This is my 5,018th day on YouTube, and this is my vlog for February 23rd, 2025. Technically I'm recording it the next day because I didn't get a chance to record it yesterday. You might as well just do the best you can with what you've got, right?
Yesterday my wife and daughter were out at the Florida Aquarium doing a sleepover, and it was weird to wake up in the house with just my son. It was actually nice to really miss my wife at bedtime the night before. In the past, at various points, I've often been liable to slip into fantasies about other women and that kind of thing. My mind tried to do that last night, and it was like, no, I just miss my wife. There's nobody else I'd rather have here. So I feel like after 14 years with my wife, I've finally settled in to a whole new level, which is great. I hope the rug doesn't get pulled out from under me on that one.
A Morning Working on the Patio
I woke up with my son and we got to work on the patio in the backyard. I'll do a background picture of that in one of these videos in the future. We've got all the bricks in place from Home Depot now on the main patio, and then I took some edge bricks to push up against the sides. A picture would be helpful here, but I worked on the edges of the patio with my son for a few hours. Then the women came home, and I was happy to show them what I'd done with the patio. We had lunch. It's funny how even 24 hours later some of the details can start to slip away.
I managed to get a crypto video out. I filmed it after they got home, on how ICP could flip XRP and Solana, and I'm grateful that one hit it off and did great.
Reformatting My Streaming PC
I also ended up needing to reformat my computer, which was awesome. I have two computers in here. The one down here controls all the music stuff, and if we do some gaming again, it happens on that computer. The second computer has all the cameras and all the streaming equipment up here. I'd need another camera to show this properly, but I have four monitors set up. Three of them are for the performance PC, which could be streaming, music, or gaming, and the other one is for the streaming PC.
On the streaming PC, OBS right now is using 0.6% of the CPU while I'm filming. For some reason, after I did a Windows update, OBS started going up to 10-plus percent of the CPU. Something was screwed up with it, and I don't play that, so I figured it needed a wipe. I got my USB stick out yesterday and just wiped the whole streaming PC. The streaming PC is real easy to format because all I needed to reinstall on it was OBS, Stream Deck, Google Chrome, and Dropbox. Super easy, but it still stopped me from filming a bunch of videos. It took a couple of hours to get it all set back up again, and because of that I ran out of time at the end of the day to film videos.
Basketball and a Mile in Nine Minutes
I ended up going to play basketball for a little while. It was a bit crowded yesterday. There were people shooting on all these different courts, a game going on half the gym floor, and on the other three hoops it looked like there were people playing different kinds of games at each of them. I thought people were just shooting at the middle hoop, so I started shooting, but one girl was like, "bro, we're playing a game here." All right, so I guess I got in somebody's way. Still, I managed to hit over seven three-pointers in a little over 30 minutes, even though the first five to ten minutes was super slow because I was trying to be respectful of their game. Maybe a time or two I got in the way, but I enjoyed getting out there shooting basketball.
Then I went and ran a mile again and got my best time in at least a decade: nine minutes, three seconds to go a mile. I was maybe running at 60 or 70%, maybe 50 or 60, talking worst-case scenario. I wasn't trying my hardest, so I'm really happy I can run a mile in nine minutes and three seconds. That was awesome.
Choosing the AA Meeting Over Filming
I ran out of time to film videos, and it came down to deciding: do I want to prioritize filming videos, or do I want to spend more time going to my AA meeting and talking to people? I went to the AA meeting. I got there and it was pretty packed, and I ended up talking with my sponsor and maybe another person or two for about 30 minutes after the meeting. So I figured, well, there goes being able to film videos, because Laura was tired from the sleepover the night before.
The night before that, I also watched a movie. I don't usually watch movies. I hadn't watched one in a month or two, at least. To me, screen time is something I mainly want to devote to my work and creativity. If I'm going to do something for fun, I'd usually prefer to be off the screen, although I've been thinking a lot about video games again and wondering when I'm going to have a PS5 and an Xbox Series X back up in here. We'll see about that. But I watched Bedazzled, the one with the guy from The Mummy, and it was a good movie. It was nice to just sit there and watch a movie. A lot of things can be taken way too far. If you watch hours of TV every day, you're probably pissing your life away, but watching a movie occasionally can be a good experience. I had a nice time.
Our Third Free Couch
Another thing we did, which was actually yesterday, was we got a new couch, which is in the background. Laura's sister got a couch from somebody for free when her house flooded, so she's buying a new couch and we took the old one. This is the third free couch we've had in our house, which is awesome, because we've got kids and dogs and I'm not interested in trying to keep furniture clean.
This recliner couch we got for free. Laura bought some furniture movers to move it the two blocks from her sister's house to our house. When she and my son put the bolts on themselves, one wheel came off and bent. I got my hammer out and banged it back into formation. I showed Laura and my son, "look, for this you need to screw these bolts in hard so they don't wobble off when the weight of the furniture pushes them down." I was initially using channel lock pliers to grip them, and then I remembered I had one of those tools, I forget the term, where you crank it and it ticks when you go back, then you crank it again. Oh my God, that was so good.
My son wants to be a builder, an engineer, a general contractor or something. So I told him, "son, you always have to look at this." I don't consider myself particularly handy, but I can handle the basics of stuff, and I tell my son to remember a valuable lesson when you're trying to build something: if it's really difficult, you might just not have the right tool. You've got to ask yourself, do I have the right tool for this, and if not, is there a better tool? I showed him this tool and he loved it, because he was able to screw the nuts in too. Then we moved the rest of the couch down, which came down in about five pieces.
I'm grateful for a free couch. We did without any couches from August or September, when the hurricane hit, so we've had no couches for about five months in the house. It's amazing that it didn't make that big of a difference. The kids have immediately moved back to using the couches.
I think I'm going to put a portable air conditioner in this sunroom, and I'll use it between the sunroom and my office here for the summertime. The central AC works great, but sometimes you need a little focused air conditioning in one part of the house that's hotter, usually a sunroom, but my office too in the summer. I'm really glad we got that done.
Wrapping Up the Day
I took Melanie for a walk when I got home from the meeting and called my mom. I'm glad that even though my mom lives across the street, I remembered that I don't have to spend all this time with her in person. Sometimes it's easier to talk to her on the phone instead of being there in person, so I talked to her for about 40 minutes on the walk, then I just came by to give her a hug and pet the dog for a minute. I got in bed nice and early, around 10:30, with Laura. The night before, on Saturday, I went to bed as late as I have in quite a while, at like 11:45, so for the day of this vlog I got in bed at 10:30 and got a great night of sleep. If you enjoy these reflections on staying disciplined while building a creative life, you may also like my YouTube Coaching playlist. I'm looking forward to publishing this on my autobiography channel.