I have a long history with Zelda. My first encounter with it was in the mid-90s when my family had acquired an NES and we were looking for new games to rent. Though to this day he won't admit to it, my dad chose Zelda as his rental option on a particular rental trip. I don't think he played much, but my brothers and I were hooked. Since then, Zelda has been a cornerstone of our gaming lives, staying on top of most every release (main line releases, at least). To this day, I consider the SNES's A Link to the Past to be one of the greatest games ever made. As a kid, it took a whole year to complete that game. Zelda was all the time ever time. In adulthood, Zelda was not quite as all consuming as a kid, but still there. A new game would come out, I'd play it to completion for two or three dozen hours, and then I'd move one.

Then Nintendo releasd Breath of the Wild.

In some ways, it's barely a Zelda game. It has various proper nouns that have been a part of the series since forever, but the refined narrative and gameplay mechanics that took root in the SNES/N64 era of games was mostly gone. But, it's also the most Zelda-like game, the OG Zeldas where you roam around and discover the vast world you've been set in. There's a reason it took a year to finish ALttP (beyond being limited to playing twenty minutes at a time): there's a lot of nooks and crannies to check out. Somehow, Breath of the Wild had successfully translated this to a modern setting. Run towards a tower you haven't actived but be distracted by ten cool looking things on the way there until you've wandered so far off course, you don't even remember what you were doing originally. And it manageed to keep doing that for dozens upon dozens of hours of gameplay. I played that game for over a hundred hours before I finally threw up my hands and decided to actually finish the main story. I could've done that at any point, but there was just so much to see.

And then they released a sequel to that game.

Surely, lightning could not strike twice. But, as I look at the play time for Tears of the Kingdom, I've put in a load more hours than I did Breath of the Wild. Not only is there that giant world from the original game to re-explore with all the changes that come with the narratives big Upheaval, but an entire uverground of the same size and a vast amount of stuff floating around in the sky. It's easy enough to get in the zone running around chasing down shrines, then doing light root exploration underground, or floating around from island to island tracking down god knows what. You can do that for five minutes or hours. Some of the best video game playing I've ever done and I really don't want to finish the main story line, even though all I have left is to defeat the big baddie.

And yet, I don't know if I'll ever feel the same way about Tears of the Kingdom or its predecessor how I feel about A Link to the Past. While it's come close to giving me a sense of the child-like wonder I felt playing that game in the 90s, it doesn't consume my every thought.

Probably because everything as a kid is a million times more magical and all I want now is to sleep and take an adequate shit.

My eyes burn with the fury of a thousand suns. It is late, I attempted to run more and faster today, but it's left my body in a state. Tomorrow, I'll need to be cogent while Kayla picks her parents up from the airport and I watch the wee baby at home.

What I'm trying to say is "I'm tired and I want easy content". One minute blog challenge it is. Actually, let's make it two minutes. Typing is slow. Here we go.

Writing a daily blog is a tiresome thing, especially when you're trying to do anything that has meaning and flow. My writing style tends to be very stream of consciousness, with very little in the way of pre-planning. This is probably self-evident if you read anything I write. There's some flow to it, but I'm easily distracted. Honestly, I approach a lot of things in life like this. When I'm working on a problem at work, I tend to do nothing for a long time, staring out the window and chewing through the bigger details in my mind. Then I kind of write everything in a blind fury, filling in the details as I go until I hit a problem that hadn't occurred to me. So... I don't know what any of this has about blogging dail-

And there it is. I'm going to do that thing about putting the baby down I talked about yesterday and hopefully get another 5-6 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

When you see a hyperbolic question posed in the title of an article, it should be assumed the answer is "no". But, what my theory presupposes is perhaps the answer is... maybe?

By far the most resounding joke made to and about new parents centers around sleep deprivation, and with good reason. Whether your new human is constantly fussy or just needs to be fed every two or three hours, a normal adult sleep schedule is going to be interrupted. Instead of relying on multiple hours of continuous uninterrupted sleep, get used to sleep in shorter bursts whenever you can get it. This hasn't been untrue in our case, but I feel like we've definitely gotten the easier end of the stick. Me especially since I've volunteered for the night shift.

It's morning as I write this, and we've exited a what's become (and is currently) a fairly typical night. The routine starts around 10-11p, where the TV is turned off and we begin migrating towards the bedroom. The variability is generally centered around waiting for the wee babes to get hungry or for us to finish watching whatever we're watching; I'm not going to be beholding to a particular arrangement of the clock hands. Once the move is made, a bottle is made and begins warming as I do a diaper change and stuff the kiddo into a swaddle. Moving to our bedroom, we've turned off all but one lamp that's set to a dim red and flipped on rain sounds. (I don't know if he actually cares about the rain sounds, but I like it; I often have rain sounds playing behind my music as I work). There, he'll be fed the bottle until he stops eating and passes out, usually making it about half way through. Once he's been calm for what seems like long enough, I put him in the pack and play bassinet that's next to our bed.

