Hey everyone, Jesus is risen and it's time for all the fun things I've done. First, I'll talk about my Lent. For Lent I gave up white bread and opted for wheat bread or no bread, and this was quite the sacrifice for me since I REALLY like white and have it basically every day for lunch (peanut butter sandwich) and pretty regularly with dinner (hot dog or hamburger bun), and don't like wheat bread. Then with church we as a parish gave up donuts for our after mass fellowship, having just coffee and juice. We also for the past year have been collecting little prizes for the Easter egg hunt that we put on (lots of stuff from Chuck E Cheese). There's also "the April Fools prank" that happened with my utility bill. I check my balance on April 1st and expected my normal range of $100-200 normally around $125-150, but instead it was $1600. I call my utility company and they say "we noticed the implausible bill, we're looking into it, just pay what you normally do and the remainder will be sorted out next month." I'll also throw in Holy Thursday here, basically my boss let us leave a little early and we went to mass.
Good Friday was a rather low key day. We packed up the car with everything and dropped off at my in-laws for the weekend. Mskate and I joined my parents at their church for mass where we heard the passion according to John. After mass we went to my parents to do our Easter celebrations and making. Like every year, we we dyed eggs and made pretzels. I brought the vinegar and egg dying stuff, and this year was the first year where we had done enough egg dying and saving of materials where every egg dying set had it's own wire egg grabber, and I still had the specialty egg dying cups from previous year kits. We made some very nice deep color eggs. While making the eggs we rolled and twisted homemade pretzels. We used the normal premade bread dough like we do every year, and then we used this specialty pretzel dough that my parents got on a trip, in addition to a gluten free recipe that mom wanted to try. The gluten free didn't work out well (it would be better if we used a dough hook mixer instead of hand egg beaters), but the other pretzels worked out great. For dinner we had French toast and some Easter candy. We also got the Easter baskets my parents put together for us. Mine was mostly peeps and resee's, but there was also a lottery ticket and some other small things. Mskate got peeps and jelly beans. The rest of the night was pretty calm, just watching some TV and such.
Holy Saturday was eventful. I had to get my allergy shot, so I did that pretty early in the morning, and then went to Wendy's for breakfast since I couldn't have a white bread bagel at my in-laws like I normally do when I see them. I had a breakfast burrito. After eating breakfast I decided I was going to do some stuff on my laptop, and I didn't have enough room at the table because grandma-in-law's crystal cake tray was in the way. I picked it up from the top to move it, and that was a big mistake, because that caused it to break and slice my left ring ringer REALLY bad. I won't go into the details, but I'm bleeding bad and we wrap it up really good with like 6 bandaids. I said "I need to go to urgent care, because this hurts like a ***********" (which is not really in character for me, I don't swear much in my productions just because I want to keep it safe for work, I just don't swear much, so that just says how bad it was). I drive myself to the urgent care, check in, and am seething in pain. When I get into the room the doctor asks how I am and I said "I could be better, I sliced my finger really bad on a glass tray." She asks me if I probably need stitches or if she needs to investigate, and I say "I need stitches." She starts to take my bandages off and it hurts because she's pressing in the wrong way, so now I have to take it off. One of the bandaids is stuck to itself and doesn't want to come off, so I pull out the scissors on my pocket knife to cut it in such a way to make it weak, and the doctor said "oh please don't hurt yourself any more;" I didn't though, I'm an eagle scout and am very skilled in how to use a pocket knife. Once I got the bandaids off it starts bleeding and hurting really bad. She gives me gauze to put on it and apply pressure until the doctor that does the sutures could come in. I'm kind of making a lot of noise pains and one of the nurses comes in and asks if I'm OK. I say I'm in a lot of pain and he offers me a pain shot in the butt. I got it and it started not hurting as bad after a couple minutes. The suture doctor comes in and kind of struggled to get it to stop bleeding enough to make a decision on how to fix it. There was a lot of cauterization and special clotting gauze, and at one point she had me hold my hand above my head for as long as I could for 10 minutes (a thing I remember from my time in the scouts with first aid), and I held it for the whole 10 minutes which she found impressive. Eventually I had 3 stitches, and a tetanus booster. What was really rough was the nerve block the doctor had to do when fixing me up, that was some super pain, probably scaring people. All the while mskate keeps trying to call me to see where I am, and didn't want to hear "I'm still at the doctor, I'll call you later." She kept asking me why I thought it would be a good idea to hold the tray like that and didn't want to accept "I've never had to move one of these before, I didn't know it was weak like that," and kept trying to lecture me about how I made a bad mistake and I'm like "woman I know that, 2 hours of agonizing pain has taught me quite a lesson and was more than enough punishment for breaking grandma's favorite cake tray." I get home and then just rest for a while.
