The Quiet Begins

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Morning folks. I had the first decent un-medicated sleep I have had since this all began. I know I fell asleep shortly after the 10pm evening news started, but since I remember nothing about the broadcast… I am guessing it was really quickly. I was woken by my bladder alarm around 4:30 at which point I snuggled with the cats until 5:30 when I finally got out of bed and showered. Yesterday was the funeral and I survived it, and today is the first day that I do not have an itinerary. I feel like today is probably going to be the hardest since I don’t really have much of anything to distract me. Knowing this… and knowing I would need all the support I could get… I got up and went to the “fancy” donut place and got a cronut and a sausage roll to bolster me as I star this day. I am sure I will have people checking in on me today… but really this is the point where my next life truly begins.

Yesterday I decided to categorize the post as “My Life 3.0” because really… that is what it feels like is happening. My first life was before I met my wife of almost thirty years… at that point another life began and it was a great life. Now I am beginning a third life and I have no clue what the future holds. When my brother-in-law lost his wife of an almost similar scope… he went off the deep end, and I now understand why he did more than I ever thought I would. He has reached out several times to act as someone to talk to since he has been exactly where I am now. My wife’s sister was the glue to not only that family… but our entire family as a whole… and everything was just different after that point. I’ve already made plans with our friend to go spend Thanksgiving with my wife’s mom this year because generally speaking it was only my wife that would be there.

We had gotten in the lazy habit of what we called “divide and conquer” where I went to my folks for Holidays and she went to her mom knowing she would be the only person there. It allowed us to spend the entire day with the respective parents, but in truth… we probably should have been just making it work so we saw both sides. I know I am going to have to step up and be there for her mom and I have already let my parents know that they are going to have to start sharing me on the holidays again. Her dad and step mom were often just calls that we made, but I know I too will have to start visiting them as well. I am expecting that I will be held onto by many in her family… because I am the last vestige of the person that they knew and loved. It was almost thirty years that we had been together, attending the same family gatherings… so it makes sense. I was as much of a fixture as she was.

So one of the things that my wife and one of her good friends did regularly… was attend the funerals of folks in their church… and then critique what went wrong on the drive back. In this light… the funeral was a horrible mess… but that was honestly sort of perfect because my wife would have been cracking up the entire time. First off it was extremely well attended. I was in too much of a fugue state to really grasp the scope… but my friend who attended estimated there were 300-400 people. Essentially it was in a high school gymnasium that had three sides for seating. The family was in the floor and there were over 100 of us there… and then two of the three seating areas looked to be fairly full. I know from my office along just being there for me… there were like a dozen people. Pretty much everyone that I met with was crying as well, or had been… so I guess the service was meaningful.

Basically I had spent so much time planning… only to hand it over to folks who had no clue what they were doing. Essentially the flow of the service was supposed to be a bunch of blocks where there was a sermon delivered by the pastor and then a musical break where a slide show played. Then another sermon break, and then the slide show would pick up again as another part of the photo slide show played. There were roughly 120 images in the slide show… and I will be charged like $150 for this video to be created… which is something that I could have done trivially and have done before. Essentially… the entire time the service was going on, a windows 11 desktop was being broadcast to a screen… with all of the lights on, so you could barely see what was going on. They eventually realized they should probably dim the lights… but that only happened after the first musical interlude.

They played the wrong songs at the wrong time… realized their error and then played the right song. There was a point where they were supposed to play a video, but somehow played the wrong video. Then when that video finished… they played the same video a second time only realizing it was a dupe after probably 3 minutes. Then clearly getting discombobulated by all of this… they started the slide show over again from the beginning rather than picking up where they had left off. Basically… nothing went according to plan, but I am not sure how many people in attendance actually realized this or if it was just me who had painstakingly helped them plan and organize all of the media for this thing. Essentially I should have just made the videos for them… so I had one set of images synchronized to a song and then labelled all of the videos 1, 2, 3, 4, etc so that no one had to think. I would say I have learned my lesson… but also this is not exactly the sort of thing you get a do-over for.

