Hey everyone, not exactly a "big adventure" here, but it is kind of a crazy set of sequences that happened over labor day weekend. First on Thursday there was a major storm where I live, super rain and tornado warnings, all while I was at the doctor. Right after I finished my appointment and checked out, everyone's cell phones went off with emergency alerts, so I hung out at the doctors and pulled up my local news channels on my phone. It was kind of crazy. I didn't suffer any damage, but a lot of people did, which will lead into big things of the weekend.
The main thing for the weekend was mskate's great aunt's funeral. She had dementia and was failing. One of my favorite memories of her is Easter 2024 where she and my grandma, who also had dementia, just talked the entire time and had a lot of fun together, enjoying each other's confused company. She passed earlier this week and her funeral was held on Friday. After my doctor's appointment I went up to mskate's parent's area and went to the church where we were having the funeral. Everyone was setting up the social area for the luncheon and my job was to scope out and test out the live streaming set-up (because live streaming funerals for the family has kind of become my thing). Well, they had a lot of storms and it took out the power at the church, which meant everyone was setting up the decorations in the dark by flash light. The funny thing is her daughter took her to the dollar store before she went to assisted living to pick out the decorations she wanted for her funeral, and everyone was putting those up. For my thing I took my laptop up to the balcony of the church to see if it would work, and it was a good place to do a set-up, but the lack of power meant I wasn't able to get on the church wifi, or see what I was REALLY doing. I did some tests using different hot spots and they worked, but we were hoping that the power would come back in time for the funeral. After the test things were pretty low key, just watching movies with IRA.
OK, it's funeral day Friday, and the power is still out. I get to the church and there's no power, so I said "OK, I guess we can do this off battery," but my batteries were kind of low for some reason, so I went back to mskate's parents house and charged my laptop and video camera. Here's where things got weird, my video camera had 40 minutes of charge when I checked while it was charging and then let it charge another 20 minutes or so, but then when I got to the church it said 17 minutes of battery, which was really weird. I ask vikingpolak to see if he can get a battery backup, and our dad has one for his cpap, so both of them go to my parents house and get the battery backup like 10 minutes before the service starts. So because my video camera is basically dead I'm running the live stream off of my built in web cam, which being in the back row balcony seat is not great for the start of the funeral, but thankfully they get back quickly so I'm able to set up my camera and do a good feed. The funeral itself was pretty basic, but then right at the end my laptop battery decides to give out, so I have to plug my laptop into the power inverter on the battery backup and because the power draw was so great the power inverter was kind of whaling. In general though, it went off pretty well, just was a rather frustrating process of live streaming due to the lack of power.
The luncheon was pretty good, we had chicken, ribs, sausage and kraut, macaroni and cheese, potato wedges, bumpy cake, cookies, and some other thing. The funny thing is I had 2 plates of food because I kept hearing my grandma saying "you need to eat more." I guess one of the great aunt's things was punch bowls, so they had that. Can't say I've had "authentic punch" before, so that was kind of neat. Everyone else had a good time as well, and everyone was thanking me for the live stream. I didn't know a lot of people there, but there was one guy I went to high school with who kind of knew me and knew vikingpolak better (because they were the same age).
The afternoon was pretty low key, but around 3PM we went to see the Cars rerelease. For the 20th anniversary Disney gave it a wide rerelease, and IRA really wanted to see it because they had special popcorn buckets and drink cups; the popcorn bucket was Lightning McQueen and the drink cup was the Piston Cup. I'm pretty sure I saw this movie back when it was first released, but it's been so long and wasn't like a "core memory" so I don't remember seeing it in theaters. Since there was a local festival going on by our normal theater we went to one that used to be a cheap last run movie theater by my grandparents. We got to the theater and they only had the popcorn bucket. We still saw the movie, and got the jumbo bucket of popcorn that came with the novelty bucket, and I ended up eating most of the popcorn since IRA and mskate didn't want much. It was pretty fun watching the movie on the big screen. After the movie we went to another theater (one my grandparents took us to frequently and mom-in-law would take after school care kids too on field trips) to see if they had the cup, but they didn't. In a last ditch effort we went to the normal theater but with a twist. Because of the festival the parking lot was closed to normal parking (but you could park for $25), so I dropped IRA and mskate off close to the theater by pulling into a blocked off area so they could go in while I could get moving without causing , and then I drove around the square mile of where it's located so they could have enough time to wait in line. Thankfully they had the cup, so I drove around and got back to the same place I dropped them off, and got them to jump back in the van and got home. I had a single taco for dinner since I had so much popcorn earlier.
Saturday would have been a simple "go home" day, but I don't know if I would be writing this for pokematic's blog and not your 3 minutes if this didn't also happen. With all the storming, something must have hit the windshield of the company lease car, which caused a chip on the top of the windshield, that became quite the crack as it grew down the windshield that I first noticed after the funeral and just grew throughout the day. Since it's a company lease with full insurance, including windshield replacement with Safelite, I called and set up an appointment at my in-laws, so we're hanging out until the tech comes and replaces the windshield and calibrates the safe driving features.
After getting home mskate went to sell raffle tickets for our church's Oktoberfest, and I went to chuck e cheese to use our fun pass. Recently they removed some games and put up signs saying "new games coming soon." Well, they added the new games, and they're really fun. There's a minions land the token game, a "knock the balls in the holes" game, an elephant ball drop game, the fidget spinner game, a "bounce the balls in the dog's mouth" game, a paw patrol "stop the spinner on a location" game, and my grandma's favorite "spin the pirate wheel and land on the jackpot like wheel of fortune" game (she loved wheel of fortune, and when we took her to chuck e cheese for an outing she loved that one). I played all the new games and some older ones, and got 2 cards from the minions game.
Sunday was really low key, pretty normal Sunday for us. Mskate sold raffle tickets since it's Oktoberfest at our church and we have basket raffles. Mskate and I each made one; I made a chuck e cheese basket, she made a disney bath and bodyworks basket, and mskate's mom donated a loungefly backpack that she didn't want. Our baskets aren't going super well, but her mom's is doing well, and hopefully we win a couple of things we could use for our new house. I bought some things we need for the new house from Lowes. We went to CEC and mskate really liked the new games. I watched a fair amount of cartoon network and adult swim, didn't really plan to but good to use my sling subscription. I especially "needed" to do that because there weren't cartoons on FOX tonight, so I watched Bob's Burgers on Adult Swim.
Now for Monday Labor Day. Mskate and I spent the day doing some furniture shopping, since Labor Day is when furniture stores do their sales and we have a new house that needs some furniture, and we just like going to IKEA and the chuck e cheese that's close by. We got a Billy media shelf, Trofast cabinet thing, an as-is Kallax (came from the display sections or something, fully built), and some containers for the Kallax and Trofast. We were going to get a couple of other things, but they didn't have them. We also got lunch at the cafe, and I really liked their pasta and marinara, and the sparkling raspberry drink. IKEA is fun because the display sections are so well crafted, and some of the things are so fake. Like, they had a gaming set-up, and it was an empty XBOX 360 shell.
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