John F Croston III

Another month’s worth of what I have been doing at 8:15 PM every night. Doing this has become a great way to see what I’ve been up to on a particular day along with what else I add in about my day. It’s become a regular habit of what I’m doing and what has happened that day and a wonderful little one paragraph diary/journal of my actions and thoughts.

A Little Background on This Post

I started keeping track of what I was doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) every day for the last few months 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) every day.

I thought this was a great idea to see if I could find any patterns in my nights. So far, I tend to watch TV Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights when I’m home. Also on the weekends I tend to be leaving or coming back from dinner, sometimes even eating dinner.

Here is my post on what I’ve been doing at 20:15 (8:15 PM) in January, February, March, April, May, June, and July.

August

Aug 1 – Watching TV while eating a chocolate cake top. Was bouncing around and can’t remember what I was watching at the time. Paid my rent at the local Burke and Herbert branch near my house, then went to St. Elmo’s to meet friends there and chat. We also all signed the agreement with big Dave that he has to lose 5 pounds per month, and we will all donate $20 to the pot to give him more incentive to lose weight. He ‘s six foot six and weighs he says 450 pounds. His goal is to get down to 290 pounds. Guessing the first few months should be easy to lose 5 pounds. Headed home to grab cleavers and then meet Sam at Braddock Road Metro to then go to Union Market to drop off my cleavers for sharpening and lunch. Next it was a stop at A. Litteri’s for cured meat and hot Italian sausage. Made a final stop at “Baked and Wired” for a chocolate cake top and a Doom cupcake (chocolate cupcake with dark chocolate frosting).

Aug 2 – Creating new Trello board of blog post ideas for “Gotta Eat Here” from my larger list of issues for “Gotta Eat Here” website to help get people interested. Taking a list from the main board to and creating individual task outside of it so I can start outlining the posts. Which means adding a list of restaurants and other information about them like their location, along with what you should eat there, website, hours, etc. Met up with Matt Bowen and his wife Lauren for late lunch at Mandu in Adams Morgon. We all had bibim bop in a stone bowl that gives you crispy rice if you left it bake to the slides for a bit. We talked about food work, his weight loss of about 65 pounds over the last year or so, which is a great slow and healthy pace in my opinion. Afterward, we stopped at a high-end chocolate shop two blocks away. I picked up to 70% dark chocolate were they picked up two 90% bars, which I think is too dark for my tastes. Once home after a bit of reading ended up taking a couple hour nap, since I didn’t get one in yesterday.

Aug 3 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us” on the CW to get me in the right frame of mind for their Broadway show in NYC.

Aug 4 – At a buddies house in Cabin John eating pasta with homemade tomato sauce with sausage, mushrooms, and other vegetables, along with drinking some wine and having some cheese and crackers. Brought a friend from North Carolina who was in DC for work for a nice relaxing evening instead of meeting and having dinner and then taking him back to his hotel.

Aug 5 – At the checkout line in Wegmans. I had gone to grab some food from the hot bar along with grabbing a few items like their sliced garlic bread, bananas, garlic hummus, etc. Another reason I went was to get more steps on my FitBit, and I ended up adding a little over 1,700 steps, which put me at 9,551 steps for the day. Worked on fixing in page anchor problems for keyboard users using either Safari and Chrome.

Aug 6 – Watching “Road to the Runway Season 14”, which is who and how people got chosen for “Project Runway”. I like watching the show to see how people make design decisions, how they can explain their reasoning, along with how they deal with change. Finished making updates to developer pages for the in-page anchors, which was done by adding a tab index of negative one (tabindex=”-1″) to the anchor. Doing this corrects issues that Safari and Chrome have.

Aug 7 – Walking from my buddies from North Carolina’s car with his family on our way to Rays the Third (Rays 3) to have burgers. We had tried to go to Puppatella’s for pizza, and the wait was going to be too long. There was a waiting line to tell to ask how long of a wait there was going to be. I ended up getting the “Hot Mess” after my buddies daughter pointed it out and thought she wanted it, and he could finish the rest. The “Hot Mess” consists of a cheeseburger on top of beef chili, mac and cheese, with tater tots, onion strings, roasted jalapeno’s, salsa, and a few other condiments, topped with a fried egg.

Aug 8 – Sitting in row K seat 1 behind home plate at the Bowie Baysox game watching Joe Grunkel pitch a two-hitter up until the middle of the top of the sixth inning. I was there as his guest and my friend from North Carolina, his wife, son, daughter, and another friend. It was interesting getting to sit that close to watch a game. After the other team got a third hit and he only had 91 pitches he was taken out of the game after six and two-thirds innings and awarded the win.

Aug 9 – Watching “Fantom Works” where they are rebuilding a 1967 Chevelle and a 1960 Lincoln Continental Breezeway. Went to sleep at 1:30 AM, woke up at 8 AM, read for about 45 minutes, and then went back to sleep to around  11:30 AM. Grabbed breakfast at the Royal Restaurant then drove around a bit to kill some time with a stop at Wegmans before picking up cupcakes to take to the ladies at An Event Apart. Delivered cupcakes then took the long slow drive home by taking Georgetown Pike and the GW Parkway. Once home read some and then napped for about two hours.

