cleaning

Pile of Shame

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Good Morning Folks! I took the day off because I have several doctors appointments stacked up. A few weeks ago I dealt with a medical issue brought on by a change in medication, and that has triggered a bunch of referrals to specialists. The positive is all of the tests have turned up nothing special, and everything being normal… the negative is we still have no clear indication as to what caused me to react to the medication swap so drastically. I don’t want to go into too much detail but essentially I lost 22 lbs in 3 days… on something that was not designed to make you lose weight like that. Essentially threw my body into a state of shock and we are fishing for the reason behind it. We will see how things shake out over the next month or so of going to specialists. Here is hoping I don’t have something tragically wrong with me that can’t be fixed.

So here is where I share some of my shame with you. Over the pandemic the Garage became a dumping ground for everything from boxes that I had yet to break down and take to recycling, to dead electronics, to all of my wife’ stuff from her classroom. I don’t have a proper before and after, because things were far worse than the picture on the left when I started this mission over the last two months… but essentially I have been working on the garage and getting it into a workable state. Essentially when my wife switched schools during the pandemic, she dumped everything from her previous classroom in a pile of boxes on the left side of the garage. When I had to hurriedly move her out of her out of the classroom when she passed away, those boxes got crammed into the right side of the garage. So since September I have been plugging away at improving things… effectively moving everything to the south side and then putting up shelving on the north side, and then doing the opposite. I have a ton of boxes that will need to be gone through and dealt with, but at least most of it is now up on shelving units, and the work table that has not been clear in over a decade is now almost completely clear… allowing me to move forward with the purchase of a 3D Printer that I am going to set up out here. I still need to do a bunch out here, but I was pushing to get to clear enough for me to be able to move all of the furniture in from the backyard before the truly cold weather hit.

In other news I recorded one of my dumb little gameplay videos of my Icetrap build, and have since pushed it up another level. Right now this has become my mapper and I play it while gathering up the sulphite to go back into delve and grind out levels on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. For the moment I am running a bunch of scarabs that just add additional monsters to the map, while also running legion and expedition with the node that gives me a single large explosion. It has been years since I have run either of those mechanics so I am having fun. It also makes for some pretty chill experience loaded mapping. For the moment, the next few points I spend on the tree are going to be adding a couple more power charges to see how things scale from there. If by some miracle I can ever stack all 18 traps on the same target and have them overlap… POB claims it will deal 16 million dps. I do not however believe that is even in the realm of possibility.

I am now sitting at 20 of 40 challenges and have my first tiny totem pole joining the role of totem poles in my hideout. I’ve knocked out most of the simple items and what is left requires quite a bit of grinding. I need to open two more of the currency wombgifts and then I will knock out the achievement for those. After that I need to focus on getting things like the cross contamination achievements, and quite honestly… just grinding a bunch of content to finish out the gear grinding goals objective. My goal is to match the same size totem pole that I have had the last few leagues which I think is 34 of 40. So I have a long ways to go before I accomplish that.

I just dinged 98 on the RF Chieftain and now I plan on knocking out a few more difficult things that I had been putting off, because I did not want to risk backsliding on experience gain. So i will be knocking out Sirius for another map slot, and potentially doing some stuff like Uber Atziri which should be reasonable with the current state of my build. I might even try some of the other proper ubers to see how well I can tackle them. I might do some more T17s and a few T16.5s since it will be awhile before I really care about how far progressed in experience I am again. 98 is really where the experience curve grinds to a halt, and those last two levels are super painful. However I expect to push to 100 again, because it knocks off a component in the last achievement.

Anyways! I need to gather trash and get it out to the curb and then start prepping to go to a doctor appointment. I hope yall are having a great week, and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.

Wind-chimes and Heat

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Good Morning Folks. I had grand plans for all of the things I would do this weekend, but largely spent the weekend being super lazy. One of the things my wife bought me at the beginning of the summer was a set of wind chimes, and it was one of those things that I never quite got around to taking care of. I bought a bracket for them and everything, but it just never seemed terribly important. While she can no longer enjoy them, I am hoping I do especially as things begin to cool down a bit. I had these grand ideas about all of the things I would do over the weekend, and accomplished very few of them because it was too freaking hot to be outside. There are a bunch of things that need to be done, and I struggled to bring myself to do any of them.

