Real Life

Melancholic Undertones

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It has been a really weird weekend and as I sit down here to write my Monday morning post I largely just find myself staring at a blank screen. It was real hard getting up this morning because it was real hard sleeping last night. Around 9:30 Saturday morning I dropped my wife off at the airport for her very first international flight and around 7:30 Sunday morning she was landing in Lisbon Portugal. Knowing that she is that far away is doing weird things to my brain, and that first night I suffered a pretty nasty panic attack. Like it is not unusual for her to travel but for whatever reason the distance seems all the more extreme and tangible.

My parents wanted to meet for dinner Saturday night and that is probably the exact wrong thing for me to do. I love my folks dearly but they have a way of putting me into a real bad mindset after being around them. Admittedly it is a large part of why I avoid phone calls and have tried really hard to get them used to texting. I get off the phone with my mother and I am in a foul mood for the next three or four hours… and I am never exactly sure why because there really isn’t a reason to be. However that reaction combined with the fact that I was already worried about my wife’s international adventures sent me down a deep hole that I am finding it hard to dig out of today. Apologies that this is not the most cheery of topics for you to be reading on a Monday morning.

All in all however things are fine apart from the bed being too cold and there being too much room in it. Kenzie and Josie have more or less been glued to my side the entire time. I am not sure if it is that they can tell I am somewhat distraught or if they are continuing to get along better. Whatever the case I have had both of them with me in bed the last two nights, generally speaking Josie in my knee pit and Kenzie either laying on top of me or beside me. Mollie on the other hand has largely been non-interactive and I am guessing this is due to the brewing collusion between the other two. She is largely spending the majority of her time up in my wife’s office where she has reclaimed the room we formerly had Josie isolated in.

As far as media goes, I watched the first season of Atlanta because I am wildly behind watching things. That was one of my hopes for the period where I am the only person in the house was to watch a bunch of shows that I had wanted to. I knew that I really should not catch up on BoJack Horseman for reasons that it always makes me question my own existence… but Atlanta maybe wasn’t that much better of an idea. While I loved the season it also has some deeply melancholic undertones which likely did not at all help my mental state. I am engaged however and I am probably going to watch the second season tonight, or at least start it. It really has such a phenomenal cast and I am fully on board with anything that has Donald Glover or Zazie Beetz in it.

On the gaming front I made more progress into The Technomancer and I continue to love it even more. I am really interested in seeing the games that Spiders has to offer because there absolutely was a void left by Bioware that they are seemingly trying to fill. I feel like I am maybe starting to enter the phase of the game where you begin to collect allied forces and head towards a final showdown. That seems to always be a thing that exists in the type of games that Mass Effect or Dragon Age represent, and I am not exactly sure what to call that genre. It is like a sub genre within the Action RPG genre and I sorta feel dumb always referring to them as Bioware-Likes. Whatever the case I am on this course until I finish the game. It is doing a lot of interesting things, but unfortunately I can’t talk about them at length without generating significant spoilers. Part of why this game works is the way in which it unfolds the setting, and in case someone wants to follow in my shoes I don’t want to ruin it for them.

Josie is getting exceptionally good at climbing things… including me. Sunday morning I was sitting working on editing the podcast and Josie was apparently completely enthralled by whatever was happening on the screen. She figured out a way to latch onto my shoulder and then sorta drape herself down my chest as I leaned back in my chair. She is super bonded at this point and follows me around like a little lost puppy. It is almost always Kenzie and Josie that are with me all of the time, and I try and make sure they both get equal attention so that Kenz doesn’t get jealous. I write that and behind me Kenzie just bopped Josie for some reason that I fail to grasp. For those who are like me and search the background of photos, some things that you can see.

  • Commodore 64 Mini that I picked up on close out for $20
  • Sony PS1 Mini that I also picked up on close out for $15
  • Sealed Case of Commander 2019 that I have not had a chance to mess with
  • Flanaess Map from D&D 3rd Edition
  • Star Wars LP that I have had for ages
  • Guilds of Ravnica mini poster
  • Stuffed Topaz Carbuncle

I hope you all have a wonderful day and I hope I have a better week than I had a weekend.

Kenzie and Walled City

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Kenzie.exe is hibernating

This morning is one of those mornings when I am not exactly sure what to write about, so as a result I figured I would give an update on Kenzie. Some weeks back in a stress filled post I talked about her being diagnosed with diabetes. In the time since then we have begun an insulin regiment in the morning and evening and are going back for another round of tests on Friday morning. The good news is that the insulin has seemingly halted the weight loss, and she may have gained some back but I am not sure if I am imagining that or not. The bad news is that due to some miscommunications the Vet was not able to successfully complete a glucose curve last week and we have to reattempt it this Friday.

