Real Life

Goodbye Deck

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Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a personal blog post and less of a gaming one. One of my biggest joys over the last few weeks has been evening time with one of the outdoor feral cats that we call Greybie. He has started coming out into the backyard to hang out with us. My wife spends way more time in the backyard than I do, and generally speaking, pings me over messages to let me know when he arrives. I’ve been spending about an hour each night hanging out and loving on Greybie and it completely warms my heart that when I get out there and set down, he comes running across the yard to be by my side.

There is so much of me that wants to adopt him and take him inside, but I have deeply conflicted feelings. Firstly we have three indoor cats already, so we would have to get him tame enough to go to the vet first without freaking him out completely. We are not quite there yet. Secondly, he is a “notched” baby which means he is a community cat. He was purposefully caught, neutered, vaccinated, and then released back into the community. Our neighborhood in general seems to be a collection point for these cats and in theory… you are not supposed to adopt them. So instead we give them safe places to stay during the winter with a few cat shelters and then make sure they are getting food and water to supplement whatever they are catching. Greybie roams around quite a bit and honestly, I am not sure if he would enjoy being an indoor cat… so instead I just give him lots of attention when he wants it.

Right now we are going through a lot of construction… that unintentionally coalesced at the same time. The city is blacktopping our neighborhood, so we have dust being kicked up endlessly by heavy machinery that is sanding the surface of the streets in preparation for the asphalt to come through. Then in our backyard, we are finally dealing with our bedraggled decking. It was never really usefully located and involved having to skim the edge of the pool in order to get over to it. We are hopefully making things work a little more smoothly and it was more economical to have folks just rip out the current deck than to try and do careful surgery and fix the old one. So as a result we have this super awkward empty space in our yard, that will begin to be filled today as the team comes back to begin construction of the new deck.

The negative is that Tripod has disappeared once again. We saw her bound over the neighbor’s fence and into the greenbelt that exists between neighborhoods. This is not the first time that things have gotten “too noisy” for her and she has checked out for a while. It is our hope that once things have settled down a bit, she will return as she has for the last five years. In the meantime, I am continuing to put food and water out just in case she needs to come back for a quick visit before bouncing again. It hurts our hearts to have her gone from the backyard, but this was something that needed to happen with the deck and I am hopeful she will fall back into her normal order eventually. The biggest sadness though is that she and Greybie were slowly working towards getting along together. The above photo is probably the closest we have ever seen them together, and one of the closest times she has been near us as humans. That photo was taken from my chair so she was maybe four or five feet away. I’m hoping by the end of the week we have our new deck and our backyard at least can return to peaceful quiet.

On the gaming front, a new patch dropped for Honkai Star Rail and we get access to the Silver Wolf banner. I spent through my stockpile of pull currency and have not picked her up yet, but essentially I will be spending every bit of free currency to do so until this banner is over. Basically, I want access to her because she has the ability to create a vulnerability in one of your team members, making it a bit easier to push through encounters without changing up your team significantly. My guess is I would replace March with her in my current comp. The arcade graphics of her attacks are also pretty freaking cool.

I’m also still poking around at Diablo IV, namely working at knocking out Lilith Altars in the various zones and getting my renown up to at least rank 3 so I can finish getting the remaining skill points. After I do this I think there is probably a significant respec in my future. Right now I am using Upheaval which seems to be completely out of the current meta of “best barbarian builds”. So once I wrap up this project of finishing the Lilith Statues, I will likely spend time trying to decide what build I want to spec into, and then making sure I have the legendary aspects needed for that build unlocked in my codex of power. At the moment I am leaning towards Whirlwind because that traditionally is my favorite Barbarian build, however, I am going to wait a bit before deciding because they are still pretty actively balancing things. I know Upheaval hit some nerfs going into the previous open test, and it certainly feels weak at times so I am open to other options.

I hope Tripod is doing okay out there. She has left and returned so many times in the past that I feel pretty confident that she is going to be just fine and then eventually return to our home and take up residence again. That said… I still worry about her.

Twenty-Seven Years

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Good Morning Friends! Yes, I realize I have already shared a version of this photo of Greybie but there is no reason not to again. Look at how precious he is. This morning however he is mostly just a placeholder because I would never actually post a photo of my wife on my blog. For the entirety of our relationship we’ve celebrated two dates as anniversaries… the date when we became a couple, and then of course the date we got married. As of today, we’ve been together Twenty-Seven years, which is one heck of an achievement if I do say so myself. We’ve long passed the mark of being together “half of our lives” and are well into “majority” territory. Heck, I am just realizing as writing that… that we’ve been in our current home for half of our lives, so I guess we are pretty much the picture of stability at this point.

Lately, we have been spending quite a bit of our evenings in the backyard hanging out with our adopted feral children. I am not sure exactly when it started, but Greybie jumping the fence has pretty much become a nightly ritual. Usually, my wife sent me a message whenever he shows up and I make my way downstairs and then take up a seat in the chair where Tripod is resting near. I’m the human that feeds the feral cats so apparently that affords me some sway. Sunday night Greybie had set up camp over near the diving board quite away from my wife, because while sociable apparently he is not super affectionate with her. The moment I sat down in my chair, Greybie came bounding across the yard for some head scratches and I gotta say… it about caused my heart to burst from sheer joy.

