Another Chilly Day
Apr. 21st, 2026 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThough I think this one ended up a bit warmer than they originally predicted -- maybe mid 50s instead of low 50s. I could go outside without a hat in the afternoon, I know that much! And having the sun out all day helped too. *nods* Tomorrow's supposed to be a lot rainier and more miserable, sadly...meh. I really hope they're right about the end of the week being at least a bit nicer!
Anyway -- proper workday write-up of what I did today follows:
Work – My Tuesday in the office started out kind of busy, but quickly got quieter as the day went on (hooray). Main accomplishments of the day were:
A) Getting the morning credit card reports done and the checks scanned, as per usual – also ran a second set of Appeal reports for a day last week for Fiscal, since they wanted to double-check some charges
B) Helping the guy who came to fix our printer by printing some stuff as he fiddled with the settings (some of our reports and such have been coming out REALLY smudged lately) – seems like the problem was the printer was set to print on a mix of different types of paper. Not sure how that happened, but okay
C) Listening to a voicemail from a lady who said she’d gotten a thank-you letter for a one-time gift but had thought she’d made a pledge; determining that she’d forgotten to indicate on her card that she wanted to set up a pledge; and calling her back and setting up the pledge she wanted for her
D) Getting a credit card call from a woman who asked why her payments hadn’t been coming out for her pledge – turned out SHE hadn’t indicated she wanted automatic payments and thus I had to set that up for her
E) Finally getting in contact with two of the four people who had recurring gifts and pledges, explaining the situation, and learning they wanted to keep the recurring gifts, along with determining the third had meant to set up a pledge and had picked the wrong option, and doing a bunch of reversals to fix this
F) Doing some other reversals to fix some other stuff
G) And looking at some returned mail and discovering one lady whose tax letter was returned had passed, so obviously she wasn’t going to need it
Nothing particularly exciting, but I’m glad to have those recurring gift/pledge people mostly cleared up now! We’ll see how it is tomorrow – especially since my coworker today had to leave early as she didn’t feel good, so there’s a non-zero chance I’ll be on my own in the office...
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – I returned to the OXBox channel for today’s pedal session to start something I’ve been meaning to watch for a while: “Let's Play Resident Evil Requiem: GRACE'S BOSS IS THE WORST | Episode 1!” AKA the first part of the Official OXBox LP of Resident Evil Requiem! Mostly because I saw they uploaded the FINAL episode today and was like “oh yeah, I wanted to watch that!” So now I can watch it all in one go. :) Managed to pedal my way through the first half-hour of Andy, Mike, and Jane’s adventures in RE9, which featured –
A) Andy being startled by the “FBI Midwest Field Office” text dramatically splashing itself across the image of an office building, then welcoming everyone back to the very first episode of the LP – Mike allowed that it was at the very least a “welcome back” to Resident Evil in general
B) Andy geeking out over Oswald Spencer (one of the founders of the Umbrella Corporation and thus The Guy Responsible For All This Shit) being featured in one of the newspapers Grace Ashcroft, one of our two protagonists, was looking at in her introduction
C) Jane wondering what the hell the FBI actually INVESTIGATES because, being English, she’s only familiar with it from stuff like The X-Files and The Silence Of The Lambs; Mike and Andy hypothesized that, being a federal agency, they mostly did murders over state lines, and Jane welcomed any FBI agents in the chat to explain things further. XD Oh, and this was all done over the scene where Grace’s boss coerces her into going and investigating the Wrenwood Hotel as they found another mysterious body matching the MO of four others they were investigating there, essentially saying “I know that’s where your mother was murdered, but do it for me, please?” – Jane and the others had to clarify that yes, they knew that Grace was being sent to the Trauma Hotel and that they did consider her boss a dick because of it
D) The trio being amazed at how lifelike the city was when Grace arrived in Wrenwood to investigate the wrecked hotel – Andy was disappointed he couldn’t walk Grace into traffic; Andy thought he spotted a case of a reused model in two of the NPCs wandering around in the rain, but Jane said they just had the same hat; Mike was all for going and getting meatloaf from a local diner (Grace was not allowed); and Andy was SHOCKED to learn a haircut cost $40 at the local barber shop (before admitting his own haircuts cost more, but they were done at a MUCH nicer place XD)
E) The trio ragging on Grace for not having her FBI badge ready to go when she arrived at the crime scene and was warned off by a cop, with Andy saying that LEON would never be so “uh-uh-just a second”; then ragging on her for staring at the floor and being generally nervous when the cop tried to ask why the FBI was even interested – come on, guys, this hotel IS Trauma Central for her (though Jane acknowledged her being so wishy-washy right now is probably part of her story arc and that she’d become a badass during the course of the game, with Mike adding that “by the end she’ll be suplexing zombies and punching rocks and all sorts of stuff” XD)