A very tiny shoulder mounted Kenzie

Another positive however is that because she has been with me since a kitten, she pretty much will tolerate me doing anything that needs to happen. That is not to say that she does not protest furiously when I do have to poke her with a needle, but she more or less forgives me immediately. I am so thankful that if I were to have any cat come down with this disease… that it is Kenzie, because there is no way in hell that I could have given twice a day shots to Mollie. I can barely even pick her up without her freaking the hell out. Kenzie on the other hand I can carry around on my shoulder indefinitely because I have done so since she was super tiny. Above is photo evidence of this era when she would sit on my shoulder and watch me game.

While not super evident by the fact that I am only level 50… I have been spending a lot of time playing Diablo III on the Switch. This has recently replaced Dragalia Lost as my before sleep game that I am playing while laying down in bed. Last night I was not feeling super great and wound up going to bed around 9 pm and then hanging out and playing D3 until the news came on. I am mostly spending my time going through bounties, and I doubt that I will complete the seasons journey on console… but it does give me something to work towards. Seeing how freaking brutal Kolrath was I opted to play as a Barbarian, and I like the female Barb way better than the male one.

Another thing that has been going on recently is that I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. I opted to start in creative mode and started piddling around on a giant castle project. I started work on this as some point during Saturday and this is around the time of recording the podcast Saturday night. You can see that I started putting up a giant wall but hadn’t made much progress in actually hollowing anything out. I find the whole process relaxing as hell and lately I have been in this weird funk of not really knowing what to play. I could be finishing up Outer Worlds and I could also be finishing up Jedi Fallen Order, but instead I have spent my time building a castle.

This screenshot is from this morning and hopefully shows off some of the scale of this monstrosity. Inside there are four levels worth of construction, and the “ground floor” enters into what is effectively the 3rd floor going up, with two floors below the ground. I am not entirely certain what I am going to do with the 1st and 2nd floor as of yet, but I think the next big project is to build essentially a “keep” on top of the peak that you can see on the right side of the walled city area.

Since I have been building on creative mode, I have not been super concerned with torching things off and as a result I have a basement full of monsters that have spawned in. This is the second floor or Basement 1 depending on how you think about it, and I need to sort out what I have planned for down here. My general idea was that the ground floor would be shops and this floor would be small houses/apartments and maybe the same for the lowest floor, but ritzier houses since everything floats out over a giant underground lake of sorts. I want to build some other buildings out along the countryside as well, because there would be an assemblage of housing NEAR the walled city but not quite in it as well. Maybe build up a walled farm or two that are protected to feed resources into the city.

I am back playing the Java version of Minecraft because for a bit I kicked around starting a server in my home for this map. I also really miss the minimap addon whenever I am playing on the Windows 10 client. Ultimately this is sorta what I do when I am playing the game. I invent civilizations and build the structures that they would have used. The funny thing is… once the process is over I do absolutely nothing with the end product and often times just discard the maps after having spent hundreds of hours working on them. All that ultimately remains is a series of screenshots to prove that I did the thing.

When it Rains It Pours

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This is Kenzie. In one of the yesterday’s photos she was the one laying on my legs while Allie was laying beside me. She is my crazy monkey girl and is currently screaming at me to throw a hairband for her to fetch while I am typing this. Along with everything I talked about yesterday, we got some bad news about Kenzie recently as well. It turns out she is Diabetic and after taking a second round of bloodwork to verify it… we will have to very soon begin giving her insulin shots every morning and evening. Insulin is nonsensically expensive and while an injection pen is in theory going to last us a good while with Kenzie, I am now deeply concerned about the expense for those who have to take way more doses.

I was at first appalled when the vet said that in a lot of cases folks end up putting the animal down when they have diabetes. I could never consider something like that with Kenzie, but when the cost of upkeep is going to add one to three hundred dollars a month depending on severity I guess I can see how that would put folks in a really tough spot. I am thankful that we will be able to weather the burden and that our Vet did a ton of legwork for us and found the cheapest place for insulin pens and needles and we just had to then go acquire them. At some point this weekend we will be taking her into the Vet to be taught how to deliver the shots correctly, and then this gets added to my daily routine.

I am also thankful that Kenzie takes meds well and will pretty much tolerate us doing anything. I hope that streak continues when that “anything” is poking her with a needle twice a day. She has finally stopped screaming and is laying down beside me now on the box that a PC Tower Case came in. I was so slow getting my system transferred over into it that she claimed the box as her domain, giving her a way to be close to me while I sit in my office chair. When I finally swapped over to the new case, I put the old case in the box and taped it back shut so she would continue to have her own personal perch. For the longest time she laid beside me on my desk, and there is a blanket sitting there still for that purpose… but she prefers the cardboard box.

Now we get on to the title of this post that is both figurative and literal. We are going through a nonsensical amount of rain right now and coming home from the store yesterday I got completely drenched, along with the four sacks of groceries I was carrying. When I got everything into the kitchen I went back into the living room to take off my jacket and lay it up to dry when I noticed a bunch of water on the coffee table. I had a moment where I was trying to figure out if I accidentally sat the wet sacks down on the table, or if it was something else. Then while trying to figure this out I heard a distinct drip coming from the rafter above the table. We have a very slow leak and it has happened once or twice before, generally speaking when the rain is blowing horizontally due to the wind. So that is another thing on the list that will have to be dealt with as we get someone to come out and look it over. I am hoping it is just a case of the flashing pulling up or something like that.

