They say the American dream is something about opportunity, being able to build yourself up from nothing, or some other patently false bullshit. I say the American dream is owning a chest freezer and stocking up on things in bulk. The evidence is definitely there. Having a dedicated freezer always felt like it was treated as some sort of life goal, one of those moments similar to getting married or having a baby. Also, the existence of giant bulk box stores like Sam's Club or Costco.

Growing up, my family went through a phase of frequenting Sam's Club and buying ridonkulous amounts of food, mostly to keep the ridonkulous amounts of people in the family fed. When we acquired a stand alone freezer, there were grandiose plans of buying a side of beef and making oodles of freezer meals that never really panned out, for whatever reason. That freezer mostly because a place to lock up Christmas cookies, keeping me from depleting the supply of those delicious morsels before Christmas actually arrived. Side note: I really developed a taste for frozen cookies; there's just something about them...

Fast forward a couple decades and I wound up marrying into a Costco membership. While we may not have ascended to the level of adulthood that would see us having a stand alone freezer, there are definitely benefits to be gained from shopping bulkly at Costco, namely quality, though at an upfront cost.

For example, one of the our standard restock items is USDA prime ribeye steak. These chonky, inch-thick bois usually come in packs of three for somewhere around $50. That probably seems like a lot at first glance, but one steak is large enough that it will feed both of us for one meal, giving a cost of $8 per person per meal. For a steak that fancy, it winds up being cheaper than a lesser cut of meat of similar weight at Safeway. It's a similar story for all of the meats we buy there, and when we get home, I spend an hour or two measuring, cutting, vacuum packing, and freezing all manner of meat.

Similarly, their prices on booze has elevated the level of snobbery of my mixed drinks. Prior to Costco (and meeting my father-in-law), Woodford Reserve is what I considered a nice, sipping whiskey. At your general liquor or grocery store, a normal 750ml bottle would run somewhere around $35-40. At Costco, you can get double that for roughly the same price. So, now my nice whiskey gets diluted with Coke Zero, and I spend the money I've saved on actual nice whiskey when I want something to sip on.

I haven't said much about Costco's in-house brand Kirkland Signature, but following the paragraph about alcohol seems like the best place to mention it: their products are legit. You could spend $60 for a 1.5 liter bottle of Grey Goose vodka at Costco... or you could get buy the 1.5 liter bottle Kirkland Signature "french style" vodka that tastes basically identical... FOR $18! Now, my bar looks a little ridiculous with all these giant bottles of booze (and/or just makes me look like an alcoholic out of control), but this shit lasts months.

Of course, it shouldn't need to be said, but since all of this product is bought in bulk, it's a trip we make once every couple months (give or take some weeks). So, again, the up front cost may be high, but averaged out over that period of time, we're saving in the long run. I can only imagine what life would be like if we had a chest freezer...

...or if I had a much larger bar...

I don't recall how it came up, but a couple years ago, Kayla had made mention of enjoying the original Pokemon games for GameBoy. At the time, I was messing around with GBA modding, inspired by a real rabbit hole my brother was going down. In my posession were two GBA SPs, so as a new thing for us to do together, I procured a copy of Pokemon Blue for myself and Yellow for Kayla. The idea there was that we could play in tandem and, once we'd built our pokeymans up enough, play against each other.

I failed to take into consideration the Animal Crossing Effect.

This phenomenon I've just invented and named is a reference back to what happened when Kayla got her copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons way back in March of 2020. She'd been watching me play my launch day copy and asked if I thought she'd like the game, thinking she might get her own copy. I was a little waffley in my response, as $60 is a bit of coin to drop on something that ends up not being enjoyed, but ended up recommending it because, similar to above, it was a thing that we could eventually play together. I needen't have waffled, because by the end of that first week, she'd put way more hours into the game than I had. This even though I'd had the game a few days longer and had also been a fan since the GameCube version and had been deprived of new Animal Crossing since 2013. To this day, she still has one or two hundred more hours of gameplay over me.

Back to Pokemon.

I got the games, set her up with a swank modded SP with a sharp, backlit screen and she proceeded to power through the game, leaving me way in the dust. This was nice in that I could ask her for advice or tips as I played through, but meant that all of my pokeymans would be way under powered compared to hers in a head-to-head match. Still, it was a fun little thing to bond over, even if I never finished the game or got to a point of being able to battle her.

Why I tried this again recently and expect different results, I'm not sure. Twice, even.

Weeks before the arrival of the wee baby, I bought each of us copies of the GBA remake of the original game. Partially, this was out of curiousity on my part to see how a glow up of the original would be on more modern hardware, partially I wanted to complete the original game just to say I did. (For the record, Leaf Green and Fire Red are the superior versions). I never even made it as far as I had in the original version, and Kayla once again smoked my ass, even in the new content the remake had that the original had not. In my defense, I was still working at the time and she had just gone on leave, so there was a need to fill boredom on her part that I didn't have. Still, she was playing with home field advantage because she knew that Pokemon game so well.

Once more, I tried to level the playing field by picking up the GBA generation of games, Ruby for her and Emerald for myself. I kept up for a while, mostly because I didn't have any loyalty to a generation of Pokemon game and Kayla was initially hesitant to try something new and figure out all the new pokeymans and strategies that would come with. But, fourth verse, same as all the other ones before. She eventually pulled ahead and has since completed the main quest of the game, while I'm wandering around trying to figure out what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing. We tried one battle together and I got my ass summarily handed to me.

