Pokematic's Easter 2023 Fun

Hey everyone, it's that time of year again, where we recognize the death and resurrection of Jesus. I'll start this little blog off with Palm Sunday, aka, my favorite mass; not Holiday, but my favorite mass of the year. It always has been, and for 1 reason, palms. Everyone gets a palm leaf, and we wave it singing hosanna; it's the one mass where we get something to interact with, and even as a 29 year old man it still gets me excited. When everyone else had set their palm down, I kept holding mine. I might as well fast forward to Thursday (since nothing of note happened in the week) where mskate and I got our feet washed for Holy Thursday's mass. This is the 2nd time I've had my feet washed, the first being when I was a confirmation student when I was in highschool. It is kind of interesting being a stand-in for one of the 12, and I'm glad I was able to share this experience with my wife.

Now it is time for Good Friday. Morning was pretty basic, just mskate and I getting ready for the day. I made pasta for lunch (no meat) and we ate it on our way up to our parents. I got my allergy shot when we got up there and after that we went to the Hallmark Store where we got IRA a green ranger plushy toy thing. After shopping we went to Good Friday service with my dad where we got the last 5 stations of the cross. It was good doing that with him, especially since we did it at his home perish and they have a good perish. After mass we went to mskate's parents to pick up IRA and some other things. Mskate had gotten an Easter gift from one of her coworkers which was angel wings (or "chrusciki" if you prefer the original Polish) and a bunny made out of a wash cloth with some chocolates in it. We decided to give the wash cloth bunny to IRA and share the angel wings with my family (because we're Polish). This was funny, when we got there Duke was sleeping in his bed put in front of the glass storm door just enjoying the sunlight, and when mskate pet him he just stretched and enjoyed the touch. Then when I pet him he got alert and excited because for some reason I'm his favorite human to play with and he always gets a ton of excitement when he sees me; and it's not like I'm even much of a dog person that gets excited to see him and insists on playing with him or just has a sense of "I'm a dog person, I want all dogs to play with me" or something, a lot of times I don't even try to play with him and just want to see the family, but he always is like "oh cool, the playful human is here, come on let's wrestle, now chase me" whenever I see him ever since I first met him. He definitely doesn't see me as an enemy since he's always clearly playing and I've been around long enough and have done enough with him where he definitely trusts me, so I'm not "misinterpreting his aggression as joy" or something like that, he just has some kind of attraction to me.

Now it was time for us to have fun with my parents. We got to their house and started the fun. First we prepped the egg dying kit. Every year I forget to bring my kit and every year we screw up something. This time it was we didn't dissolve the tablets in vinegar before adding the water, so the colors didn't turn out as good as they probably could have been, especially the red one (which for some reason the red/pink color always seems to have a problem, I don't know why but it does). We let them sit for half an hour or so as we did mskate's allergen free pretzels. That was pretty interesting since the dough didn't want to stick together as most allergen free dough is known to be, but we made it work and got the pretzels good for her. I tasted a piece and it tasted like a pretzel, which is good since gluten free bread can be weird. With the allergen free pretzels done, we dyed the eggs and did the cookie craft. IRA found these coloring cookies at a grocery store where it's a cookie with a line art drawing on the frosting, and there are markers with edible ink to color them. Grandma, IRA, and I all made one, and I think mskate made the last of the 4 after we finished ours. It was a pretty fun activity, especially since I only had 3 colors to chose from so I had to think "what kind of contrast can I use while also making it look good?" I think it turned out OK.

Since grandma has lost basically all fine motor capabilities due to arthritis we were concerned she wouldn't be able to do it, but since the arthritis has also hit her rough motor capabilities she had the small movements necessary to color by moving her whole arm, so that was great. Later she ate the whole cookie and rather quickly, which is not really like her (she used to not care much for sweets, and always ate very slowly). Mskate looked up the company and they do other holidays, so we're going to do this at Christmas too, and save the markers so we have more colors to choose from. While we did this the eggs were sitting in the dye building up color, and since we are adults now we had the patience of letting them sit and get a deep color. This brought back a lot of memories of how we would dye eggs at grandma's house, and joked that we should all climb on the dining room table like the old days. Oh fun times. At some point during this we watched a "how do they do it" clip on discovery plus about pretzel making, which was fun.

