Tag: Life

Loss of interest in a hobby

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
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.

Too many inventions too quickly

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
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

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
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

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

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

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

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.

Bloganuary 30th: Add another to the complaint box

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Bloganuary writing prompt
What do you complain about the most?
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This information might be out of date since I last worked at a fast food burger chain about 16 years ago, but one of things I learned (when getting ServSafe Certified and taking corporate training exams) was the disparity between bad service and good service. When a customer has a bad experience somewhere they typically share that experience with seven or more family/friends/acquaintances as opposed to a person who had an exceptionally good experience sharing with an average of just three people. Not even just a regular good experience where you get exactly the kind of service you expect, but the kind of service that went above and beyond expectations! Again, these numbers might not be completely accurate anymore, but the point stands. Bad experiences yield more complaints.

So with that in mind I’d like to take a moment to say that I generally don’t complain, and I don’t go out of my way to complain about poor service unless it was REALLY BAD. The reason for this is because I’ve been in that situation. Sometimes the stars just line up for a cosmically shitty day of work. I can take a step back and think about the little details that add up to cause that experience. This is something a lot of people don’t seem to do, and that extends beyond the customer service experience to the thing I really wanted to address in today’s post. Critical thinking.

The thing I seem to complain about most is the lack of critical thinking that seems to happen more and more these days. People making snap judgements and instantly being harsh. People who fall for misinformation and help spread it further. Like those stupid memes of math problems that lead to people fighting over the answer because some of them forgot how to utilize order of operations. In those moments, when something seems off and people are bickering back and forth over what is right, that is the time to step back and apply a little more critical thinking. Why are we fighting over a silly and irrelevant math problem on social media? How are some people arriving at a different answer? Which all leads into the next thing that I complain about most.

People lack the ability to stuff their ego and pride and admit when they are wrong. Seriously, when faced with overwhelming proof and easily verifiable/testable logic, why double down on being wrong? I don’t want to dig into that too much, because I don’t want to try and research the psychology behind people refusing to admit their wrongness.

I also don’t want to keep ranting about this because it will just irritate me for the rest of the day.

Bloganuary 27th: The dreaded reading backlog

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Bloganuary writing prompt
What books do you want to read?
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So many books to read, so little time! I have a decent list of books to read that I’ve picked up in the last couple of years, and I actually put that list into a personal OneNote so I could track purchases. Below is the list of most recent books that I’ve purchased and added to my backlog. There are 33 books in the list, and I’ve grouped some based on series. Are any of them on your list?

  • Mistborn Era 1
    • The Final Empire (Read)
    • The Well of Ascension
    • The Hero of Ages
  • Mistborn Era 2
    • The Alloy of Law
    • Shadows of Self
    • The Bands of Mourning
    • The Lost Metal
  • Elantris
  • Warbreaker
  • The Stormlight Archive
    • The Way of Kings
    • Words of Radiance
    • Oathbringer
    • Rhythm of War
    • Wind and Truth
  • Brandon Sanderson Secret Projects
    • Tress of the Emerald Sea
    • The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England
    • Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
    • The Sunlit Man
  • J.W. Wells & Co.
    • The Portable Door
    • In Your Dreams
    • Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard
    • You Don’t Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps
    • The Better Mousetrap
    • May Contain Traces of Magic
    • Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages
    • The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse
  • Defenders of Lore
    • God of Neverland
    • Queens of Wonderland
  • The Flanders Panel
  • Death by Cliché
  • Obsidian
  • The Beholden
  • Starter Villain (Reading)

Bloganuary 24th: Fun close to home

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Bloganuary writing prompt
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
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I’ve now lived in South Dakota for about 19 years, and there are still so many things I haven’t done. Maybe it’s because of my lifestyle or just lack of interest in general, I’m not entirely sure, but there are some that I really should go do and visit.

If you’re familiar with South Dakota, then you probably know that it is the Mount Rushmore State. I still haven’t visited Mount Rushmore. I’ve been nearby in that part of the state but was either working or passing through, and it isn’t an “attraction” that is top of my list. I’ll also include in the list some non-South Dakota places that are popular around my area.

Among the list of attractions or towns that I have NOT visited:

  • The Black Hills
  • Wall Drug
  • Des Moines, Iowa
  • Le Mars, Iowa (The Ice Cream Capital of the World – home to Blue Bunny Ice Cream)
  • Valleyfair (amusement park just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota)

If I wanted to get REALLY specific, I could do some that are actually close to home, but I’d rather not. If I didn’t visit them, they weren’t that popular to me or my lifestyle so they aren’t worth remembering or mentioning, but I’m sure there are more that people would get mad at me for not including. Oh well, such is life!

Bloganuary 23rd: Doing things for fun

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Bloganuary writing prompt
List five things you do for fun.
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Personally, everyone should have a hobby, and preferably a creative one if possible.

Unfortunately, while I do have a handful of things I do on a regular basis for fun, I also have a penchant for dabbling in new things. Maybe it’s just because I’m looking for something else to add to my skill sets or list of substitute hobbies.

Anyways, the five things I like to do for fun.

On the creative side of things I like to paint miniatures for tabletop games, although I’m slowly running out of mini’s because I’ve forbidden myself from buying more games that we haven’t played. So I’m also working on 3D printing things to paint. I also enjoy putting together those 3D wooden objects, like the ones made and sold by UGEARS. They’re kind of like adult LEGO’s at this point, except permanent and not transformable.

On the non-creative side, I like to read and play video games for fun, especially sci-fi and fantasy stuff. I would separate out puzzles but most of the time those are part of the video games category because of the medium I choose to do puzzles in, such as the game Escape Simulator which is designed around the category of Room Escape games. Not to sound I actually started playing them probably sixteen years or so ago when they were still Flash-based and were a big thing coming up in Japan.

There is kind of a middle ground between the two, creative and non-creative, is Magic: The Gathering. The reason being is that on the non-creative side I get to consume media. Lots of reading of the cards and the backstories. On the creative side I get to flex my brain a bit and try to figure out how to play with new cards and new mechanics of the game. Creating a cohesive deck with lots of synergy between the cards to try to find win conditions is a lot of fun and often takes up a lot of time when I get the itch to build a new Commander Deck.

That’s all I’ve got for major hobbies that I do for fun. I have some other things I probably could add to the list but I don’t do them as frequently so they’re not as important. Still, it helps to make sure I’m never without something to do with my free time.