Final Fantasy VI Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Is Grinding Fun?

April 22, 2020 by Belghast

This is probably going to end up being an odd post because I am essentially going down a rabbit hole that was inspired by a comment I received from yesterday’s blog post. In it long time reader and regular commenter Mailvaltar noticed something about my post.

I can’t help but notice that you used the word ‘grind’ an awful lot in this post.
In contrast, there’s only one instance where you speak of enjoyment, and that’s the last paragraph where you talk about the fact that the boost kinda ruins said enjoyment (of leveling characters).
I don’t know…maybe just let it all go and play something else entirely…?
Mailvaltar

This has lead me to think about it probably more than was intended, but I guess at the end of the day I find grinding to be enjoyable. Sure I didn’t specifically talk about the enjoyment I was having, because for me at least grinding can be relaxing and enjoyable. Like I said at the beginning of this recent string of posts about World of Warcraft, I started playing it again because I needed a game I could more or less shut my brain off while playing it. Living in the time of pandemic has been an extremely stressful thing for me on a personal level. Not only have we not left the house much in the last six weeks, but we have had to figure out how to both be fully functional working adults without stepping on each others toes all the while trying to juggle a completely new skill. I’ve had to learn how to manage a team of sixteen people efficiently without actually having any face to face interaction with them, and my wife has had to figure out how to teach a classroom to a group of students that may or may not have stable internet connections.

The stress has made it to the point where I just really need something soothing to play at night, and in many ways a familiar grind offers an awful lot of solace. You have to realize I am also the guy who gleefully starts a brand new seasonal character in Diablo 3 effectively every three months to grind from scratch and ultimately throw that character away later when I “rebirth” it in another season. There are certain kinds of grinds that just set my mind in order, because I am effectively working entirely on muscle memory. There are kinds of grinds however that I do not find enjoyable, and probably part of the confusion is that I rarely give much effort to explaining what makes one fun and another not so fun.

I think the mindset I have at the time ultimately is what changes things for me. If I feel like I am forced to do something that I don’t really enjoy… see PVP requirements in games like Destiny 2 gating some weapon that I want or grinding for faction in a zone I hate like Nazjatar or even the relatively frustrating methods of leveling alternate jobs in Final Fantasy XIV. Those are grinds that can wear me down and make me want to walk away from a game for an indefinite period of time. Leveling a brand new character through questing and roaming around the world doing bite sized world quests for faction… those are both the sort of grind that sets my mind at ease and allows me to just go with the flow of the game ultimately relaxing me.

My favorite zone in Destiny 2 for mindless grinding

My favorite activity in Destiny is doing public events and patrol missions, because it is the sort of bite sized repeatable entertainment that allows me to just zone out and enjoy myself. Similarly I think the main reason why I have never gotten into Warframe is that there isn’t really any equivalent to that sort of self directed engagement. Everything in the game is mission focused with an objective, and I seem to always avoid doing things that put me on someone else’s schedule. I hate anything that happens on a timer, or anything that involves leading or following another NPC away, because it forces me into a rhythm of game play that is not my own. Those kind of grinds are ones that I am forced into and not one that I choose on my own.

The problem for me at least is that I find it extremely hard to predict ahead of time if a grind is going to be one that I find personally fulfilling. On some level there needs to be some goal that I am working towards to keep me engaged. The goal needs to feel reachable, so like 2000 kills instead of 20,000 kills, but there also needs to be a chance of me having something interesting happen in the process. There needs to be enough friction to keep me interested, but not so much that it knocks me out of a flow state while grinding. Like I said before it needs to be an activity that I am participating in mostly from muscle memory and not really requiring much in higher order thinking. Finally and most importantly I need to find the moment to moment game play mechanically enjoyable. It needs to feel good for example when I charge into a new pack of mobs and drop my first few attacks on them. Charging in as a Warrior and dropping a Thunderclap just feels good, and is probably never going to reach a point where it feels stale.

The games that filled this niche for me growing up were the various JRPGs that I obsessed about, probably none more than Final Fantasy VI. This is not my screenshot because I played on the Super Nintendo and don’t have any images from 1994. However I spent countless hours roaming around aimlessly killing whatever monsters I happened to encounter. I spent weeks trying various things in the Colosseum in the World of Ruin, or trying to steal stuff with the Genji Glove. It allows me to play for a very short amount of time or hours at a time. I think I put off beating the game for as long as I possibly could, because I have always hated when something I am super into ends. I am not sure if I have ever beaten any RPG, without grossly over-leveling and out-gearing the content. I guess you have to understand that I am never chasing “challenge” but instead a mindless state of blissful escape where I turn off my brain for awhile and just become one with the experience. This is what the grind is for me.

