More Blogging this Year

Posted on January 2, 2021 by John F Croston III

Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking I need to blog more to get things out of my head. While keeping track of things that happened in 2020. Along with things that will happen this year.

I used to write long blog posts that were way too long and needed code examples. But not too many posts at all in recent years. So it would take a day or even a week or a month to get it all done or sit in my drafts forever. Some are still there now.

To make it easier, I’m looking to write shorter pieces. About life, food, health, weight loss, walking, accessibility, learning, etc. And at the same time, attempting to keep them between five hundred and a thousand words.

I might even post a quick photo from my walking the neighborhood. Or what I’m eating or reading, etc., with a few words about what it is or why I’m posting it.

There might even be some posts with some of my drawings, but most likely not.

Or I could finish and post old drafts that I have lying around that need to get out into the world.

So look for more writing from me this year. I am looking to keep it going more often than once or twice a year.

So this post came in at 238 words, so it’s a good start to writing shorter posts.

Posted in 2021, Blog, Code, Drawing, Photos, Writing | Leave a comment

2020 What a Year

Posted on January 1, 2021 by John F Croston III

All in all, 2020 wasn’t that bad a year for me. At least there was more positive than negative.

The following are things that went well for me and will be written about in more detail in the coming weeks.

Purposeful Walking

The first thing that improved for me was, I did more purposeful walking this year, Meaning, it wasn’t because I was commuting to and from the house to the train to the office and back, but out taking lunchtime walks most days and then again in the evening after work along with ones on the weekends.

Because of this, I managed to walk 3,200,944 steps, 2,314 flights of stairs, not many living on the first floor of a house, and finally a total of 1,468 miles, which is two or three hundred more miles than an average year of mostly walking during my commute.

More Sleep

Another positive thing with this year has been I have been getting more sleep because my commute is now from one part of the house to another. Even if I woke up at 7:00 AM or before and couldn’t get back to sleep, I would stay in bed and rest until close to 9:00 AM when I would start my workday.

Doing this has been helpful and cut back on my need for naps on the weekend.

Eating Healthier

With not eating out or getting takeout since mid-March, my eating habits have improved. Been making, cooking, or assembling all my meals, which I enjoy doing but hadn’t done much of or as often until this year.

This year I managed to eat more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on tortillas than in the last ten years, which is still better than what I would eat for breakfast or lunch from the work cafeteria.

I have eaten more fruits, vegetables/salad, nuts, trail mix (peanuts, cashews, almonds, raisins, and M and M’s) this year, which has been a good thing.

When cooking, I even made enough to have many extra meals, so I only had to reheat them and put others in the freezer for later.

Read More Books

The year started out well, and I was reading a book about every five days or so on average, and then when the pandemic hit, it slowed up a lot. I finished the year strong in December and managed to read 22 books.

Some books were longer than others and others not so much. A bunch were between 120 and 150 pages. A list of those books will be coming out in another blog post.

No More Car

In the fall of 2019, I had car issues that I decided not to spend the money to fix, so I used the metro (commuter train), bus, and walking to get around the DC area.

I sold my car to a friend’s friend in late August because they thought it would be cheaper to fix mine than theirs. Now I need to find out if that was the case.

Met My Neighbors

With all the walking around my neighborhood, I have met more people on my block or within six or eight blocks of my house.

Some I met for the first time, and we have lived a few houses away for over ten years. I saw others a few times a week and would say hello on my commute to and from work, and I finally learned their names.

I even met a couple that is retired and is now Certified Master Gardeners. I even got a small fig tree from another neighbor that I replanted in a five-gallon bucket.

Attended More Conferences

It worked out deciding not to attend CSUN, which is an accessibility conference in Los Angles, as it was at the beginning of everything closing up related to the pandemic.

Because many other conferences had some time to switch to remote events, I used my vacation to attend more of them, and part of it wasn’t used to travel. I attended four or five conferences, a workshop, a few couple hour food-related classes/demos, etc. More on these in the future.

