalk and noticed that the $9 gelato place isn't open yet, which is sad because I would have loved to eat it while sitting out on the giant stairs near the water. That time will come soon enough. The restaurants were open and people were sitting on the tables.

We had a surprise meeting this morning, by which I mean I was caught by surprise by it even though it was in my calendar and had been for months. It was just a standard division meeting that's both not exciting and filled with quote CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY information, but there was a section about AI. The thing that got me was that they mentioned they named an in-house AI assistant after one of the people who works here and even came up with a backronym for it. I looked around to see if anyone else was as uncomfortable with this as I was, and no one seemed to be. Then again, I went on a Butlerian Jihad rant to Laila after she somehow used a hotkey to open up Microsoft CoPilot on my computer-
Me: "[blah blah]...okay Laila? No soulless machines."
Laila: "Okay abba."
and I imagine that makes me a bit of an outlier.

I've restarted my full exercise program after a long time of slacking. I used to do dozens of pushups a week but when I had my appendix out a while back I obviously had to give that up. I got back to walking a bunch almost immediately but by the time I could do pushups again I could only do a fraction of the amount I could do before and of course it was discouraging. Well, discouragement can only go so far, so I put all my exercises into my phone reminders because that's proven to be something that actually motivates me. Now I have exercises six days a week, plus all my walking, so hopefully it'll make a difference. It's definitely a bit of a drag--I am not one of those gym-motivated people, and other than walking I do not ever look forward to exercising. But since I'm middle-aged now, I need to make sure I keep doing it if I want to stay healthy.

Alright, work's over, time to go home.
dorchadas: (Chicago)
I woke up with my alarm in near-darkness, took a shower, got out, got dressed, and [instagram.com profile] sashagee was still asleep. I went out and made most of my breakfast, and when I went back to get my watch [instagram.com profile] sashagee had woken up but Laila was still asleep. It was raining hard outside, and so we decided to let her sleep in. [instagram.com profile] sashagee carried her out to the bathroom around 8 a.m., gave her her medicine, and she immediately came over to give me a big hug as I was leaving for the office. Apparently as soon as I left, Laila went over to the couch, pulled some blankets over herself, and fell back asleep. That rain is really hitting her hard!

I brought my umbrella but really didn't use it. The thing about the Windy City is that half the time (and like 95% of the time if it's a thunderstorm), the wind is going to break your umbrella and then you're out one umbrella and still wet, so. Or it's one of the storms rolling in from the plains dumping buckets and your umbrella is not going to help. Or it's a drizzle and doesn't matter. True sign of a long-term Chicago resident is that we own an umbrella and don't really use it.

Today is the "Spring Step-off" event at work, but the rain has ruined a lot of the plans. We were all originally going to go out and walk for a couple miles on the riverwalk, but since the weather wasn't conductive to it, instead we walked in circles around the floor. Eleven loops was a mile, and most people did five or, on the high end, eleven or so. I did thirty-six, and I wasn't the top performer--he did fifty-five. Since my walk took me around fifty minutes, I figured that was enough, and retired back to my desk with the free subs and pickles that were in the break room. Mediterranean subs, so veggies and spicy hummus, on slightly toasted bread. Delicious. There's also a bunch of cookies, so I grabbed a cookie every nine laps or so and then had extra cookies when I got home because [instagram.com profile] sashagee had made white chocolate and strawberry cookies. Well, I was planning to really kick a new exercise routine into gear, so this is an extra reason to.

Yom Kippur

2024-Oct-14, Monday 13:44
dorchadas: (Judaism Magen David)
Well, it happens every year.

The liturgy is the same every year, so it's hard to come up with new things to say (probably the same problem some rabbis having during the drash), but there's comfort in that. It's like Passover, like Sukkot, like all the holidays we have done for thousands of years. In good times and bad, in times of persecution and times of leniency, when those who hate us are strong and when they are weak, here and in Israel, it's the same. Even in Jerusalem, they still say לשנה הבאה בירושלים ( l'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim, "next year in Jerusalem"). It's nice to submerge yourself into the ritual, when you always know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen: to listen to "Kol Nidre" and then to be sent out to "B'Shem Hashem" on Erev Yom Kippur, to hear "Avinu Malkeinu" and the "Unatanah Tokef" and end with my favorite song, "El Nora Alilah." It's not a Neilah without hundreds of people (would be thousands but there aren't that many left behind at the end of the day) singing along as the gates are closing.

At Break Fast afterwards, I sat with a couple and their teenage daughter, who had a moment of fangirling when she learned I knew [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny. She had seen the Spongebob Squarepants musical that [instagram.com profile] sashagee and I also saw--and which I didn't write anything on here about, searching through my archives--and when I told the daughter that [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny had won a Jeff for her Foley and that I knew here, she was incredibly excited. She actually squealed "That's my first choice!" when I said that [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny sometimes gave guest lectures at Northwestern, because it turned out she was going to college for musical theatre. All of which is to say, the kids are alright. At least the ones willing to stick out YK through Neilah.

The interesting part is the part that's different every year, and that's the classes that happen during the afternoon. There's a gap between the end of Yizkor and the beginning of Neilah, and Mishkan fills it with various seminars and events you an attend. I went to one about "stillness," which was basically a guided meditation session. We all lay on the floor with our knees up and just concentrated on our breathing, in for four, hold for four, out for eight, for about five minutes, and it was one of the only times I've actually been able to achieve 無心 (mushin, "No-mind") while meditating. Then we did facial self-massage, rubbing our temples and squeezing our eyebrows for a few minutes, which felt nice but didn't get me to sink into the activity the way that the first part did. Between each session we talked with a person next to us about our experiences, how we found it and how it made us feel, and what we got out of it, and it was a really nice way to just be for an hour before I went off to the second class.