And wait.

About five minutes later, he'll wake up and start fussing, just a bit. The rest of the unfinished bottle is administered and he gets some tummy time on the soft bed that is my very hair chest. Again, once he seems calm enough, I put him back down in the bassinet.

Mission accomplished.

At that point, he'll sleep upwards of six hours with a fifty percent chance of needing a quick twenty minute feeding session in between. It's a pretty great way to be, though the feed-put-down-wake-up-feed-put-down ritual gives me some anxiety. Like, what if I put him down the second time and he doesn't stay down? What if he fights it?

That kind of leads into the second way that he's "the best baby", because sleep isn't the only part of that equation. Since birth until now (and, if we're lucky, it holds true going forward), he's been a very needs oriented complainer. Meaning, he really doesn't fuss unless he actively needs something, and that something is a bottle nine times out of ten. It was entertaining being the parents in the mother/baby ward sandwiched between two rooms where you heard babies constantly screaming and ours was just super chill. There was one night that was a little worse than the others, but again, that's for a different post. All told, if he's not in distress, he's either sleeping or a happy baby soaking in the wonder of life outside the womb. And that's pretty damn cool.

So, do we have the best baby? No. The best baby is all of the above while organizing food drives for those in need and fighting for trans rights.

But we have a pretty damn good baby.

In observance of all this happening eight weeks ago, let's continue that three part series.

Writing about the act of getting the wee baby out of my wife and into the world is a little more straight forward than any amount of waxing philisophical about taking care of a pregnant wife and/or post-pregnant wife + baby. It's merely a story. Kayla has suggested a few places on where to start the tale, but perhaps it should start at her last OB appointment where active measures were taken to start the whole process. Whether or not those measures actually did anything, we also took matters into our own hands in a couple ways.

The first way was Kayla's investment in a yoga ball and chilling out on that, trying to open up all the pathways in the hopes that he'd just slip out. The second way (and my favorite) was the introduction of "get the baby out" walks. There are a couple of really good spots for walking a very short drive from home, so we'd go out there in the evening and Kayla would waddle a mile plus in the hopes of making him slip out. The last of these we went on was a particularly gnarly hike that had a fair amount of verticality.

The wee baby kicked his bubble open the next morning.

Continue Reading

Fine, I'll take the loss on the 19th instead of doing revisionist history. I'll write an extra post on September 1st to make up.

I'm currently in a real conundrum with all those berries I bought at the beginning of the week. Early on in the week, I ran out of mojito ingredients (namely, mint and lime) and then I was alone with the wee baby for a couple days (post on that soon), so haven't really had an opportunity to enjoy those. In an effort to use those berries up before the go bad, I'm currently running a small experiment: which clear alcohol with soda and a mash of black-, blue-, and raspberries? Let's find out.

This is one of the drinks. But also all of them.

The Process

The recipe for this drink is pretty simple:

1. Grab a fistful of farmers marketplace blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries and shove them in a tall glass.

2. Add 1oz of clear alcohol. For this test, I'm testing vodka, gin, and white rum.

3. Muddle the berries into the alcohol.

4. Fill the glass with ice and top with club soda.

The Results

Overall, this is a pretty light and refreshing drink, but each alcohol is bringing it's own thing to the table.

Vodka (Tito's) - I'm not a huge fan of Tito's, but I had some leftover from friends visiting in April so figured this would be a good application to blow it on. Honestly, there was no real alcohol taste, which I suppose is what you'd expect from a good vodka. It was like drunky chunky berry LaCroix with a tiny bit of buzz. Not bad.

Gin (Kirkland Signature London Dry) - I picked up this cheap bottle of gin from Costco during that same friend visit situation and... I actively don't like it. Same situation as above, figured I'd blow it on a dumb experiment. On first taste, you can definitely pick out the juniper and it's not playing with the berries super well. By the bottom of the glass, it was fine.

Rum (Bacardi White Rum) - Rounding out the lower tier alcohols is Bacardi, another alcohol I've soured on since having something much better (I'm sorry I betrayed you, Koloa). There's definitely an extra taste here that wasn't present in the vodka version, but I can't put my finger on it. It's fine.

Conclusion

None of these are stellar drinks, but if I had to pick one as a winner, it'd be the Tito's vodka. I'd like to try this setup using alcohols that are actually good, as I'm sure these lesser versions are dragging down the scores, but I don't feel like being six shots of booze buzzed right now. Also, as somebody who's not partial to soda water in general, there may not be any saving these cocktails.

Now, add a bunch of sugar and we'll talk.