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Day 12 of 56: Oops 1/?

Posted on April 1, 2020 by Blog 0

Well, crap. As I’m starting to write this it’s 00:30 1 April. Oops.

As I wrote before, I have a mouse/mice under my bathroom sink. Every once in a while I can hear them chewing things. Well, today I heard at least two of them fucking around in there, in the middle of the day.

Thankfully when I went shopping yesterday I picked up some peppermint oil, so I mixed 25 drops with about 4oz of water and sprayed that all under there. I’m a little concerned with the fumes from the oil affecting Athena, but everything I can find suggests ill effects when in a diffuser, not when mixed with water and allowed to naturally evaporate. If I’m wrong, let me know. I don’t want to hurt my baby, but I need to discourage mice from living in my house. Soon I’ll spray some peppermint under the house to try to get them out. I don’t want to kill them, I just want them out of my space.

Finished skimming the reading for this task in my business ethics class (SO DRY AND BORING) and am going to start building the assignment tomorrow.

Did a lot of DS9 watching, mostly instead of doing classwork/chores. I’ve watched the series before so it should be background material, but I just get so invested in everything.

Turnip’s doctor hasn’t approved his second shipment of special food, so in the morning I am going to have to give him Friskie’s. Still wet food so it should help with his urine balance (high concentration due to not enough water), but it won’t help with dissolving those blasted bladder stones.

Gave Athena one of the yarn ball poof things, sprayed with a few liquid catnip doses, and remembered that she does in fact like it. I need to find a way to get her more active, maybe some catnip toys that she likes will give her some more physical activity. She chonky. Even with less than half the recommended amount of food. I need to find a way to get her moving more instead of just sleeping all day. When she stands on me, being less chonk would be great. She has tiny feet, and 15 pound of chonk in one spot HURTS LIKE HELL.

My GM is holding a call on Friday about the closure, so most of the day I’ve been freaking out about the virus and what that means for the hospitality industry.
Sorry to make this not a very interesting post, today has been weird in a mental health kind of way.

Turnip is still loving his yarn ball poof thing and will slam headfirst into a cardboard box to attack it, no additional catnip spray required. So there’s an adorable thing that keeps happening. It’s the little things.

That’s it for me today, please enjoy this GIF and I’ll scream into the abyss tomorrow.

Day 11 of 56: Respite

Posted on March 30, 2020 by Blog 0

Usually, at least for an introvert like me, staying home and doing nothing is all the respite needed to recharge. That all goes out the window when you’re stuck at home with nobody to talk to but the cats.

Did a little more reading for my business ethics class, vacuumed a spider that violated our peace treaty, and got myself sucked into Facebook. A little after 2 I realized I was running extremely low on some supplies. After a little more time-wasting online I started getting ready to leave. Got a Marco Polo from my best friend, so we chatted for a little bit. We usually meet up once a week and go shopping, it’s been almost a month since we last did that. We decided we were going to go shopping together but apart. Athena was being adorable and kept trying to steal my shoes by their laces under the door, so I had to let that play all the way out.

The Foodening

My friend and I met up in our respective vehicles, rolled down the windows, and tried to figure out where we wanted to eat. We’re both so tired of making our own meals. I was craving Hawaiian or a hamburger, we decided on Hawaiian. Went to the best Hawaiian restaurant in town; I got my favorite plate: teri chicken, teri beef, noodles, and rice. I usually get mac salad instead of rice, but I’ve been eating a lot of mac salad lately. Next time.

After we picked up food, we went to Fred Meyer. We pulled our cars next to each other and rolled down the windows again so we could talk and eat. It’s kind of our thing. We did the responsible thing and made sure we were physically at least 6 feet apart. We may have needed to do our normal routine, but no need to be irresponsible.

The Shopping

We both feel the same way: shopping in the current situation creates a lot of anxiety. Fred Meyer was a lot less crowded than it usually would be (though my frame of reference is a weeknight, not midday) but there was still way more people there than either of us felt comfortable with. Once cool thing was that there was an associate at the door with the carts and he told us that all the carts had been sanitized so there was no need to wipe it down again. Super cool, good job Freddies!