It's traditional to read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur, because of the themes of judgement and repentence--in Hebrew תשובה teshuvah, literally "returning." Like so much of Tanakh when you look at it, Jonah is a bit odd. G-d tells Jonah to go to Ninevah and Jonah immediately runs away, tells the sailors to throw him overboard as soon as they ask what's going on, and when he goes to Ninevah and the people there listen and change their ways, asks G-d to kill him because he's so annoyed about the outcome! So why is this in Tanakh and what message are we supposed to draw from it? Jonah tells us in Chapter 4 that he ran away because he didn't want Ninevah to be delivered from judgement, perhaps because Ninevah was an enemy of the Children of Israel. The sages also give two other reasons: the first is that he thought he would be a laughingstock because if he proclaimed that the city would be destroyed and nothing happened, everyone would think he was just some ranting weirdo on a streetcorner rather than a righteous prophet of G-d; and the second is that if Ninevah did repent, it would look really bad for the Children of Israel, who were told to repent by many prophets and yet consistently refused to do so. But why is Jonah's immediate response the modern millennial humor "Things are bad, death is the only escape"? We spent an hour talking about that as a whole group, because the room was set up as a classroom so the usual practice of breaking up into ḥevrutah wouldn't have worked, but I enjoyed the discussion even though it kept moving on before I could contribute anything.

The next day was the Chicago Marathon, and my sister [instagram.com profile] wanderluster_kp was in town running with [livejournal.com profile] nytesenvy as support. [instagram.com profile] wanderluster_kp asked if she could sleep at our place since the marathon check-in was around 6:30 a.m. By the time we woke up she was already gone, but we got ready and headed out in time to see her round the bend at the northern part of the race, around Addison. And it turned out that [livejournal.com profile] uriany was there too! He and friends were waiting right near our location and saw [instagram.com profile] wanderluster_kp at the same point. They invited us to go further south to catch her later, but my parents were bringing Laila home so we needed to be there to meet them. After lunch and nap time, my parents and I left again to go down to Chinatown to catch them on the southern leg of the race. It took a while--apparently [livejournal.com profile] nytesenvy was having some trouble and had slowed down--and they weren't visible on the tracker any more, but we did see them go back a bit after the end-of-race 15 mph car went by, and then we left again to go toward the finish line. They finished with a time of around 6 hours and 52 minutes, and then we picked up [instagram.com profile] wanderluster_kp and took her back to my house to clean up.

It was a very Chicago day for a marathon, though--bright and sunny in the morning, and gale-force cold winds in the afternoon. Classic.
dorchadas: (Azumanga Daioh Chiyo-chan bus gas)
This post is slightly backdated because somehow the original date passed me by!

Laila continues to expand her vocabulary. While she was originally placed in speech therapy after her early intervention assessment, apparently the speech therapist always had some doubts about its necessity--the day I worked from home to meet her, she told me that the very first day she heard Laila say, "Her bag has flowers!" when she was coming up the stairs and she was like "Oh, why am I even here?" She doesn't have any worries about Laila's development. I wrote back in the two years and eight months update post that she was reluctant to use sentences, but that reluctance seems to be fading. She'll very often string words together now, most frequently "No want" (of course), but also things like "sit here" or "I fell down" or "What happened?" My parents heard her say, unprompted, "I want some bread please." Of course her longer sentences are about food!

She's also getting a better understanding of emotions, though of course being a toddler, she thinks about it out loud. One of the cutest things she still does is when she thinks something is hilarious, which always leads to laughter that sounds like this: "Ahahahahahaah funny!" We were at the park and Laila was playing with another kid about her age, and when the other kid had to go home she threw a crying tantrum. And Laila looked at this other little girl, yelling and crying and falling on the ground, and did this:
Laila: "Sad."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Mmhmm."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Cry."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Mmhmm."
She'll sometimes do the same thing herself after she's done crying, along with analyzing what it was that made her cry ("Fall down" or "bonk head" are common). She has a much better understanding of when she's done something wrong--it doesn't mean she doesn't do it, because of course she's a toddler, but she'll sometimes run away immediately after it, or try to give us a hug and kiss in the obvious hope that we'll think she's too cute to notice her throwing her toys or trying to stand on the table. Just normal, ordinary toddler things.

She's been in a gymnastics class lately, and while the first class apparently ran [instagram.com profile] sashagee ragged with how wild Laila was, it turned out to be because she had just come back from a weekend out at the grandparents and was low on sleep. She's been much better in subsequent weeks and has slowly started to learn that sometimes you can't just do what you want, especially if there are other people there your age who want to do it too. It's also good because it helps her burn off her energy, of which she has a prodigious amount. Even the other toddler parents at the gymnastics class talk about how much energy Laila has. They're right, and they don't even have to keep up with her!

It's not all good news. Our book-loving baby, who always wanted to be read to, has discovered video. She still likes books, but she's much more annoyed that we limit her screen time to an hour a day and always stuff that we watch together with her. She used to watch a lot of Sesame Street but lately, she's been on a Ghibli movies kick. She watches My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, The Secret World of Arrietty , and Howl's Moving Castle over and over again, half an hour at a time in the morning after breakfast, and then no screen time until after dinner, when lately she's been wanting to watch the Cars shorts. In the way of young children, she's perfectly happy to watch the same thing day after day.

Here's a recent of picture of her taken by her Papa and Nana after they dressed her up for St. Patrick's Day:

2024-03-16 - Laila green outfit

Not pictured here, but they painted her nails green too, and she was so pleased by that. For days after until it washed off she would keep looking at it.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Floor desk

2024-Mar-12, Tuesday 09:26
dorchadas: (Maedhros A King Is He (No Text))
I'd had the same desk since roughly 2007, now pretty wobbly and with a broken keyboard tray. I just did a quick search trying to find a picture to show what it looks like, and I can't--maybe the model is very out of style. I've also had the same computer chair and one of the arms is falling apart.

Anyway, I've been wanting to switch to a floor desk for years, something like this. But of course, you can't get something like that in America because there is zero market for it and overseas shipping would be 4x the price of the item. Even online, when people talk about sitting on the floor, you always see comments about how the commenter could never sit on the floor because it would hurt their knees and back (probably true), and how the originally poster shouldn't keep sitting on the floor because they too will ruin their knees and back (haha do they not realize that Asia exists?). Well, even when I sit on a computer chair, I sit cross-legged and I only support my lower back against the chair. The whole point of sitting is to be fidgeting constantly, moving into a new position as the previous one becomes uncomfortable.

My current idea is to get a desk top that's something like this one, and then use storage cubes (something like this) for the corners, with regular coffee table legs for the rest of the support, then maybe some similar boxes on top. Keyboard tray in the inner corner so that it'll be at the natural height of my arms (maybe a foot off the floor). Plenty of room for two monitors (a third if I get one) and my work laptop and I'll finally get to sit on the floor like I've wanted to for a while.