F) Andy checking out Grace’s inventory as they entered the scaffolding around the hotel wreckage and finding a gun...and then seeing in the description that Grace bought it for personal self-defense with her very first paycheck and being like “I brought my gun from home?!” – Jane compared it to having to bring your own stapler to the office
G) Grace entering the crumbling, debris-laden hotel through one of the side doors, and Andy noting that the hotel had seen better days – only for Mike to go “I’ve stayed in worse places.” XD And then to repeat the sentiment when Grace wandered into the even more disgusting bathroom where the corpse was originally found
H) Jane wondering how old Grace is, and Andy admitting that she looks about 12 – cue Jane laughing as she wondered “what qualifications do you need to get into the FBI?” and Andy insisting she must be an amazing analyst
I) Andy getting jumpscared by a bit of falling ceiling in the bar area and accidentally hitting the button to turn off Grace’s flashlight – Jane noted that was a “bad instinct to have” XD
J) Grace discovering someone had taped a picture of her with a key taped to the back next to the message “Let’s talk – Room 204,” then hearing a noise from one of the doors closing and scrambling around in her rucksack for her gun – Jane scolded her for not quick-slotting her items before she came :p
K) After failing to escape through the kitchen, the trio directing Grace through the door the key opened and into a hallway – where they were immediately distracted by the pretty curtains billowing in the wind (they had a lot of nice things to say about the graphics of this game in general; they’re FRIGHTENINGLY detailed). Sadly, the curtains did not prove to have Hitman-esque “bead physics” when Andy shoved Grace’s face into them
L) Andy finding a fire escape after going upstairs – only to discover that it was locked. Jane was like “the fire safety!” and made Andy look at the locked door again in order to truly soak in the horrible decisions made there
M) Grace having to get some wirecutters out of a toolbox on a pool table to cut open the wires holding a pair of doors shut, and the nearby deer head falling off the wall immediately afterward – Jane reacted to the jumpscare by yelling “JUMPSCARE!” then promptly made fun of her own reaction, and the gang seemed to adopt it as a potential running joke
N) Grace proceeding down the hallway to Room 204 to find a creepy radio inside spouting gibberish – the trio noted that it all felt like it things had gone a bit Silent Hill, with Mike noting the radio thing felt ripped straight out of P. T. (and now I’m wondering what a Silent Hill/Resident Evil crossover would look like)
O) Grace discovering a creepy bed covered in creepy photos of herself and her mother, with one particular one triggering a flashback event to when she and her mother Alyssa stayed in Room 204 back when the hotel was operational eight years ago – which in turn prompted the trio to note that Grace looked EXACTLY THE SAME when she was eight years younger (Mike tried to be nice to the video game company by noting they wouldn’t necessarily want to make another model, but – it’s CAPCOM, with fucking Resident Evil money. They could have put in the effort!)
P) The flashback sequence, consisting of Alyssa realizing someone was after them when Grace got a creepy phone call, followed immediately by the lights going out, and trying to hustle them out of the hotel – cue Grace witnessing, in fairly quick succession:
I. The nice hotel employee they encountered on the way out who was going to fix the electrical panel getting suffocated with a bag over his head and his throat slit by a mysterious hooded man
II. Her mother promptly shoot the hooded man three times before hastily hiding a big envelope under a painting in the reception room
III. And her mother – having just talked her through an understandable panic attack and assured her that she’d explain everything one day and that she loved her – getting a knife to the neck right in front of her, courtesy of that hooded guy, who hadn’t quite died when he’d been shot three times (he then collapsed and knocked over a table with a lamp, starting a fire just to make everything worse)
O.O Yeah. As you might imagine, the trio’s reaction to that was essentially “OH MY GOD THAT IS SO MUCH MORE TRAUMATIC THAN WE THOUGHT, GRACE’S BOSS IS GENUINELY HORRIBLE” and, in Jane’s particular case “Oh, I’ve been way too hard on this woman” :(
O) Grace going to get the items her mother hid behind the painting (after being spooked by a mysterious no-answer call on a mysterious cellphone) and finding a journal with a few entries about how that hooded man seemed to be stalking her (Alyssa) and a mini-disc (unreadable because no one had laser eyes or a Sony mini-disc player)...only to be interrupted by the cop from before. Who slurred out that something had stung him…
Before turning into a zombie and trying to attack her with a SHOTGUN he somehow picked up. With Grace unable to flee as she’d somehow hooked the sleeve of her jacket on the luggage cart her mother had put in front of the painting all those years ago (yes, it was still there) – Andy was like “for God’s sake Grace!” XD I left off with Andy trying to wiggle Grace free and not get shot – tomorrow, we’ll see where things go from here! Nowhere good, I’m guessing!
