Tag: Sidequests

Sidequests Week 17

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My sidequests for this week were to go to bed early and get an early start the next day, stand barefoot in grass, and to take myself on a date.

I actually went to sleep early a few separate times this week – both Wednesday and Thursday, I felt generally pretty tired and conked out. I think as a result the poems were later in the afternoon, and I used my backup for one of them. But that was a pretty easy one to do. The first night that I fell asleep early didn’t really felt like it had helped much the next day, but the next night I felt really refreshed when I woke up.

The next one was to take myself on a date. This coincided pretty well with a weekend that I had a lot of plans. On Friday I drove to OKC to check into a hotel, and then later that evening went to the Science Museum’s 21 and over night.

The theme for this one was “Ye Olde” SMO21+. I had never been to one of them before, nor had I ever gone to the Science Museum. It mostly seemed like an excuse for adults to browse and interact with the exhibits without having to share the space with children, since it is a very child friendly and hands on museum. They played music and had areas set up for activities and to sell drinks. It was pretty packed and the activity tables filled up quickly so I wasn’t able to squeeze in at all of them, but one involved making soap (mostly you just chose the scent you wanted and mixed what they gave you), another involved cutting your own stamp from an eraser and possibly being worked through making your own mini Gutenberg press out of cardboard. They also had bookbinding and calligraphy, an area set up for jousting on bicycles, a small trebuchet which they used to launch balls, as well as microscopes, medicine bags, an armor station, and flower crown making.

In the VIP room, the VIP ticket got you a free drink and you could make your own personal coat of arms and design your own facemask. It was a lot of fun, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even get a chance to wander through all the exhibits before they were shutting down. They do the 21 and over nights a few separate times throughout the year, so it’s something I definitely plan to return to with a friend that was interested but worked this weekend.

The reason I got the hotel room was because the original plan was to attend a water lantern festival the next night, which would have made a good opportunity for my self date. Alas, the weather was bad so the water lantern festival was rescheduled. So on Saturday, my self date did not involve a romantic lantern send off, but did still go pretty good. I actually put on a dress and took myself up to a cake store I had been wanting to try to buy a Japanese fluffy cheesecake and a Vietnamese coffee (both really good, at Cake It by DaDa) and then I drove back downtown to go to the OKC Museum of Art. Unfortunately, the art museum was closing early because of the weather as well. I still managed to see all of the exhibits at least. OKC also had their art’s festival this weekend, but it was all shut down because of concerns with the weather as well.

Originally I had a reservation for a spendy restaurant downtown, but I didn’t want to linger for an hour wasting time before they opened, and if everyone was that concerned about the weather I figured I would spend my evening in the hotel room. Still, a cake luncheon and browsing the art museum counts as a date, as far as I’m concerned.

I drove home today and have been cleaning and doing laundry, but after running out to get some thai milk tea, I paused for a moment to complete the last card: standing barefoot in grass. I will admit that on occasion I do shuffle the cards around a bit, and this was one that I had pulled earlier in the year when everything was still winter dead. I didn’t think it suitable to do it at that time, so I put it back into the deck and pulled another, and it finally came back around.

My yard is mostly weeds more than grass, and very overgrown at the moment. I need to mow on a less wet day some time this week! I think I expected it to be pokier because of the weeds, but it was still quite soft to stand in.

So that all completed the sidequests for this week! As a follow up addendum, I have heard back from both of my penpals at this point. When I got the PO Box, I also signed up for Informed Delivery so that I wouldn’t have to regularly run 15 minutes out to where I rented the box to check it. Whenever I have mail delivered, I get a picture of it sent to my email, and it has been quite exciting each time to get an actual letter. I have responded to one of them, and will work on the response for the one I received yesterday sometime this week.

Sidequests Week 16

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This week’s sidequests include writing down a favorite memory, learning a new recipe and making it, and learning how to make… origami stars.

Oh. Oh no. I just re-learned how to do those! Well shit. Still, it was a good excuse to make some more, because I still have plenty of my glow in the dark origami star paper.

I’ve got strips with several different designs on them, but I decided to go for the floral one since spring is very sprung.

Last week, I became interested in meal kit subscriptions again – I turn them on every once in awhile out of curiosity to see what they’re like. What I generally dislike about most meal kit services is that the minimum orders send too much food for a week for a single person. My parents send me home with leftovers most Sundays, and I like to eat out maybe once or twice a week, so I really only need one or two meals subscription wise. Plus the cost of meal subscriptions tend to stack a bit too much for my tastes. I signed up with Dinnerly to give it a try for the hell of it.

