Month: December 2021

Oh my god what a difference a good night’s sleep in my own bed makes. I woke up around nine after the cat came to nudge me awake, and got my first meditation session since before the trip. It was a decent one, I wasn’t too distracted, but I need to figure out a way to make sure I keep my practice up on these road trips. I know I could have made time if I really wanted, but travelling throws off diet and other good habits.

We found out yesterday that Mrs. S, our neighbor, tested positive for COVID. She’s the mom in our quaranteam family. The girls, and I, have been over there extensively during the Christmas break. The news set off an anxiety storm in Missus, who seems certain that we brought COVID to my family and infected everyone back home.

The girls woke up feeling better — it seems sleeping in their own beds helped them out as well. We brought them to a local COVID testing and vax event this morning, but they were all out of rapid tests. We got them their second dose anyways.

I’ve got to go talk to Mrs. S’s husband about what they’re doing. Their conservatives and vaccine hesitant, so I don’t think they’ll do anything other than isolate themselves. I’m not sure how that’s going to work though with everything that usually goes on around their house. Ugh.

I got my second paycheck today and seem to have the FTX situation resolved, so I need to do my budget and figure out where everything needs to go.

Just a bit of time for a quick update tonight. We just got back from our trip. The girls woke us up before dawn. Elder was sniffling and sneezing, generally miserable, and Younger was crying because of her ear. I think she may have caught swimmer’s ear in the pool yesterday. So we decided to go ahead and hit the road, skipping the FIL’s house on the way back. We drove straight through.

I must have put 10 straight hours in the driver’s seat. We stopped a couple of times for bathroom breaks, gas, and food, but I don’t think I actually rested until we were about an hour from the house. I took a look at myself in the rest stop bathroom and I looked like death, heavy bags under my eyes. I swear I had sea legs.

Today is our last day visiting my family, and I am exhausted. As is Missus. I wound up taking the girls to my cousin’s house so they could play with his kids, about the same age as mine. In fact, Younger’s real name is the same as his youngest, so that led to some interesting times. The kids had a ball.

Missus and I did some shopping, hitting up a thrift store, Hallmark, and spending an hour walking around the mall before hitting up a poke restaurant for lunch. We went back to the hotel and read and cleaned up. I finished reading The Scar and went straight into Iron Council. After, I went to pick up all four kids and brought them to swim in the hotel pool. Then my cousin came, we swapped, and he took the kids to my grandmother’s while Missus and I went out for dinner.

We didn’t spend much time at my grandmother’s tonight as it was getting late, the kids were worn out and Elder is coming down with a cold. So we’re all back in the hotel room, it’s almost ten local time, and the kids are in bed.

Tomorrow we’re waking up and packing the car. It’ll be a challenge to get everything loaded up quickly, I’m hoping we’ll be on the road before nine so that I’m not on the road too late. I don’t have high hopes.

One day of driving back to the FIL’s, for another night, then it’s only a few more hours home on Friday for New Years Eve.

It’s been a good trip, although I didn’t see all of my cousins. There’s been some family drama over the years, so I don’t particularly want to see some of them, but I probably could have done a better job planning and letting people know we were coming down. Oh well.

The girls had fun and I’m glad they had a chance to visit their second cousins. Maybe next time we won’t wait four years before we come back. Who knows how many more years my grandmother has left.

No post yesterday, breaking a pretty good streak. After travelling twelve hours with the kids yesterday I was just too tired to try and bang out a late-night post in the hotel room. I was just too exhausted.

We actually left the FIL’s house an hour earlier than we had planned. That’s probably the first time that’s ever happened. We gassed up and headed west. I let the girls use their tablets and headphones, and we made it about three hours before we stopped for lunch. It was some understaffed travel center, with a Burger King and Sbarro, neither of which had full menus.

We almost ran out of gas, hitting a twenty-mile stretch of highway with no exits. The GPS was messed up and told us that the nearest fill up was over thirty miles away. I stopped at a rest area with four miles on the tank and figured out that we were as many miles from a gas station.

The girls had been napping for this middle stretch of road, and we’re wide-awake, and annoying, for the last couple hours. It’s like they could sense that we were almost to the hotel and were amping up their energy.

We got checked in and unloaded into the hotel, then hopped across town to see my grandmother. My dad and his sister were there, and we had some of my grandmother’s signature vegetable soup, and caught up while the kids watched TV.