After about an hour IRA and I went to the Super Mario Galaxy Movie. We were going to go to the 11 AM show, but then my finger had other ideas, so instead we went to the 2:30 PM movie. Mskate ordered us online tickets because it was approaching a sold out show. When we got there we were going to maybe get snacks, but the concessions line was full, the snaking line went all the way to the entrance of the queue. IRA and I both said "I don't need snacks that bad." Our show was in theater 7, and we went to theater 7, or at least we thought so. We're sitting there watching the previews and then the studio logo came up, Amazon studios and MGM. "Wait, that doesn't make sense, this is Illumination and Universal," and then the opening shot of Project Hail Marry started playing (which I had seen earlier in the week). I look over to IRA and say "I think we're in the wrong theater," and instead of being at screen 7 we were at screen 1, which because they do fancy numbering the 1 looked like a 7. Thankfully we didn't miss anything, just some more previews. It was a pretty funny movie, full of references and simple "good vs evil." However, it doesn't leave much for non-fans, which is why the critics don't like it.
In the evening it was time for the big egg fundraiser. But first, there was a tornado warning. Everyone's phones got an emergency notification, and then the sirens went off, so all of us had to go to the basement. IRA has a little TV corner with some chairs for the summer when it's hot, and we all found chairs. I pulled up a local news station and we just waited it out. This was an hour before we were going to start hiding the eggs. Come the time for the eggs was fun. There were 3 groups with 6-7 houses each. I reached out to my old boy scout troop to see if they would be interested in service hours (because this was all for charity) and we got some takers. I told them to come get their assignment at 7 but mskate wanted us to start hiding at 8, so we just had some conversations about scouting for an hour, which was pretty cool because we'd mention the names of some of the boys that were new when I was aging out, and they were the older boys to one of the boys when he was new who was now and older boy himself. There were 2 takers, a 15 year old who is approaching eagle and a new cross over who was still getting used to being a boy scout, and their parents. I told them all that they had to do, and gave them a choice on which 2 houses they wanted to do, and then mom and I did 2 houses. Afterwards we joined mskate and her dad to do a house, and then we did the neighbors by her parents house. Mskate was a bit uncertain about how the boy scouts would do, but then they did great and the young boy's mom told me he's looking forward to doing it again next year, so it sounds like one of his first service hour project was a success. Now that we have at least one more team (probably more) with the scouts, we're willing to take on more houses next year.
Easter Sunday was a big day. Halleluiah, He is risen! I have a bagel with peanut butter and it was so good. Mskate and I get ready and go to mass with my parents at the local church with the earliest mass. Nothing spectacular to speak of, and we didn't get a call about coffee and donuts having problems so we assume it went well. brunch with the in-laws went well, and the Easter baskets were quite impressive. I got a little lego, seas candy, a Babylon Bee movie on DVD (which apparently has 4 hilarious ways to watch it), and some pokemon Hershey bars. We just relaxed until it was time to go to my parents.
My parents were kind of weird this year. Instead of the normal big family celebration that went on for hours with lots of singing, it was my immediate family (parents and brother) with mskate and I the entire time with 3 people (aunt, and 2 of my mom's friends) popping in separately. It was good to see my aunt because she doesn't come visit often (we normally have to go to her) and we used to spend Easter with that side of the family growing up. Dinner was good, especially the blessed bread and ham. We're Polish and do the blessing of the baskets tradition, and mom and dad got ham and bread blessed. Mom confused her friend that stayed for dinner, she made the announcement that we would be eating in 10 minutes and to go to the bathroom now before it started, which is something we had to do when we had our old people, but unfortunately 3/4 of them passed and the accordion friend still standing is, well, not standing all that well as she's recovering from a surgery and didn't want to come, so it was kind of "why are you announcing it like that." I remember that was kind of a thing with the first couple of holidays after my uncle passed, since we would have to set up the dining room and serving around being able to get his wheel chair in the room (which was a bit awkward) and then we were like "oh, I guess we don't have to do that now." Whatever. After dinner mom's friend left, and since we didn't have singing I set up my laptop on the TV to watch our Disney vacation videos. Because their TV is 4K and my gaming laptop is capable of 4K video the laptop and TV wanted to do a 4K output, but my cable is a cheap 15 foot basic information cable (and so not 4K capable), so there was a lot of screwing around with settings to get it to work. I almost just set-up our 480p projector just so I wouldn't have to deal with it. One of mom's other friends stopped in during this, and we also had desert which was lemon pie and chocolate sweet rolls my aunt made (which was a recipe my grandma used to make based on what my dad said when talking about it). After all this we just went back to the in-laws for the night.
Things weren't over come Holy Monday, because we went to the different stores for after easter sales. We got some plastic eggs and prizes from Walmart and Target, including some big prizes that we're going to use as "premium options." We now estimate we have about 600 eggs and maybe 100 prizes. Some of the eggs came with candy, so we took the candy out and are going to donate that to the church food pantry. After that we went to the accordion friend's house to visit her after Easter. I told her that I missed having her at Easter, so hopefully that gives her some drive to come to the next one. It was just a calm little visit. After the visit we went home and I fixed the auto pay on my storage unit, and then I unpacked, went to Chuck E Cheese for the first time in about half a week, and here I am typing out. Tomorrow I'll do some organization of things we got. Well, this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.
