I had a couple of Zoom meetings this morning at NC time (-4 UTC). So I woke up at 5:50 and logged in for those. They ran for just under 3 hours.

Afterwards I ate a light breakfast of granola and banana slices in yogurt. I added some hazelnut milk to balance it out.

Around eleven a friend of my mother’s, Julia, came and picked me up and we went downtown to Tommy Knockers for brunch with another friend of my mother, Ruby.

I had the Scotch Egg, a hard boiled egg wrapped in ground bacon and spices, topped with mustard and paprika. The eggs lay on a bed of garden greens quite stylishly.

To drink I ordered the tap cider, Alpenfire. I didn’t care for the cider, it was a bit like light beer. It didn’t have much body or depth of flavor. It was maybe like a semisweet apple juice.

It was a very nice opportunity to meet up with old family friends. Ruby’s son, Cedar, was my best friend growing up. I still consider him my best friend, that’s a position that could never be replaced.

Julia’s daughter, Nina, was another young friend. I can remember playing together with dolls and LEGOs. Her father raised stick insects and had games on his computer.

I recall watching the premiere of Powerpuff Girls at Julia’s house. They had a special event running on Cartoon Network with some prize giveaway you had to call in for.

Fond memories. I got a chance to inquire about the other children I had interactions with. Kali lives in Tennessee, Cherese is in Florida, and Becky is in Oklahoma. Rebekah is still local and something of a sports prodigy.

After the meal we must have chatted for an hour and a half. All sorts of topics. Quite pleasant.

I was able to get a phone number of another friend’s sister, Lily, and I left her a voicemail inquiring about her brother, Lang. Hopefully we can meet before my flight home on Monday.

During the drive back to my father’s house we stopped at Laurel Groves, the cemetery, and I had a chance to pay my respects to my best friend, Cedar. He was just a year younger than I. It’s been 13 years since he passed. I wish I had kept in contact with him more.

There are many people I have lost contact with. I recall my first email was a Hotmail address. I lost the password sometime around going to Job Corps on February 5th, 2005.

At the center I had a Yahoo address and I was introduced to MySpace. I recall connecting with mostly students at the center and maybe someone from Port Townsend.

Sometime in 2006 the kids around me started talking about moving to Facebook. I remember logging in to MySpace and someone snorting and saying, “you still use that?”

I’ve always been regarded by others as being good with computers, but I’ve never been good with keeping up with trends. I expected Social Media to be a fad that would eventually go away.

Anyways, Facebook was quite effective. I was able to put in my schooling history and it brought up the profiles of several friends. That was quite impressive compared to MySpace.

I used the Yahoo email until I moved to NC. At some point the account became inundated with spam and I made an Outlook account. I initially try recovering my Hotmail, but I couldn’t quite remember how it was spelled, Aquila13 or something.

I still use the Outlook account these days. I tried getting back into the Yahoo, but it’s totally gone. I think Yahoo went away at some point. Been sold off or something. But the email address wasn’t recoverable.

So, unfortunately, I was never able to copy my contact lists over between any of the accounts. Additionally, I had multiple technology scares that led me to purging my social media accounts time and again over the years. Now I don’t use it at all.

Now with all the AI stuff going around I just don’t feel like I understand computers anymore. The last technology hurdle I successfully passed was Bitcoin. I chased the mining game from 2013-2020.

I should have just held with the HODL crowd. If you count all the Bitcoin and Litecoin I ever bought, I would have a multimillionaire by now. Thousands of coins to pay for GPUs and then ASIC mining rigs that were soon obsolete.

My last mistake was liquidating my last coins to cover the EIDL loans and other bills. I did it two months before Bitcoin hit $10k. I could have paid my debts and had plenty of cash left over.

Went off on a tangent again, sorry.