"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." T. S. Eliot
Big Ern was sad to learn that his grandparents were going home soon but he was happy to spend some more time with them.
I picked up a few of Mom's favorites to celebrate her birthday. During my childhood birthday parties the menu was often fried chicken and ice cream cake because those were her favorites. That made it easy to decide what to get this time, anyway.
A fun thing about Xbox Game Pass is it helps you to discover lots of little indie games that you might never have noticed otherwise.
Eating used to be a highlight of my day, and it's still pretty fun, but I think watching Ern eat might be my new favorite. Will he eat it? Throw it? Wear it? Nobody knows.
We're getting pretty good at rolling around.
Shoplifting has gotten bad enough that the Redmond Target has been turned into a giant vending machine that you can walk around inside.
I finished Starfield. Spoilers!
The end of the game is kind of cool. You meet sort of the entity at the center of the universe who invites you to die and be reborn with super powers in another universe similar to your own. Like a multiverse situation. Most of them are just like your universe but you can make different choices for different outcomes, but others are wild like one character is a houseplant instead of a person, or everyone on your team is a child version of their normal self. I didn't mess around with it too much but I thought it was an inventive way to increase replay value.
It was a bittersweet ending because by choosing to go to another universe you die in your old one, and your friends can't come with you.
It's been getting very pumpkiny at the Big Ern household.
We got some reading material from the library to really get in the mood.
Ernie had been eating with more adult spoons but he couldn't ever get the food that was in the bowl of the spoon, if that makes sense. So Lydia got him these flat head spoons that are easier for him to eat off of. Tonight he dined on homemade squash soup and smooshed up bananas.
Eating can get pretty messy so after dinner it was tubby time.
Ern had a fantastic mullet developing. I'm very proud.
We made an appearance at Redmond Town Center for our daily $20 in giftcards walk. Money for nothin', gifts for free.
After his highness was in bed I played a bit of Starfield. There's a mechanic where you can take other people's ships by force and then add them to your fleet. An amusing bug was that whenever I spent any time in that ship there would still be dead bodies from its former owners strewn about.
Something beautiful happened today. Lydia was holding Ernie up above her and he spit up and it got in her mouth. He was spitting up the milk that Lydia had fed him earlier from her own body. It was a very circle of life/water cycle wonderful part of nature. These two are pretty gross and I'm glad I'm not involved.
One of the cool parts of Seattle's Stranger Things: The Experience was the end where they let you out of the experience part into a retro 80s mall type place with booze, free arcade games, and lots of photo ops. There were a lot of fun bright lights there as well and I have a little friend who likes bright lights a lot. Well they started letting people get into this area for free and I liked it so much I thought I should take a second bite of the apple.
The place was about to close and move to a new city, and Zoe hadn't seen it yet either so we took her along.
Ernie journeyed to the Upside Down multiple times.
We had some classic Chinese-American cuisine at Tai Tung in the International District.
I let Lydia part this poor boy's hair a few times and she keeps giving him these horrendous middle parts. He looks like Dwight Schrute.
Lately I've been playing Firewatch which is about a guy who works in a remote area in a fire tower. The loneliness and isolation take their toll and he starts seeing weird things happening around him. His only contact is by radio with the lady who works in a neighboring tower. It's suspicious because I've listened to a podcast serial with the exact same premise.