We were able to stay 6 feet away from each other, that wasn’t very hard. It was keeping everyone else away from us that proved difficult. I saw a few people with masks, and I’ll admit I was a little jealous. I grabbed a container of pre-cut watermelon, because I’m worth it. It took us about 3 tries to get to the spaghetti, every time we went by that aisle it was PACKED. Finally got everything we needed, sans toilet paper still, and headed to check out. Self check was wrapped all the way to the Starbucks kiosk, and if you stand in line for any of the others you have people who have to walk within a couple feet of you to get past. Not ideal.

The Unwinding

Since it’s been raining/snowing and will for the next week or so, we decided to go to the parking garage downtown. Since its construction we’ve always gone to the top level to hang out, but with the rain and the fact we have to be in separate vehicles, we opted to go one level down. Talked for over an hour, catching up on everything. I was able to convince her to start doing the podcast over Discord since we have to shelter, so we should hopefully have our first episode up very soon.

I think that with us talking at the parking garage like we’ve done for the last 12 years gave us the sense of normalcy that we both needed. We were physically apart, but for an hour back together.

Respite.

Home

Thankfully, I have a can of Lysol so I sprayed a bunch of things down. The store in the village is small and sparsely occupied, while Freddies had so many people. It just felt like the safer thing to do.

Turnip has all but destroyed his mouse toy, so I bought him some catnip yarn poof things. He wanted nothing to do with it at first, but then I sprayed it with some more catnip and now he’ll suddenly run across the room and fling it around. Little asshole is an asshole and then does all this cute shit. So I can’t really hate him too much.

Some of my leftover Hawaiian deliciousness, and continuing my Deep Space 9 marathon.

Respite.

Reflections

I’m not really sure why, but it feels like my entire day consisted of this trip to town vs. the village. It could have been the time-suck that is Facebook making my time not in town was much shorter, or it could be the stress of going where there’s more people. I’ve been home for 5 hours now, am a couple glasses of wine with watermelon in, and I’m just now barely starting to calm down.

These are the times we live in, and we just have to do our level best to get through them.

I’m just gonna add some random GIFs that I like.

Day 10 of 56: Zoinks, Scoob!

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Blog 0

Oh my goodness, look at the time! It’s almost 11pm (when I started writing this) and I’m only starting to write this up at almost 11! Zoinks!

I kind of feel like I”m dating myself with that opening couple sentences. Zoinks means I watched Scooby Doo growing up, and “oh my goodness” means that I’m secretly an old lady. For the record: I’m a 28 year old man.

Not going to lie, today was also pretty unproductive. I ordered Turnip’s prescription food, worked on the last couple hours of the event mine in my stupid game, have watched almost all of season 3 of Deep Space 9, and got about halfway through a paragraph in my school text.
That’s a typo… I got halfway through the chapter.
What makes that typo funnier is I’m working on a business ethics course right now. It’s just SO DRY… I struggled with my Linux+ classes since I don’t use it regularly enough, but that at least was slightly interesting. How I yearn for the listings of all the different flags for dpkg… *sigh*

Beyond all this excitingness that is my life in isolation, heated up some leftover homemade Salisbury steak (aka mini-meatloaf) with some mac salad, heartburn, don’t have Tums, then looked at the clock and here we are with my “zoinks” and my “oh my goodness”.

Maybe an introvert blogging during a pandemic doesn’t make for the most interesting content.
Oh well. It is what it is. If you have topics, I’m all ears in the comments below.

Day 9 of 56: Some thoughts

Posted on March 28, 2020 by Blog Uncategorized 0

Let’s chalk up today as a mostly unproductive day. At 7 I ventured forth to acquire supplies, but I also drove around a little bit. Here’s some things from the brain of Joe from today. No subheadings, no extra crap to make SEO easier, I don’t care. Just thoughts.

For the most part, I spent today continuing my marathon of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Chief O’Brian and Quark still remain my favorites for various reasons. Miles is both a kind soul and a badass tech, Quark is a good person despite his desire for profits.

Woke up with a slight ear infection (feels like), mouth still hurts, and a little sneezy/runny nose. It all felt better in the afternoon. Added a comb to the shopping list, I apparently haven’t had one for several years. Now that I’m not doing my hair every day, I figured combing it every once in a while would help with overall health. Watched Julien’s video where Jenna cuts his hair, it’s been 6 weeks since my last haircut so I’m awfully tempted to cut my own hair. Maybe I’ll shave the sides and go with a full mohawk. Maybe even dye it blue.

