Category: Sidequests

Sidequests Week 13

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A few simple ones this week. The sidequests were to go to bed early or sleep in the next day, to meditate for 10 minutes, and to spend 5 minutes alone.

Thursday night I crashed early and slept quite awhile.

It was actually quite nice to get a lot of rest, though I still felt a bit tired the next day because I probably overshot and slept way too much. And then proceeded to not sleep much the next few nights. Oops.

Being alone for 5 minutes is easy – I live alone. I do live with three cats, but I can isolate myself in my office area and be really alone for a full 5 minutes.

I don’t meditate often, but when I do I find it fairly refreshing. I like guided meditations, specifically the ones in the Headspace app (the guy’s voice is incredibly calming, not sure if it’s the accent or how he speaks), but I try not to keep too many subscriptions rolling at once, so I haven’t had that on in awhile. However, I decided to splurge for a yearly subscription just for this year to see how that plays out. I’m sure there are probably a few more “meditation” cards in one of the decks, and it’s not a bad practice to try semi-regularly.

The particular one I chose was one of the sleep meditations for getting comfortable and in the right headspace (heh) to fall asleep easily. I’m usually out like a light when following it. I wouldn’t take that as endorsement to how well it works though, just on the fact that I always fall asleep quite easily when I clear my mind and focus on resting. Usually when I stay up very late it’s less due to insomnia and more because I chose to be easily distractible.

Sidequests Week 12

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My sidequests for this week were to set a timer and clean for 15 minutes, clean or wash my vehicle, and to purge my closet and donate the clothes.

I will usually do a bit of basic cleaning daily and then do a deeper clean every weekend, and I know that takes longer than 15 minutes. Out of curiousity, I decided to set a timer to see how long it did take me rather than counting down to make sure I did at least 15 minutes. Cleaning the entire house took me about an 1 hour and 45 minutes – that does not include finishing out the remainder of the laundry that I started either, but that’s mostly a waiting game and then a bit of folding, which takes less than 15 minutes.

So that’s one card out of the way.

The other two were things that I have been overdue in handling. I’ve been telling myself I need to clean my car for months. It’s not that it gets bad – most people that get into my car always immediately say that it’s really clean. But there are some things that I haven’t done in awhile that need to be done.

So, after sorting through some clothes and dropping them off at Goodwill, along with a few other items I no longer use, I dropped by the car wash. I washed the outside of the car there, and then returned home to vacuum and wipe down the insides, and clean the windows really well.

So now my car is nice and shiny, I don’t have clothes sitting in my closet that I’ll never wear, and the house is clean. It’s a successful weekend.

Sidequests Week 11

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The sidequests for this week were to remove one thing from my space that is sabotaging my best life, to learn a card or magic trick, and to drink my favorite beverage.

Well! Is is cheating if I count something that I did last week for that first card? Probably, but the effects of the choice have been so great and I only tossed the items related to it in question this week. I’ll count it!

I changed back to pine pellet litter for the cats, which meant doing a new litter box set up entirely and having to throw away the old ones.

About 5’ish years ago I had changed to pine pellet litter and generally liked it, but had an issue with one of the cats always pooping right outside the litter box. It wasn’t hard to clean up, because the litter box was situated on a hard floor, so it was easy to pick up and wipe down and sanitize the area each time, but it was mildly annoying. “Maybe they don’t like that litter you use,” my dad insisted.

So I figured, okay, fine. I’ll try regular litter again, we’ll see how this works out.

I dislike the smell of regular cat litter, especially the more used it gets. I also have cats with very fluffy paws, so it tracks everywhere. I had to vacuum daily, only to see litter tracked across the floors several hours later. I would wake up to grit in my bed. Not only that, but one of the other cats disliked the feel of it getting wet close to her paws, so she started pissing over the side of the litter box, which was a whole new issue.

And whoever was pooping right outside the litter box was still doing it.

I didn’t immediately change back to wood litter, instead trying to stick out using the regular litter, especially because buying new litter boxes and setting everything up is a little bit of a time/financial investment. But finally last week I’d had enough, and switched back. The smell is a lot nicer, for one. Sometimes the wood litter gets tracked around the house, but there’s fewer pieces of it. So I only had to sweep during my weekly clean instead of vacuuming daily.

And someone is still pooping outside of the litter box, but I can wipe that down pretty easily.

I love it so much more. The setup is pretty decent too. I found a reddit post where someone had recommended years ago buying a restaurant drain bin with a bin that fits under it and gives a few inches of space leeway so you can push the dissolved wood litter through, and using a litterbox liner in the bottom bin to collect that.

So maybe it’s cheating because I did it before I pulled the card officially, but this really helps me with my best life.

