greetings thatoddhaystack shareholders. starting this year I will be offering snacks for these meetings. if you look at the tables under the window I have placed an assortment of complimentary doritos bags. we’re still working on the drinks but there is a water faucet directly across the hall.

ok funny haha preamble aside. captain it has been a year. even though it’s been only two weeks since orange clown was inaugurated I feel like I’ve aged 30 years. but I stay silly! I stay silly… I will try to keep my stress out of what I always intend to be a fairly lighthearted blog post but like. shit in da US sucks right now!!! also yes I am posting this in feb instead of jan. I intended to post it in jan but ummm then I didn't. heart.

december

so I posted last shareholder meeting at the beginning of december with some goals… I did finish up christmas presents for everyone I needed to! two secret santas and then one physical present for my mom. and I managed to organize ordering gifts for several other members of my family (as in, I ordered items and then everyone else paid me for them). I do take a certain amount of pride in like. organizing group orders? tickles something in my brain. I didn’t do a ton of things event wise because I was tired. and mostly focusing on christmas things. I did go to a local craft fair where I bought some baked goods and also more christmas presents. and later on in the month I baked cookies for a cookie swap at a library where people really liked my cookies and I felt good about that.

I spent new years eve with my brother and his girlfriend and their mutual friends and even though I was a complete stranger to most of the people there I felt welcomed. I baked cookies for that too because my cheat code to helping my anxiety at being invited to social events where a lot of strangers will be is to bring a food item so I feel like I am providing something to the party instead of just taking. maybe that’s indicative of something deeply wrong with me. but most people love people who offer them free food so I will not stop doing it.

going back to goals I did finally manage to make a mega brain dump of the 12908102 thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head like a DVD screensaver. I am still sorting through those thoughts a month later. but at least they are out on paper. oh yeah I also did end up writing that ghost jam 2024 roundup. I managed to squeeze it in as an entry for the 2024 ukagaka advent calendar which feels kinda surreal still to be listed up there with a bunch of prolific devs… I do want to work more on ukagaka still I just have soooo many things going on in my head. all the time.

I also finished my largest crotchet piece to date in a shawl I made from one skein of acrylic yarn. it quickly worked its way into my daily rotation of accessories and I love it a lot.

january

so, I didn’t quite make new years resolutions in the traditional sense. instead, I opted for a list of “25 in 25” things to focus on. things like watch 25 movies, make 25 new recipes, visit 25 new restaurants. things like that. I am not holding myself to filling out all of these categories in full by the end of the year, more so to give myself something to focus on and reflect on if things I set as these goals are actually things I want to do. or not.

so how am I doing for most of these goals? let us go over the list… together!!

I watched a whopping five movies in january, not counting a rewatch of the substance and little shop of horrors. for the sake of this goal I’m only counting new movies, not rewatches. my favorite of this month’s new movies was companion!!! which I was pleasantly surprised by as it was a $5 secret movie showing at my local theater and I had a blast. I read three books in january: dead of winter, invisible cities, and the phantom prince. out of those, dead of winter was my favorite. I visited two new (to me) restaurants in january, although that kind of feels like a cop out since both of them were to celebrate my brothers birthdays. but like, I had a meal at each of them, and they were restaurants I had never visited for, so they count.

I made two new recipes in january. one was for mini vanilla scones, and the other was a very loosely followed recipe for potato mochi stuffed with cheese. the potato mochi one barely feels like it counts to me but again, it was a new to me recipe, and I made it in january, ergo it counts. “events done” is kind of a Loose Category where the main aim is to Get Out Of The House And Socialize. things like creative group meetups. volunteering. going out to a local festival. or a haunt. that type of thing. anyways in january I went out to three creative group meetups which was swell. I did only end up writing one blog post in january since I am. writing and posting the january roundup in february. oops. honestly for this category if I manage to get it halfway done I will be proud because I have been sooooo inconsistent with posting long form blogs. 32+oz water days is kind of a gimmie category. I might have cleared it already tbh, I haven’t been tracking it super closely. I’m mostly just trying to put a focus on Drinking Water and 32 oz is emptying my water bottle once which is more than doable. whenever I clear this one I’m thinking I will make a goal for 64 oz (which would be emptying my water bottle twice each day) which I still think is doable just. difficult.

I crotcheted six things this month! a tiny ghost kitty amigurumi, a hat for me and a matching one for my sandalphon plushie, a needle that I made into an ukagaka shell, and two bookmarks I intend on bringing to a barter only event that is upcoming. along with some more crotcheted items. pretty pleased with that output so far; I mainly don’t want to get rusty. I did not… go to any ffxiv art parties this month. to be honest I might nix this goal entirely and put in something else, because my intention was to participate more in the ffxiv art community with this, but I’ve kind of felt a lack of interest in ffxiv and drawing ffxiv characters lately, so while I have idled at a few parties so far this year, I didn’t end up drawing anything at them. idk. we will think about it. lastly is 8 hrs of sleep which I only added partway through the month. as people know I am very bad at getting enough sleep. so while I have something different tracking the amount of times I get to sleep on time, this is to track times I go to bed later than intended but still manage to get enough sleep, like on the weekends when I can sleep in more. still pondering this goal tbh.

