photography

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.

Of Geese, Cameras, Wolves, and Whirlwind

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Good Morning Folks. I wish my Canadian friends would come collect their geese. We have a gaggle of them that roam around my neighborhood and this past weekend they straight up blocked my progress trying to get back home. I slowly had to ease up on them and they eventually parted and let me through. I got out of the car and tried to wave them away… but that only caused them to hiss at me and stand their ground. If you have been reading the blog for awhile you will know that they also blocked my progress when I was trying to get back to the visitation for my wife because I forgot to bring her glasses. Last night they also briefly blocked my progress when I was going to a dinner thing. It seems like they exist to be a roadblock for whenever I need to be somewhere.

Yesterday was a lot. It would have been my wife’s 49th birthday and as a result we planned on having a dinner thing at 7pm at one of her favorite restaurants. She was basic and loved Olive Garden… what can I say. I think her ACTUAL favorite restaurant was Desi Wok an Indian/Desi place in Midtown Tulsa, but it has a super small dining room and could not have supported the big group that we had last night. I am not sure the actual headcount but it was somewhere around twenty people and I mostly did okay. In truth I was way more stressed by being around that many people at one time, but I took it in good spirits. I did not get out of there and back home until around 10ish… so I was exhausted and pretty much went straight to bed. My children aka the cats were super grumpy that I had been gone all night, but quickly assumed snuggling postures with me in bed as I did my dailies in the few mobile games that I play before falling asleep.

One of the things that I need to do is come up with a reason for me to get out of the house more, and honestly be more active. I am pretty damned sedentary and have been over the five years of remote work. One of the things that I used to do with my wife was go off on camera shoots, looking for various interesting things to photograph. I am a bit fan of urban decay and turning benign subjects into abstract ones through the photo lens. One of the things I hated about this however was the weird proprietary chargers that we had to use with our canon cameras. So I started out looking to see if anyone made a version of the chargers that used USB C. Instead I found something way more cool. These are some replacement batteries that you just hook up with USB C as though they were a power bank. I bought a pair of them to try out and maybe this will jump start my desire to get out and take some photos.

My friend from High School that keeps tabs on me has also said that they want to go out and shoot photos more so I might be able to convince them to join in the madness. There are a few places that I would not mind revisiting. For example Downtown Coffeyville Kansas was really cool the weekend we took a trip up there circa 2014ish. There is also plenty of stuff in and around Tulsa to take photos of that is interesting. I remember we made a trip out to Guthrie and that was pretty great as well. Mostly the camera was a good reason to go somewhere other than my home, and while walking around looking for things to take photos of… I completely forget that I am walking around and end up putting on a bunch of steps that I am unaware of until get home and realize how tired I am. I need distractions I think and this seems like a reasonable one.

Another distraction that I am heading towards is starting up collecting and painting Warhammer 40k miniatures again. I’ve missed this but have not really had the space for it. At some point when I find someone to donate the library of math books that my wife collected over the years, I will probably start turning her office into a hobby room. At some point I envision having 3d printers set up in there and a painting desk. In the short term though I have been watching stupid amounts of videos trying to determine how best to ease back into things. The same friend from High School has said we need to do a few painting nights rather than me making a rash decision with which of the dozens of paint lines that I want to buy into. They have a smattering of various paints so that I can get a feel for how each of them works. The hobby industry has expanded significantly since I last paid any attention to it… which was around the release of Warhammer 8th edition.

Prior to that I was a Rogue Trader through 2nd edition Warhammer 40k player back when we were in High School. I grew up daydreaming about having access to all of the things that I saw in White Dwarf magazine. We did not have access to a GW store of any sort, with I think the closest one being over five hours away in the Dallas Metroplex. What we did have access to were woefully incomplete product lines at various small comic shops, but we made the best of what we could get and had a lot of fun painting them. Quite honestly having a paint night with this friend is going to be a massive throwback to our high school days where I would go to his house and abuse the large collection of apple barrel paints to paint up my squads of beakie space marines from the 30 count plastic box.

I played some more Titan Quest 2 yesterday and rolled another melee character, this time going warfare and earth instead of warfare and storm. There is significantly more synergy there and I went hard on doing a fire based whirlwind character like I have done so many times in Last Epoch. It works well enough, but still feels a bit more clunky than I would have liked it to be. However I do think a lot of what I am reading as clunk is just the slower pace of this game as compared to Path of Exile or Last Epoch. There are two problems that I need to solve with this build, the first being mana regeneration and the second being some sort of either life leech or regeneration that will keep my health topped off when I encounter status effects that I will not be able to easily avoid since I am up in the face of everything I am fighting. My goal with any build is to make them so they are self sustaining in way that I never have to hit the health potion, or at least not without me taking some massive spike of damage.

