July 11, 2017

 I think I forgot to mention may unintentional jalapeno peanut butter sandwich for lunch yesterday. After cutting up a jalapeno for my dinner the night before I apparently forgot to wash my cutting board. Yesterday morning when I was making my lunch, the bread apparently picked up some of the oil from the pepper. While I was eating my lunch I started to notice a very subtle heat on the tip of my tongue. It was a very odd sensation.

There was something else I forgot to mention but I have since forgotten it again. Such is life.

Waking up this morning sucked but I managed it as always. I took a different route to work and I think I might keep it for a while. Until I forget and turn the wrong way. It is more straight forward and I think it's about as fast, maybe a little faster, than my current route. Both are slower than my old route but I'm not dealing with that construction so I will continue going with alternates.

Today was a very quiet, slow day. Most of my morning was spent pulling out prize drawing tickets and counting them. It was just so slow and I was tired so there was very little motivation to do anything requiring much brain power.

This afternoon I started working on a personalized reading list because they keep coming in. It is a very generic request, which can make it surprisingly difficult to pick books. I think I end up thinking about it too much. I should take the stance that if all they do is check boxes and don't provide any detail about what they actually like, then it is fair game to pick the first books I come across that meet those broad categories. But I also know the system is flawed and it is not the patron's fault that or request form sucks at the moment. I am really looking forward to when the librarian in charge of revamping the form is able to actually revamp the form.

Other than that, I helped the occasional patron, including one of my favorite old guys who comes in to get help with different ebook services. He's got a good sense of humor about it and he's fun to help. I also talked with the teen librarian because she is back from her vacation, and gave her crap about being gone for the phone interview and the photo shoot for the magazine.

I also ran into the music teacher from the school I used to work at and we ended up having a long conversation about all sorts of stuff. I'm always a fan of a good conversation.

Oh, maybe the other thing I forgot to mention was my flower getting fried yesterday in the 100+ degree weather. I gave it two big cups of water last night and one this morning, which had it looking better by the time I got home from work today. I'm glad I didn't kill it.

This evening was another one involving my struggle with VR. It's like an abusive relationship. It puts me through so much grief but then shows me a little glimmer of hope. My main issue tonight was my controllers not wanting to connect. It seems to be a common issue and one that everyone and their mother has a different solution to fix. I think it is a computer issue and not something that I can fix by messing with the controllers or the software, because I think I tried at least five or six different things to no avail. I think the only thing that worked was shutting down my computer. But even that wasn't reliable because it worked that one time but not any of the other times.

The one time I got the controllers working I played the bow and arrow game with the scary red robots. It works much better on my desktop and I could look around without dropping a bunch of frames and making me feel a tad nauseous. I also found out that I could teleport around the map, which let me find a location with my back to a wall so I didn't have to worry about them coming up behind me. And the sound worked, which was really helpful. I still had a couple scary moments because even with the sound working there were some Weeping Angel moments where they weren't there one second and the next they were about to hit me.

I ended the night by jumping into Elite Dangerous because I didn't need the controllers for that. The first attempt was a fail because the headset was somehow oriented in the wrong direction and I couldn't figure out a way to fix that other than redoing the SteamVR process. So I redid the setup and all was well. And it was freaking worth it. When you get into the game window, you are standing in the hanger with your ship behind your. At least I think it was my ship. I could be wrong on that but there is definitely a ship there. Once you're in the game you're actually sitting in your seat and you can look all around the cockpit or cabin. I could even get up and walk around a little bit but I have a small ship so that wasn't very exciting. But the rest of it was. It was so cool. I had to look to either side to see my menus. I could look down to see my character's body, which moves the controllers just how I'm moving them, which is kind of freaky. I could also look up and behind me out the top canopy windows to get a better idea of where I was related to other objects. It's crazy. I launched from the station I was in and I can definitely see myself getting sick flying around. I did a few barrel rolls and that was about enough for me. I think the problem is that my eyes are seeing it but my body isn't experiencing it, which is confusing. I am hoping I can keeping playing around with it and maybe build up a tolerance. I'm just glad I'm an explorer at the moment and not involved in combat-centered stuff. It would be badass but I don't think my head is ready for dogfighting.

While I was waiting on VR stuff, and taking a break from VR troubleshooting so I didn't break a controller, I edited my dating app bio. I haven't gotten any hits yet, thankfully, because I don't know that I am prepared for that part of the online dating experience, but I wanted to make my bio better, which I think I accomplished.

And now I keep getting distracted by all the random things, so I am going to stop writing this so I can record my audio journal and go to bed.