Tag Archives: Cleaning

Cleaning House = Cleaning Brain

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Mondays. Usually they are the start of the new work week and the harbinger of another five days of constantly having to answer questions. Not today though. Today it was a day of sleeping in, cooking a nice meal and starting the big spring cleaning process that I’ve been wanting to do for a couple of weeks now. The weekends are always too short to do projects like this though so it’s nice that I have more time now to really dive into all the stuff I’ve been hoarding and, hopefully, getting rid of a lot of it.
Today I started with personal hygiene and care products. Working at the head office of a big drugstore chain has gotten me a lot of free stuff on the make-up, shower, perfume and body care spectrum. A lot of stuff that I don’t use or that has gone bad over the years of not using it up. I dove into two bags and a crate of the stuff and ended up with two bags full of things that I could throw out. Body creams and sunblock gone bad. Perfumes that were free samples but smelled absolutely horrible. Hairsprays that didn’t really work anymore and the list goes on. It felt liberating throwing everything out and now I’m left with a crate of stuff that I actually use and keep in my bathroom. It’s mostly shampoo/conditioner, shower gels and foams, body care products and some toothpaste. I’m prepared for summer with two different types of sunblock and some after sun. I also own a ton of facial cleansing products since I like to clean my face before I go to bed and put night cream on so I feel clean and hydrated in the morning.

I notice that next to working towards a cleaner and less cluttered house, it’s also decluttering my brain. Not having to be annoyed at random bags in my bedroom anymore feels really nice. Being left with stuff that I know that I will actually use is even nicer. I don’t want to say that I’m a minimalist, because I’m really not, but I don’t want to take stuff home with me anymore that I know I won’t use that someone else actually will. So now I’m left with the necessities and it’s making me happy.

I also realized that I’ve owned Animal Crossing for more than 10 days on my Switch now which means that I can actually see how much time I’ve put into the game so far. According to my Switch it’s somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. Which means I’m playing a little over an hour each day and that sounds about right. I’m actually not really actively working towards anything right now. I’m mostly just running around my island and making sure I dig up my fossils every day aswell as find the money rock and do some fishing and bug catching. I guess I’m aiming to get the next installment of my house paid so I can upgrade again and start making some individual themed rooms instead of the one big room I have now.
I’m kind of amazed with how other people have shaped their island by all the pictures I see on Reddit and Twitter. I know a lot of people do “time traveling” to unlock stuff. Which basically means they’ve been tampering with their date and time settings on their Switch. Personally I don’t feel the need for that and instead am just doing my own thing. Which is fine aswell.

I’m not sure why I suddenly feel the need to blog so much. Maybe without my work I finally have the headspace to focus on other things. If I had more than one week off I would have considered joining Blapril as active participant since it seems like writing is coming much more naturally now that I have the time. However since I have only one week off and my work will probably be slightly crazy as I get back to it I’m going to shy away from Blapril and just do what I feel like in the moment. No stress. No commitment. It’s nice for a bit.

Mental Health Day?

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I called in sick to work today. Not because I was actually sick but because I desperately needed a day off to retain my sanity. I’ve come home every day of the week with stress induced headaches and it looks like it won’t let up for a while yet. So I texted my boss that I wasn’t coming in today and that I would be back on Monday and went promptly back to sleep. I slept in untill around noon and then got out and sat down to play some games and think about why I picked today especially to have a small mental breakdown. In truth I’ve had a bit of a mental breakdown earlier but powered through it, going to work and just acting normal while trying not to fall apart. Today I couldn’t so I decided to stay home.
It has mostly resulted in a day where I was able to relax and create some headspace with cleaning up the house. I’ve gone through a lot of my clothes and prepared two big bags to be donated to goodwill. I rounded up all the paper and trash and took those out. I vacuumed and did laundry. As I was organizing the house I slowly felt the rest return to my mind aswell. I’m not done yet, there’s still some stuff I want to sort through and throw out and I still need to do some additional cleaning, I feel like it has helped me get back into a more stable mood. Plus having a three day weekend is extremely nice aswell in the middle of all the chaos that is going on at work.