One of the things that still annoys me is how there are cases where you do not care at all about the early tiers of abilities for a specific mastery. For example I rushed pouring my divinity points into Earth so that I could pick up the aura that would make every melee attack that I do deal fire damage, because the two spells that were in the first tier were useless for the sort of build I was going for. This is sort of the thing that I was saying when it did not feel like there was much synergy between abilities. Some abilities have ways to mutate them into other types of attacks… for example you can make Lightning Bolt be a spear attack which is cool… but it would have been cooler if you could have just made that work with ANY weapon attack. Part of the reason why Path of Exile 1 is so awesome, is that in most cases you can use any attack or spell with most weapon setups, giving you some really broad freedom in how you build your character. There is more flexibility here than in Path of Exile II for example… but it also really feels like they have a build in mind for each of the trees.

Anyways. I think I am tired of writing for this morning. I am still sort of exhausted from last night, not so much sleepy tired… but emotionally drained. I told my folks when I got home that it was awfully “peopley” in there, and my Dad laughed who is also a confirmed curmudgeon. I now need to figure out what all I missed yesterday while I was not working, and figure out how to pick up where I left off from Monday. I hope you all have a wonderful day and I will figure out something to talk about tomorrow morning.

Wandering Osage County

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Fridge Frenzy

frigidaire-refrigerator-interior I don’t really deal with change well, even if it is a positive one.  As a result this morning I am a bundle of nerves and will maintain that state until the big event of the day is over.  As the title might suggest, we are getting a new fridge today.  We reached a point of equilibrium in determining that it had to happen immediately if not sooner.  For awhile the freezer was not cold enough to keep ice cream, but cold enough for pretty much everything else.  As a result we had been trying to eat up as much stuff from the freezer as we could to make the inevitable cleanout that much easier.  I believe it was Thursday at lunch, I went home to take a breathing treatment… and since I was already home decided to fix some taquitos to help empty that box out.

I pulled them out of the package and they felt cold but definitely not frozen.  This is the point at which I should have said to myself…  self don’t eat this.  However I am dumb… and this little warning klaxon never chimed in my head.  As a result I got insanely sick starting about thirty minutes after finishing them off.  Basically our food in our freezer was starting to go bad, rather than just not be fully frozen.  As a result this morning we got up early… which 6 am is super early for me on a Sunday, and cleaned the house in preparation for the refrigerator to arrive sometime between the hours of 8 am and noon.  The picture to the side is one I was able to find on the web of the fridge we ended up going with.  We have a friend that works for Lowes and it seems as though he was able to hook us up with his employee discount.  We purposefully wanted something simple… because generally speaking simple lasts.

The previous fridge we had was a wedding present, and we’ve had it happily chugging away for sixteen years.  It was as bare bones as you can get, and it worked well for a long time.  This one is not quite so bare bones, but has something we’ve always wanted…  ice and water in the door.  However my wife purposefully wanted one with separate slots for ice and water, again trying to keep the mechanism behind each as simple as possible.  At this point we are just praying that one it does in fact fit the hole in our kitchen, and two the water line that exists works and everything hooks up nicely.  Until those things happen… I will be a bundle of nerves.

Wandering Osage County

hominy_flowers_depot Yesterday it was absolutely gorgeous out, and as such my wife and I both had a serious case of wanderlust.  There were certain things that needed to get taken care of, namely dropping her car off to get an oil change.  The funny thing about having a FitBit is that it changes your behaviors in an effort to get more steps in.  As a result we drove the car around to the Hibdon Tires location around the corner from our house, and walked back home through our neighborhood.  We gathered up our cameras and were on the road after a pitstop a nearby QuikTrip.  At first we had no real idea where we were going, then like so many of our other trips… this one started with a simple question.  What happens if you go past Skiatook on highway 20.  We could have looked on a map sure, but since we had never really been past the statuary on Skiatook’s main strip… we opted to just drive over there and see.

sniders_soda For a long while there is absolutely nothing, then all the sudden you arrive at Skiatook lake.  Now we knew this existed, because you hear about it on the news, but I always expected it to be rather small.  Instead you have a pretty huge lake, with what seems like a focus on fishing.  There are lots of areas where there are submerged trees that would make for amazing bass fishing.  There were a few boats in places that I wondered how in the hell they navigated around to that area.  I am sure it was extremely careful use of a trolling motor and a lot of patience.  We continued on past Skiatook lake, because again the road was way too nice for it not to go someplace.  As a result we ended up in Hominy.  Now mind you… in 1999 we lived in a town next door to Hominy, so this was not the first time we had been there.  In fact we had a friend that lived there, and got our very first ferret as a rescue from the town.

