Category: To Occupy my Time

It Has Happened!

I stopped by the Starbucks in the Fred Meyer near my house because I needed to buy 6 ounces of coffee to make a cake. Like I usually do when buying coffee to make cakes, I explained that I wasn’t a coffee drinker, but needed a small amount for cake baking. The nice young man working there did some figuring and quoted me the price of $1.77, which was fine by me. I handed over two dollars and was on my way, holding the coffee behind me on the walk home, so I didn’t have to smell it.

The next day, I had another look at the receipt and discovered why the price was so low. I had been elevated to senior pricing!

While I’m still several years away from getting this discount for real, I was happy to take it in my 50th year.

While looking for the age requirement for the Starbucks senior discount, I have discovered that Starbucks does not have an senior discount policy! But! Some baristas might apply one if you ask. So I got doubly lucky. Thanks, Jayden.

We Finish the 2024 Exit Advent Calendar!

Here is our prize!

It’s a magnet, and to see the size of it, look at the next picture.

We had a busy December, and fell behind on our puzzle advent calendar. But February 1 was the day we got it done!

This had the usual combo of fun and frustrating puzzles, this time all were themed to movies. Each room was a different movie set on the “Werner Sisters’s” lot. And at the end we found out who the Werner Sisters were!

Move Quiz Results

Battleship Cinematic Universe was a team of two this month, but we had a great movie quiz! We got 12th place! I think that might be a record.

The team names were fun as usual. I enjoyed A Complete Known and also the three plays on Nosferatu: Yesferatu, Nosferatu Fast 2 Furious; Nosfera3 Tokyo Drift

Matt was a big contributor to the score. It turns out the only time travel objects I can identify are the time turner (though I wouldn’t have known from which Harry Potter movie it came; Matt knew) and the magic mailbox that allowed Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves to communicate with each other. Unfortunately, I thought the name of the movie was the Beach House, not the Lake House, so we missed that one anyway.

Got my Year of the Snake Badge

I did some activity on a holiday I don’t celebrate, and Garmin rewarded me with this pretty badge.

There is also a Lunar New Year’s Eve one; I earned that one too.

I smugly thought that I had earned a badge every year, but I see I missed 2021. January 25, 2020, I did not yet have my Garmin watch.

Here’s to the new year.

I Discover Time Guessr

Hank Green, of the Vlogbrothers, was killing time on a video (for algorithm reasons?) and so played through some of the games he plays. One of them was TimeGuessr. I was intrigued.

In this game, you are given a photo and then must guess when and where the photo was taken. It’s quite fun.

And I did really well my first time out, like here where I was only 241.4 meters off! (Though 5 years off.)

And like this where I was only 4 years off, but amazingly 12.1 miles away even though I had no idea what I was looking at except it was somewhere in Asia that used a lot of English in their signage.

I don’t have a lot of room in my schedule for daily games, but I would like to dip into this one now and again.

American Son at Twilight Theater Company

Matt and I bought tickets for our first outing to the Twilight Theater Company. That’s our neighborhood theater; it’s an 11 minute walk.

Jeri Haile was great as Kendra Ellis-Connor. She is apparently new to Portland. I look forward to seeing her in more things.

The play gave us a lot to talk about on the walk home. It was a good evening at the theater.

Matt Has Attended 500 Classes

Matt came home with an exciting prize from his gym:

We took the official picture and then both realized, “Wait. It’s been way more than 500 classes that he has attended at MeFitness.”

We concluded that he had attended 500 classes since the switch of the scheduling system. Well done, Matt, for attending 500 classes beginning from a random point in time.

Two Terns at a Bike Rack

I was at Kaiser getting some imaging done, and had fun comparing and contrasting my Tern bike to the one already parked.

I observed that the other bike did not have the folding handlebar mechanism and that the light was down on the front fender rather than on the handlebar.

I also checked out the locking method. I use three: a front-wheel lock, a U-lock and cable, and a U-lock on the back wheel that also holds my helmet.

The other bike used wo U-locks and two cables. It looked like it worked well and was fast to set up.

Keeping Me on Track in 2024

Getting things done didn’t come as naturally to me in 2024 (and 2023, (and 2022, and 2021, if we are being honest)) as it had before. Early in 2024, I made two sheets of basic stuff, one for my stuff, and one to stay on top of my aunt’s finances.

The sheets took probably 10 minutes to make, and they worked very well. You will notice the additions that appeared as the year went on. The delimitation for books and movies was particularly important. It’s really hard to catch those up in one session at the end of the month so switching up the goal to the 15th and the last day helped.

With my aunt’s stuff, it was nice to cross things off as I canceled things no longer needed.

You will notice that I gave myself the last week in December off. A just reward after a year of good work.

I’ve drafted new sheets for 2025. Let’s see if they work as well as these did.