Aug 10 – Watching a commercial between the first and second sections of Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us”.

Aug 11 – Sitting in Cabin John drinking wine with five other friends having one of my friends that are going to marry two of the other ones in the fall reading through the ceremony. All of them have done some acting at places like the Maryland Renaissance Faire and community theater, so it’s going to be a production to say the least.

Aug 12 – Napping for about an hour and twenty minutes because I have stayed up past 1:30 AM the last few nights and was tired. Another day of trying to get our tech team to get our entire pride scanning tool back working while reviewing changes implemented to PROD server.

Aug 13 – Adding places to eat in my Trello board about “Gotta Eat Here” blog posts. Changed the blog post titles from “Write about “XYZ City” to “XYZ City – meal”. The meal part was for some of the larger cities I have more locations to eat at like Washington, DC and New York City. Previously updated a few links on my slides and adding the event for Toronto to the accessibility camp website pages. Attended a few meetings today, along with testing a new API QA tool the tech team is working on.

Aug 14 – Sitting on the 7:10 PM train to New York City talking to a guy from Seattle about cyber security on his way to visit his parents and family in Philly. Today was an interesting day since I ended up breaking my glasses while outside during a fire drill at work. Had to leave work an hour and a half early go to my eye doctors in Crystal City to have them fix them. Got there in no time and they were able to fix my glasses easily. I made it to Union Station to catch my train to New York City for the weekend earlier than if I left directly from my office at 5:30 PM after work. DMd with Jimmy Chandler and Shawn Lauriat to see when they could both meet on Saturday to have a meal.

Aug 15 – Walking out of the “F train” station at Second Avenue on my way to the “Meatball Shop” at 8 Stratton St. I had three meatball sliders that were the classic beef meatball, the spicy pork, and jerk chicken all topped with tomato sauce. After leaving the meatball shop, I walked over to Chris dogs and had a Crystal and a Chihuahua, which had sour cream and avocado in the hotdogs wrapped in bacon. After that walk over to the Esther Astro Place subway station to get back to the ace hotel. At 12:30 PM met Jimmy and Nicole in the hotel lobby to head over to Gotham West Market to meet Shawn. I was there to eat Ramen at Ivan Ramen’s Slurp Shop. I ordered the Shio Ramen, which I didn’t realize, was such a salty style of Ramen. Afterward, we grab ice cream at Ample Hills Creamery, which was in Gotham West Market. Today was a long day of walking around New York City ended up walking 10.5 miles that were about 23,000 steps. Ended up with 244 active minutes of walking.

Aug 16 – ENTERED 12/27/2015 – Sitting on the Amtrak train back to DC from being in New York City for the weekend to see Penn and Teller’s live show earlier in the afternoon on Broadway. Ann Murray was sitting about eight seats away from me in the row in front of me to my right. Great show even though I had seen a lot of the trick before on other TV shows or more recently on “Fool Us”.

Aug 17 – ENTERED – 08/18/2015 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us’ were a magician had both Penn and Teller shuffle and mixed up half a deck of cards each. Then shuffled them face up and face down, then tossed them randomly on the table and mixed them some more. Next he told them he would pick their card before they even picked it, which made Penn frustrated. Teller grabbed the ace of spades while Penn grabbed the three of clubs, which I found ironic since they do a trick with the three of spades. He then had them place the cards back in the random facing deck and gathered them together. Next he spread them on the table with every card face-up except for two, and they were Penn and Teller’s cards. At which point Penn picked up his chair like he was so mad he wanted to throw it across the room. Off course, he fooled them, but the great part was Teller grabbed cards to look at them while they tried to figure it out.

Aug 18 – Adding places to eat in Philly to my blog post outline Trello board. Also was updating my old iPad 2 applications.

Aug 19 – ENTERED 08/21/2015 – Was in the produce section of Wegmans picking out salad greens, along with some other fruits and vegetables. Had grabbed dinner first which was mostly curried chicken spicy little lamb in some breaded shrimp.

Aug 20 – ENTERED 08/21/2015 – Sitting in my spare bedroom at my desk working on my bills. Well sitting there partway through my bills I realized I didn’t have enough checks. Spent some time trying to figure out where I could get to a Citibank branch to order more checks. Most branches within about 5 to 10 miles of the house close at 6 PM weekdays. On the weekends, most branches are closed the other ones that are open are about 7 miles away and don’t open till 10 AM. Would have liked to get things done closer to 9 AM.

Aug 21 – Napping after a long week. I was laying on my bed reading and realized I was extremely tired so took an hour and a half nap. My day was spent in a couple of meetings along with working on reviewing a new iPad application for accessibility issues.

