January 1, 2017

 This morning I set my alarm kind of early but then ignored it because I wanted to sleep. I found that my alarm apparently shuts off automatically after an hour and fifty-nine minutes. At least that's when the music shut off. You would think it would be at the two hour mark but I guess not.

While I was still in bed I finished reading a book called The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. It lived up to its title. It was basically about a kid getting trapped in the basement of a library by a creepy old dude who wants to force him to memorize some books because he plans on eating the kid's brain and brains filled with knowledge taste better. Sounded like an interesting concept but it was just weird. I'm glad it was more of a novella than a novel. The thing I liked most was the physical design of the book.

Today I started playing Farming Simulator 15 and that is what I did for most of the day. I had avoided the Farming Simulator games for several years now because I was worried they would be a huge time sink and I couldn't afford that, especially during grad school. But now I have some free time so I decided it was time to jump in. And it lives up to my expectations. It's a very tedious game and I like it. You can kind of just zone out while driving back and forth across a field, trying to go in a straight line.

I went through all the tutorials and and then started the career mode. I got four tractors, a harvester, and some things to attach to the tractor. I also started with three fields. Over the course of the day I cultivated all three fields, planted crops, and sold two of my tractors so that I could afford a sprayer for fertilizer, which I then used to spray my fields. I think that means I drove back and forth across each field three separate times, but I'm cool with that. Eventually I can hire help to do all the field work but at the moment I am enjoying all the zoning out tedious stuff.

Tonight I made pasta, using one of my new pots that I got for Christmas. It's an oval shape instead of circular which is going to take some getting used to. I like it but it is kind of a pain when it comes to cleaning it in the sink. To the pasta I added a little jar of pesto, that I also got for Christmas. At some point I would like to make my own pasta and my own pesto but for now I'm cool using pasta in a bag and pesto from a jar.

I recorded an audio version of my journal tonight. I tried it awhile ago and quickly lost interest. We'll see how long it lasts this time. My main reason for starting again is that now that I am living on my own, I don't do a lot of talking when I'm not at work. So on weekends, I can go an entire day without talking. It would be two if I didn't have to go to my Mom's to do laundry on Saturday. Goig a day without talking isn't a bad thing in theory but it can be a bit annoying when I go to work on Monday and have to answer the phone first thing or talk to people and my voice doesn't work very well. So, if I at least speak long enough on Sunday to record my audio journal, my voice will get a little use and be better prepared to handle interacting with people on Monday. That's the goal anyway. Tonight I just plugged in a microphone and started talking. I would like to improve the quality going forward, concel out some of the background noise and whatnot. I'm also thinking about maybe turning it into a video so that I can save it to YouTube as a private video, which would serve as a back-up. So maybe playing Farming Simulator 15 where I can just drive around a field and, which doesn't take up a lot of brain power, leaving me the ability to ramble about my day. We'll see. Making a video might turn into more of a chore than I want it to be, which would be easy incentive to stop making audio recordings all together. So yeah, we'll see.