Next to cleaning I also took the time to sit down and enjoy my gaming sessions today, instead of mechanically doing 2 hours of dailies. I did some leveling on my Warrior in WoW and ran around doing job quests in FFXIV aswell as taking the time to do Mainstory roulette among other things. Level 80 on the Monk is starting to get very close and I’m happy to have another job to max level, especially a DPS job that normally has to deal with very long queues for roulettes. The Moogle tome event seems to have made things slightly better though, my average wait time for a Mainstory roulette has gone from 30 minutes down to about 15 now. I have been wondering though, once I have all my battle classes at level 80 and all my crafters and gatherers at level 70 and above what I’m going to do in the game. I don’t actively raid. I don’t really feel like pugging Savage content although I’m fine with Extreme primals. Right now I have a reason to log on every day while leveling, but I’m a bit scared that once that goes away I won’t feel the pull to log on as much anymore. Of course there is a ton of content to do besides leveling, I just have a hard time imagining what I would like to do when I don’t have a steady “schedule” to adhere to anymore. I know these are worries that are premature, I’m still smack dab in the middle of levelling all the things, yet I can’t seem to keep this off my mind.

All in all taking the day “off” has really calmed me. I got some stuff done in real life aswell as in my games and I’m feeling extremely relaxed as I’m writing this blog post. Maybe this will be the trigger for me to recognize the signals of overwhelming stress earlier and some days off ahead of time instead of calling in sick last minute.

Vacation moods

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Seeing as I’m not near a pc and thus a physical keyboard for at least another week I am once again typing up this post on my tablet. So again I am probably going to keep it relatively short.

I have had the first week of my vacation fly by. I’ve gotten a lot of things done and feel like I am slowly settling into my new home. Right now I am spending a lot of time cleaning and buying all the stuff that I come across that I lack. I have mentioned it on Twitter but my house is super dusty and I am vacuuming almost every day because of it.

In gaming land I have been spending a lot of time on FFXIV. I have finished the Hildibrand story line, I have done the FFXV crossover event and bought the car. My carpenter is about to hit level 60 and I have finally gotten my weapon upgrade on my White Mage. I’m also working on getting a full set of 390 gear on that and gearing up my alt classes with the tons of Mendacity tomestones that come with the grind. The few things that still linger are the 24 man raids and finishing off the Omega raid.

I have also been spending a bunch of time playing Yoshi’s Crafted World. I have obtained the second gem and am working  my way to a third. Some of the levels are actually quite challenging, especially when you want to find as much items as possible in your first run through. It’s still fun and I can see myself finishing the main objective in the game this week. After that it kind of becomes a collection game and I wonder how long that will keep my attention.

As for the rest this week… I will be watching the new game of thrones episode tonight and the big Ajax football match later this week. My uncle is coming to visit and I still need to do a ton of cleaning so I think I am set for the rest of the week.

 

Birthdays, books and bringing down the chaos

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As I sit down to write this post another weekend has gone way too fast. Granted it’s “only 19.30” as I’m writing this and I still have a few hours of evening to fill. However it feels like the two days respite you get inbetween the five days of hard labour seem to last shorter every week. Somehow the more stressful work is the faster the weekend goes. Normally I could attribute my short weekends due to sleeping in late but not this time. I woke up around 9.00 both yesterday and today and I didn’t really stay in bed for long after waking up either. This has caused my mornings to be filled with World of Warcraft and consequently freeing up my afternoons for other things.

Yesterday the weather was nice and I really needed to get my eyebrows back in shape so I decided to go into town to walk around a bit, poke my head into the “Used Products” shop we have and get my eyebrows done. I probably should have picked a different Saturday to do this because this weekend was the last holiday weekend for the country before schools and normalcy starts up again. Our city center was absolutely crawling with people and there were lines for everything. Success was had though! I bought a used copy of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” for the Nintendo DS for only €10. I remember owning that game for my computer back in the day and even though I may still own the disc, I doubt I can get it to work on my current PC. The DS however is still going strong so I figured I would pick this up and enjoy it 13 years after release date. I also managed to get my eyebrows plucked and cut, after an hour wait, but decided against getting my hair done due to the fact that it was already late and I had to be home on time for the big event of the evening: My uncle’s 50th birthday!
I’m not sure how big of a deal this milestone is in other countries but here in the Netherlands we celebrate it in a big way when a man or woman turns 50 with set traditions and usually a very big party. So that’s where I spent my Saturday evening, dancing with my family and generally having a good time. A lot of my coming weekends will look like this since September seems to be the birthday month. It drastically cuts down on my time but it’s nice to see my family and friends and celebrate life.