Tonight however… I am hoping to get some relaxation in the form of mindless Diablo 3 grinding. It is the opening of a new season and with it comes something I have never done before. I have a plethora of Demon Hunters, Crusaders, Barbarians and Necromancers… but I have never before gotten a Wizard or a Witch Doctor to 70. Grace confirmed that the Haedrigs set this time is a good one for Wizards and as a result I am planning on pushing myself well out of my comfort zone and running up a finger wiggler. If this works I might even knock out the Witch Doctor next season.

There is just something relaxing about our quarterly ritual of grinding up fresh characters in Diablo 3. Given all of the nonsense happening right now in my life I really need something peaceful and relaxing. I’ve had pretty fraught evenings of late where I never could quite settle into playing anything in particular. So I am looking forward to having a purpose tonight.

Lastly before I close things out. I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their comments yesterday. They really do mean a lot even though I told you that you didn’t have to make them. I mean I knew that my admonishment would do nothing, but I also sorta felt like I needed to let people off the hook. We all have a lot of things that we are dealing with and my burden is by no means more significant than anyone else. That said I really do appreciate the constant reminder that I have a bunch of people out there that care about me.

Flowerbabies and Bounty Caches

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This morning should be the beginning of a return to normality for me. The flood related stuff seems to have wrapped up for me and with it my weird alternating work schedule. I still feel somewhat jet lagged from the experience of having to rapidly shift around my schedule for a week and some change. I am sure as I return to my normal rhythm of getting up at 5:30 each morning and going to bed around 10-ish each night those effects will fade. Last night did not help since it was both the return of Fear the Walking Dead and a documentary series on a local murder mystery and we wanted to watch both.

This weekend also signaled the return of the “flowerbabies” in our back yard, as well as the return to having to add another step to my morning routine of watering them. We are getting a really late start to the season in part because our nursery of choice was flooded. We went by on Memorial Day but they seemed to be cleaning up and not actually open for business. Saturday however they were ready to go and we picked up a number of hanging baskets to go on the hooks that we set out around the pool. You never quite know what you are going to get until you go and then sorta pick out whatever happened to speak to you at the time. I am quite partial to the Purslane because those orange and magenta combination is stunning. Also a big fan of the white petunias with the eggplant centers. We have a mix of colors but they now need tending so I will have to start cutting my blog time a little short each morning.

As far as gaming goes I spent the vast majority of my weekend running bounties. I’ve reached the point where I can easily survive Torment XVI so I am now chaining my way through objectives. I finally realize how Grace always seems to know exactly where she is going in these levels, and I feel like once I have reached my final objective… I will have most of the semi-random map layouts nailed as well. At the very least I will hopefully stop going the opposite way given that for the most part the areas around the warp pads are somewhat static. This is not something that I had caught onto in all of my hundreds of hours playing this game. I am sometimes pretty dense.

At this point I have gathered up 25 bounty caches. The majority of these are from Torment 15 with some of the more recent additions to my pile from Torment 16. The caches apparently have a memory for what level you were on when you got the cache even though I can’t seem to see any external indicator of this. Ultimately I am working on knocking out the Conquest of Avarice which is to loot 50 million gold in a streak. Since I don’t want to have to do this insane amount of farming twice… I am probably going to significantly overshoot my target but i am loosely following this guide I found on the forums.

A T13 bounty cache contains 1,190,000 gold.
43 T13 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T14 bounty cache contains 1,440,000 gold.
35 T14 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T15 bounty cache contains 1,540,000 gold.
33 T15 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T16 bounty cache contains 1,640,000 gold.
31 T16 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

So in theory right now if I figure everything I have looted at this point is a T15 even though I know some are not… it would get me to 38 million gold. I think my goal is going to be to farm up about a page and a half of caches in my vault and then do the mass open. Basically I don’t want to have to do this grind twice so I figure well overshooting my target is the best course of action. 52 caches would be roughly a page and a half and that should in theory net a minimum of 80 million gold… so MORE than enough to hit my target.

It was probably nonsense for me to pick this one as my first conquest… but in doing so it has given me a sense of purpose to grind out an incompatible number of items that have ultimately bolstered my ability to take down content. While I have only picked up a couple of primal ancients… they have seemingly made a difference. The weird thing about this season is that I have yet to see a single Ramaladni’s Gift. I have an ancient Pigsticker waiting in the bank for me to get one since I don’t want to have to re-roll to get a socket… although I guess I could just re-roll one of the stats that I would have re-rolled anyways and roll to something other than the socket when I finally find one.

Whatever the case… I am super into Diablo 3 this season and have been more driven to solo grind than I think I ever have. This somehow transitioned from a social game experience for me… to something that I am finding even more deeply relaxing than it previously was.