Everyone kept saying what a touching service it was… but all I could see were the glaring technical and execution errors. I tried… but someone without the rigor I would apply to the process was the one executing it. The part that was the worst however was the fact that the microphone that the pastor was using kept cutting out. Eventually they swapped mics… but not before someone from the venue had walked out onto the podium and fiddled with it three times. I was laughing from the floor… which prevented me from crying. I have worked in IT my entire life… so this honestly was fitting. I know if something CAN go wrong it often does. I just felt so awful that maybe I could have done something to make it work more smoothly… that if I had done their jobs for them… it would have gotten done right. I know my wife specifically had wanted her funeral done by this funeral home… because it is folks who go to her church. However that said… I will be planning my own funeral elsewhere for certain.

I was too exhausted to be outraged honestly… and at this point it is done and behind me and nothing I can do can fix it… so all I can really do is laugh. The entire day yesterday is a blur. I hugged so many people… and I believe thankfully I was able to summon forth the correct name for each of them. It was a long day. I did not get home from the entire proceedings until around 5:30 pm, and at that point I was so past going. I took off all of my sweaty clothing… piled it in the washing machine and will be going down in a bit to start that. Every part of me ached… physically and emotionally. I eventually made it to the couch where Gracie snuggled with me so deeply that it soothed away all of the frustrations. Even thinking back upon that morning… it felt like it had happened days ago. The entirety of the day… felt like it spanned a week of time. So many things happened, so many people seen, and greeted… to give them the opportunity to carry on their own individual grieving process by offering condolences.

I was told that I was loved so many times, and offered back my own love in earnest countless more times. Then also had folks checking on me throughout the night. I spent time hanging with my non-biological sister regaling them with the days events… only to have to bail because the neighbor down the street was at my door checking in. Her kids were delivering a gallon jug of Milo’s Sweet Tea and Milo’s Lemonade since we had a bunch of drinks left over, and I said that was the one thing that I would not mind having. I successfully dodged taking home all of the left overs, because I said that I would rather the church had a meal after services this Sunday in memory of her. I need to figure out how I am going to work the logistics of the sermon, because I still plan on editing it and maintaining their website. Basically my normal Sunday flow was to edit AggroChat and then when she got home from Church edit the Sermon, and I plan on keeping that rhythm. The irony of all of it is that I am very much not a religious person… but also knew how important it was to my wife, and I supported her in all endeavors.

I think I am going to clean a bit today. The cats have continued to remove greenery and flowers from the arrangement that my good friend Cyl sent me, which also thankfully are the only flowers that I ended up taking home. The rest went to other family members who are more floral motivated. We did not have a ton of flowers because we were trying to redirect everyone to just donate to the church in lieu of sending them. My wife’s teacher partner in crime for years is also working on setting up a scholarship fund, and the church has already said that they planned on making a sizeable donation from the funds that were incoming. That isn’t exactly how I expected that money to be spent… but I am not going to argue with it. They spent the five years or so we did the podcast and website, trying to pay us for doing it. We kept refusing it, because we viewed it as just supporting the church with our actions. I still do not plan on accepting a dime from them going forward, because really… that is precisely what she wanted.

Right now I think I am targeting maybe going back to work on Monday. I have a new employee starting this coming week, and if nothing else would like to be there for him. I still feel like I am completely unmoored, and maybe some of the regular features of a work schedule would help with that. Right now… I am just bone weary tired… so at least in the nearest interim I am going to rest. The last week took a lot out of me. If my math is correct, I unintentionally lost around twelve pounds. Starting tomorrow though I am probably going to begin getting up first thing in the morning and walking for a bit. I still want to travel more… and in order to do that… I want travel to be less physically painful for me. That means I need to figure out how to drop a bunch of weight so that I can maybe ride on a plane without feeling like it is going to break my legs.

