Month: February 2024

Loss of interest in a hobby

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Daily writing prompt
Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?
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Thankfully the prompt is automatically at the top of the post or else I would feel the need to start with “Nobody panic, I’m not losing interest in a CURRENT hobby.”

Now, to be honest, I don’t have an exact answer because I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things, but yes there are definitely activities I’ve grown out of over the years. As a kid, I used to love riding my bike all over the place, playing with LEGOs for hours, probably some other things that kids typically lose interest in as they get older. Moving the clock forward to college, there used to be more alcohol in my life. More parties with friends. Not anymore, though, because I had a great (negative) role model about alcohol and I came to realize that I didn’t like the way it made me feel. All of those things are activities or hobbies I outgrew or lost interest in, although I really should consider getting a bicycle again and just riding the bike trail that loops around my city.

Funny enough, there is one hobby that I “outgrew” that ended up coming back. Pokémon cards. Unfortunately, when you’re a kid you don’t have a disposable income, so I couldn’t feed that cardboard crack addiction of buying booster packs. I didn’t come back to the game until more than 20 years later when my niece and nephews started to get into it. I don’t actively buy packs for that game these days, so I guess I still sort of outgrew it, however I do collect and play Magic: The Gathering instead so I would say I came back to the hobby eventually. Just in a different way.

It’s interesting how life changes like that.

Satisfying the sweet tooth

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What’s your favorite candy?

I’m terrible with sweets. I have so many that I enjoy that I don’t know if I could pick just one as a favorite. Plus my preferences have changed with time.

Primarily, I love chocolate based candy products, and more specifically from the Reese’s product line. So, if I had to pick one above all others from THAT grouping, I would probably pick either the Reese’s Sticks or the Reese’s Pieces. I did at one point really like the Reese’s Fast Break bars, but after a while I got tired of them.

I did recently discover the joy of Kinder Chocolate bars and Bueno bars, and I would say the Bueno bar is a solid contender against the Reese’s Sticks.

Sadly, as much as I enjoy these different candy snacks, I have to heavily moderate myself or else I end up buying them daily. That’s not really healthy for me, and not kind to my wallet.

Sometimes you just need a break

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Do you need a break? From what?

Yes.

I most certainly need a break, but not exactly from any one thing.

It’s more like I just need a break from EVERYTHING. I say it that way because even when I’m “taking a break” from something in particular I’m still thinking about it in the back of my mind.

Work, for example, is something that I have to plan my life around to a certain degree. What does my work schedule look like for the week? Do I have meetings right away in the morning that require me to be in a little earlier to attend? Did I remember to have laundry ready or do I need to do some in the middle of the week? The weekend rolls around and I still have to consider that I need to be in the office Monday morning, so no crazy plans or screwing up my sleep schedule. Did I plan accordingly for my PTO so that nothing gets missed while I’m out? I think you get the picture. Now, apply that to hobbies.

When you have a limited time for hobbies and some of them overlap with having a social life you run into similar issues. Am I going to off work on time? Did I underestimate how much time I would be spending with family? So on and so forth.

So really, I just need to find time to drop everything and go off the grid for like two solid weeks. Maybe someday.

Too many inventions too quickly

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Daily writing prompt
The most important invention in your lifetime is…
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It’s hard to pick an invention from “my lifetime” when I don’t even know what was truly and originally invented IN my lifetime.

When I first started to write out my answer for today’s prompt I had settled on Wireless Technology, but the more I thought about it there are certain elements of “wireless” that are older than any person still living today. So, I stopped writing about it, deleted everything and took a break.

Now, I’m sitting down several hours later to think about it and I realized that technology has advanced so quickly and confidentially that I don’t know what to pick.

I think, just for the sake of putting SOMETHING out there, I’ll stick to an abbreviated version of what I had thought about before regarding wireless technology.

