This is probably not that groundbreaking but here’s how I play solitaire with real cards. This presumes you already know how to play solitaire say, on a computer. The smaller sets tend to fly all over the place so these are full size cards. There are five stacks to the right of the draw pile, stacked up with five facedown, then four facedown on the right four stacks, then three facedown on the right three stacks, til getting to one facedown on the rightmost stack. Flip over the top card of each of the five stacks, and use the bed to the left or the right for ace stacks. Then draw three cards from the deck and only draw from the top down of the draw pile. For the next draw, another three cards. Flipping over the draw pile is done until success in reaching all four stacks from ace to 2s or until there are no possible moves left. The hardest part is not fidgeting so the cards stay in more or less the same place til you move them. This game is also called Patience.
New Book of Days
Assorted lifehacks and oddities. NO KINGS
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July 21, 2025
The idea here was to make sangria but not sangria. It was a base of sweet tea. I added:
3 or 4 half slices of washed lemon, you know, they look like half moons
1 apricot, washed, pitted and sliced (if you’re in the Marines or superstitious about apricots and their supposed bad luck you could use a peach instead, though I am not and happen to like apricots)
Half a pink apple, washed, pitted and sliced
I actually was using about 3 cups of sweet tea then I diluted the rest with water but wouldn’t recommend that as it diluted the flavor. Dunno what I was expecting, LOL. Better to use just sweet tea. Serve it over ice or serve it plain. Try it with other fruits if you want. Store it in the fridge, wait a few hours, and see how you like it. -
Have you ever come home from work or school or whatever and are too tired to fix a meal but still want something quick? Here’s something I’ve been making since high school. I normally make it in a coffee mug to get the proportions right but as you can probably tell, I’m a little scatterbrained. So please ignore the fact this is in a glass and has too much almond milk. Here’s the recipe.
Halve a banana and put both halves in a coffee mug. The ripeness of the banana is really important. Try to get one that’s precisely ripe
Add a splash of almond milk and mash it up well with a fork
Gradually add more almond milk, and a drop of vanilla extract, mashing the banana against the sides of the mug
That’s it.
Over all the years I’ve been drinking this stuff I’ve tried to improve it with things like honey, cinnamon, cocoa powder and whatnot but the plain stuff is still in my opinion the best.
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July 10, 2025 by HTV9
Look at this thing. Photogenic it is not. Anyhow, this is an attempt at putting sunscreen on the middle of your own back without needing help. The idea is to use it diagonally like how you can scrub your back in a shower with a washcloth, by draping its long side over one shoulder and grabbing the other end from beneath that shoulder on the side from the front with the other arm’s hand, then doing the same thing on the opposite side. Well I tried to do that with this thing and it of course ripped immediately. Then I figured out this would work best with a bandanna. In a pinch a rolled up sock, rolled up handkerchief or rolled up T-shirt could do the same thing. Then to get the sunscreen out of the fabric before washing you’d just need to put liquid soap on there, scrub, rinse, reapply the liquid soap and toss it into the laundry hamper. You could also find one of those long-handled bath sponge things, rubberband a paper towel over the business end of it and use that.
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June 9, 2025 by HTV9
Not too surprisingly, the gluing on the lap desk gave up the ghost. So here’s my new idea. This is 2 long pieces of paracord tied with trucker’s hitches in 2 places on each end of each cord. 4 trucker’s hitches total. I looped each around two corners of the lap desk so 4 corners of paracord loop are visible on the top, then carefully adjusted the location of each trucker’s knot until it looked (on the bottom) like there were two parallel lines making an x with fat lines for each side of the x, with a parallelogram diamond in between. This took some fiddling to ensure the bottom loop part of each trucker’s hitch fastened on to the other bottom loop part before the two half-hitches used to “secure” it (I am not a fan of half hitches since they’re not that secure but they are fast, I’ll give them that). I then carefully tightened each trucker’s hitch. Then, I tied each loop to itself, and then to the other loop in the middle. Hopefully it lasts a while. I think I’m going to go and make some more half hitches on the extra bit of paracord so it doesn’t hang loose. So the million dollar question is does it work? Answer: Yes.
July 21, 2025 Update: It still works. I’ve had to tighten the trucker’s hitches about 3 times but it’s holding. -
June 3, 2025 by HTV9
Apologies for the picture but I promise it is worth making.
1 tsp strawberry jam
1 black tea bag
1 raspberry flavored herbal tea bag
1 cup of hot water
1 pinch of cinnamon
Let steep for 10 minutes, then take the tea bags out and stir well. -
May 19, 2025 by HTV9
Some things I found help, and will add to this list when I find more:
Exercise. However, not excessive exercise. My current weekly routine, pathetic as it surely seems to any Gymbro, is leg day: 1 chair sit, arm day: 1 wall push-up, core day: 1 half-sit-up with legs bent. Light, slow, gentle stretching on one or two days per week, also not excessive. Plus walking a lap back and forth in my place once every hour to couple of hours. In future there will be more sets and reps but not anytime soon.