Feeling the Burn

2023-Nov-01, Wednesday 13:22
dorchadas: (Cowboy Bebop Butterfly)
A bit over a week ago, after finally crystalizing that I will never go to a gym because 1) I don't want to pay for a gym membership and 2) I will never in a million years wake up early enough to go there before work, especially on days when "before work" means making matcha in my kitchen before I sit down on the couch, I ordered a set of resistance bands. I used them previously to do curls and ended up fine, but yesterday I used them to do squats (3 sets of 20--all the advice I found said to do more reps if using resistance bands vs weights). This morning I felt a little sore but mostly okay until I had to climb the stairs down from our home and then again to get up to the L platform. They still hurt even now as I'm sitting at my desk. Well, I'm going to keep it up so that doesn't happen anymore.

I'm going to pick up a custom-made dress shirt today. I have a noodle-limbed CLAMP character body, so finding any sort of clothing that fits me is a struggle. Shirts are okay compared to pants, though, and I just noticed that the pants I'm wearing now have a small rip on the knee. In the time [instagram.com profile] sashagee and I have been together I've gone through like six pairs of pants and all of them because the knees gave out. It's hard enough for me to find pants and now I have to deal with this? I'm going to see if Suit Supply has any pants that aren't dry clean only because maybe I could get a set of pants that actually fit me and won't rip basically immediately. Those are difficult to find at the best of times.
dorchadas: (Blue Rose)
We take Laila to the park just about every day to get some of her energy out, and the park that's closest to us is designed for babies and toddlers far more than for older kids so there's plenty of equipment for her to burn off her energy. She's taken to running around the edges of the park through the leaves, and that's led to two stories in the past week:

One


Lately Laila has taken to walking along the raised concrete border of the park, either holding onto one of our hands or by herself, and a few days ago she ran into a boy around her age who wanted to do the same thing but going the other way. They got close to each other, then very close, and then Laila--who is used to everyone who gets close to her face wanting to give her a kiss--closed her eyes and leaned in to "MWAH" the boy. With a very 😐 expression, the boy turned his face away, stepped carefully around Laila, and kept walking along the concrete border.

Two


There's another kid at the park who seems to just have a bad disposition. Twice now he's yelled "NO! NOOOOOO!" when Laila came nearby and once yelled "NO BABIES!" at her when she went over to see what he was playing with. [instagram.com profile] sashagee even told me that one time he even pulled his fist back like he was going to hit Laila, and when his father stepped in and told him that he had to apologize he started throwing a tantrum. [instagram.com profile] sashagee overheard him talking to another father at the park, saying, "Sometimes I just don't know what to do. He's just so angry."

This is a Laila story because Laila still just takes it all with a smile--she doesn't take it personally at all. Even when the kid yelled no loudly at her, she just looked at him and kept on going. She's so pure-hearted.
dorchadas: (Maedhros A King Is He (No Text))
Thank you so much for all your good wishes, everyone! I'm home now and under [instagram.com profile] sashagee's care and she's preventing me from overdoing it. I normally walk ten thousand steps a day and it's been very hard to be sedentary, but I tried to walk for just ten minutes a couple times a day and while I accomplished it once, the second time I tried it I stopped within a couple minutes. I've been sitting down and playing video games all day, which I'd normally consider to be kind of a waste if that's all I did during the day, but it's not being lazy, it's recuperating. That's it.

I'm still trying to stand up and move around a lot, but my steps have taken an extremely sharp dip. I'm really itching to get up and moving again but in the meantime, games it is.

To make myself feel a bit better, I've started replaying Suikoden again, which I last played in October of 2019. I'm playing in Japanese so it's good practice, but that means I'm extra confused about what I have to do or where I am. I literally remembered nothing of the plot until I tried to recruit one of the refugees of the elven village and Kirkis went on about how bad the Empire was and I was like, oh, that's right, I'm in the rebellion fighting the empire! The empire used a superweapon called the Hellfire Mirror (焦魔鏡 shōmakyō, localized as "Burning Mirror") to annihilate the village of the elves and decimate their population! Now I have to track down some alchemist named Lucian because he can dispel the barrier around Milich Oppenheimer's fortress. I really need to look up a Let's Play of this game so I can remember what I've done and who everyone is.

Yesterday my parents came over for dinner and to see me. Before my appendix troubles, [instagram.com profile] sashagee were planning to go to Morton Arboretum to see the trolls before they vanish at the end of the month--at least theoretically, since it's been delayed twice before--but that's obviously not happening now. I had invited them to come walk with us and they invited us over for dinner afterwards or in case it was too icy for my mother to make the hike, and with my being an invalid, they came over and my father did some home repair projects while I sat on the couch and [instagram.com profile] sashagee stopped every attempt I made to help in even a small way. Emoji dejected It was really frustrating, but now we have her mirror hung on the wall and another set of coathooks down in the genkan by the door. In exchange, [instagram.com profile] sashagee made them pasta with meat sauce--farfalle, since I got to freely choose the pasta--and gave them a picture frame with two photos of the baby in it, with a third slot for after the baby is born. They couldn't stay long because they had to get home to feed my sister's dogs, but it was really nice to see them.

There was a real moment of serendipity too--my mother mentioned that a few months ago she was looking through old boxes of clothes from long ago, which included baby clothes, and thinking, "There's never going to be any grandchildren, I should get rid of these." But she didn't, and now the baby is going to get some of the clothes that [instagram.com profile] wanderluster_kp wore when she was an infant! As a family, we're really big on passing things down.

I went back to work today, since I just have a sitting-at-a-computer job, and [instagram.com profile] sashagee did too! She started her new job for the state government and she's out there in training right now while I'm working in the office. I'm excited she's getting a chance to work from home, since while she's feeling much better she's not back to 💯 quite yet. It's a contract position at the moment but hopefully when her term is up she'll get placed elsewhere. That would be wonderful. 🧿
dorchadas: (JCDenton)
I spent years dithering back and forth over it, debating the pros and cons, not knowing whether I'd like it or not while my mother and my sister both got Apple Watches and said they liked them, and finally when the 6 came out, I asked for one. I've had it for a bit now and I can see why some people are fanatics for it. I'll never be one of those people who's always talking into my wrist, and I turned off the always-on display so it's only on when I raise my wrist (which seems to double the battery life so I only have to charge it every other day), but I set up the Infograph watch face to show my steps, activity rings, the phase of the moon, sunrise and sunset, the weather, and a link to my calendar. I have spoken to it once, to tell it to set a timer, which was easier than pulling out my phone--and like my phone, it only speaks Japanese.