I left some space for adding new goals/things to track because I have some ideas in my head but idk if I want to put them to paper yet. overall I think I am doing well, at least on this front of things to track.

new york

the biggest thing I did this month was take a weekend to visit my mom in NYC. we cleared 31 miles of walking over the four days I was there. yes I felt like my bones were about to explode by the end of the trip but I do not regret it because we hit a lot of restaurants and a lot of stores!!

my favorite restaurant that we hit was sushidelic, which i think wins points for me purely on whimsy. i had the sushi parfait, which was layers of rice and vegetables and fish arranged to look like an ice cream parfait. really fond of the chirashi rice used for it; I could probably eat an entire bowl of that alone. my mom and I split a dessert, which ended up being another parfait with several different sorbet flavors, fresh fruit, a mini taiyaki, and more little pastries and layers of mousse and cake. although I also really liked the tonkotsu ramen that I had at ichiran. it’s a restaurant that pretty much only serves tonkotsu ramen (+ vegan ramen) and they do it Well.

another thing that happened was going to a mentalist show where like the guy picks people from the audience and reads their mind and shit like that. before the show each audience member got a little prompt to fill out to put in an envelope. mine was like “what’s a fear of yours” and we had just watched the wolfman the prior night, so I just put down “werewolves” not expecting anything to happen.

as it turns… in…. I was called on to participate in the show, where the mentalist had some theatrical stuff happen and then identified my fear as being “werewolves” which made people laugh and I was like “I just saw the wolfman :(” (was not Actually upset to be clear lmao). him knowing what my envelope could be easily explained away by one of the crew members having read my envelope and then passing it on to him so like, it was fun but not groundbreaking.

another audience member got called up to participate, and we were sitting across from each other across a fairly long table. we were told to close our eyes, and then I felt a tap on the back of my neck. the mentalist asked us to keep our eyes closed, and said to raise our hand if we had felt a touch. I did, of course, and then I heard gasps from the audience. I found out later that the audience had not seen anyone near me, and that the mentalist was standing near the other person a good 6-7 feet away. I personally think someone tapped me from behind the curtains that were pulled pretty closely behind me.

the last portion of my audience participation I can’t really explain though. so there was some theatrics about “connecting” with the other audience member to receive their thoughts, and then the mentalist had me close my eyes and plug my ears and tilt my head back. he touched my forehead, and I swear to god I heard the mentalist’s voice in my head as clear as if I were listening to it on earbuds. and like, maybe he had a microphone hidden in either the hand supporting the back of my head or in the finger that touched my forehead but it straight up sounded like it was In My Head, not in front of or behind it. idk if you can like conduct sound through bone or something but that’s my best guess as to what happened… it was so freaky (and I think I unconsciously jolted b/c my mom told me later there was an Instant Reaction from me. the contents of the message are less important; it was about a nightmare the other audience member had were they had killed their friend, and it was what they had written down in their envelope. which again, could be explained by the mentalist having read the envelope prior to the show. still don’t know how he beamed his voice into my head LOL

onwards to february

already in february I went volunteering! it was a two hour shift at a habitat for humanity’s restore but I think I really needed it to feel like. I can do something good in the world when everything is exploding. even if its just organizing boxes of tile at a thrift store. I will probably try to volunteer there again to have something else to keep myself sane. other than that, katsucon is coming up this month, and while I opted not to buy a badge this year I might swing around the convention center for a few hours just to absorb the con atmosphere because I am kind of deeply feeling FOMO.

the dark pot (yaminabe) ukagaka event is in full swing and I intend on scraping together something for it by the end of the month. for those uninformed, yaminabe is an event where multiple devs submit a single file that all get combined together to make the randomtalk for an ukagaka. the shell is predetermined. it’s a chaotic event that a few eng devs have entered in last year and I hope I can grasp satori before the month is up… it’s a coding language that is more writing focused than yaya, which is what I’ve coded all my ghosts in to this point. we’ll see if I get around to it! also on the ukagaka front, I want to finally finish pomogaka, a utility focused ukagaka that is entirely centered around pomodoros. I got like 90% of the way finished and then fell off it entirely. and it’s been on my list for several months now.

another thing on my list for several months is finally finishing my astray cosplay. something that is 90% done that I can’t bring myself to finish for whatever reason. still working on oc profiles at a glacial pace. unsure if I will finish my writing heavy ones this month but as long as I am chipping away at them that’s ok… I want to organize aforementioned big huge brain dump and go through my youtube watch later playlist that I’ve been tossing blender tutorials and crotchet videos into. and the usual things of keeping up with book clubs and continuing to post weekly draws. all the usual stuff. last month I didn’t manage to finish… nearly as much as I expected but I was also kind of in Survival Mode for the last third of the month. and optimistically I feel like that will change but……………. sighs………… at the very least I have to keep creating stuff or else I will want to explode. see you later this month!