I did some activity on a holiday I don’t celebrate, and Garmin rewarded me with this pretty badge.
There is also a Lunar New Year’s Eve one; I earned that one too.
I smugly thought that I had earned a badge every year, but I see I missed 2021. January 25, 2020, I did not yet have my Garmin watch.
Here’s to the new year.
Hank Green, of the Vlogbrothers, was killing time on a video (for algorithm reasons?) and so played through some of the games he plays. One of them was TimeGuessr. I was intrigued.
In this game, you are given a photo and then must guess when and where the photo was taken. It’s quite fun.
And I did really well my first time out, like here where I was only 241.4 meters off! (Though 5 years off.)
And like this where I was only 4 years off, but amazingly 12.1 miles away even though I had no idea what I was looking at except it was somewhere in Asia that used a lot of English in their signage.
I don’t have a lot of room in my schedule for daily games, but I would like to dip into this one now and again.
Matt and I bought tickets for our first outing to the Twilight Theater Company. That’s our neighborhood theater; it’s an 11 minute walk.
Jeri Haile was great as Kendra Ellis-Connor. She is apparently new to Portland. I look forward to seeing her in more things.
The play gave us a lot to talk about on the walk home. It was a good evening at the theater.
Matt came home with an exciting prize from his gym:
We took the official picture and then both realized, “Wait. It’s been way more than 500 classes that he has attended at MeFitness.”
We concluded that he had attended 500 classes since the switch of the scheduling system. Well done, Matt, for attending 500 classes beginning from a random point in time.
I was at Kaiser getting some imaging done, and had fun comparing and contrasting my Tern bike to the one already parked.
I observed that the other bike did not have the folding handlebar mechanism and that the light was down on the front fender rather than on the handlebar.
I also checked out the locking method. I use three: a front-wheel lock, a U-lock and cable, and a U-lock on the back wheel that also holds my helmet.
The other bike used wo U-locks and two cables. It looked like it worked well and was fast to set up.
Getting things done didn’t come as naturally to me in 2024 (and 2023, (and 2022, and 2021, if we are being honest)) as it had before. Early in 2024, I made two sheets of basic stuff, one for my stuff, and one to stay on top of my aunt’s finances.
The sheets took probably 10 minutes to make, and they worked very well. You will notice the additions that appeared as the year went on. The delimitation for books and movies was particularly important. It’s really hard to catch those up in one session at the end of the month so switching up the goal to the 15th and the last day helped.
With my aunt’s stuff, it was nice to cross things off as I canceled things no longer needed.
You will notice that I gave myself the last week in December off. A just reward after a year of good work.
I’ve drafted new sheets for 2025. Let’s see if they work as well as these did.
Thad passed along this unique puzzle, and Matt puzzled away, completing it in a short amount of time. (Some evening game time was sacrificed. And perhaps some normal bedtimes.)
The puzzle mechanism has a surprise, which has not been photographed so the vast readers of this blog don’t have the surprise spoiled. But I was glad I got to see it.
Methinks someone is making fun a bit of our reward culture….
Why yes! It’s 2025! That means it’s time for a new five-year standard diary.
Look how shiny it is!
This brings my time using the standard diary total to 20 full years.
Usually my favorite part about the five-year diary is reading back through the entries of the previous years as I complete each day’s entry. But 2020 through 2024 were rough, and I didn’t often read back as I filled in the 2024 days.
Here’s hoping 2025-2029 will bring smoother sailing.
I read the movie schedule incorrectly and the first movie of my planned double feature was not playing for another week. I had already bought a ticket for the second movie in the double feature at a different theater, so I had time to kill.
I needed a place to hang out where it was warm and there was access to a bathroom. Where could I go for 2+ hours? After mulling it over, I remembered the Lloyd Center, the first shopping mall built in Oregon.
(But actually I only remembered the Lloyd Center because I checked the movie theater outside of the mall to see if I could catch an early movie at that theater. The answer: not any movie I hadn’t already seen or was interested in seeing.)
The Lloyd Center is in a state of change. All of its anchor stores have closed, and the only chain stores left are Forever 21 (it spans two floors!) and Barnes and Noble.
(Correction: The website says there is both a Hot Topic and a Claire’s; I remember seeing the Claire’s, but don’t remember the Hot Topic. The main point is that only a smattering of the retail spaces are filled with national chain stores.)
Let’s see what else there is to see.
I drove past hundreds of empty parking spaces in the street-level covered parking. When I finally found the place people were parking, it was blocked off by a chain, and I couldn’t figure out the alternate entrance. So I ended driving up a ramp (on the wrong side, as it turned out) and finding parking on the upper deck near where the Sears used to be. As I walked in, I heard much more ambient chatter than I thought I would hear.
Turns out, there was a card trading convention on the first floor! Many people were buying, selling, and chatting about cards.
Of course, to take over all this space, all the stores behind them need to be closed. And they are. One of them is the old Victoria’s Secret where I have attended a few NWCTC plays.
The medical directory lists two providers and the mall’s offices. In the early aughts, there were many professionals occupying the third story of the mall.
As the chains have fled, The Lloyd Center has offered attractive leases to small businesses. Floating World Comics is here, as is a place to buy lego.
There’s also a skate school. A school, not a rink!
Speaking of rinks, the ice rink is still going strong. It even snows intermittently. Speaking of, OPB had a fun story about one of the Zamboni drivers in December. It’s worth a listen. Or read. They have a transcript.
One thing that is an intermittent bummer about life in this particular big city is that I have no easy access to a department store. This used to be a Macy’s at the Lloyd Center, and there was another Macy’s downtown. Sometimes I just want to go to a place where I can buy a sweater and kitchen shears. And such a place is nowhere near me.
The third floor had a variety of interesting things. Beau Monde, the haircutting school I went to for many years is at the Lloyd Center now. They used to be down on SW 12th. If you want to play bridge, you can learn at the Portland Bridge Club.
Across from the Bridge Club is another club: the Chess Club. When I walked by there was a tournament, so there were many families hanging about.
The food court still has a few eating options. It also hosted some overflow chess action.
After walking the whole building, I hung out for the rest of the time at Barnes and Noble, where they had only the old edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. The new edition came out in the summer, and I hope no one buys that previous edition because it’s expensive.
I also learned that Barnes and Noble is part toy store, which makes sense because the Lloyd Center’s KB Toys closed years ago.
Overall, it was a very interesting and pleasant visit.
