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What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I was going to the psychiatrist the other day and noticed a jewelry shop on the ground floor. I entered it, kinda hypnotized. The idea was to merely look at the prices and come back another day, but I felt compelled to purchase the rings... two engagement rings, as is traditional in Brazil. The cheapest in the store, but that doesn't matter.
The next day I made a special dinner for my girlfriend, complete with romantic music (Godfather soundtrack to pair with the Italian food) and an app on my phone that simulated a candle. At one point I said I had to go to the bathroom, changed clothes to something a bit more formal, came back and kneeled in front of her like people in the movies ("you're so American"*, she said. She always says that). I was planning to say a bunch of stuff but I choked up pretty quickly with emotion, and so did her. She was so freaking happy I don't think I'll ever forget that. I knew she'd say yes, but it was nice to hear anyway.
And that's the story of how I went from the guy that don't believe in marriage to the guy that just proposed. I suppose it was just a matter of finding the right girl.
* I'm not actually American
Edit: so she read this comment and won't stop repeating "I'm the right girl, the right girl" in her purposefuly thick accent :P
Congrats on the engagement!
Thank you very much!
I had one of the most interesting weekends I've had in a while. Friday night we had my mom and stepdad over for dinner. They recently moved to where we live to be closer, so it's been nice being able to have them over more often. We're sitting around the dinner table eating and talking when I asked my stepdad something and he reacted a little funny. He didn't answer and he looked a little green around the gills and got up and headed towards our guest bathroom. I figured something wasn't sitting right and he was going to throw up. Then we all heard this noise coming from the bathroom. It was hard to describe, almost an animal-like sound. He was choking on a piece of sandwich. My wife reacted quickly and dialed 911 and sent our daughter next door to get our neighbor who is an ER nurse. I went to my stepdad and started the Heimlich. He was starting to lose consciousness, which made things difficult because he's about 220lbs and outweighs me by about 60lbs. After a couple of tries we got the piece of sandwich dislodged and a few minutes later he was back to normal. Just a wild experience. I was very proud of my wife's quick reaction and our neighbor getting to our house quickly to check him out. The rest of the weekend seemed a little brighter.
That's quick wife thinking! I hope he's OK now. Do you have to pay for the ambulance coming in this situation if they go empty handed?
You know, I never asked my wife what exactly happened with 911. I think it was all over before she even really got into the details with them. They must have cancelled the ambulance because one did not come.
Started with that unemployment life of applying to all sorts of jobs, setting up classes for the summer and the fall, starting training for CompTIA certs, and working on a Nickelodeon Writing Fellowship script, and seeing what sticks.
Also figuring out what has been going on with my dog. (Anal gland rupture, got an antibiotic, she's going to be just fine.)
My dog had the same issue. We now take him every two months to have his glands expressed, and it hasn’t been a problem since. I wish her the best of luck with the recovery.
She's 19, and she had an issue with her stomach so when she bled all over the floor this morning, I thought she was done. This was probably the best case scenario.
For the first time in a long time I sat down to read an entire book cover to cover. It's been harder to just sit down and read since developing depression a few years ago, so it was nice to get back some of my old habits. (I don't mean to trauma dump, just trying to provide context)
Anyway, I read Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, which is the first book in a series she's writing. It's about a fucked up magic school for children that kills an extremely large portion of its students. It's really well written and she makes a special effort to deconstruct and play with the idea of 'destiny' that is present in a lot of other fantasy. Without getting into spoilers the main character has essentially been destined since birth to turn into one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. It talks about that one the back cover, so I don't count that as a spoiler.
I've a big fan of Naomi Novik ever since I read Uprooted and then Spinning Silver. A lot of her books are roughly based on other stories, but then really subverting your expectations. I can't wait for the next book in the series, but it doesn't come out for another several months.
After burning through A Deadly Education, I made another trip back to the book store and absolutely loaded up on books. It felt good and I can't wait to read them.
That books sounds incredible!
I highly recommend it. Naomi Novik is one of my favorite authors, though I still haven't read her first series.