2. Continue edits on Chapter 5 of “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Partial check – thanks to the above write-up taking so long, me needing to answer all the reviews left on Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland,” and me wanting to take a moment to get back into the flow of things, I spent today’s writing time going over the beginning of Chapter 5 and making just a couple of tweaks here and there. Not many, but I was able to correct a typo or two and reword a couple of awkward sentences. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will be able to pick up where I left off before taking The Long Break To Edit Chapter 6 Of LB:DQ! We’ll see!
3. Watch something on YouTube: Well, WeirdKev did link me to a YouTube Short this evening, so I guess that counts… Said short was by PunkeyDoodles8, with audio by _videojames_, didn’t have a proper name, and was I presume an animated version of a tumblr shitpost, where someone talked about how, if they had a time machine, they’d go forward in time to dig up their own bones. With an onlooker being like “...why?” and the original poster just going “They’re mine.” XD Very odd, as you might agree! WeirdKev wanted to know what I thought Doc would think of that – I said he and Marty would be like “...well, it doesn’t cause a paradox, but it is disturbing.” Which is a legit way to feel, I think.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – there was nothing over on Valice Multiverse apart from WeirdKev’s direct message, but I managed to get something into the queue over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – the traditional “here’s a link to the start of the story now that I’ve posted the last chapter so you can read it over from the beginning if you want” post for “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland.” Just a nice way to wrap things up for that story, I feel.
Not too shabby -- though I once again despair over my inability to keep the damn workout video write-ups short. There's always just too much I want to talk about there! *sigh* I gotta figure out something...as it stands, though, I gotta get to bed, as my parents need my car tomorrow to get to one of Dad's appointments (the truck died on them today while they were out and about), and because of the timing, we have to leave way earlier than I usually do and drop me off at work earlier. Which sucks, but... So yeah, gotta get to bed now. Night all!
Anyway -- proper workday write-up of what I did today follows:
Work – My Tuesday in the office started out kind of busy, but quickly got quieter as the day went on (hooray). Main accomplishments of the day were:
A) Getting the morning credit card reports done and the checks scanned, as per usual – also ran a second set of Appeal reports for a day last week for Fiscal, since they wanted to double-check some charges
B) Helping the guy who came to fix our printer by printing some stuff as he fiddled with the settings (some of our reports and such have been coming out REALLY smudged lately) – seems like the problem was the printer was set to print on a mix of different types of paper. Not sure how that happened, but okay
C) Listening to a voicemail from a lady who said she’d gotten a thank-you letter for a one-time gift but had thought she’d made a pledge; determining that she’d forgotten to indicate on her card that she wanted to set up a pledge; and calling her back and setting up the pledge she wanted for her
D) Getting a credit card call from a woman who asked why her payments hadn’t been coming out for her pledge – turned out SHE hadn’t indicated she wanted automatic payments and thus I had to set that up for her
E) Finally getting in contact with two of the four people who had recurring gifts and pledges, explaining the situation, and learning they wanted to keep the recurring gifts, along with determining the third had meant to set up a pledge and had picked the wrong option, and doing a bunch of reversals to fix this
F) Doing some other reversals to fix some other stuff
G) And looking at some returned mail and discovering one lady whose tax letter was returned had passed, so obviously she wasn’t going to need it
Nothing particularly exciting, but I’m glad to have those recurring gift/pledge people mostly cleared up now! We’ll see how it is tomorrow – especially since my coworker today had to leave early as she didn’t feel good, so there’s a non-zero chance I’ll be on my own in the office...
