Mondays seem to be a reflective day for me. Youd think it would be something like a sunday evening or something but no, monday mornings are when i get weird and nostalgic. I wonder if thats because its my escapism coming through since i really dont want to do my job. I get really hard anxiety every monday morning when i get up, gurgle-y stomach and everything. Its one of the things i wish i could shake but i just haven't been able to do it. Who knows. Most of these entries come from a monday morning or something when im sitting here wishing i was doing just about anything other than working, cobbled together throughout the day until i'm "done" with it and then it just gets saved. A window into the mind of an IT professional on a monday I guess. 

 One of my cats is dying and im really sad about it. He's ancient and it's past his time but that doesnt make it any easier. For those of you who dont watch the streams, his name is Mr Gus and he was a cat we inherited from a dead neighbor when their family couldn't care for him. We dont know how old he was when we got him, but the vet guessed about 16 or so, that was about 5 years ago. So he's definitely older and had some mobility issues at that time, but was still spry and i still wanted to love on him. We may be taking him into the vet latr this week for a sleeping session, i dont want him to suffer and I know the end is near just from how he's acting. It's just hard. I hold on for too long and i know it. I did this when Crystal got sick and passed, babied him right up until i just couldnt do it any more. He'd lost his ability to walk and was dragging himself around and i just couldnt help him any more and he had to go to sleep too. I hate this part of owning cats. I love them so much their whole lives and then I have to be the one to put them down too. It's just not fair. I know life isnt fair, but it still hurts. Gus isnt there yet, but he's getting close and I dont want to do that. 

He is just on my mind a lot lately. There are of course other things to worry about, as always, but he's weighing me down a little. I think it's because he is such a good boy and never causd anyone any trouble and is just a sweet old man. I love his little face. But I do have to think about something else a little bit or I'll spiral down the tube all day and no one needs that. 

 Streaming has been going alright. Game night was fun, but we didnt play any Halo and I'm sure that put off at least a couple of people. I would love to play some Infinite or something this week maybe. I can get Flanja and the rest to hop in on that probably. I'm sure. We'll shuffle things around a little this week and maybe do something short after jams, keep jams short, and start halo around 10. Get people in there kinda early but not too early? We'll see. I know there are some people who only come for Halo and dont really play anything else, but also vice versa, so we'll just have to play things by ear. I suppose at the end of the day if im having a good time and they are having a good time, the rest isn't as important, or worth worrying about. 

 We are gong to the state fair this weekend and im super excited about it. I get to go to the beer tent too, and even though Mrs Potato doesnt really drink, I think it'll be fun to try some new things. Plus i get to wander around a little drunk all day, so that'll probably be my first stop! Pretty excited for the butter cow, because i mean shit, if you go to a fair and DONT see a giant animal made out of butter or cheese did you really go? I've never been to one before so i'm very stoked on the possibility of having a bunch of crazy new fried things i can try. If you fry something, i'll generally eat it, and i'm taking like 40 bucks to just spend on trash food while im there. 

 We went to some sand dunes this last weekend, and i really always like going there. the town around the dunes is just so nice and vacation-y, which people everywhere having a great time and lots of summer homes that are cute and fun to look at. We got there really early int he morning, which is good because it takes 3 hours to get to the place. Parking was a cinch and we got to wander in the dunes for about 3-4 hours before we got too hot and needed a break, and it was about the time all the kids and families were flooding into the sand so it was a good time to roll anyway. We saw some good graveyards out there and I've been getting better about stopping for them. Sometimes in the country they are just kinda hard to see before you drive past them, and then stopping and turning around it kind of a pain in the ass, so sometimes i dont. I've been getting better about it though. 

 Socially things are alright. Think i've pissed off one of my friends but maybe not? I'm not sure. he's not the best person for finding out what you did but there were some backhanded comments on friday night that made me wonder if i said or did something to cause a problem. Probably, i tend to do that, i cant remember now how they said it, but they did say something about demeaning or condescending comments, which i mean i guess you could see how i talk to people that way sometimes, but it might also not have been me at all. I dont know, thats partly the problem really. We were playing a game and its one that this person has gotten lost in fairly quickly before, so i just try to keep them moving in the right direction. Maybe that could be a little demeaning if i wasn't being kind about it, or maybe it was because i was being too kind about it that the tone makes it sound condescending. I just know that i have tone problems in social situations and not everyone gets it, or might take things the wrong way. I certainly hope that isnt the case here, and it's probably someone else that they were referring to, but unless or until someone can be specific i just spin my wheels on it. 

