Saturday, June 20 2020

Dear Journal,

Happy Saturday, everyone! I had a slow start this morning. When you wake up at the same time as Rodney, there is little hope for getting anything done until he is changed, dressed, fed, and contently hanging out on the living room couch. And as long as I was winding up for the day with him, I also decided to start a load of wash, take a shower, and cook a mean Saturday morning breakfast featuring some bacon, peaches, and some French toast-ified homemade sourdough bread. Lekker.

With breakfast out of the way and a steaming cup of coffee sitting in front of my keyboard, it's time to write. Let me first kick things off my giving EA props for announcing that they are resurrecting the original Skate video game series.

And just in case I didn't find this news on my own, five other people I went to college with all independently notified me of this exciting news. Anyone who went to college with me would testify that I've sunk a lot of time into this game, and we had a lot of good memories huddled in my dorm room watching me command a shaggy looking skateboarding avatar of myself down half pipes, canyons, and over the side of buildings. This is exciting news.

"So does that mean you'll be spending a lot more time in the studio with me?" laughed Marissa.

The answer is 'yes', so long as I can hold my breath long enough to plunk down X hundred dollars one whatever 2020 gaming console this title will be exclusive to. I'm not a fan of buying a new gaming console just to play one game, but as the saying goes, skate or die.

Sip. So what are you working on this weekend? I spent most of yesterday writing code. You see, I'm in a race against the weekly project board to finish an ambition rewrite of our virtual chore wheel.

"I thought I was just about to wrap up, but I found a pretty gross bug," I told Marissa. "I found that when you change the name of a chore, it changes the name for all of them."

"Oh, that's not good," Marissa laughed.

"I don't know how I worked on this all day without noticing I had ten copies of 'Clean the microwave'. But it's kind of exciting," I continued. "I don't mind a good bug to chew on."

And I squashed said bug this morning while waiting for Rodney to change out of his pajamas. How's that for multitasking? The new site is coming along great. Although, I'm a little rusty with JavaScript. Regrettably I still write JavaScript like it's 2014. And even though that was only six years ago, six years is probably about fifty years in the frontend web development fad timeline.

As I wrapped up my coding binge, Rodney and Marissa returned from running errands, and I shifted focus to tidying up the kitchen and starting on dinner. With Rodney's help, we whipped up a Sfincione pizza in record time, and we even had some time to put together a new dessert.

I stumbled upon this new dessert recipe while looking for a way to use leftover sourdough bread. The random blog I found called the creation "Sweet Strawberry Crostini" - just some toasted sourdough bread smeared with mascarpone cheese and diced mint and topped with a few scoops of lightly sugared diced strawberries.

"I have a problem," I said to Marissa in a mock-anxious tone. "This desert won't fit on the tray. I have an extra and I don't know what to do with it."

Marissa laughed, and after carefully placing Charles Mingus in his crib, she took a bite.

"Oh," she said, looking surprised. "It's refreshing."

"Here - let me try a bite," I said, reaching for the wedge." We stood for a moment in silence, chewing and thinking.

"Are you sure it doesn't just taste like toothpaste and strawberries?" I laughed. Marissa's face changed, like the thought was causing her to retch.

"Well now that you said toothpaste, I don't think I can enjoy these anymore," she laughed.

"I knew there was something wrong when you described them as refreshing," I replied. "I don't think that's a good dessert word. That's a toothpaste word."

"You have a whole tray of those?" laughed Marissa. "What are we going to do with a whole tray of toothpaste dessert?"

"Eh, we'll just pick all the strawberries off," I said, licking my fingers clean. "This was a risky choice - just a random, untrusted dessert recipe off the Internet - no sweat."

After finishing dinner and putting Rodney to bed, Marissa and I knocked out some new video edits, then headed downstairs to crack open a bottle of wine. We ordered a new bottle of Chardonnay from the Internet, and having a whole snack, wine, and movie pairing planned, we were excited to wrap up Friday with some mild and fancy debauchery.

"Let's read a little about this wine first," I said, squinting at the label and punching the winery into google. "Lemon and citrus notes... Spanish American war... pH... color density... wow, we might be in over our head here."

"Let's just drink it," laughed Marissa. She buried her nose into her glass, took a deep whiff and looked up with a silly smile. "This is a white."

We polished off the bottle of Chardonnay with a bowl of popcorn, chasing it down with some licorice, getting as much through the movie Sideways as we could before we were nodding off on the couch. It was a good day.

Hope you also had a fun Friday night. And I hope you have a great Saturday too. Thanks for stopping by today.