Drinking a favorite beverage was a bit harder to decide. I really like a lot of things? So what do I declare my favorite? The blueberry Red Bull? The Dr. Pepper? The bottle of water? It seemed that I should treat myself to something special, but I realized that quite belatedly into the week, and instead of dropping by a local boba tea store, I ended up napping my last free day away.

But, I do have boba tea mix and tapioca pearls at home, so it’s simple enough to make.

I use the DeDe instant mixes for boba, and I kind of ignore the directions and use milk instead of water. The only downside is, it’s been so long since I made boba that I think my tapioca is expired. Alas! The tea itself was pretty good though.

And then there was learning a card or magic trick. This is hard in a completely different way in that tricks of these sort require dexterity and sleight of hand, which I lack. Still, there are apparently some card tricks that are more logic than sleight of hand, and a few of them can be found in this video.

The next question is will I actually retain this and ever use it?

The answer is no.

But! I did kind of learn about it.

….

I know, I cheat my way through a lot of these. Bwahahaha.

Sidequests Week 10

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The sidequests for this week were to listen to my 5 favorite songs, draw a fictional character, and to draw or write about a spacecraft and what it’s used for and what features it has.

The top 5 favorite songs is simultaneously easy and hard. First off, my favorites tend to have a revolving door, so sometimes something new comes along and completely occupies me before moving on to be replaced by the next new thing. There are some that have a pretty special place in my heart though, so I added several of them to a playlist and after some deliberation deleted and pruned until I had 5.

And even amongst those, the answer might be completely different if I had made the decision on a different day of the week. See! Hard!

And then I sat and listened to the choices. Anyhow, the choices were as follows:

  1. Aria di Mezzo Carattere – Nobuo Uematsu
  2. Bittersweet Symphony – The Verve
  3. Needing/Getting – OK Go
  4. Berzerk – Eminem
  5. Lose Control – Teddy Swims

Starting off is a song from one of my favorite childhood video games, Final Fantasy 6 (originally FF3 in its initial US release). Nobuo Uematsu is a Japanese composer that has provided the music for the Final Fantasy series, and there are a lot of songs from the series that I absolutely adore. The FF Victory theme lives in my head rent free, and I had a hard time choosing between this song and “A Place to Call Home” from FF9. This particular song is a little more than background music and actually has lyrics and a place in the plot.

The next song, Bittersweet Symphony, came out when I was in middle school. I think my childhood friend loved it first, and it always makes me think of her, but it’s also a great song. Also the lyrics stick with me a lot more as an adult than they did as a kid. As far as songs that make me think of her, this and Wonderwall were pretty much tied for contenders on the list. But Wonderwall has other and numerous associations.

The next is Needing/Getting by OK Go. I’ve always loved OK Go and most of the music they make, but the significance of this song for me is that I relate it back to someone I used to love. There were several songs that I relate to him that ended up on the list, including White Flag by Dido, Why Don’t You and I by Chad Kroeger and Santana, and Last Leaf by OK Go. This one really could have changed out any other day of the week. Fun thing about this song though: the car in the music video is the same one I currently drive. Which, speaking of, OK Go makes really fun music videos! Go watch them!

Berzerk by Eminem is probably my favorite Eminem song. It’s also great to add to any workout playlist, and can usually be found on mine whenever I make one.

The current revolving favorite is the last one – Lose Control by Teddy Swims. I’ve had this song on repeat a lot lately – so much so that it’s almost on its way out.

For the spacecraft, I will describe the alien ship in my story a little better, but probably briefly and it will likely change as I make things more concrete in rewrites. I still don’t really have a name for the tripod-bastards, unfortunately. Naming things is hard, guys.

The ship has about 4 levels. The bottom level is storage of supplies and has vast areas for training and staging for large scale invasions of planets. Since their entire “culture” revolves around seeking out alien worlds and destroying them for their resources, this area is large enough to accomodate everything they take. This is also where the smaller, faster ships for attacking are kept.

Every level has smaller vehicles lining the outside edge of the ship. These are for the convenience of the crew, and can also act as emergency vehicles to escape – but since their entire life is built around their ship, they don’t use basic escape pods. After all, their goal would be to protect it as their “home.”

The next level up is the prison section – there are two large cell blocks on each side of the ship, each containing multiple halls full of detention areas. Splitting the prison blocks is an engineering section.

Above that is the command center, and the areas of the ship where the actual “work” of maintaining, running, and operating the ship takes place. They have it spaced here to have better access to engineering and to keep an eye on the prison sections, and to provide a buffer between the prisons and the residential area.

The top level is the residential area, where they keep their families and live their normal off-duty lives out. There are likely conveniences here to make it more “homely” such as parks and entertainment and cafeterias.

It’s a pretty basic description, I guess, but it’ll do.

As for drawing a fictional character – I decided to draw Goku, from Dragonball.

