2023-07-06:

Fri:
Fed everybody.
Work time. Got the task done, finished up the testing I want to do. I'll test a third device I suppose when it's free. This is really just a port of the stuff I was testing before, after all. An expansion, if you will. So it's been tested a bunch, it's fine.
Finished the next chapter, started the next.
Got the cat stuff. 10 lbs more litter for .50. What a bargain. Not sure how that works, but I'll take a 50 lb bag instead of a 40 lb box I guess. Is the bag more or less environmentally friendly? Saw chicks.
Did shopping.
Got back. Shoot, I forgot to go to Savers. Sigh.
Had dinner, checked sites.
Then game. Of the 4-5 problems at the site we solved... one. And that was in a cut scene very, very late into the night. We have information that should solve #2 right away. #3 we're going to try something, it may not work. #4 we have no clue. Then either that will reveal the big bad or we have to keep looking for what the real problem here is, the thing that riled up all the ghosts. We think it's the guy we saw going after the "forbidden knowledge" at the center of the old temple. I guess he could be the Skeletor of our adventure? Sean didn't mention him having a skull for a face.


Sat:
Fed everybody
Did the back yard and some plants moving around. Very humid!
Checked sites.
Ate lunch.
Accidentally picked the longest 3D print not the shortest? They must be in reverse alphabetical order on the display. (I can't see the whole name which included the time to print.) Sigh. It's fine, I started it early enough so...
Finished the next chapter.
Several hours in now, 3D print is looking good. If we don't lose power. It's really raining out here. And the wind is blowing like crazy.
Ah, calming down a bit now?
Pick berries- not many out there. Probably won't get many more than last year. The bushes by the driveway don't even produce. I guess we'll see, but it looks pretty bleak. Enough for one pie is fine, I guess.
Watched some movies, it is movie night.
10 hour print came out okay. I think it skipped a row or two, the filament may have gotten stuck. I go over every few minutes to check it. It's not something you can just leave alone, really. But it did recover. It's not perfect but it's not terrible? I don't know. Another 9 hours (the estimate was a little off) to print it again, and the same thing can likely happen on such a long print? I don't know.
Then did xbox.

Sun:
Last feeding everybody. Cleaned up the cans and washed the containers. Found Onix hiding, he rushed out of there so at least he's still alive. Bought mouse traps on the way home. The catch and release kind, enough is enough mice, no more running around the counters!
Picked a few more berries.
Checked sites.
Started the 4 hour print, the thing I wanted to start with.
Ate lunch.
Did paperwork and finance stuff. Only 1 invoice last month. Nice?
Played some River City Girls 2.
The print came out good this time. Shorter prints = happier me. I think I've done the longest and the shortest now so the rest should be somewhere in between. That bodes well. Good amount of filament left but I'll probably need more.
Did some reading.
Had dinner.
Played more Girls 2. But ran into a bug. A big one. There are certain times the screen "locks" and you can't go anywhere. For reasons. You kill a few waves of enemies and the screen unlocks. Easy, right? Well, this time the last wave never showed up. I was just stuck in the room, with no way to go anywhere. Thanks, "way forward." Way to not allow me forward, is what I'm saying. I'm not the only one to run into that bug either, but at the same time there was only one page about it. Maybe it'll be fine next time? If this keeps happening it's game over, I can't even finish it. So it must be okay. Right?
Got ready for tomorrow.

Mon:
The mouse traps worked great! I hadn't been in bed for 15 minutes when I heard a snap and thumping around in the kitchen. Went and put together a cage with some litter and food and stuff, and dumped a mouse in there. Dash Mouse! He was pretty fast running around, poor scared mouse. Then I got up in the night and emptied it again! Two mice in one night. Not bad. They hadn't killed each other by the morning. It was raining, I hate to dump them someplace in the rain. A normal mouse would be nice and dry in their burrow at this time. I'll wait until it lets up. Have to find a good spot, there must be some woods around here. I could walk down past the bridge, I know there's trees over there, put them into a carry cage and put it in a bag? I'm not letting them out just outside the house. Or I could take them to my parent's house and let them out in the woods there. I guess I could keep them the whole week, go on Friday morning over there?
Work. Found a dead tiny turtle in the parking lot looking for feathers. How did a baby turtle even get there? And it was in the middle of a spot, how did someone run it over? Poor turtle.