So much is the ritual that we caught on the security camera that he was roaming around last night looking for us. normally speaking I feed around 5 pm but at that point, we had a real “gullywasher” of a storm blow in really fast… dump a ton of rain, and then blow out. So our normal ritual of hanging out in the backyard was put on hold for a bit, but apparently, some 40 minutes later the backyard was relatively dry again and Greybie was looking for us. We never really made it out there, but I did go out and feed around 8 pm last night and by that point, I got to see him on the front porch. Far as we can tell his permanent roost is about three houses down in our culdesac. Apparently, he heard me step out onto the front porch because the next thing I know there is a grey streak careening across the yards running towards me. He’s always seemed way more interested in attention than the food, and last night was no different.

Tripod on the other hand was waiting around on me this morning. She tends to mill around near my chair just before I get up and then is waiting on me under the table over on the patio when I come out to feed. You can’t really see it in the footage but Splotchie another area tomcat is laying on the brown patio storage box. Tripod always acts like she wants attention but I’ve never been able to get close enough to her to touch her. Since she and Greybie seem to be getting along fairly well, it is sort of my hope that maybe seeing us pet him every night will eventually make her curious enough to come over toward us. There was one night when she ran over behind me while I was sitting in the chair… but then she thought better of it and ran back under the table. There is no doubt that I am her human… but she just doesn’t really know how to engage in that whole thing yet. I mean she’s been with us for roughly five years now, and I am largely just happy she is safe.

In other news, last night my Dad texted me a photo of his babies. I’ve shown off pictures of Fang, the Tomcat that is from a litter of kittens that showed up at their house some years ago. Well apparently Fang brought home a young pair of cats… one male and one female… obviously from the same litter. We have no clue WHY, but it seems like he told them my Dad was a friendly human and that he would take care of them because suddenly Bonnie and Clyde as Dad named them, have become a fixture of his world. Bonnie was very clearly “with children” when they showed up, and she now pretty much lives in his shop. He goes out every night, and she comes into the shop when he is shutting up for the evening and makes sure she has food and water.

A few weeks back she had her litter of kittens and now they are apparently old enough to be roaming around freely. There is a fourth kitten that is apparently shy, but they definitely look healthy and happy. Bonnie is extremely friendly and just like Fang comes up to me for attention whenever I come to visit. I’m hoping she will be fine with me playing with her kittens as well. A few weeks back for Mother’s Day it seemed like she was trying to run interference in the shop to try and keep me from finding wherever she had hidden them. So she clearly has protective mom instincts going on.

As far as gaming goes… I pretty much spent all of the extended weekend mainlining Honkai Star Rail. I’m really enjoying this game and yesterday I released a video of me playing through the second Simulated World instance. There is a game still under NDA that was having an event last weekend, and while I had every intention of playing some of it… I really mostly just kept playing Honkai. Originally I was going to write about my weekend adventures, but I sort of pivoted into anniversary and cat land. I am certain no one will mind me filling their feed with cute cats instead.

I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead of you. I’m already ready for another weekend. Thankfully it is a short week for me, so we will see how fast I can get there.

Greybie is Pure

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Good Morning Friends! Last night I did not do a ton of gaming because around 7 pm I went outside… and largely stayed there until 9 pm. I got a message from my wife that Greybie had shown up in the backyard, and I wanted to get some lovins. Greybie is such a good boy, and once again I tried to coax him to hop up on my lap and failed miserably. He however wanted pretty much constant attention and would reach up anytime I stopped petting him. I had the original intention of going out and reading, but instead, I pretty much spent all of the two hours that I was out there… hanging out and spending time with Greybie. Our backyard is a bit of a peaceful oasis, and I’ve realized that I actually do like entertaining folks… just exclusively of the fur-bearing kind.

Tripod was a bit calmer last night and instead of pacing back and forth under the table, she hopped up in one of the chairs and watched us from a few feet away all night long. There was one moment where she slinked her way over behind me… then suddenly thought better of it and retreated back to her chair. I did not move to intercept because I wanted to make sure she had the confidence to be closer to us without fear of us trying to grab her or something. This is truly the long con when it comes to Tripod because she has been in our backyard going on five years or so, and it feels like short bursts of progress. She always seems happy when I come out to feed and lingers nearby… but never really gets within touching range.

As soon as we went inside for the night, she was over roaming around my chair to investigate the area. She spent a lot of time sniffing everything to get her bearings. She clearly recognizes me as her human, because when it is just my wife out in the yard she doesn’t get nearly as close as she does when I come out. I just don’t think she knows how to interact with me yet, or has the confidence to actually come over and get attention. She will stare intensely at Greybie when we are petting him and then will start rubbing up against the legs of chairs and such scratching her own head on them. My hope is that she will eventually put the two together and realize that humans do a really good job of being head-scratcher.