I had this idea that I was going to go out on a photo shoot somewhere, but again with the heat I just could not bring myself to go out and do it. I did however get everything all set with my camera and the new USB C charging battery works beautifully. I went out into the backyard and took a few photos which you will see throughout the rest of this post because I wanted to test both the battery and a sd card adapter that I had never used with it. My camera is over a decade old at this point but still seems to do a pretty admirable job capturing shots. It isn’t a full frame digital slr, but does a pretty good job and the only real annoyance I have with it is that I like using this hand grip, and I have to take it off in order to get to the battery compartment. I’ve got my backpack packed with everything I need to go out on adventures and I think I am going to start throwing it in my vehicle when I go anywhere just so it is available if the inspiration hits me.

I need to figure out what I am going to do with the library of books in my wife’s office. I really would like them to go to some measure of use, but I am not even certain where to start with that. I have toyed around with the idea of just getting a storage building so that I can put all of that stuff in it until I have a better idea of what I want to do with it all. Storage units are much cheaper than I realized they were, but that also seems like a hassle to move them somewhere else. I need to get out into the garage and organize and clean some stuff out there as well, but again… the heat is the problem. I am hoping once we get into September that things calm down a bit on that front. I know there is a bunch of stuff in the garage that I just need to have hauled off. There is a local group we have used before that if I can make a big pile, they will take it all at once. I have a bunch of boxes for larger electronics that I need to break down, but then there is the problem of what the heck to do with the Styrofoam inside of them. I could in theory save it for building wargaming terrain or something… but that also seems like a massive pain in the butt to find a place to store it.

What I really need to do is move everything from one side of the garage over to the other side of the garage so that I can put up shelving units properly. There is this giant cat toy thing that my father-in-law made which was lovely… but like 300% larger than it needed to be so that it took up MOST of our livingroom. It is just sitting there and has been sitting there for over two decades, and I think it is a candidate for the “haul pile”. We have a couple of rugs out there as well that I have no clue why we saved… other than it was just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with them at the moment we swapped. Basically I need to spend some time building a pile so that they can come haul it away and clear up more swap space for me to organize things. There are some cheap shelving units that you can get at Sams that seem pretty sturdy and my goal is to put those in pretty much every place where I can in the Garage just to get more stuff up off the ground and usable.

We have this giant workbench thing out in the garage that blocks access to the breaker box… which generally sucks because I have to climb up on the thing if I need to deal with them. However it would make a really great base for setting up both a FDM Printer and Resin Printer out in the garage. Even in the winter months, our garage stays fairly warm because our insulation between the laundry room and the garage is kind of shit, so everything directly up against the house rarely gets low enough to matter. After reading and watching so much stuff on the toxic chemicals that they give off… I am legitimately concerned about the cats when it comes to fume off-gassing for either process. This is especially true with resin, but seems to be also mostly true with FDM as well. There is plenty of room to set everything up out there pending I give it a good cleaning and de-clutter. I have a good concrete slab on the north side of our house that I could start piling up things for the eventual dump run.

Another thing that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later is the little tree/bush/whatever that is growing on the deck off our pool. I have not really spent a ton of time in the backyard this summer due to the extreme heat, and I am sure this is something that my wife was going to take care of eventually as she spent countless hours reading in the backyard. However it has grown up enough now that it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with I think. The vine that we have been fighting for two decades… is back with a vengeance this summer and I just do not care enough to deal with it right now. It seems to be grown all in throughout the boxwood that has long since outgrown the bounds of what a boxwood should be. Everything is just so much more difficult when there is only one person. All of the things that I need to do… are things that the two of us would have tag teamed until we got them finished. I miss my wife for all of the normal reasons but especially because I miss being part of a team.

Anyways…. I have rambled enough for a blog post, but I did share random photos with you for your time.