As for today I decided to slowly start getting rid of stuff I don’t use or wear anymore. I wanted to start small so the thing I’ve tackled today was my jewellry box and my rack of earrings. There was a period of time where I owned over a 100 pairs of earrings. After getting rid of everything that wasn’t real silver, I’m slightly allergic to “fake” silver earrings, I’m now down to a total of 20 pairs of earrings/earbuds and I’m happy where I am. I’ve also gotten rid of a lot of cheap, bulky bracelets which in turn opened up some space to store my watches. All in all it was a very satisfying task and it will save me the headache of having to do it when I move out next year.

Finally I managed to get started in a book again for the first time in a few months. Last April I discovered Robin Hobb as writer and the amazing books she has written. I’ve bought the entire Farseer Trilogy and am currently a little over halfway done in the second book. I’m really hoping to finish it off in September and start reading the final book in the trilogy after. It atleast gives me something to do that doesn’t involve a screen and reading also improves my writing so it’s a win/win situation overall.

As for the rest of my Sunday though. I still have one or two chores to do and I really want to get atleast the Beast Tribe dailies done in FFXIV so my Machinist will gain a bit more experience. Otherwise I predict some more time in WoW to get the emissary quests done on my Paladin and an early night so I can be fresh for work tomorrow.

Lazy on Sunday

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Today I’m having a lazy day. I’m quite content with just lounging in my room, getting an hour of gameplay in here and there and otherwise just doing a whole lot of nothing. I tend to do my cleaning on Sunday because it’s usually the day we don’t have anything to do. With severe allergies towards dust mite it’s quite important that I vacuum and dust my room regularly. Especially since my bedroom is also a mini living room. I spend most of my time up here playing games, reading, watching shows and just doing my thing in general. It’s not that I don’t like spending time with my Dad and his girlfriend, it’s just that I’m often very tired and just want to be left alone. Plus they have their own schedule with watching certain shows on TV and basically completely ignoring me once I do spend time downstairs with them.

I used to have the mindset that time spent doing nothing is time badly spent. I always felt like I had to do something. Be it cleaning, working on a hobby, reading. Anything. Going outside, sporting. You name it. As I get a bit older (I’m nearing my 30’s what the hell) I realise that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing you can be doing. I don’t recover as well from colds anymore, I’m very low on energy due to work and house buying related stress and I’m plagued by headaches, tiredness and random shivers. All signs that I just need to take a step back and rest up a bit more. It feels weird to be okay with living in about 6 square meters when I’m moving to an apartment that will be 50 square meters. I will actually have a living room all to my own. I can plug my consoles into an actual big TV instead of one shared with my computer. I can’t wait!

Next week I don’t really have anything special planned. There is a friend coming over on Saturday but that’s it. With some luck work will be less busy aswell and I can actually use Thursday to rest up and relax instead of going into town and driving through half the country. I probably have some time to actually dive into games a bit more than last week and I hope I can get a little bit more done in FFXIV and maybe Yo-Kai Watch. I will definitely finish off Botanicula. Point and click adventures are a very nice way to relax after a long day of work, so I can see myself finishing it in an evening or maybe two.

All in all I don’t have that much to say today. I’m in a very relaxed mood. It’s nice and quiet in the house and outside (although people are coming home as we speak). My room is cleaned, laundry is done. Fresh bedsheets and a clean pajama are waiting on me when I’m going into bed tonight. All in all I feel content today. I hope I can take this feeling with me the coming week.