Learned More

I spend more time at night and on weekends on YouTube learning about homesteading/small farming about grow my own food and raise animals for when I get my plot of land to put a tiny house on, cooking, JavaScript through the JavaScript book club, which I joined in January, tiny houses, and much more that I will write about soon.

My Weight Loss

With all this purposeful walking and eating better. Not perfect, but an improvement from what I have been doing. I have lost almost 60 lbs. since the end of September 2019. Almost half of that has been since the beginning of the pandemic.

I even had to buy a set of metal leather punches to put new wholes in my handmade leather belt because I had run out of wholes.

I even purchased one new pair of jeans this fall because the others were at least four sizes too big. I only bought one pair for now since I’m mostly sitting in the house working and then out for a walk, so I don’t need more.

With having to walk to the grocery or farmer’s market and using a backpack, I found there was less room for junk food that way, which helped too.

Conclusion

So all in all not a bad year for me.

I know it’s been hard and difficult for many and will be for a long time to come too.

So here’s hoping for a better year for all of us in 2021.

Posted in 2020, Food, Health, JavaScript, Weight | Leave a comment

Playing Around with Flexbox by Starting with Articles and CodePen’s from Others

Posted on January 28, 2019 by John F Croston III

About a week ago on January 13, 2019, I saw a tweet from Heydon Pickering  ( @heydonworks ) talking about how he was using Flexbox to switch directly between multiple and single column layouts but didn’t have time to read it at the time because I was at work.

Later that day I saw Jonathan Snook ( @snookca ) had tweeted about some tweaks he had made to Heydon’s CodePen example.

Here is Heydon’s “The Flexbox Holy Albatross” article which he didn’t want to use media queries or JavaScript, along with Jonathan’s article about Heydon’s “Understanding the Albatross” article. NOTE: I used media queries to change font sizes in my example.

Started to Play with Heydon’s Code

After reading through both articles, I started playing around with Heydon’s CodePen to see what would happen with only two blocks for my jfciii Ate Here restaurant list. After playing around for a bit, I grabbed the HTML and CSS I had messed with and copied it into Textmate to make one page using my template for jfciii Ate Here. At that point, I gathered a few restaurants from my list of place to eat in Washington, DC and replaced the blocks with real content to see what doing so would be like on the page.

Part of my picking certain restaurants was to gather ones with different lengths to content for the same row for a wide width screen (think desktop/laptop). At first, I started with two per restaurants to see what that looked like for desktop/laptop and different width between there and a narrow width for a phone.

To me, it seemed that having two items to a line/row seemed like it could be confusing when reading the content, But then I remembered that most of the time people would most likely checking for restaurants on their phones while they were out wandering a city or sitting with friends instead of a desktop or laptop.

Pushed My Code Example

After pushing the updates a few different times to my website, I asked a coworker what they thought about the two columns, and they thought maybe adding a bit of space between the two columns would make it easier to read.

I then spent some time working on my CSS to add a few REMs worth to the right of them which seemed to work. But then I had the problem of forgetting I had to only added it to the first item in the list for a widescreen device. I ended up using :nth-child(odd), so the extra padding was on the first item in the row. Next, I had to remove the extra padding when in a narrower view such as on my phone.

Then I decided to attempt to use three restaurants to a row for a few rows and then two for one, and one with only one restaurant to see how they all looked before updating my PHP code to generate a given amount to my application page.

When I did that, I then had to add a max-width to the restaurant content container, so it didn’t span the width of a row, so the reading experience was better for people because of the long line length.

So here is my experiment with a bit of flexbox for jfciii Ate Here and the current look of one restaurant at a time for the wider width.

Thanks, Guys

Thanks, again Heydon and Jonathan for your articles and examples to get me to play around with flexbox.