I am sorry if all of this is too raw… and if it seems weird that I am working through such private emotions in a public venue. My blog is more a dialog with myself than a dialog with the world. When I write it… it is essentially like I am talking to myself and then find it odd that anyone is actually reading it. I do however appreciate all of the support I have gotten both through this blog and through all of the other online methodology that exists for me. Yall have been amazing as I have struggled with this.

Aggressive Hugging

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In the upstairs bathroom, there are two tiny windows in the room with the shower… and Josie loves them. She has long since stopped fitting into these windows but this does not stop her. She always looks so damned uncomfortable, but if there is ever a time when I cannot find her… I will find her in these windows especially as the sun streams through them. The quality of the photo is pretty shitty because I was using the digital zoom for fear that she would hop down when I came into the room. I love her, and I wish she was as snuggly as she was when she was a kitten, but I try and give her the space she needs. I am wondering how her personality is going to change… and honestly how the personalities of the other two girls are going to chance now that there is no momma and it is just daddy. Cats are effected in unpredictable ways by life changes.

I am so exhausted at a soul deep level. I got something resembling normal sleep last night. I rush ordered a box of zzzquil and it was sitting on the front door step when I got home last night. So I indulged in that and slept pretty much from 9pm until 3:30 and then got up for the bladder alarm and took shorter naps from 3:30 until 5:30 when I officially crawled out of bed. All told I think the stuff worked pretty great and hopefully it can help me through this transition between sleep patterns not working, and normal sleep. Though the more I read up on it… it seems like it is essentially the same as my old trick of taking two benedryls. I knew I needed rest going into today and was willing to carve it out however I could get it. The problem with all of the methodology is that I never sleep the entire night when I am taking something to induce a sleepy state.

Yesterday was the viewing and I got over there around 10:30… saw my wife for the first time… had a mild freak out because she looks nothing like the woman I married. Realized a large part of this is because I had forgotten her glasses and then rushed back home to get a pair. This is what held me up for a bit as I had to wait on a bunch of geese to cross the road. There are around 15ish of them that frequent the small ponds in our neighborhood and they feel like they own the town. So essentially all traffic stopped while we waited on them to cross… at which point I could scramble through the house trying to decide which glasses to grab. She had so many pairs, because she essentially two strengths… readers and then normal progressives and kept them pretty much everywhere she might need to make the transition between the two. I grabbed a brand new pair she had picked out but never really started wearing. Figured she might as well get to wear them, and they also complimented her.

So when I say she looks nothing like my wife. The funeral home did their best, but they had been working on her for an hour without any luck… pumping air into her lungs without any air escaping, and it was just obvious that she had a very rough time. I personally think she died in the driveway of my house and was gone from that moment forward, and all of the trip to the hospital emergency room… was just in vain. On some level seeing her like that helped me more than I realized, because it allowed me to draw this line in the sand that she is no longer there in any form. That she had been gone for a very long time. They nailed her hair though, and I give them mad props for that. The funeral home tried really hard, but when a body has had a traumatic last moments… it shows, and she looks exceptionally rough. I tried to give some of the people she was especially close to a bit of a warning that she as going to look rough.

That was probably the hardest thing about yesterday. I was friends with most of the people who cared about my wife the most from the teaching community. Many of which I have been in text messages off and on since the event happened. Seeing them dealing with the levels of pain I dealt with in those first few days was so hard. All I wanted to do was take the pain away from them and protect them from the feelings I knew all too well. I gave so many hugs, and they were big and lasting and I let so many of my wife’s friends pour tears into my shoulder. I joined most of them in tears, but I had the benefit of this being way more real for me than it had been for them. I watched my wife dying, and I saw her husk sitting on a gurney in the emergency room. They had not seen her… so within moments the battering ram of crushing grief claimed them… and all I wanted to do was lessen their pain.