 I dont know man, it's halfway through monday part 1 and im already tired, but only for thinking too much. I'm going to turn my brain off for a bit. 

 

This past weekend was a good one, even though we didnt quite do the things we set out to. We helped my mom shuck, biol, blanche, and freeze 5 dozen ears of corn, and washed some blueberries, which im sure we'll get to take some of. It was a good time, i'm glad we could sit and chill with my mom for a while. Mrs Potato and my Mom have always got on fairly well, and it's nice for them to get out of their normal things and hang out with each other. I'm hoping we do similar things for more veggies and the like over the fall. We could have a lot of fun making jams and jellies and packing things away for the winter time. We'll have to make sure to note any good farmers markets and things like that we see on the little trips we take on the weekends. 

I felt weird about game night this week and i cant really put my finger on it. I wanted to play Halo earlier so that someone could still play with us, since he's in a EU time zone so his nights are way later than ours when he stays up to play. It worked out pretty well I think and while there wasn't a lot of joiners early, by the time things got rolling there were more than expected. I think maybe what we can do next time is a little bit of gold after jams, then the halo, then switch to whatever the big weird thing is that week. I really like Risk of Rain with a lot of people but I know it's not everyone's favourite game. Maybe we can get back into that. 

I REALLY enjoy Peak, but I think i was too slow on the uptake and most people are bored with it now. Boops played too much on saturday so I know why she was mostly nonplussed when playing with us, and we did have a great turnout for the people that played with us, I just feel off about it i think. I wasn't trying to push it too late with that one, but we did stat about an hour after i said I would start. 

 I decided not to do the fire on the porch thing on sunday morning, mostly because i woke up an hour later than i'd meant to and also because i just didnt wanna go do it. I think maybe I'll try doing the thing again in the evening and see what I think about it, but only on days it's not 400 degrees outside. Those are gladly coming faster, i'm excited for things to start cooling down and i can stop using the AC at all for like two months until it starts getting too cold and we have to crank up the heat. I think the kotatsus will help with that this winter, and the kids will just have to layer up. I'll check the windows and frames and walls and stuff for any now holes or cracks and then just work from there. 

 New plans for taking a trip in september, but not til near the end sadly. I dont think i've got any days off until then, so we'll just have to make those count. I'm still trying to figure out when I want to take my week off. Normally we do that for the week between xmas and new years but this year someone beat me to it. I didnt want to be that guy that does it every year, even if i DO want to be that guy. Seemed fair for some of the others to at least have the chance, and they took it. 

 I'm all over the palce today, i dont know what is in my brain. 

We went to a cantelope ice cream fesitval yesterday, somewhat nearby (about an hour away) and it was pretty nice. They had a big ol fair and farmer's market, as well as a bunch of seasonal stuff out. Lots of vendors and tents and stuff, which we always really enjoy. We came home with some fudge and some chocolate covered oreos from a bakery/chocolate shoppe in that town. Pretty good stuff, even if i have to share some of it with the kids. 

 Streaming has been going alright, wish I could do it more. No new projects to discuss, mostly just trying to keep this crazy train rollin. 

 The next thing I'm working on will be for a little bit of fun I think. Made a plan a while back to drag my camcorder outside with my microphone and a laptop and see what kind of hang time I can do on a weekend morning on stream. 

The idea I think will be to set up the laptop with OBS and voicemeeter, which is already done, then set up a new scene for sitting outside. I think the camera pointed at me towards the house should be fine, but it'll also be on a tripod so i can move it around and point it out or at the fire or a bug or something as needed. I dont think anyone will be coming outside while I'm out there but I think I will let everyone know and remind them the night before so they aren't surprised. 

I've got a USB HDMI capture from avermedia that I've used int he past to connect the camera to, but first I'll need to connect the camera output to the Composite/HDMI upscaler, which I do want to replace eventually. It'll get sound form there but I'll just mute that. I've got my microphone and interface ready to connect, and once those two things are on there all I need to do is figure out what to do while im outside. I think I'll have roska in a call with me so we can do music requests, and then probably play some marbles or something i guess. Maybe. I actually dont know how well that laptop will run that for a stream. Also i guess I should probably mention the ethernet connection back into the house, since I'll just be using a super long cable for that. 

 In theory that should all work out just fine. 

Past that I dont have many project or plans. Working extra has been terrible but hopefully the boy gets himself a job soon and i can lay off a little and take a break. I have to keep reminding myself that the job market sucks right now and that he's trying as hard as he can, even though it doesnt really look like it. He does odd jobs for my mom to keep busy and keeps up around here when we ask., so i cant really complain too much. It could always be worse. 

Might need to think of a new project. 

 

    Amazing weekend, totally fantastic, wish it didn't have to end. 

    Friday was a half day at work and I got to spend the half working on stuff i actually like. Tedious, individual, and slow paced, no pressure. Just do it right and get it right and test it to make sure you didn't break anything type stuff. I was replacing a switch and then moving all of the connections to be a little more efficient than they were initially. That involved moving each cable one at a time, marking which port they came from, which port they were moved to, and what vlan that port was assigned to. It doesn't seem like it would be that complicated but the process just took forever. 

    After that we went to a fish sandwich festival, which was honestly a little underwhelming but still fun. We had out sandos and fries (the fries were awesome) and then drove around and looked at stuff. We found a thrift store/laundromat, which was an odd combination but she found some stuff she liked there, so we won.  

    The part I think i'd rather revisit ad do again are the beaches we found. There were quite a few cute little county beaches that were there and available and empty for anyone to use. We didnt have any beach chairs (I've since rectified that) so e wandered about on the strip and picked up rocks and driftwood and the like. I'm excited to go back with the beach chairs and the umbrella and a cooler and some jams and chill time. I'm super into just sitting there on the beach, i love that, or laying on a blanket on the sand and just letting myself soak it up. The sound of beaches when no one else is around is just fantastical. 

    The rest of the weekend was nice and calm. Sunday we did a lot of cleaning, and by we i mean i did a lot of cleaning. I needed to find the small USB capture card i used to use for the VCR before i got the switcher. I knew it was here someplace and just couldnt find the damn thing. Mrs Potato was missing some boxes of decorations and either could have been in two places, and both needed cleaned real bad. So I cleaned out and organized the under-the-stairs closet, and the server bathroom. Yes, you read that correctly, the server bathroom. 

    To explain, we've got an unfinished bathroom where Mr Gus has his litter box and without much else to use that room for I stuck our server cabinet and IDF switches in there. It's in a cabinet and doesnt get gunked up by dust and hair luckily, because i clean that hallway and room once a week, but also its quieter. The server and large POE switch used to be in my closet, and during the summer (or what i like to call "jet engine season" the server fans run 100% non stop until it's cooler outside. So like three months a year it's loud, and during the winter its actually really nice to have in my closet, because it warms up the whole room, but in the summer thats terrible too. So it has a new home down here where i can close the door and let the heat get sucked out of the room. 

    This coming weekend I think we'll do some beaches and picnics and chill time. It'll only cost me gas and if we pack lunch it'll save us buying anything and Mrs Potato will be happier since we wont be eating crap food. 

 I think next weekend will be a good one too. I've gotta get some fire wood so we can do the garbo wake and bake stream and see how that works out. 

    We started something in here but then stopped. Thats fairly normal for me. I've got about four drafts from various times that i started and just never published because they were whiny or stupid or just not interesting. Not to say that anything i put in here is interesting even a little bit. Maybe what I'll do is just keep something like this up and running most of the day so I can just pop thoughts into here as i think them. No real plans or projects today or this week, except maybe breaking Peak with the dudes on saturday and fixing Boops' computer. Her motherboard died in one of our most recent power outages, from what I can tell. Or the microswitch on the power button isnt working, but thats so stupid rare i just bought the replacement mobo and it got here yesterday. I was too tired to do anything with it and she's got a replacement to use for the meantime, but thats the computer roskadj runs on, i'll need that back before tomorrow night. 