Further Reading and Video Watching

Now it’s off to spend time finishing up reading Rachel Andrew’s ( @rachelandrew ) book from A Book Apart “The New CSS Layout“. Then start reading Rachel and Jen Simmons ( @jensimmons ) other work and watching both of their amazing videos to understand CSS Grid better. See below for more of their work.

Rachel Andrew

Jen Simmons

Conclusion

Please leave a comment of which number of restaurants per row for wider screens you think works for ease of reading and compare against my current version of jfciii Ate Here.

Posted in 2019, Ate Here, CSS, Development, Flexbox, Food, HTML, Restaurants | 2 Comments

You Should Use Your Local Public Library to Do Work

Posted on July 7, 2018 by John F Croston III

You should use your local public library to read, do tech related work, catch up on e-mails, etc. on the weekends or nights after work when others are not around. Over the last year or two, I’ve found working at my local libraries has been easier than working in a coffee shop. It’s also a change of pace from working at home.

Using the library is easy on your budget. Doing this means you don’t have to buy another latte or fancy pastry or sandwich or salad or Gelato so you can get another hour and a half of internet connection. Or so you do not feel guilty that you stayed there for a few hours more without buying anything. Plus, if you’re drinking lots of coffee or tea, you won’t be all hopped up on caffeine by the end of the day. Even though some libraries let you bring in beverages in a fixed lid container. I think the main Columbus library sells drinks on the first floor.

Over the last year or so I have gone to a few of the Alexandria, VA and Washington, DC, libraries. Did this on a few nights and most weekends when I’m home. I spend my time working on improving my list of restaurant’s I want to visit when I travel or even at home application (jfc iii Ate Here). A lot of the time is spent finding the details about a restaurant. Such as their address, phone number, a description of the place and what they serve, and URL. Once, I have that information I put it in a GitHub issue so I can add them to the proper city or state JSON file when I have the time.

I especially like visiting the central libraries in bigger cities when I’m there visiting for work or on vacation. It’s great seeing how grand some of the older libraries are. In the last year or two, I have been to the following cities and their libraries.

Libraries are Listed Alphabetically by City Name

NOTE: Updated list of libraries and URLs on October 9, 2019.

I have found at the smaller libraries, the earlier you get there doing so allows you to locate a power outlet. Be they in, on, or under some tables. Other time you need to find a chair along the windows of the walls for an outlet. To avoid having the problem of lack of power I make sure to charge my laptop the night before. Or in the morning if the library doesn’t open until late morning or early afternoon.

Bringing headphones to help cancel out some of the noise can be useful depending on the library. Sometimes having headphones in or over your ears is enough to cancel out most of the sound so you can think. Doing so gives you that option if that is what you need to do.

No matter the size of the library they now all seem to have wifi so you can get to the internet. With not knowing how good the wifi is or how much content other people are going to be downloading I tend to bring my “Your Karma” mifi. Doing so allows me not have to worry about what others are doing on the internet.

Conclusion

Use your local libraries to get work done, so they continue to get the funding they need and are open for others to use. It beats sitting at home all the time. You might even see people you know or meet some new people.

On hot summer days or cold winters ones too it’s a pleasant place to relax and get out of the weather when you are traveling be it for work or vacation.

Bonus Location to Work

Use your local libraries to get work done, so they continue to get the funding they need and are open for others to use. It beats sitting at home all the time. You might even see people you know or meet some new people.

On hot summer days or cold winters ones too it’s a pleasant place to relax and get out of the weather. When you’re home or traveling be it for work or vacation libraries are a great place to be. Another great place to get some work done is your local auto dealer. I know you’re thinking I’m crazy. But if you can get an appointment on the weekend when they open. You then tell them you are waiting and will be sitting in the salesman’s section out front. Doing this is great if you have your own wifi/mifi. Because the service section has desks and opens an hour or two before the sales people get there. Giving you plenty of time to work quietly. Usually, the only person running around is someone either sweeping or mopping the floor so it looks good for customers buying cars.

