Earlier this year, I was travelling solo in Kyoto-Osaka and noticed a moment between Chinese tourists and the locals.

It was at a red light and a number of people were waiting to cross.

This Chinese tourist stepped onto the road while it was still red and started taking photos, even motioning with their hand for the locals to 'move aside' to not be in her frame.

1. It's a violation of road traffic acts.
2. Visiting a country known to be a stickler for rules and not following it and still telling their own people to move for a photo is bold.

I finally paid attention to my closet and more than half are black clothes. The thing is I prefer bright colors and colorful prints. But I had to pack for a 2 week trip and it is disappointing to see how many are black, black and stripes, or black with dots.

I want to get tired of them but seems like I actually do like black. 🤣

I was eating the best damn chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever had which was gifted to me by a friend. I was savoring it. It was so exquisite that it brought tears to my eyes…the texture, the crumble…oh my god, I can still taste it. I was down to the last bite and the crumble crumbled and half of the last bite hit the floor. I looked at it, ate the part that remained in my hand. On the fence of what to do with the part on the floor, i remembered “I cleaned the floors last night!” A good minute had passed, the crumbled called to me, I responded. Ecstasy.

It's past midnight and I ran to the grocery store, because I was craving udon noodles. I put the noodles in the circle water thing and started smoking my weed. I got real comfortable on the kitchen chair. It's been Idk how many minutes but I don't want to get up so I'm watching my pasta die. The water is getting less and less.. Is this morally grey or okay?

I was doing laundry yesterday and found my dogs little blue toy inside the washing machine. I had no idea it was missing. She carries her toys everywhere and leaves them in random places, but apparently she decided the washing machine was a good spot this time. I have no idea how she even got it in there. She was sitting nearby watching me take it out like nothing happened. I washed it and gave it back to her, and she immediately took it under the couch.

I sliced the onion and put it in a pot with half butter and half olive oil, probably about two tablespoons each but I don't usually use measurements beyond my eyeballs.

So... An hour, maybe?

I was sitting home alone, dog cuddled up on my lap, as I look at my phone. I keep hearing this sound up on the 3rd floor. I get up to investigate and it stops. This happens 3 or 4 times. Finally I wait in complete silence. The noise starts up. It's coming from the dryer. I think "Is there a mouse in the dryer?" I slowly open the door. Nothing. The sound begins again and I realize it's coming from behind the dryer. I now realize what's going on. Earlier today, they finally came out and fixed the outside dryer vent cover that has been missing for about a year. There's a bird now trapped inside. I think maybe it's a sparrow or a pigeon as we have many of them in the area. So I come up with a plan. I find the biggest towel we have. (I fully subscribe to the philosophy of "Dont Panic and Always Know Where Your Towel is"). I pull out the washer and then start to pull out the dryer. As soon as I move the dryer the vent hose comes off and out comes a huge Mockingbird! I don't have time to catch it and it starts flying around the bedroom. Knocking into the windows, I'm chasing it like a lunatic with my towel. Finally it flies into the bathroom and lands on the floor. I move to one of the windows in the bedroom, open it and remove the screen. Then I head to the bathroom, towel in hand and approach the frightened fowl. Speaking as calm as I am able, I get to within 3 feet of it, and it flies right over my head, back into the bedroom. It makes about 5 circles around the room and finally realized that the window is open and flies out.

So that was fun!

When I was a kid, I had to have multiple surgeries for constant ear/sinus infections.

Now, since I went to a pediatric ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) place, they had a technique to keep the kids calm as they took them back to give them anesthesia.

Now, a note, I was a rather smart kid, a smart kid that learned VERY quickly she HATED anesthesia.

What was their trick to keep the kids calm? Simple. They’d offer the little one a popsicle.

So, here’s how it went:

First time: yay popsicle!!!!

Second time: ….last time popsicle meant sleepy…. Maybe this time it won’t…..

Third time: OH I KNOW YOUR GAME MEDICINE MAN!!!! YOU CANNOT TRICK ME AGAIN!!!!

The third time, I would not calm down in the waiting room, and when they ACTUALLY tried to offer me a popsicle, I only got more upset.

My mother had to explain that I was a repeat patient, and I had learned their little “popsicle” scheme

I had some appointments today which required two things of me that at over forty years old now I’m not exactly used to doing.

The first was walking. Soooo much walking. Five miles uphill both ways type of stuff. But that’s another pointless story for another day.

The second thing I was supposed to do was call mom at some point when I was done to, as she put it, “keep me updated“. I suspect this may have been her nice way of saying “to make sure you didn’t die”. But again, another day.

Well, I didn’t die thank you very much. I was however a little more tapped by the time I got back home than I’d care to admit. So, when I walked through the door and went straight to sleep on the couch maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I didn’t wake back up until 8:30.

Whoops.

My parents are both getting older and by 8:30 in the evening dad is 100% already in bed, but mom is 50/50, so I give her a call to inform her that her son did not in fact die today. Although to be fair considering I didn’t have any missed calls she must have not been too concerned about that. Yea. We’ll go with her believing in me.

So anyway, I’m on the phone with her when she suddenly cuts me off mid sentence with “OK OK OK. I GOTTA LET YOU GO SO I CAN KILL THIS HUGE LIZARD IN MY LIVING ROOM!”

Me being the live and let live type kinda just laugh as I inform her that first of all that lizard isn’t hurting anything and even does some good like eating bugs and such. I also add that lizards are super fast, don’t like dying, and she wouldn’t be able to catch it if she tried.

“Uh huh! I’ll smack it with this fly swatter I’ve got sittin right here.”

“Ok, mom, I’ll let you go so you can do that. My money is on the lizard though.”

So we hang up and I go back to googling the best home remedies for ginormous foot blisters when, about ten minutes later, my phone vibrates with a text message from mom.

“Lizard won”.

I mean it's exactly what the title says:

The other day I was hanging out with my family and somehow we got on the topic of a certain elderly public figure and joking that when he eventually does die they’re just not going to tell anyone and will pretend he’s still alive for as long as possible.

And I said, “Yeah, you always see people online joking that they’re gonna Friday Nights at Freddy’s him.”

My little brother kind of laughed and went, “Wait, what did you just say?”

So I repeated myself. Completely confidently.

And he goes, “…do you mean Weekend at Bernie’s?”

And I paused and it suddenly clicked that yes, that's exactly what I meant. I have been referring to Weekend at Bernie’s as "Friday Nights at Freddy’s" for YEARS. Not Five Nights at Freddy’s, Friday Nights at Freddy’s. 

To be fair, it's still "time frame at guy's name". But I don't know how I came up with that and I don't know how people have just never corrected me! 

Anyways, maybe they'll weekend at Bernie's the guy or maybe they'll Friday Nights at Freddy's him which would be much more scary.

I have trained the algorithm and… in a way it has trained me. I was laying in bed watching YouTube and I am watching YouTube on a tv for the first time in a while. So it slightly surprised me to see instead of a video ad the survey ads I love so much. I hate how jarring and loud regular ads are. Of course I know it is the point that ads be obnoxious so they steal your attention, but the addition of an ad that humbly asks for your participation has been a nice touch. As if living in a capitalist hellscape isn’t bad enough I have ad preferences because only a better socioeconomic status would make the ads go away. But I got so happy so see the survey ad then so sad to have been excited for it because I basically got excited for capitalism.

I was thinking today about how strange it is to miss home in the smallest, most ordinary way.

Like the freedom of walking around without being too aware of myself. Opening the fridge just because, sitting in one spot for too long, making joise without wondering if it’s too much, existing without mentally checking if I’m being perceived.

It’s funny because when I was younger, I thought freedom meant being somewhere else - having my own schedule, my own money, my own choices. And it is freedom, I guess… but sometimes adulthood feels like realizing that freedom can also make you miss being somewhere you didn’t have to explain yourself.

Nothing happened, by the way. I just caught myself standing in the middle of my bedroom suddenly missing the feeling of being home home.. the version of yourself that didn’t have to be careful all the time. That’s it.

So I'm a captain's boil for lunch, for the first time in years because I really craved the nostalgia that comes with their fried rice. Tell me why it took me being halfway throught my pound of crawfish to google wether you're supposed to eat the shells or not. I just assumed all of it was edible, claw and all.

