2025-11-17 04:12
Sat
In the afternoon, visited party of community group member (there were a few cakes since a few people had birthday celebrations around that time), in a slightly distant location, car windows down for a bit (imo they could have been kept down longer, tho car later cooled well... and the water bottle's 2nd use... cooling, came in handy). Since the radio was off when driving, I put music on for a little while.
Not many others (except the leader) from the community group were there, tho the place was filled with members of the gardening group, maybe relatives of the 3 birthday people, some red, pink and white rug to cover stuff, and many sets of food, even sushi. Quiches were brought by us, and I tried 2 small sushi pieces, some cheetos, and listened to interesting discussions of earth shelters, houses built with packed bags of earth. There was talk about permits, and when I later asked about the house, I discovered it was going well.
I had the pavlova cake (a large slice!) after it was served, in a wooden mesh baskets with "paper" plates. Went outside and had a slice of cheese, there was some Turkey being cooked in a large brick fire-oven, idk if it really was "on since Thursday", tho learnt that when making crackling, it takes 3 minutes directly in front of the fire... and requires close attention (much faster than crackling with an electric grill-oven).
Got to tour the large gardens, I have a feeling the 2 neighbours agreed to remove the fence some time ago. Some sections were a tight squeeze, and there were 3 rows of pots with many plants, and some automatic watering system (but it only covered part of the garden). The house behind the far end of the garden (separated by a half height fence) grew Shirley Poppies, pink, white and purple. After going fully round the back area, a cat raced past us, I learnt it belonged to the person with a long beard, who talked about the Earth shelters, described stuff to us, and owned the house to the left. Some neighbour, further left and behind a (similar) half height metal fence, was good at keeping a lawn, had it shaped well, and mentioned the lack of weeds in his garden.
The cat (Nephretiti, 3 years old) sat in the shade for a bit, walked off when I walked a bit towards her, and had orange, white, and a bit of black fur. When the owner picked her and let us pet her... she had softer fur than Ravi.
I tried plum leaf, quite bitter... and we crossed the mostly empty garage, I discovered the solar panels produced ~650W at the time (probably could produce more tho, according to it's LCD graph), and made over 50MW over it's lifetime. As we were leaving, we went to the front garden, and found some lillies. Parent asked "Isn't it toxic for cats?"... and the gardener replied "Yes, but I don't have to worry because she doesn't go near it". He also mentioned (just before) that some tulips, planted near black stone, managed to survive summer (tho wilted a bit then), and when I showed a picture of the poppies, told me it was Shirley Poppies (chatGPT didn't recognise the exact species when initially asked).
We then went home, arriving around 5pm, and I set a 27 minute timer for 5:30pm (so we can go to mass on time), using the new, Live OS laptop a bit to play counting game or so (I posted the empty bottle pic in the SS lounge before going, not after), and maybe 2048. Managed to arrive a bit early for mass, tho had to skip the evening tea in case we'd be late for the community group, tho parent briefly said hi to a woman there, and all 3 of us exchanged bye's.
Arrived a bit early, and got to met the presenter, even showing him the colour matching LED game, and he got to try it too.
Sun
Sunday was nice and relaxing for the most part. There was time chatting with the YEW user, binaryexploiter talking about upgrades to his forum, etc.... brief readings of TFES, the gallows humour thread, and I watched part of a pibble (cute dog) video. However, the Chatzy chat, while starting off well, ended up with me accidentally triggering the user and I felt a bit bad.
Towards the evening, I run age estimation on a post here, it coming back as 16-20... find a post with stronger suspicion and report that... tho since it was a goodbye post (yes, I searched "sn goodbye" because I wanted to read such post to it's final outcome (peace)... after having discussion with someone who experienced nightmarish stuff).
tldr for next paragraph... I code.
I modify my random string generator to generate a longer string, after running it for a bit and noticing the length change occasionally, realised that "0" padding was needed, after realising strlen() won't be a good fit (coz each character is printf'd one at a time), and switch-case doesn't support less-than conditions, create a table of if-statements, using perl to get the exponents calculated right.
Mon
After checking Tor a little (some Polish or similar site... some fox imageboard, etc)... chatting, playing the counting game with my alt on discord, and contacting a friend who was offline for a while in a group server (the owner was discussing questions about country, age, and gender, I sent :3 and the friend sent (^_^) with brackets), I found some time to write here (there were a few notifications, few tabs to check out, etc)... before the memories fade.
PS: Breakfast had avocado mixed with sugar and milk powder... tasty.