The Monthly Zest - July 2025
OK so my unemployment summer vacation is over LOL. I accepted a contract for a PM job for the rest of the year and I start tomorrow. It'll be nice to get back on my routines and make money again but I also have to admit I'll miss having time off. But hey I'm excited for something new (and something closer in mind to what I want out of a job, even if its just a contractor gig).
Besides my big exciting news July was a pretty quiet month so this post won't be too long. As previously mentioned I wanted to mostly do low-key things this summer around home to save money and also as an excuse to explore stuff around me.
I did a bunch of small little road trips around the New England area which honestly is like the perfect summer activity. I visited:
- Portland, Maine for my friends' Fourth of July party. Went on a trampoline for the first time in probably 15 years? HONESTLY I miss having a backyard. But I can live vicariously through my friends that do have them.
- Portsmouth, New Hampshire to hang out with a guy I met on a dating app. Never been up there honestly and it's such a fun little city! Visited an art gallery, walked along the waterfront, hit some breweries and we went to a quiet little beach across the water in Kittery. Was a very good time :)
- Amesbury, Massachusetts for BareWolf Brewing's birthday party. They have really great beer and pinball so basically I was in heaven. My friend and I ended up hanging out there playing SF6 sets on their laptop for a while and we had a couple dads there watching us hyped lmao. Amesbury is such a cute little town too.
- Old Orchard Beach, Maine for a few days at the beach with an old childhood friend and his family. Lots of porch beers and one really long and perfect beach walk made for a perfect getaway.
- My hometown in suburban south shore Massachusetts to hang out with my family and swim in their fancy new inflatable Intex pool LMAO.
- And Boston too of course, visited the MIT flea market and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with my mom who hasn't been there yet.
BIG month for Gamer Sean too. We're in the pinball off-season but we've been keeping busy with one-off tournaments at venues around the Boston area which have been super fun even if I don't do that well. I DID qualify for league finals at the beginning of the month though which was really cool! The big pinball event of the month was Sunrise at Pop's, an overnight tournament for charity where we played from 11pm to 7am. It was extremely fun and we raised about $4500 for a bunch of local charities. I thought I was gonna have trouble staying awake but it ended up going by extremely fast. We played a bunch of fun formats for challenge rounds and my favorite was having to play on a machine covered in spray cleaner.
My friends and I have been getting back into playing Halo too on the Master Chief Collection. Honestly, doing custom game sessions with a ton of friends and talking smack and laughing at the crazy shit that happens is the most fun I've had playing video games in a long time. I have Halo fever again! Unfortunately that also turned into finally checking out the Halo TV show which I will uhhh write something about someday lmao. I also got some new art for my arcade stick with my most special guys on it AND Sagat is out next month in SF6 so I'll be jumping on that again.
Excited to see how this new job goes!