Rod Shark One

Day 3 - The Countdown Begins

Today the time crunch really starts to hit me. We got a lot of appointments this month on top of trying to make the move happen at the end of the month. I think it will all be possible as long as we remain calm and keep making slow progress.

Important Dates

On The Packing Front

Today is my last day off from work. It's off to a slow start because the boyfriend's family had to drop off his sister's dog to the vet for surgery which meant they got up earlier than usual and came back in the morning while we ate breakfast (oatmeal with some strawberry sauce I made from frozen strawberries). I'm trying to avoid doing any packing while the mom is home because she has said in the past how upsetting us moving away would be to her. But I may have to do some while she's here today if she doesn't leave the house again in the afternoon.

The packing I want to do today will change based on when the rest of my packing materials and boxes arrive. No matter what, though, I want to open a large box to start putting our DVD/Bluray/Game cases away. Since we got into collecting things we love in physical media form last year I knww that this would definitely be the bulk of what we pack alongside the books. Our strategy is to have the boyfriend put all the discs into CD sleeves and keep them in small, plastic cases that we travel with carefully. That way the empty cases could all be kept in a box without too much worry on whether the jostling and damage they'll take in the move will affect the CDs.

I also pulled out my old plating and bowls and plan to wash them to prepare to pack in the specific dish moving box I ordered.

So on top of preparing a large box for DVD/Bluray/Game cases, I will also pack some of my pans to see if they can fit neatly in a Medium box, some of my utensils in the now empty powdered sugar bucket, and maybe one more medium box of books.

I ended up spending a large portion of my afternoon washing and organizing dishes that had been sitting in moving boxes from my last apartment. They had gotten filthy thanks to some cats that were roaming around in the family's garage. It presented a new problem for me where now I have to decide how many glasses I'm actually taking with me, and I ended up having to throw away some of my favorite old plates and bowls because of some kind of corrosion that seemed to be happening with them. I've never seen ceramic bowls develop brown spots like this one did, but it was reminiscent of rust. I don't trust eating out of them at this point.

By the end of my day I had assembled a bunch of the new boxes that came in including our two boxes for electronics, packed another small box of books (Books 3, which has my Heterotopias collection in it), started the DVD case box, and washed and counted all of our glassware to make sure they would fit into the box I ordered. Tomorrow the insert for the glass box should come in and I hope to have all the glassware safely bundled in packing paper by then so that I can just slot them right in.

Before I could get some more packing done, the family came home with the sister's dog and things got really tense and awkward and exhausting in the house so I retreated to my room to recover. Not much else is getting done today, unfortunately.

Chess

ChessDay3

Chess went super well today. I beat the Level 2 CPU in a way that felt a lot cleaner and smarter. This is the least amount of pieces I've lost. I took more time looking at the board state and thinking about what my best move is, which seems to be, "Can I attack and defend at the same time? Can I attack a more expensive piece instead of just defending my piece from getting eaten?" It feels like a strategy where you force the opponent to make a bigger sacrifice than you will, sometimes. I wonder if real Chess can feel that way, too. But I feel good about getting better at Chess without putting too much focus in it. Beginner learning rocks!

Blog

I got access to a guestbook service I'm eager to try out so it's already on the front page! I'm having fun tooling around and editing it. Using HTML and CSS again feels familiar in a comforting way. It reminds me of the early days on the net. Man I'm old now.

Considering how today goes I think tomorrow I'd like to add a separate page just for an "About Me" section. But I'd want to add some art first, I think.

Stretch

StretchDay3pic1 StretchDay3pic2

Although it looks like I've kept up a streak, this app is only tracking my progress through the 90 day challenge I picked. Over the last couple of weeks I've missed a total of 5 or 6 days, so I'm definitely past the 90 day period. I'm glad the app lets me finish it on my own time, though.

Baking

I tried to make a sliced white bread today, but I got the dough way too hydrated and didn't have the time or elbow grease to really save it so I had to throw it out. I'll start another this weekend, maybe. But I need a good recipe that uses a lot of Bread Flour instead of All Purpose.

Piano

PianoDay3

So I had wanted to get a head start on learning Piano again because even though I'm going to get serious about it after the move, why not start now? Well I don't have a keyboard or piano at my disposal so I bought a game on steam called Piano Glow that I thought would do the trick.

It actually looks like a remarkably useful app, but using the computer keyboard for it is kind of a nightmare. Having the keys assigned to letters when piano keys already have their own letters makes for a layer of confusion that I wasn't aware would affect me so much. So I think I'll put Piano on hold after all.

Maybe I can start making music in other ways in the meantime, though... KiraStudio did look interesting.

Tomorrow I'd like to make time for: