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2024 - Week 35

Arts & Crafts 

With Drag & Balls done, a crafting break was needed to focus on reclaiming my home. That didn't last long. I did try a little crochet, but I found I was missing stitches on both sides of my table runner and I wanted to rip it way back to where I hadn't screwed it all up. This is a common and annoying thing with crochet that I don't have in knitting. I can easily find the spot I screwed up in knitting and it's often fixable unless I did a totally wrong stitch rather than have a missing one. If I accidentally add, I can just combine two to get it back to the correct thing.


I decided to restart the project in knitting and I plan to do the border in crochet. It gets more cool the more I think about it. I felt absolutely insane while I was taking the whole thing apart , but in just a couple of days, I already had a third of what I had before. I would be doing the main portion in garter stitch because it lays flat. Then I planned to block it before doing a border with a different colour. I hadn't fully decided how many rows of that I would do, but I thought it would be good to do a row of the main colour followed by the secondary colour in a single row followed by a row with chains to give it some flair.


Much better and I'm enjoying doing it now. I just prefer knitting.

Decluttering & Minimalism

One of the things I decided to focus on for this week was cleaning up after Pride Week. I know that sounds vague, but I made a To-Do List when I was at my Dad's place, so I had a basic map to work from. It didn't fully match the environment at home, but it was good enough.

One of the first things I accomplished was fixing one of my car keys. Time would tell on whether or not the circuit board in the second needed a repair. On Wednesday, the tool I needed in order to move the metal key portion over to the new case came, but I still needed a battery to see if further work was needed on my backup key set. Why go through the trouble of DIY here? Key replacements cost hundreds of dollars when it's for a car. I did have to drill into the old case to break it open. It was much more difficult than most people go through to do it.

It feels like it took me way to long to move a chair from my craft area to my living room, but sometimes life is like that with neurodiversity. There are sometimes just too many little steps in between A and B to get something done quickly. Next up was relocating the rug from there into my bedroom and moving the rug from in there to be under the chair I moved then moving the storage bench from the living room to the craft room. After that, I needed to do a bookshelf reorg as I had new books to put away. I thought I may go back to fully alphabetical instead of having one unit for permanent and the other for TBRs, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that or not. Like, had I really given this last change a solid chance before deciding to change it up again?

I got the rug switched into my bedroom. My craft desk was on top of it and that was one of the "little" steps in the way to doing this part. I found the sticky things to set it in place on my bedroom floor then vaccuumed it. As soon as I put it in the space I felt like this was where it should have been all along.

I ordered a better foot thing for under my work desk and I planned to use the other cushion-like one in the living room for watching TV.

Gaming & Streaming

I'm working on a resort area at my Minecraft base. It features little cabins that look like fruits and vegetables because they are fun to make. I don't know what to name the place yet, but I'm enjoying making it. I have a carrot cabin, and two unfinished buildings: a watermelon reception area and a pumpkin patch entertainment hall.

Goal Setting & Tracking

Arts & Crafts: Fix the table runner project. (100%)
Decluttering & Minimalism: Clean the condo. (15%)
Gaming & Streaming: Work on a resort in Minecraft. (10%)
Lifestyle & Sports: Try a tap class. (100%)
Movies & Television: See Alien Romulus. (100%)
Music & Songwriting: Nothing for this week.
Reading & Writing: Work on the horror screenplay. (100%)

Lifestyle & Sports

Due to the Labour Day long weekend, there was no softball this week. On Wednesday, I tried a tap dance class and I loved it. The school I found is very LGBTQ+ friendly and tap is so fun. It's basically a mix of African and Irish dance styles, so there are similarities to hip hop and highland dance within it, as well as, the classic, very white Hollywood, Fred Astaire type. They do them all there. Due to my softball schedule, I won't be back until halfway through September, but that gives me time to get shoes that fit me properly.

I'll be having a pretty active fall this year. As one softball league is ending, another is beginning. Getting Started League for curling begins at the end of September. I'll be doing tap dance when I can as well. Hopefully, all of that activity will lead to some weight loss. 

This week was partly about getting ready for all of that. Fall softball is with the other queer league in Ottawa and I'm excited to be playing on a team with several friends and I'm looking forward to making a couple of new ones too. I missed playing time in the regular season due to the rotator cuff and I'm glad to be getting a second chance. I got some black shirts and a black hat with Wednesday on it. It's an Addams Family hat. The league is on Thursdays and I think it'll be fun if that messes with some peeps.

I'm testing a colouring shampoo out in purple. I stopped dying my hair partly because it was so messy. Since this is a shampoo, it goes on much cleaner and doesn't drip all over. It was easy to rinse down my drain as well. It's supposed to be very good at covering greys.

 

It went OK, but it ultimately needs more coats to cover well in my opinion. The nice thing is that it's a shampoo, so it's way less messy. It takes about the same amount of time as dye, but it's easier to prevent it from getting on everything else in my condo.

Movies & Television

I finished the Stardust Crusaders season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure this week and Episode 44 broke me for a bit. I'm heart broken. What a journey that whole season was. So much character growth in Jotaro especially. 

I gave up on Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I just found it too damned boring. I thought it would get better once Worf was there, but I cared even less about those episodes. I stuck in until about halfway through season 4 despite how painfully dull episode after episode about space politics was. I've since switched to Voyager and I don't care that people say Deep Space 9 is better because it hardly had any real sci-fi, exploration, variety, etc that I've come to expect in a Star Trek series. There were too many episodes about things like war that I don't want to spend my time watching. Overall, it became too much about the Klingons for me and I agree with this reddit post on how dull of a culture they actually have.

I saw Alien: Romulus on the weekend with friends. While waiting to meet up with them, I ran into other friends, which was a bit weird for a second because my brain was like, "I know one of you lives in this part of the city, but I didn't expect to actually run into you, so I did not immediately recognize you. Also, I only see you all at sport things." Context and neurodiversity is fun sometimes like that. It was good chatting with them for a bit until I found my other friends. The movie was excellent except for a brief bit of sus CGI near the end. It's not explicitly connected to any other story lines, but there is enough there to subtly infer that things that happened in Covenant could have resulted in the situation this group finds themselves in. Sometimes subtle is the better way to go with a story.

Music & Songwriting

I haven't been actively working on anything. I'm just exposing myself to different styles and combinations.

Reading & Writing

I've fixed the scene in my screenplay. I had hoped I could get it done by the end of this month, but I'm unsure 3-5 pages per day is reasonable as I shake the rust off and handle other life demands. Technically, I have until sometime in October, but the earlier the submission, the less it costs to submit.

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