Around 2 I realized I hadn’t eaten anything, or even had a coffee, so I compromised and made a bagel. I also became concerned that when I’m not sleeping I’m sitting in my chair in the living room. That’s not healthy, I need to find a way to get more steps and keep up my physical health. Thankfully I found my exercise bands in a box, I need to find a way to integrate some exercise time into my day. Granted, I wasn’t the best when I was able to go to the gym, but I was moving around a lot more than now.

At about 5 I realized that the day had pretty much passed. I needed to go to town, Fred Meyer is the closest store that has some of the things I need. Not really sure how it happened, but another hour and a half transpired (I blame Deep Space 9) and then my only option was to go to the village. I’ll probably have to go to town in the next couple days, but for now I’m good.

I went to the village and did a similar routine to the last time: drive past the store and do a half-loop through the area. The store had only a few people there this time of night, but I still wanted to check in on the place that I love. Same as before, minimal cars in normally occupied units, next to no other cars on the road, restaurant parking lots empty. This time, because of the Governor’s order, the parks and recreation areas I passed had fencing around them. I was a little sad because it sucks that it had to come to this, but also happy to see that my community is taking this pandemic seriously and taking steps to limit the spread.

I finally went to the store and it was more or less empty. That’s great! I was greeting by several signs reminding shoppers that only one person per party should be shopping and to observe at least 6 feet of space. Also great! I grabbed most of what I needed, still no toilet paper (I have a half dozen rolls still, should be fine, but given the shortages I need to keep an eye).

Quick tangent: I don’t understand the need to hoard toilet paper, of all things. Sanitizing products, sure I get that, but toilet paper? If anyone has any sort of psychological reason why this is the case, please enlighten me in the comments.

When I got to the check-out counter, they had signs again reminding to keep the 6 foot distance, and marks on the floor. While staying behind the line I was able to load most of my stuff onto the belt while staying distant from the checker and the other shopper. That was super cool. Checked out, went home, reheated leftovers, played some Apex, and here we are.

Reflections

I guess my main thought from today was that yes this isolation sucks and it’s for the greater good, but it brings me a certain amount of joy to see that everyone in my area is taking it seriously. It might also help that the majority of residents in my area are older so we all feel a certain responsibility to distance. We’re coming into the second week and I’m already bored out of my skull, but in the end I know that we’ll come through this.

I realize that most of my reflections are all super cheerful about the outcome of this whole thing, but that’s just how I feel. I think that the steps being taken locally are responsible and for the good of the community as a whole.

Also, holy crap it was almost a week before I left my house?! I only went outside twice in that time to move the trash can to and from the street. Wow. Time flies when you can’t leave your house, I guess.

Last 10 Days Out

28 March – Store – 10-ish minutes
22 March – Store – 10-ish minutes
19 March – Work – 30 minutes to clean up/out my office, nobody was there…
18 March – Store – 5 minutes, needed stuff for dinner

Day 8 of 56: Semi-productivity and random thoughts

Posted on March 28, 2020 by Blog 0

Let’s be honest here for a second, the first seven days have been rough creatively. Trying to come up with interesting content every day of the shutdown, since that was my personal goal, is a lot more difficult than I thought. Especially since I’m sheltering in place due to the virus. There’s only so much interesting stuff that happens in Casa JoDrRe. So for today here’s some random thoughts and semi-productive things.

The Semi-Productivity

I took a shower today before 4. That was a feat in itself. I cleaned the kitchen, cooked, and had my first actual meal in two days ready by 6.

Though I didn’t have all the ingredients for Salisbury steak, and the gravy was nonexistent (fun fact: low-fat hamburger doesn’t leave a lot left in the pan, and you really should have beef stock on hand), it tasted great and was almost like a mini-meatloaf.

I also sent an important email that I hope helps get a thing resolved soon, even though I received the notice 3 weeks ago. Accidentally forgot to send this email because of all the stress of the last couple weeks. Almost adulting is still adulting, right?

The Random Thoughts

I have an SEO tool installed to help with SEO-stuff-that-I-don’t-understand since I eventually want to add ads and hopefully eventually make this a revenue stream (HOW?!?!) and I just can’t come up with anything to link internally/externally that would give a green smiley face so I don’t even care. This can be an off day. Whatever.

