Stop & Chat: January 12-13

No, this is not a real picture. It's a video game! I know, video games are kind of leaking into what was supposed to be a separate blog, but I guess that's to be expected if I do an (almost) daily diary series. So sorry ahead of time to those of you who have no interest in computer/techie/gaming things. This will be a rather technical post once I get around to what I did on the 13th.

But first! The 12th!


Tuesday started off wonderfully! I woke up a little later than I'd like, but I've come to accept 8 AM as a good wake up time for myself now, especially since I've been staying up so late. I'm just used to 7 or earlier, even back in the states.

I was feeling particularly inspired, so I got to cleaning up a bit. Dishes were washed and put away, the kitchen was organized just a little better, and I ate some clam chowder for breakfast because I'm an adult and can decide what a good breakfast is. :P

The living room had been calling my name for a few days now, so I finally got working on it. The living room was the place I had pretty much neglected beyond opening up boxes and setting piles of books. With the long distance assistance of my wonderful Momma we worked out a place for all the furniture and I moved the couches to their final destination. I unpacked the TV (finally) and moved that to its stand and arranged that in the room. We had some difficulty figuring out a place to put the bookshelf, but after a little rearranging got it in a good location. Then I set off on the arduous task of organizing all of our books to be put in the bookshelf. It took a while, but I think I got it worked out.

At one point I got distracted by noticing that the motherboard part that was sitting on a box in the office looked rather dusty for a new piece. I had assumed it was laying out because M had started messing with all of the parts we had bought while I was asleep, but it never occurred to me that he had already finished setting up the computer! I spent a little bit testing out the new parts (ie: playing video games) but after a video card crash found out that there were a few more updates that needed to be installed. I got the computer started on that and got back to organizing the living room.

M woke up and came into the living room to see my handiwork right around the time I finished up the bookshelf and mentioned that he wanted to go to the grocery store to pick up some food for him to take to his shifts. We sat down for some food and decided that we would sit on the couch while we waited for the food to settle, then leave. I don't know about you, but I do not do well with warm food, a blanket, and a comfy setup. It's the perfect napping recipe. Before either of us knew it, we were both konked out on the couch and by the time we woke up it was dark out and neither of us really wanted to go out anymore.

I thought, hey! I haven't used my coffee maker since arriving in Korea! I should reward myself for getting so much done by having some coffee! I have some decaf for later in the day when I don't need the caffeine (and yes, I know decaf isn't actually 100% decaf) but still want that coffee fix. I got everything set up, turned on the coffee maker, and returned to the living room to watch some YouTube with M.

The coffee maker beeped entirely too early. I went over to find that only half of the water was in the coffee pot and the rest hadn't been transferred from the water reservoir. Hm. Weird. So I set up the coffee again and got it started only to find that none of the water was switching over. This upset me greatly. I tried looking at the setup myself to see if there was some sort of blockage but was unsuccessful, partly because I was just plain upset. M said he would look at it after eating, and I thought that I would get my happy mood back by playing some video games on my fancy shmancy new computer set up.

The sound was not working on the computer. I don't have speakers currently and don't need them because I have a headset that I use. It's an older headset that requires an audio jack as opposed to a USB port. The computer would not recognize that I had plugged something into the audio jack. I figured I would restart the computer and if that didn't work I would grab M's USB headphones and use that.

The boot manager stopped working. I couldn't get the computer to start. M tried re plugging in everything and it still would not start up. So he did a full wipe of the SSD and began reinstalling the OS.

Blah. I was very upset at this point and went to the guest room to be by myself and play some games on my 3DS. M came in to tell me that he had successfully reinstalled the OS, but I had lost all of my savegames for Ark, the game I had been playing. I got the game to start reinstalling again, but I had no intention of playing. After sitting around in a bad mood for a while I decided to do something and worked out a little using one of our ottomans to do variations on a step/jump up. It was a short workout, only about 40 minutes, but it did the job of getting my heart pumping and temperature up. I spent some time on one of our numerous porches watching the light snow fall and listening to the sounds of the city. If it weren't so dark I would have taken a picture!

Once I cooled down I decided to watch M put together his Gundam kit. At some point I fell asleep and in that time M got the TV, PS3 and XBox set up.

I woke up early in the night to a picture and message from my Mom that said "Dogs liked your Lush." and a picture of a torn up box and a few open bath bombs/bubble bars. D'oh! Yes, I sent my Lush orders to my parents' house because the site wasn't accepting my APO box. You lied to me, shipping information/FAQ page!

"Uh, excuse me? Lush? Your products arrived in damaged condition."

Dad and my sister checked to make sure everything was accounted for. A Cinders bath bomb was the only thing that had been completely opened and I initially became concerned because I know that product tends to have a whole cinnamon stick in it. Rachel also said that Drake had been chewing on some of the styrofoam when she'd gone out to save the poor box. A quick Google search told me that both cinnamon and styrofoam is not a particularly worrisome thing for dogs to ingest, and just to keep an eye out for lethargy or aversion to food for the next day or so in case of intestinal blockage from the styrofoam.

While I'm glad that nothing was missing I was more concerned about the doggies. They have never interacted with any package that my parents have had delivered, including the previous Lush package. And it's not that they barely have packages. Dad is a very avid online shopper and Amazon Prime is his best friend. We all think that it was just the scent that was coming from the boxes that caught the dogs' attention and got them tearing through the stuff. It was obvious that they stopped as soon as they got to an actual product and realized that it wasn't as yummy as it smelled. I'm sure one or both of them had a not-so-fun time after licking that bath bomb.

I still obsessively harass my sister every few hours, asking if the doggies are acting weird at all. :)

After that interesting midnight adventure I went back to sleep. M grew bored of waiting for me to wake up and went to the grocery store by himself, and I woke up well after 10 (I know, very late!) in a very confused state.

I'm only slightly ashamed to say that I spent pretty much all of the 13th playing video games. I did spend some time washing some dishes and helping M with the groceries, but a majority of my day was spent at the computer finally playing the game that I've been trying to play for the past week or so. It. Was. Awesome! I definitely noticed a difference in everything from my FPS to the graphics quality to the smoothness of game play. I'm one happy camper with this new computer setup!

After M left for his shift I took some time to stretch out from my workout the day before and worked a little bit on other areas of my body. In that time our little bloggy group of friends got together for a fun Facebook chat and I ended up falling asleep mid reply. LOL. I was tired!

I woke up at 8 and I've spent today working on some blog posts and waiting for the sun to come up enough for me to take some pictures of products I'm trying to melt. Mainly my L3 wax. I already melted one piece before realizing that I had never taken individual photos of each product. Oops!

I didn't mean for this to become another novel but I'm finding that it's very nice to be able to go back and know what exactly I was doing on a particular day. It's helped fill in some gaps in our memories several times already! I'm going to leave this off here and I'll try to remember to post tonight before I fall asleep :)

Have you  guys had any snow where you're at lately? What's the weather been like??