Data Day: Health and Wellness

In the first third of the year, I exercised every day (even when sick). At a minimum, I forced myself to do 20 minutes of Beat Saber VR cardio, jog 1.5 miles, or perform at least 20 minutes of an outdoor continuous activity like picking up trash quickly or mowing the lawn.

As of the end of April, I have spent 50 hours and 10 minutes doing Beat Saber, jogged 30.5 miles, and did 9 hours and 40 minutes of outdoor activity.

I started January out mostly jogging, but quickly ran out of good treadmill shows to watch. In February I switched to mostly Beat Saber, gradually extending the time spent and the speed at which I played the maps. This was great for cardio but not so great for my shoulder sockets. I'm now back to jogging again so my shoulders can have time to recover.

I'm currently holding steady at my pre-pandemic weight, 136 pounds, down 10 pounds from my intra-pandemic high of 146 pounds.

Recipe Day: Grilled Salmon with Mango Salsa

Time

• Prep Time: 20 minutes (mostly chopping the mangos)
• Cook Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

• 1.5 pounds of salmon


• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1 lemon's worth of lemon juice
• 10 chopped mint leaves
• 5 minced garlic cloves
• 1 tsp coriander
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/4 tsp turmeric
• salt to taste


• 2 diced mangos
• 1/2 chopped cucumber
• 20 chopped mint leaves
• 1/4 cup chopped red onion
• 1/2 lemon's worth of lemon juice

Directions

1. Prep Marinade: Mix oil, lemon juice, mint, garlic, and spices in a bowl.
2. Prep Salsa: Mix mangos, cucumber, mint, red onion, and lemon juice in a bowl and refrigerate for later. Or, buy some mango salsa at the store so you don't have to learn how to cut around a mango core.
3. Marinate salmon for 2 hours shallow dish in the fridge.
4. Preheat grill to HIGH and take everything out of the fridge.
5. Grill salmon normally, 3 - 5 minutes per side depending on how done you want it.
6. Serve with spinach or rice.

After taking the picture for this recipe, Ian and Maia insisted on becoming foodgrammers too:

Review Day: Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

There are no major spoilers in this review.

We purchased this game almost a year ago, and haven't played it in at least 4 months, so I think it's safe to say that we'll never finish it.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the sequel to Breath of the Wild which I gave a solid C- to. Looking past the hype, the first game was a tedious grind only made bearable by the fact that Maia loved watching me play it and there was nothing else to do during the pandemic.

This game reuses the same engine and takes place in the same world (although the world is so altered that it felt very different right off the bat). Though it has some newness injected, it does very little to fix the underlying flaws that plagued the first game.

First, the good:

• The new abilities and the puzzles that require you to glue things together in oddball ways are very clever and give you a lot of leeway for solving things in unexpected ways.
• The world is three times as large (there are now islands in the sky, the overland itself, and then the Depths underneath), and you spend plenty of time flying through the air as a means of exploration. This mechanism feels much better than it did in Skyward Sword, and is worlds better than the sailing in Wind Waker.

Now, the bad:

• The controls remain unintuitive and frustrating. The number of times I try to do one thing but end up doing something else (like climbing a wall instead of walking through a door) is extremely high in each play session. This is especially frustrating when enemies require lots of precision to beat.
• The "open world" concept still provides no reason to really explore off the beaten path. The world is huge but generic.
• The story is abysmal and repetitive. Because it's an open world game, you can solve the four main dungeons in any order, but they all have identical stories and story beats as a result. The same applies to many of the subquests -- doing something once is interesting, but then having to do it 5 more times is boring.

One day last year, Maia and I felt like we were close to the end and finally decided to beat the game. We had beaten the four main dungeons and traveled to the endgame to defeat the final boss. Only, it turns out there was a fifth leg of the game to deal with and what felt like "95% complete" actually turned out to be "75% complete". This deflated a lot of my urge to finish the game (and I'm a completionist!), and we never picked the game back up seriously after that. With so many other more fun activities to do, the incentive to go the rest of the way just isn't there. Also, Maia has moved on to Pokemon in the interim.

Final Grade: C

Ian Year 3 Battle Report

Ian has finally made it to the age of 3!

Primary stats:

• Height: 36.25" (23%)
• Weight: 28.4 lb (17%)

For scale, he is as tall as 6.042 standard hot dogs end-to-end, and weighs as much as 284 standard hot dogs.

Not much has changed developmentally since the year 2 month 11 update. He knows his shapes, months, colors, and other trivia, reads the weather report in our Sunday paper, and recites books and songs from memory. He always wants a book at dinnertime but feels like he cannot make the choice himself.

His favourite catchphrase right now is "LET'S PLAY!" -- he doesn't always want to play Duplos by himself, although he also usually doesn't accept our input on how to play when we sit down with him.

He loves Maia and Maia takes good care of him. For his 3rd birthday, they got to have a sleepover in his room -- Ian went to bed first then Maia snuck in with a sleeping bag after he had fallen asleep. In the morning, they sat quietly in the room for awhile as Maia read some stories to him.

He's coming towards the end of his first year at preschool (with two more to go, based on where his birthday falls in the year) and greatly enjoys it. He especially likes that the playground is littered with construction trucks to play with. On the occasions that I pick him up from school midday, he's always playing alone with the trucks, lost in his own little world.

Happy Birthday Ian!

End-of-the-Month Highlights Day

New photos have been added to the Life, 2024 album.

• Events
  • Belated Easter dinner with Char on T 4/2.
  
  
  • Solo dad dinner at Local Provisions on W 4/3.
  
  
  • Visited my mom for an early birthday celebration on F 4/5.
  
  
  • Went to Riverbend Park to see the bluebells, saw a kestral and owls at the Nature Center, and had brunch at IHOP on S 4/6.
  
  
  • Dinner at Fire Works Pizza on S 4/7.
  
  
  • Went to the optometrist on Eclipse Day, M 4/8. Discovered that my current glasses were actually 1 prescription behind in history which is why my eyesight was so poor. Saw the eclipse from home in the afternoon.
  
  
  • 20th work anniversary on F 4/12.
  
  
  • Family trip to Meadowlark Gardens on S 4/13.
  
  
  • Sick day for me on W 4/17 that led to 2 weeks of sinus congestion.
  
  
  • Family dinner at Bungalow Lakehouse on H 4/18. Maia lost her 5th baby tooth (top incisor).
  
  
  • Went to the Loudoun Earth Day event with Laura and George on S 4/20. Dinner (steak frites) with Tammy and Patrick on our back porch.
  
  
  • Solo dad dinner at Local Provisions on W 4/24.
  
  
  • Rebecca chaperoned Maia's National Zoo field trip on H 4/25 while Ian and I hung out for his birthday.
  
  
  • Went to Ian's preschool art show on F 4/26.
  
  
  • Hosted Ian's 2nd birthday party on S 4/27.
  
  
  • New recipe for dinner (grilled salmon with mango-mint salsa) on S 4/28.


• Projects
  • Gently remodeled and shuffled bathroom assignments in the house on S 4/13. I now have the basement bathroom, Rebecca has taken over my single bathroom, and the hall bathroom has become the domain of just the kids.
  
  
  • Family project to map all the breakers in the house on M 4/15.
  
  
  • Started learning the state of web development in 2024 to overhaul the URI! Zone.
  
  
  • Still doing daily Spanish lessons in Duolingo (386 day streak).


• Consumerism
  • Really enjoyed watching Fallout this month.
  
  
  • No amazing new music, books, or games this month.
  
  
  • Not playing any games at the moment.

April's Final Grade: B, Great, other than getting sick.