Summer in the year of change

I'm going back in to the office 4 days a week in 2 weeks, and some weeks 5 days when I'm needed. It's been a year and a half of working from home, with only going in once a month from November to April, and then once a week from April until now. Again, so many pros and cons for going back. But, because I am, I want to make the best of it. 

I'm looking forward to seeing people at work again. Some have started in the past year and I've barely seen them, and some I've still never met. So I hope to make some new friends, and maybe go to lunch with them sometimes. I'm going to bring some snacks to work, because it's always nice to have a snack drawer. I may look for some new things to decorate my office with too. We're allowed an hour for lunch but myself and most others just work through lunch so that we can leave at a good time. But I want to go out to eat a little more, or to a coffee shop nearby during my lunch, either alone or with others. Or the park when it's nice weather, which is a very short amount of time here in GA. Of the year and 3 months I was in the office, I never went to the park nearby, and it's a nice park. 

I've been at a new church for 4 months now, and it seems like both a long time and a short time. I am so thankful I found it in only 7 weeks, because in previous church searches I've looked for months up to a year. I miss my previous church sometimes and in some ways, but it's like when you leave high school and all of the people who made it high school leave, and only a few teachers or younger friends you liked were there, and over time they all leave too and what you miss are the people and how it used to be. There were a lot of new people that went to that church in 2020 that I just didn't get to know well enough to miss a whole lot when I left. I really like them, but I just didn't grow close to them. A few of my best friends are still there, but most have moved on too, or left before me. 

In the middle of a transition still, I struggle to know who my friends are. I have a lot of surface level friends right now - some with big potential that I'm excited to get to know but have been too busy this summer to get together, and some that I see is having to move from my close friend circle to my "see you once a year" friend circle. And some just every 3 months or so. It's honestly painful. At the same time, I know that some people who don't go to church and only have work friends haven't been in contact with many friends at all over the past year, so I am thankful for the friendships I have and will have. A few weeks ago I went to dinner with a bunch of people from my new church, for the purpose of people getting to know each other or staying in community if they already knew each other, and there are three during the summer. All went really well, and at the end I ended up talking to a girl and we started having a really good conversation, and she was so kind and encouraging that I almost cried. 

iPhone game reviews

-Family Feud - I like and recommend, it's just hard to type fast enough. 

-Solitaire TriPeaks Card Game - I'm shocked at how fun this solitaire game is but the competition when you're in a group or club is stupid. People have rules like you can't go longer than 20 hours without playing. 

-Brick Out - Shoot the ball / Bricks n Balls - the monotony and chance of these games is entertaining for some reason.  

-Doorman Story - This is a "Diner Dash" type of game but with hotels. It's fun for a while, but eventually it gets crazy and pretty much impossible without paying real money. 

-Lily's Garden: Design and Relax - It's a mix between candy crush where you mix colored tiles, and a decorating type of game. It has a good story line behind it that makes you want to see what happens next and improve the place and explore new places, but it just takes a really long time to do anything eventually. 

-Tetris - I like the ones where you compete against someone live time and clearing more than two lines at a time sends the other player an extra line. But I go as fast as I can and lose most of them, so I don't understand people's speed with it.

-Snaker.io - This game is really fun!! Although I think you're playing against bots instead of real people. The only thing is, eventually I figured out a way to almost win the whole thing by just going in circles really close to yourself so that no one can get inside of your circle and eventually you keep getting bigger and nobody can hit you. 

-Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp - Nope. It got really boring and repetitive, and the furniture wasn't that great and I couldn't organize things to make it look nice, and quickly ran out of room. It was a cool idea though and I like the RVs. 

-Paper.io - this game is so great!! You are trying to make your color bigger than everybody else's and not let anybody else steal your color too, and not get hit at the same time. Again, if you go in circles it's helpful, as well as staying near the edges of the map so that nobody gets passed. If you get good at it though, each game is REALLY long. 

-Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (Like Pokemon Go)  - I hated it. I don't "go" anywhere enough to get cool stuff. 

-Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery - It was really boring. You just tap a lot and run out of energy a lot. 

-Idle Miner Tycoon: Gold and Cash - A lot of the "Idle" games are fun to me, but this one a lot more so because it seems to be never ending, and while you aren't playing the miner people keep getting more, and when you come back you have a lot more to do. Some idle games cap out at a certain number and then it's not much fun. It honestly sounds stupid when you first play, but for me it was entertaining. 

-Candy Crush Friends Saga / Soda - I was overly obsessed with this game for too long - not only enjoying it and needing to keep going, but also competing against friends. I started actually paying money to skip levels I was stuck on or get boosts, and it got to be ridiculous so I never want to play them again. 