The day was more physical exhausting than anything, because I kept trying to give time and attention to everyone that showed up for us. I just kept flipping between groups of people as they came in, because everyone wanted face time with me to offer their heartfelt condolences. I shifted into host mode, and while I broke down several times… the action of trying to make everyone understand that they were appreciated kept my mind busy. Everyone was worried about me, but I was way more worried about all of them. The few of us that were in the emergency room that night, had already been through the phases that they were going through. It isn’t easy… I am still very much not okay… but yesterday made me realize how much more okay I am than I was. My friend Vid introduced me to the Ball in a Box metaphor for grief… and I don’t necessarily think that my ball has shrunk yet…. but I do think the momentum has slowed.

All of that said… all bets are off for today. Today is the funeral, family luncheon, and then graveside portion and will similarly consume all day. I left the house around 10 am yesterday and other than the frantic rush back for glasses… I did not make it back home until almost 8 pm. At which point I pretty much scarfed some food that a neighbor had brought me the day before and then collapsed into bed while being swarmed by cats since I was not around all day. Today is going to be exceptionally hard, and I am probably going to go with the more comfortable of the clothing options I was thinking about… because I know it is going to be a long hard day. It was also sweltering yesterday… before the sun heated up the funeral home it was actually somewhat chilly but in the depths of the 90 degree day… I was a mess. The nice shirt that I was going to wear today is a light color, and I am absolutely going to spend the entire time sweating through it. So I feel like I probably need a darker color to at least diminish the impact.

While I wonder what changes my cats are going to go through… I also wonder what changes I am going to go through. I’ve always been a secret hugger, but been to self conscious and awkward to regularly engage in them. Yesterday I hugged so many people and it just became my most natural form of self expression. There was a student that my wife had recently taken under her wing, and I have been texting back and forth with her because I knew she was going to take this exceptionally hard. Shelli had become a bit of a surrogate mother to her over the last few years since she had graduated, because she needed someone like that in her life. Yesterday she told me “i felt a piece of her when i hugged you it truly felt so calming for the first time since this all happened.” and that made me very thankful that I cast aside those self conscious tendencies and just gave into the hugs.

Maybe I change through this. Maybe I become less conscious about who I am and the space that I take up in the world. I am a giant… and I have always been trying to take up less space. I move my way through life like I am just about to upset the balance and knock everything over. Maybe I accept the fact that I will never take up less space in the world and give into being the person that I actually wish I could be. If you are still reading I thank you for coming along on this journey.

Sad Bel Days

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Hey Folks. I am sorry that I stopped blogging for awhile. I had been struggling with figuring out what I wanted to talk about for the last few weeks, and then my world effectively ended on July 2nd. Around 8pm my wife passed away suddenly an very unexpectedly, and I lost touch with reality. I am not okay, and quite honestly I am not sure if I will ever be okay again. I am however forcing myself to attempt to keep some semblance of a rhythm and put one foot in front of the other over and over until I get through this. Today is the visitation and tomorrow the funeral, and I have done my best to do her justice. There is honestly nothing that I could ever do to truly do that. She was an amazing woman and I am sorry I never shared her with you other than little snippets here or there.

She dedicated her life to education, and teachers live under a microscope, especially in my state and the current political climate. I was always terrified that something I did or something I said would negatively impact her or her career, so I only really talked about her in generalities. Know that she was my whole world. My mission in life was to do whatever I could do to enable the great things she was doing in the world. Nothing I did was terribly important compared to the impact she had on countless lives. I may have groused from time to time, but I always understood the importance each time I was “voluntold” to do something for her and her classroom. I have a lull this morning so I am sitting down to talk to you all… but quite honestly I have no clue where I am going to go with this. I guess I will start by sharing a snippet of the obituary I wrote for her.

She devoted her life to the power of education, particularly in the field of mathematics. A passionate and lifelong learner, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Education from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah in 1998. Throughout her 26-year teaching career, she inspired thousands of students, primarily at Jenks Public Schools in Jenks, Oklahoma, and more recently at Collinsville High School in Collinsville, Oklahoma.