So we finally got the kids asleep around eleven, our time, and it didn’t take me long to pass out. We’ve had our hotel breakfast, and are passing time while we wait for the local Children’s Museum to open up. After that we’ll do some shopping and then head back over to Grandma’s to let the kids meet their second cousins.

We just arrived at the FIL’s house after a three hour drive. This morning was a whirlwind of activity as we prepared for the trip: making sure the girls packed appropriate clothing; assessing the food in the fridge, take what we could and everything else to the garbage; cleaning the house, prepping the cats’ care, figuring out what electronics and charging equipment we were going to take.

Not to mention it’s Sunday and I had all my normal Perp rotations and other daily tasks. I ran into a problem with my Trezor that prevented me from doing my regular rotations, but I kept all four of my Star Atlas accounts synced up and made my regular purchases across the board.

We did the three hour trip with only a short stop when we started to get a few last minute provisions. The girls slept most of the way while I listened to driving music on Radio One.

The girls are trying out their grandpa’s new home gym — there’s a treadmill! — but I managed to get in another four mile run today before we left. I figured I better do it before we left, as I don’t know I’ll be in any shape to do it midweek. We’ve got a lot of time in the car this week, and I know once I meet up with my cousins that there will be a lot of drinking involved.

My FIL’s wife is putting the finishing touches on (another) prime rib, and then we’ll probably watch a movie. The girls will probably be up late since they took such long naps, but I’m really hoping I can go to bed at a decent hour so that we can get on the road as early as possible. I really want to get my morning meditation in before we hit the road.

We have 600 miles from here to go.

It’s been a pretty good Christmas. It’s almost seventy degrees outside, and is pretty hot inside with the oven going all day. Yesterday’s prime rib came out great, and the turducken is a short time away from being done. I’m expecting family to start arriving any second now.

Missus and I stayed up to watch some of the new Matrix movie last night. I’ll say I went into it with pretty bad expectations, but the movie went in a self-referential meta place that intrigued me. We didn’t watch but an hour.

I bought a copy of Far Cry 5 for D last night, he told me he’s really enjoying it, as I knew he would.

The girls opened their presents this morning after a rough night. Both girls peed the bed, Younger in ours, so I wound up changing the bed at two or four in the morning. I didn’t even turn on the lights because I thought it might keep me from getting back to sleep. The kids must have woken us up five times after that. We told them they could have at their stocking stuffers, and Younger kept coming in the room for various reasons. We finally got up around ten and unwrapped presents.

— (later, same day)

So we’re winding down for the night. The visit from the in-laws was good, the prime rib came out great and the turducken as well. The kids spent some time down the street playing, so hopefully they’ll sleep well tonight.

I can’t really believe that we’ll be hitting the road tomorrow. There seems like an overwhelming amount of stuff to do tomorrow, cleaning the house, doing laundry and packing our food and belongings. It’s a lot to do before we get out of the house before three.

I’d say it was the best Christmas ever save for some of the complaining that the kids did. Not quite as much bickering as usual, and I didn’t have the beat anyone’s butts, but my kids are not very gracious.

I however, am.

It’s hard for me to believe that Christmas is almost upon us. Most of the gifts are under the tree — I still need to help Younger wrap gifts she bought — and the kids are in the living room rehearsing the show that they’re going to put on for the adults later — a musical production of Must Be Santa Claus that they’ve been practicing for several days.

I ran four miles yesterday, a new record for me, both in distance and in the fact that I ran in forty degree weather. It was almost easy, and the push at the end was pretty good, I probably could have squeezed a bit more out as I wasn’t terribly exhausted at the end. I figured the run was the least I could do given the punishment I’m subjecting my liver to these last couple days.

I’ve been playing a lot of video games, living my best life, as Missus would put it. Last night it was Cyberpunk. I’m waiting on my brother to hook up with me so we can play Tarkov later, it’s been a week and we still haven’t linked on that.

I started the prime rib earlier, it’s got about five more hours before I need to finish it in the oven. Should be delicious. Missus is cooking right now. I haven’t eaten yet, and it’s almost one. I had a late night snack so a fast won’t do me harm.