Then, when I sat down for this week to think about what kind of recipe I should look up and try to make, it suddenly occurred to me that I could use the Dinnerly subscription for this. Dinnerly is one of those meal kit services that sends you the ingredients and a recipe card, and you cook for yourself. I hadn’t even thought of using my random online ordering obsession to help with the Sidequest until the overlap became obvious to me.

Okay. The two recipes I chose were Philly Cheesesteak Stuffed Peppers, and Lemon-Tarragon Chicken with Polenta. Each recipe makes two servings, so I was still up to 4 meals in a week – I had hoped maybe I could be enough of a fatass that I’d be able to demolish two servings, but the portions are really decent so I was back up to the problem of having more food than I needed in a week (so more than likely, I will turn off Dinnerly within a month). The recipes also have ratings for how easy/difficult they are to make and how much clean up they involve, because some recipes are more complicated than others. The chicken recipe required more effort and also seemed to assume I had more tools on hand. The ingredients were okay, though the peppers that arrived were already a bit soft/wrinkled.

I did not take pictures of the food. I’ve never been good at remembering to take pics of food. But everything turned out delicious, and I have the recipe cards to stick in my personal recipe book for future use. I especially liked the ease of making the stuffed peppers.

That being said, I am still on the lookout for a meal service that fits my needs. Of course, most of them allow you to skip weeks at a time, which may be the option I end up choosing to make one of them feasible for me.

The last sidequest is to write down a favorite memory. I especially love moments that leave you wheezing with laughter, so let’s do a silly one.

I work in a pharmacy, and we have to sort paperwork and retain documents in a manner that allows us to find them later if needed for an audit or any other reason. The actual prescription hard copies that we receive are called log copies, and several years ago our state did not allow us to store electronically received documents digitally. This meant that every electronic document prompted our system to print a physical copy which we had to store per the legal requirements of our state, which made for a lot of paperwork to sort and put in order. I was working on that one day, and had several piles sorted out. Right next to where I was standing were some boxes of supplies, and I was using those boxes for extra counter space to work on.

One of my coworkers came over and attempted to lean over the boxes to grab something on the shelf behind it. Unfortunately, she was more top heavy than she knew, and she bent further than her center of balance. As she realized what was happening, the panic set in. “Oh no, Mary!” she said loudly, arms flailing. I looked up to see her falling, but didn’t reach out to help because she did it very very slowly, and I was somehow convinced that certainly she could catch herself and stop the fall.

Nope.

Not only did she not catch herself, instead of grabbing the boxes to keep herself up, her flailing arms pushed everything out of the way so that she could continue to fall directly to the ground. Paperwork went fluttering into the air and boxes went tumbling everywhere.

Being the helpful individual I am, I went, “Oh shit!” and then burst out laughing. Everyone looked up to see us practically dying as we wheezed with laughter, before she half-angrily asked why I didn’t catch her. (I also did not help her up. I’m such a great friend.)

Not as dramatic but still fun, I remember saving something that is usually thrown away as trash, and setting it on a filling pod. I don’t remember specifically what it was (sometimes we save desiccant for use in other things, so maybe that). Another friend walked up, spotted the trash, picked it up and tossed it into the garbage just a few inches away.

“Nooo!” I said dramatically, reaching out futilely as the item went sailing beyond my reach. Apparently my reaction was just humorous enough to send my friend into the WTF giggles.

Lots of moments like that – saying something just shockingly inappropriate enough that someone’s eyes go wide and they start laughing, or some misunderstanding or misinterpretation occuring, or oddball conversations or arguments about inconsequential things. I don’t always remember the fine details, but I love those moments. After all, as trite and stereotypical as it sounds – laughter is the best medicine.

Sidequests Week 15

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This week’s sidequests included sending a handwritten letter, learning a life skill I’ve wanted to learn, and creating my own planet by writing or drawing details of the landscape.

A handwritten letter seems easy enough – I’ve got a few friends that I could have chosen to write a letter out for and mailed it. But I’ve also been lurking on penpal reddits for a long time, despite never having had a penpal. So – what the hell! It could be fun to actually try to penpal thing for a bit. I decided to splurge on getting a PO Box for the next few months (to be safe) and made a few posts asking for penpals. Then I left that up over a very long weekend while I was out of town to watch the solar eclipse – I had rented a cabin in an area where totality was going to pass over, and I took my mom.

