Adventurenet.net

Tuesday February 25, 2025

A postcard shipped inside of newspaper.

The recipient of this postcard in the UK shared an interest for World War II postcards.

This card was an old one and flaking apart a little bit, so I took the advice from another postcrossing user and I wrapped it in a free newspaper page as protection.

And then there’s my pal Tony.

I try to turn random things into postcards for Tony and for this attempt I used a Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary gift note card.

The gift mentioned on this card was shoes, by the way.

Wednesday February 26, 2025

Today I am being voted out of an online reality game based on Survivor.

I’m not sure why I was selected.

We just merged with the other tribe and have greater numbers and a good group of players, but something must have changed because no one is talking to me which is a sure sign I have been selected to be sent to redemption island.

I made myself a fake idol out of coffee beans and a piece of sticky note paper.

Thursday February 27, 2025

Today some lovely postcards arrive in the mail.

My postcrossing profile makes it clear that I’m a gamer and so I often receive video game related postcards.

These are both very good cards!

Friday February 28, 2025

This postcard of the New York public library (the one in the Ghostbusters movie) is being shipped off to Norway.

The recipient of this card is a big Bruce Springsteen fan.

I shared a few nuggets of knowledge that I have received from my wife who knows about topics such as this.

Saturday March 1, 2025

When I send postcards to Tony, sometimes I’ll take a pic of the card and postbox that I drop it into so that there is record of the card in case it does not arrive.

I’m sure Tony isn’t tracking them or anything, but I think it’s fun to show of the various graffitied blue boxes.

On this Saturday I went to a casual board game gaming group for the second time.

I am attempting to be better at going out and socializing as this is something that I haven’t been doing well at for many years, now.

When I lived in Nebraska I had my hangout spot and my group of friends and we were just in a constant cycle of doing our thing.

When my wife and I moved to Austin, I did not do a good job of making new friends and then covid made things even harder for several years and I just never quite bounced back.

I need to start being a regular at a place where folks socialize and so I am trying a gaming group.

At today’s event I was invited to playtest a game that is in development.

It is a party game where a team has a player who has a stack of cards and one-at-a-time must give clues to their team to guess the card.

When a card is successfully guessed it is kept as a point and when time runs out what is left of the stack is passed to the other team.

Play continues back and forth until all of the cards are gone.

Each round a new challenge is added to make things more difficult for the team.

The challenge card that I had the most trouble with was one where you had to stick out your tongue before every clue. I would forget to stick out my tongue or I would over-compensate by sticking out my tongue between every word.

It was a silly game.

I hope the creator is able to move forward with releasing it into the world.

Around this time Lauri and I caught RSV which I kept thinking had to be covid, but the tests kept coming back negative.

I caught it first so it may have come from the gaming group.

We spent some time at home taking a bit of time off and coughing a lot.

I made some Dutch oven bread during this time.

Saturday March 8, 2025

I am healed up and ready to go back out to the gaming group again today, but the meeting place has moved.

I was playing with them at a temporary building at a park, but that building is coming down as Spring is beginning and so gaming will now be taking place way downtown at a food court.

While trying to find the food court location I found myself in The Oculus where I was asked by a pair of Swedish college students if I would be willing to pose for photographs.

Delightful.

I absolutely posed for those photos.

I do find my way to the food court and I love the idea of gaming surrounded by delicious and convenient food, but this place is loud and crowded. I only recognized one person and they didn’t recognize me and it was just kind of scary and awkward, so I left.

I’m not proud of this, but it was uncomfortable to be around this much noise and try to break into a group of strangers that I don’t know.

Also there were a lot less players.

I suspect that the location being this far downtown may have been the issue.

Or maybe folks were like me and had trouble finding it or didn’t like the loud and crowded feeling.

🤷‍♂️

Since I was far downtown in Manhattan, I went with my backup plan of visiting a US national historic site and museum.

I visited the African Burial Ground Museum instead.

The location goes into the details of what is known about the folks buried here.

By looking at the skeletons it can be determined that some of the folks buried here were under extreme physical workloads.

Slavery.

The museum goes into the details about why folks are buried here and what has been done to preserve and document the location and people.

I was hoping to also visit the Jamaica Bay location for the Gateway national park but on my way there I realized I would arrive just as the gift shop and welcome center was closing.

I’ve been to the Staten Island Gateway national park location already, but I would like to visit all three.

I’m running out of places to get national park stamps in the New York City area.

Speaking of traveling around the city, I have an upcoming camping trip on Long Island.

I have just purchased an ultra-light tent for trip. Since I’ll be spending about four hours on busses and trains I figured it was the right time to upgrade from my $40 tent that I purchased in 2010.

