Factoid February Archives - Page 7 of 7

Waiting on Server Maintenance

Last night a pretty crazy thing happened. It was announced that Everquest Next Landmark would no longer be under NDA, meaning we can say whatever we want about it. With this happening on Saturday night, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to devote a Steampowered Sunday to this brand new game. Problem is up until now I have been a good little NDA abiding monkey and did not take even a single screenshot. So that leaves me without a lot of fodder to talk about for SPS. Another problem is, shortly after going off NDA they took the servers down to apply a fix for some issue that were going on.

The valiant Landmark team has quite literally spent all night working on the problem, and while it sounds like they are getting close they have yet to get things where we can log in. Which means for the time being my episode of Steam Powered Sunday is delayed. However the show must go on, and since it is uncertain if they will get things back up in time for me to write a Sunday post I am going to move forward with making my Factoid February post. It is not my intention to keep making two posts a day but it seems like that is going to be the case here at least.

Belghast the Eagle Scout

I grew up in a small town of roughly 2500, and with that upbringing came so many little tropes of small town life. The one that did because I wanted to, not because someone expected me to do… was Scouting. In essence it gave my dad and I an excuse to sneak off and do outdoorsy things. Granted these days by the very technology laced lifestyle I live, you could never tell that I was ever a good little boy scout. I even went so far as to be a camp councilor at the local scout camp for a season. The pinnacle of all of it was me getting my Eagle Scout during my sophomore year of high school.

Even more interesting than that, my Eagle award was a bit of a major occasion. I was the very first Eagle scout from my small-town troop in thirty years. They made a huge deal of it and it was attended by several politicians looking for a photo opportunity. As cool as getting that was, it was tinged with regret. Our troop had eight scouts all on the verge of getting their Eagle, and I was the only one who actually went through with it. Getting your Eagle is essentially a lesson in dealing with frustrations. You have to create an Eagle project proposal, and submit it for approval. It then gets kicked back for this technicality or that one, causing you to revise it over and over until finally several tries down the road they finally give you the green light.

More than anything it is that this perseverance that is what I think the project is trying to teach you. In the working world I cannot count the number of times one of my projects has suffered random rejections that are completely out of my control. The determination that in part I gained through the frustrations of trying to get Eagle have helped me to just keep pushing forward. So while it saddens me that I am the only one of my friends that actually completed the process, I am proud of myself for doing it nonetheless. So that’s today’s factoid… I am an Eagle Scout, and while I don’t always agree with the political stance that the Boy Scouts of America take on various issues. I am still proud of the lessons I learned along the way.

I screwed up…

Well I almost screwed up that is. Tonight we went out and ate dinner with a friend and caught a show. While waiting on the show to start I checked my phone and noticed something. That’s right… today is in fact February First. The significance? Well remember I had said I wanted to start a new thing this month that I am calling Factoid February. Once again credit for the name goes to The Chindividual who so graciously suggested it. So now I sit down and try and fix my mistake by making a second post today to introduce the feature.

The basic idea behind it is to let my readers know a little bit more about me one factoid at a time. I decided to do this during the month of February… well to be honest because it is a short month, so I have to come up with fewer things to talk about. I have been trying to share more personal details in my blog, so think of this as another step along that path. Hopefully someone finds this interesting in the process.

A Maxipad Once Saved My Life

I love this little factoid because it has a great title. Last year I had a scary incident, I think it predates my blog a day thing, so I am not sure if it ever made its way onto my blog. If it did, it warrants telling again. Normally speaking I get up at 5:30 in the morning and I am not even vaguely close to awake until sometime around 6:30 as I am sitting upstairs drinking my coffee. If you are keeping track, that means I start the beginning of most blog posts in a near catatonic stupor. It is easy to say when I am in this state I am less than observant. So as I stepped out of the shower and toweled off, imagine my surprise when I turned back around and the bathroom looked like a crime scene with blood splatter literally everywhere.

My first thought was holy shit… something has happened to one of the pets. This thought didn’t last terribly long as I felt a warm trickle down my leg and as I peered downwards there was a red geyser shooting out of my leg. It was around this point when I screamed for my wife to help. Actually if you listen to her tell it, apparently at first I said rather calmly that I was bleeding. This didn’t warrant much concern from her, since at least once a day I end up injuring myself somehow. I am constantly banging myself on something, or nicking my finger or something… I am fairly accident prone. But apparently I escalated the concern and managed to draw her out of the bed to investigate.

Redecorating Our Bathroom

By this time I was getting pretty woozy and I ended up sitting down. It seemed as thought I had somehow cut myself and a vein near the surface of my leg was doing projectile style bleeding akin to the black knight skit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We tried to stop things up with toilet paper, towels, and basically anything my wife could get her hands on. At this point I was losing the ability to apply pressure as I had lost quite a bit of blood. Always being the logical one… she quickly thought about what could soak up a lot of blood… and she reached into our cabinet and pulled out a maxipad slapping it down on my leg and holding it tight. I kept it in place as she called 911, and while we had to change it a few times before the ambulance got there it did the trick.

At some point during this time she managed to get underwear on me and a shirt. I remember absolutely nothing of this, but I do remember tiny bits and pieces of being on an ER table and getting my leg stitched up. Apparently in the madness my wife didn’t gather any pants, so I vaguely remember walking out to the car after getting treated mumbling “I have no pants” wearing nothing but my boxers. So like the factoid says, the Maxipad saved my life. I doubt I would have truly bled out… but the bathroom certainly looked that way. So massive props go to my wife for her quick thinking… and even more go to our neighbor who cleaned up the mess in our bathroom while we were in the hospital.

The funny thing is… we are still to this day finding places where I managed to bleed. Somehow I bled on the well at the back of the under sink cabinet where my wife pulled the pads from. I also somehow managed to bleed on the ceiling. Anyways hopefully I didn’t make my readers queasy, going through this was really damned scary… but looking back on it I find the whole thing extremely humorous. For weeks I refused to take a shower without laying out a few maxipads on the counter just in case. I still get a little freaky about spots on my legs, fearing that I might spring a leak again. So that’s one day for the very first day. I will have to summon a brand new one tomorrow.