It’s hard to imagine that we’ll be hitting the road in forty-eight hours, heading up to the FIL’s house for a night and then heading onward for another eight hundred miles. I have no idea what we’re going to do when we get there. Maybe I should figure that out.

We are slowly making it through the week as we approach Christmas. Plans are coming together. We have our housekeeper coming by later today, and I’ve got to prep for our party on Christmas. I’ve got four pounds of prime rib that I’ve got to cook, and I’m hoping to do it sous vide. I’ve also got a turducken breast.

I almost double-booked our hotel rooms. I couldn’t find the confirmation email and went to do it again through booking.com, but I was warned that I already had a similar reservation. Then I double checked and found the email. So we’re all set.

I played Far Cry co-op with my friend E. last night. It was really fun. I’ve been playing solo so long I forgot how much fun it could be. It’s light fare compared to the hardcore horror of Tarkov. Maybe today I can get a round in with my brother. The timing may be a problem, with Missus on WFH today.

Work continues on the SCORE CLI. I was able to refine it so that it can report when the next fleet will run dry. I want to make it a node process that will resupply, determine the next to go empty, then sleep and repeat. I also have it so that it can report the total amount of resources that will be needed at next run. I want to extend that to a total burn for the week, and do spl-token checks to see what is actually in inventory. I was running into problems with the spl-token libs though, that’s where I’ll be picking up.

My drunk ass thought I was texting my boy Ed last night and instead sent a series of text messages to my in-laws group chat. I was role-playing Cyberpunk, that’s all I’ll say. Missus woke me up this morning, halfway mortified, half-joking.

I managed to get a working supply-all function working for the SCORE CLI. I have a bunch of other improvements that I want to do for it, but I’m not sure how much I’ll get done today and tomorrow, given that I need to go through the Opensea submissions and prep another airdrop. Maybe I’ll save that for tomorrow.

Yesterday was my MIL’s 70th birthday, so we went over her house for surf and turf. The kids disappeared into the garage to watch TV while the adults ate. And drank. I think I must have drank most of a bottle of prosecco by myself, then went home and kept the party going.

I hopped on the Kartov Discord and wound up getting in a sherpa match with someone for a scav match. We wound up getting sniped pretty quickly, at that point I was too wasted to play, so I kicked off and played some Cyberpunk for a bit. I was running across the map like I would do in Kartov, and stumbled across some random NPC that killed me really quick, and I kept respawning, trying to take them down, but I couldn’t do it after like ten tries, which is when I sent the text message.

I wrapped presents yesterday. I realized I got four gifts for Elder, but didn’t get anything for Younger. Oops. I talked to Missus about it and hopefully it’ll all work out. We’ll see. Two more days till Christmas Eve.

I swear I need to procure a ton of coal in the next couple days. Day two of winter break and I’m ready to send their presents back. It’s been a couple of rough mornings.

Elder’s taken three days to do her laundry and I just got in a screaming match with her because she “wants help” with her laundry, but all she’s been doing is sitting in her room, probably sneaking some videos on her tablet. She doesn’t want help, she wants me to do it for her, and I probably would have if she had made more of an effort to do it.

Still, I can’t be yelling at her like I do. It’s bad parenting, and I’m so frustrated. I’m trying to discipline her but I’m worried I’m setting a bad example. Missus is at her wit’s end as well. It’s like as soon as we wake up — or ar woken up — the two of them start going at it. It’s like when we were all doing work/school from home and I could barely get anything done with all the bickering and arguing.

I did manage to drag my lazy butt to do a workout. It wasn’t anything worth talking about, but I felt like I had too since I’m so far behind in my workouts. Here it is, almost ten in the morning, and still working through my routine.

I spent most of yesterday working on my SCORE CLI program. I did some refactoring and cleaned it up a bit, and spent several hours trying to figure out the deposit calculations. Naming conventions have a lot to be desired. The Rust code and TS factory module seem to be pretty consistent, but when you start looking at the portal and CLI code it starts getting a bit harder to grep. Some of the vars are in seconds, and others are in milliseconds, so wrapping my head around what’s going on proved challenging. I’m hoping I’m rested enough to take it on again today, I need to get it knocked out so I can move on with other tasks.

I don’t know what to do with these kids. Younger is playing Uno by herself, and Elder is locked up in her room. I’ve got an hour till lunch, let’s see if we can’t turn the day around.