Dam Impressive

June 3, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was another of my infamous “you no can has sleep” nights as my brain absolutely refused to shut down. I really need to get some melatonin and give it a shot when that sort of thing happens. I was extremely tired, but my brain was spinning on some completely useless project, and like the software you have to manually close when restarting your machine… it kept gumming up the process. As a result I am borderline catatonic, and find myself getting sidetracked by the simplest of things this morning. It is going to be a not so enjoyable day.

General Celes

I spent most of the morning playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6 on my PSP in an attempt to catch up to where I had gotten previously with the native PSN version. Taking screenshots is a bit more of a pain in the ass… so I did not take very many. As a result you get something I found from Google image search of the same basic spot I am at currently. Apparently the above example chose to rename their General Celes to Moghan… for whatever reason I have never really renamed my characters. I prefer to just accept the name they are given by default, since that tends to be how they are referred to out of game.

Yesterday I had encountered an odd glitch, where I was unable to talk to Kekfa and start the “Figaro Submerge” sequence. I had a previous save luckily, so I could load that back up and sure enough the second time it worked just fine. The big negative so far of playing the GBA version, is that you only have 3 save files. As a result you keep having to round robin your way manually through the saves. I pretty much save every time it is possible, and hate saving over whatever my latest game is, so this process just becomes more cumbersome.

I made my way back to the Mog screen that allows you to pick which batch of adventurers you will follow. As a result I picked Locke first, as he is generally my favorite character in FF6. It took me a bit to remember how this whole sequence worked, but after some trial and error I managed to get into the underground passage, rescue Celes and make my way out of South Figaro. When we needed to shower and get ready yesterday, I was standing just ouside South Figaro on the world map. So I will head my way back to Narshe and that should be the end of that sequence. I will likely play the river journey next… for whatever reason I tend to save the Sabin for last always.

Dam Impressive

Yesterday we had plans to eat dinner with my wife’s mother at 4 pm in Grove Oklahoma… which is on the edge of the Grand Lake of the Cherokees about an hour and a half from Tulsa. There are multiple ways to get there, none of which extremely straight… and some of them way more contorted than others. Since we had not really been out on one of our photo jaunts in awhile my wife suggested we take one of the extremely contorted ways so we could look for interesting scenery. As a result we took this hour and a half trip and extended it to be a little over three hours long.

The weatherman said that the day would be clear and sunny.. but the end result lead us to constantly check the weather on our phones as the sky was pretty much filled with rain clouds the entire trip. As a result the lighting was less than favorable, and especially so as we travelled past places we would normally stop. To the weathermans credit, it never did rain… just looked like it was going to at any moment. While we had been along the route at various segments of our planned trip, we had never actually been the totality before.

I am hoping this actually works… because I have never really attempted to create a linkable Google map for something. But this is the route that we ended up taking to get from 169 to Grove via Highway 20. When we got in the Spavinaw hills we encountered the extremely cool Spavinaw lake dam. Basically Spavinaw lake is where the bulk of the water for the City of Tulsa comes from. In the 1920s the City realized it would need to draw water from outside of the immediate area and as a result created this massive waterworks that spans from Lake Spavinaw, through other smaller lakes and ultimately ends of at the water treatment facilities inside of Tulsa. As we drove along the road it took us right beside the extremely cool looking spillway pictured above.

Luckily the sky had cleared a bit by the time we got there, so we pulled off into the parking lot and roamed around. Normally I have a no trespassing rule when taking photos… I will not cross any fences or barriers… however if there is a way around said fences that do not involve actually crossing one… I am game. As a result I ended up walking around a fence that was locked over at the power station near the spillway… and this allowed me to get some interesting shots close up to the water flow.

When I go out and take photos I end up uploading them all in bulk to Google+ albums, then create what I call a keepers album for sharing. I had not dumped my memory card in awhile, so I had photos from mothers day, the house work, and then these of Spavinaw… so the end result was that I uploaded 182 photos. After I did my culling and singling out the ones I really liked the most… that became whittled down to the 42 keepers you can see in this album. I think there are some pretty good shots in there, and it has honestly been awhile since I have felt like uploading what I shot… so I think this is a good thing.