Today for the most part I’ve been playing my mobile games (TIME SUCK) and having my own marathon of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I know Quark is supposed to be mostly hateable, but damn that fashion. Could I rock that?

I can’t wait for the warmer weather to come. I just want to sit on my deck with a cup of coffee and read the news and listen to the cheeseburger birds. I had hoped it would be this coming week, but looks like that may be a while longer.

I posted on Facebook that I’m looking for an espresso machine. Got a targeted ad today for a knockoff, so if you have me on Facebook let me know of any machines you’d recommend. I really only need to pull shots, price under $100, not a big deal if there’s no steam wand (right now just want iced lattes, but could make hot lattes if it would heat the water on a schedule).

Reflections

Sorry for not being very interesting today. Also sorry for not posting on the same day. I noticed early on that I was doing recaps of the previous day and I was losing some of the details. I feel that if I finish up the post as I go to bed (late since I have no job to go to right now) I can finish my thoughts until I head to bed.

While I have a vast library of memes saved, this is one of my all-time favorites. Please enjoy.

The top-front of my mouth (the little piece of skin above your front teeth that connects to your top lip) has hurt for the last two days, and I’ve been very runny-nose-y. Think it’s just the changing seasons or sleeping weird. No fever so I’m sure I’m fine. Everything feels better around midday (except my mouth, which is annoying), so when I go to town tomorrow for supplies I just need to make sure to wipe down carts and surfaces before and after I touch them.

Be well, all, and do your best to protect your community members who cannot protect themselves.

Shopping List

+ Litter Genie cartridge
Athena has one of those and ran out a couple weeks ago; I have to take Turnip’s waste in a trash bag through the house and add her waste to it. Gross. Too much kitty germs.

+ Potatoes
I have a few left, but the bag I got mostly has a bunch of bad spots in each spud. A lot of the food I’m making right now pairs great with mashed potatoes, so I’m going through those pretty fast.

+ Peppermint essential oil
Motherfuckin’ mice. Need to spray a peppermint solution under the house, maybe they’ll leave and stop waking me up in the middle of the night.

+ Coffee beans
If I can find a self-grinding coffee machine, would be nice to have some whole coffee beans. Nothing beats fresh-ground coffee. #baristalife

Day 7 of 56: Turneeeep!!!

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Blog 0

Turnip, aka “Turneeeep,” aka “Monsieur Turneeeep,” aka “Demon,” aka “Asshole” has been with me now for two years. Technically, two years ago yesterday, but we didn’t get back from Idaho until very late so we’re going to say it was 26 March.

Our Relationship

Turnip and I have clashed from Day 1. He picks on Athena, he screams at me, and thankfully we finally got past the peeing everywhere stage. However, he will lay on his back and point his toes, makes the most adorable little chirp noises when you poke him, and for some reason loves the stupid games I play. “Where’s Turnip?!” is my favorite, it’s when I put a blanket over him and say, “Where’s Turnip?!” and then he finds his way out. There’s also “Squeesh” which is when he is sitting between my feet on my footrest and I just squeesh him.

The Vet

A little over a month ago he started peeing in the guest bathroom’s sink and tub, and some other places, and it had a little bit of blood in it. I figured it was because he had some stale water (stopped drinking as much so I didn’t pay much mind that it hadn’t been a while since I last changed it out), so I made extra sure to make sure he had fresh water. The problem went away for a week or two, and then returned. Since it came back, I became extra concerned and took him to the vet the next day. To be clear, it wasn’t a lot of blood and he didn’t seem to be in pain so I hoped to be able to take care of it myself.

His vet was very nice. His exam went well, but they wanted to hold him for testing to see what was going on. When they called for me to come pick him back up they said he was extremely well-behaved, at which point I audibly laughed. There’s no way this demon was well-behaved in a strange environment! But it’s true: during the exam he was absolutely ENAMORED with the tech and the vet… and that’s just what I was there to see!

The Damage

Long story short, he had a UTI (possibly from the stale water, the vet was hesitant to blame me even though I knew I had slacked in my responsibilities), concentrated urine, and bladder stones. She prescribed him some antibiotics for the UTI and a special wet food to help dissolve the bladder stones since I didn’t want to put him through surgery.

