TroytlePower

Last year my wife went on a trip through her school, and this weekend she went back up to Bend, OR, to get together with the group of girls she went with for an anniversary celebration of that trip and to participate in Bend’s Pride celebration. I stayed home, which meant I had the house to myself from Thursday evening to Monday.

The first thing I did was stop at the store Thursday afternoon to buy everything I needed to make a big ole pot of spicy bean chili. This would come to be my primary sustenance through the weekend, and it was delicious.

Over the next few days, I played a lot of Ocarina of Time over on my twitch channel, finishing off the last few dungeons and defeating Ganon. This was bittersweet for me because it was nice to knock off another game in my revisit of Zelda (after the original and A Link to the Past), but it was sad to finish revisiting a game that I remember so fondly from when I was a kid. I’m still playing through Minish Cap over on the podcast, but I think I’ll probably start up Majora’s Mask soon, too (maybe even on tomorrow’s stream).

Once I was finished with Zelda, I started playing Rage 2, which I’d checked out from my local library rather than purchasing it, because I really wasn’t sure if it’s over the top violence and absurdity would be for me. What I didn’t realize was that this game was made by the same studio that put together the Mad Max game I’d played previously, and had absolutely loved. Rage 2’s driving segments (so far) don’t feel quite as kinetic as that game’s, and it’s combat sequences feel more similar to Doom, but I’m having a lot of fun with it. I’ve returned it to the library for now (in favor of a few other games I want to try out), but I’ll definitely be revisiting it.

Now, on to the productive stuff! Our house originally came in to the family as a place for my dad to stay a few days a week to be closer to work, then I started staying here for the same reason a few days a week, and now my wife and I are here full time while my dad is still doing the few days a week thing. When I started coming down over a year ago, the garage was a bit disorganized and a bit dirty. Since then, the garage has gotten way less organized and way, way dirtier. This weekend, knowing that my wife was out of town, I completely gutted the thing. It took over ten hours, but I got things way more organized, took out a bunch of trash, swept out an upsetting amount of dirt and dust and dead bugs, and even got a little exercise area set up with my new exercise bike and a monitor to play games on.

The garage never should have gotten to the state it was in, but it felt darn good to do something as productive as cleaning out that whole space while my wife was out of town, as well as eating a bunch of chili and playing video games.

And on top of the positive feelings from checking such a massive item off the to-do list, for the past four days, I’ve spent at least 45 minutes every day on that darn bike, and it feels great!