Things I did today

Wade Pfau has gotten so much into the math of retirement planning that his previous academic title was Professor of Retirement Income. With his wealth of knowledge, he's decided to write a series of books:  Retirement Planning Guidebook: Navigating the Important Decisions for Retirement Success  Reverse Mortgages: How to use Reverse Mortgages to Secure Your Retirement Safety-First Retirement Planning: An Integrated Approach for a Worry-Free Retirement and How Much Can I Spend in Retirement?: A Guide to Investment-Based Retirement Income Strategies In this first book of the series, he walks through the major topics of generating retirement income that the other three books cover in-depth, as well as Social Security, Medicare, and Long Term Care planning. In the first chapter, he stresses that there are multiple income strategies and that there are certain strategies that resonate more strongly with some, and other strategies that work well for others. There is more beyond the i...

 Surge 11 went well. I remembered to do my stretches and PT daily except for the last 4 days of the month, when my hip pain was finally mild to none. I was worried with my hip pain as I had a conference to attend the third week of the month, and walking was still painful. Apparently, what I needed was being forced to walk 5 - 9 miles a day for six days at the conference, along with my PT. At end, for the day I walked 9 miles, I had a painful hour in the afternoon that subsided, and after that I've only had the mildest of pain on occasion when going up stairs. I guess I'm mostly cured! I'll call that an unintentional success and keep doing my PT. Surge 12 took me some time to think about. I've settled on going through a book I bought late last year, "Retirement Planning Guidebook: Navigating The Important Decisions For Retirement Success", by Wade Pfau. I've been wanting to read this book and work through the exercises, as I'm hopeful to retire before I...

 I only ended up adding six recipes as I didn't have nearly as many recipes that I'd tested enough! Throughout the winter, I'll be cooking a lot more, so I'll feel more confident in adding good ones. For the month, though I added Beef Stroganoff , Ham Quiche , Pad Thai , Chicken Cacciatore , Arroz Con Pollo and Tuna Steak . You can find the full list at my recipes page: http://www.lauraqjohnson.com/recipes.html For Surge 11, I need to get back to daily PT as my hip is continuing to bother me. It's gone from moderate pain to mild, which is good - but part of the reason is that I'm not going on near daily walks anymore. That I really miss, so I will be using November to strengthen and stretch my hip and area around it.

Since it's close to Halloween, I decided to embark on the Halloween Special that the Dicey Dungeons creators made a while back. Sounds like a fun distraction! You can play as the Warrior, Inventor and Witch. I guess I'll do them in order. Warrior is first! Halloween Episode 1: The Warrior Hah! How funny, the enemies are wearing Halloween costumes!  The gameplay and equipment isn't different except for the "Spooky Fury" which means you don't know when Fury (your equipment triggers twice) will happen - if it happens at all. As always, they do a great job on the dialog. The final boss was Drake the Vampire (of course!) and I beat him rather handily with my overpowered equipment. Halloween Episode 2: The Inventor Moving on to episode 2 was the Inventor, and the creators still had some interesting tricks up their sleeves. One needed to really consider how the equipment was going to work AND how it would work as a gadget. At the end of each match, one piece of equip...

James Hoffmann partnered with Cometeer again to create a Discovery Box. Cometeer has a proprietary method of brewing and freezing coffee at a strength ~10 times a normal coffee, so they can be shipped as little frozen pucks. To 'brew' the coffee, you pour hot water on it. If you want a cold coffee, you just let it melt in its capsule in the fridge overnight, and pour it over water and ice. I'd have a third picture, but you know what black coffee looks like. The Discovery Box had 8 coffees with 2 pucks each. Each day, Cometeer included a short video from James explaining each coffee and the accompanying flavor profile. I was encouraged to rate the coffee "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" but what I didn't know was if thumbs up meant "I loved the coffee" and thumbs down meant "I merely liked it, or worse", or "I liked it and would drink it again" vs "I didn't like it and would not drink it again". I ended up going...

 This month's surge is a little housekeeping-ish. For a while, I've been trying new recipes, but I've not been putting them on my website and I really ought to! It's been helpful as a reference and to send to friends who are looking for something new to cook, especially if they like their Instant Pot. So Surge 10 is all about adding more recipes to my site. Hopefully I can get another 10 or more up there as it only has 14 currently. No more weekend work in October, which means I'll have time for it!

I only played one new video game between 9/15 and 9/30 because I was working overtime at work. Normally, I work about 90 hours for half a month. This time, I worked over 120 hours. Often, I needed to be in meetings that started at 5am, so even when the day ended around 4 or 5pm, I was exhausted and no mood to figure out a new game.  I was going to try to catch up on weeks 7 and 8 and pretend I was just slow on publishing. But I realized that I had fewer genres to try out. I've already done a few before starting this surge - RPG, puzzle games, deckbuilders and platformers. I also know I had no desire to play any sports games or first person shooters. Instead, I decided to end it early and write up the final review for 20 games I did play since the beginning of September. First, a quick writeup about Vampire Survivors. What a weird game. You wander around, attempting to kill waves of monsters while your weapon autofires, meaning you have to time when you get close to enemies to kill ...

This week, I played Legends of Grimrock, Deathtrap Dungeon, and Universal Paperclips. Legend of Grimrock: Looks pretty cool in the intro! Ah, I've been convicted of a crime, and if I go through this dungeon alive, I'm pardoned? Sure. Why not! Well, let's go dungeon exploring!  Sure, whatever that is. I grabbed the torch behind me, and I'll start my way down the dungeon. Ahh, it's a gross snail! Punch it! Hit it with the stone axe!  Why are you missing when it is RIGHT HERE? Augh, it's bitten one of my players! I managed to kill the snail and move along to a corridor with two  snails. I figure I'll fight them one at a time, until I hit the wrong key and moved when I didn't want to and got cornered. Frustrating. There were other puzzle-y elements that I found frustrating and so my frustration meter went too high. Not having fun, and now punished for one keystroke. I think I'll put this real time RPG away. Not the one for me. Deathtrap Dungeon: A choose...