I Am Completely Serious

1. I got my hair cut this morning. My original appointment was for yesterday, but a meeting got scheduled that conflicted with it. Thankfully there was still enough time to change the appointment, but the only slot left was at 11:45am today, and I really prefer to get it done earlier in the morning so I can get on with my day. But it worked out okay. I didn't have anything time sensitive at work until two meetings later in the afternoon, which is good because the person ahead of me went over by half an hour. Not sure if the guy was late to his appointment or if his just took longer than anticipated. I could definitely see it being the latter because he had a long grey beard that he was getting died in a rainbow (this is a queer salon so the site of an older bald guy with a rainbow beard was not at all out of the ordinary, but it was a very cool choice on his part).

2. The rain started today but so far did not significantly interfere with my day. Rained lightly on the way to the salon, but had stopped by the time I got there (very good because I had to park around the block) and was still dry when I left and also when I arrived at work. Very light sprinkling when I left work, but not bad. And it was still dry when I got home, so we were able to take our evening walk. Tomorrow is supposed to be the worst of it, so I've decided not to go in to work tomorrow. I have nothing that really needs me to be there and the only reason I was planning to go in to begin with is because I also need to pick up my Christmas cake at the nearby bakery. So I do still have to drive down there, but I was able to move the pickup time to early in the morning and I'll just pop down and get it and hopefully not get too wet and then relax the rest of the day indoors.

3. We got an extension on the work project until mid February and I think we can meet that deadline. The company who is customizing the software for us said that is the hard deadline really for real this time to keep the go live date of spring 2027, and upper management really does not want to move that date, so fingers crossed. Based on where we are now, though, it does seem very doable.

4. Only a kitty would be comfy half hanging off the sofa lol.

1. It is supposed to rain heavily from Tuesday through Saturday, which of course includes Thursday, the day we were planning to go to Universal Studios. Now, if this were Disneyland we could change our reservation. Or if we already had Universal Studios annual passes, there wouldn't be reservations in the first place and we wouldn't have to do a thing. But for day tickets, if you buy them online (which is encouraged since you get a hefty discount), you can't change the day or get a refund. My ticket is a two-day pass, and I used it on the initial day and then have 90 days to use the second one, so no problem for me. But Carla's is a day ticket purchased for the 25th, and while we could just eat the cost, we've decided to tough it out and go anyway. Hopefully the rain won't be as bad that day, or it will mostly rain overnight or whatever. Anyway, we do not have any sort of rain gear other than umbrellas, so to hopefully get less wet if it does rain heavily, I ordered us rain parkas off Amazon today and they will arrive tomorrow, in plenty of time for our rainy day.

2. Speaking of ordering things online, you may remember when I decided to stock up on shoes because I didn't want to risk these ones being discontinued when I actually needed to replace them. Well, as it turns out, I think I misjudged the size when I ordered them online, and the new ones are painful (the right shoe hurts my arch and gives me shin splints). I had a vague memory that when I purchased the first pair in store that they were a wide. It was a size smaller than I usually wear, but fit well. But when I went to order them online, wide was not an option, so I thought maybe I was misremembering and these just feel wide while being a regular width shoe. Buuuuut, I think they were actually a wide, and as it turns out Adidas does sell that shoe in a wide, but it's a separate entry on the website rather than the main entry allowing you to choose both size and width. I have two pairs unworn in the closet and was able to still submit a return for those, and in fact went to FedEx today and shipped them off. The pair I already wore a fair bit was also ordered too long ago to return anyway, so I'll just donate that to Goodwill. They're almost brand new and will fit someone who is not me very well. A new pair in wide is coming tomorrow, and hopefully those will fit correctly because I don't want to wear my old shoes in the rain because they have no tread left on them and are very slippery.