The entire time I was talking with the vet I was extremely nervous and could barely make coherent sentences. It was at that point that I knew I loved this furry little asshole, despite our differences.

The Turneeeep

So, with all that said, happy Turneeeep Day! Have some photos of my adorable little asshole.

Day 6 of 56: Mental Health in Isolation

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Blog 1

Mental health! It’s important! We all know this! But a lot of us are sheltering in place! That’s rough! More exclamations!!!

Full disclaimer: I am an introvert who lives alone so I already love living my hermit life. I am also not a mental health professional, the thoughts below are what are helping me (plus some silliness), but if you need it I will always urge you to seek professional guidance. Always take care of yourself.

Another disclaimer, today was Turnip and I’s two-year anniversary of being together, but let’s be honest it’s the anniversary of me making a 13 hour drive with him screaming in the car. Tomorrow we’ll do a Turnip post, that also gives me more time to gather pictures. Cats make the Internet go ’round.

Anyway, here’s some things that I’m doing to help keep my mental health game strong during this trying time (seriously, don’t try to hand me an egg).

Take a shower! Regularly!

I don’t know if it’s just me and I’m just an oily sunuvabitch, but my hair gets nasty after a day. To the point where if I don’t shower for a couple days I can put up my fauxhawk. Nasty.

It’s easy to fall into the sneaky despair spiral. Don’t fall into the spiral, take a shower! If you live with someone, they’ll thank you. Even though I live alone and far enough from neighbors, the shower is the only place that I’ll full-on sing along to music, or even really listen to music, period, now that I’m not driving around in my mobile karaoke studio.

I guess this tip is a toss-up between feeling clean makes you feel better or singing along to your favorite songs is good for mental health. How about both?!

Open the windows!

If you’re like me, once it gets dark you close the blinds so peeps walking by can’t peep ya. In the morning, though, you need to open them blinds so your peepers can peep some things.

Since my job involves staring at a screen all day, one of the things they say to help reduce eye strain is for every 20 minutes of screen time look out the window in the distance for 20 seconds. For me, the same thing applies to keeping things interesting. I have a lot of squirrels and birds that run by my house, it’s always interesting to see things that are going on that aren’t on a screen.

Plus sometimes you’ll see some epic stuff. Like one time I watched two squirrels fighting and chasing each other across my yard. One gets chased to the top of this tall tree, goes to jump to another nearby tree and misses. Falls like 20 feet. Audible thud, thought he died. He gets up a couple seconds later, gives a cartoon head shake, and just runs off to do other squirrel stuff.

Chat with people!

I think this is the most important tip I can give right now. We’re all in isolation, it gets lonely, humans are social creatures. We actually need to interact with other humans, it’s just how we are. I’m an introvert and thrive in being alone, but every once in a while I just need some interaction.

Thankfully, we’re in the golden age of technology! If you’re working remotely I’m sure you’re using something like Zoom, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Skype/Teams, etc. for meetings and stuff. Do the same thing with your friends! Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, Facebook Messenger, Marco Polo… the options are plentiful. I actually had a Facebook Messenger video call today with a friend who was testing options so they could play D&D with their other friends remotely.

If you don’t want to do the video thing (or can’t), voice chat has been doing the trick for me! When I play Apex with friends, being able to just talk in the party chat is great with reconnecting to fellow humans. Call loved ones on the phone, video game chats, tin cans on a string… any way to regularly reach out to someone will do wonders.

And before you try to tell me to have a conversation with my cats, it’s not the same. They absolutely will not be able to respond in any meaningful way, don’t listen to their lies, they just want treats.

Reflections

I know there’s a lot more things you can do for your mental health. Unfortunately, it’s getting late and I want this up before midnight. These are the ones that I’m doing right now to keep up my mental health, and I’m sure as time goes on I’ll find more! We’re not even out of the first week, folks!

We’ll get through this together, it’s going to suck, but we’ll get through it.

Day 5 of 56: Distractions!

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Blog 0

Today was definitely the fifth day of an extremely long weekend, I just kept getting sidetracked by all these distractions! Mobile games, Tumblr, Facebook, “Mom, stop reading fake news,” Deep Space 9, and hot dogs. I figured by this point in time I’d be well on my way to cleaning up the house, re-organizing, homework, and just productive busywork in general. Nope… distractions.