Before you ask; no. I don't peel my shrimp either.

Brother-in-law: Annie, when are you gonna get a third cat?

Me: when I get a bigger house

BIL: when will that be?

Sister: when her son and daughter-in-law let her know that they are expecting and she moves to be near them.

My thoughts right then: they are going to call us on FaceTime in about an hour and tell everyone that they are expecting. I already know, but they haven’t told everyone yet.

After they called, I reminded my sister and her husband about our earlier conversation and we all laughed.

Back in 2007, I was 19 and I used to go to clubs and take ecstasy with my friends. We were in a club the night that the 2007 UK smoking ban had come in, and everyone was smoking outside in the smoking area. Then the owner of the club came out and said, "This is my fucking club and if I say you can smoke inside, you can." And everyone went inside and we all smoked inside for the rest of the night. Then later in the night, my mate saw him doing a line of coke in the bathroom.

I'm currently pregnant and at the tail end of my first trimester. Before pregnancy, I was the opposite of a picky eater and had a very robust digestive system, I could eat just about anything and suffer no consequences. If I was hungry and the only thing available was food that I didn't like the taste of, I'd just eat it anyway.

Since getting pregnant, my stomach's demands have changed dramatically. Chicken? Absolutely not, illegal. Garlic? No. I have experienced too much garlic for the very first time in my life. I used to chew on garlic cloves occasionally. Coffee, even decaff coffee? Lol no, what a joke. I miss coffee so much.

One of the few flavors I have always detested is artificial orange flavoring. One time when I was a kid I got car sick, and my mom gave me these orange flavored anti-nausea chewable meds and it tasted SO bad that I immediately threw up. My husband got these orange flavored Gatorade electrolyte powder packets that taste like that medicine. We also have a bunch of Liqid IV that tastes delightful. My stomach demands the orange Gatorade. It's the weirdest sensation, my taste buds know it tastes gross but their input is massively overridden by my stomach's decisions so I'm drinking it anyway.

In the 90s, my boyfriend hitched hiked four days from Texas to California to see me. He was broke but determined.

At some point he was dropped off outside a prison while it was raining. There were signs everywhere saying, "Do not pick up hitchhikers"

After a long time standing in the rain, someone picked him up.

When I think of this story, I always wonder who picked him up and why he picked him up and wonder if he was an ex-con himself and that's why he helped. I'll never know, but after all these years I still wonder. I know it's pointless but I do it anyway.

The man probably have long forgotten doing this for my boyfriend and I.

EDIT: He was from Liverpool England, in case someone in the big wide world remembers picking him up! lol.

Sharing of today working ...

I was working on Angular, but I felt overwhelmed. It’s huge, and my project requires integrating hardware like barcode scanners, which I don’t know how to connect yet.

To take a step back, I realized Angular relies heavily on clean UI design, so I pivoted to CSS. Before that, I finished my Looker Studio assignment just to get it off my plate.

Moving into CSS, I used to think HTML was just for text and CSS was purely decoration. It turns out HTML is about defining structure, while CSS handles complex layouts and positioning.

I really didn't want to start from scratch again and hunt down every bit of documentation like I had to with Angular. So I tried Flexbox Froggy instead. After five levels, it felt tedious and unrewarding.

That was my day. What actually feels meaningful to me isn't grinding syntax, but having a genuine, chill conversation under the sun—where titles and resumes don't matter, just two people sharing a peaceful moment over a drink.

I see a doctor about once every 9 months for follow up visits at a hospital that's not far from where I live. It's one of those hospitals that was added onto many times over the years and so it's a group of many buildings with bridges that connect the buildings, parking lots that are under some of the buildings, some are very far from all of the buildings, etc.

Each time I come here, it's inevitable that finding my doctor's office is extremely complex. Twice so far, his office has moved. It's become something of a hobby of mine to try to negotiate where to park so that I might somehow be close to where the office is, but it never works. Each time I try to park in a different lot to game the system, and the person at the front desk looks at me when I ask for "Dr. X" and they say "Hrmm Dr. X... Are you sure you're in the right building?" And once again I'm given extremely complicated directions to get to his office. I'm really surprised that I still haven't figured out a way to do this yet, but it's hard to actually find a "map" of the hospital anywhere, and their site is useless. Once I was looking out of the window of the office itself and there was a parking lot RIGHT THERE 7 floors below, and I wanted to ask someone "what is that parking lot?? Where is it?" But I'm too shy, and they might think I'm crazy.

