Mild Amusement

A while back, my trusty cell phone needed to be replaced, so I purchased a new Moto G Stylus on sale. In fact, the only reason I got that phone was that it was a pretty hefty sale, so I paid less than half the usual price for it. I'm not about to complain if I can get a smart phone for less than one hundred dollars. As it is, I'm not a huge gadget guy, so I don't need a top of the line device. I just want something that takes phone calls, sends and receives text messages, and lets me connect to a few applications. It's a pretty simple list of requirements. Since this particular device checked all of those boxes, I was pretty happy to find this particular deal. When I first got it, I noticed that it had a different charger than my previous phone, so I had to switch over to the new one. My new phone had a USB-C port (the one that looks like a flat, symmetrical oval), while my old one did not. Well, they sent a charger with the phone, so I just plugged it in. When I did ...

When the pandemic hit and everyone was forced to work from home, we ended up changing quite a few things around the Mild Home. I mean, how could we not? For example, I now had to sit in a chair in front of a laptop for hours at a time. That thought had just plain never occurred to me. The idea was that I would do my work in the office and if I occasionally needed to put in a long day, I could do a couple of hours at most from home. There's a big difference between a chair that's acceptable for two hours and a chair that's acceptable for eight hours. One of the other notable changes was in my morning routine. Notably, we invested in an exercise bike so that the Mild Wife and I could still get some cardio from home. Sure, we could run outside, but between the worry of masking up and the weather being chilly for good chunks of that time, it never seemed like a fully reliable option. As a result, I ended up using the exercise bike for roughly enough time to finish a couple of q...

For the most part, daily life is pretty mundane. I mean, it's not like you win a million dollars every other day, and most people don't get married twice a month. Sure, those exciting things happen to people, but they are the exception, not the rule. On the daily, I get up early , make and consume breakfast , go to work , have lunch , hang out with the Mild Wife , have dinner , and go to bed . Sure, I have fun during those events, but it's basically a lot of the same, over and over again. The interesting thing about that all is that it is not at all boring. For all that much of it is repetitive, the company makes a huge difference, and we managed to find our chuckles throughout it all. Heck, this blog is a testament to the fact that we can still find a little bit of amusement at least once a week . Today's post is a prime example of that. The Mild Wife and I were having dinner, just going through the motions of eating and chatting. She handed me a bowl of food, much li...

It has been a couple of years since the Mild Wife and I moved into the Mild Home ( and almost ended up adopting a cat in the process ). On an intellectual level, I know this fact and I can process it, but there is a different part of my brain that says, "holy crap, it's already been more than two years?!" It's just hard to believe that so much time has passed. Now, I led with that particular fact because I want you to know that I am not new to this neighborhood, nor am I unfamiliar with what happens nearby. I have more than two years of experience in the matter, after all. That's hardly a tiny sample size. So, imagine my surprise when I looked out my window one fine morning and saw this: It was probably around 7AM That's far enough away where I couldn't be sure exactly what I had seen, but it was also clear enough where it made me do a double-take. I remember walking past the window, glancing out the window, taking a few more steps, and then literally back...

Whenever holidays roll around, the Mild Wife and I try to do something to celebrate. We don't necessarily go all out, but we do like to participate in the festivities. We put up Halloween decorations to let the kids know that they're welcome to trick-or-treat at our house, and there was a whole series of posts this last Christmas ( culminating with this one ) about the festivities. Basically, we like to partake in the holidays. Lunar New Year is no exception to this rule, so we usually end up having some form of a celebratory meal and handing out red envelopes to our nieces and nephews. Again, it's just one of those things that we like to do, to honor our heritages and get in on the celebration just a bit. It just makes things a tiny bit more cheerful. This year, we couldn't do some of the usuals. A family gathering seemed unwise given that the pandemic is still a thing, and we didn't want to go to a restaurant, either. So, that basically left us with having a mea...

Recently, the Mild Wife and I were catching up with my sister and our nephews/nieces over a video conference call. I've mentioned this set of calls once before, when the Mild Wife and I inadvertently ended up playing virtual hide-and-seek for two hours . It had been a while since we'd chatted, so we were mostly just catching up and letting each other know how we were doing. As it happens, these calls tend to occur around breakfast time, so it's not uncommon for us to either point to breakfast items or prepare breakfast as it happens. We don't exactly point a webcam at the stove while it's on, but you can definitely point out what's happening. Say we are brewing coffee; that usually means there is a receptacle holding coffee in it nearby. If we happen to be using one that is made of glass, that means that we can point to the coffee inside and describe how it is turning from grounds and water into coffee. It's also easy to serve pancakes or eggs onto a plate a...

As is the case with many of these posts, I don't really remember what started the conversation. I remember the punchline and I remember the laughs along the way, but I cannot pinpoint the exact details that led to that turn in conversation. Still, bear with me, because the punchline is worth it. So, at some point, the Mild Wife and I were commenting that in many Filipino households that have a cat, there are decent odds that the cat is named " Muning ." Obviously this rule is not without exceptions, but let's just say that the Mild Wife has seen a lot of "Muning's." As best as I can tell, it's sort of a term of endearment that means "cat," but it frequently becomes the cat's actual name. I suppose the closest translation I can think of would be something like "kitty" in English, where some people just name up naming their cat "Kitty." In fact, the Mild Wife has even shown me social media posts bemoaning the fact tha...