Welcome to another entry to the summer survival guide! It's my day off, it's early, I have no plans.... everything’s good except.... the janky ass weather is keeping me held indoors! It's bad enough slaving the whole way through the work week, now the weather gives the ol' proverbial "fuck you" to my free time? So today, I will be exploring a few options for some fulfilling rainy day activities.

Personally, I don't mind a rainy day once in a while; I welcome them, especially when there is yard work that my brain knows needs to be done, but my body and soul flaked out the moment the plans were made. While it's completely acceptable to seize the day and go shopping, head to museums and art galleries, eat at your favorite restaurants or hit the movie theaters.... a rainy day also gives you an excuse to lounge around as you please. Lets face it, most of the time (with a busy work schedule) its necessary to have days like this every so often to recharge the batteries. We'll do exactly that!

First of all, I'm not going anywhere... so I carefully chose only the best and most comfortable attire among the floordrobe. A pair of basketball shorts and a loose fitting tee; a look that says "cozy" and also "I'm sort of a slob and should probably do laundry soon." I won this awesome Team Eastman shirt a while ago from the Kevin Eastman fan page. It's a bit bigger than I typically care for my tee shirts to be, but it makes for the perfect "stay at home all day" outfit.

I'll start my day with a decent breakfast; eggs and hipster toast. As a millennial, I'm suppose to thrive on this shit. I've enjoyed avocado and toast separately for quite some time now and only recently slapped them together. I suppose it's a good replacement for butter had I not already used butter underneath that... I added chia seeds for bonus hipster points. For extra flavor, I threw some chopped up greens from some leeks I picked a while back that were still in the fridge and looking kinda like they had a couple more days before they turned into bottom shelf refrigerator juice.

My reading pile, before the virus hit, stacked up decently. So, I'm taking this down time to knock out a few titles I've neglected from my pull list. We got a little everything in the pile ranging from Spawn, TMNT, Venom, Ice Cream Man, Redneck, Elvira, Jughead: The Hunger, Vampironica, and Secrets of the Sinister House. They say a rainy day is a gift to people who read. I assume that refers to people who read books without colorful pictures but comics and graphic novels are literally the only books I read. My 5 year old brain has never been able to keep focused on pages of black and white words. I need the pictures.

Board games, another prime stay at home staple, can elevate any simple rainy day to a party. I have a few including Monopoly, Sorry!, Yahtzee, Cranium, Candy Land, etc. It wasn't until the coronavirus hit that I played one of the best board games yet, "Can You Name 5." I've never even heard of it before until cruising through the lesser known board games at Wal-Mart. It seemed necessary to give it a try. So basically, you roll the dice and move your piece to the corresponding spot. If you land on a specific color, your opponent picks up a card from the pile and reads you the color on the card. If the card says child actors, infomercials or movies with Johnny Depp, you name 5 of them from whatever category you receive with your time limited by a small hour glass. I know way more than 5 titles that Johnny Depp starred in. For some reason, the moment that fucking hour glass is flipped, not even one comes to mind. Another note, for the categories that you don't happen to have any knowledge of such as natural fibers, inventors and countries south of the Equator, it can also be a learning experience. I personally enjoy Google searching the categories I find myself stumped on. However, if it isn't useless knowledge of things from my childhood, I usually forget them by the next game but it's always worth a shot trying to remember.

It's been an insanely long time since I've ventured into the old home VHS tapes and a rainy day is the perfect time to revisit them. For instance, take this shot from June 22nd in 1994. I was 5 years old, I had a bike with training wheels for maybe a week or so prior. One early morning, before everyone got up, I took my sisters pink bike (complete with a pink basket) and hit the road. I didn't care that it was a girls bike; it didn't have annoying training wheels. I felt like Marty McFly when he took that little girls pink hoverboard in Back to the Future II. Later that day, I smashed my knee up pretty good as well as my forehead from a decent spill but I remember quickly getting back to it. Now days, I bend to plug my phone charger in and end up bedridden from back pain for a couple days.

Hunger is striking again between all these activities. Contrary to belief, for someone who reviews junk food, I do eat relatively healthy. However, I'm not going to change any minds with this next one. I'm sticking with the theme, being a lazy little shit and ordering pizza. Fox's Pizza Den is what I went with. My gram use to live down the road from one back in the day. I remember walking there a handful of warm summer days to get ice cream. They had Flintstones ice cream push ups which are still as irresistible to me today as they were 26 years ago. Anyways, pizza delivery nowadays has been pretty excellent! Order online, delivery with no contact, a simple knock on the door and the delivery guy is gone before you open your door to your food; if we could keep this antisocial delivery service once the apocalypse ends, that'd be great!

Towards the end of the day, we were greeted by one hell of a sight once the clouds all disappeared. The images speak for themselves, really. It was the perfect ending to a relaxing, lazy, rainy day! After taking hundreds of photos I settled indoors with a bag of fresh popped popcorn and some Fresh Prince on HBO Max until I pass out. With little to no effort, I had an enjoyable rainy day and I'll hopefully feel energized enough to do yard work in 80-90° temperatures the next day.