As I was recovering from Con Crud, I didn’t know how much I’d get done on anything this week. It turned out to be quite productive.

Arts and Crafts

I decided it was time to repair my spooky snow globe. But it did not go well at all. I finally had all the items needed. It was to take about 36 hours for the glue holding one piece together to be good. While cleaning, I knocked the innards onto the floor and a headstone broke off. So more glue and more time before I can complete the repair. The internet says it should actually be 72 hours, so I guess it’ll be Monday of next week before I can finish repairing it. I really hope nothing else happens in the meantime. I put the fragile pieces into a drawer to hopefully protect it. It has been sitting around broken with most of the things needed to repair it for well over a year. Possibly several. And I just want my spooky globe back.

With this on hold, I did a Garden Gnome diamond painting. It’s got mushrooms and flowers with it. I promise it looks better than in this photo. The white space in the mushrooms isn’t white in reality. I’m not sure what is going on there!

DIY and Projects

On Monday, I taped the area so I could get painting the trim in the upper cabinet area. It was too hot in my unit to do anything else, but at least I was ready to start. Once the trim painting is done, I will just have toe kickers to install before I can start the flooring.

It was Thursday before I got the first coat on of the black for the thin trim that outlines the upper cupboards. I briefly thought I may buy some trim for the upper doors to make them more decorative, but I think I’m scrapping the idea. I’ll be able to get them done faster if I don’t do that and that means finishing the kitchen sooner. Plus, I don’t think it will add all that much to the design. And if I really want it later, I can add them later. I’ll decide fully on that once I’m further along.

I did a bonehead thing and forgot to close that particular paint can. Luckily, it was a small can and I just poured extra into my tray to get the thicked paint out of it. And luckily, there is plenty left for what I need it for. Not ideal, but I got the second coat done after a meeting on Friday because it was a quick thing and I HAD to deal with the already open can. That’s an ADHD moment of forgetfulness. It’s somewhat funny as I recall thinking about having to close it and oh, it’s black paint, so best do it away from the new kitchen pieces, but then I just cleaned the tray and brush and left it open. I didn’t put any of the extra paint back in the can because of it as I didn’t want the gloppy thick bit to go back in it. I planned a third coat for sometime on the weekend to finish that piece up.

I finished paint coat three on the trim on Saturday morning. After removing the tape, I did not have clean lines and I think it will take some time to touch everything up with a ruler or something to get it to look fully proper. I haven’t found a paint tape that actually works well and I think I may stop using it because of it.

Gaming and Puzzles

The rename for this section finally came to me, though I didn’t know where Videos was heading, that came to me shortly after. Videos and Vlogs. I don’t know how much I will use it, but it’s a thing now.

Onto gaming. In Satisfactory this week, I wondered if I could control the shape of my conveyor belts to improve building design. Nothing I did seemed to work, so I had to use some tickets to get the conveyor walls. I got a lot done on Monday. I decided to take advantage of the closer limestone deposit and set it up to mine and turn it into concrete.

I used a basic splitter to have half of it go into the SINK and half into storage. I now had a constant ticket making setup. And I could change what the constructor was making as needed. There are a lot of things that are more efficient for tickets than cement, but the limestone is right there and I just ensure there is fuel in the furnace to keep it moving. I hope to get onto coal soon, but I know nothing about it.

I also did a bunch of work on a smaller, but taller, copper factory across the “street” from my main factory. I split that also so I could be making something like copper sheets and storing a bunch of copper ingots.

And I got my coal collection happening. Coal is a bit far, so I’m going to want to have a truck station there someday.

I hoped I could get the boulder off of the only Caterium ore I found that was a solid source of it, because manually mining isn’t a lot of fun.

Friends and Family

A couple of friends and I got together to carve pumpkins on Saturday. Here was my contribution, which requires a real candle to show the glow. Given the hair, my friend is waiting until the actual day to capture it fully. It was an attempt at the Joker.

General and Miscellaneous

We had been receiving emails for awhile from our property management company about needing to prepare to be out of water on Wednesday. Apparently, the city would be installing new water meters. But I didn’t know if it was actually going to happen because the subject line of the email showed my building address and the actual PDF file showed the address of the building across from us. Both are managed by the same property team, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to have both of them being done. Thirty minutes before the day long shutoff was to begin, I filled my tub with water for flushing the toilet. I had already gotten bottled water for drinking. The property management company is changing on November first, so I wasn’t shocked by the quality of work going on around the place. This wasn’t our first time changing property managers in the 12 years I’ve owned my condo. Anyway, they never turned off my water. It was all for the building next door. I got up early for nothing.

Health and Fitness

Early on, the antibiotic made me feel a lot better. My energy was returning and I was sleeping properly. My appetite was decent though it did cause some abdominal discomfort.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I will be changing up what I’m doing for fitness. I’m considering either changing dojos or just doing workouts at home. I don’t care much about belts these days. I just want to get in shape. There is a place really close to my home though the schedule may conflict with the softball league I intend to switch to, but it would only be for the summer and early fall that it would be an issue. The other dojo is an entirely different set of martial arts, but it’s also very close to home. Another big draw is that it would be entirely with adults. I plan to do a trial once I’m closer to done on the kitchen. It also has a lot of female instructors, which is generally a good sign for other women to be safe there.

Movies and Television

This week, I finished Invasion. I feel like the narrative was done well. Some at Can-Con disagreed with me, but it’s in the top 5 of TV shows on Apple TV right now, so I’m pretty comfortable with my view of things. He thought season one ended weakly, but that was part of the point. A false sense of safety going into the rest of the series.

I started Foundation. It’s the series based on the books by Isaac Asimov. It’s really good, but the Apple TV Windows App sucks hardcore. As I’ve seen the complaints on the Windows Store, I submitted feedback to Apple to see if that could help us all. I doubt they are spending much time checking feedback on the Microsoft Store front, so I felt direct has a better chance of actually getting to them. I told them exactly how it is regularly functioning for me in the hopes that they would have a specific thing to look at with it. Honestly, they should let us watch from the browser from our dashboards. It works much better on an Apple device.

Music and Songwriting

Since I had only barely begun my antibiotics, I opted out of choir this week. I didn’t want to chance getting anyone there sick. I doubt I’ll be signing up for the winter session. I just don’t love going out in winter that much. I could spend the time on bass and indoor fitness. We’ll see. There’s no rush to make a firm decision. An extra good thing would be focusing more on music I actually enjoy.

Reading and Writing

I’ve begun reading The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger and it is helping me find all the problem areas in my narrative. That might seem daunting, but it’s actually encouraging me because now I know why I was stuck and felt so lost in so many areas. I think all writers should have copies of it and of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey on their shelves.

Friday was the monthly Zoom call on Discord. It was moved to Discord as our former teacher was no longer teaching formally due to the cuts the college made to many artistic programs there. We’re all still mad about it, but our former educators are finding ways to keep busy and continue teaching. It’s the college who lost out. It was very low key as several members were watching the Toronto Blue Jays game. It was nice to chat for a little bit anyway.

C’est tout.

Catch you on the flip side,

Rae