Sunday Summaries #3

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Hello everyone and it’s Sunday again! My time really does fly doesn’t it?
It’s been a really busy week for me. Work has been kind of crazy, I played a lot of FFXIV and I did a lot of stuff around the house. I also took my time shopping again, seeing as one of my bras snapped and I needed replacement ones anyway and I picked up some new jewellery and for the first time in ages Pokémon cards.

So, what have I done?
In the world of gaming I’ve been mostly focussed on FFXIV. We raided two nights of Omega Savage and got turn two down and are slowly working our way through learning the mechanics of turn three. Although I’m really enjoying the raids I’m really struggling to get my Ninja going properly. I have my opener down and most of my rotation but somewhere halfway through fights I seem to fall off quite a bit and I’m not really sure why. I’ve also realized that trying to time skills together is probably detrimental to my DPS so I’m going to try to be less rigid about it and see if my DPS improves. I have mastered Ten-Chi-Jin a bit better so there’s that.
I keep saying that I’m going to work on my gathering classes but for some reason I just really can’t be arsed. It’s not really in line with my roadmap to Stormblood but I’m just not really feeling the need to spend my time on my gatherers or crafters when I’m too busy working on my battle jobs still. This is also in combination with having less time to play overal seeing as my Friday evenings are mostly taken by either watching series or sleeping early. I’m really tired the last few weeks so it impacts my game time enormously.
I have been leveling my Bard and she’s currently sitting on 66. The queues for roulettes aren’t that horrible anymore, I average about 15-20 mins wait time per queue, and I’m filling my time inbetween with hunt marks, FATEs or doing some IRL stuff while waiting for my queue to pop. Things have actually been going so well that I think she might be level 70 by the next time my summaries post comes around. I’m also taking my White Mage through some Palace of the Dead to get her to level 60 so I can start leveling her to level 70 properly aswell. I hope it goes faster than on my Bard, mostly because I predict I will have shorter queues.

In real life my life is a bit odd right now. I’m waiting for results from varying lung tests (which I’ll get tomorrow) and for the rest I’m spending most of my time being tired. We went into town for some shopping on thursday and I could barely stand on my feet during the evening. I have made some progress in clearing out our attic again. My mom had obtained quite a big ministeck collection when she was still alive but it was spread out everywhere. It took me about 7 hours yesterday but I managed to get all the pieces into one place and neatly tucked away. I’m not planning on touching it soon to do some ministeck myself but it’s nice to have everything in the same place. It helps when you’re looking for something to know where it is. I’m also struggling what exactly I want to do with my Switch/WiiU. I don’t really use my Switch much on the TV but it’s nice to have the option for when I want to. My WiiU is currently boxed under my bed, but I have so many games to finish on it that it feels bad to let it just lie there. I may just set it up again in a few weeks so I can properly work on my backlog. I say this now however but I know most of my time will be swallowed by FFXIV anyway so don’t pin me down on this.

What do I have planned for next week?
It really depends on my results tomorrow. I hope there’s nothing serious but you never know. I want to get my Bard to 70 and put some time in on my White Mage. I also feel like I should spend some time on one of my single player games or my backlog will never go away. I’m not really sure which one I’ll pick but I’ll probably post about it when I do. There’s many games that are competing for my interest and I have a really hard time choosing what I want to do.
I hope I can continue cleaning up the attic aswell. I feel like I’m finally making some progress, there is more space and I can store some stuff that have been put down randomly everywhere in one place. I also hope I can find the remainder of my Pokémon cards. I found my big folder with most of them in but I’m pretty sure that I have more than that and I have no idea where it has disappeared to. All in all I’ll have enough to do, assuming I can do it.

Cleaning House

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I’m sitting here staring at my blog, wondering what to write. It’s been a while and even though I have a lot of things to discuss I’m not sure where to really start.
Maybe I’ll start with telling you guys that I just came back from a wonderful 8 day trip to Mallorca. I’ve been needing a vacation for quite some time now and flying off to the sun for a full week was something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I managed to get some relaxation time in and tanned a little bit. I’m really white skinned so getting any sort of tan takes me a while, especially having to prevent turning lobster red instead. I’ve done a lot of things, visited a water park, aquarium and midget golf, but mostly I took the time to destress and relax away from home.
I had my 3DS with me and I managed to finally sit down and play a few games that I’ve been meaning to. I’m about 4.5 hours into Bravely Default now, playing through Chapter 1. I never got past the intro first so it’s a milestone! I also spent about 5.5 hours total playing Ever Oasis and I’ve fallen in love with that game. The combination of having to maintain a town and also dungeoning is quite refreshing and the whole atmosphere of the game is insanely cute. I might dedicate a post to it later.