Plus, it’s interesting on a Saturday towards the end of the month. Doing so lets you listen to the dealership manager or owner come to talk to the sales team to get them pumped up to sell cars. Along with reminding them they have to sell a certain amount of vehicles to meet quotas and they can get bonuses.

Use your local library to get work done.

Posted in 2018, Ate Here, Food, Library, Restaurants, Web Applications, Work | Leave a comment

December 2016 – What I’ve Been Doing at 8:16 PM (20:16)

Posted on December 31, 2016 by John F Croston III

Here is my December 2016, installment of what I had done at 8:16 PM each night during the month. I also found it helpful writing down what happened during the day as a small journal/diary of what was good, bad, or interesting.

Little Background

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:16 (8:16 PM) every day for the last month after reading Kitt Hodson’s Pastry Box article from Jan 1, 2015. Which was about how a year earlier she read Erica Douglass’s article about writing down what she did at 11:11 AM and 20:14 (8:14 PM) everyday.

December 2016 Events

Dec 1 – Sitting at my house watching the newest episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” Not that exciting of a day at the office. We continued to work our way through the DEVELOPER.dol.gov website broken or redirected links.

Dec 2 – Sitting over at my buddy Ron’s house getting ready for the music to start back up. That was after first going to St. Elmo’s to correcting an issue my “10k Apart” and “Ate Here” application had when hitting enter on the “Submit” form without picking a city, state, or location. Along errors that occurred when a person attempted to mess with the URL to see what they would end up displaying. Worked wasn’t that busy besides a few things that showed up and had to deal with them. We continued to work our way through the DEVELOPER.dol.gov website broken or redirected links along with sending the government tech boss the five JIRA issues to see if he could find the proper place to direct people on the website.

Dec 3 – Walking with friends from St. Elmo’s to an Italian place on Mt. Vernon Ave. to grab dinner after watching the Del Ray, VA, tree lighting ceremony from the bar at Pork Barrel restaurant. I met most of the same friends at St. Elmo’s for coffee in the morning after sleeping in until 10:05 AM. Once I left St. Elmo’s I stopped home quick and then headed to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on updating broken or redirected links in my slides. Then went over to Pho 75 to grab a small bowl of Pho with raw round eye and fatty brisket with extra noodles and extra fatty brisket. Next, I went to Boccato Lounge to continue working on my “Ship in Six’ project.

Dec 4 – Laying on my sofa reading Twitter while watching last weeks episode of “Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain” waiting for this weeks show to start at 9:00 PM.

Dec 5 – Working in my spare bedroom on my ARIA slide pages to now use HTML5 instead of XHTML code. Doing so will help reduce the page weight by a few bytes along with making it cleaner and easier to read.

Dec 6 – Eating veggie lasagna at my buddies in Cabin John while tasting a few different Italian red wines. Today wasn’t my day to commute. Had to get into work early for an 8:30 AM meeting and Metro took an extra 20 minutes which only gave me 10 minutes to grab breakfast before the meeting. Then getting to leave 30 minutes early meant getting home at 6:15 PM which is when I would normally get home. So an extra 30 minutes to commute home. To get to Cabin John, it takes about 35 – 40 minutes at none rush hours times. During rush hour in the rain today it took about an hour and 15 minutes to get there, so it was nice to spend time with friends catching up and having a nice simple meal with some wine. The trip home only took about 40 minutes.

Dec 7 – Started updating my NVA and DCA JSON files for both my 10k Apart’ and “Ate Here” websites. The changes I made were to correct grammar for Stachowski’s Market, added an asterisk to Beefsteak which I haven’t gone to, and added Vaso’s Kitchen.  Also, updated my slides to use HTML5 where they didn’t break them because the JavaScript was looking for things from XHTML. My work day consisted of attending a team meeting, then looking over a bunch of Microsoft Word documents before meeting with the creator on how best to make them accessible since they had 20 documents to change. We decided on a plan and they were going to correct one document first to make sure that was accessible before doing the rest of them. Later in the day had to come up with a list of things content creators should think about when creating content. Luckily we already had an accessibility checklist document that I could start with and in about fifteen minutes had a good first draft to send to the necessary people.