Work wise, nothing special. I was again the designated "switch the server setting" guy for a development team. No trouble there.

Finished the next chapter.

It was nice and sunny out so when I got home I took the walk down to the grove of trees I was thinking of. I had the mice in a tube in my tiny aquarium in a bag. I set the tube down and one mouse shot out of there and went running. The other just stuck his head out. I said "you better hurry if you want to stay together, he's getting away." But he didn't listen. So I left the tube there (littering, I know, but it is cardboard so it will degrade fairly rapidly it's not plastic and I picked up litter so it's a net zero) and wished him well. Hope they make it. And no more mouse poop on my counters? Perhaps?

Recovered, as it was fairly humid outside but only 75? Doesn't make sense. I'll pick berries tomorrow, there are some out there, hopefully early in the morning.

Checked sites. Ate dinner.

Got ready for tomorrow but no work, remember.

Worked on the next chapter. No writing, but I finally have to decide what spells and such they're going to take, as well as the backgrounds for Olaph and any magical items they're going to "check out" for their journey.

Then xbox.

Huh, caught another mouse! These traps are certainly proving themselves. I'll take you for a little walk tomorrow mouse-kun.

Tues:
Happy forth everyone, so is America back to being great yet or what? Why, it must be, as just this week we made sure that lighter skinned people continue to have advantages over darker skinned people simply for existing, and that we're sliding backwards towards allowing someone to discriminate based on some perceived "belief" against others. Neat! Baby steps people, today it's discriminating against one thing, tomorrow another, and soon we'll have separate water fountains again. Then will America truly be great.

I love the "closely held religious beliefs" excuse BTW. As church attendance is down everywhere it gets harder and harder to say with a straight face that "religious belief" holds any water over everything. Just once in a courtroom I would love to hear someone asking a "religious beliefer" exactly how many times that month they personally had gone to church? Here are some of the tenants the bible espoused- how many have you followed this week? How many times turning the cheek? "But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." Or sharing your clothing or food? "Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same. Luke 3:11 NIV" No? None of that? Well, sorry, you don't get to claim religion as the basis for anything. Come on back in a year after you've been to church 52 times, done your hail Marys, your confessions, your tithing, oh and if you're a woman, make sure you tell everyone you're menstruating so things you sit upon can be cleansed.

"When a woman has a discharge, if her discharge in her body is blood, she shall continue in her menstrual impurity for seven days; and whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening. Everything also on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean, and everything on which she sits shall be unclean. Leviticus 15: 19-20."

Now, I'm off to buy me some slaves!

"You may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT"

Wait do I actually have any "relatives" in Israel? I don't think so.......

Started the next 10 hour print. *crosses fingers*

Picked berries. There are tons of bugs out there. Are they mosquitoes? I really hope they are not but I kinda fear they are.

Won River City Girls 2 finally. Back to FF7 remake.

The print came out. I mean, it finished. There's some skips. I guess I'll have to fill them in and paint the whole thing white after all. Oh well, it's probably fine.

Took mouse to his new home in the woods. At least, that was the plan. He had other plans. As I didn't have a tube anymore like with the first pair I was trying to use an old oatmeal container to get him into the walking cage. He jumped on my arm, ran over me, and got away. Past a cat, of course. He ran into the closet, then I didn't see if he turned left or right into my room or the collection room. Sigh. I put a trap by my door, we'll see if he goes past that and traps himself again. So that was a whole thing.

Glued the two pieces I have together. It's not perfect of course, but I think it'll be adequite. Only a few more pieces to go!

Played some Remake. When I say "played" it's more like I wandered around wall market for an hour and took in the sights. Okay when I say sights I mostly mean Aerith but you get the idea. The plot was only very, very minorly advanced. No stutters though, gee throw more hardware at the problem why don't you?