As I mentioned yesterday, I want to start splitting my time stuck at home between the two cats in the living room and bedroom. I also want to reorganize the house, converting the spare bedroom back to a home office and streaming studio; then I can bring Athena in there and spend quality time while still being able to do stuff.

None of that happened today, because like I said, I kept getting distracted! That inspired today’s post.

Here are 5 of my biggest distractions and how I’m sometimes able to avoid them! (today excluded)

  1. Facebook

    Facebook is by far and large the biggest time-suck out there. We get it, Facebook takes up all your time. I know this, obviously, but I get a warm feeling in my dinosaur brain whenever someone likes, comments on, or shares one of my posts. Which is their entire point.

    Obviously, the easiest way to avoid this distraction is to uninstall the app from your phone. That won’t necessarily stop you from visiting on your computer or through your phone’s browser, but removing that icon removes that muscle memory of opening it when you’re bored.

    Sometimes I’ll move either what page it’s on (page 4 right now), or put it inside a folder. If you don’t keep it in the same spot then you can’t develop that muscle memory.

  2. TV Shows / YouTube / Videos

    This is one of the hardest ones for me. I’ve always been enamored with video whether it was Cartoon Network growing up, or YouTube now. At one point I even considered a career in television production. Part of my problem is I’ll turn something on to be background noise while doing something else, but then I end up only watching it and not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

    I don’t really feel qualified to provide any sort of guidance on this one; as I’m writing this I’m watching some Jenna & Julien Podcast on YouTube and reading my palm. Earlier today it was Deep Space 9.

    Perhaps the easiest way to avoid this distraction is to designate an area solely to TV and videos separate from the rest of your space. This is one I’m working on: once I rearrange the house I’ll have the consoles and work area in a room with the main TV in another. My living room right now is where everything happens; I eat, watch TV, game, blog, and do homework in this one chair. Creating a space dedicated to gaming, work, and blogging would definitely reduce the time I’m distracted by TV and videos. If possible, give that a shot and let me know in the comments if that works for you.

  3. Mobile / Console Games

    Here’s another one that’s really hard for me: games. As I’ve said before, I play this really dumb mining game and right now there’s an event mine and basically you have to keep your screen on to get the most points to be able to spend to upgrade your mine. Right now next to me my phone is on and I’m keeping an eye on the points so I can upgrade my mine to win this event. Earlier tonight I stopped working on this very post to play Apex with a friend for an hour. I’ve been known to start up Minecraft on the console (my PCs are slow and can’t play it well) and that’s all I do for 10 hours.

    Again, not really qualified at the moment to provide guidance, but I’m really pushing for the separation of areas to sort of help with this. I do know that when I was working I would pay minimal notice to games on my phone because I was doing stuff, and weeknights I could play for an hour or two before I needed to stop and make dinner or do something else. Let me know in the comments if you have any other advice. Until then, I’m gonna keep mining away.

  4. Tumblr / Reddit

    Tumblr and Reddit are two distractions I have in the middle of the day that don’t last too long, I get bored after a little bit with them, but they’re distractions nonetheless. In the mornings, Reddit is something I check after the news just to see another point of what’s going on.

    I got a little disgusted a while ago with Tumblr, so for me it’s easy to ignore and check Reddit or Facebook for memes. Reddit, since it has so much information, causes me to get overwhelmed easily and navigate away.

    Some potential fixes for these distractions are the same as Facebook: uninstall or move it to another folder on your phone. Also prune the subreddits and blogs you follow to make sure you’re getting only information you want and not a lot else.

  5. General Tech Problems

    This may be an IT guy or tinkerer thing, but if I’m on a computer and there’s something I need to do and a problem comes up, I’m going to focus on that problem and any sub-problems that come up. For example, yesterday I got my home Linux server going again. It needed about 400 updates since it’d been offline so long. I quickly got that resolved and my day continued; today I logged into it, noticed it was running a 4 year old version of the OS, and got sucked into figuring out how to upgrade it to the latest version. Then I cleaned up old packages that I no longer needed and started working on hardening some security measures. Did I need to do any of that? No. No, I did not. Did I do any of that? Yes. Yes of course. Because I have a problem.

