real world Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Wandering Osage County

April 6, 2014 by Belghast

Fridge Frenzy

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

In Memorial

March 21, 2014 by Belghast

Bad News

When last I wrote it seemed as things were looking up, and that my grandmother was improving. So I got up yesterday morning thinking this, and as I went through training I kept expecting to get a text giving me a status update on how thing were going. I had just finished eating lunch at Chipotle when I got a text from my father. Now normally my dad is jovial at all times, but this one was rather somber saying only “call me as soon as you can”. When I saw it, my heart sank because I was pretty sure what was going to say. Sure enough when I went outside to call back he said “grandma is no longer with us.”

Things were in fact going as planned yesterday. She was visibly improving, and they had taken the ventilator and feeding tube out. She seemed to be breathing on her own just fine for a bit, but then apparently her blood pressure shot up rapidly and she suffered a heart attack. Apparently there is only roughly an 11% chance that a young and healthy patient is going to make it back from going “code blue”. However when it is someone who is either very sick or very old, it is almost futile. My grandmother unfortunately was both sick and old, and even though they tried to revive her there just wasn’t really a chance.

A Normal Life

After she had passed the doctors said that she was never going to have a normal life again. This had been a fact that apparently no one shared with us, or at least not the right people at the right time. Apparently it was highly unlikely that she would have ever left the hospital and returned to normal life after what she had been though. She would have been in some form of a medical assisted situation from that point on. She had already been tied to an oxygen tank for several years, and as much as she hated that… she would not have tolerated more very well.

I don’t believe they had fully roused her from sedation yet when it happened. So I hope that means she went relatively peacefully. She had been “under” since last Friday evening when they did so to try and force her to rest. As a result the majority of this week she has been sleeping relatively peacefully. I am very thankful that I spent the time with her Friday, holding her hand and letting her lean against me as she struggled to breathe. While she shifted in and out of lucidity, I know there were moments that she knew very much that I was there. I got to spend at least a few moments with my grandmother before they put her under.

Bereavement Special

The thing is… I have been through so many deaths in the family at this point that I end up falling into funeral mode. On the way up to my home town we stopped in at the grocery store to purchase what I jokingly refer to as the “bereavement special”. People bring you all sorts of stuff when there has been a death in the family, but no one ever thinks to bring the most important thing… toilet paper. So when there has been a death in my family or someone else’s I tend to bring a package of basics… because those are almost always the first things to go. So last night I gathered up Toilet Paper, Paper Towels, Napkins, Disposable plates, cups and silverware and a huge box of trash bags.

The hardest thing about last night is realizing that this is likely going to be the last big family get together. My grandmother was the glue on my mothers side of the family. Her house as the focal point of the holidays. When my grandmother on the other side passed away several years ago, we watched as slowly any semblance of a holiday fell apart. While I realize that I will still have the holidays with my parents, gone will be the big gatherings. My generation is really not as close knit as the older ones, and while I get along fine with my cousins… we all have our own lives and things to do. We rarely make the time to get together in any fashion, even though the majority of us all live within an hour of each other. So this funeral may be the last time I see some of them until the next funeral.

Haunting Malaise

In all honesty, it really has not hit me yet. I am so amazingly thankful for my friends and the insane outpouring of support that I have received so far. You guys are all amazing, and I love you all dearly. Right now I think my body is in mental shock, and at some point I will absolutely lose my shit. I am not sure if it will be before or after the funeral, but for my Grandmother on my dads side it started during the funeral and continued on for a few days. Honestly that death was the beginning of a downward emotional spiral, and I am hoping that I can stave that off this time. I was in a really bad place mentally after that death, and I am hoping I can go into this one knowing that is a possibility and keep it from happening.

In part that one was towards the end of this insane streak of deaths in the family, and I think I just couldn’t take any more. There was a period of time where over the course of 5-6 years we lost 14-15 family members. I think I have mostly recovered from that, and I handled the death of my Grandfather okayish, and that has been about two years ago. I guess in a way I am thankful that I saw her last Saturday. At that point they had put in the ventilator and fully sedated her, and she was just lying there peacefully hooked up to all these machines. It was at that point that it entered my mind that it was possible she would never make it out of that bed. I have had the better part of a week to chew on that image in the back of my head. Right now I think I am in a better place to deal with her being gone than I would have on last Friday, when everything was immediate and fresh.