Gaming Restlessness

When we got home from our little jaunt, I had to fight with the Google+ photos system for a good deal of time. They have changed something, so that it does not work nearly as well for bulk uploads. As a result I was pretty pissed by the time I finally finished with that mess. I ended up flitting back and forth between several different MMOs… never quite finding the fit for my mood. I played my Melee Mage in Rift for a bit, but ended up getting frustrated because I had not kept up my butchering… and was going to have to go back into Silverwood and grind wolves until I raised it enough to do Gloamwood. This is the negative side effect about leveling through the instant adventures system… you end up in a bad place skill wise.

After logging out frustrated, I went over into SWTOR and tried to play my Sith Warrior. Right now I am knee deep into Imperial Balmorra yet again… and that kind of frustration just made things worse. I managed to complete three or four quests before ultimately logging out again. I patched up Guild Wars 2, because for whatever reason… the fact that I have real internet and can patch things quickly. that would have taken me leaving a game running over night… still amuses me. That more than any other change has meant the most to me… the fact that we have real internet finally! There have been some negative side effects however… I used to host a small web server out of the house, and with Cox blocking port 80… we have lost access to most of that content.

I played GW2 for all of ten minutes before remembering why I don’t really play the game much. The gameplay choices they have made just are not that enjoyable to me. No matter how much I have tried to play it… I still find the lack of quests off putting. So I feel like I am running around aimlessly with nothing of any importance to do. Once that sets in, everything I do feels extremely grindy… since very little of it actually matters other than your world completion score. I wandered around in the 40-50 zone near Hoelbrak but quickly logged as the game almost immediately bored me.

I would have gone upstairs to the loft and played some PS3 or XBOX, but I fear that they would have had the same result. I was just in a restless and frustrated frame of mind… that was only made worse when I actually attempted to go to sleep. For whatever reason my mind latched onto the nettop computer I am building for the loft. I started going over all the things I would need to do, evaluating what the best emulator and video front ends would be… all of which were not at all important. Especially since I have yet to even move the computer out to the loft from my office. I was just restless in every sense of the word… and as a result am paying the price today as I struggle to keep my eyes open.

Wrapping Up

I am hoping that I survive the day as one of the sleep deprived masses. I will be mainlining five hour energy shots in a vague attempt to be alert and responsive. Right now I am honestly not sure what has to get accomplished today, but I am hoping by the end of my web service staff meeting I will be able to determine that. I hope you all have a productive start of the work week… and that you are not going into it nearly as tired as I am right now. Hope you all have great days.

Four Job Fiesta

June 2, 2013 by Belghast

Oh Sunday… that morning in which you think to yourself… crap I have to go to work tomorrow. Today will be pretty much dominated by my wife’s mothers birthday. We are going to drive to grove later this afternoon to meet her for dinner, and are talking about potentially meandering our way there with cameras. So as a result I have no clue when we will actually leave, but there will not be much gaming at all today. Right now I am just trying to barrel through my morning blog post without losing focus.

Riftstraction

I still need to return to my Sith ways, but for whatever reason yesterday I was distracted once more by the lure of rift and my melee mage. I hit level 22 yesterday while still wandering around Silverwood. I ended up getting caught up in a buzz of completionism… something that I am not normally afflicted with. The problem is… I had left a lot of the quests involving the court of Prince Hylas unfinished. One constant for me regardless of the game… is that I love slaughtering elves. So I got caught up in the carnage, and ended up completing all the quests for the zone.

I have since moved on to Gloamwood and am busy killing Barghests and Bats. Gloamwood is the only zone that ever made me question my choice of Defiant. I just love the feel of it, so much atmosphere and if they traded the goblins for skeletons… it would have been my perfect zone. Gloamwood Pines so deserves to be the guardian capitol city, it is better in every way than Sanctum. It actually looks like a real town, with plenty of houses to actually support people living there. Whereas Sanctum is a capitol city with no housing at all. This has always been one of the problems I had with the Rift old world… it doesn’t look like people could actually live in it.