Next to going on vacation I’ve been using my free time to work through the mess that is my room and the attic. My room is more or less empty right now and I’ve thrown away about 3 trash bags worth of stuff from the attic. I’ve also been giving away a lot of my old children’s books which frees up even more room. During my cleaning I’ve stumbled across my old Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) and all of its’ games and the two nintendo mini classics you see on the picture at the start of my post. I’m fully intending to put batteries in atleast one of these and hang it on my bag to play. I remember having a very good time as a 9 year old with these games and I’m sure if they still work they’re still a blast to play. The silver one is Super Mario Bros. and the green one is Donkey Kong jr. It made me insanely happy to find these because well, I like my game collection and these two were “missing” for quite a while.
It feels nice to get rid of things. I’ve never been a hoarder, but a lot of my stuff got chucked up on the attic out of habit. It was and still is quite full with tons of things that I need to sift through, but for now I’m happy with my progress and I will continue a later time. Ideally I want the shelves that now hold old toys and books to be reserved for my older gaming gear, mostly so I know where it is and it’s easy to pick up whenever I would want to play it.

Speaking of games…
Ofcourse I have played the shit out of Stormblood. My Ninja is currently sitting on level 70 with a full Lakshmi Ex kitted right side and waiting on her Susano ex weapon. I am going to do Omega Normal tonight with my Free Company, something I’m quite looking forward to aswell. Leveling a DPS hasn’t been the easiest this expansion, mostly due to insane queue times. I think the longest I’ve had so far has been an hour. And that’s not even counting the queue times to get on the server itself. I really enjoyed the Stormblood story, especially the Doman part. My Ninja plays really nicely if we forget about Ten-Chi-Jin for a minute and my static will be starting up Savage raiding soon. I’ve really enjoyed Lakshmi ex aswell, although the Bollywood music tends to get kind of annoying after two straight hours of it.
As far as the new classes go I’ve mostly been exploring Red Mage. The playstyle is very refreshing and fast once you get the hang of it and I’m pretty sure I’ll level it up fast after Bard and Warrior. Samurai right now just feels very complicated. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it once I start playing properly but for now I’m leaving the class alone. Bard is a different story. I really like that they removed the casttimes and what they did with the songs. It’s my second favourite class after Ninja and I’m slowly leveling it up, being stuck at 63 right now.

I’ve also been grinding out my crafters, kicking my miner up to level 50. I notice that the game as a whole is taking up a lot of my time so I might take a bit of a step back, map out what I want to do exactly and invest a bit less time. There’s a lot of other things that need my attention right now so I want the time that I do put into FFXIV to be useful, be it through leveling another class, working on my gatherers or getting my Ninja in the best gear. I may actually make a “roadmap for Stormblood” in which I put weekly, monthly and yearly goals. I know it sounds like quite the project but it’s something I’ve been thinking about longer and I may actually just go forward with it.
Ofcourse I’ll share this on the blog aswell, hopefully somewhere the next week.

All in all the vacation time has done me good. I’m more relaxed and focused and ready to take on everything again. I hope this also means I can get a bit more structured with my routines and include blogging more again. For now though I will have to finish here and head to bed… Seeing as I’m more tired from the vacation than when I flew off to go there!

