Weekly status update [0025/????]

A pleasantly quiet week, punctuated with some quiet pleasantness.

  • As mentioned in my rant earlier this week, I finished up Final Fantasy XIII after years of having it hang over my head.  I then immediately started playing it again from the start.  I’ll probably write a “Here’s a Thing” about it soonish, but: it’s a lot better than people think.  Except for the trophies.  Damn the trophies.
  • We had the first extended game night in ages at Fercott Fermentables on Tuesday.  We played Power Grid at Jase’s request; despite him having never played the game, he won on the first tiebreaker, with Chad in second.  Power Grid is a stone cold classic board game, and I enjoy it every time I play, although in this particular game I knew I was going to lose and lose badly about halfway through.  Good times, though, with great company and a good atmosphere.
  • I have a big stack of books from the library but haven’t made a huge dent in them yet due to playing too many video games instead.  I did finally read/look at/gape at Banksy’s Wall and Piece, which Chad kindly loaned me.  It’s a gorgeous piece of art full of gorgeous (and sad, and clever, and all other sorts of things) pieces of art.  One of my favorite touches: a lot of the pieces have either how long it took to paint them–sometimes crazy short amounts of time–or how long they lasted before getting painted over or removed.
  • The diet continues to go well, inasmuch as I’m pretty sure I’m still losing weight and I’m definitely still managing keto.  I intentionally didn’t weigh myself when I started and still haven’t, due to my tendency to obsess over slight variations in the short-term numbers when long-term trends are the important part, but the key “clothes fit better” index is going strong.
  • Speaking of personal health, neither my back nor my wrists have been acting up recently, which is a very pleasant state of affairs.  I suspect the former is at least partly due to the continued weight loss; not sure about the wrists, but I’m not gonna knock it either.

All in all, a pleasant week, with the sadly-too-rare pleasure of an excellent board game evening in the middle.  I… should really try and do something to make those happen more often, but I’m not sure what.  Now, though, it’s time to get back to reading on this quiet Saturday, which is actually a whole lot like what I would have been doing on most Saturdays before retirement anyhow.  Funny how that works.

Weekly status update [0021/????]

It was a relatively uneventful week, other than a pair of delicious meals that effectively bookended the working chunk.  I was confused enough on Monday to think it was Saturday, though, so it goes to show you that days of the week start becoming a bit nebulous once they don’t actually affect your life very much.  Or I’m just very forgetful.

Or both.  Why not both?

  • The first meal, on Tuesday, was a going-away dinner for one of my old coworkers.  I was pleasantly surprised to be invited, and had a good time chatting with all of my old teammates.  The steak wasn’t bad either.  (It was delicious.)
  • The second meal, on Friday, was at the local Tex Mex place I frequent.  I got a platter full of meat with caramelized onions, avocado, and all the taste.  It was also delicious.
  • In the middle, along with last weekend?  So much Planetside 2.  So much.  According to this page, I started playing this past Sunday or Monday (the graph is a bit unclear) and have already put 61 hours into the game.  That’s… a lot of game.  It also doesn’t count the several hours I’ve spent on alternate characters.  I wrote about it here.  Yesterday I could feel the game starting to get a bit stale… but then I convinced one of my old coworkers to play Friday evening, and we both had a great time together, and that renewed my excitement.  We’ll see how long it lasts.
  • Alongside the videogames (well, mostly the one), I finished reading John Kessel’s The Moon and the Other.  I should write a “Here’s a Book Thing” about it, and I may, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed it quite a bit.  What on the surface looks in some ways like a reaction to The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t, really.  Also, those two books one after the other was a bit of a weird coincidence, given their exploration of gender roles… but I picked up the Kessel almost entirely based on the cover.
  • I suspect my back is just going to hurt me a bit every morning from here on out, but at least it’s not the acute pain I was experiencing the last few weeks any more.  Small blessings and all that.

Lastly, this is not really something specific that happened, but: every time I left the house, I realized how little I leave the house now.  I am definitely not an errand-a-day sort of guy; if anything, I bundle them up and do them all at once, then stay home for two or three days before venturing out again.  This was helped by the fact that I didn’t get a rotisserie chicken from Walmart even once this week, which usually puts me on the road for a couple of minutes every morning.  It seems a little strange, as someone who spent at least some time in the car every weekday since I was sixteen or so.  It’s a small but significant change to the rhythm of my life.

Weekly status update [0020/????]

It’s kind of amazing to me that I’m 20 weeks, 140 days, into retirement.  It both doesn’t feel that long at all–I can still remember driving into work and hunting for a parking spot, sometimes the most challenging thing I did all day–and impressively far in the past.  That second part excites me; I was a little worried that the days would quickly start disappearing into a blur of nothingness, but instead I feel like I actually get quite a bit out of most of my waking hours.  Sure, it’s reading, or playing games, but those are both things that I wanted to do more of in the past and didn’t have the time for.  Now that I do, it’s nice.  Really nice.

  • I’ve officially given up on the whole USPS situation.  Dealing with their international handling department is a special kind of hell.  I got replacements for all of the items, so I don’t really care that much now; I’m mostly just angry I wasted time contacting them in the first place.  More fool me for trying to do the right thing.
  • I fasted most of this week, and I think that was successful in recalibrating my hunger levels… but then I went and ate way too much today in a sort of rebound effect.  Sigh.  I still stuck with the keto side of things, so I’m not worried about that, but we’ll have to see in the days ahead if I screwed it up.
  • Still haven’t done much in the way of puzzles.  The dot-by-dot book I got in my last order from Japan is actually really disappointing; it has a bunch of cheater art in the background of most of the puzzles, so you almost always know what the picture is going to be before you start.  Boo.
  • Played a whole lot of videogames this week.  I finished Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction after putting it aside a couple of months ago, and tore through Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty in a single sitting the next day (it’s short, though).  I still haven’t made much more progress in Shining in the Darkness, though; I’m not sure why.  I was enjoying it when I was playing it.  Instead I picked up the original PlayStation version of Final Fantasy Tactics digitally and started playing it on my PS3… but I think I’m gonna force myself to set that aside and get back to the Shining series.
  • I’m a good chunk of the way into The Moon and the Other, which is an interesting sf novel by John Kessel.  In some ways its setting is an inversion of The Handmaid’s Tale, which makes for really interesting compare-and-contrast reading.  I didn’t do that intentionally… but it’s a neat result.
  • Watched a whole lot of Landail on Twitch, as he was playing a game I particularly like (Tactics Ogre) most of the week.  Actively spent less time in some of the other online communities I’m a part of due to frustration with some of them.
  • My back’s not in great shape again yet, but it’s better every day, I feel, and I’m taking an ibuprofen every morning to help reduce the inflammation.
  • On the other hand, I haven’t needed my wrist braces for days, which is very nice.

All in all, despite the frustrations I had earlier in the week, I feel pretty good about how it ended.  Even the tiniest dent in my gaming backlog’s a good thing, and I’ve really been enjoying my recent reading level.  Hopefully next week will continue the up and to the right trend.