Now for the food fun. My parents made Easter baskets for everyone; I got Reece's peanut butter eggs, peeps, a Lowe's gift card, a lottery ticket (with a dollar coin), and a little Easter bunny "get the ball in the cup" toy, mskate got peeps, jelly beans, a Disney gift card, a lottery ticket, and a little Easter bunny "get the ball in the cup toy," IRA got Reece's peanut butter eggs, jelly beans, a Target gift card, a lottery ticket, and a little Easter bunny "get the ball in the cup toy," and vikingpolak got a 6 pack of beer, cash, a lottery ticket, and a little Easter bunny "get the ball in the cup toy." IRA and I really enjoyed the toy, and I got good enough where I would win. Vikingpolak and I won on our lottery tickets while mskate and IRA didn't win, even on the "loser's 2nd try" tickets my mom got as a back-up since grandpa Pop would do that when us grandkids would get lottery tickets as gifts. Now time for dinner. The family was going to have French toast and omelets cooked with butter, but since that is the 3 things mskate can't eat vikingpolak got a salmon fillet for mskate and whoever else wanted it. Mom took care of the French toast and enlisted me to take care of the hash browns. I made 2 pans of about half the potatoes that they prepaired and that was enough for half the family, then the other half were cooked and the rest of the family got enough. It was a good good Friday family dinner. This was also the time when everyone that wanted one got an angel wing, and we had enough left to share with my grandpa and aunt when my dad and vikingpolak see them on Easter.

With dinner over it was time to make the pretzels. This has been something we've done since I was really little, and very fun. IRA struggled a little bit but I showed him how to do it (he was doing the crossing too low down by the middle giving the pretzels long arms, and I demonstrated he had to do it pretty close to the top). For 3 or 4 pretzels I did the Mennonite method of "flick twisting" and I was successful after some "and then they came undone" failures. I also burnt my thumb taking one of the trays out, but oh well. We visited for a little while after the pretzels just to let them cool, and then we said our goodbyes, took IRA back to his parent's house, and went home.

Saturday was a simple relaxation day. I worked on writing the blog and mskate and I went on a walk in the park by us. I thawed the freezer so I could clean it and get the ice maker working again (I think the line completely froze or something, and I want to see if I can get it working again). Unfortunately that didn't work, but since I emptied the freezer I took the opportunity to clean out all the crumbs that have happened over the years. I also found that Tubi had The Passion of Christ streaming on it, and since our decan said it was a good movie to watch to really get a sense of what a Roman crucifixion was like since the 4 Evangelists didn't deem it important to go into detail of what a crucifixion was like, and it was quite good, though I have to say, it is a VERY difficult movie to watch. Like, I watch R-rated movies every so often so it's not like I haven't seen violence before, but this was super intense. I think I will have to do a review of it, but I will just say that it really helped me understand what our Lord and Savior went through, and I was happy I watched it on Tubi with ad breaks because I needed them to catch my breath. That night we went to the Easter Vigil, and there was just 1 very interesting thing that happened. Typically with the Easter Vigil the church is dark and everyone receives a candle to light when it's time, and those candles have wax shields because wax is going to drip, and our church uses paper wax shields. One lady's wax shield caught on fire when she lit her candle and fell to the ground, and mskate and I sitting on the end were ready to jump over and help, but she was able to step on it before anything happened. This left her without a wax shield though, so mskate went out and got one for her. So yeah, that was a little exciting.