As a slight digression, the solar eclipse was awesome and the cabin was luxurious and the area was beautiful. We were visited by a large luna moth two nights in a row. During the eclipse, I realized it was stupid that I hadn’t brought my SLR camera, so the only pic I have of the event are a few crappy cellphone pics, but seeing it in person was more important to me than capturing the moment.

Through my vacation weekend, I got a couple responses and narrowed the options down to a few people closer to my age that seemed interesting. Then, once I was back in town, I finished opening the PO Box, wrote the letters, and then sent them. I will say that writing about myself to a stranger was a bit hard – I don’t really find myself or my thoughts so interesting that I’m used to sharing them (I find it hard to extend these sidequest posts into anything more than basic updates, for example). But, done! Now I’m just waiting to see if I get any responses.

As for the life skill, it’s hard to get near 40 without knowing basics on a lot of things. That being said, I’m sure I’ve got loads of gaps on relevant life skills, but there have also been things I’ve just not been interested in learning, so it took me awhile to try to think of something. Even though I have no reason to ever wear a tie, I have always been curious about tying one. So once again, Google was the master that led me on the way to this website, which apparently sells ties and such, but also has good step-by-step guides on how to tie different knots.

The picture is from maybe a third attempt at a more basic knot. They offer video guides, as well as step by step illustrations with descriptive text (which works a bit better for my word-brain). And yes, I did specifically buy a tie just to learn this. I don’t foresee it being a skill that I put to use often, and since I don’t use it often I will likely forget it in about 30 minutes. But I do know what website I will likely visit to walk me through the process in the future, when I never need it again.

The last sidequest involved creating a planet and writing or drawing the details of the landscape. I’ve made many imaginary worlds for many stories, but a lot of the worlds I’ve made usually are places very Earth similar, with various biomes and environments, but that seems a bit extended for this particular card. So, let’s do something simple.

Hmm. The planet of Levia is an ocean world, primarily covered by water, all of it saline. There is no fresh water on the planet, and no landmasses beyond the occasional island. Massive storms, similar in strength and force to hurricanes, form easily and last for days or even weeks. Because of all the surface storm activity, it is hard for humans to actually create any staging points above the water, unless those structures are very resistant to the high winds and waves.

Underwater, there is flourishing life everywhere – the water teems with schools of fish-like creatures, and even massive leviathan sea monsters. Similar to Earth, the deeper you go, the weirder things get. There are massive underwater caverns and tunnels. But in the shallower areas of the ocean, there are massive coral communities that play host and home to a variety of smaller creatures and plants.

Owing to the fact that there are no landmasses, nothing has ever had a need to develop lungs, so there are no underwater mammals, but there are creatures similar to whales in size and ecological scope – they just don’t need to surface for air.

So there’s a very basic one-note world. Not even the most original, I think there’s a game I’ve heard of that takes place in a similar environment (I’ve always wanted to play but never have, Subnautica?). Or on the flip side, could always do a post-apocalyptic ocean world like the Kevin Costner movie and describe the creatures that have adapted to live that were once surface dwelling. But dunwanna.

Sidequests Week 14

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My sidequests for this week included meditating for 5 minutes, learning to make a better paper airplane, and to do 15 minutes of yoga.

See – already we’re meditating again. Good thing I downloaded that app. And also once again I used darebee for my yoga – this time keeping in mind to go with “Easy” for my fat lazy ass. So those were pretty easy to do. I almost considered cheating because there is a darebee one that had a few stretches and then 15 minutes of meditation, but I decided to do the 15 minutes for the meditation card, and do 15 minutes of yoga on top of that.

Then there was making the better paper airplane. This was also not going to be hard because I really only know how to make the basic of basic bitch paper airplanes and they never fly well at all. I did a google search and came across this youtube video posted about a year ago discussing the design for a literal world record paper airplane. They admit that the design that they have is not the actual final design used to break the record, but rather one of the prototypes. I followed the instructions on the video and made this:

Owing to the fact that I don’t have a large space to test this in, I don’t have any impressive video of the flight, mostly just of me causing it to crash immediately into the wall and then doing a really weird laugh as a result. But, it does fly significantly better than any paper airplane I’ve made before. The folding is a bit of a pain in the ass, but the guy in the video explains it really well, and it’s easy to pause at each step to follow the directions.

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.