Went Hiking with Mary

8:39 AM (of Sunday, September 1st 2024)

Today is Saturday, August 31st 2024, the last day of August. I woke up at around 9 AM, I think it was exactly at 9:01 AM. I fell asleep at maybe 4 or 5 AM, so I honestly didn't get much sleep, but I was going to be hiking with Mary today so my body woke itself up early. The first thing I did was check my text messages before even getting out of bed. Even though I last texted her at noon on Thursday saying let's do Saturday morning, which she didn't reply back to confirm, she didn't reply until just this morning at around 7:30 AM, to ask what time I'd be getting ready.

Mary is my most recent ex-gf, but we still meet up and hang out as friends every now and then. She visited me in Puerto Rico again after we already broke up. We planned to hang out and meet up again today.

Probably one of the reasons I didn't fall asleep earlier was that she didn't confirm Saturday morning as the day and time we'd go hiking. So I fell asleep on Friday unsure whether we'd be meeting up at all. Some acknowledgement confirming would have been helpful. Anyway, I basically woke up and just replied I'd be ready in 15-30 minutes and I'd be at her place by 10:30. I rushed to take a shower, change clothes, and pack some things.

I'd previously falsely believed that I could wake up, use the bathroom, take a shower, change clothes, and head out the door in under five minutes. But I wasn't ready and fully out the door until a bit after 9:20, even rushing as fast as I could. Well, I don't think I was rushing as fast as I could, I still kind of think I could do all that in under five minutes if I really wanted to, but I took my time apparently. I started driving to her place, she lives an hour away from my parent's. I ended up taking a wrong turn and that added another like 5 minutes or so. I still arrived at around 10:30 AM, I think it was exactly 10:31 AM, and then texted her to come out.

Anyway, we basically went back closer to my place. She said she was originally planning to be the one who was going to drive out to where I was, but I texted her that I'd be there by 10:30 AM right away. We just caught up on things on the drive back.

We went to the Great Falls park and just hiked, talking about random things the whole time. We took a total of 11k steps throughout the day, so I'd estimate we walked for 9-10k steps here, which wasn't much for me, but at a certain point, she said we should turn around and go back. I could have kept on going for hours longer, but we turned around.

After this we drove to Sticky Fingers which is a vegan bakery that she knew about. Apparently they have been in some popular cooking shows and YouTube cooking show contests and have won, so that was awesome. Since I follow vegan posts, I have seen several several vegans entering and winning cooking shows and contests. A recent one was something like a "sea food" (to me they are sea animals, I don't see them as food) contest, and the vegan who entered would have won without using any dead sea animals, he was told ahead of time he won, but at the last moment they changed their mind and disqualified him for not using any sea animals. Actually maybe I am mixing this story up, I think this guy actually did win. There was another cheese contest where a vegan could have won, but they changed their minds at the last round, even after telling him privately he already won. It's something like that, and the "sea food" vegan guy actually did win.

Anyway, pretty much most if not all the flavor in food comes from vegan seasonings. Salt is a vegan seasoning, so are all the herbs, spices, basically all the sauces, and so on. The flavor comes from plant foods, not rotting animal carcasses. So that's just one reason why I think it's cruel people kill any animals at all, since all the same foods and taste can be made without using any animal parts.

Anyway, we ordered some pastries and a tempeh sandwich, and ate at a park bench nearby. It was delicious. We then came back in and ordered more pastries to take home. After that, I just drove her back, we listened to The Hen House podcast on the drive back to her place.

She probably knows the lyrics to equally as many songs as me or even more. I probably exaggerated, but I told her I knew the lyrics to over a thousand songs today. I at least know lyrics to hundreds of them, but maybe not over a thousand, but maybe over a thousand. I don't even know. Likely not over a thousand songs. It only takes me like a few song listens, plus reading the lyrics of the song at least once or twice, since often I won't be able to understand at least some of the lyrics. to fully know the song's lyrics.

For some of my own songs, I don't even know the lyrics to them anymore. Isn't that shameful? Some of these lyrics are ones I wrote myself, some I've sang along to for hours on repeat since I wanted to get parts of it right, but it's just been ages since I last listened to them.

Anyway, I dropped her off, and then drove back home. On the drive back home, I felt like jogging outside when I got home. However, when I arrived home, I felt pretty weird. I think it could be due to being in my mom's car for so long, it still literally has that "new car smell" even though it's from 2019, and the new car smell is supposed to be hazardous to health. Yeah, I just looked it up, common symptoms from exposure to that are headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, and other issues. Anyway, I took a nap and then felt better. My parents coming home from their grocery shopping is what woke me up again.

When they got back home, my dad played one of my Learn Tagalog songs on his computer. He told me he saw them on YouTube as he opened it up, and it already had 73 views. In my shock to want to see it, I knocked down and spilled half of his juice on the carpet, so we had to clean that up by lifting the couch and moving it and then my mom went on to dry it. He also vacuumed the area since it's been years since anyone has vacuumed the area behind the couch.

Anyway, that was my day today. I didn't do anything else the rest of the day.