Allergy Test, Stream Slump
Hello! Thank you for joining me here, it’s great to see you. I am writing to you from within the Big Allergy Test of 2026. Let’s start there. So yesterday I went to the doctor and I got a bunch of patches placed on my back. They are there right now - taped on securely. The patches have a ton of different allergens separately placed in a grid so that afterwards, the doctors can see what irritated my skin and what did not.
Now, not to cheapen this blog post, but given that these things are taped onto my back, writing a blog post is one of the few things that seems safe for me to do. It’s like your friend who calls you to hang out after three other people have already said no. I’m sorry about that. It’s true that I may not be blogging right now if I didn’t have these patches on my back. But you know, I do want to write a blog post anyway. This will be good for me; I need to get my head on straight.
There’s basically two stages to this patch thing. There’s the first 48 hours (where I am right now), where you need to be super extra careful of two things. The first, is to not get your back wet, which includes via sweating. No sweating, and no showering. The second is to not move in such a way that could tear the things applied to your back off. If you do, you’ve compromised the test. I originally scheduled this test in April, and it couldn’t happen until now, mid October. You know what American healthcare is like. I’m pretty keen on not taking risks when it comes to needing to redo this.
The second stage of the test, days 3-7, are the less restrictive, but still annoying phase. At the start of day 3, Erika is going to remove the testing patches from my back, and - using a special skin crayon that the doctor sent me home with - she will outline and make markings denoting where the different patches were. This is important because the results aren’t going to be interpreted until the end of day 7, and by then, it won’t be visually obvious where things were if they didn’t irritate me. Erika is applying lines to help orient the doctors.
During this second stage, you no longer have to worry about not moving in ways that might rip the securely fastened tape off your back - they have been taken off. You do however still need to avoid getting your back wet. Still no sweating, and still no showering.
SO, I am sitting here, still within the first 24 hours of having the patches applied. We’re at the beginning of phase one. I’ve been working out 4 times a week more often than not nowadays, so a week without working out will take a lot of fun activity out of my week for sure. On the plus side, my body will probably benefit from a recovery week.
Longtime readers of the blog might guess that I am doing this skin allergen test in order to work on the eczema that has long plagued my hands. Those guessers would be correct. My hands are commonly itchy or painful or both, so we’re hopeful the allergy test will help suggest some possible triggers. While this week will be annoying, it does seem worth a shot to me. Enjoy your showers this week everyone.
As far as streaming goes, it’s safe to officially call this a slump. The slump isn’t exclusive to streaming, it’s a life slump. It started with me getting a little burnt out and crashing for a week. I took time off of working on speedrunning, and retroactively called it a week off. Then that turned into two weeks off, and today I’ve hit a full three weeks from the last time I spent even one minute working on speedrunning. I’ve just been blobbing around and relaxing. Some amount of the three weeks of blobbing I actually needed, though it was definitely not three weeks. I’m kind of burnt out on being in vacation mode now.
I need to start inching my way back into my good habits. It’s the slow decline. I’ve started eating worse. I’ve started being sketchier about pot moderation. It’s the cycle. My goal is to keep making these burn out cycles shorter. This was three weeks. That’s fine, today I’m going to try and get myself moving in the right direction again.
In other news, Podo turned six last weekend. Erika and I took him to the doggie ice cream parlor that we’ve taken him to for possibly every birthday he’s ever had. We definitely took him on his first birthday because I still have his little doggie birthday hat with the 1 on it. I’m pretty sure we’ve gone back every year since. Anyway we got the kid two scoops of ice cream and he thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn’t take any pictures obviously since I’m the worst at pictures.
BUT - speaking of - I am about to start getting better at pictures I’m pretty sure. So with pictures, honestly I enjoy taking pictures and having pictures. The main obstacle right now is my phone is so dated I never really want to take pictures on it. I have only owned two smartphones throughout my life. My first was an iPhone 5 purchased in late 2012, and the second is the iPhone 8 that I bought in 2017 or 2018 and still own today.