While I was going to the effort of posting videos on Catfriend Television, I decided to go ahead and post this video of a rather rotund raccoon visiting the front yard early this morning. I’ve seen as many as four at once, but more recently we’ve just had this one showing up every few nights. I’ve also posted about the possum that visits the backyard and very occasionally the front porch. I’ve yet to capture anything terribly unexpected, but apparently, my dad has four deer that roam around their house. When I went up there to take him to a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, I had to stop while they crossed their driveway. He also has two new cats that showed up, which are rather friendly… Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve yet to get a good photo of Bonnie who has come to visit me each time I’ve been up there lately. She just had a litter of kittens, so I look forward to playing with some tiny fuzzballs at some point.

As far as gaming goes, I think I have wound down Path of Exile for a bit and started picking back up Last Epoch. There is a big patch that is set to land next week, so I am getting back in the swing of things and preparing for that. There is also a new content update for Guild Wars 2 that is about to release next week as well, so I am sure I will be spending some time exploring that as well. I made an attempt at Maven and failed miserably and called it “good enough” for the Crucible League, and will likely just buy a carry next League so I can have the advantage of four void stones. Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch are so easy to get to… but The Elder and Maven are such a colossal pain in the ass to even get to the fight… let alone defeat them. I don’t really enjoy bossing, but I want the ability to get base T16 maps for everything… so I will likely just spend the currency to get someone to carry me to victory going forward and get it over with.

I hope you all have a great weekend. It is raining like crazy here so I expect it to be a very indoors weekend for us. I’m hoping that I get some more time hanging out with the outdoor cats however.

Dawnbreaker and Backyard Greybie

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Hey Folks! I spent some more time yesterday tweaking and leveling my Wintertide Brand Occultist. I’ve dialed up the defensive layers a bit and I have a Watcher’s Eye that should also help whenever I can get the free passive points to allocate a jewel socket for it. This is never going to be a bossing character for me, so with that in mind, I am largely leaning into comfortable mapping clears while upping the survival. Essentially I think my next play is to pick up another strength travel node, which should allow me to drop a +30 strength node and then use that point to allocate the socket for the Watcher’s Eye.

I had a Dawnbreaker laying around in my vault that I picked up off Searing Exarch, and I decided to give it a spin. Sure I lost some damage by dropping the caster shield with +1 to cold gems, but I also gained a number of defensive layers baked into the shield alone. Essentially what this is doing is splitting some portion of the damage I am taking and then making it resolve against my Fire Resistance. Sure my Fire Resistance is not amazing and nothing like the 90% that I have on my Juggernaut… but it is enough to sort of blunt the blow for all other attacks a bit. The shield alone is worth almost 2000 armor by itself and has a small amount of life baked into it along with a 46% block chance. While it doesn’t make a ton of sense thematically… so far I am thinking the Dawnbreaker is helping.

I recorded another video yesterday afternoon of me playing the class and talking through some of the decisions that I am making. Now this video was recorded before I made a number of tweaks like the Dawnbreaker last night but still shows the general state of the build. If you want to look at the state of my tree here is a POB, but note that I currently am muling a new wand with my Juggernaut to level it because I can handle crucible progress so much faster with that character. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty happy with where things are so far. Sure it is weaker than most of my other builds but I am actually enjoying running around with Wintertide Brand again. Would I start that build in another league over RF Jugg? Probably not. That does not mean however I am not enjoying myself.

Now that the weather is warmer, my wife has been spending a lot of time out in the backyard in the evenings reading. Around 8 pm I decided to go out and check on her, since often she comes in way earlier than that, and found that Greybie had decided to hang out as well. He’s been coming around to the backyard more often lately and it is pretty great. So I spent about an hour out there petting him and trying to coax him up onto my lap. He is still a little too skittish for me to actually lift him up and place him there… and expect him to do anything other than run away. When not actively getting attention he would set up shop underneath one of our chairs and just lay there.

All the while we were back there Tripod was over on the concrete patio off our kitchen… some 15 feet away. Greybie and Tripod seem to tolerate each other, but I am not certain they are actually friends yet. She kept coming closer to us… like she wanted to come over and get attention as well and then would retreat back under the patio table rubbing up against the chairs. I feel like she is on the brink of being more sociable, but I am not entirely sure how to tip her over. Our thought is maybe if she watches us petting Greybie… and him being seemingly happy about it… that she might realize that she too can get love and attention. I would honestly love it if Greybie set up shop in our backyard as well because at least knowing those two cats are relatively safe and happy would be a load off my mind. He lives somewhere down the cul de sac but given that he spends MOST of us time in the orbit of our house… I don’t think he has another family.

I really need to start taking my Steam Deck out into the backyard with me and playing something while just chilling with the feral cats. Last night was delightful but other than when I was actively playing with Greybie I was somewhat bored. You can only screw around on your phone so much before it is no longer interesting.