Dec 8 – Sitting in a stranger’s living room in DuPont Circle area listening to a two piece band play music and answer questions as part of “The Little Salon” event. Which is a monthly creative art, music, spoken word, etc. event that moves around the DC area and is held in different people’s home. I managed to find a nice comfy chair and sat back and watched the event move around. During the first break, I managed to locate the restroom on the second floor and then updates to the third floor to see the study and seating area which also had another bedroom up there. A part of the whole center of the house was open to the third floor so all the light from the skylight could get down to the bottom of the house. When I left closer to 9:15 PM to catch the metro when I was outside you couldn’t tell at all that there were 80 – 100 people inside the house. I also tried a six types of shrub (bitter mixer) and bought two bottles from one of the vendors there.

Dec 9 – Finishing up a small bowl of raw round eye and fatty brisket Pho with extra noodles and fatty brisket with my buddy Sam at Pho 75. At work during the day, I worked on reviewing a few PDFs for accessibility issues.

Dec 10 – I was home taking a two and a half hour nap until right before 9:00 PM after doing web work and meeting a few people at St. Elmo’s in the early morning. That was before heading out to meet old ARMY.mil co-workers and their significant others for lunch at Maketto and then off to a few wine stores for wine tastings which were mostly champagne. First, we went to MacArthur’s and tried about 8 – 12 champagnes and I bought a few hundred dollars worth of wine for only six five bottles. Then is was off to Wide World of Wine where I/we tried three Spanish wines. Here I only bought two wines for about $260, but these were older wines from two of my favorite producers in the world. Then finally, to Pearsons for a few more champagnes. I ended up buy four more wines there which were Piccolo Cru. After that, we headed over to 2 Amy’s to grab some pizza and other appetizers.

Dec 11 – Driving back from William’s after figuring out where the pre-CSUN road trip will be which is going to be Los Angles, CA. WE might meet up with one of William’s friends while we are there. We are going to look for AirBnB places near Venice Beach so we can either spend the whole tie there relaxing or use at a base to go and eat a=our way around LA. Then I helped William with getting firewood for the main house along with help to clean out the gutters. Then we each stacked a ton of pig feed (barley and corn) and once that was done we went and filled up the pig feeder with a dozen bags and finally filled the water tank at the back of the barn, so the pigs had water to drink for the day. We had to make sure to blow out the water hose so that it didn’t freeze and crack because it was so cold (34F and felt colder with the windchill).

Dec 12 – Working on making updates to my presentation slides in my spare bedroom.

Dec 13 – Sitting in Cabin John, MD, for Barry’s birthday with Bev and Aimee on Skype from Chicago while eating box frozen pizza and drinking a few nice red wines from Matt Cline while the girls drank the same wines in Chicago. Attended the work Xmas party/potluck lunch. As usual, I brought cheese and crackers.

Dec 14 – Was working on a bit of paperwork. Another slow day at the office but managed to enter an issue in JIRA at 10:00 AM before the standup meeting and we worked to get it fixed, tested, and in PROD by 3:00 PM. Which could be a record of fixing something in five hours start to finish.

Dec 15 – Watching The Big Bang Theory where they are having a baby girl. Spent the part of my day going over the changes I wanted to make to the DEVELOPER.dol.gov dataset pages to only use one set of information instead of one for desktop and another for handheld along with making it accessible and using one set of TABLEs to do it all. Plus, started reading an article about CSS Flexbox and Gird where I noticed they used a max-width which gave me the idea to use min-width for IE stuff and it looks like it will help correct are display issues with IE in handheld made or at least make it better. We are not expecting people to use IE in a narrow handheld width much if at all. Finished up my paperwork and updated the NYC JSON file for both my 10k Apart and Ate Here applications which were missing Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop and had two versions of Ippudo Ramen in them.