I got the 40 mm because I have relatively small wrists for my height--I'm 6'5" / 197 cm, but I wear size S shirts--and I really like the way it looks. It looks more like a watch and less like A Device, and with the screen off most of the time it's a mysterious blank cube on my wrist. Like the Monolith.

Right now, most of what I've used it for is exercise tracking. I set up Activity to track all my exercise and closed the rings for the first time today, and I've been engaging in a competition with my mother and sister. My sister took the train back to Michigan today so she obviously didn't get a lot of exercise, but my mother--for someone who's almost 70 (tomorrow!), she moves a lot. I'll really need to work hard to beat her consistently.

I'm not sure it's possible to do so without revealing our true names and so gaining power over each other, but if anyone wants to be Activity buddies message me. Emoji back and forth dance
dorchadas: (Warcraft Moonkin Moonfire)
Happy Lag B'Omer, the holiday where Jews light bonfires, remember the students of Rabbi Akiva who were killed in a plague which may or may not be a metaphor for remembering the people who died in the Bar Kochka Rebellion of 132 CE, hold weddings, play with archery, cut our hair, and emerge from our caves and turn our laser eyes on those who are too concerned with worldly matters rather than the eternal study of Torah.

Rashbi Laser Eyes
You think I'm joking?

Obviously, during the Plague Year all we can do is use our laser eyes, so watch out. Emoji Awesomeface Cylon

Just got another email from work, saying that work from home is extending into June, but they can't say for how long. We're stuck in germ jail at least through the end of the month, and they rightly point out that some people might not be comfortable riding mass transit or being in the office if they're vulnerable to coronavirus or live with someone who does. I don't, and I don't have any comorbidities that I know of other than having had pneumonia when I was a teenager, so I would actually be fine going into work and riding the L if they did reopen the office. But I'm not going to complain if I get to sit on the couch with my laptop for longer, like I'm doing right now.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd been walking in the cemetery nearby, and that tradition continues. Since that post I've gone a couple more times, with [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny and with [instagram.com profile] britshlez, and last time I went I took pictures! Here's a few:

Memento Mori )

It's sunny today, but still a bit chilly (13 °C), but that's not why I won't go on a long walk today. I'm waiting for a delivery from Takara Sake, which is currently out for delivery. It's mostly cooking mirin, which thanks to American liquor laws I still have to be present to sign for it, but since I already had to be present to sign for it anyway I went ahead and ordered a bunch of sake too. I don't drink by myself, but by the time we're out of germ jail, my liquor cabinet is going to be extremely well-stocked.

And now, lunch time. 🧇
dorchadas: (Awake in the Night)
I went to bed at midnight last night but couldn't fall asleep until 3 a.m. Originally I thought the guy who lives below me was having a party or something, because I kept hearing music and laughing and people's voices, but I went out into the living room and I didn't hear anything, so I think he just fell asleep with the TV on or something. I listened to a few meditations, I read Twitter with the screen accessibility brightness hack, I tried visualizations, but nothing worked, until I turned on my Rain Rain "city rain, cat purring, sound of a dryer" mix, which finally worked. And then I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and I'm still exhausted.

Sigh. Emoji dejected

After the Anime Chicago Sampler on Saturday, I went off to eat dinner and then got back online for [livejournal.com profile] smtemp's birthday! She was hosting an anime power hour, so people got out beers (I finished off about one ounce from each of four almost-empty liquor bottles) and we watched an old power hour video that [facebook.com profile] bret.thomas.391 had made for an ACEN past. And then we watched a Disney power hour on YouTube, and part of more anime, and then [facebook.com profile] seloy shared her screen and we looked at old photos for hours. I wasn't in any of them--most of them were from before I started hanging out with the suburban friends, or while I lived in Japan--but it was still great. Group Zoom calls that are just discussions I'm less of a fan of, but something where we'll all focused on a unifying activity? Those are great.

I also ducked out for a while to go talk on Discord with some of the Anime Chicago people, which was similarly lovely. A small group discussion--made smaller by some of the people zoning out--after an afternoon of watching anime. 最高.

I had mentioned going on a walk on Friday, and on Sunday, [instagram.com profile] britshlez texted me during my Japanese lesson saying that she was nearby on a dog walk and asking if I wanted to walk for a bit. I came out, we got take-out margaritas at Cescas Margarita Bar & Grill, and then walked south on a side street, down through St. Boniface Catholic Cemetery, past a group of decorated cars in a procession driving past the home of a girl having a birthday, and over to her house. She went off to see her sister, who just had a baby and is having a hard time, and since I was already down near where [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny and [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans live, I texted one and then the other. Apparently, though, it was such a nice day that everyone had the same idea--both of them had already been out on walks and gotten back not that long before. [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny and I made plans to walk next weekend, and [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans suggested we walk or video chat sometime this week, so Emoji La The weather is supposed to be gorgeous all this week, so there will be time.

And then I went home, ordered ramen from Blowfish because I didn't want to cook, played Stellaris, and tried to sleep. It didn't quite work, and now I'm exhausted, but I'm here. I guess that's a victory, nowadays?
dorchadas: (Death Goth)
One benefit of the work they did on our furnace back when it broke over the winter is that it seems to have a helped fix the aircon as well. It always used to struggle to get below 26°C or so no matter what I set it to, but it's 31° outside right now and it's 24°C indoors now. Pleasantly cool. Which is good, considering it's supposed to get up to 33°C tomorrow and there's an excessive heat warning through Monday night. Emoji Sweatdrop

Still wearing all black and long pants, though. Fashion matters.

Last night I went out to [profile] pinandstutter's birthday party at Burger Bar and later at an actual bar. The bar had one (1) kind of sake on the menu and it was nigorizake, but being hyperconcious of money, I didn't get anything (and I had already gotten a delicious milkshake, so I was pretty full). I spent a chunk of the night comparing notes with [twitter.com profile] liszante about our respective times in Japan. They overlapped slightly, though I was in Hiroshima and she was in Hokkaidō, and we even both spent time in Tokyo in consecutive years (her in 2008, me in 2009), at the two temples mentioned in the famous poem by Bashō:
花の雲
鐘は上野のか
浅草か

A cloud of blossoms
The bells, are they in Ueno?
Or Asakusa?
She went to Asakusa and we went to Ueno. I thought I had an old blog post about it, but that was the year I worked at Suzugamine and working a full week plus Saturdays with a two-hour commute each way left me barely enough time to do anything. There was one teacher who lived in the apartments right next to the school and I was incredibly envious.

