Getting some spring cleaning done.
Spraying down some weeds.
Watching some baby goats on a farm at the edge of town.
Lots of babies.
Our neighbor had a birthday party for their one-year-old and brought us some food from it.
Ogii cooking.
Great dinner.
Neat custom-made postcard Ogii got.
Ogii doing taxes.
This guy was pushing this cart selling toys. He stopped by the restaurant we were eating at to go to the bathroom. The yellow car in front is a Transformers knockoff that transforms, drives around, and has flashing lights and music, so we bought it for Sarnai.
A few weeks ago this was $15 to rent; glad we waited a bit for it to go down in price.
Well that's annoying.
Dumb slow internet.
I've never seen these alcoholic lemonades before.
14% alcohol per volume compared to 5% of Mike's Hard Lemonade; they're strong.
Ogii cooking more great food.
Lots of texture.
Neat hunting vest in a local store, but I almost always want sleeves on mine.
Somebody won a fairly big prize here recently.
Pretty flower pictures at the Tejon outlets.
That sounds great; every live game, every Sunday. Might have to consider DirectTV.
Near the coast 91.7 is public radio; inland it's a Christian station.
We were thinking of starting a cashmere store in Carmel or Monterey. This was the only one in the area we can find on Google Maps but it recently closed as the owner retired and now only sells online.
So Ogii went around looking for possible places to rent. This is a little square in Carmel.
From the outside.
A nice little area.
Although it's back behind this gazebo which sells purses. And the whole thing is kind of enclosed on itself and not very open to people just walking by.
A second area.
Also not too bad of a little store.
In a very pretty area. However, the larger mall is just across the street and might attract all the shoppers instead of them coming over here. It's also kind of enclosed on itself.
Another location, another store tucked back out of the way of passers by.
So much for Carmel. This little mall area in Monterey in Cannery Row also had an opening. And it's right by this Taste of Monterey wine market.
A decent size.
Except there are a ton of other art stores in this mall (and we wanted to hang art on the wall to sell in addition to the cashmere).
And it has the same problem as the squares in Carmel; there are a ton of people who walk by outside, but almost nobody comes into the mall itself.
My turn to cook: chislic. Half well-done, half medium. I didn't plan that; it's just that the second batch didn't cook as much for some reason.
We drove to Kettleman City on Friday night as I was filling in there on the weekend and Ogii was driving to Los Angeles. They had a newly-opened Tesla charging store there, which makes sense because it's almost exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on I-5.
In front of Bravo Farms.
We had some BBQ.
A nice little open area.
With lots of fake houses for playing and picnic tables for eating.
A shot-up no shooting sign.
A funny sign about glasses, but not those types of glasses.
Really cool piece of art on the wall.
And fun wanted posters in the bathroom.
Why do all of these have "doo" on them?
Paper recycled from poop? This seems like a thought you'd have and then decide, naw, that's too nasty to actually go through with.
Some play houses on the other end with what looks to be gold mining stations.
They have lots of antiques scattered around, including this old fish finder.
Antique cans. I wonder if any of them are worth anything?
Ogii compared to a giant tree.
Really neat metal cutout art.
A shooting gallery.
Ogii aiming.
Me taking a shot.
Each target would do something different if you shot it. The worst was a little frog; after you shot it, it would spit water at you.
That's fine; I don't need to see to shoot.
There's a giant FedEx plant behind the store.
Ogii playing with her candy toy.
There was a UFC fight that night. However, the main bout was changed a week ago, and then a ton of fights were changed after Conor McGregor threw a handcart at a bus with some of the fighters on it, getting glass on them and making them unable to compete.
A lot of the fights still ended up being really good, though. There was a huge height difference in this one.
This guy got beat pretty badly.
Ogii mentioned all of the announcers shave their heads.
Bruce Buffer was in a suit that looked like an optical illusion.
Khabib Nurmagomedov always wears a papakha, a huge hat from his homeland in Dagestan. It makes it easy for you to find his fans because they wear them, too.
He won easily, as expected.
And then put the hat on Joe Rogan.
That's a really cool card. Looks like it'd be neat to make rather than buy, though.
I love the Streamlight 65018 Stylus penlight. I hate all the regular penlights; they're too big and too dim. This guy is thinner than even the pens I use, so it fits nicely in my white coat pen pocket, and it's super bright. I'd say too bright, but that has been useful for picking up the very small pupil abnormalities which I wouldn't notice with a dimmer one.
The only thing it's missing is a ruler built onto the side. Although most of the ones with rulers are only 50mm long, and the ones that are longer are hard to read as a PD rule and aren't bright enough as a penlight (such as the one by MDpocket).