OK, it's Easter Sunday, Jesus is risen. I had one of the pretzels we made on Friday for a breakfast snack before heading over to my in-laws for their festivities. Before I get to the fun, we were greeted by the dogs. Since around this time last year their dog Duke had a seizure and is getting very old mskate and I try to go in through the side door to not excite him (because for some reason he thinks I am the most entertaining person in the world and gets super excited whenever he sees me, but we can minimize the excitement by just "appearing in the house" by using the side door instead of going in through the front door), but this time he already saw us and was barking so we just went in the front. He tried jumping but wasn't able to, so we were able to bring our things in before getting to the big presents. My father-in-law goes all out for holidays, and he had this elaborate spread on the dining room table for everyone. He said "the Easter Bunny came" and I said "no, the Easter Bunny just leaves a basket of candy, this was Easter Santa," and he agreed that it was "Easter Santa." The thing I enjoy the most they get me every year since we got married are these milk chocolate eggs with white chocolate chicks in them. There's nothing super special about them, but the fact that it's a hollow egg with 2 halves joined together (and not some chocolate egg with a peanut butter or caramel filling), and that hollow egg has something in it and not just air, I'm just kind of fascinated by them. I got some other chocolates and gift cards, but the chocolate eggs with a chocolate chick inside are my favorite (maybe I'll do a food review one day). Mskate got a lot of peeps and gummy candy, and a Lego Disney parade train (not for use on a track). We ended up making it while we were at her parents house and now it sits proudly on the stair landing shelf with the rest of our Lego displays.

After the fun we picked up a close friend of the family that they call "Aunt" (we'll call her "aunt C" in the blog). As we were driving up mskate said "we could pick up aunt C on our way to my parents," and since we were driving the pickup truck that's pretty high up I asked "could we though," which made her realize we would need to wait until we got to her parents and could borrow a car. We picked her up no problem and she enjoyed spending time with the family and visiting with the dogs. Delilah jumped up next to her multiple times and just let her pet her, and Duke managed to jump onto the couch to see her. Mskate initially put him on the other couch with me because she thought he wanted to see me, but he very quickly made it known he wanted to get down, and once he was down he ran over to the other couch and jumped up on it (something he doesn't do anymore, because he's old, but regularly forgets he's old). We had eggs, bacon, fruit, hash brown patties, and chocolate croissants. I'm going to have some breakfast for a few days. Mskate also paid for her old skating club to set-up an egg hunt in the front yard, and IRA and I were told to do it. We completed it in probably 1 minute, and I won by 2 eggs. In the eggs were bouncy balls, stickers, yoyos, finger puppets, and sticky hands. It was fun not having a parent say "now you need to give some eggs to your brother so it's even" for once, considering we're both adults and can handle winners and losers.

It's now about the time we went to my parents for their festivities. My dad and brother were at my aunt and grandpa's, and pepperBC's family was doing something else, so the group was a little smaller this time. We gave grandma her Easter basket and she was really happy with it. We got her a fuzzy bunny card, magic water coloring book, and some chocolates. She really enjoyed it. We visited with everyone for a while, then it was dinner time. We had ham, chicken, potatoes, rolls, carrots, corn, and asparagus. Given that everyone from the asparagus story was there (J and P, and Grandma), we reminded everyone of the asparagus story. It was a fun time. After dinner the in-laws came over for desert and accordion time. They also brought over aunt C, and she and grandma really hit it off. We sang some songs like Peter Cottontail and A Tisket a Tasket, and some others. For desert I had some chocolate pie and ice cream, and then spilled some on my pants so I had to wash them and then spend 10 minutes in front of a space heater drying them. No stains though, so I'm good. It was quite a fun day, and at about 7PM we packed up our stuff and went home.

Monday was pretty simple. I did a bunch of grocery shopping and sorted all our food from the festivities, filled up the gas tank, and shipped a package for ebay. I also started out the day wearing long pants but then changed into short pants after lunch time and getting hot unloading the car, so I guess it's officially spring. I wanted to do more work on running inventory on the ebay inventory and shipping material, but I just did that and watched some comedy specials on my free trial of showtime. This was a great mini-vacation, and I'm quite happy with it. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.

Easter Fun 2022

 Hey everyone, it's Easter time again, which is a fun time with our family. This year was a REALLY big year though, because mskate went through RCIA to join the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. I'll get to that soon enough but first I need to go through everything starting at Friday.