I've been trying to be less rigid about exercise lately. I used to make absolutely sure that I got 10,000 steps a day, no matter what. This works fine on weekdays when I can take the L to work and walk on my lunch break, but it's harder on weekends, especially if I want to get anything else done. Right now, I'm taking Saturdays off from trying to hit 10K and still exercising on Sundays. Maybe I'll leave Sundays by the wayside at some point too, I don't know. I still feel healthy enough.

Writing 10K repeatedly there got me curious about whether 10K Commotion is still online, and it is! I haven't played DDR in half a decade and now live on the second floor, but if I ever get a first-floor apartment or a house, I still have Stepmania and my PS2/USB adapter...

Maybe I should reread that webcomic, too. I'm kind of amazed it's still online--early 2000s is roughly 2000 years ago in internet years and so much from back then is gone.

Alright, out into the furnace and off to a party. Like Arrakis, G-d created Chicago summer to train the faithful.
dorchadas: (Jealous)
How appropriate that I'm posting this on Labor Day, comrades.

Content warning: Food, weight discussion )
dorchadas: (Not he who tells it)
Enjoying a lazy Sunday on Labor Day weekend. Yesterday was busy, with a dentist appointment in the morning and Call of Cthulhu in the afternoon, but I have nothing scheduled for today. Next weekend is [tumblr.com profile] novafigura and [tumblr.com profile] hopefulrefrain's engagement party, the weekend after that [livejournal.com profile] melishus_b and her boyfriend are coming from Seattle to visit, the weekend after that [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I are going to Seattle for [livejournal.com profile] t3chnomag3's wedding, and the weekend after that is Yom Kippur. But for the moment, I have very little to do. Emoji Happy cat

I signed up for the pedometer challenge at work. This isn't really anything out of the ordinary for me, since ever since I downloaded a pedometer app for my phone that changes color I've tried to get 10K steps a day (about 8.1 km for me), but the team I signed is full of exercise junkies so we decided to compete in the 12K band. I got in my steps without too much trouble yesterday since I was already planning on reading while [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd was out, so I just walked around a bit with my book. Today I'm at 3.3K right now and we still have to go grocery shopping and clean later, but I'll probably have to do an hour of walking. It keeps me from spending twelve hours in a row playing video games like I used to and helps me keep up on my RSS feeds, and I actually enjoy walking. I just wish that we had our own house or a ground floor apartment sometimes. I try to walk softly and our downstairs neighbors have never complained, but...

I've started a new RPG project, because that's my primary outlet for creativity other than writing. I keep trying to adapt the old TSR AD&D setting of Dark Sun to something that I'd rather run it in, and after almost two years of Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom, I'm comfortable trying to adapt it into a hybrid of Exalted and NWoD. I haven't gotten very far, but I made a few changes (ported over Composure and Resolve, dumped Manipulation and Appearance, split Dexterity into Dexterity and Agility) and have some more in mind. The Essence stat in Exalted being universal means it works perfectly as a way to determine psychic potential, since everyone and everything in Dark Sun is supposed to be psychic. The way sorcerous motes work in Exalted 3e, where the sorcerer has to roll and accumulate energy, simulates the way Dark Sun wizards draw in life energy from plants to power their spells and allows me to give defilers an advantage by making their accumulation faster. There are enough dials on the weapon statistics that I can easily replicate the way most weapons are inferior because they're made of stone or wood or bone by tweaking them. I think it can work, and it'll be fun to work on, even if I never run it.

I have three maps on the wall of the computer room from the three fantasy settings that have most influenced me. One is the map of Vvardenfell from the Morrowind Collector's Edition; one is Chrono Trigger's Kingdom of Zeal, where dreams come true; and the third is a map of the Tablelands from the Dark Sun boxed set.

[personal profile] schoolpsychnerd has promised to make a special dinner tonight, but hasn't said what she's going to make. I'm not sure it matters, because I can think of only three times she's made something that I haven't liked it, and one of those didn't count because the flour had gone rancid. I'm looking forward to it. Emoji back and forth dance

I might have a Darker than Black later in the weekend, and probably a post tomorrow about a long-term personal goal that I've reached. I hope everyone else is having a good weekend!

Miyajima: Thursday

2016-Jul-21, Thursday 22:53
dorchadas: (Cherry Blossoms)
After a delicious breakfast of broccoli, rice, pickles, hamburger, sweetened omelet, salted mackerel, burdock root, breaded fish paste (がんす, a local dish), tea, and pudding with caramel sauce (Hotel Active, for all your Hiroshima visits!), I went back to the room, got my suitcase, and [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I headed down to check out right on the dot of our requested 9 a.m. departure time. Then we walked out onto Aioi-dōri and set to wait for the streetcar.

Hiroshima's street cars are a local institution. They've been running since before the war--there's actually at least one car that's been in service since before the war and survived the bombing--and Hiroshima actually turned down proposals for a subway network in favor of an underground mall because, well, they already had the streets cars. I've spent uncounted hours of my life on them, what with my incredibly long commute to and from Suzugamine every day, and sitting on them was kind of like stepping back into the past.

I had forgotten the little chime they play when the car starts moving after a stop, though...

We rode the streetcar to the end, past the stop where I used to get off for work, though now renamed to 修大附属鈴峯前駅 (Shudaifuzoku-Suzugaminemae Eki) since the school combined with a boys' school due to low enrollment. Even the old ramen shop, おじいちゃんの作ったラーメン (Ojiichan no Tsukutta Ramen, "Grandpa-Made Ramen"), was still there, though we didn't have time to go.

Then at Miyajima-guchi, we took the ferry across to the island.


At high tide, too.

After dropping our luggage off in the coin lockers and showing our friends the asshole deer of Miyajima--[personal profile] schoolpsychnerd has a video of me leading a deer around using a wrapper from an ice cream cone, but it just looks like I'm using elf magic--we headed straight over to Itsukushima Shrine to take advantage of the high tide for some nice views. It was all set up like the aftermath of a festival, maybe Tanabata, with a floating stage. There was even a priest in the actual shrine conducting a ceremony, which I've never seen before. And that also means that I had no idea what the ceremony was for, either.