hominydepot Hominy was not completely foreign territory, but we had not really explored it in ages.  We saw the semi-renovated train depot that now serves as the chamber of commerce and parked my jeep there.  Like most small towns in Oklahoma, Hominy is visibly struggling to keep business.  However they seem to have more pride than most.  Instead of letting buildings set vacant and become a danger, some local artist had taken to painting murals to cover up the empty glass windows.  Most of them are devoted to patriotic themes, and there is a store front “branded” for each of the branches of the armed forces as well as the coast and national guards.  In addition there seems to be an Native American artist in the town who is similarly painting murals on the sides of buildings.  While nice, this is not the sort of stuff that interests me.  I love taking pictures of broken down buildings and urban decay.

brokenglass The people in the town were super nice, and we ended up having conversations with a few strangers.  There was this really nice lady that runs the Napa auto parts store that gave us the lay of the land.  We also carried on a conversation with the guy that runs the nearby cafe, and watched him precariously teetering on a ladder… in a fashion that the ladder was not really designed to be used.  He had just moved into the cafe had was putting up a new sign that would be easily seen from a tall hanging post.  The town had a lot of potential, with these little areas where they had torn out a dilapidated building… that could be turned into nice little courtyards for outdoor dining, or even parks.  In any case Hominy was a nice and safe place to wander around for awhile, and no one seemed to find it terribly odd that we were walking the town on foot with camera equipment.

You can see the full album full of photos I took in Hominy here.

Clearance Lego Find

lego_find I love summertime for the insane clearance deals you can find at various stores.  Namely each and every Wal-mart seems to have complete autonomy on what they actually put on clearance.  As a result if you are willing to hit multiples of them, you can find some pretty amazing stuff.  From Hominy the easiest way to get back to the Tulsa area is to go through Cleveland… another town we were familiar with due to friends living there.  While Hominy is pretty much your standard small town, Cleveland is pretty much just a bedroom community for Tulsa.  That said they do have a newish Wal-mart, and at that point I was desperately in need of a bathroom.  The prospect of clearance Legos was just a nice fringe benefit.

Just like it is up to each Wal-mart to determine what goes on sale, it is up to each to determine where exactly in the store it will be located.  Some stores dedicate an isle or two to clearance, others jam it out in their garden centers, and the worst just mark down items on the shelf mixed in with normal priced stuff.  Cleveland Wal-mart had one of the better setups that I have seen mostly in small town stores.  They had two full isles dedicated to a mixed jumble of non-clothing clearance items mixed from around the store.  This place seriously was the Lego motherlode.  The above sets were originally $55 to $65 dollars, and I picked them up for $30 to $35 dollars.  This is where I love having a smart phone.  I end up looking up the sets and then determining if it is good enough of a deal for me to pick them up.

They had some of the really huge sets on clearance too, but even though the set might have been $90 originally… it sitting there for $70 is still a good chunk of change and not really worth it for me.  Similarly there are times where the smaller sets are just not good enough for the price.  THey had a Star Wars lego set, that was some sort of a probe droid.  The only reason why I would have really wanted it were for the unique Jedi minifigs.  But the realist in me had to think that really… the probe droid was made almost entirely out of otherwise not so cool pieces.  So while you got a few nice minifigs, you also got a bunch of junk that you would likely never use again for another building.  I am super happy with the sets I managed to pick up, and I am at least halfway to having all three TMNT minifigs.  The other really awesome thing is that I didn’t even notice until I got home that the Star Wars set comes with Cad Bane… who is awesome.

Ding Twenty

Screenshot_20140405_222806 Finally after all of this excitement I managed to get home and actually sit down to play.  At this point I have played 46 hours of game time on my Dragon Knight since launch.  I feel as though every level has been an accomplishment.  At this point I am twenty, and I am pretty damned proud of that fact.  Twenty feels like an actual accomplishment, instead of something you manage to get on your very first day of gameplay.  One of the things that Elder Scrolls Online has managed to do… is to bring back a sense of accomplishment with each and every ding.  In many ways so much of the game feels like a throwback to an earlier time when each and every thing was hard fought.  When you step into a public dungeon, you can feel the Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest roots.  This is the concept I wish I could convey properly to people, because I Think a lot more people would enjoy the game if they saw just how deep and nuanced it is.

Screenshot_20140405_210040 The big event of the night is that we pulled together a group and delved into the Wayrest Sewers dungeon.  So far other than the fact that it takes place in a sewer… and that you are slopping around in a lot of rat filled muck… I have to say this was my favorite to date.  It feels in many ways like the Deadmines of this game, in that there is a really nice fight the rebels style storyline going through it.  I won’t go into much detail, because I don’t want to spoil the storyline, but the quest reward at the end is a really nice heavy armor chest piece.  Additionally a spiffy ring and sword dropped that I managed to talk my healer out of.  That has been my favorite thing about these dungeons, is that folks are more than willing to swap gear around to whoever needs it.  Like I managed to get a really amazing two hander, that I happily swapped over to Waren who is currently using that as his main weapon choice.  As of today… we are exactly a week into the game, and I have to say I am still loving every minute of it.

#Lego #Photography #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #RealLife