So every year my family makes soft pretzels for Easter, a Polish tradition we normally did with my dad's side of the family when we went to see them on Easter. We haven't done it with them since my paternal grandma passed, but we still do it with my parents, and this year IRA and my maternal grandma joined in. This does put a little challenge for mskate though, since she has pretty much all the food allergies, and most of those things are in pretzels. My ever accommodating parents found a way though, finding a good allergy friendly dough recipe online and making her special dough. We made her pretzels first to prevent cross contamination (no flour on cutting board, no pretzel residue in the baking soda bath, no pretzel crumbs on the baking sheets). The fun thing is we got to use our pretzel making template we got for a wedding present. Since Dad and I like Good Eats with Alton Brown, we made jokes about the unitasker. It was pretty handy though, because you shape the pretzel on the mold, and then it lifts off the mold to put in the bath, and then that can be used to fish it out. After making mskate's we made our normal pretzels, and it was really fun.

After the pretzels we dyed eggs. We had 2 different egg kits going, but we just couldn't get some of the colors to turn out right. This is where grandma really enjoyed watching us, because when we we little we would dye eggs at her house and it brought back a bunch of memories. One of the interesting things in one of the kits was an "egg glaze" which made the eggs shiny after dying. IRA and I had some fun with that, but the glaze was stale or something and didn't really spread well (it was kind of like a gelatin-jelly), and they didn't turn out very well. We also did egg sleeves, and mskate was really fascinated by those. Unfortunately my parents got "large eggs" and the sleeves were more meant for "medium eggs," but we were able to use most of them and they turned out well. It was a really fun time. At some point mskate and I made it to church, but I don't remember if it was before or after my parents.

Saturday was the BIG day, probably the most eventful of all the days. First off, mskate's sponsor and her husband came up on this day. We met them at a restaurant mskate and I discovered one night when I said "I don't want to cook, I want to go out to get Chinese at a restaurant," and while this wasn't Chinese it was a new restaurant. This was really fun since I haven't seen them since the wedding, and I get along really well with the husband (but I don't know him well enough to come up with a blog name yet, lol). We sat together and had some fun discussions about the trip up and jobs. I guess you can say we had brunch, because some people had breakfast foods and others had lunch foods. The restaurant is also along the water, so after the meal we went out and walked along the dock. The really fun thing was pointing out Canada (because we're close to the border, one of my favorite radio stations is a Canadian station, and if I set-up the TV antenna just right I can get like 4 Canadian TV channels). Mskate and I grew up close to the border and had short vacations in Canada in our youth, so we take "look, it's a foreign country" for granted, but for them it was really impressive to be able to be able to see Canada in person across the water. 

After lunch it was time for another big event. IRA and I are fans of Steven Crowder and when they announced that Dave and Steven would be doing a live show at the Royal Oak Music Theater (something that isn't too far from us, and I went there when I went to the Mike and Micky Show), we knew we had to do it. I picked up IRA and we found parking. Then we got in line and it was pretty crazy. The line stretched all the way around the block past the transportation center, a lot of people wearing Steven Crowder shirts, Let's Go Brandon, and MAGA. I know IRA wore one of his Crowder shirts; I want to say it was "piss off youtube."

When we were in line venue security came walking around distributing "legal to drink" wrist bands (this makes it easier on the bar inside, instead of everyone showing their ID everyone just shows the wrist band). I didn't have any plans on drinking, but I wanted the wrist band. While we were waiting in line I remembered I had my pocket knife on me (because if I'm not at my day job, I probably have my pocket knife on my person like a good boy scout), and I remembered "live performances don't want you to have pocket knives." I ran back to the car, dropped my knife in the cup holder, and ran back. I struggled a little to find IRA, but after calling him I reunited.