After we went through the shrine, everyone was pretty hungry and [twitter.com profile] xoDrVenture wanted oysters, so we stopped into the first restaurant we saw that was serving them. I got anago-don, fried conger eel over rice, because while I've made some effort to stick to kashrut during this trip, I'm willing to make an exception for Miyajima eel. And one of the waitresses wanted to touch my hair when we left and said it was soft.

After lunch we headed into the shōtengai to do some shopping and snacks in preparation for [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I climbing the mountain. We bought a set of tea cups and a wooden case for putting matcha in, and I drank a "banana milk" (basically a smoothie). After heading down to the other end of the shōtengai, we walked back and went to the rope way stop. Originally it was going to be four climbers, but by the time we got there the group had been whittled down to just [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and me, so we dropped off our excess gear with the people going up the ropeway and took our first steps on the trail up Misen.


Mossy rocks, my favorite.

The climb up Misen isn't the hardest climb in the world. Most of it is worn stone steps like those shown in the picture, and even though the heat and humidity were brutal at sea level they weren't as bad under the tree canopy. Of course, we were climbing a mountain, so we were sweating buckets in any case.

We saw quite a few people coming down the mountain, and there was a work crew fixing one of streams that run underneath the steps in some places. There was also an old Japanese man who gave [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd his fan when he met her, saying that he no longer needed it since he was coming down the mountain. That occurred near the bottom, which I'm glad of because that fan came in pretty handy on the climb up. I'm not sure I've ever been as disgusting as when I reached the top, except for the last time I climbed Misen.

[livejournal.com profile] tropicanaomega and [twitter.com profile] xoDrVenture were waiting for us at the railway station near the summit, another friend and [livejournal.com profile] tastee_wheat having gone to make the climb to the top. I went over to buy some ice cream, only to have the woman working the food desk ask me in pretty good English if I had been at the kagura performance the previous night. I recognized her, since she had been there with an American guy and she said that she knew us because he talked to us. That was the basis of our interactions though, so I ordered my ice cream, ate it, then waited for everyone to assemble.

We took the rope way back down and then the shuttle to the Miyajima Seaside Hotel, where I've stayed with my parents before and where [facebook.com profile] aaron.hosek, who went ahead to Matsumoto, had arrived first and asked them to send the shuttle to us. We went to the hotel, checked in, and the showered to get slightly less utterly disgusting and changed into our yukata for dinner:


I'm a little surprised it actually fits.

Dinner was, of course, amazing:


This was about 60% of it.

We ate pretty much until near exploding, though slowly, which helped prevent any actual explosions. It was a little under two hours total for dinner, between the different courses, the talking, and the slow eating of many tiny portions, and was the best meal I've had yet in a trip full of great meals. When we were done, we all got dressed up in our yukata except for one of us who wanted a bit more opportunity to rest and went down to the front desk to ask the shuttle to take us back near the shrine.

Itsukushima is lit up at night, but it wasn't as pretty as I remember it being this time. Or maybe it was just that even though the sun had gone down it was still incredibly sticky. We walked from the pier to the shrine, past it a little until the houses started and the streets started to remind us of Fatal Frame, and then back to the pier, where I successfully called the hotel to ask them to come pick us up. Back at the hotel a bunch of people went to the onsen, but I took advantage of the facilities in a different fashion--I took a bath in the huge bathtub, which was actually large enough for the water to cover my knees. When I started to feel a little cramped, I drained out the water, dried off, and went to bed.

Steps taken: 17538
dorchadas: (Drop Bear)
We've emptied out all of the boxes and the only real thing that needs to be done to finish all our moving in is to take possession of [livejournal.com profile] softlykarou's new computer and desk when it arrives and set those up. After that, it'll just be getting a few new odds and ends and replacing what doesn't fit our new decorating scheme, which is mostly weathered dark wood. Fortunately for us, there's plenty of antique shops of the "random jumbled piles" type in Andersonville that have exactly what we're looking for. We just need to earn enough money to afford it. We already have one item that we're saving up for:


We picked up a few other things and repurposed them as well. Our various TV and paraphenilia remotes are held in an old-fashioned nutcracker bowl, for example. We still have two pieces of Ikea furniture I want to get rid of and/or give to anyone else who wants them, but it'll be a while before we're at that stage.

The main impetus that led me to write this is that we emptied the last box today, after almost a week of it sitting on the hearth (yes, hearth--we have a working fireplace), and in celebration of doing so, we decided to...clean the apartment and do the laundry. Well, it needed doing, and we figured out how to air out the futon. Most apartments in Japan have a metal railing outside the window for futon hanging, but we don't even have windows big enough to do that, much less a railing. Nonetheless, I think we managed it:

Futon siting up and airing out
It's even in sunlight like it's supposed to be!

I actually had an introspective question about my tastes when I started writing this post, but I got side-tracked because I'm happy that it only took two weeks to get everything unpacked and arranged. Maybe I'll revisit my earlier idea tomorrow.
dorchadas: (Zombies together!)
So, the apartment is almost entirely packed into boxes thanks to the efforts of the supremely efficient [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd. We picked up the keys to our new apartment today, including the room key, building key, storage key, and mail key, all of which look the same. I'm going to have to come up with separate keychains to put all the keys on so I can remember them all.

The actual moving day is on Friday, but [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd is planning to move a lot of the boxes tomorrow with the help of a friend. We don't want to move too much, because the movers are coming and they'll be moving all the heavy stuff and we don't want to litter the whole apartment with things and make their job harder, but we also want to move enough that they won't actually have much to do. Even if they do have a minimum time we have them for. But we're going most of the moving ourselves, and I'm glad that I'm in much better shape than I was last time I moved. I'll need it to walk the four blocks with some of those boxes.

We've now lived longer back in American than we lived in Japan. I wrote that post about where is home a month ago, and every time I see some picture and get really homesick--and I think that's an appropriate word--for the rice fields of Chiyoda, I have those sentiments again. But we are moving into a nice apartment. I'll post pictures when we have them.
dorchadas: (Teh sex)
I originally got the iPhone 5S over the 5 because of the pedometer after I saw that LoseIt included step tracking and would automatically adjust your calorie thresholds based on distance walked. Even though I know that calorie counting is worthless, I still do it because of my mania for self-quantification. Originally, I'd just walk as much as I normally do and treat any day where I got over the threshold set by LoseIt to get extra calories off (7250 steps) as a bonus, which wasn't that often.

