Wandering Osage County

Fridge Frenzy

frigidaire-refrigerator-interior I don’t really deal with change well, even if it is a positive one.  As a result this morning I am a bundle of nerves and will maintain that state until the big event of the day is over.  As the title might suggest, we are getting a new fridge today.  We reached a point of equilibrium in determining that it had to happen immediately if not sooner.  For awhile the freezer was not cold enough to keep ice cream, but cold enough for pretty much everything else.  As a result we had been trying to eat up as much stuff from the freezer as we could to make the inevitable cleanout that much easier.  I believe it was Thursday at lunch, I went home to take a breathing treatment… and since I was already home decided to fix some taquitos to help empty that box out.

I pulled them out of the package and they felt cold but definitely not frozen.  This is the point at which I should have said to myself…  self don’t eat this.  However I am dumb… and this little warning klaxon never chimed in my head.  As a result I got insanely sick starting about thirty minutes after finishing them off.  Basically our food in our freezer was starting to go bad, rather than just not be fully frozen.  As a result this morning we got up early… which 6 am is super early for me on a Sunday, and cleaned the house in preparation for the refrigerator to arrive sometime between the hours of 8 am and noon.  The picture to the side is one I was able to find on the web of the fridge we ended up going with.  We have a friend that works for Lowes and it seems as though he was able to hook us up with his employee discount.  We purposefully wanted something simple… because generally speaking simple lasts.

The previous fridge we had was a wedding present, and we’ve had it happily chugging away for sixteen years.  It was as bare bones as you can get, and it worked well for a long time.  This one is not quite so bare bones, but has something we’ve always wanted…  ice and water in the door.  However my wife purposefully wanted one with separate slots for ice and water, again trying to keep the mechanism behind each as simple as possible.  At this point we are just praying that one it does in fact fit the hole in our kitchen, and two the water line that exists works and everything hooks up nicely.  Until those things happen… I will be a bundle of nerves.

Wandering Osage County

hominy_flowers_depot Yesterday it was absolutely gorgeous out, and as such my wife and I both had a serious case of wanderlust.  There were certain things that needed to get taken care of, namely dropping her car off to get an oil change.  The funny thing about having a FitBit is that it changes your behaviors in an effort to get more steps in.  As a result we drove the car around to the Hibdon Tires location around the corner from our house, and walked back home through our neighborhood.  We gathered up our cameras and were on the road after a pitstop a nearby QuikTrip.  At first we had no real idea where we were going, then like so many of our other trips… this one started with a simple question.  What happens if you go past Skiatook on highway 20.  We could have looked on a map sure, but since we had never really been past the statuary on Skiatook’s main strip… we opted to just drive over there and see.

sniders_soda For a long while there is absolutely nothing, then all the sudden you arrive at Skiatook lake.  Now we knew this existed, because you hear about it on the news, but I always expected it to be rather small.  Instead you have a pretty huge lake, with what seems like a focus on fishing.  There are lots of areas where there are submerged trees that would make for amazing bass fishing.  There were a few boats in places that I wondered how in the hell they navigated around to that area.  I am sure it was extremely careful use of a trolling motor and a lot of patience.  We continued on past Skiatook lake, because again the road was way too nice for it not to go someplace.  As a result we ended up in Hominy.  Now mind you… in 1999 we lived in a town next door to Hominy, so this was not the first time we had been there.  In fact we had a friend that lived there, and got our very first ferret as a rescue from the town.

hominydepot Hominy was not completely foreign territory, but we had not really explored it in ages.  We saw the semi-renovated train depot that now serves as the chamber of commerce and parked my jeep there.  Like most small towns in Oklahoma, Hominy is visibly struggling to keep business.  However they seem to have more pride than most.  Instead of letting buildings set vacant and become a danger, some local artist had taken to painting murals to cover up the empty glass windows.  Most of them are devoted to patriotic themes, and there is a store front “branded” for each of the branches of the armed forces as well as the coast and national guards.  In addition there seems to be an Native American artist in the town who is similarly painting murals on the sides of buildings.  While nice, this is not the sort of stuff that interests me.  I love taking pictures of broken down buildings and urban decay.

brokenglass The people in the town were super nice, and we ended up having conversations with a few strangers.  There was this really nice lady that runs the Napa auto parts store that gave us the lay of the land.  We also carried on a conversation with the guy that runs the nearby cafe, and watched him precariously teetering on a ladder… in a fashion that the ladder was not really designed to be used.  He had just moved into the cafe had was putting up a new sign that would be easily seen from a tall hanging post.  The town had a lot of potential, with these little areas where they had torn out a dilapidated building… that could be turned into nice little courtyards for outdoor dining, or even parks.  In any case Hominy was a nice and safe place to wander around for awhile, and no one seemed to find it terribly odd that we were walking the town on foot with camera equipment.