Full Speed Ahead

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Surprisingly I’ve been having an easier time gearing up my Astrologian in FFXIV than I thought I would. I’m already fully kitted out in Lore accessories and am now working towards a full Lore left side aswell. If I just keep on pushing my roulettes, and catch up to Alexander, I should be up there in no time at all. I wish I could say the same thing about my Ninja and her Scripture gear, but unfortunately due to the enforced tome cap it’ll take me a while to get that far. It’s easy to cap Scripture though and I should have my first two pieces of Scripture gear next reset (them being the pants and an accessory). All in all stuff is proceeding easier than I thought, and that’s very nice.
My Machinist is level 54 aswell, even though I’m only doing daily quests, level roulette and PotD on her. I really want to milk every other roulette for Lore, both for the gear for my AST and the Lore I’ll need to buy Umbrites for my Ninja. It also helped tremendously that I’ve finally worked my way through Midas normal with a friend. I do like all the sidequests and the stories Square Enix has going on, and being able to close out another chapter is nice.

On the WoW side things have settled down a bit. I’ve done a mythic+10 on my hunter, so that should be a nice reward waiting for me at the start of the next reset. I’ve raided on my Warrior and we’re currently very close to downing Helya on heroic mode. Seeing as how Nighthold will come out next week already though, I doubt that we will kill her before. We’d need a full focused raidteam on Monday or Tuesday with people wanting to commit to bringing her down. I really hope we can do it though because it would be such a shame to not have killed Helya before we set foot into Nighthold. I guess we’ll see next week.

On the personal front I’ve been quite thorough with my new years resolution. My room isn’t cluttered at all anymore and, after rearranging my clothes closet this morning, I feel like everything is much more organized and clean than it has been in a long while. I still have too much stuff in my room that I should take up to the attic… But for that I need to start organizing the attic. It’s just such a huge mess up there and I’m quite lost as to where to start. There’s one corner that’s more or less “mine” where a lot of my old toys are. Barbies, Lego, old Donald Ducks. I don’t actually want to get rid of that, but maybe I can see if I can rearrange some stuff over there and create some space where there now is none. A lot of other stuff can honestly just be thrown out but that’s a project for when I have more time to myself than just the two-day weekend. I know I’ll just have to start somewhere and be happy with small victories, and I’ve already thrown out atleast one trash bag full of old broken junk, but we’re still a long way off. Especially since my dad is a bit of a hoarder and has a hard time saying goodbye to anything… It makes wanting to clean only more difficult. He’ll have to get to work at some point though, since he’s old and wants to move to a house without stairs… And he can’t possibly bring all the junk we have lying around.

Playing Pokémon and Cleaning House

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It has finally sunk in that I really do have a two week vacation. With my trip to Lisbon coming up in only a few days and work feeling like it’s on the other side of the world I finally have time to do some much needed cleaning. We have a shed and attic full of old stuff, most of which is my dad’s, and it’s just been taking up space everywhere. I intend to atleast get rid of all the broken stuff that is laying around or stuff that I seriously  no longer need and hope to use the space that creates to my advantage. I can’t really keep on storing all my stuff in my rather small bedroom so having a few shelves emptied out on the attic would help me out a lot.
The shed is mostly inhabited by old chairs, deflated balls of all kinds and even an old rubberboat that I’m pretty sure is broken. So I’ll take out all the stuff and slowly but surely pick my way through it, deciding what can go and what can stay. Especially a ton of old folding chairs are on the list to just go to recycling. They’re old, unused and I’m pretty sure the cloth that’s on them will never ever be clean again, so we might aswell get rid of them. My dad already said he’s not really planning to use them anyway so there’s that aswell. So this week or when I’m back from Portugal I’ll probably load them into the back of our car and take them to recycling and there they can do whatever they want with it.

Greninja!

I’ve been playing a lot of Pokémon. A whole lot. Both on Blue and on Pokémon X I’ve been making a nice amount of progress and I actually feel like I can finish both games very soon. I picked the Water starter in both games so I’m looking forward to getting my Blastoise and Greninja (see above picture). I feel like I’ve been cheating a bit on Pokémon X though, since I brought over a lot of Pokémon from an earlier playthrough, including a lot of event Pokémon. I asked a friend to keep them as I resetted my game and now half my party exists of Pokémon who have a level advantage due to being traded. I’m not too bothered though, I’m happy with my current team and I’m not far off the third Gym!
In Pokémon Blue I managed to get my hands on all the starter Pokémon now (trading with a newly acquired Red version from a friend!) so I’m one step closer to completing my Pokédex. In my very first playthrough when I was about 9 years old I managed to get up to 148 types of Pokémon. I don’t actually remember which ones I was missing, but I still regret resetting my game when being so close. So this time I will aim for getting all 150 Pokémon that are available in the game! But first I need to make my way to Gym number four.

