Woke up a little earlier than usual today, given I’m on holiday break. Sleep was uneven and full of gaps, and by 9am I was ready to give up the ghost. Didn’t help that I had an “appointment” at 1pm in Sheridan. An hour and a half drive for lunch with my parents, my grandfather, and his wife. Love the man, but he picks some real out-of-the-way places to eat, and doesn’t seem to like variety.
Didn’t really feel like breakfast, and my sister wasn’t up yet, so I return to my old addiction of Smash Bros. With the new one coming out, I don’t know how much longer it will be any fun to play online. Meanwhile, our father has converted us to an MMORPG called Neverwinter on the PS4, so I’m sure that will be eating up some of my headspace in short order. As expected, the Smash matches are already on the decline. I can’t even enjoy some of the more brutal wins because honestly it doesn’t feel like I deserve them.
It only takes me a handful of matches before disgust drives me offline. Instead, I retreat to my room and fall into a YouTube pit for about an hour. The semester’s over, but I am still kind of soaking that fact in. My sister wakes up about 10:30 and wanders over. She’s excited because when I leave, she’s going to be alone in the house for two days to play Neverwinter by herself. After I meet my parents for lunch, I’ll follow them home up north and stay for the weekend. I’ve only fiddled around a little on the game so far, so odds are she’ll blow right by me in progress.
I watch a few more videos, mostly pointless fluff or playthroughs from Alpharad (a YouTuber). Really, I’m stalling. I’ve put off gathering my clothes and packing a few things for the weekend. It’s stupid anyway, not like I need a whole lot. I grab a couple sets of clothes, my laptop, wallet, keys, etc. I get a wild hair as I realize I don’t know where I’m going, only that the restaurant is in Sheridan. I decided to pull up Google Maps, and sure enough there are only one or two food places there. I check with my parents and it looks like Midwestern Grill is the place to meet up.
As I get ready to leave, my sister is getting ready to build her character. I run her through some quick tips and tricks for Neverwinter, purely because some parts of it are completely unintuitive and the tutorials are crap. After a few minutes, she’s building a red-headed fighter and I’m dithering for the last few minutes before I leave. Finally, I get in the car, plug in my phone, and hope I don’t get lost.
The drive is incredibly boring, but relatively straight. But that hour-and-a-half feels a lot longer. By the time I reach Sheridan, I’m getting…mixed results from Google Maps. It led me to the restaurant and the town as separate destinations. By the time I realized this, I had already passed the Midwestern Grill and gone into the main part of town. Circling back was a pain, but at least when I found the place there was a parking spot right next to the door. It was a small town diner, generously a greasy spoon.
Inside, I found that my grandfather was there alone. No wife, no parents yet. He was also surprised to see me (makes sense, I had only decided to show up for this lunch yesterday). We talked for a little bit about my schoolwork before mom and dad walked in and sat down with us.
When we were ready to order, I decided to get the steak from their menu. A little bit of social faux pas, but I hadn’t had breakfast and wanted some beef. My parents began admonishing me for going for the expensive item on the menu when they were paying (I would have paid for it (T-T)) and mentioned that they were planning to have steak that evening. So I backed off and got a tenderloin instead. It was…edible. The best that can be said for it was that it was forgettable. Likewise, mom and dad seemed unsatisfied with their burgers, and Grandpa apparently didn’t get the sauce he wanted for his fish?
The conversation mostly didn’t include me (again, unsurprising given the surprise of my visit and Grandpa’s usual interests), so I tuned a lot of it out. Some of it I joined in. I was interested to see what had been done to his house to help it sell. The last time I was there, the back yard might have served as a jungle, and there was a narrow path inside between stacks of papers and other bits of clutter. Now, it was virtually empty and completely repainted and retiled. Given his location in Indianapolis, his house will probably sell really well in its new condition.
Eventually, we wrap up our conversation and make to leave. I hug Grandpa a few times on our way out, and prepare to follow mom and dad home. It’s the usual story: I try to keep up and dad doesn’t believe in speed limits like I do. He’s blasting way ahead, and I’m forced to speed up just to follow him. Eventually we hit roads I remember and it stops being a problem, but still, I hate following them in a car.
When we get to my parents’ house, I apologize for ordering the steak. They start laughing, and explain that it wasn’t the expense of the steak, it was the place I was ordering it from. Just because they had steak on the menu didn’t mean that it was going to be good. Of course. I feel silly, especially as I consider how bad the tenderloin was, and I can’t honestly believe that the steak would have been anything but terrible. Luckily, my folks have half a cow in their freezer, and I can look forward to a real steak.
The afternoon is mostly some collective lazing. Dad is playing a bit of Neverwinter and mom and I are buried in the news. I really don’t want to clog this diary up with more of my general antipathy to Trump, my following of the Mueller probe, and my ongoing outrage against Congress. Short version is that I talk a little politics with my mom, we complain about the above topics, dad chimes in a few times, and we conclude (again) that it should be relatively simple to fix and that a significant portion of the country needs a wake-up call. Still, seems like it’s just wasted wind that won’t solve anything.
The afternoon drags on and…it becomes clear that I won’t be getting steak (T-T) because dad is just too burned out to do it tonight. I settle instead for scrounging something from the fridge. Dad made some wood-fired hamburgers earlier in the week, so I heat up one of those instead. Not a steak, but still good.
Conversation kind of dried up downstairs, so I head up to my room to watch tv. I have a few shows to catch up on saved in the recordings. In particular, episodes of My Hero Academia and Steven Universe are calling my name. After that, I turn the tv off and boot up my laptop to watch RWBY and a few other videos that have popped up.
At about 10 pm, I go back downstairs and watch Ready Player One with my parents. I really like the movie, actually saw it twice in theaters. Makes me wish we had something comparable to dive into in real life. At the same time, I’m kind of glad that we haven’t abandoned in-person socialization yet (even if I’m not great at it myself). I restrain myself from commenting on some of the plotholes and just enjoy the movie before heading to bed.