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – I returned to the OXBox channel for today’s pedal session to start something I’ve been meaning to watch for a while: “Let's Play Resident Evil Requiem: GRACE'S BOSS IS THE WORST | Episode 1!” AKA the first part of the Official OXBox LP of Resident Evil Requiem! Mostly because I saw they uploaded the FINAL episode today and was like “oh yeah, I wanted to watch that!” So now I can watch it all in one go. :) Managed to pedal my way through the first half-hour of Andy, Mike, and Jane’s adventures in RE9, which featured –
A) Andy being startled by the “FBI Midwest Field Office” text dramatically splashing itself across the image of an office building, then welcoming everyone back to the very first episode of the LP – Mike allowed that it was at the very least a “welcome back” to Resident Evil in general
B) Andy geeking out over Oswald Spencer (one of the founders of the Umbrella Corporation and thus The Guy Responsible For All This Shit) being featured in one of the newspapers Grace Ashcroft, one of our two protagonists, was looking at in her introduction
C) Jane wondering what the hell the FBI actually INVESTIGATES because, being English, she’s only familiar with it from stuff like The X-Files and The Silence Of The Lambs; Mike and Andy hypothesized that, being a federal agency, they mostly did murders over state lines, and Jane welcomed any FBI agents in the chat to explain things further. XD Oh, and this was all done over the scene where Grace’s boss coerces her into going and investigating the Wrenwood Hotel as they found another mysterious body matching the MO of four others they were investigating there, essentially saying “I know that’s where your mother was murdered, but do it for me, please?” – Jane and the others had to clarify that yes, they knew that Grace was being sent to the Trauma Hotel and that they did consider her boss a dick because of it
D) The trio being amazed at how lifelike the city was when Grace arrived in Wrenwood to investigate the wrecked hotel – Andy was disappointed he couldn’t walk Grace into traffic; Andy thought he spotted a case of a reused model in two of the NPCs wandering around in the rain, but Jane said they just had the same hat; Mike was all for going and getting meatloaf from a local diner (Grace was not allowed); and Andy was SHOCKED to learn a haircut cost $40 at the local barber shop (before admitting his own haircuts cost more, but they were done at a MUCH nicer place XD)
E) The trio ragging on Grace for not having her FBI badge ready to go when she arrived at the crime scene and was warned off by a cop, with Andy saying that LEON would never be so “uh-uh-just a second”; then ragging on her for staring at the floor and being generally nervous when the cop tried to ask why the FBI was even interested – come on, guys, this hotel IS Trauma Central for her (though Jane acknowledged her being so wishy-washy right now is probably part of her story arc and that she’d become a badass during the course of the game, with Mike adding that “by the end she’ll be suplexing zombies and punching rocks and all sorts of stuff” XD)
F) Andy checking out Grace’s inventory as they entered the scaffolding around the hotel wreckage and finding a gun...and then seeing in the description that Grace bought it for personal self-defense with her very first paycheck and being like “I brought my gun from home?!” – Jane compared it to having to bring your own stapler to the office
G) Grace entering the crumbling, debris-laden hotel through one of the side doors, and Andy noting that the hotel had seen better days – only for Mike to go “I’ve stayed in worse places.” XD And then to repeat the sentiment when Grace wandered into the even more disgusting bathroom where the corpse was originally found
H) Jane wondering how old Grace is, and Andy admitting that she looks about 12 – cue Jane laughing as she wondered “what qualifications do you need to get into the FBI?” and Andy insisting she must be an amazing analyst
I) Andy getting jumpscared by a bit of falling ceiling in the bar area and accidentally hitting the button to turn off Grace’s flashlight – Jane noted that was a “bad instinct to have” XD
J) Grace discovering someone had taped a picture of her with a key taped to the back next to the message “Let’s talk – Room 204,” then hearing a noise from one of the doors closing and scrambling around in her rucksack for her gun – Jane scolded her for not quick-slotting her items before she came :p
K) After failing to escape through the kitchen, the trio directing Grace through the door the key opened and into a hallway – where they were immediately distracted by the pretty curtains billowing in the wind (they had a lot of nice things to say about the graphics of this game in general; they’re FRIGHTENINGLY detailed). Sadly, the curtains did not prove to have Hitman-esque “bead physics” when Andy shoved Grace’s face into them
L) Andy finding a fire escape after going upstairs – only to discover that it was locked. Jane was like “the fire safety!” and made Andy look at the locked door again in order to truly soak in the horrible decisions made there
M) Grace having to get some wirecutters out of a toolbox on a pool table to cut open the wires holding a pair of doors shut, and the nearby deer head falling off the wall immediately afterward – Jane reacted to the jumpscare by yelling “JUMPSCARE!” then promptly made fun of her own reaction, and the gang seemed to adopt it as a potential running joke
N) Grace proceeding down the hallway to Room 204 to find a creepy radio inside spouting gibberish – the trio noted that it all felt like it things had gone a bit Silent Hill, with Mike noting the radio thing felt ripped straight out of P. T. (and now I’m wondering what a Silent Hill/Resident Evil crossover would look like)
O) Grace discovering a creepy bed covered in creepy photos of herself and her mother, with one particular one triggering a flashback event to when she and her mother Alyssa stayed in Room 204 back when the hotel was operational eight years ago – which in turn prompted the trio to note that Grace looked EXACTLY THE SAME when she was eight years younger (Mike tried to be nice to the video game company by noting they wouldn’t necessarily want to make another model, but – it’s CAPCOM, with fucking Resident Evil money. They could have put in the effort!)