The tent weighs maybe two pounds and has not stakes.

It uses trekking poles instead.

I am very nervous about going camping without the safety and convenience of a car.

I should take a test trip to the campsite one of these weekends to see what it’s like to take the Long Island railroad and busses.

They’re less frequent and undergoing some construction.

Heck, maybe I should be camping upstate instead of on Long Island.

Monday March 10, 2025

Wreck This Journal!

I’m close to completing this, but I keep putting it off.

Maybe a week devoted to Wreck This Journaling would be enough to finish this.

Today a postcard has arrived from Germany.

I shared this with some friends and accidentally ended up figuring out what is happening on this card.

The chicken is saying “Halt! Stop! I’m Gunter Wallraff!”

Gunter Wallraff is a famous undercover reporter.

Tuesday March 11, 2025

Today we have tickets to a play and also I made some dump cake.

The ingredients available at the dollar store are fantastic for making this.

I can get a box of cake and a can of cherry pie filling for for $1.25 each.

The only other two ingredients are a can of soda and a stick of butter.

This time I tried a cherry cola which wasn’t bad, but my favorite so far has been orange soda.

The play we went to see had the most strict phone policy that I have dealt with so far.

Most places will ask you to turn off your phone before the show starts and if they catch you taking pictures or video an usher will shine their flashlight at you to mess with your camera and to get you to stop.

Some have put stickers over the camera and when they catch folks taking pics/videos they pull them to the side and tell them to delete the content and the backup while being watched by the usher or be ejected from the theater.

At this even our phones were placed into a bag which was locked.

It went pretty quick and I didn’t turn off my phone, but I did mute it.

Someone else in the theater did not and their phone was ringing through the bag for about two minutes before they were escorted out by an usher to deal with the issue.

While entering the theater I saw signs warning of nudity.

This also explains the phones in a bag thing.

Interesting and thought provoking play.

Wednesday March 12, 2025

One of our adventure books wants us to grow plants, but we don’t have the dirt or pots necessary to do this any longer.

We left all of our plants behind in Austin.

We gave them away to friends.

We went back and forth on whether to grow micro-greens or to buy dirt and some pots.

We ended up buying the gear to do both.

The dirt and the flower pots haven’t arrived, but I did purchase a small kit of seeds from eBay that arrived today.

These seeds will be folded into wet paper towels, inserted into plastic bags and these bags will be taped to the window.

Penny respects our science.

Good luck little window seeds.

I have thirteen types of seeds, but I only bought ten little pot planters from the dollar store, so there are three leftovers. We’ll figure out what to do with them later.

These are all herbs, by the way.

I am looking forward to eating these later.

Thursday March 13, 2025

Time to be part of a live studio audience.

This is an item that has been on my adventure list for a long time and tonight is the night.

We have priority tickets to The Late Show with Stephen Colbrert.

It was a delightful time and a delightful show.

I am glad this is out of my system, though.

There is a lot of time spent getting tickets, waiting outside, waiting inside, waiting for the show to start, and then the pre-show begins.

I am glad that I was not selected by the host of the pre-show to be teased in front of the studio audience.

That guy was brutal.

Funny.

But brutal.

My favorite part was getting to hear Stephen Colbert swear when his producer pointed out that he said the wrong word during one of his jokes.

A quick reset and retake was filmed, but hearing a television personality use the forbidden f-word will live on with me forever.

Here’s a crime scene of Penny drowning her victim (the string).

This blog post is over!

(But I have more pictures that don’t really fit into the adventure stories that I want to keep, so I’m just going to kind of list them below).

For the life of me I can’t remember what day this was.

I use software to rename all of my iPhone photos to include their date and time from the metadata, but when I get pictures from Lauri or other sources I don’t always do a great job of writing the information down.

These next two photos are from a night that Lauri and I were waiting for a bus and someone lit off a ton of fireworks.

Lauri and I attempting a matching pose on the bus, but I am much taller than she is.

Evidence of cold and snow which are bullshit.

I also take pictures of books that I might want to buy.

This helps me to avoid making spur-of-the-moment purchases and possibly also save money by buying used books.

Here are two that caught my eye recently.

Making burgers while using our hilarious oven mitt.

I play a lot of modded Minecraft.

At the moment I play on an All The Mods 10 server.

We recently replaced our gaming mouse with another

I made an inside out sticky ball with masking tape for the cats.

Here’s a small part of one of my builds in that Minecraft server.

Here’s a lost pic from my time in Detroit when we put together the jigsaw puzzle.

I like to take silly pictures where things are a little bit off.

In my head a picture of a serious pose where my elbows are hanging in the air is hilarious to me.

Miscellaneous picture posts are over.