Year: 2020

Animal Crossing Tools

Here are a couple of Animal Crossing tools and sites that I have found useful:

  • Turnip Prophet: If you are not opposed to mild cheating in the form of data mining, someone reversed engineered the turnip market information. There are several calculators available, but I like the interface and charts on this one the best.
  • Animal Crossing Pattern Tool: You can use this to convert images to Animal Crossing QR Codes. You will need to have an active Nintendo Online membership and the phone app to use your patterns in New Horizons.
  • Island Tune Creator: Easy way to create island tunes.
  • Nookpedia: One of several Animal Crossing wikis. I use Nookpedia because it gives gift suggestions for the villagers.
  • Nook Plaza: New Horizons item database. It’s one of the only ones (that I have seen) that shows what the customization options for each item look like.

Plants: April 2020

The backyard is still a hot mess, but I guess that topic is probably best relegated to a post of its own. My pachypodium saundersii compacta is coming out of hibernation now that it’s warming up (it literally went from a temperate 70 to 80 to 90+…). I kind of want to repot it, but I have heard that since it grows well in compact situations, not to overpot it. Most of our small to medium sized pots however are being used by other plants so it will probably just stay where it is for the time being.

I don’t have a picture, but I think my lithops got a bit sunburned this past week. I normally keep them under an overhang on one side of the house to make sure they are kept out of any rain that we have and also don’t get too much direct sunlight (this side of the house gets direct sun in the morning but is kept shaded during the afternoon heat). Because it has been super overcast in March and early April, I moved them to a different table to make sure they got enough sun. I had forgotten to move them back to their normal spot during the heatwave.

We have finally kinda sorta started a vegetable/herb garden in the form of planting food waste from stuff that we get at the grocery store to see if it will actually grow. The garlic and green onions are growing well so far, not too sure about the ginger as it hasn’t broken soil yet. I still need to weed and till the plot of land that I had set aside for a proper vegetable garden, but that project is going to require several trips to a hardware store/nursery (and now is not a great time to be doing that) so we’ll have to make due with what we have laying around the yard.

Here is a blurry pic of spider bro who gets MVP for eating and warding off all of the stupid aphids that were infesting some of the plants on this table. The cobwebs are a little unsightly but I, for one, welcome our arachnid guests so long as they are outside of the house.

2019 In Summary

For whatever reason, I don’t think I ever posted this video. Throughout the year, I try to record short 8 to 15 second videos on my phone of whatever we happen to be doing for the sake of collecting the most interesting clips from each month and stitching them together at the end of the year.

I was watching the video again and just noticed that the footage I had recorded from the Cubs game at Wrigley Field never made it into the video. I guess it must have gotten dropped somehow when I was migrating my video editing workflow from my phone to the iPad? No clue. I may readd it then reupload it to YouTube, but we’ll see.

I don’t have any idea why I just never made one for 2018. I may dig through my phone and make one or at least make one for our 2018 Japan trip since I recorded a buttload of video..

Anyway, 2019 was a great year. We had originally planned on not traveling anywhere aside from maybe one short family visitation trip. Instead as it turned out, we ended up traveling quite a bit (for us). I am glad that we did Japan trip #2 in 2019 since we uuuh are not likely going to be flying anywhere anytime soon.

Animal Crossing New Horizons

Suffice it to say, a lot of Animal Crossing was played this weekend. Was there ever a more perfect time for Animal Crossing to come out? I really wanted a physical copy of the game, but Amazon delayed my preorder (as well as literally everyones preorder for obvious reasons). As such, I cancelled the preordered and purchased it digitally.

Next house upgrade coming tomorrow morning as well as possibly a new neighbor.
My two starting villagers are Shari and Sheldon.

Also, super pleased that I can scan the QR code’s for the clothing that I had made in New Leaf using the phone app.

My Traveler’s Notebook (Regular) Setup

Here is a post on how I use and setup my regular sized Traveler’s Notebook. My passport sized TN is used as a daily planner/general notebook whereas my regular sized TN is used as a creative outlet for watercoloring, sketching, scrapbooking, and stuff like that. I really like the TN system because of how modular it is; I use my notebooks for a variety of things so being able to swap inserts in and out is crucial. For daily use, I usually have 2 or 3 notebooks inserted at a time (detailed below). For travel, I will have one notebook (an insert dedicated to travel journaling) to keep the thickness of the TN down to a manageable size, since my travel journal insert is filled with about a dozen pamphlets and stuff like that.

This is the Traveler’s Factory Tokyo Station edition notebook that I picked up during our first trip to Japan in 2018. The red mizuhiki charm (the knot thingy) was purchased during the same trip. The brass charm was purchased from the Nakameguro store when we visited in 2019.

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