P) The flashback sequence, consisting of Alyssa realizing someone was after them when Grace got a creepy phone call, followed immediately by the lights going out, and trying to hustle them out of the hotel – cue Grace witnessing, in fairly quick succession:
I. The nice hotel employee they encountered on the way out who was going to fix the electrical panel getting suffocated with a bag over his head and his throat slit by a mysterious hooded man
II. Her mother promptly shoot the hooded man three times before hastily hiding a big envelope under a painting in the reception room
III. And her mother – having just talked her through an understandable panic attack and assured her that she’d explain everything one day and that she loved her – getting a knife to the neck right in front of her, courtesy of that hooded guy, who hadn’t quite died when he’d been shot three times (he then collapsed and knocked over a table with a lamp, starting a fire just to make everything worse)
O.O Yeah. As you might imagine, the trio’s reaction to that was essentially “OH MY GOD THAT IS SO MUCH MORE TRAUMATIC THAN WE THOUGHT, GRACE’S BOSS IS GENUINELY HORRIBLE” and, in Jane’s particular case “Oh, I’ve been way too hard on this woman” :(
O) Grace going to get the items her mother hid behind the painting (after being spooked by a mysterious no-answer call on a mysterious cellphone) and finding a journal with a few entries about how that hooded man seemed to be stalking her (Alyssa) and a mini-disc (unreadable because no one had laser eyes or a Sony mini-disc player)...only to be interrupted by the cop from before. Who slurred out that something had stung him…
Before turning into a zombie and trying to attack her with a SHOTGUN he somehow picked up. With Grace unable to flee as she’d somehow hooked the sleeve of her jacket on the luggage cart her mother had put in front of the painting all those years ago (yes, it was still there) – Andy was like “for God’s sake Grace!” XD I left off with Andy trying to wiggle Grace free and not get shot – tomorrow, we’ll see where things go from here! Nowhere good, I’m guessing!
2. Continue edits on Chapter 5 of “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Partial check – thanks to the above write-up taking so long, me needing to answer all the reviews left on Chapter 6 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland,” and me wanting to take a moment to get back into the flow of things, I spent today’s writing time going over the beginning of Chapter 5 and making just a couple of tweaks here and there. Not many, but I was able to correct a typo or two and reword a couple of awkward sentences. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will be able to pick up where I left off before taking The Long Break To Edit Chapter 6 Of LB:DQ! We’ll see!
3. Watch something on YouTube: Well, WeirdKev did link me to a YouTube Short this evening, so I guess that counts… Said short was by PunkeyDoodles8, with audio by _videojames_, didn’t have a proper name, and was I presume an animated version of a tumblr shitpost, where someone talked about how, if they had a time machine, they’d go forward in time to dig up their own bones. With an onlooker being like “...why?” and the original poster just going “They’re mine.” XD Very odd, as you might agree! WeirdKev wanted to know what I thought Doc would think of that – I said he and Marty would be like “...well, it doesn’t cause a paradox, but it is disturbing.” Which is a legit way to feel, I think.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – there was nothing over on Valice Multiverse apart from WeirdKev’s direct message, but I managed to get something into the queue over on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – the traditional “here’s a link to the start of the story now that I’ve posted the last chapter so you can read it over from the beginning if you want” post for “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland.” Just a nice way to wrap things up for that story, I feel.
Not too shabby -- though I once again despair over my inability to keep the damn workout video write-ups short. There's always just too much I want to talk about there! *sigh* I gotta figure out something...as it stands, though, I gotta get to bed, as my parents need my car tomorrow to get to one of Dad's appointments (the truck died on them today while they were out and about), and because of the timing, we have to leave way earlier than I usually do and drop me off at work earlier. Which sucks, but... So yeah, gotta get to bed now. Night all!