-Hole.io - This game also sounds stupid - you're a "hole" trying to swallow up surrounding things on a map, and the more that falls in, the bigger you get. If you get swallowed by another hole you die. You want to be last alive or the biggest in size. You start to learn patterns of where is best to start that has a lot of small things that eventually gets you bigger faster. 

-Sims - there are two sims apps - I hate both of them. Haha. At the moment I can't even remember why.

-Super Mario Run - When this first came out I loved it!! You have to know the right ways to jump and how long to hold down a jump...it was a strategy not to get hit or to get the highest points. It was fun until I mastered some and then couldn't even complete some levels. 

-The Trail - This is similar to The Oregon Trail. You're a person walking though, and you pick up things as you walk. You stop at the end of each walk at a campfire to trade things with real people, or sell things, and eventually you have a house. You create / craft things, need new clothes as they wear out, and need food. The scenery changes all the time and it's a pretty game. Again, I became addicted to this game so I had to delete it. I couldn't play it in moderation. 

-Hungry Shark World - I can't explain how stupid / weird this game is (you eat people along with other fish) but also entertaining at the same time. It just is. 

Hi, I'm a PC

 PC games I've played in the last few years and my reviews on them... 

Ooblets

It's similar to Animal Crossing. You come to a town where you get a tiny house that you get to upgrade as you go, you meet random people in the town, you accomplish tasks, you plant things in your yard and keep it up, etc. The most unique thing about it is that you get to have "Ooblets," these little creatures, that follow you around. You win them by having dance battles with them by choosing the moves your ooblets do that is supposed to trump the others. It gets redundant but there's this Pokémon feeling that you "have to catch them all." I played it in the testing stage, so they have added more to it since I played, but after a while I just ran out of stuff to do, my house couldn't hold any more furniture, and I'd pretty much collected all of the ooblets that existed. Still, I would recomend the game. 

Firewatch

This had beautiful graphics and scenery. It has an open world feel, where there is a massive amount of the world you can roam freely in. It's story based though, so you follow instructions, have tasks, and follow a compass through the woods and on trails. The premise of the game is fascinating - you are at a fire watch tower for the summer, making sure to report any forest fires you see, or going out to tell people to stop making fireworks or camp fires. The only other person you interact with it someone on another tower through a walkie talkie. A mystery begins, and weird things start to happen. Overall I hated the ending, and I got lost a LOT. There's a lot of walking / hiking in the game, and I wish that you could just spawn at the place you'd last been if there wasn't something for you to do on the way. 

Beneath a Steel Sky

This came out in 1994 and they remastered it recently. It's a sci-fi, point and click adventure game with an intriguing story of trying to figure out a mystery and also trying to get out of this weird city you're stuck in. It was good! I am definitely glad for walkthroughs on Youtube though because I got stuck a few times and didn't know what else to do / how to progress the story at times. 

Beyond a Steel Sky

The sequel to the the above came out in 2020! It had a lot more to do, it was a longer game, it obviously had way better graphics, and overall I really liked the game. Everything was very futuristic. Again there is mystery to it, and you have to figure out what is going on in the game and solve a mystery. I had to use walkthroughs again because I got stuck sometimes. 

Life is Strange

A lot of times I'll watch someone on Youtube play the first 30 minutes of a game to see if I'd like it before I buy it so I don't waste my money. I did that with this game and was excited about it. You play a girl who finds out she can rewind time to change her choices. You're at a creative arts high school where you are studying photography. You talk to lots of people, the graphics are great, the conversations and people are engaging. And of course, there is a mystery to solve. You know up front that a girl is missing. But at some point things get really weird and dark, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. At one point I almost didn't finish the game because it was so bad, but I did finish the game. I wouldn't recommend the game to anybody. There was so much creativity in this game, but depth of the darkness in it ruined the whole thing for me. 

Gone Home 

This only takes about 2 hours to play so it's pretty short. A lot of people love this game but I didn't. You come home to an empty house after being out of the country for a year and don't know where your family is. It's stormy. You start exploring this mansion - which is your house - and think the whole time that they're going to be dead or missing or something tragic / scary, when in fact nothing scary is happening at all. It tells a story as you pick up things or collect things, and you find secret doors in the house. 

Tell Me Why

This is by the same people who made Life is Strange. This was set in Alaska, so again, beautiful and creative scenery and towns and people. You switch back and forth between these two twins as adults, and then also as kids. They are trying to figure out what happened with their mom - she was murdered - and their memories aren't very good because they were traumatized. They are on the search for what really happened as they are also trying to sell their childhood home. The game focuses heavily on the brother who is transgender, and how people relate to him either positively or negatively. It's an overall very sad game without a good ending. 