The only problem with the Streamlight is it's actually too thin; when I bend over to tie my shoes it'll often fall out of my pocket. It comes with a little plastic cover that has a hole on it so you can leave the cover on all the time to protect the bulb and still use the light, but that makes it a bit too long for me and slightly decreases the light output. And since I've dropped the thing on the floor like once a week for over a year and it only broke recently, I'm going to continue leaving the cover off and just buying a new one when it breaks.
A train of army vehicles.
Fog in the hills.
Funny, Volksagen swag.
How do these dumb YouTube stars afford houses like this?
373 new movies on Amazon Prime, but they're all "Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark" quality. I'd rather have three good movies.
And again. 372, all horrible.
That's a fun logo; Slo Cal.
Combat archery sounds fun. If we're in LA when they do it, we should check it out.
I was trying to sign us up for this night run on my phone because the discount for registration was ending in under two hours. However, you couldn't type in your date of birth.
You had to click back month by month. Do you know how long it takes to get from the nearly 2020s to the 1980s? A long time. Especially because if you misclick it closes the calendar and you have to start all over again.
Forget it; we're both going to be born in 2000.
Another annoying this is you're supposed to check in the day before. Well, we'll be four hours away then, so that's not happening. Thankfully we can do same-day check in, but we have to pay for the premium upgrade.
I ran across this book while Googling for some retina disease. Thought it might be nice to buy, but not at $675. Especially when Google Images is so great at finding all of the different diseases. You can just type in what it looks like and scroll through images until you find something that looks like what you saw in the back of the patient's eye, then click on the picture to figure out what it is, all for free.
An ophthalmology podcasts that goes over new treatments. Although you have to be careful because a lot of these are small studies and he's interviewing the researcher who performed the study, so there still needs to be a lot of other studies to prove they work.
I had an idea for an app like this. Except this app is already out, is much nicer looking than anything I can make, and has lots of features I would never have thought of. So much for that idea.
Man, this woman has the life. She lives in LA, plays volleyball all day, and plays poker all night. That's like my dream. Except she's way better than me at both volleyball and poker.
Phil Laak in a crazy snow-themed outfit while playing poker.
This was crazy. Alec Torelli 3-bet preflop with AA, bet on the flop, bet on the turn, and insta-folded when he got check-raised.
It was correct as he was behind, Andy had a straight, but crazy seeing someone folding AA so easily.
You can buy a little fenced pasture with water and corrals. Nice if you want to own some horses or goats or whatever but don't have the land for them.
This is a cool business card: laser-etched cutouts in wood.
That is a huge eagle. We'll have to try that if we travel to Mongolia.
One of my classmates is opening a second optometry office; nice.
I should never have told Ogii about this "texting your spouse on your anniversary time." Thankfully she forgets some days. Although it is kind of cute.
Transitions contact lenses. I've been waiting for these for like 15 years since Nike created the tinted MaxSight contact lenses.
Great, my identity has been stolen 7 times. I guess that's just expected to happen regularly in this day and age. Just have to check your credit report regularly.
This is kind of a nice; it has all the drops you need for an angle closure emergency in your office. Most of the items are fairly cheap, like $15 a bottle; it's the acetazolamide and pilocarpine that are insanely expensive.
I wanted to back up my Quickbooks online data so I could cancel my online subscription. However, you can't just back it up; you have to export it to a desktop version and then save it. That shouldn't be so hard, right? Except I guess I need a desktop version of Quickbooks.
Nuh uh; I'm not paying $200 for a full version just so I can back up a single time.
Looks like there are enough other people who feel that way that Intuit has a trial desktop version just for this situation.
Except it has an error when installing. Thankfully restarting the computer fixed that.
Then another error, which only occurs in "rare situations." Well, like they optometry saying, it's not rare if it's in your chair. It's happening to me, so I don't care how rare it is. Actually, that's probably worse, because they probably don't have a solution in their online FAQ.
Got around that, and now there's supposed to be a popup window in the desktop version.
Except that doesn't happen; it just sits there.
Great, another error trying to update.
So it has to roll back the update.
I finally called Intuit tech support and they looked at my computer to see if they could figure out the latest problem because I had run out of ideas.
The first person I got only worked with the online version, so she transferred me to someone who works with the desktop version. He said to add Intuit to the trusted sites in Internet Explorer (another dumb caveat: the export only works with Internet Explorer, not any other browser).
And he also said to run the desktop version of Quickbooks as administrator.
Not sure which one of those helped or if it was both, but it finally worked. After hours of Googling errors and nearly an hour on the phone with tech support.
And I finally have my backup. I'm exhausted.
Aw, Ocularfest was my favorite CE meeting because it was based on Oktoberfest and had lots of beer, pretzels, German food, and German bands. Now it's just going to be another regular CE meeting. The guy who organized it moved a few years ago; I wonder if that had killed it.