Then I downloaded Pedometer++. All of a sudden, I had color-coded feedback on how far I had walked, and for some reason, that kicked the RPG player in me into gear and I had to make the numbers go up! Must turn the bars green! Must beat arbitrary threshold!

So I started walking around in empty conference rooms on my breaks at work while reading books, because previously I just sat at my desk reading and I figured I might as well get the walking time in then, because walking back and forth in my apartment took forever and was pretty monotonous. The cleaning staff would occasionally see me, and they always said it was fine, so I kept doing it.

Yesterday while I was walking in a conference room on my floor near the end of the day, one of the cleaning staff came in to check that the room was empty. Unlike the other times that had happened, he mentioned that he had seen me earlier walking around and went to his boss to see what was going on, and his boss mentioned that yeah, I did that and maybe it was just a relaxing thing. So I mentioned reading, and we chatted a bit and he told me that seeing me walking in circles had inspired him to try the same thing around his apartment, and how relaxing he found it!

Well, he said that originally he literally copied me in the only way he could find and wandered in circles around some parked cars near his apartment, but that he pretty quickly realized that other people would not only find that weird, they might find that threatening or suspicious. So now he does it in his apartment, but it remains relaxing.

It's a nice feeling being inspiring. (^_^)
dorchadas: (Zombies together!)
Friday - Burgers, Art, and Sauerkraut
The next morning, [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd again had to be somewhere early. This time, though, I didn't even wake up when she wished me goodbye, so I was pretty disoriented when I woke up and the room was otherwise empty. I loafed around the room for a couple hours, getting progressively hungrier and less willing to leave the bed, and then I finally scarfed down all the remaining nuts and headed out the door to a burger place I had looked up on my phone. When I went outside, the weather was pretty much my ideal weather: cloudy skies, cool breeze, wet ground, and the smell after the rain. It was almost enough to make me change my mind and go into the Irish bar I saw along the way, but I kept to my original plan.

I had originally set out with the intention to walk from our hotel down to the National Mall, and I managed to stick to that plan even though when I left the restaurant it was raining. I went to the Freer Gallery of Art (and apparently just missed an exhibition about the tea ceremony! By one day! ARGH!), which was recommended I think by my father, though I can't remember exactly who told me to go. Anyway, it's a collection of art from what a 19th century art collector would have called "The Orient," so there was everything from Japanese screens to Arabic pottery. The last one I didn't devote much time to, despite how beautiful it was, because I've never really been interested in pottery. Honestly, I'd be happy with plain white bowls or bowls made out of dark wood, much like my taste in furniture.

There were other interesting things, though:
2014 DC Meteoric Iron dagger for Emperor Jahangir

That's a literal starmetal dagger. Emperor Jahangir had it made out of a fallen star, and later said that it "cut beautifully, as well as the very best swords." So maybe there is something to that meteoric iron superweapon fantasy trope!

2014 DC Kobo Daishi going to China

That's a picture of Kōbō Daishi on his trip to China to learn the teachings of Buddhism, which he later brought back to Japan. I mainly liked this image because it has a literal example of red oni blue oni (赤鬼青鬼), though the art is definitely beautiful as well. It's the kind of thing I'd love to have in [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and my bedroom, in my imagined dream residence where the bedroom has byōbu, tatami floors, a futon instead of a bed, zaisu and low table, and so on. I can probably do a lot of that even if there isn't a tatami flooring, really. I actually prefer sitting on the floor in a lot of cases.

Oh! Also, in a weird coincidence, I found proof that [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd, like Nicholas Cage and Keanu Reeves, is an immortal vampire who has survived through the ages and secretly manipulates us from behind the scenes:

2014 DC Green and Gold: the Little Green Cap

Green and Gold: the Little Green Cap, but it's pretty obviously a picture of my wife. I'm on to your schemes!

The collection of jades was neat, but it's just jade discs so it doesn't make a very good photographic subject.

After I looked all around there, I used my remaining time to head back into the Museum of the American Indian and look around some more. There was a short movie called Who We Are that they showed in the theatre on the top floor, so I headed up there to watch that. It was maybe fifteen minutes and primarily served as a well to tell people that Native Americans aren't just records in history books or cultures frozen in time, both of which I already knew, but it was a good introduction to the idea. Then it let us out in an exhibit that went into detail on various tribes' traditional beliefs and practices, most of which I knew almost nothing about. I couldn't stay for the entire time, though, because [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd texted me to let me know she was finished with her presentation an hour before I expected, so I had to start walking. I was determined that I would walk from our hotel to the National Mall and back to our hotel, and I did. It just took me about an hour since it was mostly at a slight-to-moderate incline. I didn't go back to our room when I walked into the hotel room; I just sat on the couch and let [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd know that I was down there.

We were going to meet with [livejournal.com profile] satinalien for dinner at Old Europe, but she was feeling under the weather, so [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I went ourselves. Here's a sample of what we ate:

2014 DC Dark rye bread with schmalz at Old Europe

That's dark rye bread with Griebenschmalz vom Schwein, or a spread made from rendered pig fat. It may have been the least kosher thing I've ever eaten, but it tasted fantastic. I also got the Schnitzel Old Europe, which had veal, chicken, tomatos, onions, hollendaise sauce, and sides of sauerkraut, potatos, and mixed vegetables. And beef stew as an appetizer and a dark chocolate cake. It was quite possibly the most stereotypical German meal I could have eaten other than the lack of bratwurst, but you can't have everything at once. I also learned that my pronunciation of German is not particularly good, which shouldn't surprise me since I've never studied it at all. Maybe I should look into that if I plan to go to German restaurants more often.

After that, we went home and went to sleep. We were going to meet up with some friends, but they were drained from the day's activities and so were we, so we all went to bed.

Saturday - Trip Home
Not that much to say for the final day, since it was mostly just taken up by going home, going shopping, and then sitting around at home. There was one minor hiccup when it turned out that the hotel's free shuttle didn't run on weekend's until 9, so we had to walk from the hotel to the Metro, and then that Metro trains only run about every half an hour on weekends, but we made it there, made it to Union Station in time to take the MARC train (which only started weekend service in December!) back to the Baltimore airport, and then flew out. The only notable thing was the restaurant we ate in in the Baltimore airport had USB plugs in the wall. They also were locally-owned and served locally-sourced food which was really good, but I didn't take any pictures so you'll have to take my word for it.