Sims 4

I started playing Sims 1 when I was 12 years old and loved it for the gameplay, and then didn't play it for years and years. Now, on Sims 4, I love it more for building houses, the decorations, and sometimes the gameplay still. People can create houses, stores, schools, amusement parks, disney castles, anything you can think of, and upload it for you to choose to download and play too, for free! Some people are so talented at it. I like watching people play the Sims on Youtube sometimes because they are funny or creative, with things like the 100 baby challenge, rags to riches where you have to start with no money and then slowly make money somehow without an official job, etc. There are always new additions coming out and new worlds, from the big city to a Japanese world covered in snow, to a college town, to a magical world. They have stayed big for over 20 years with no signs of stopping. 

Unravel 

You play as a little yarn person who has to travel through scenes by unraveling parts of himself to hook on things to swing, jump, push, and then pull the yarn back to him. If there isn't enough yarn to use then you did it wrong and have to find another way. Although it was an interesting idea, and they even had a second one, I didn't play this for very long. I got bored with it and didn't continue. 

Fall Guys, Among Us, and Fortnight 

I'm combining three that most people know about. Fall Guys - I was just really bad at it so I didn't enjoy it. Even practicing over and over again I couldn't get the hang of it. Plus there were several rounds that actually made me motion sick. Among Us - if I played with people I actually knew and could talk to them, that would be way more fun. But when I'm playing with strangers every round, it's annoying because you don't know if people are telling the truth, and everybody just jumps on one person to kick out for no reason. Or lots of people leave when the game starts because they didn't get imposter. I like watching people on Youtube play the game though because it's funny and they are creative with it, especially with different mods to make people different roles. Fornight - that's a big no for me. I can't aim and shoot at the same time already, much less build things! 

Civilization

I've played lots of Civilization games. I don't remember all of their names, and some of them are not called that either but have the same premise. I like a lot of them, but the problem is I can't stop playing them and I get addicted to them. You're constantly upgrading your town/city, your army, etc. and for no end in sight. Just bigger and better, always and always. Some of them that you play with other players where there's a chat has an amazing amount of drama and angry people! People make up rules for you like "You can't attack another clan" when the whole point of the game is to attack and gather resources. 

Nancy Drew games 

There are 33 Nancy Drew games - I started playing them at 12 years old and have played all of them. They are where my love of mystery, point and click, adventure, task driven, beautiful and creative scenery, and interesting dialogue games come from. They are much more PG in nature, and I wish there was more like them. The last one came out in December 2019 and it had a whole new engine that created it, new graphics, new people who created the games... and it wasn't that great sadly. But I loved most of the other 32! They are set all over the world in all kinds of places. Amusment parks, trains, Europe, a boarding school, a haunted mansion, Italy, and more. Even though they are PG, tons of adults play them, and I got stuck all of the time and had to use walkthroughs. They were hard! There were lots of puzzles, things to collect, people to talk to, etc. 

Next I'll be reviewing some iphone games I've played over the past few years! 

The in-between time

 The things that occupied my time during a normal week: 

-Wednesday afternoon planning meetings for high school youth at church 

-Wednesday night I led a women's bible study 

-Thursday night I attended a young adults' bible study 

-Sunday church 

-Other miscellaneous meetings and events on any given week for church stuff 

I've been gone from my church for 6 weeks, so none of the above has happened in that time. My weeks are weirdly empty as other people's lives have stayed busy. I know that some day soon I will have a new church with new things to do there and ways to serve, so I'm trying to appreciate this slow time in-between. But it's still weird. And I miss pretty much everybody. 

I've been watching a lot of movies / TV shows, reading books, and watching Youtube videos (mostly of other people playing video games like Among Us because they're funny). I've spent some time with friends, but not as much as I would like. 

I am almost finished with a bible study about Elijah that Priscilla Shirer wrote, a 7 week study. It has been phenomenal. Right off the bat she talked about how as soon as Elijah told King Ahab there would be no rain until he prayed for it again, God sent him into a remote wilderness where no one could find him. There, the Lord provided food for him by ravens bringing him food (which are normally angry birds that eat other animals), He protected him there (people were looking for all of the prophets of God to kill them), and God prepared him there. In a much less drastic way, I am there in that wilderness, waiting for God to say it's time to move to the next spot. I'm eagerly anticipating God's direction and guidance because I am expecting Him to do great things in a new church, and when I finally move to a tiny house. But as Shirer reminded us, there is something to learn and appreciate in each season. So I am trying my best to stay positive and thankful in this season of not only slowness, but also of much less friends than normal. 

I'm thankful for:

-My job - the time working at home, and the times I go into the office 

-My coworkers and the times we get to talk and laugh 

-My parents

-Good health

-Nothing being messed up with my car

-My savings are going well for my tiny house 

-The time I've had with friends 

-Good books 

-Good movies/TV shows