At the time of her passing, She had just completed the coursework for her Master of Education, majoring in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Math Education. She was set to graduate with honors from Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

Her love extended far beyond the classroom. She was devoted to her family, her friends, her students, and her church. A woman of deep faith, she lived her beliefs with action, compassion, and integrity. She was an active and beloved member of Dalton Hill Baptist Church in Owasso, serving in numerous roles, including most recently as song leader.

Her dedication to math education led her to travel widely, including presenting at an international conference in Portugal. She was a respected member of countless educational communities, both in-person and online. She also had a deep love for books and knowledge; in another life, she might have been just as at home in a library as she was in the classroom.

Its weird because even now… I feel this visceral instinct to protect her anonymity. While pasting that… I could not stop myself from lightly editing out her name. I think part of this is because she quite possibly is the only person on the planet with her name. She had an unusual spelling and that made me hyper vigilant. I just wanted to protect her… and still do… but was completely useless in the end. She was claimed by biology and there was nothing at the time that I could do other than sit and watch and hope that they could save her. I miss her so much. Everything in the world feels wrong right now. I am not sure if anything will ever feel right again.

I am not sure what the future of this blog is. It all feels so hollow and useless. I am terrified for today, because it will be the first time I see her since the emergency room. I am also terrified at all the social interactions that are going to be needed to get through the day. I’ve been thankful that family on both sides has done a lot of texting, and limited dropping in… because on some level I just need time by myself to process this. Everyone in my larger social network has been great, and I appreciate all of you. I’ve been talking some in semi-public messages over on my Gamepad account, usually content warning them with “Sad Bel Days”. I don’t want to trauma dump, but it also gives folks a way to check in on my mental state without pestering me. I will say I am at the very least still making the bed every morning, which was a little thing that was super important to my wife.

I am terrified for the ordeals to come. 90% of everything in her classroom is something that we had bought, so it will fall upon me at some point in the very near future to go up there and pack everything up. More than that there will be month after month of various legal processes that have to take place as I update everything from medical insurance to car titles. Functionally I know I will be fine, but I am also terrified financially because I don’t know what the future looks like. I knew what reality looked like with two incomes, but I have zero clue what things are going to be like with one. I feel fucking guilty that I am even thinking in those terms. My brain keeps latching onto random threads because the more analysis that I do… the less processing power I am giving to my emotions to completely crush me. I’ve felt the pain of losing someone before, but this is so fundamentally different that it might not even be thought of as the same thing. It legitimately feels like half of my being was ripped away from me… and I have no clue who I am anymore in any capacity.

GenX • Husband • Petfriend • WASD Stan • Daily Blogger • Weekly Podcaster • Eternally Confused

My social tagline was ordered on purpose. Husband comes first in the list of non-age-based descriptors because that is where I placed that role. Whatever she needed of me I was there without question. I took care of things. I dealt with the financials, restocked the house with groceries, did the laundry… etc etc… all so she could focus on the important work of making the world a better place through education. Now that she is gone… I just don’t know who I am anymore. Like there are people in this community that think I have shit figured out, but my entire life revolved around my wife. Anything I did on the side felt thoroughly unimportant and meaningless next to the great things she was doing constantly. Maybe it is because I grew up with a mom who was also an educator, but I treated that role as sacred.

Anyways I am mostly posting because I am not sure what my posting schedule is going to look like. I figure there are people out there who may not follow me on social media and may not know that my world ended. I am still out here. I have so much support. I just don’t know who I am anymore, and it will take me a bit to figure that out again.

