May 6, 2018

Today was pretty laid back. A fairly uneventful birthday.

This morning I woke up and read in bed for awhile. I spent the rest of the morning eating Cheerios and watching videos. After lunch I ended up spending most of my morning laying in my darkened bedroom, under the ceiling fan, listening to Avril Lavigne, falling in and out of sleep. It was 84 degrees in my house and my bedroom was relatively cool. I also didn't have the motivation to do anything else, which was probably related to the heat. I wanted to play a video game but nothing sounded appealing. Laying on my bed, however, sounded very appealing.

I took a shower around 4:00PM and then headed to my Mom's house. We went to the Chinese buffet for dinner because that is kind of a tradition. The patron I had to talk to the other week about making noise in the computer lab was there with two small kids. We didn't acknowledge each other, but I find it surprising that he has two kids, and that he is fighting to keep them, because he seemed more interested in the TV than paying attention to them.

The best part of the buffet was when a dad was helping a little boy fill up his plate. The dad pointed out the pizza and the boy got excited and turned around to yell at his sister that there was pizza. She said they had that last night and the boy turned back to his dad, suddenly annoyed, saying they had pizza last night, like all of a sudden it was unacceptable. It was funny.

After dinner we went back to my Mom's house, ate cake and ice cream, and I opened presents. It didn't really feel like it was my birthday so it felt kind of weird opening presents. My sister got me a couple muffin tins, which is pretty exciting, because now I can make cornbread muffins.

I got home around nine o'clock and returned my friend's phone call that I missed while at my Mom's house. We talked for about an hour about his truck project, cooking, woodworking, and random other things. I'm not great at initiating communication with any of my friends but I appreciate when they make the effort.

After that I played a little bit of CoD: WW2 just to get in a little bit of video game playing today. They weren't the best rounds of my life. The connection wasn't great and it seemed like everyone on the other team was either using snipers or shotguns. So it was a struggle to get across the tiny Shipment map because of the snipers, and then when I did, I ran into a shotgun. Kind of frustrating, but I managed to finish a few orders and contracts, so it wasn't terrible.

I set up a hike tomorrow after work with the academic librarian. It is definitely outside of my comfort zone, for multiple reasons, but I need to get out of my comfort zone more often. Baby steps.