What did you do this weekend?

We tried to spend fathers day together as a family and unfortunately it didn't go very well. Recently my oldest son (aged 7) has had to "move out" so to speak due to his inability to stop hurting his younger brother. He spends most of his time with another family (that has no kids) and stays with us for a few days at a time until he can work through some of his trauma.

We tried to spend just one day together but it was too much for them to handle, so I spent the day with one and my wife with the other, doing separate activities. It really sucks and is pretty discouraging.

Father's Day Get-together: had a nice family get-together outside at my parent's house. It was a great temperature; I went swimming with my kids, we had a big outdoor feast - my ma made pulled pork - and then a campfire. We played "Wavelength" which is a great campfire game, and my sister brought a nice LED version of Cornhole. It was a delightful day, and desperately needed because...

My aunt died from lung cancer. Seriously, cancer is so awful. One of the worst things is that you end up feeling a little bit good, because she's no longer in horrific pain. My mom is a mess - they've been best friends for 70 years. She doesn't know what to do; they've talked every about 360/365 days per year since 1982. My uncle is a wreck - I think my family will be bringing him food for a while and trying to take care of him. My dad just doesn't know what to do for my mom; he's not good at this sort of thing, and he's old and tired. I don't know what to do, and, well, I miss my aunt. When my brother was a kid, he couldn't say "Dorothy" so he called her "Dodo" from a young age, and everyone in the family for the last 30 years called her Dodo. She was a gifted maker-of-things; if you could knit it, crochet it, or tailor it, she could do it very well. When I was in high school I was in a small group of singers for a local musical festival, and I had to look like a Victorian Dandy Caroller, and she made me a glorious long scarf to match with a tophat for the part. She liked Terry's Chocolate Oranges, and she was sassy and funny, deeply caring and kind to her family, but a magnificently bad customer for food service people. Sometimes I would go back inside restaurants and increase the tip significantly after we had been. Cancer sucks.

I live in CA where they reopened this week so I took full advantage by staying home to play video games and watch the NBA playoffs. It was wonderful.

Had a bit of a family get-together and celebrated my thirtieth birthday. It was nice, but as an introvert, also kind of exhausting spending a whole weekend with a group of people. I spent most of Monday just decompressing, haha. We traveled to the village where my mom grew up - she and her siblings own their childhood home together after my grandmother passed away a few years ago - and it's very rural. Had a fancy dinner in a nice restaurant in a nearby town, then went to the only pub in the area. It happened to be the first time in a long time they had live music, so it was quite lively.

It's so funny to see how things work in really small communities. I live in a small town of about 6000 people, which is small enough that most people know of most people, but not so small that a small group of strangers raises eyebrows. My mother's home "town" is much smaller, to the point where a small group of strangers at the pub become a bit of an attraction. My sister lives there, and on Sunday we went to a local farm to buy some eggs. It was completely trust based! They had an unlocked door in an outbuilding, and inside were some refrigerators with eggs, and you just wrote down your name and what you took in a book and paid via Vipps, a ubiquitous payment app here. That sort of thing really only works in very small communities, but it's lovely that it still exists.

I had all these grand plans to go out, buy new pants that actually fit, go to a new restaurant, etc... but on Friday night I redownloaded Bioshock Infinite and I couldn't stop playing. I had forgotten the buildup to the big reveals and my partner had never played the game before and she was hooked through the end. We played through the DLC as well, which was new to both of us. Pants can always wait for another day...

3.5 hour chat with my dad, and video games and class reading for the rest of it. The chat was on Saturday because he was going for a hike on Sunday, since he has a vehicle again and can actually get to trails.

I also bought a hair straightening brush for my beard and it looks much less wild, now.

Explored San Francisco for a couple days and went on a really nice hike with some friends. It was super relaxing and in more than one way the break I needed!

Bought an ice cream maker.

Made ice cream.

It was honestly some of the best ice cream I have ever had. I used the Serious Eats Philidelphia style ice cream recipe. It was perhaps a tad too sweet, but that could have been because I wasn't aiming for accuracy when measuring. It ended up tasting like marshmellow cream, probably because I didn't have the scotch and just added extra vanilla.

Before that I tried making an artificially sweetened version and that one did not turn out well at all; it tasted like alcohol.

Later on I'm going to do custard style ice creams and maybe try David Brian Gilbert's Old Bay ice cream. Honestly, that video was the whole reason why I bought the ice cream machine.

Father's day is in June 8th in Brazil so nothing related to that.

What I did do was go out with my mom to Avenida Paulista at the rough center of the city. However, that day was gonna be a nationwide protest day. Fortunately, we came in early (or late IDK) before the bulk of the protesters came in and flooded the streets so they were mostly concentrated at the MASP and we could just do what my mom wanted to do. There were a lot of LGBT and Trans pride flags and related posters. Some Marielle (Female leftist politician killed by cops) posters and related paraphernalia, and lots of party flags and other leftist flags and related people handing out pamphlets and such, like you might see in the images. There were even some hammer-and-sickle flags I saw flown. In the MASP there was a small Brazilian communist party place that had some 3D printed merchandise models of Lenin and probably a few other communist which is greatly amusing and ""based"". They also had someone handing out pamphlets and my mom took one since they basically just ask you to take it. (how non-consentual, respect others' boundaries, gee /s) (also, this is not at all meant to dismiss what the protesters stand for.) There were also some vehicles for playing music. One was playing a prostest song by Geraldo Vandré named "pra não dizer que não falei das flores", but than changed to some Brazilian funk and them sertanejo, which is a bit out-of place and amusing, but okay, people are normal and get tired of hearing the same songs and like to hear what they usually do.

Anyway, we walked around since my mom often has no specific things she planned to see or do which is no big deal for her but strange to me. After some walking around, we decided to go eat at a fast-food, which tasted good as always. The dentist told me the instructions concerning what I need to avoid doing with my braces (namely using your front/incisor teeth) is temporary so I just ate my burger normally this time. After that me and my mom went to a library and culture exposition and my mom went to a primary bank of sorts(?) to do something related to her account or savings I forgot about, failed and we went home.