You can see the full album full of photos I took in Hominy here.

Clearance Lego Find

lego_find I love summertime for the insane clearance deals you can find at various stores.  Namely each and every Wal-mart seems to have complete autonomy on what they actually put on clearance.  As a result if you are willing to hit multiples of them, you can find some pretty amazing stuff.  From Hominy the easiest way to get back to the Tulsa area is to go through Cleveland… another town we were familiar with due to friends living there.  While Hominy is pretty much your standard small town, Cleveland is pretty much just a bedroom community for Tulsa.  That said they do have a newish Wal-mart, and at that point I was desperately in need of a bathroom.  The prospect of clearance Legos was just a nice fringe benefit.

Just like it is up to each Wal-mart to determine what goes on sale, it is up to each to determine where exactly in the store it will be located.  Some stores dedicate an isle or two to clearance, others jam it out in their garden centers, and the worst just mark down items on the shelf mixed in with normal priced stuff.  Cleveland Wal-mart had one of the better setups that I have seen mostly in small town stores.  They had two full isles dedicated to a mixed jumble of non-clothing clearance items mixed from around the store.  This place seriously was the Lego motherlode.  The above sets were originally $55 to $65 dollars, and I picked them up for $30 to $35 dollars.  This is where I love having a smart phone.  I end up looking up the sets and then determining if it is good enough of a deal for me to pick them up.

They had some of the really huge sets on clearance too, but even though the set might have been $90 originally… it sitting there for $70 is still a good chunk of change and not really worth it for me.  Similarly there are times where the smaller sets are just not good enough for the price.  THey had a Star Wars lego set, that was some sort of a probe droid.  The only reason why I would have really wanted it were for the unique Jedi minifigs.  But the realist in me had to think that really… the probe droid was made almost entirely out of otherwise not so cool pieces.  So while you got a few nice minifigs, you also got a bunch of junk that you would likely never use again for another building.  I am super happy with the sets I managed to pick up, and I am at least halfway to having all three TMNT minifigs.  The other really awesome thing is that I didn’t even notice until I got home that the Star Wars set comes with Cad Bane… who is awesome.

Ding Twenty

Screenshot_20140405_222806 Finally after all of this excitement I managed to get home and actually sit down to play.  At this point I have played 46 hours of game time on my Dragon Knight since launch.  I feel as though every level has been an accomplishment.  At this point I am twenty, and I am pretty damned proud of that fact.  Twenty feels like an actual accomplishment, instead of something you manage to get on your very first day of gameplay.  One of the things that Elder Scrolls Online has managed to do… is to bring back a sense of accomplishment with each and every ding.  In many ways so much of the game feels like a throwback to an earlier time when each and every thing was hard fought.  When you step into a public dungeon, you can feel the Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest roots.  This is the concept I wish I could convey properly to people, because I Think a lot more people would enjoy the game if they saw just how deep and nuanced it is.

Screenshot_20140405_210040 The big event of the night is that we pulled together a group and delved into the Wayrest Sewers dungeon.  So far other than the fact that it takes place in a sewer… and that you are slopping around in a lot of rat filled muck… I have to say this was my favorite to date.  It feels in many ways like the Deadmines of this game, in that there is a really nice fight the rebels style storyline going through it.  I won’t go into much detail, because I don’t want to spoil the storyline, but the quest reward at the end is a really nice heavy armor chest piece.  Additionally a spiffy ring and sword dropped that I managed to talk my healer out of.  That has been my favorite thing about these dungeons, is that folks are more than willing to swap gear around to whoever needs it.  Like I managed to get a really amazing two hander, that I happily swapped over to Waren who is currently using that as his main weapon choice.  As of today… we are exactly a week into the game, and I have to say I am still loving every minute of it.

#Lego #Photography #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #RealLife