NBI
A few words on the Newbie Blogger Initiative. I’ve seen it started up for this month, but honestly I don’t have the time or motivation to participate. Inbetween going away on vacation, cleaning, trying to finish games and going back to work on the 20th I just can’t find the time to blog a lot. I’m trying to churn out 2-3 posts a week atleast… But it’s difficult. I’m just so busy! I do love to write here but there’s simply other stuff that’s more important to me right now. I hope everyone understands.

Flooding

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Literally getting my feet wet
When I came home on Wednesday evening I was in for a nasty surprise. Getting upstairs and into my bedroom after dinner I discovered quite an amount of water on my bedroom floor, courtesy of a leak. A combination of a partially clogged gutter near my skywindow and a ridiculous amount of marble sized hail proved to be a fatal combination to handle for the outside works thus “flooding” my room with water.
Luckily for me the area with my bed, desk and clothes closet was spared, thus leaving me breathing a sigh of relief as I saw all my electronics being intact and not having to deal with a wet bed. The only real victim of this whole ordeal has been the rug I used for under my deskchair, which is now sitting in the outside garbage bin because it was completely soaked. It didn’t give up without a fight though, seeing as it left behind quite a big chunk of rubber remains that I have for the most part scrubbed off the floor yesterday.
All in all not the best two days for me personally.  I have been quite sore all over today due to having to scrub the damn rubber off the floor and assisting my dad with maintenance work on my roof. Having to hold a tilted skywindow over your head for about 20 minutes is a real test to your arms, can tell you that much.

Picross Madness
I posted earlier this week about My Nintendo, Miitomo and the rewards program and mentioned that I had gotten The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess: Picross game.
I really love Picross. It’s one of those games that has you think about your moves and keeps your brain healthy. Combine it with a game series I’m really starting to get into and you have a gem of a game. I’m currently over 2/3rd of the way completed when it comes to the game. There are three modes of play: Picross, Mega Picross and Miicross.
Picross is the original game with the numbers and squares. You can opt into hints or not and after the inital tutorial there are 45 puzzles to complete ranging from 10×10 squares to 20×15 squares.
Mega Picross is the same puzzle buildup only with a twist in the puzzles themselves. Instead of having rows and colums seperately with numbers they have replaced some of them with numbers that span two rows or colums at the same time, making the puzzle a bit more challenging to complete (See picture below, it’s from Pokémon Picross but the same idea).

The last play mode option, Miicross, is a very large picture broken up into about sixty 10×10 puzzle grids. Solve them all and you unlock the picture.

So far I’ve completely solved the normal Picross mode and the Miicross and am now steadily working my way through the 10×10 grids in Mega Picross mode.
I find it a really nice puzzle game to play. I play it at home to relax after work or when I just don’t feel like starting up any of my machines. It’s also a nice way to spend the 15-20 mins on the train every day, making me be at my destination before I even notice.
The music is nice and not too annoying when played constantly and the graphics, as far as they matter, look good. The only downside so far has been that with the bigger puzzles the squares you need to tap to fill in get smaller and especially around the bottom edge of my screen it sometimes doesn’t really tap the right square, causing me to make an error and thus giving me a time penalty.
Time is  a thing is this game in so far that if you go over 30 mins in solving a puzzle you will not unlock the coloured picture. Going over 30 mins has proven to be almost impossible though, unless you keep on making mistakes so they have been really easy with that.

All in all I’ve really been enjoying this game and I feel like it’s a very good way to spend my first 1000 platinum points of the My Nintendo system. I’m currently saving up to get WarioWare Touched aswell, because free games are always awesome! And it will leave the programme at July 1st. With harking in around 200 coins every week though I should have that game on my 3DS in no time at all and have room to get both the Mario and Donkey Kong themes for my 3DS aswell.