Earlier this month, Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragonball and Dr. Slump, died. Dragonball has had a major influence on my life. I initially started watching the very chopped up dubs of DBZ as a kid in the late 90s, when they would show the first few arcs of DBZ and had split a few of the movies into episode side chunks and aired those as well. After I moved to Oklahoma, they started the Toonami block on Cartoon Network and I was able to continue enjoying the show there. Most of my initial online life was spent in chats and forums and fansites for Dragonball. I don’t think it was my first foray into anime, as the SciFi channel used to air their Saturday morning anime movies. But it was one of the first longer series I became obsessed with.

Even to this day, Piccolo is my all time favorite character.

RIP Toriyama.

Sidequests Week 9

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My sidequests for this week involved trying a new food or drink, learning to make something with origami, and spending time out in nature.

So, Friday night I decided to doordash some food from a local Indian restaurant. The extent of my forray into Indian food has mostly just been curries, which I love, but there’s a lot that I’ve simply never tried. I ordered samosas, korma, and a few different desserts, gulab jamun, rasmalai, and kheer.

I’ve heard of samosas before but have never had them. The website describes them as lightly spiced turnovers stuffed with potatoes and green peas. They were bigger than I had expected, and came with two different dipping sauces – one kind of sweet, and the other a spicy green sauce. Whatever spices they used inside the samosas made everything look green, and was kind of similar to the green sauce. It was really good.

The korma was described as being cooked with exotic spices, herbs, cashew, almonds, and raisins in mild cream sauce. It came with rice, and I chose lamb for the meat (the option said lamb or goat, and I was thinking I might try goat as part of “something new” but then it didn’t present it as an option and the description says lamb. I have had lamb before, but only a few times – so new’ish?). It had a bit of a kick, but was still fairly mild – the first impression once it was inside my mouth was that it was very fragrant, so I’m a bit curious what the spice combination is. It was also really good, even though I’m not the biggest fan of lamb or the style of rice they use (being half-Korean, I definitely prefer my rice stickier).

And then there were the desserts. Rasmalai is made of cheese patties cooked in condensed milk with pistachios and rose water. It also had raisins and rice. My first impression of the texture of the cheese was kind of coconut’y because it was rough and crumbly. Kheer is a rice pudding flavored with cardamoms and garnished with pistachios. It was actually very similar to what the rasmalai was soaked in, and despite being described as a pudding it wasn’t very thick. Both were sweet without being too overwhelmingly sweet. The gulab jamun was described as condensed milk and homemade cheese balls deep fried in butter and dipped in sugar syrup. For something that was described as deep fried, it was very soft textured. I also would not have guessed it or the rasmalai were cheeses. They were all good, but I wouldn’t seek them out as my new favorite desserts.

This wasn’t a very hard task for me because I don’t mind trying the occasional new food.

The origami one was a little harder because I wanted to try to find something that could be made with lucky star paper strips. I bought a whole bunch years ago when I was really into folding the little bastards, but I never got around to using all of them. There was an intriguing rose design that someone had, but it was so intricate and tiny that in my ripe old age of almost 40, my hands are just arthritic enough to go, “Ha, fuck that.” So I decided to make lucky hearts – the only downside being that apparently you have to cut the round edges on them, so it was going to be very annoying to do.

Also wondered if I could cheat and just make more lucky stars because I forget how to make them easily and have to look up the instructions each time? It doesn’t say to learn to make something new with origami – just learn to make something with origami. If you know but forget, and re-learn… does it count?

So I did initially start with hearts, but the strips I have are too thin and long to make nice looking ones, so I opted to cheat and re-learn the stars. Once I followed the directions the first time it came back really easily. I decided to go ahead and make 100 and put them in a jar, for one small wish. But I didn’t really keep count and made 210.

I decided to use the nature card as an excuse to visit the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, which I don’t do very often despite living quite near it. Unforunately I did so on Saturday, which had some nice weather, so the result was that everyone else was out there too and every parking spot for every hiking trail and picnic space was packed. In fact, I’m pretty sure I drove in on someone’s family reunion. So I didn’t find a spot to actually get out of the vehicle and enjoy anything up close. Still, I did spend a good couple of hours simply driving around and enjoying the view, which was nice.

The Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma aren’t very impressive as far as mountains go – there are many ranges that have taller mountains, and you don’t have to travel far before they’re out of sight. But it is a very very old mountain range. So old that it is more accurately described as the skeletal granite remains of a mountain range. As such, they mostly look like clumps of crumbling rock formations dropped on top of each other. A lot of people like to visit the Wildlife Refuge to fish or hang out at some of the ponds or campsites, or to go hiking along some of the trails there. They’ve also got bison, longhorn cattle, deer and elk, and a prairie dog city.