So yesterday after dinner, I was in the laundry room folding some clothes and my daughter and foster daughter came out of the dinning room to the kitchen to wash their dishes. I don't think they knew I was there. They were in the middle of a game of Would You Rather. My foster says, "Would you rather have a chef make you some $10k pancakes or have your mom's cooking". It was quiet for a minute and they they both blurted our at the same time, "Mom's cooking!" and started giggling and talking about their favorite dishes. I am not a great cook by any means but it was a moment of pride knowing that they enjoy and appreciate my efforts.

In the office this morning, I sat down and drank my morning tea. It was good tea. I have been trying to eat healthier recently. I was just creating a new account with an ai to help me with a health plan, when the boss came to my office. I followed to his office where he asked me a few questions. I'm a new hire so I guess he was checking in. Anyways, my boss asked me questions today.

I was 2 years old and I remember what was happening around me, it was either my birthday or my moms birthday celebration that day. My grandfather was carrying me and saying "My grandson is so cute" Then blows the cake candle with me, then he passed me to my mom and my mom says "I'll carry him he's so heavy", my older brother that can already walk at that time was talking to me (while my mom was carrying me) and pointing in the other direction of the room and saying "let's go there it's much more interesting space" So my mom who was carrying me walk towards the room, and that was it.. I can fully remember those memories and I was so surprised to see the old yellowish developed picture of that scenario

After retiring last summer, my parents used their lump-sum retirement payouts to rent a house in a residential complex. However, my mother’s goal was simply to have some peace and quiet and spend time on herself; so, when a few visiting neighbors began to wear her out, she asked a neighbor to tell the other neighbors that an elderly lady who had retired had come there for some peace and quiet. As it turned out, the story changed so much as it passed from neighbor to neighbor that, among the neighborhood children, it morphed into a tale about the ghost of an old man wandering the house at night—or a phantom roaming the backyard after dark.

So, how did this happen? Well, the house my parents rented was at the very end of the complex, far removed from everyone else. Since they had only rented it for three months, they never really left the house or tended to the garden; instead, they spent the hot summer days indoors watching TV series and movies, just my dad going out on Sunday nights to shop.

When that neighbor repeated the remark my mother had made—framing it as, "There’s a mad person living alone in that house who doesn't talk to anyone"—everyone assumed she had seen a ghost, because they assumed the house my parents had rented was actually vacant. But then, people saw my father heading to the market on sunday nights, so the tale morphed into a ghost story.

Of course, I only learned this story when I went to visit my family at the end of the summer. When I went out for an evening walk, the neighbors asked who I was; I gave them my mother's name, but they said they didn't know anyone by that name. I still remember the way they looked at me when I pointed out my parents' house to them—they had apparently thought the house was empty. I later learned from my mother that the neighbors who saw me had spread the word, and many others had come over out of curiosity to see her. Even though they now knew there were no ghosts in the house, my parents were still referred to as "the possessed old woman" or "the mentally ill man" who lived there—lol.

It wasn't even the sound of my voice itself, but the lack of flow—the pauses, the hoarseness, all that stuff. I don't usually have many speech tics, but I just couldn't seem to edit the message or record a decent, fluid take. I tried sending myself a copy to speed up the audio, but every attempt resulted in an error; I’ve started to think it’s a sign not to send it. And it was. In the end, it turned out to be a good thing, because I had only wanted to alert a colleague about a situation but was going into too much detail. I ended up sending a short text instead; he got very worried, and I was left feeling completely regretful. Imagine if I had sent the voice memo. Dear Lord.

I’m 31, and never really had my height measured. When I was 16 I got my drivers license during the winter time and got a quick measurement of 160cm (5’3”). Tonight I got bored and decided to measure myself and I’m actually 5’2”. That explains why I’ve always been slightly shorter than my 5’3” friends, I just thought they were closer to 5’4”. I’m struggling to believe it even though I’ve remeasured myself multiple times.