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After more than 5 years of playing off and on, my best friend and I finally finished Final Fantasy XII! I’ve been playing FFXII off and on since its release in 2006. So when we committed to play the game together I was hopeful we would actually complete it. I had no idea it would take this long. We only played on Fridays for a few hours and only in person.

I’m in a bit of a holding pattern here. My freshly rekindled Magic hyperfixation is simmering along. Other than spending money and watching YouTube, I haven’t done much with it. My new plan is to put together a commander deck for Friday Night Magic, go once, and then re-evaluate my priorities. Gaming As expected, I’m finished Destiny 2’s Season of the Haunted seal! Trying to figure out how much time I’m willing to put into Solstice.

So much stuff going on, but in the middle of it all I have, at least temporarily, found my next hyperfixation. It’s Magic the Gathering… I’m pretty ambivalent about this, but I seriously have no control over it. Even though large portions of me want to ignore it, I can’t help myself. I’ve played Magic off and on since Mirage, which was released in 1996. I really like the gameplay. I really like the fun of opening packs and seeing new cards.

So first the power failed, then our government failed, and then my health failed. I haven’t written here in a while. I went from an American existential crisis directly into a pretty hefty covid infection. I made it 2 and a half years without getting sick, but, unfortunately, the streak is broken. I’m not going to write anything more direct about the Supreme Court here. I’m not going to write further about my time with covid either.

I joined many members of my city in losing my power last week. We’re very lucky. We have enough money that the loss of groceries didn’t really affect us. We were able to go elsewhere to eat, and then to the movies to get cool. I know a lot of others are and were not so lucky. I hope that the powers that be can take this failure and work to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

We attended the Columbus Arts Festival on Saturday. There were a few artists showing there that I was excited to see, but overall the art itself was less important than the food and the excuse to be out and about. We took the bus to get there, my first bus trip since the pandemic. I absolutely love riding the bus. The routine of walking to the bus stop, waiting, getting on, paying, start stop start stop along the route is very satisfying for me.

The long weekend stretched into a long week. I wrote about half of this a week ago but never finished. Changes to my routine, even good ones like an extra day off, always seem to mess me up. My sleep schedule is no longer a schedule at all. My mom went out of town on vacation this week. So I walked one of her dogs, Lily, for a few days. She’s a bit afraid of everything, and a lot afraid of me, but I managed to get her to walk for me!

No post last week. My friend was very sick. He seems to be better now though! These past two weeks have been very very busy for me. I had a lot of fun, but also a lot of stress and even fear. I’m going to focus on the good times here, although some of those were stressful in their own way. One of my friends had a birthday this weekend. We went out to a bar at peak times for the first time in years.

I made a mini-bucket list for Destiny 2. I can feel my enthusiasm waning and I want to get some big things done before I fall off. This way I can look back on my time with the game with satisfaction, rather than with regret and vague plans to return some day. I tend to leave a lot unfinished when my hyperfixations fall off. The worst part is, I never completely lose interest, just enthusiasm and focus.

It’s actually nice out! I worked out for the first time in months last night because the bar was actually warm enough to touch. It was a great session! Next year I really need to figure out a better way to heat the garage and equipment for workouts. It stays cold in there for way too long. My Destiny 2 obsession continues, but I believe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.