Not wanting to take pictures with my phone has long been the only real drawback of it though, so I just continue using it. I have no particular desire to give more money to a tech company. Unfortunately though, my phone is finally hitting the point where it’s being obsoleted. My phone can no longer run modern operating systems (I think we’re on the iPhone 18 now, so my phone is 10 iPhones ago), so apps are slowly starting to not work. My calorie tracker that I sometimes use looks entirely different when I look at it on Erika’s phone, and it feels like it might crash at any moment. Spotify is starting to slow down a lot. Even with these I was surviving, but as of last week the main app that the healthcare system I use for all my medical stuff doesn’t work anymore either. I’m officially one of those people who can’t actually check in on their phone at a doctor’s appointment (I know this as I just had one to put these patches on).
So with all that said, I think at the age of 38 I am ready for my third smartphone purchase, and with it we’re going to have a big jump forward in camera quality. Once I get a new phone, I vow to start actually posting pictures here. It will be soon.
I revamped our dinner schedule. Here’s the new menu I’ve been making:
Day one - Tofu with pickled cucumbers. Sauce of Gochujang + mayo. Tofu gets squished and baked so it’s crispy. Pound of cucumbers is the vegetable, cut up and soaked in some rice vinegar
Day two - Butternut squash tacos with bell pepper, guac, black beans, and homemade tortillas. This is the largest expenditure of effort of any of the dinners, but it’s arguably the most fun. I roast butternut squash (once squash is out of season I picture replacing with sweet potatoes), roast a bunch of bell peppers, make guac, and then make tortillas using masa harina
Day three - Sesame tofu with broccoli. Sauce is sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, pepper flakes, maple syrup (or a stevia and water mixture if you don’t want sugar - something we’ve been doing). Thickened with corn starch, topped with tons of sesame seeds.
Day four - Pizza Beans. We use the really really big tan / light brown beans for this. They go by a bunch of different names. Large butter beans, Gigante beans, so on and so forth. This is just cooking a ton of beans in tomato sauce with garlic and onions and then topping it with mozz and broiling it. It’s like making a pot of meatballs but it’s beans instead of meatballs. I serve it homemade Parmesan crisps just to give it another element. Served with a side of cabbage - half a cabbage head for me and Erika, cooked down with onions and garlic or just alone with spices.
Day five - Chickpea fritter. I cook chickpeas and then mash them up and combine with egg and fry. Vegetable is the other half of the weekly cabbage head. Prepared with a sauce of yogurt and dill.
Day six - Cheeseburgers served with a two pound bag of onions worth of caramelized onions.
Day seven - you order out
Lunch every day: Raspberry chia pudding - 6 ounces of raspberries cooked down, two tablespoons chia seeds, 1 cup of milk, stevia or other sweetener to taste. It sits overnight before I eat it.
Some of the meals have been mainstays far longer than that, but I had to start modifying a lot of the classics once Erika’s diet started to change. For example, we don’t really eat rice anymore since Erika’s system doesn’t do very well with it. We’re eating a lot of beans right now. This has been one of my recent projects, and I’m happy with where our weekly meal plan is right now.
I had to renew my medical marijuana card recently. Typically, this is a humorously brief annual phone call where I say that medical pot is helping me manage my anxiety and insomnia and the doctor tells the state I’m allowed to buy pot. I’ve been part of the medical marijuana system since 2016, and at no point has the whole doctor certification thing been an overly serious process. I will at least say that in Massachusetts, where I was in the medical marijuana program originally, you did at least have to go in somewhere in person. This is making me realize I should write a full history of my experiences with medical marijuana doctor certifications at some point on this blog. I have a full ten years of doctor’s appointments under my belt at this point.
But anyway - here in Pennsylvania you’re allowed to just do the doctor’s appointment by phone. This year however, we’ve managed to reach a new level that I didn’t realize was possible - I got a text message asking me to respond “YES” if I agreed to the fact that pot was helping me manage my conditions. So I responded “YES” (and I responded several hours after I was sent the text because I forgot I had scheduled a doctor’s appointment) and the whole thing just clicked into place. I got an email from the state saying my doctor’s certification was approved and now I’m good to go for another year. Lol
Okay well today is Day Six - so I’m about to get up and get these cheeseburgers cooking (the caramelized onions were cooked earlier today). Have a great week everyone! I believe in you and your ability to have a great week.