Got ready for tomorrow.

Worked on the next chapter, ready to write tomorrow I think. Do I have any work to do? Oh, dentist in the morning, so that'll be fun.

Then xbox.

Wed:
Went to the dentist. They're still watching a few things but nothing serious. Good news. Did xrays.

As expected, not much work related stuff today. Helped a little bit on the NTLM stuff for the developer, some other developer I guess he didn't know what he was doing. But it's all been done at this point? I have no idea.

Wrote the next chapter. Got them some new gear, that surprisingly took the whole chapter. Huh.

No haul yet, stayed late and checked and the stuff is dated today so maybe tomorrow?

Got home, picked berries for 45 minutes. Almost have a large container full, so that's good.

Checked sites, ate dinner. One call. Whined about me coming tonight. I accepted because I am a moron.
Some kind of samsung laptop. Error on boot. And booting is SO SLOW. Struggled for almost 2 hours just to get it to boot from a flash drive or CD (remember those? The machine is 11 years old!) to run a disk diagnostic tool. Finally gave up! Brought it home, got the replacement SSD in there, blew the vents out, booting up a 2017 version of Win10 to install. Because that's what I had on disk. I'll just update it, it's fine. Copied his stuff off while that was happening, to my Mac. Copied okay? So is it the drive or not? It seems to copy well enough. But just booting the device was so painful.

Anyway, working on that tonight yehaa. And great, it doesn't have an ethernet driver. This is my shocked face. Huh, that's weird, it's like ethernet doesn't exist. There's no "unknown device" or anything in device manager. Guess I'm doing everything over wi-fi? 45 minutes and it's only 94% done with version 22H2 windows 10. Love their naming scheme by the way. MS. Give your marketing department a raise.

Thurs:
Quite busy today somehow. Got a surprise invite to a demo for some cert stuff. So got through that.
Then made some test cases around what I saw in the demo.
Worked with the developer for the NTLM thing again. Please, get your own freaking server.
Did proofreading of what I did yesterday and a little work on the next chapter.
Did the test cases on the machine that had the cert loaded as I didn't have any directions.
Got the directions late in the day. Ugh, opensll. I won't be able to actually make the security work as the cert still won't be trusted by the browser. But at least I think I can follow the directions.
Had the usual status meeting.
No haul, stuff is still from 7/5, what are they waiting for?
Wrote up a new spell.

Came back home, finished up the stupid laptop. Brought it over to the guy. Still another hour there, getting him all set back up.

Back here, picked the day's berries. Almost a full container.

Checked sites. Ate dinner. Hot today. Clouded up but no rain yet.

Sent Sean some questions about the meaning of the words "target" and "object" as they relate to magic. Paragon spells are really all over the place. Some say target, some say object, some list very careful weight limitations others do not. Some spells it doesn't matter how well you cast them the effect is the same, some do have an effect, some the effect is based on the rating, some 1/2 rating, some 1/3 rating. I realize it's up to me in my story for the most part what "object" means but at the same time, that could really break the entire world. I do want this to happen in "Sean's Pyre" as much as possible, because being given the rules and then having the characters find creative things to do with those rules is better than me just saying "yeah, that's how I think it works in this slice of the Pyreverse." Right?

Got ready for tomorrow. No calls today.

Let's look ahead. I'll probably try to use those directions, get a cert made and loaded onto another device. Test it. I'll just need to do one more, it's old software we're patching I don't have to do the newer models. That will come later as a non-patch.

I think that's the only work thing.

Shopping, going to the bank, seeing my parents. Getting yummies?

Then back for game. No Stan. We'll see if we can solve another 1/4 of this mystery in one session.

The weekend, more yard work, probably more berries to pick. Maybe cut the front lawn depending on heat levels / rain. Have my parents over Saturday.

Of course more printing. I've got enough filament for one more piece at least, I think.

Nothing else major that I can see from here.

There's less days ahead in 2023, we've passed the halfway point. Leaves will be falling soon.

See you all next week, when it snows.