National Coffee Day: September 29th

$1.04 total (BEFORE cash back 👀)

These were all National Coffee Day and other freebies we picked up from Starbucks, Circle K, Dunkin', and AMPM today. $0 for everything except Dunkin'. For that, we each combined $1 credit we got yesterday (thanks, T-Mobile Tuesdays) with their "free medium hot or iced coffee with any purchase" deal and paid $0.52 out of pocket for a donut.

National Coffee Day is Sept 29th every year, so if you didn't take advantage this year, be sure to put it in your calendar for 2022!

Oh, and my husband doesn't like coffee, so... 🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪

 

10 Years Self-Employed

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of me quitting my job at Moneytree — the last and final time I was anyone's employee!

This was unsurprisingly a special moment for me. Poor execution on my part and a bumpy ride for awhile afterward, but one regret I most definitely don't have is taking control of my schedule. I didn't know what the future would hold or that I would be so settled and comfortably self-employed a decade on, but this was the moment I got my freedom from the "9 to 5" (I was actually working graveyard shift, but that's details), and I have never looked back.

Guinness World Records™ Most users to complete a remote 10 km in 24 hours 9/19/21

"Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean." — Ryunosuke Satoro

On September 19, 2021, tens of thousands of runners participated in a remote 10k in pursuit of the Guinness World Records™ "Most users to complete a remote 10 km in 24 hours" record. Sean, a handful or friends, and I were among them. Many of our times weren't much to sniff at, but all together, we got to be a part of something kind of special. Oh yeah! And we broke the record. 🙂

As for Sean and me, we just did our part running our miles up and down Las Vegas Blvd that hot, fall morning.

For those who might otherwise ask, though a lot of participants wound up buying medals and other items to commemorate the achievement, this was a free event to partake in, and the digital certificates we received for successfully breaking the record were more than sufficient mementos for us. This didn't feel fractionally as personally significant to Sean and me as breaking the rhythm game marathon record back in 2013 or as any number of other personal accomplishments felt at the time, and most things we do feel more trivial after the fact anyway (or to me, anyway), so I never got around to posting about this at the time (it's actually January 2022 as I'm typing this), but I'm learning to appreciate and value the power of teamwork and recognize that what we can achieve together is at least as worthy of celebrating as each of our individual contributions, so yay! 🎉 

Stamina RPG 5: Done!

SRPG5 ended last night! It went roughly like SRPG4 did for me but with a one or so difficulty improvement. I'm still working on the not going all out every session thing. Other than that, I mostly just played everything I could, had a peek at the quests when I started finding myself low on goals and direction, and otherwise hoped for the best. 😄

In addition to tons of unlocks and the 20s and 21 I did, I'm pretty sure I finished all the base pack 19s and below. I didn't think to keep track of milestones and achievements as I went along, but I was happy to get Stamina Nation Rank 3 and master or grandmaster every bpm tier up to 200. I also didn't know where I stood as far as the other ranking stats almost at all until the very end, aside from occasionally checking out the TP + LP ranking. (Actually, I didn't even realize most of the ranking sorts existed til really recently.) Kinda cool to see how all the effort came together after the fact though!

My results for 2021:
Level: 86
Highest pass: 21
Rankings:
•TP/LP: 31/483
•TP/LP (female): 1/51 (Amy didn't enter this year)
•Experience: 21/484
•Experience (female): 1/52
•Marathon (BB): 13/349
•Marathon (BB) (female): 1/33
•Timing (Gold): 10/459
•Timing (Gold) (female): 1/50
•Footspeed (JP): 56/68
•Footspeed (JP) (female): 2/3 (1st place: lolipo)
•Stamina Nation accolades: 8/349
•Stamina Nation accolades (female): 1/33
•Democratic People's Republic of Timing accolades: 14/415
•Democratic People's Republic of Timing accolades (female): 2/44 (1st place: Freyja)
•Footspeed Empire accolades: 19/304
•Footspeed Empire accolades (female): 1/28
•Pass count: 8/484
•Pass count (female): 1/52

By contrast, in 2020:
Level: 78
Highest pass: 20
Rankings:
•TP/LP: 44/493
•TP/LP (female): 2/56
•Experience: 31/504
(The rest was N/A for last year, or I didn't check.)

As always, I'm massively grateful for all the effort put into this event by organizers as well as fellow competitors, Urza for motivating me, and Sean for putting up with me. ❤ Thank you once again! 🙏

As for what's next, like I've heard a number of others confess, I'm feeling pretty burnt out and ready for the off season. I played through last year's and think some downtime is LONG overdue. I'll be tapering down now but sticking it out enough through ECS10 in a couple of weeks to see the end result of the past few months' effort. Gotta bring it on home! 😜 I'll still be aiming to maintain and even work toward gains after that too but definitely planning to cut down a bit, mix in some running and other activities, and catch up on some much-needed R&R. 😴

My Facebook posts from this year vs last:

SRPG5 (2021): https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157794409372024&id=550422023&sfnsn=mo

SRPG4 (2020): https://www.facebook.com/550422023/posts/10157067784587024/