Most people take for granted what is considered “wireless” because they don’t think about them, or because the technology is obsolete and no longer in use. Like TV remotes. Still in use, but people these days probably forgot they existed (until I mentioned them just now) because the vast majority of people probably don’t need them anymore! So, although the TV remote might not have been invented in the last 35 years, wireless technology has continued to evolve. The electromagnetic spectrum, which includes the infrared light TV remotes use (even Nintendo’s Game Boy Color had IR sensors), is the backbone of all wireless communication, and we harness it in so many ways. Between that and the invention of The Internet, they have drastically altered the world we live in today. Broadband and shortwave radio eventually led to Bluetooth technology which is probably the most relevant for today’s prompt because it was invented in my lifetime (but I didn’t want to settle with just Bluetooth because it’s a subset of the wider and more important idea.)

Anyways, this is all just my opinion, so whatever. Wireless Technology is the most important invention of multiple lifetimes.

My ideal day needs more hours

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Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
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There really aren’t enough hours in the day. So, let’s change that!

My ideal day would be like 36 hours long, at least. I know the Earth’s rotation won’t allow that and our bodies aren’t accustomed to it, but that’s okay. This is all purely hypothetical.

So, 36 hours. How do I fill that to make MY ideal day? I’d start by sleeping in and getting about 12 hours of sleep. I love sleep so much, but I have to respect the order of the world we live in by having a job and paying bills.

After I wake up I would probably eat a small breakfast on the patio while I watch the sunrise, about an hour at most spent here. (I don’t currently HAVE a patio that faces East, but if we’re making the day 36 hours long then I can live anywhere I want.)

After breakfast would be some game time. Not sure what I would play, but I would probably spend 4 hours on that? Maybe 6? Followed by lunch, and then back to gaming for another 4-6 hours. Let’s say that puts us at 25 hours. 11 hours to go!

The last 11-13 hours would be running around doing chores around the house or running errands, followed by dinner, and then ending with a couple more hours of game time.

Super simple and fairly straightforward. Although, the most important part of all of this is just that I would have 36 hours in the day. I could totally spend half a day hiking, have a light lunch at the top of the mountain, and then the rest be roughly the same. If I still worked 8 hours in the day I would have a ton of time to fit in all the things I would want to do.

Wait, I forgot to include writing! I would definitely cut out one of the time slots for gaming and swap in writing for 4-6 hours. This still assumes that I have a regular job, though. If writing was my full time job then it would just replace that for 8 hours.

Either way, my body would hate me for being up for 24 hours.

Time changes everything

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How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

Wow, this prompt could get deep!

First off, just because I thought it was amusing, I wanted to share that I spent a good minute or so trying to think of a title for today’s post. Soap Opera titles like Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns came to mind because the names of these shows are so simple yet so fitting, and the content of these shows is relevant to the general question of the prompt. (For the record, I don’t watch these shows, I just know they exist because my Mom watched them.) Then I thought of the line Fry from Futurama uses in regards to the yogurt in his baseball cap. “Ya see, it used to be milk. And well, time makes fools of us all.” That’s when I decided to keep things a little higher level for my answer, rather than deep dive into my past to try and self-evaluate who I am today.

Time really does make fools of us all. Children look at the world very differently than adults, but they too eventually become adults and see the folly of their naivety.

For myself as a child the world was in some ways full of promise. Until Mom passed away. That’s the kind of major life event that drastically changes a kid. I was only 12, and while I had the concept of death in my head it didn’t seem REAL until it hit my family in such a strong way. I didn’t really know what to think after that, but the world became a little more grey and uncertain.

Then a couple years later, my Dad remarried. A few years later and we moved several hundred miles away. Two important things were instilled in me through those events. Relationships can change, and people need to keep moving forward. As much as Dad loved my Mom, he needed a partner to keep him going, and as strong a bond as I may have had with friends, those friendships couldn’t last.

As an adult I take those two things to heart. Friends have come and gone, some due to differences of opinions and others because of life choices/directions. I don’t like to think of it as “moving on” but rather “moving forward” because there’s no going back.

From To-Do to To-Someday

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Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.

That title is a bit of a mouthful! I also toyed with the idea of borrowing a line from Strong Bad Email #61 to go with “To-Do List this Sunday, Sunday, Someday” or something like that.

Anyways, on to today’s prompt.

