Laboring on a Funeral Day

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.

Chuck e cheese was fun. They have some games that we don't have at our local CEC, and those are fun to play. I got a couple jackpots, and our pass had 500 free tickets for labor day. We used some of our tickets to buy unique prizes for the easter egg fundraiser we do every year. On our way back we stopped at BJ's Wholesale and got gas and frozen broccoli. It was a fun time. Once we got home I unloaded the stuff to our garage to move later.

Labor day is normally a day for grilling. However, I grill very often so it's not too special of a thing; plus, I want clear out my freezer which means my tenderloin, and when I grilled that last time it didn't turn out great. I "slow" cooked it over a period of about 1.5 hours in the oven, and it turned out really good. I made some of the broccoli while I waited for the tenderloin to cook. I also made mskate an omelet. It was a good dinner. Now I'm just enjoying some TV and calm night stuff. Overall a pretty good weekend. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.

Pokematic's Oktoberfest 2025

Hey everyone, so my church does an Oktoberfest every year as a fund raiser and social event around the end of September/beginning of October. It's quite a fun time, there's beer, polka music, dancing, games, and raffles. The raffles are the big thing for my wife and I, mainly because this year we were kind of in charge of the basket raffles. About a month prior to Oktoberfest parishioners donate baskets of things and everyone is given the option to enter raffle tickets to win the baskets. These cover all kinds of things; bird feeders, alcohol, american girl dolls, lego sets, luggage, lottery tickets, coolers, gift cards, action figures, activity zones, and others. There was also the premium raffles of a 65 inch TV with PS5 and game, and a trip to Mexico, each with individual premium tickets. We sold tickets before and after mass many weeks, and bought about $200 worth of tickets over the month. In total there were 103 baskets, which I think was a record. The cool thing about the tickets is that they are "buy a sheet of the same number, write your name once," which saves a lot of time. Leading up to the weekend mskate was doing lots of things to get ready, organizing baskets and setting up decorations.

Friday was family night, a night of activities more geared towards kids and families. We had a petting zoo, pony rides, Disney music bingo (from the same guy who does music bingo for us at other times of the year), a "Taylor Swift concert" with a look alike lip syncing to songs, a videogame trailer, a kid spa trailer, minigolf, and pumpkin painting. It also had some normal Oktoberfest things like the beer garden and sausages, and the basket raffle (which we were kind of in charge of). My volunteer shift started at 7PM, so I had time to come a little early and enjoy the festivities. Well, it was also VIP day at Chuck E Cheese, where pass holders got free dipin dots, 500 tickets, and 30 points (on top of the daily points they already get with their pass). I decided to go to chuck e cheese and get my VIP stuff, and "speed run" my points so I could get to family night. Normally 40 points lasts me about an hour, but I also play "longer games" and take my time, but I had to go through 70 points and so I played the "token eater" games, basically jumping from one game to the other before it fully registered. I made a couple hundred tickets on this, and kind of fulfilled a childhood thought of "how fast could I blow through my tokens." Lots of fun regardless.

I got to family night around 5 PM. I had a sausage for dinner, and played some minigolf. There wasn't a whole lot for me, but was kind of fun looking around. It ended up being a good thing I was there since the volunteer that was working the videogame trailer didn't show up and they needed someone to be "the rule enforcer." The videogame trailer was either 4 or 5 TVs set up with multi-player games (minecraft, mario kart, lego marvel, and something else I didn't see), and a long couch for everyone to sit on. Players were only to have 15 minutes if there was a line, but could have more time if there wasn't a line. I had to make sure the line was managed, kids weren't overfilling the trailer, don't let kids with food or drink in, and to pay attention to if kids have had their turn. A couple of times I helped set-up Mario Kart since I know Mario Kart. I didn't have to end the turns very often since it wasn't very in demand. Once I helped a grandpa get in the trailer to look for his grandson. It was a pretty cool thing. Some people asked me for business cards and I'm like "I'm with the church, I don't know the business, talk to the guy with the blue shirt." A little after 7 someone came to relieve me, it was his shift. Young guy, showed him what to do, and all went well. Hopefully he was able to be "authoritative" considering he seemed to be around the same age as some of the teens that would go in.

After that I went to help mskate with the raffle. I was going to help enter tickets, but there was some confusion over the numbers which meant we didn't enter the tickets that night. The POS system was square, which is what we use for when we do art fairs. This came in handy when I rang up some items wrong, which made canceling them easy. The Taylor Swift "concert" was pretty good. The impersonator looked pretty close to Taylor, and she had the sparkly jacket, and did all her mannerisms that I know. At first I wondered if she was actually singing, but then I heard the "studio production" in the songs and knew it was lip sync. Oh well, still a good concert. Eventually she joined the audience to dance with the kids, and this is when things got a little weird. The DJ "ran out of Swift songs" and started playing Katy Perry songs (firework and roar are the ones I remember). I'm like, "ok, now you're just breaking character." Oh well, I don't think the kids were paying that close of attention. At the end of the night we moved all the raffle baskets into the social hall, which was kind of involved since we wanted to keep the same layout as the tables while keeping all the ticket buckets with the baskets. Also at the end of the night the left over food was free, so I picked up some sausages to have for breakfast and lunch tomorrow.