The funny thing about my recent venture into melee magery, is that it was intended to be able to play with my friend Rylacus. The only problem with that notion is he has not logged in since late night Friday. Oh well… this game has the best mentoring system I have seen, so I can always drop my level back down to hang out with him. I am purposefully not doing the dungeon finder so I can run the dungeons for the first time on this character with him and hopefully Thalen as well. I love Rift, it is a great game… but the problem has always been that it is pure hell to get other friends to play it. I really hope the free to play conversion makes that problem a bit easier.

Four Job Fiesta

For a few years now, my friend JJ has been trying to get me and some other friends to join in on the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta charity play-a-thon. While I do not fully understand the process… from what I do get the goal is for all of us to try and beat Final Fantasy V and raise money for the Childs Play charity in the process. There are multiple ways to sign up to play but the basic concept is that there are 22 jobs (26 in the Advance version), and at the start of the game… you will be assigned 4 random jobs. Then you have to complete the game using only those jobs you were assigned.

Since it has been years since I have played FFV, and I have never beaten it… I am playing with the least number of possible restrictions. I am praying I get a fairly balanced team, otherwise I will be pretty much screwed. My friend Drathis got a pretty rough combo last year from what I can remember and struggled with it. I will be relying on JJ a lot as this goes forward since he is pretty much the FFV master. I think he can play the game in his sleep, so I am sure he will be a good source of information. Right now my intent is to play the Gameboy Advance variety on my PSP.

I blasted this out over social media, and it got picked up and reshared… so hopefully this helps get the word out. Everyone is welcome to participate, to sign up all you need is a twitter account… as the sign up process involves that. I am assuming that will also be how we get assigned our four jobs on 6/17. The festivities begin the day before my birthday, so I guess I know what I will be doing for my birthday. I have a feeling it is going to take me a long time to beat the game. You guys should all sign up and join in the madness.

Six Advance

Yesterdays post spawned comments from a few friends, namely JJ and Stop that I should really be playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6. Apparently the PSP native copy is globally considered the worst possible port of the game, and has known lag issues. So I took the advice… found the latest version of gpSP I could for the PSP… and restarted the game on the Advance version. I have a Gameboy Advance SP somewhere… but I have no clue where it is right now. So my best option was to play the game on my PSP via emulator, and the game runs beautifully.

All of the issues I had that I thought I just misremembered… were really issues with the PSP/PSOne native version. The Advance copy plays super fast, and is actually scaled to fit a modern aspect ratio beautifully. The only problem I encountered was a pretty massive bug when Kefka first visits Figaro. I could talk to everyone BUT Kefka… then zoned out to see if it would fix the bug… and now Kefka is no longer there. I am going to have to reload from a previous safe and see if I can fix the bug. I would hate to think it is going to be game breaking.

The one awesome thing about this, is that basically it proves out the theory that I can play Advance games just fine on my PSP, so this will likely be how I end up playing FFV during the Four Job Fiesta event. The PSP battery life is always an annoyance, but I have a spare battery for this reason. I just want something I can play it on that is portable so I can play over lunch etc. I will be trying to dig up actual copies of the GBA carts, so that I don’t feel too dirty emulating them.

Wrapping Up

Okay time to start getting ready to confront the day. Time to leave will be coming sooner than I want it to, and I still need to shower etc. I hope you all have a great Sunday, and a great start of the week. I have no clue what I will be doing today other than the visiting my mom-in-law part. I might try and fix the bug on the FF6 play through so I can keep going, or I might dive back into Rift. In any case I hope you all enjoy your day.

Kyclops Kombat

June 1, 2013 by Belghast

I am getting a later than normal start this Saturday morning. Quite honestly I am pretty groggy because it was another “watch the skies” night. I really did not sleep well at all, for the most part I kept getting woken up by a new round of tornado warnings from about 11pm onwards. At some point during the night the danger passed and it shifted to infomercials. I know this because I dreamt about some magical drug that can cook food in only minutes… I feel as though I maybe got a few things mixed up.

Tornado Alley

For the most part last night was one big near miss. The storms hit all around the Tulsa area where I live, and instead gave the areas where both of our parents live pure havoc. Most of the night was watching concerned while texting back and forth with my dad about what was coming towards them. At one point there were two tornados, on either side of highway 169 roughly 10 miles from my parents house. But other than a bunch of rain both all three of our sets of parents made it through the night safe.

