10: I hate horror movies

Lots of stuff today, all of it good!

First things first: my feet are feeling a lot better! I've been struggling the last couple weeks because my feet have never been skateboarding before, so the new motion and combination of muscle movements for close ~45 minutes a day, every day, wasn't doing them a kindness. I took both weekends (sat and sun) off from skating, in the hope my feet would recover somewhat, and when I went home for the 4th I also took off the Friday. I skated to work yesterday, and it seemed like the pain hadn't gotten any better or worse, but today it's much better. I didn't skate to work this morning because I knew I had a ride home (more on that later), and the walk isn't that much slower (30 vs 15 mins), so I just walked this morning, and I think the break from skating may have finally let my feet heal somewhat. We'll see in the morning, I am writing this sitting at my desk after not having done anything strenuous with my feet for the last little while.

Second thing second! I had (semi) real work today!! Super-intern Jared (we joke because he's not graduated yet, and will be going back to school in the fall, but is experienced enough he's technically not an intern) gave me an assignment that will actually be somewhat useful: I am to catalog and record every single section of the NEC (the National Electric Code, AKA "The Bible") that pertains to receptacles (fancy word for wall outlets / the boxes they go in), and then write a single document that can be used by other engineers to find specific requirements and sizing necessities, without them having to trawl the NEC for the thing that they're looking for. I'm doing this with an Excel spreadsheet, wherein I wrote down every single section of the NEC (210.52, for example) and which exact thing it pertains to (This one is "occupied spaces" or something), and then have a separate catalog of every one of those sections, rewritten for clarity by myself (and Lara, shoutout to Lara for helping with this, she needed work to do too). It's a bit of a herculean task, I made it through 15 of the 59 chunks of relevant codebook, and I think Lara made it through 3 or 4 (she joined me later), so we've got a ways to go, but it's genuinely really nice to have something to do, even if it's just a reference document that'll maybe get looked at eventually.

Third thing!! The escape room I mentioned a post or two ago was this evening, and it was fantastic! There were 16 of us from work at Escape Room Herndon, in 4 teams of 4, and it was a great time. We were split into the 4 teams of 4 by Steph and Jack, our wonderful DPN (developing professionals network) leads, and I ended up on the Intern Squad™, which consisted of myself, Lara, Jane, and Jake. I probably couldn't have chosen a better team, they've all become friends of mine in the 3 weeks since I started, and we worked together pretty well.
After we had gathered in our teams, we were given four options for escape rooms, one for each team: 8-Bit, The Graverobber's Dilemma, Magician's Workshop, and Maritime Mutiny. This is where the title of this post comes from, because they were pitched to us as "The Retro one", "The Horror one", "The Magician one", and "The Pirate one". They all seemed cool, but as fate would have it, the other interns and myself were discussing horror media at lunch today, and I had expressed my... dislike for such things, but of course the other three in my group were all fans, so we ended up with "The Scary one".
There were three rooms in our escape room, the first simply the interior of a small cabin, the second a very dark mad scientist room with a sink full of bones and a collection of different vials and tools on the wall, and then a third room that had, among other things, the body of the person who the cabin belonged to, a glass coffin, a decapitated pig head a la Lord of the Flies, and a vest made of human skin from the person's "experiments". The escape room was fun, and my dislike for horror is very surface-level, but underneath it my constant curiosity and want to know how the story ends keeps me from shying away, at least once I've started the story, or if, for example, three of my friends have dragged me into it. I only screamed a few times. 😉

Fourth! This one is much smaller, but I listened to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess in full for the first time today, and it's fantastic. I had of course heard some of the songs before, the album was decently popular in '23, but I had never heard a few of the tracks, and all of them are great; It's going to become my soundtrack for the near future.

Fifth!! I was originally intending for there to be 4 things, and I haven't even discussed the last one yet, but I wanted to also add that I had my hair in a ponytail at work today when I was reading the NEC (not all of my hair, more of a half-up half-down situation, except closer to like 1/4 up, it's just the front of the top of my head, so that my hair is out of my face and the little ponytail lays flat). Anyway, one of my coworkers said she loved my ponytail, and that felt great.

And finally, Sixth! Sixth is the photo for this post, my stickers were delivered!! I ordered ~$20 worth of stickers on Redbubble for my skateboard a week or two ago, and they came today! There are a couple not on the skateboard, a pride flag and QR code sticker that went on my helmet, and then a great pane from Calvin and Hobbes with Calvin saying "You know, I don't understand math at all" that I put on my laptop. I'm hoping people at work notice the skateboard and the stickers, because many of them are references to things that I know other people will get, and I love having those kinds of interactions.

I need to carve out a time at the end of my day to write these posts, because this is getting ridiculous; it's so much later than it was supposed to be, but I just wrote an entire 1100 odd words about my day. If nothing else, this whole blogging thing might make me a more practiced and natural writer.