Daily - 2025-11-01

Previously…

Gratitude

• Halloween was fun. We briefly saw the oldest and probably started a tradition of taking the two youngest there for the first trick or treat stop every year. Later, even in the rain, the gorls had a great time trick or treating.
• While hanging out in the truck at Costco, the gorls used my boredom buster Pi Zero built and had a blast. Honestly, I’m still riding the high from it. Made me so happy they liked it and it worked perfectly.

Yesterday recap

Left a little early and hit two winterization stops before calling it a weekend. Both were easy stops and I was home by 12:30PM. This was the plan all along because I wanted to be home to then go to our oldests house to have the gorls trick or treat there, plus do a little grocery shopping.

We hit the road about 1:30PM and stopped at the oldest. Her and her fiance dressed up as Kermit and Ms. Piggy. They always go all out for Halloween and was great to see them, even if only for a few minutes.

Now for a little inside look at living poor.

We bundled doing some grocery shopping with the trick or treat trip for two reasons. One, we group trips to minimize gas cost. It takes us about 20 minutes to get from our little town to Olympia. Additionally, my wifes van is falling apart. I no longer trust it for trips outside of our little town. So, we bundled the trips and planned it so we can take my work truck instead of the van. I have no idea what we are going to do about the van. We can’t afford to replace it.

Second, we do once a month grocery shopping, which requires a lot of planning. One of the stops for our monthly grocery shopping is a bread outlet. This is day old or damaged bread heavily discounted. We buy a lot of bread, bagels, buns, etc. and completely fill a freezer.

After going to the bread outlet store we went to Costco. We use Costco to buy in bulk and honestly, they’re ruining their value. For example, our Costco no longer has the bulk powder laundry detergent, which is a huge disappointment.

Costco was packed, so just my wife went in, while the gorls and I hung out in the truck. This was an opportunity for me to setup the boredom buster Pi Zero build. I posted about it on Fedi. The gorls played some offline games and had a blast doing it. It made me so happy that it worked and it did exactly what I built it for.

Got home, hung out, and then prepped to go trick or treating. As we were getting ready the rain started and it poured all night. The kids got soaked, but had a blast. Our neighborhood is all families, so there were hundreds of kids out in the rain trick or treating. My wife is deathly afraid of clowns, so she had to go inside a few times to avoid the It costumes.

We watched Garfield’s Halloween special and called it a night.

How are you feeling today?

Pretty decent, actually. The house is full of food and we don’t have to go anywhere.

Todo

Chores

• Replace the furnace filter.
• Misc. business admin stuff.

Fun

• Big wrestling day. Need to catch-up on Friday Night Smackdown we missed last night and then Saturday Night’s Main Event is in the evening.
• Watch Baaghi 4 with the wife.

Projects

• Never got to this yesterday. Install and test scrcpy on the existing install of PostmarketOS on the Microsoft Surface. I don’t want to move forward with this project if using my phone as a crutch won’t work.

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