It was pretty great. I'm glad we had enough money and I had enough vacation time that I could come along, because if I'm going to be a tourist in a city, DC is a great place to be one, and a lot of [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and my friends seem to live either in DC or in the cities around it. Next year is Orlando and I've heard that it's in Disney, but how much fun would that be by myself? The year after that is New Orleans, though, where I've never been before, so I have to go to that one.

Whew! That took forever to write. Smiling sweatdrop

Active Weekend

2013-Jun-17, Monday 17:38
dorchadas: (Dreams are older)
So, last weekend [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and had another party finally! And true to form, [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd couldn't decide on a day to hold it, and so I picked the weekend, and then it rained. Of course. If we had had the party on Sunday, it would have been a brilliant sunny day, and then we could have gone on our two-hour-long walk to get a new keyboard on Saturday instead, when it was probably ~8 degrees cooler and cloudy. Then again, maybe I wouldn't have spilled chrysanthemum liqueur on my keyboard if we had it on Sunday and we wouldn't have had to go for a walk at all on Saturday, which if you notice, would have been anticausal anyway.

I missed out on playing Betrayal at the House on the Hill, but I did get to try Elder Sign and...I thought it was pretty terrible, honestly. It was pure Ameritrash--a very strong theme, of investigators trapped in a museum and hurling themselves at the terrible horror from beyond the stars (the King in Yellow, in our case), but with mechanics that are kind of forced through the round hole to fit the theme. I mean, I suppose all of your actions being at the whim of the pitiless hand of the RNG does fit Lovecraft's uncaring universe and the lack of any special place for mankind, but I felt like there was very little I could do that would actually affect the outcome of the game other than occasionally add a couple more dice into the pool. And even that wasn't always good, because those dice were supposed to be more favorable results, and thus didn't have the tentacles "Terror" icon, but sometimes there were locations that required multiple Terror results and the extra dice didn't do any good. The strategy relied on determining where to allocate the results of dice after they were rolled, which is strategic, yes, but it wasn't very satisfying.

It was described to me as Arkham Horror-lite, which if that's true, makes me glad I've never played Arkham Horror. I'll stick to games like Android.

Unfortunately, as I said, I managed to spill alcohol on my keyboard, and despite [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd's heroic and nearly-successful attempts to repair it, it was too far gone. She managed to get some of the keys to work again, but there were still about half of them that were broken, including both enter keys, and the second attempt to fix all those caused it to give up the ghost completely. Fortunately, in a burst of foresight two years ago, I had deliberately bought a $19.99 keyboard, reasoning that before mechanically failure hit I would spill something on it and ruin it. And what do you know...

Anyway, we ended up going on a two-hour walk trying to find a new keyboard. First to Target, which had a spot for the wired keyboards but nothing actually in stock, and then to Radio Shack, except Google Maps listed them as seven blocks south of where they actually were, so we had to walk that distance and then all the way back home. On the other hand, we did pass by Golden Pacific, which is good because we needed another bag of rice, and because I got to walk through Little Saigon around Argyle Street. As I told my father when I called him for Father's Day, I was walking through a place where I looked different than the average person, I couldn't understand most of what people were saying, and I couldn't read half the signs. I felt right at home.

We'll have to go back. There were a ton of restaurants I didn't know were there that we have to try.

Three things

2008-Feb-13, Wednesday 22:31
dorchadas: (Dreams are older)
I had to ask for a deadline extension today. I feel like a real journalist.

My muscles are made of lead. I really hoped I'd be feeling better, but (except for how I felt Sunday night) I feel worse. This must be how a Martian who came to Earth would feel.

A hand-made Valentine's Day card is the best gift ever.

OMG boxes

2007-Jul-06, Friday 00:07
dorchadas: (Angst)
Packing is really, really annoying. Fortunately, we're almost done. We only have a few things left:

  • Sort through the stuff at the top of my closet

  • Pack [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and my clothes away

  • Get the stuff I've left in the basement (video games, Wii, etc.)

Once that's done, it's just moving to the new location and then unpacking. As well as working out a few other minor details when we get there (how to dispose of garbage, how we get the mail, pre-lease signing inspection to make sure we don't get screwed out of our security deposit when we leave...).

I think It's the Fear is my favorite song right now. You can take the angst out of me, but you can't take me out of the angst, I guess.
dorchadas: (Gendowned)
So, while Ultimate yesterday was awesome, my muscles today are doing a fabulous job of telling me that I shouldn't have played it. At length, and with some vigor. While I'm more in shape than I was (I didn't get excessively tired during the game, and I didn't need a break, or even really to sit down, after it was done), I'm not as in shape as I thought. With more Ultimate games forthcoming, though, hopefully that should get better soon.

As a show of solidarity with my muscles' pain and anguish, I will share with you the most emo video ever made.

If anyone can out-emo that, please post it. I'm curious. ^_^
dorchadas: (Dreams are older)
There's some images available from the next Fallout game. With the change in setting, they won't need to worry much about what happened on the West Coast. It's shaping up to be a good game, from the minimal information we have. Have to wait until Fall 2008 for it, though...

I got to play Ultimate Frisbee today. I haven't played that in...six years, I think? And I haven't played frisbee at all in three years, but I was still not bad. Better than I (and some of the other people) expected, anyway, though I need to work on throwing. I made some pretty crappy throws. We're planning on doing it the first and third Sundays of the month, at Engstrom Park in Batavia, for anyone who is free and available to come.

Oh--this is another shout out. Rachel and I will be moving into our apartment on the 7th. For anyone who wants to help, we'll feed you a home-cooked meal at the end of the day. ^_^
dorchadas: (Drop Bear)
Starcraft board game?

Awesome. I mean, clearly actually playing Starcraft is awesome too, but a board game? 180 miniatures? Card-driven combat? 2-6 players?

All I have to say is, "Zerg Rush! Kekekekekekeke ^_^"

My knee has been clicking a lot when I do anything other than moving it in simple up-and-down patterns. It's a little worrying, though not that much. It's not painful, there's no loss of movement, and since I had knee surgery when I was 13 I knew something like this would happen eventually. I just hoped that eventually would mean "sometime in the distant future."

I should probably stretch more before exercising. My stretching right now is kind of perfunctory.

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