Dec 16 – Driving from Pho Viet Flare on Van Dorn on my way to Wegmans to do some grocery shopping and to look if they have any Hardywood Gingerbread Stout for my buddy Sam. I managed to get my shopping done and could not find any Gingerbread Stout the first two times I looked around where it typically is stored. After talking to another couple that was looking for Hardywood beer and showing them, I went over to the area where they keep the new bomber bottles and saw some weird looking bottles that caught my eye. Doing so let me notice that there was one lone Gingerbread Stout mixed in with everything else.

Dec 17 – Driving from my buddy Sam’s house after having dinner that Bangkok Golden on my way to Boccato Lounge to continue working on reading through the “Ship in Six’ old e-mails and finding places on AirBnB in Venice Beach, CA. I was look where we wanted to stay at during our mini road trip before CSUN at the end of February. We had the usual of crispy rice salad, duck laab, and pork drunken noodles at Bangkok Golden. We first drove to Banh Mi DC Sandwich to pick up a few egg rolls and a roast pork Bahn Mi for later or lunch on Sunday. Managed to get about a three-hour nap in the afternoon instead of doing more reading on Ship in Six e-mails and Pho at Pho 75.

Dec 18 – Not sure if I was reading Twitter, a book, or watching TV after spending a good part of the day making updates to GitHub and reading through the “Ship in Six” e-mails from Amy Hoy along with taking notes on them and the “Stacking the Bricks” podcasts and a few videos from the “Ship in Six” series.

Dec 19 – finishing up a phone call with a college friend to see what her plans for Christmas were with her family, parents, and brothers and sister, along with her grandchild and son. Instead of doing work after the day job I spend about an hour and twenty minutes on the phone talking to the older of my younger brothers, along with my youngest sister on how things had been going, the weather, plans for the holidays, and how all their kids were. Figured I would be easier to talk before the holiday weekend when things were a bit slower and less hectic.

Dec 20 – Checking my GitHub issue comment through Grammarly after making changes to the way the address information is displayed. I removed the words “Address” and “Phone” from the screen along with adding a line break when the street address ends and again if a second address is there. Next, I need to move the last few days updates to the server so I can have people check them out.

Dec 21 – eating a small bowl of Pho with fatty brisket, raw round eye, extra noodles, and extra fatty brisket over at Pho Viet Flare on Van Dorn St. in Alexandria, VA.

Dec 22 – Watching TV but nothing that exciting that I never wrote it down. Needed to relax and unwind a bit. We finally, started working on consolidating the dataset TABLE information on the DEVELOPER.dol.gov dataset pages from two different sources only to use one by using “flexbox” in our CSS. After playing around a bit with using “min-width” for the mobile data, TABLE cells corrected the display issues for IE browsers. I managed to find time to show a co-worker how we were going to consolidate the dataset TABLE information too, along with starting on my DAD JIRA issue. Which ended up being one of the top five largest pages of the 40 or so pages we need to fix.

Dec 23 – taking a few hour nap after getting out of work at 3:00 PM. Finished up the large DAD JIRA issue I started along with finishing the second one and almost completed the third one before going home at 3:00 PM. After work I to the red line to the New York Ave metro station to head over to A. Litteri’s to get some cured meat because they were open until 6:00 PM and I would not have to go on Saturday then. Luckily they were not too busy, so I made sure to give a nice tip to the two older guys that wait on me all year when I go in on Saturday’s.

Dec 24 – Having Christmas Eve dinner over at the Kamin’s and having great conversations a diverse set of people. Spent the morning at St. Elmo’s to visit with friends then it was off to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on taking notes from Amy Hoy’s Ship in Six e-mails along with updates to GitHub. Only managed to get a short nap.

