For this week, my sidequests were to Visit an aquarium or pet store (or watch relaxing fish videos), to learn a new word and use it in a sentence (another new word! grr), and to make something with my hands.

I deliberated on what to do about making something with my hands at first. I initially thought I should do something creative or artsy, but wasn’t really feeling it this week. So in the end, I made cinnamon rolls. I had a cinnamon roll recipe I used to use as a kid, but it was made from a biscuit recipe, so it made something heavy and crumbly which was good but not quite what I want in a cinnamon roll. So late last year, I decided to finally look up a recipe that was a little more yeasty and fluffy and I made proper cinnamon rolls for Christmas. Since the yeast packets were sold in threes, I decided to use another to make more cinnamon rolls for myself this week.

The recipe that I use for the dough can be found here at Sally’s Baking Addiction. Like most recipe sites of the sort, there’s a lot of preamble. I don’t get it either. But it’s a simple recipe and yields a nice dough.

For the filling, I use a different recipe. Specifically the one I found here. I had looked for it separately earlier last year, and now mostly just stick to it.

And for the cream cheese frosting, I mostly improvised my own thing. It’s basically just one part sugar and butter to two parts cream cheese, softened and stirred until smooth. (I think I usually use 1/4 c sugar, 1/4 c butter, and 1/2 cup cream cheese).

I made them early on in the week and had them for dinner. (Hey, I even made a post about how that was successful adulting!) I did not take a picture though. I do intend to make at least one more batch though… I have one last yeast packet to use up, after all.

The next sidequest was to learn another new word. This was a little easier, using the Merriam Webster word of the day again.

This time I didn’t even have to wait as long to find one as I did with oneiric. On the one hand, the word sounds familiar enough, and I know I’ve used “bunk” to refer to an idea in the same way, which likely has its basis in this word or a similar origin. But I’m uncertain that I’ve ever heard bunkum itself. As for using it in a sentence… “She dismissed his entire story as bunkum and interrupted him immediately, demanding the truth.”

Does that suffice? I think it does.

And then the last bit! I could see how the alternative of watching fish videos or visiting a pet store is nice for the sidequests, because it’s not always easy to get out to an aquarium. But I was visiting a friend in Tulsa this week, and she loves visitng her local aquarium near there, so it was a great excuse to go. I also bought her the Sidequest Deck, and she decided she would start doing one card on her days off from work. By a hilarious coincidence, she pulled the same aquarium card as well. “I guess we were fated to go.”

So we visited an aquarium.

It’s not a massive aquarium, but the Oklahoma Aquarium in Jenks is still a fun spot to visit. They’ve got an indoor carousel, a gift shop, and several interactive displays where you get a chance to touch or feed some of the animals. A significant portion of the exhibits are dedicated to local aquatic wildlife, such as catfish, bass, gar, snakes, frogs and the like. They also have a few beavers, a few otters, and some less local and oceanic wildlife, including piranha, a massive sea turtle, and a shark enclosure that you can walk through. It’s very kid friendly as well.

We didn’t spend as much time there as we did the first time they took me, mostly because we were a little pressed for time. After the aquarium, we went to the Van Gogh Immersive experience, which is an exhibit that discusses Van Gogh’s life and works and influences. Afterwards, you can go into a large room where a 30 minute video is looped across all the walls and floor that plays images of his work and quotations of things he had written in letters, set against music, sound effects, and the occasional reading of those quotes. They had a VR thing just outside the room (it cost extra and we were too hungry to stay too long), a coloring station, and a few other things that we didn’t explore fully. It was quiet in the exhibit, likely because it has been running there since last year and we decided to go shortly before it shut down, specifically to avoid crowds.

….That doesn’t have anything to do with the Sidequests, but it was neat, damn it!