Saturday was the big night, full Oktoberfest. During the day we figured out what was going on with the ticket numbers, and got all the tickets entered. We also were running out of tickets the night before, so we ordered more on amazon prime to be delivered to our house. We got to the church around 4PM and did the set-up. I set-up the computers for entering the ticket numbers in the look-up table, and as we were selling tickets I was entering them. There was a slight problem, I needed the wifi password and I couldn't find anyone to give it to me; well at least not immediately, I found someone who had it pretty quickly. Mskate also brought here laptop, and it was kind of funny how I had my gaming laptop next to her basic business laptop. Oh well.

About an hour into the night I got dragged into an event. They needed people for the mug holding contest, where you hold a beer mug out perpendicular to your body, and as the game went on they'd add beer to make it heavier. I wasn't really planning on participating, but one of the old ladies who knows us was like "come on I'm sponsoring you in the contest." I'm all "uhhhh, OK I guess." I get up there and I get this 5 pound glass mug. I was saving my arm for the competition, as was everyone else. Once it started I held up my arm, and my arm started cramping. Not quite sure why, I was shaking my arm out and warming it up, but I basically immediately started feeling the burn. I was one of the first people eliminated, and only had a little bit of beer poured into my mug. I was going to hang around and see what ended up happening, but there was a bit of a problem with my laptop and I had to run back to the table and fix it. I was able to fix it no problem, basically someone minimized the web browser or clicked off the tab and lost it among my sea of tabs, and all I had to do was pull my browser back up.

I think sometime around this time is when mskate went to our house to pick up the raffle tickets we had to amazon next day delivery order. The night before we were running low on raffle tickets and mskate said "I'm going to order more tickets because we're going to run out." That was good because we would have run out had she not ordered more. Well they were supposed to arrive before the night began at like 3:30, but they kept getting delayed and arrived at 5:45. Mskate ran home to get them when she got the notification that they were delivered, and that was really good because we ran out like soon after she got back. Later in the night I had a sausage for dinner, and then got a soft pretzel as a long snack while entering the tickets.

It's now nearing the end of the night, which means we were now doing the raffle drawing. After the ticket was drawn one of the other volunteers doing the drawing would give me the ticket and prize, I would look up the number, and mskate would write the name. One of the tickets was entered wrong and we had to have a completely different volunteer go through all the tickets looking for it. It was generally well organized, but not perfect. We figured it out though. As I was going through the numbers we ended up winning 3 baskets; one of the alcohol baskets, the crock pot basket, and the hands on science center basket. Also, with the admission bands there was a raffle for a trip to the Bavarian Inn, and mskate won, so in total we won 4 things. Unfortunately I didn't win the big screen TV and PS5, but here's the funny thing, it was our music director's 7 year old son. His dad was both happy and not happy, because while it was a great prize now they had to find a place for it. Some people picked up their baskets that night, but a lot didn't and we had to put the baskets in the social hall. We loaded our baskets into our car, and in the morning I unloaded them.

I'm going to go over all the stuff by basket.

• The Crockpot Basket
• A crockpot
• A box of 3 crockpot liners
• A set of salt and pepper shakers
• A $25 Meijer gift card
• 3 cooking utensels (a slotted serving spoon, a non-slotted serving spoon, and a meat masher)
• 2 packets of crock pot seasonings
• garlic salt
• a cookbook or recipies
• Alcohol basket
• A bottle of strawberry wine
• A bottle of tequila
• A bottle of fireball whisky
• A bottle of rum
• A bottle of spiced rum
• A bottle of of dry gin
• A bottle of of vodka
• A reusable wine bottle
• A case of Local's Light American Lager
• A case of smirnoff ice zero
• A pack of solo cups
• A pack of solo shot glasses
• A novelty giant solo cup that was the basket
• A sign that says "bar open proudly serving whatever you bring."
• The hands on science center gift certificate
• A $400 gift card to Bavarian Inn Frankenmuth

Sunday was a great end of the weekend. I went through the baskets and got some of the stuff put away, all the liquor and wine (and sign and cups) fit in my liquor cabinet, and the smirnoff ice fit in the fridge door (and the beer is just sitting in the hallway waiting for the next family party). The utensils went in the utensil drawer, the seasoning went in the seasoning and cooking cabinet, and the gift cards went in the gift card drawer. I still had to find a place for the crock pot and novelty solo cup, but those would go into the storage locker. Still haven't found a place for the cook book yet, but that'll come.

Sunday night was pretty cool, it was the big 50th anniversary dinner after the mass celebrated by the arch bishop. Since the arch bishop was there and there was an attack on a Mormon church earlier that day, there was quite a police presence and they secured the perimeter. It wasn't just the arch bishop, there were also all the past priests who came to celebrate, including the first priest from 50 years ago (he was in his 80s). It was a pretty cool mass, it's been a while since I saw a mass celebrated by the bishop. Dinner was pretty good. I had a rum and ginger ale, and for dinner I had green beans and beef tenderloin. It was a good way to end a good weekend. Mskate still had some work to do with the baskets, calling people to tell them "you need to pick up your basket," and one lady thought it was a scam since our area code is from our hometown and not where we live, but that's just kind of her story. Well this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.