    There are a few things I'd really like to automate, but none so much that I want to put the work in to do it. There was the plan to use jellyfin for a bit, but with the ubiquitousness of Plex and it's ease of use, i might just stick there. The main problem with jellyfin is having to deal with IIS and auto-renew certs and the like. It might be a fun project to get working for myself, but I highly doubt anyone else could use it in the same way. I'm actually not even sure if there is an app for consoles or smart tvs that would connect to it, even if i got it working remotely and forwarded correctly, with certs. 

     We've been getting better about planning meals. Last pay period i did not control shit as much as i should have and we ate out more often than we should have. Nothing so bad as to break out the credit cards to pay for important stuff later, but bad enough that we'll be picnicking for the next few date saturdays for sure. It's not all so bad, i like picnics and so does she. And we've been trying to make a meal plan for a while now that we can shift around and use so we dont eat the same things all the time, and we know what we need to buy for groceries a little better. So far i think it's working out fine, but time will tell after a month or so if we stick to it. I'd like to stick to it. 

 Work drags on. Hour by hour it just sort of.....happens. 

    Theres ticket I should probably pick up and work on, but really one of the things i need to remember is that im not the only person who works here. As my boss likes to remind me the other guys can do some work for a change. I know im an over-achiever when it comes to my jobs, and i put too much into them, and i can't leave things alone until they are correct.  I cant help it, its just how i am with working. I've needed a job since i was about 16 and couldnt live without a job since i was about 18 and had my son. He's grown now so maybe i ought to get over it, but i think i've just been relied on so long i actually dont know how to live any other way. 

    The idea of being without a job is terrifying. Not that Im anywhere near losing my job or anything, but just the idea of having more than a few days off in a row scares me. Maybe in that case its not so bad that my generation really wont be retiring, since i can just happily work until i die at this point. All that being said I would love to not do that, i just dont know what the adjustment period would be like. I'd probably get fat. 

     Im excited for the weekend. And for things to cool off a bit. The summer doesnt do me very well around here and maybe thats something I should work on changing. Finding a new place to live is going to be a huge pain in the ass, but I really would prefer to live some where cooler. At the rate things are warming everywhere though maybe thats not ever worth doing, since wherever we go could be just as hot by the time i can afford to do the thing. 

    We'll try again tomorrow. 

 

 

 Last night's stream went surprisingly well for changing things up a bit more than i expected. We watched a movie weirdly enough, not normally something we do on that stream. And even the movie was unhinged as a choice, which I was actually kind of happy for. 

The little fish are fun, and the jams went really well I thought. Voodoo came online and we all played peak for a bit, it was a great time. Very different for me and that was a hard thing to do. I almost played some clone hero but decided it was better to not do that. 

I hope my normal people didnt feel disenfranchised, but thats definitely something that probably did happen. Our mashup master added a bunch of things and we just sort of ended up playing marbles for a while and then watching movie. Peak was really fun though, I kind of want to play some more of that with kreegus or blossby or as many people as possible. I like big mobs of people playing games together, thats my favourite thing over all. 

 The music was great, really missed playing stuff, just for the fun of it. Got some b roll to redo because i digitized it really stupid, or i think what actually happened was my video driver updated and the older version of the encoder was used, so I can't actually export it right. I need it without the audio but also need to chunk or a couple of pieces I think I might use for myself. Wont be using the whole like, two hours, of b roll, but theres some of it I may borrow. 

Nothing new on the projects, I sort of gave up on the always-on garbo-tv thing for right now. I dont know what my goal is with that so I stopped putting a bunch of thought into it. I suppose the uploading of the Layton time VODs i've got still needs done. I'm going to get back on top of that. Its just a time-suck because it takes like 45 minutes to upload on of them, then I have to manually start the next one. Its just a drag so I havent finished it. That one wouldnt be a good one to do on stream. I wanna do projects I can do on stream because i think that would be more interesting. Or at least something. 