Once again I assumed my ticket was in the balcony, but the usher told us "no you're on the main floor, center." We weren't super close like I was with Mike and Micky, but it was still pretty close to where we could clearly see the acts. One thing that was really cool was the pre-show music was either Louder with Crowder parody songs or pogo. I want to say that the song before the start was the song they play before the online show, but I can't say for certain. The opener guy was pretty good, I want Steven to have him on the online show some time. Dave and Steven were hilarious. I don't remember a lot of the jokes they told, but it was really fun seeing them do jokes that weren't just about modern social-political topics. Dave's closer about the prostitute and White Castle sliders was gold. What was really neat is that a lot of the jokes were specific to South East Michigan since Dave is from Detroit and Steven's family is from Detroit and Steven used to live in Ann Arbor. Since they're high level comedians the jokes work if you're unfamiliar with the area, and I'm sure they use the same jokes elsewhere in the country, you could tell there was "hometown details" that were added, like Dave talking about "getting high at this house on Gratiot" (a street in Detroit) at this show is probably "there was this Detroit house I used to get high at" in other shows. After the show I dropped IRA off and went back to our house for Easter Vigil. Mskate was worried that the show would go too long and I would be late, but it didn't.

This was quite the ordeal. Mom and Dad brought grandma, and that was quite something. I struggled with mass, because they had a bunch of Easter flowers in the church, and I am allergic to pretty much all the flowers. After everyone was seated and situated, I stood outside by the fire they had going. As I stood out there I had the great idea of "if anyone joins me I will say 'surely you were with him' and see if they say 'I do not know that man.'" Unfortunately no one joined me so I didn't get to use that, but it got some laughs when I told people about it afterwards. My standing out there actually helped with the technical production side since I was able to give them a reference for "average height adult male" when framing the shot for the online stream and projected video inside the church for when they were lighting the candles off the fire. The mass was good, but twice I had to step outside and get some non-allergy air. The first time was about halfway through mass, and the second time was after communion. After the second time I sat in the back away from all the flowers, and that helped some. After mass when we were packing up my grandma, she told me "it's really late, you can stay at my house, I don't want you driving all the way home." I reminded her that she was at my church, and my house was much closer than her house. Bless her heart, but she gets very confused. After mass I took a hot steamy shower to clear my sinuses, and that felt good.

Easter Sunday, the day of celebration. Mskate's friends joined us for breakfast and we made these vegan pancakes that everyone could eat. It was a really weird recipe, since the batter was the consistency of cookie dough and not pancake batter. When we put chocolate chips in I originally said "put the chocolate chips in after pouring the batter," because with normal pancake batter you do that because if you mix it in the bowl the chips all settle at the bottom and the distribution is all off. However, because this was "cookie dough" the chips were all stuck on the top and melted into the pan without going into the pancake, so then I mixed it in with the batter in the bowl like I would with cookie dough. Mskate and I distributed the work; she mixed all the ingredients, I cooked them in the frying pan. The scraping scoop we had dished out the perfect amount, and everyone enjoyed my cooking.

First we saw the in-laws and we gave Easter baskets, just nothing super exciting. After them we went to my parents for the Easter party. Grandma and her accordion friends came over, and we had a fun sing along. We sang some Disney songs and old spring time songs, but what was really weird was singing "you are my sunshine" and "a tisket a tasket." Everyone knows the chorus for "you are my sunshine," it's a pretty common public domain song (and if it's not like how Happy Birthday was still under copyright until recently, it's part of the American cultural cannon). Well accordion friend printed off the verses for it and this was the first time any of us have heard it, and it turns out the song we all thought was an up-beat love song ("you brighten up the day like the sun, I can't imagine life without you here") is actually a depressed break-up song ("my life was full of light when you were here, but now that you are gone my life is dark and meaningless"). That was crazy. Then with a Tisket a Tasket, pretty much all of us only knew "a tisket a tasket, a [something something] basket," and we had the Ella Fitzgerald version which has the line "and if she doesn't bring it back I think I will die," which is a pretty extreme reaction to "I lost my basket." I think we had a pot roast dinner, and it was good.

Because Easter fell on a Sunday this year, I had the Monday after off. Mskate and I largely spent the day relaxing and organizing after Easter (new toys and candy, had to find places for them), and then I was like "it's been forever since I went to the movies, I want to see Uncharted." And so I found a theater that was playing Uncharted and I saw it. Since Uncharted is basically a videogame adaptation of treasure hunt movies, it translated to film pretty well. And that was my Easter weekend. It was pretty jam packed, and really fun. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.