I use Google Calendar all the time, and I have the Google Tasks widget on my phone’s secondary home screen. The neat thing about this widget is I can check things off the list based on what tasks are pre scheduled on my Calendar AND I can add my own items directly in the widget. Makes it easy to add things on the fly if I need to remind myself of something that needs doing. Unfortunately, if something has a due date assigned then it appears in the list chronologically, and anything without a date appears at the bottom. So as it stands, I have several items at the bottom of the list that I forget exist. Just simple reminders of things I can or should be doing with my time.

  • Books
  • Games
  • Gym routine/schedule
  • Lifestyle plan? (And yes, it has the question mark)
  • Meal Plan
  • Minis

Technically the items Books, Games, and Minis are more like suggestions while the rest are actual To-Do items. I like to keep them on the list anyway.

So, as you can see in the list there are a few “planning” items and they never seem to get done…

For those that are curious, the “Lifestyle Plan?” To-Do item is there to remind me that I need to take some time to reconsider how I structure my use of time every day and my priorities if I want to achieve goals. Sadly, I also avoid it because lifestyle changes are difficult.

I’ll get to them eventually.

Getting my cook on

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What’s your favorite thing to cook?

First off, I’m not a recipe blogger, so I apologize in advance for not giving you all my life story centered around a favorite dish before actually getting to the point.

Recently I’ve taken to cooking something akin to Beef and Broccoli (or is it Beef with Broccoli?)

I found a simple enough recipe for the sauce not too long ago and started making my own version without measuring ingredients, or even having all of them to begin with, and got it down so it’s easy to throw together.

  • 1 or 2 cups Beef stock (I had chicken, which seemed to work just fine)
  • 1 Tbsp Soy sauce
  • 1 or 2 tsp Oyster sauce
  • Cornstarch slurry for thickening

I’m sure I’m missing one or two things but that’s the base of the sauce. Toss all of it except the slurry in a sauce pan, bring to boil, add slurry, simmer until thickened. Easy! Typically I only use a couple spoonfuls of the sauce each time I cook, otherwise everything would end up swimming.

The beef part I’ve been lazy with and just used ground beef. However, in an effort to be ever so slightly healthier, I’m not using any cooking oils for the broccoli and other veggies I decide to throw in the pan. Instead, I happened to have some less lean/kinda fatty ground beef so I just fried up the beef and used the fat that renders out. I was just cooking it as a patty and setting it aside so that I didn’t have to go through the hassle of draining.

For the veggies I was using some combination of onion, potato, and zucchini. The potato, being a starch, was thrown in there so I didn’t need to cook rice. The onion and zucchini were for flavor and to drive a healthier balance to the fatty meat. I just chopped up all three and fried them, adding a pinch of salt.

See? Rather simple recipe, and it’s been something I’ve been able to quickly throw together at home either for lunch or dinner.

A childhood after dial-up

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Write about your first computer.

My Dad has always been a tech junkie and worked in the telecom industry through most of my childhood, so we’ve always had a computer in the house. I couldn’t tell you much about the computers themselves from back then, I just remember that my Dad liked to be an early adopter of technology.

We had DSL before almost everyone else in our area because of my Dad’s job and needing to help test it out. He figured out how to play multiplayer Doom over LAN between our family computer and his work laptop. When we got one of the early generation CD burners, my brother and I learned how to modify computers when he showed us how to open the case and swap around parts. Another perk of his job was being able to bring home copies of the latest operating systems to install, so I got to first experience Windows 95 & 98. All kinds of these things that eventually would lead to him bringing home some decommissioned computers from work and giving us one of our own so we could play games and not hog the main family computer. But in all of that I wouldn’t say any of them were MY first computer. I wouldn’t get that until I was in college.

My first computer, the one I had acquired for myself, was a pre-built model from somewhere like Dell or HP. Would have been around 2007-2008, so you can imagine what a mid-tier gaming computer was like back then and cringe at the thought of trying to use it nowadays. It served its purpose, though, and got me through college. Well, it and my laptops. I had two different laptops through college because during the first few years they loaned them out to students, but they did away with that program. I had to take a quarter off which meant turning in that loaner laptop and then purchasing my own when I was ready to come back. Those were my first laptops.

Laptops aside, I was fortunate to grow up with technology and see all the different changes happen in real-time. All those firsts led to where I am today with my computers and other gadgets.