I wonder if I've sort of axed my own streams. Its possible. We were really consistent there for like two years and then all of a sudden i had some thing and my consistency went down the tubes. That might have been the only thing keeping people coming back, knowing i'd be at least doing something. 

Its a sunday today, which means I'll be doing some stuff. Right? I wanna race, i wanna watch a tape, I wanna jam to some records and laugh together. Theres more things to do than time to do them, with is sad but just how it works, i think, Right? 

 There was some kind of reason I started doing this again sporadically, but the reason escapes me. Maybe it was really just to talk to something that doesnt really talk back, or a place to organize thoughts, or somewhere to scream into the void. 

The weekend was bonkers and I dont feel like we've gotten anything done. I have to go back to one of my client sites next friday to redo some stuff that we did because we didnt have the right parts yet, but the time was scheduled and we had to get things moved over. Maybe I shouldnt talk about work here, but I'm not getting specific about who or what or where really, just that it was a lot of work and it's not quite done. 

 I've been playing with using JellyFin instead of Plex, but since I've got friends that watch my plex (they paid for their own remote pass) maybe I ought to keep it. Right now the only real problem is the fact that it doesnt work remotely. Yet. There is a bunch of crap I have to do before it works right, and none of it is working right. There's just not time to put into it, maybe this weekend on sunday I can poke it a little. Locally it works great, or rather mostly great. I think it uses different formats for naming and ordering files, so of course since it's sharing with Plex I can't make to many changes yet. 

 Boops has been driving on the road a little now that we've got parking mostly dialed in. She's getting a better idea of how big the car is, hoe much to turn the wheel, when to start slowing down, but we are working on all of that stuff still too. She does come into some corners kinda fast, but i guess i do too so maybe it's just me freaking out because im not the driver. When i taught her brother it was a bit like that too. Once she's done I just have to get Mrs Potato driving and everyone working and then maybe i can just lay on the ground for a month. I've always wanted to just have time to do nothing again, i dont think i've had that for more than a few days at a time (which honestly, cmon, does that even really count?) since i was about 17. Maybe thats a whiny thing to think about. But I'm 38 now so....yeah its been a little while. 

In the mornings I want to start going for a walk, even if it's just for like 10 minutes. Just to get the legs moving and the blood pumping, maybe i'll even quit drinking coffee again completely. i've gotten pretty good with it since i stopped drinking it like water a few years back. It was honestly wrecking my brain i think, but i needed to be awake, and active, and fast. That worked for a long time but i think i burned out my body, and my brain. I feel like sometimes i'm just losing my mind. Remembering things and doing more than one thing at a time, and my hearing. I wonder if i can work on any of those things. I mishear a lot of things any more and sometimes things aren't quite loud enough for me. I've avoided my earbuds for a while and turned things down at the mixing table to help a little, but it's just quieter. May be one of those things that's too little too late and it's just fucked as it is. 

 We moved RoskaDJ into the cabinet. She needs a physical box to run on or else the sound doesnt work right. I've been thinking about trimming that instance down a little, or maybe virtualizing it and seeing if it'll work that way, just to have one less computer running around here. I feel like I just add new ones all the time. Michiru (physical server) will be good to have for jellyfin, if i ever get it working right, mainly for the hardware transcoding. Maybe I will just keep both Plex and JellyFin, jelly for me for when im home and plex for those that pay for it to work. I mean they dont pay /me/ but thats besides the point. 

Streaming hasnt really been going at all. I couldnt do my normal saturday thing, nor play with the dudes on friday this week. I was going to try and do something on sunday but i was just wiped out and laid around. I want to gt back to doing something more often than once a week, but i also think i need to change up what i do on saturdays. We can play some games, or jam out, but i wanna watch a tape, or do something different, i just dont know what yet. The game night thing has been fun but we've been doing it for about a year now and i think its time for something new. Maybe if i think of something good I can do every other week or something for games like we used to, or once a money? I like that, just not every saturday. 

 We'll be back, and we'll do stuff, time just will tell on what we are doing.