Dec 25 – Relaxing and watching TV after napping mid afternoon after going to see the new Star Wars movie “Rogue One” and then driving around DC to see what was open along with what people were doing. On the way home I stopped at “Bob and Edith’s” to have breakfast for a late lunch

Dec 26 – I was watching reruns of American Pickers while catching up on Twitter and doing a bit of relaxing too. Went to St. Elmo’s to visit with friends until about 12:30 PM and then headed over to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to have some hot chocolate. I worked at reading and taking notes on the final few “Ship in Six” e-mails from Amy Hoy. Worked on making updates to GitHub which I think was creating ReadMe files for my slide presentation folders since they were missing and might help explain more what the folders were about.

Dec 27 – Sitting in Cabin John at my buddy Tony’s house with two other friends drinking a 1999 Château de Beaucastel which they all thought was great. I had some issues since I managed to burn my tongue a few days ago while eating a small bowl of Pho. During the day I managed to complete three DAD JIRA issues. After the others left spent some time talking to Tony about my buddy William’s pigs and what he thought they needed which were mostly to have more intermuscular fat. We spent more time talking about his pigs in general.

Dec 28 – Backing up my iPad mini 3 while pushing updates to the DC JSON file for “Cucina Al Volo”. Working on cleaning up some e-mail along with adding a few things to GitHub for my 10k Apart and Ate Here repros. Need to add two restaurants one to the DC JSON file and the other to the NVA JSON file. Today at work I managed to get through four more DAD JIRA dataset issues along with starting the fifth one which is one of the most difficult files to update since it contains 26 different tables.

Dec 29 – In my kitchen filling up my water bottle along with grabbing some Mortadella and Provolone cheese. I did some QA and accessibility testing of the ILAB Android Child Labor application. Once that was done, I continued working on updating another developer dataset page.

Dec 30 – Sitting at a table in Pho 75 reading an article from Twitter while waiting for my food. I managed to finish two more DAD JIRA issues at work even though we got to go home two hours early. Managed to get about a two-hour nap after doing a bit of reading what happened n Twitter during the afternoon.

Dec 31 – Lying on my sofa reading Twitter and watching Ohio State lose to Clemson in the Fiesta Bowl. Met friends at St. Elmo’s this morning and chatted over two hours. Then went to M. E. Swing Coffee Roasters to work on making more updates to my Ate Here and 10k Apart JSON files with new places to eat. Next, I went to Earl’s Sandwiches in Arlington, VA, to try two of their sandwiches and have the rest for dinner while watching football/TV in the evening. I got the turkey pesto, roasted red pepper, cheese, pickles, etc. special along with eh “Bay of Pigs.” I ate half of each and saved the rest for later. I then added more money to the meter and went down to Boccato Lounge for some hot cider while I worked on posting my “what I did at 8:16 PM” for the month of November around 3:30 PM. While getting everything ready to post my December one too once, I finish this bit of writing. Once I left there, I picked up a buddy of mine, and we headed to Banh Mi DC Sandwich to pick up some egg rolls t snack on while watching football. We then stopped at the Good Fortune Grocery Superstore to pick up some roast pig which I planned to use with some Ramen over the next few days. Our final stop was at Total Wine to help my buddy pick out a six pack of miscellaneous beers. WE managed to grab three IPA’s, two stouts, and one porter. During the afternoon I realized I had written a hundred or two words shy of 31,000 for my “What I was doing at 8:16 PM” each day this year. Once this is done, I should easily be over 31,000 words. Next year I will attempt to write more, so I get to 40,000 words along with less spelling and grammar errors.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you and gets you to keep track of what you do a particular time of the day, along with a short daily diary entry to see what you have done or can accomplish over the course of a year.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:16 PM some evening, please leave a comment. Or a suggestion of something that is not part of my ordinary life you think I should do.

Posted in 2016, 8:16 PM, December, What I've Been Doing | Leave a comment