3. There is a little gyro place up the street from us that has been there forever. We used to go there fairly often when it was under the original management, but in recent years it has changed hands twice and also I try to avoid things with a lot of garlic and onion, so we haven't eaten there in ages. But we decided to try it out today and while they have overly complicated the menu and added burgers and other random stuff, they do still have gyros and they are still delicious.

4. We had a delicious dinner tonight, too. We were planning to have one of the frozen Chicago deep dish pizzas Carla's aunt had ordered for us, but then Carla decided she wanted to make latkes, too, since we didn't do that last Sunday when Alex was over. So we had pizza and latkes, which is not the most traditional combination but both were very tasty.

5. I would estimate Chloe spends a good 80% of her time in the warming bed during the winter lol.

Recently Finished
Strange Pictures
I was going to hold off on reading the novel version of this until the final volume(s) of the manga are released, since I've already read three volumes of the manga, but it came up again as recommended, this time on Hoopla, so I went for it. I do think Uketsu's novels work better as manga. Inserting the illustrations in the novel version feels more repetitive, whereas since the manga is all pictures, having the characters refer back to stuff feels more natural. I'm still going to read the rest of the manga when it's released (Strange Houses was five volumes, but Strange Pictures feels like it could be just four, so the next one might be the final one), just to see if there are any major differences. Anyway, I enjoyed this one but I do like Strange Houses better.

The Bletchley Riddle
Middle grade book about a girl who is trying to investigate her mother's disappearance. When she runs away from the man her grandmother hired to take her to live with her in America, she instead goes to live with her brother, who is working at Bletchley Park as a code breaker. The book is told in alternating POV chapters between brother and sister, and the audiobook had two narrators. I liked it a lot.

Murder on Platform Four
Another Tate and Bell mystery. These are very quick reads.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Speaking of quick reads, this one was super short. I got the audiobook in a sale and figured I'd check it out. It was only about five hours long. I did like the narrator, decent Japanese pronunciation, but the book itself was pretty dull. I think I might enjoy this okay as a manga, where you can just glance at the pictures of food and be on your way, but I don't need to listen to long descriptions. And a lot of what I like about mysteries is the process of the characters finding clues and working things out, but the way this is written is each customer's request is broken into two chapters, one where they come to the restaurant and tell them what kind of food they are looking to recreate. Then the second chapter is the food being presented to them. There is some exposition about how the guy figured out what they were remembering and how to find it, but it wasn't at all satisfying in any sort of mystery way. There are several more books in the series, but I'm not going to bother with them. It's not bad, just not for me.

Maps of the Disney Parks: Charting 60 Years from California to Shanghai
I bought this at Disneyland the other day. Nice coffee table book of maps of all the Disney parks currently in existence, with a small amount of text sprinkled throughout. I noticed several other reviewers on GR mentioned what I was feeling, which is that while this is nice, it's not quite what I was expecting or wanted from the title, which was the actual park maps. This has a few, but the vast majority of the maps are concept drawings and things like that. I would a book that compared park maps over the years.

My Home Hero vol. 18-19

1. Finished up another puzzle today. It's Santa Vader lol.



2. We decided to renew our Knott's annual passes after all. I knew it was cheap but had forgotten just how cheap, but then I've been seeing ads saying it's only $118, and that really is so cheap that even if we only go a handful of times it's worth it. And then when I went to actually do the renewal it turns out that the renew price is even cheaper! It was only $99! And the way their parking pass works is it's an add-on rather than being a higher level of pass, so we only have to buy parking for one pass since we always go together.

3. Not only is it the weekend but I'm now looking at two weeks in a row with four day weekends. And I was able to get off early today, too.

4. I found out the amount for my bonus today. It's quite a bit higher than the last couple times because the company performance overall was higher and also my salary is higher and it's based on a percentage of that. Next time's will be lower because this time I was still an area manager during most of the scope period (the December pay out is for April through October) and the percentage for store management is higher than for the rest of HQ.

5. We ordered from Coco Ichibanya tonight and now I am full of delicious curry.

6. Tuxie's looking handsome.