    If you don’t tinker, this isn’t a problem for you and I wish I could be like you. If you tinker, sorry but you need to figure this one out on your own. Maybe if you tinker enough you’ll eventually come back around to the task at hand, but I just Always. Have. To. Tinker.
    Sorry.

Reflections

I realized while making this post, being distracted and all, that I get distracted pretty easily. I think most of my problems would be fixed if I created a dedicated work/play area (spare bedroom) separate from the relaxing/eating area (living room). Again, like I said yesterday, I already want to change around the house so I’ll be able to report back on that soon. I think part of the problem, too, is that I have a laptop and can use it wherever. Since its charger is in the living room, I’m hesitant to unplug it and move it to different rooms. Either I unplug it all the time or purchase another charger for the different areas; either would allow me to be in different rooms while still using my primary computer.

Shopping list

I didn’t leave the house today, Governor Brown issued a stay-at-home order yesterday, but just for posterity here’s what I will need to get within the next few days.

  • Creamer
    • Cold Stone sweet cream, baby!!!
  • Trash bags
  • Milk
    • Starting to smell a little bit, have half a gallon left
  • Buffalo chicken strips
    • I had the last of those tonight, so good…
  • Cheese
    • About a third of a block left
    • Craving some quesadillas tomorrow already
  • Propane
    • Been out for a while, but if the snow stops soon I’d like to grill some chicken I have since I gross myself out when I cook chicken on the stove
  • Peppermint essential oil
    • May just order on Amazon
    • I have a mouse under my sink, I heard him again last night.
    • I want to get rid of it without killing it, what I’ve found online suggests that peppermint essential oils sprayed around will keep it from coming back.
  • Rubber gloves
    • Cleanup after aforementioned mouse

That’s it for today, sorry for the weirdness.
Stay well, stay home, stay weird, stop them distractions.
Joe

Day 4 of 56: Splitting The Difference

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Blog 0

Have I talked about my cats? I can’t remember, I don’t even really know what day it is. I have two cats, each with their own personality. I don’t spend a lot of time in my room, so today I decided to try splitting the difference between them.

Athena

Athena is my baby, I’ve had her for coming up on 4 years. We just… connect. One of my old roommates noted once that it’s like we have our own language and just have entire conversations. (To be clear: I’m not one of those weirdos that will meow at their cat. She meows at me, I answer in English, and we just seem to know what the other wants/needs.)

Turnip

Turnip is an asshole. All cats are assholes, Turnip more so. He meows constantly for no reason, shreds all my furniture, and just is an overall asshole. He meows when he’s in the sitting area and I move to the kitchen, I call it early-onset Kitty Alzheimer’s, but that’s not really relevant to anything.

Turnip also doesn’t get along with Athena, no matter what I do. Because Turnip is such an asshole to her, Athena stays locked in my room and he gets the rest of the house. That’s not fair to her or me because she’s my baby.

Splitting the difference

Today I decided to just split the difference. The time amount asleep doesn’t count, so let’s say 16 hours to split. And then I have to cook and eat food, so let’s take another 2 hours off, which leaves me with 14 hours to split between the two cats. I got out of bed a little after 10, unemployment FTW, so I figured starting at 11 I’d change rooms every two hours.

I did fairly well… for the first couple hours. At 1 I moved to the bedroom. I have a server from an old computer that does DNS, workgroup management, and is like a dev server when I’m building sites and tools. It was throwing errors at startup about 6 months ago so I turned it off; today I finally took a look at it. Just needed a filesystem check. Felt pretty stupid.

Anyway, got that fixed and a little after 3 moved back to the living room. Turned on the TV to have some noise and BBC America is having a Deep Space 9 marathon. Needless to say, I’ve been in the living room ever since. So much for splitting my time!

Reflections

Today was a good first step in splitting up my time between my cats. Since I don’t really have anything to do with my time it’s difficult to stop doing nothing and go elsewhere. I’ve been toying with the idea of livestreaming or starting a podcast for a while now, and now that I don’t have a roommate I can easily reorganize the house. If I move my computers to the spare bedroom, including my game consoles, I could effectively create a streaming studio and workspace that I could bring Athena in for the time that I need to spend with her.

I also realized that when I went shopping yesterday I didn’t get enough ramen. Only got two packets of hot and spicy beef, should have gotten much more.