Wisdom Scrolls Need to Die

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Good Morning Folks. This morning I hope you will indulge me in a bit of a rant. I feel like it is time for the humble Wisdom scroll to go away… permanently. For those uninitiated into the world of Path of Exile, or ARPGs in general… any loot in the game that has affixes on it… aka Magic (Blue) quality or higher drops as unidentified. You cannot equip it until you have spent a piece of currency called the Wisdom scroll on it to reveal its statistics. In the beginning of the game this creates a subtle pressure of having to pick and choose which items you identify, because Wisdom Scrolls are a scarce resource. However you rapidly reach a point where this is just busywork. You either dedicate one inventory slot to a stack of wisdom scrolls so you can identify items out in the field, or you have a trip over to your stash so that you can perform the process of everything you decided to pick up… before often chucking the items anyway because they were not actually that good in the first place.

We can blame this trend on Diablo, and creation of the Scroll/Tome of Identify. Since Path of Exile was essentially a giant love letter to Diablo 2 specifically… we got the wisdom scroll and also the teleportation scroll. I feel like it is way past time for both of these concepts to die. I get that there is something interesting about picking up an item and taking the risk that it might be useful… but we don’t play games in the same way that we played Diablo 2. You might clear a level and find two or three items that are even of the right type for the character you are building. In that scenario it is not that big of a deal to chuck it in your inventory in the hopes that it might actually be good. The opportunity cost of the Identification scroll is minimal, especially given that players are already used to sacrificing inventory grid real estate for charms. It is quaint and anachronistic… but still something I would consider to be poor game design.

However when you consider what loot looks like in Path of Exile it becomes less forgiving. I am already running fairly strict loot filters and still see lots of items that are potentially good… but most likely vendor trash. The GGG team has said countless times that they want loot on the ground to matter. However so long as we cannot see the stats that roll on the item… I am never going to pick up that random Imperial Skean that is sitting there on the left side of the screen… even though it is entirely possible it could have rolled with +2 to skills, and two Damage Over Time Multipliers making it far better than anything I am currently using. It was generated… cost processing cycles to do so… and is effectively dead on arrival because it is not worth the time to pick it up and identify it in the vague hope that maybe it might be useful. Instead as players we chase currency drops that we can then use to buy ideally rolled items from other players, when those items might have been rotting on the ground all along.

The thing is… even Grinding Gear Games knows this is bad design. They have all but removed the Wisdom Scroll from Path of Exile II and have entirely removed the concept of a Teleportation Scroll. Essentially they matter briefly in early Act 1, until you unlock and NPC called The Hooded One. Once you have done that.. you are never going to pick up another Wisdom Scroll or manually identify an item ever again. You can click on the NPC, choose Identify Items and it will unmask an entire inventory full of stuff. Diablo III for example still had unidentified items… but they just required you to click on them in your inventory… and by the time Diablo IV rolled around everything drops identified. Last Epoch has no concept of unidentified items and allows us to fully filter items based on the quality of what dropped… and is a much better game for doing so.

Why did I write an entire article complaining about this common practice? Not sure honestly. You can do something a million times and then one time it feels like it is a bridge too far. It mostly started as me mourning not having an NPC that would identify all of my items for me that Path of Exile II has. Then became a little stab of frustration every single time I had to click on a scroll. I only picked up this Full Wyvernscale because it is a good base and I am trying to grab some level 85 bases for Kodra to craft on. I did not expect it to be a good item, and were I mapping for myself… it is highly unlikely that I would have picked it up. Most uniques I completely ignore unless I know that it is something that might have value, or it is something like in this case that I have not picked up yet this league for the unique tab. It just feels like it is time for this practice to die.

Maybe it had a reason for existing… like for example maybe loot was not treated as itemized until you unidentified it in Diablo and as such required less memory as it was simply a stub. I know this is not the case in Path of Exile because attributes are assigned to the item regardless if it is hidden by identification or not. There have been exploits in the past that allowed people to see what the stats were on an item before using a wisdom scroll on it. This made it super risky to buy any item from another player that had not been identified. Mostly I just feel like it is time for this entire construct within the genre to die in a fire.