I feel as though I have to explain something to folks who are not from “Tornado Alley” and even more so not from Oklahoma. From the time I got home around 4pm until after the time I went to bed around 11:30pm no normal programming was shown at all. All of that time we have literally the best meteorologists in the country tracking the storms and some of the best storm chasers in the country following them. The station we watch for example has not one but two helicopters at their disposal, and they are also chasing the storms by the air.

So when storms are a brewing, it becomes this surreal showplace of watching as these giant green, red and yellow blobs inch towards your home and family. All the while we are seeing live in car video, and tower cam video showing just how bad the storms are. There were several points during the night when a normally calm broadcast would be interrupted by an excited storm chaser yelling over the weatherman that a tornado was on the ground and this place or that place. At which point all focus would shift to whatever that crisis was, and putting the other crisii that had not quite happened on the back burner.

Oklahomans have a pervese sense of attraction to Tornados… it is that whole moth too the flame thing. Anything that destructive has to be respected and almost admired with a certain kind of majesty. You can hear this in the storm chasers voice and choice of wording… you know they are out there for a totally different purpose than you the viewer is. While we are huddled in our homes scared shitless about what might be barreling down on us… they are excited as they see the “best activity all night” while describing a wall cloud. You can’t take offense to these adrenaline junkies reveling in the fact that they are chasing a storm that spawned a massive tornado. It is a symbiotic relationship… without them we would not have nearly the warning that we do.

The biggest take away for the rest of the country is that you should fear and respect tornados. We Oklahomans have literally grown up with this our entire lives, we have the best possible weather and storm chasers on our side… yet still as evidenced by last night… people die because they were either caught unaware, or did not respect the fury of the storm. All of the deaths that happened last night along I-40 were in essence preventable… it is drilled in from our first days in school, that the worst place to be in the case of a tornado is your car on the road. Yet when the sirens went off, for whatever reason people took to the highways to avoid it… and instead placing themselves right in the path. The most tragic of these deaths is the mother and child that were… according to the highway patrol… sucked out of their car by the storm.

Kyclops Kombat

Before all hell broke loose, early in the evening… I was looking forward to being able to play some Rift. One of my good friends, Rylacus was planning on playing last night, and as a result I decided to break out my one remaining lowbie while waiting on him to show up. I have made several attempts at rolling a mage in Rift, and none of them make it terribly far. The long and short is… that I just do not enjoy “finger wigglers” as I call them. I need to be smashing into things with a weapon to get that visceral feedback I crave in a combat system. If forced to, I can usually play a Necromancer type because pet class caster is kind of that hazy middle ground that I can find some enjoyment in… but I had never actually made one past level 20.

When Storm Legion was announced, and they mentioned having a Melee mage… I knew I was all about that. The Harbinger really is a fun class to play, and for the most part it is essentially the battlemage archetype from other games. You have a series of spells that essentially summon armor or weapons to suit whatever situation you are in. Right now I have a sword that procs a dot, axe that procs a heal, physical resist armor and magic resist armor… all of which are useful in certain situations. Right now I am mostly playing with the 2 handed healing axe and the physical resist armor, because against quest mobs that seems to be the power combo.

I had only been on playing my mage about thirty minutes or so when another good friend of mine shows up in mumble. Thalen has been working on his cleric and managed to get him up to level 48. One of the things you have to know about Thalen, is that he is a rabid completionist. As a result when he logged in, he was wandering around the droughtlands looking for 5 quests he had missed, that would count towards the droughtland completion achievement. He mentioned that there were a series of elite quests that he could not quite solo… so I quickly found myself logging over to Belghast and heading that way.

One of the subplots in the zone is that there is a group of Cyclops that you can earn the respect of by proving your strength. Thalen had apparently made it all the way to the end of this series and had two quests unfinished. The first of which was to engage the cyclops in a massive 4 way brawl, and the other was to track down and kill several named cyclops. I mentored down to 48 and we headed out to the arena. We started up the battle and I was shocked at just how much damage I was taking. Moments later I realized that yet again I had rushed off into combat… without throwing any buffs up.

After buffing the combat was pretty easy overall. While tracking down the various named cyclops my Raredar plugin threw this big green alert over the top of my screen that I have not entirely familiar with seeing. It seems that it had found a rare named spider, so I tried to keep it busy until Thalen could get back to me. It dropped a piece of epic currency and a piece of blue armor, which would have been good… were we actually doing this content on level. We wrapped up the quests and I bowed out of the group, as things were starting to get crazy weather wise.