Another realization is that I’m posting these either at the end of the day (boring content), or in the middle of the day (interesting stuff happens but then I forget by the next day). In the comments put some ideas for posts that you’d like to see! I’d like to keep up the daily log format at least through the end of the quarantine, but if there’s content you’d like to see or thoughts of mine you want to see, I am always open!

Day 3 of 56: Venturing Forth But Also Not

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Blog 0

Last night I was pretty good as far as falling into alcoholism during this crisis, but also not really. I had about 2 glasses of wine left of my fancy box wine so I finished that off after dinner. Unfortunately, I was also playing a really stupid game on my phone and by the time I knew what was going on it was 2 in the morning. So I really didn’t start day 3 until almost noon.

The majority of today was playing that same stupid game on my phone, not gonna lie, and also watching the Jenna & Julien podcast. The game is called “Idle Miner,” and it’s really dumb, but they have these event mines that expire and this mine only had until 8 tonight to finish it. I didn’t get anywhere near complete. This is absolutely not a sponsored post, I advise you to steer clear of this game because it is highly addictive and a complete time-suck. **goes to upgrade his moonstone mine in the meantime**

Around 6 today I started getting hungry and knew I was out of wine. Even though I knew this would be a bad idea, I took a shower and went to the store.

22 March Shopping List:

  • Wine
  • Soda
  • Hot dogs
  • Bunzzz (hot dog buns)
  • Mac salad
  • Hamburger
  • Mustard
  • Chaaaaps (chips)
  • Queso
  • Ramen

I swear, I shop like a college student. I still technically am, so yeah whatever.

Joe Ventures Forth

Bringing my bottle of hand sanitizer with me (can’t be too careful), I trundle off to the store. This is the first time in 4 days that I’ve listened to music so I’m having a good time. I hit the first roundabout by the store and there is at least 40 cars there. Nah, that’s too many people given the current situation, I’ll just drive around for a while; it’s nice out, and it’s just great to be not in my house.

Swing by work and the parking lot has maybe 5 cars in it, there’s nobody around, everything is just abandoned and empty. Surreal is the word I used to describe it to my coworkers in the group chat. Everything was empty, except for the volleyball court (20-ish people), and the large park at the center of the resort (PACKED / 50-ish people and pets). The way my resort works is it’s basically its own town and the resort manages a fair amount of homes and condos. There are people who live in the resort full-time, and a lot of the homes are managed by other property management companies. Because my resort suspended operations, of course there’s going to be significantly less people. Beyond just being mostly empty, it was also boggling how many people were still taking their spring break vacations in spite of the situation.

Despite the surrealism of both the resort being empty and yet still bustling with activity, I return to the store. There’s maybe 20 cars, so it should be a little better to head in. I’m able to quickly grab all the items on my list while staying away from other people.

When I got to the checkout line, the cashier finished with the lady in front of me, turns to her coworker, holds up a block of cheese and asks, “Where did this come from?” Her coworker doesn’t know, so she puts it back on the counter to be returned. I’m all like “Hey is it still cold? I could buy that!” She holds it out to me to check the temp because she’s wearing gloves (GOOD FOR YOU, STEPHANIE!!!) and it’s pretty warm so I turn it down. I have half a block of cheese at home that’s still good, I don’t need to buy some warm mess.

Joe Returns Home

I finish checking out, take my items to the car, and re-sanitize my hands and the steering wheel with that bottle of sanitizer I brought. Have you noticed that when you need to not touch your face is when it itches? Yeah.

From the time I left to when I got back home: about 45 minutes. That includes travel time and driving around the resort. Approximate time to be exposed: 10 minutes. Shabooyah.

Then I made dinner (top sirloin and mac salad) and started blogging! Some more Jenna & Julien, some Vine compilations, and of course some wine. I refuse to learn any sort of lesson.

Last 10 days amount of time in public

22 March – Store – 10-ish minutes
19 March – Work – 30 minutes to clean up/out my office, nobody was there…
18 March – Store – 5 minutes, needed stuff for dinner
14 March – Starbucks & Store – 10 minutes total
Store was for creamer and small supplies
13 March – Pizza – 2 minutes to pay for the pizza, they already were takeout-only!

I think this section is good to include whenever I leave the house now for tracking’s sake. Don’t think I’ll put it in every day, but at the very least whenever I leave the house.