Maybe I should just stick to playing Tetris against her. She'll never be able to beat me at Tetris.

I'm playing catch up at this point and it's quite late. Though I have topics to talk about (one fairly fresh, but perhaps too fresh), I'd rather get quantity content out over quality right now. Let's go.

Candles are fun. I'm not talking about birthday candles, but the scented kind that you can get at Bath and Candle works. It's fire, so that's cool, but it's also a nice way to class up your house just a tiny bit. Also, it'll cover the smell of the trash can, which is good if you like having polite company over. Not sure when I started getting into the candle game, but...

Who knows where that was going. Some things are best left unanswered.

I don't often do things that might be stereotypically considered "millenial", especially by Bay Area standards. Some of that is probably growing up in suburban Oklahoma, some of that is nerdy interests that lie elsewhere, and some of that is living a hermit life until very late. But, today, that trend was bucked not once, but twice.

We began the morning by packing the sleeping wee baby up and heading downtown to the farmers market that's put on every weekend. Kayla had gone to one in a neighboring city last weekend with a friend, so thought it'd be a fun activity to do as a fambly. It's summer and summer is mojito season, so I was on the lookout for fresh fruits to put in cocktails. We tried a variety of things, mostly berries and peaches... which, incidentally, is what I wound up buying. Peaches and lemons for some peach bourbon smashes, and various berries for tossing into mojitos (blueberries, black berries, and raspberries). We also wound up grabbing some veggies for philly cheese steaks this week. It was a crowded situation, especially with a chonky stroller, and I wasn't much for listening to people's sales pitches, but you're definitely not going to find better fruit anywhere else. We've added "visit five local farmers markets" to The List, so others will definitely be hit (not SF; we already checked that one off a long time ago).

That evening, we went to ShaKa Brewing, a local hole-in-the-side-of-a-warehouse brewery that sports a rotating list of food trucks. We'd been eyeing this place for a while, mostly waiting for the karaage chicken truck to show up. We had skipped their previous appearance at the brewery due to the Taylor Swift concert, a cultural event that strained the local economy. While we grazed on delicious fried chicken skewers and potato croquettes, I enjoyed a flight of the brewery's best selection, which was chosen for me by one of the owners of the brewery (super nice dude who's birthday is the day after mine). We crashed a hightop table iinside the building, which really was just their brewing warehouse that had tables, chairs, and even a couple couches and games on one side. I'm not 100% sure the reason, but they even had two bamboo trees with tied up with tanzaku for tanabata. Overall, it was a pretty chill experience and we're planning on hitting them up more and trying out some of the other food places that come to camp.

These are the kinds of things that I've wanted to do more of since my time here, but haven't for various reasons, be it not wanting to go by myself or everything being shuttered up due to a global pandemic. Maybe this is where we can start turning that around.

I've mentioned the three part series on the journey of having a baby a few times, but have kept kicking the can down the road because I wanted to write something insightful or inspirational or some bullshit. That requires more thought than I'm willing to put into it, so I'll instead cover those three parts from a personal historical narrative angle.

I've been around pregnenacy a lot in my years on this earth, being the oldest of eight children. And, while there's a fair amount of mechanical similarities, when it's your wife carrying your child, the game's a bit different. First of all, this is the person you've chosen to commit your life to, sickness health and all that; the emotional ties are on another level. Secondly, every woman is going to pregnant different from every other, so I really didn't know what to expect with Kayla. Would she be one of those that has nightmarish pregnancies, being bedridden and unable to help herself? Would she morning sickness all over the place? Would she skate through mostly unscathed, just getting larger and feeling the ill effects of her guts getting shoved out of the way of the child growing inside her?

Yeah, it was really that last one. No morning sickness, a shocking amount of mobility even towards the end, and no real major side effects. If you were to ask her (and I'm going to do so right after I write this sentence), the worst part of the whole pregnancy was the heartburn, which started off bad during "morning pregnancy", kind of went away for a bit, and then came back with a vengeance in the later months. (I just asked, and I was correct. Go me.) She also added that generally feeling drained was a close second.

This left me in a perpetial state of waiting to be waiting on her hand and foot. Sure, I took up some extra slack as her body got larger and she tired more easily. Covering extra chores, cooking, blah and etcetera. That and emotional support, which is definitely not in my wheelhouse. I did the best I could where I could, but in the end, I don't think I ever had to bend over to pick things up for her.

One thing emotionally I guess I could say I did well on was being invested and involved. I accomponied her to every doctor visit and even got called back to see the ultrasound or listen to his heartbeat most times. Speaking of, the "big" twenty week ultrasound was a little nerve wracking. There were a couple of markers that, taken together, could've been a marker of genetic issues. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the proxy hypochondria I've developed for this kid. However, early on, Kayla had an NIPT done, which is a mother's blood test that checks for genetic markers coming from the baby, things like downs syndrome but also the baby's sex (not to be confused with gender). The kid's so healthy now, I'd actually forgotten about this brief bout of worry until retrospecting for this post.

But, that wasn't where the worry stopped. There were a few occasions where I kind of mentally freaked out on Kayla's behalf. There was a this kid growing in her and only two potential ways for the kid to get out, neither of which are exactly a picnic walk. Dwelling upon that notion gave me mild anxiety, and that kind of morphed into a perpetual background anticipation as the time grew nearer. See, while I knew how to pamper a pregnant lady good, my knowledge of things like "signs a woman is going into labor", "what really happens when the water breaks", and "when and how should contractions be timed" was brand new territory to me.

But covering that is for part two of my three part series: Partum.