The sad part is… Rylacus never showed up during the couple of hours I was playing. Later on I ended up getting a text about 11 pm from him… just when the shit was hitting the fan here… saying he was able to log in now. I texted back saying that unfortunately we were under the gun weather wise, and answered a few of his questions. I am sure the third text came off extra grumpy, as he seemed to have a way of texting just as I was trying to fall back asleep. Hopefully we can get meet up another night and run around together. Would be nice if we could some how engineer both myself, Ry and Thalen being on at the same time. If that ever happens… we will have to find something epic to do.

Enter the Returners

As things got more dicey outside with the weather, I decided it was time for me to disconnect from anything online involving other people… and switch back to something I could pause. I picked up my psp and continued on my adventure through Final Fantasy VI. I have to say I still have a solid dose of nostalgia about this game, but there are little things that annoy me. For example it feels like it takes far longer between rounds of combat than I remember. Granted this could just be my impatient self, used to non-turnbased combat… but it feels like those action bars take for freaking ever to fill.

There will probably be spoilers in the lines ahead… so if you have not played this game you should probably stop reading. Essentially last night I finally completed the Mog minigame… and escaped Narshe. The combat there is far rougher than I remember it being before. It might be that I just suck at final fantasy games nowadays, but it felt like the final guard battle did way more damage than he should have. It took me a few tries to get past him, one of them involving loading an earlier save… since when you rez back you have 1 hp… and I had next to no potions at that point.

After that I ventured forward to to Figaro, had my first real renin with Kefka… and still thought it was cool to watch Figaro castle submerge. I remember back in the 90s, I was not at all expecting that turn of events. Because of the engine room… and mecha look… I thought maybe it would turn into a robot or an airship… but submerge was not one of the things I was thinking. So after thumbing our noses at Kefka we wandered across the desert and went through the cave to South Figaro.

At this point I had enough money to pretty much optimize everyone’s gear… since this is the very first occasion that you have to actually purchase anything. While I don’t remember thinking this at the time… that is a really really long time to go surviving only on drops and chests. Nowadays it feels extremely cruel, but at the time I guess it was just par for the course. After spending some time in town… I couldn’t really remember exactly what I was supposed to do next… and there was not a clear call to action. This Final Fantasy game seems to do a far worse job at messaging what you are supposed to do than I remember.

Essentially I fell back on my “wander aimlessly” skill and found Sabin’s cabin… at which point we get the “Edgar realizes his brother is still alive and nearby” cut scene. So now it jogs my memory… that we have to go up Mount Kolts to get to Banon at the returners base. Bingo! We have a plan now. So I ascend Mount Kolts, see the spooky shadowy figure following me… remember that it leads in a boss fight. Sure enough it is Vargas the son of Duncan… who killed his father because he thought Sabin was the chosen one. We fight Vargas, Sabin jumps in… the game teaches us how to use his freaky Blitz ability… and boom we win the day because pummel apparently is just THAT good.

After that I find my way to the Returners base… Terra gets all emo because she doesn’t know which path to choose. You walk around the base talking to people, and finally meet Banon outside. Does anyone NOT choose to join the Returners? I mean what happens if you say no… do you just stay there and the game is over? Far as I know there is not an entire second side of the game where you rejoin the empire and kick returner ass… so if you say no it essentially has to be a non-choice. Based on a google search, apparently if you say no… she still agrees to follow them to talk to the Esper in Narshe. So yeah… sounds like pretty much a non choice… but you have the opportunity to be a dick about it.

Basically I reached the point where my eyes could no longer stay open when we had run away from the Returner base and the game forks. I figured that was a good time to stop playing, so I had Mog save in the split decision room. I feel like I will probably pick up and play Locke’s story, as he is probably my favorite character in FFVI. He is kind of the rogue I judge all other rogues by. Did I mention that FFVI had a massive impact on me growing up?

Happy Birthday Mom

So I need to wrap up, because well it is 10:30 and I need to call my Mom to figure out what we are doing today. Today is her Birthday, and while she doesn’t actually read my blog… I figured the sub section title was fitting. It sounds like we are basically free of Tornados until at least next Tuesday. I am exhausted from the previous night, so not sure how much oomph I am going to have as the day goes on. I hope you all have a super enjoyable day, and one that is likely to be more productive than mine. I may end up having to take a nap before the day is over.