Aug 22 – Walking out the door for a walk into Old Town Alexandria. I ended up taking a very slow walk from my house down to the Potomac River and back again. Managed to get 12,900 and some steps in for the day. Today was a bit relaxing after visiting with friends at St. Elmo’s. Then I went home to drop off some fruits and vegetables from the Del Ray Farmers Market. After that went to Union Station to pick up my knives and have lunch. I went with the Vietnamese soup. Then I did some more shopping, and next came home to read, along with taking a couple hour nap.

Aug 23 – Was driving by Arlington Cemetery on the way home after a day out with coworkers at the flea market in Shenandoah and drove through Shenandoah National Park and a bunch of other things. After stopping at Super H Mart and good Fortune Grocery, I was driving down Wilson Boulevard near Pupatella’s randomly ran into a friend of mine. Picked him up and gave him a ride home even though it was only a few blocks away. I spent the rest of the day out with two co-workers at the Shen-Valley Flea Market where we can tacos and some fresh fruit with lime juice and a Mexican spice blend, which is a great and healthy snack. Next we drove to Front Royal, VA, where we saw a hot dog stand and stopped for one hot dog to hold us over until later and then took a slow drive through Shenandoah National Park. After that, we stopped at the quilt store and the fruit stand next door.  We stopped at Creekside Bakery and Deli to pick up a snack before heading to off to Copper Fox Distillery so they could take a tour of the place. At the end of their I headed across the parking lot to get some bacon before they closed. We did a quick stop at the new brewery so one of them could try two tasters of two different beers.

Aug 24 – Watching Penn and Teller’s “Fool Us”. The magician that was on was talking about doing a trick for a young lady who was blind. See wanted to see him do a trick. Normally he would do a card trick, but since she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t do that. So he asked the young lady to think of a card both the number and the suit. He blindfolded himself so that he could not see and had her count out the number of cards for the number that matched her card. Next he asked her to stack the deck on top of her cards. Next he had her count out one card for spades, two cards for hearts, three for clubs, and four for diamonds and then stick the rest of the deck on top of those cards. He then took cards and shuffled them around and then pulled out the card that she picked. He then showed the audience the rest of the deck, which were completely blank cards.

Aug 25 – Sitting in Cabin John having wine with a few friends. We talked a great deal about different subjects. We even discussed that we were talking about a whole lot of different things. I spent most of the day in meetings and doing a lot of testing old applications that needed to be migrated to new servers, and there was no old code to create them from.

Aug 26 – Signing up for Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s online talk Monday afternoon called “Kick Procrastination’s Ass”. Did this while texting friend in Boston about accessibility camp, along with all the changes with her and her family in last two months. Busy Day at work with a bunch of meetings looking at responsive templates along with testing a few different new applications.

Aug 27 – Was starting to clean up the last three or four  months worth of “What was I Doing at 8:15 PM” entries. I used voice dictation, and it got a bit messed up. Another day of a few meetings, along with some final testing of two migrating applications, started a third and read up on another one that needs to be looked at soon. I looked at a few test pages to see how accessible they were before they built out about 140+ other pages from these templates.

Aug 28 – Driving down King Street headed towards the Principle Art Gallery to meet a coworker, his wife, son, and a few other family members. They were there looking at his uncle’s painting. The day was spent testing a new application that needs a bit of work excessively with keyboard navigation and visual focus. After looking at the art, I stopped and had a small salted caramel ice cream in a cup for dinner. That’s one of the advantages of being an adult. While walking back to my car I ran into a friend and his daughter from the coffee shop and chatted with them while they got ice cream across the street from where I got mine.

Aug 29 – Watching “Chopped Teen Championship” episode. It was interesting watching the 13 to 16-year-olds compete against each other and what they could do with such short notice. This morning I went to St. Elmo’s to hang out with a few friends. I did some shopping at the Del Ray Farmers Market before and picked up some nectarines and tomatoes. The afternoon was spent reading and napping and even more reading.

Aug 30 – Can’t believe I was actually on Facebook today and it happened to be 8:15 PM. Was responding to a few friends that commented on me staying I should visit the National Zoo more often when I’m over there with a bit of time and can find street parking. It’s a nice walk around to see the animals and tourists with their kids. Plus, you can get between 8,000 and 10,000 steps in if you walk from the twenty-nine hundred or so block of Macomb St. NW to the bottom of the Zoo property. Along with a few side trips to see say the pandas, the elephants, and some of the different monkeys (Gorillas, Orangutan, etc.). The hardest part is Walking back up the hill to Connecticut Ave and then the car. At 8:15 PM today sitting in my spear bedroom I have 15,541 steps, which is 7.13 miles. Not a bad day of walking. Now it’s off to the basement to do laundry.

Aug 31 – Sitting in 14th St. Matchbox on the second floor playing euchre with the DC Euchre group. Ended up having a good day playing, since I won four out of five matches. Spent the early part of my day in a meeting and then doing testing of a new application.

Conclusion

In the future, I plan to post this information once a month at the beginning of the following month once I’m caught up.

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.

If you want to meet up to do something exciting at 8:15 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.

P.S. Need to go back through these 8:15 PM posts and add any links or photos that are relevant to make them more appealing.