I'm jealous of your fire - in my city it is illegal to have a backyard fire, even in a very safe firepit. We have to head out of town to my parent's to have a fire. I'd love to just be able to head outside, put a small fire in a pit, and hang out.
It’s pretty humid here in the southeastern US, so very little risk of starting a bigger fire. Definitely a good way to spend an evening. :)
It's often humid here in Ontario as well; while I guess it's technically possible to start a fire, it seems really unlikely. There's are a couple of weird rulings on it, such as you can have a fire if you're using it for cooking, but then there is a list of things that are exempt from the cooking claim, like hot dogs, and that as soon as the cooking is done the fire must be extinguished, and if anyone complains about it, even if it is a "valid" fire, it has to be immediately put out.
Studied for finals. Broke Kubuntu (I fixed it, pipewire isn't quite show-ready as of 0.3.24, so back to Pulse and JACK, but that was fun). Studied some more for finals, and cooked a lame version of this with boneless, skinless thighs, and home fries as well. Even without the skin, the chicken came out amazing.
I have a pretty standard setup: USB headphone adapter, and use a mix of Pulse and JACK applications, so nothing crazy, but stuff I don't want to deal with:
Spotify (via snap) doesn't like to connect to the Pipewire bus on an inconsistent basis, usually with a 3-30 second delay, Supercollider doesn't like to connect to the Pipewire bus automatically (an issue with application detection I can't fix unless I recompile it without JACK support to start my server with a specified ServerOptions.OutDevice() option, but takes 2 seconds with qjackctl anyway). If I start Firefox, then Renoise, Firefox's framerate drops, and audio stutters, and if I resolve that, Renoise's framerate goes to 10FPS.
I borrowed my dad's rototiller, and tilled our gardens - we have two garden beds that we plant in - and then we planted both gardens. Tomatoes, chillis, beans, peas, cucumbers, zucchini, and a bunch of marigolds around the outside to help prevent pests.
I repaired the arms on the front seats of our mini-van - the fauxleather was cracking, so I got a repair kit and gave it a pretty respectable attempt. The end result was not bad for something that I learned how to do while doing it, and cost less than 10 bucks. If you have cracking leather arms in a car, I recommend getting some leather tape and trying it out. What I did was got some paper, and then traced a stencil that I used to shape the patch that I was applying.
I bottled Hot Sauce Batch #5 - this one had thai green chillis, jalapeno, cucumber, garlic, and some peppercorns. It ended up being very floral - not my favourite hot sauce that I've made. I also bottled Batch #6 which was just straight up scotch bonnets. I'm excited about that one.
I mowed the front lawn, and did some back lawn cleanup, and mowed my neighbour's front yard. He's 95 and can't do it as much as he'd like. I also added some more river rock to the terminus of our french drain which brings it level with the rest of the yard. One of my neighbours asked if they could pay me for some of the leftover river rock, and it was very difficult to get him to just take some of it; he ended up putting 10 bucks in my mailbox for it, and started off trying to give me $50.
We played a few board games - Forbidden Island is the one my son requested, so we played that a couple of times over the weekend, and we also played Sequence, which is not a particularly thought provoking game, but one the kids can certainly handle well. It's not my favourite, but it's worth playing just to hear my son giggle like a maniac when he plays a one-eyed jack.
I watched a pretty hefty amount of disc golf - the OTB open was this weekend, and I actually made a post about the OTB open in ~sports if you are interested in that sort of thing. It was a really good tournament.
My aunt is unwell - she has lung cancer - and me and my sister have been the ones trying to coordinate visits for my mom and siblings and siblings' families, and have been chatting at length with my cousin. On Sunday, my cousin managed to get her mom into local hospice care, and that's been a good move - the pain management is so much better, and she's feeling more like her old self.
Did numerous small things to the Tercel project (nothing worth writing about, just needing done).
Met my across the street neighbors when they were walking through my alley looking for their cat, subsequently helped them look for it and when it proved fruitless gave them tips for luring it back home. They woke up the next morning with the cat on their doorstep.
Went to a rainy amateur drift event.
Picked up a new, larger smoker (at a deep discount) and sold my older smaller one. Contemplating what I'll make first on it.