Rain sounds, from whatever’s handy, be it streaming media on a TV, a phone, or in theory CDs of it
Not eating right before bed
Organizing the shit out of my schedule so I have less to worry about when I hit the hay
Finally finding a few hobbies/activities I can do that I enjoy doing or at least like a little while stuck in bed or otherwise out of energy, and doing them
Enough in-person social interaction to make monke brain do the function it is supposed to do. Usually this means at least two days per week of going outside the house and staying out of it for several hours at a time while also socially interacting. Great?Not That Helpful In My Experience But Your Mileage May Vary:
supplements
herbs
medications
baths
earplugs and eye masks
Some additions put here July 10, 2025 -
May 11, 2025 by HTV9
This is partially what the whole upcoming book is about. So it’s a bit of a preview.
If you’ve ever been sick or laid up in bed for any amount of time, you’ve probably tried the usual ways to entertain yourself, such as TV, books, writing, texting, and magazines. Here are some others.
– Studying meteorology and then carefully observing the sky world outside the window. Birdwatching lore and airplane lore can also come in handy here
– Reading manga or comic books
– Playing the minigames within video games, if a friend or family member can get you to that area
– Playing immersive video games if you have the energy, because it seems the human mind functions better if it thinks you’re still fully mobile. Seems to help most to play a variety of these. How I like to play them best, having not grown up with video games, is to see if I can apply any information I learn within them to my everyday life. It’s been surprisingly helpful so far
– Whistling, especially if you didn’t know how before
– Quality time snuggling a pet
– Making and using a bucket list, and dividing it up into stuff you can do on days like this and stuff you would like to do eventually. Then doing stuff you can do on days like this, on days like this
– Figure out fun stuff to do with friends and family, using books published prior to about 2000, because able-bodied status aside, lots of folks actually forgot how to have fun together without TV, video games, and screen time. For instance, various card games can be cliche, as can various board games, but there are some lesser-known ones that are really interesting and fun. Eating meals together is super underrated.
– Figuring out what you even like to do in your spare time, which is different for everyone. It really helps to scour the internet and libraries for ideas. Also, certain kinds of fiction can contain a great deal of inspiration. In particular whatever you gravitate to in order to blow off steam or whatever is considered a treat for you is something you gotta pay attention to. It can take years to figure this out but then you can make a point of doing this as often as possible
– Brainstorming about various kinds of badges in the scouts/scouting world (and it is worldwide, scouting is international and has many organizations) and how you could potentially adapt them for your situation, thus completing them eventually. A computer file is invaluable here, as staring at this thing and thinking about it can be surprisingly productive and you can edit it as much as you want
– Finding new and unusual ways to celebrate every single holiday, including the strangest and most obscure ones
– Micro meditation, as in, meditation for the time it takes to have three full breaths or something like that -
April 9, 2025 by HTV9
This is a lap desk that started to come apart. It’s made of bamboo, and the corners are kind of held together by wood glue and some slices of bamboo stuffed in there, though it was starting to splay out when I was using it. So instead of going out and buying clamps, I did a quick gluing of this stuff with an all-purpose heavy-duty waterproof glue, then clamped it back together the few millimeters it needed to get clamped with this setup. Two paracord pieces, ends melted with a lighter, tied with two trucker’s hitches each, then one trucker’s hitch each got tightened. When I was clamping them each was in the middle and a bit tighter but you can see how it goes. Did it work? Well, I’m typing on the laptop lap desk now so yeah. For now it’s holding. Maybe later I’ll need to wait for it to darn near completely fall apart then reglue it and re-clamp it even more. We’ll see.
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April 4, 2025 by HTV9
Here are some things I’ve learned over a few years gardening in Texas on my patio.
– Granular as well as liquid organic fertilizer is needed for stuff to survive here since it gets so much water. Compost also really helps as does topping up the soil with more potting soil when it gets low. Once every couple of weeks works fine as long as it’s not too hot. Sparingly for the granular and liquid stuff, lots for the compost. Hold off on too much of this during the really hot parts of the year; do this only like once every month and a half then. And if you add mulch feed the soil right underneath it.
– Potting soil is good. So is mulch on top of it. I like cedar mulch.
– If you don’t want to water every single day, set up a sprinkler system on a timer for each day in the hotter parts of the year. This is definitely what you need for tomatoes. Mint too
– Watering yourself just before and after sunset works fine unless it’s a humid month like May or early June in which case it has to be done in the morning so the sun burns off any extra
– Starting seeds in a setup like this directly in each pot actually works for some seeds but not for others
– In really hot times in the summer, leave the pots on drip trays or something similar which keeps the water at the bottom, and water both the bottom saucer and the top surface of the mulch/dirt
– Put stuff on top of a table and about four feet apart, to get more air circulation when it gets humid, to prevent mildew
– Don’t take plant pots inside in the winter unless you want a new ant farm. Therefore, don’t grow anything that won’t survive long periods of freezes mixed with heat waves. Or just plan to swap out one year’s annuals with something else you grow next year
– Prune whatever needs it when it needs it and do it religiously
– Sweeping and/or hosing off the patio prevents excessive ants and snails
New Book of Days 