Tag: sidequest deck

Sidequests Week 3

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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!

Sidequests Week 2

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For the second week, I drew some pretty simple cards. My sidequests included taking a break from tech for 2 hours, drinking 5 cups of water, and learning a new word.

The tech break was easy. I just curled up with some comics and read for awhile.

Drinking 5 cups of water was a little harder. First off was the interpretation – does it matter what size cup I choose? If I mostly drink bottled water, should I drink 5 bottles of water? Or should I measure out 5 literal cups? In order to be technical, I decided on 5 literal cups. 1 cup of water is equal to 8 ounces which is roughly 240 ml, multiplied by 5 is 1200 ml total to drink. The bottled water I tend to buy comes in at 500 ml per bottle so finishing 3 bottles of water in a day seemed practical to completing the task and being a little safely over. And I managed to complete that.

Learning a new word is a little harder. I decided to google “word of the day” several times last week to see if someone’s word of the day was something I wasn’t familiar with, but didn’t have a lot of luck. Checking again today did finally net me a new word that I wasn’t familiar with through the Miriam-Webster Dictionary website’s word of the day:

So, last minute save! At least I didn’t have to pull out a dictionary and start browsing from A.

Sidequests Week 1

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My Hero’s Journal sidequests for this week included decluttering a space in my home, discovering a new sci fi thing to get into, and to do a 10 minute stretch.

I started by reaching out to a fellow nerdy friend of mine.

I asked for a couple of recommendations, and his suggestions were either the Expeditionary Force book series or The Expanse. So I figured I would download and read the first book of Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson. It’s interesting enough – has a little bit of a Starship Troopers meets Mass Effect vibe. Humanity gets pulled into a galactic war that has been ongoing for centuries, and the Expeditionary Forces are the members of the military of several UN countries that are sent to prove themselves to their new allies. I’m still only halfway through the first book, but I’ll likely work my way through the entire series over the next year or so.

In general, I’m a fairly clean person. The most cluttery parts of my home tend to be the storage areas, such as the closets or my bookshelves. That being said, I’ve gotten really bad about just leaving things on my paint desk rather than putting them away properly, so it looked like this beforehand:

After straightening the items out, throwing away the garbage, and putting some of the random things where they belong (or at least, shifting them to a bookshelf… as I said, another bad clutterzone for me), it now looks like this:

It probably still looks a bit more cluttery than other people would like, but at least it’s just down to my painting supplies and blank canvases and nothing unnecessary. Since I would like to paint more this year, it’ll be nice to start off with a space I can actually work in.

And last of all – the 10 minute stretch. I kind of put that one off for last. In order to figure out what stretches I would like to do, I used darebee.com. First I ambitiously thought, “Stretches? Stretches aren’t too hard. I’ll just choose normal for the difficulty.” After getting halfway through my first selection, I realized, “Oh, I am a fucking fat stationary lardass, why did I think I could do this?” and I did a new search under light difficulty to find a workout. I’ve always liked darebee because I’m not super knowledgeable on a variety of workouts and having a resource that tells you a routine and has visual aids and videos is very helpful. It’s a good starting point for a beginner, or if you are more advanced and just want to try something different, they’ve got loads of workout plans to choose from.

This is the stretching routine I ended up going with. It technically comes to a bit under 10 minutes, but since I had worked halfway througha different one also, I figured I had completed the quest, if sloppily. Most of their workout programs are set up visually like this with very simple directions. When it gets into the workouts, it also tells you how many reps to do of each. They function entirely on donations so if you use them and find you like what they’re doing, consider throwing a couple bucks their way.

Also I am not very stable and 30 seconds seems to take forever when you’re doing some of these on a hardwood floor without a mat of any sort. And you have old lady knees.

So, one week down on my year of sidequests!

Happy New Year!

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It’s the first day of 2024! This year, to give myself a few little challenges, I splurged on these.

These are The Hero’s Journal planner sidequest decks, which can be found on their site.

They are, for the most part, very simple tasks to accomplish. Each deck has 52 cards, so I have decided I will be doing 1 card from each deck weekly until the end of 2024. I won’t be posting images of the cards themselves or detailing what task I pulled from which deck (after all, if someone decides they want to buy their own deck, why would I spoil the surprise therein?), but every Monday I will do my best to update by giving a general summary of the task and what I did to accomplish it. If I manage to keep up with it, I will have completed all three decks by December 30th of next year.

I guess this is just a silly way to keep myself accountable. So the sidequesting shall begin! First update will be January 8th!