My Childhood

No matter how prepared I am, this is going to hurt a lot. My earliest memories from childhood are from my Grandmothers house. My mom went back to work pretty quickly after my birth, so from infant on I spent every single day with my grandma and grandpa. There are so many stories of me as a child, and at this point I find it hard to sort out the ones I actually remember and the ones that have been recreated in my memory based on the stories of others. I do however remember laying on the floor in front of the television watching Mr. Rogers, and doodling. I remember running around her house with a towel safety pinned around my neck as a cape. I remember my grandfather chasing me around the house with a cattle prod, and me hiding behind grandmas legs for protection. It was years later that I found out that the cattle prod he was using was completely broken, and he was making the buzzing sound with his mouth.

So much of myself I owe to my grandmother. I am pretty certain that my love of games in general comes from her. Every single day, for hours on end she would sit at the table playing solitaire. Sometimes she and I would play candy land together, or trouble… to the point where both boards were completely worn out. She was my caretaker and my constant companion as a little boy. Hell the fact that I don’t use a recipe when I cook is almost certainly directly tied to her. She was one of those rocks that you can place your world on as stable and unchanging. I miss her so much already, not having her around is going to be hell. I’m getting emotional writing this, and I have to go to training yet today so I am going to cut it off here. Thanks again for all the support, I greatly value each of you in my “internet family”.

The Wi-Fi Miracle

January 20, 2014 by Belghast

Aging with Technology

It has been a really weird morning so far, and as a result I am getting an extremely late start getting a blog out today. For starters I was up pretty late last night watching episodes of Lost Girl on Netflix. Neither of us really seemed to want to get out of bed this morning, seeing as for both of us it was a holiday. The original plan was to go up to my mother-in-laws and set up a printer. However there were several other issues that needed to be dealt with at all. She is in her 70s, and the fact that she is on Facebook is pretty damned impressive to me. However technology as a whole is this black box for her, and she seems to be unable to decouple the existence of the internet with the existence of her laptop.

For weeks she has complained that her laptop isn’t working, and in truth it works completely fine. What is at fault however is her internet connection. Quite simply put she doesn’t have one. That is not to say she does not sometimes have one, but internet is not a thing she pays for. Instead years ago I installed a wifi router at my nieces house that lives adjacent to her. The intent was to provide me internet access when I was up there during a family illness so I could continue to work while still being available. By some freak if science the wifi signal was usable over at my wife’s mothers house.

The Wi-Fi Miracle

Using Google maps to measure the approximate distance it is well over 200 ft, and passes through lots of walls between the access point at and the location where my mother-in-law has her desk. It was absolutely amazing that it ever worked, let alone has continued to work until recently with a over seven year old wireless router. But she cannot grasp or does not seem to believe that it is simply an issue of not enough signal strength. At this point it could be so many different things, her new laptop could simply have a weaker wireless card, since good wi-fi coverage is just an assumed fact these days. It could be that she piled more stuff in the back bedrooms, which the signal has to pass through. Or it could simply be that the wireless access point is slowly dying.

Whatever the case she feels there is a grand conspiracy to deny her access to Facebook. In truth I was really not ready to deal with this issue today as I have never attempted to set up a wireless repeater, let alone tried to make two different access points work together. We have a graveyard of old wireless routers laying around the house as we seem to burn through them every couple of years. The last thing I wanted to do was try and install a semi-functional technology in the home of someone completely technologically confused… and end up having to do house calls two hours away. So we rescheduled for next weekend, and this week I need to research some options and get something ordered from Amazon.

Gauntlet Revival

I am not really sure if yesterdays Steampowered Sunday post adequately covered how much I really enjoyed playing Hammerwatch. By the time I stopped to write my blog post, I had played roughly 66 minutes. By the end of the day I had logged well over 4 hours. Shortly after posting my blog entry, I hooked up with 3 other friends and we discovered a bunch of new things about the game. Firstly when doing multi-player you have the ability to add crutches. Since we were still obviously learning the game, we added two really important ones. Firstly we gave ourselves unlimited lives, which allowed us to brute force a few horrible areas of the game by simply respawning back into combat and bashing our faces against a wall until we got through it. Additionally we added hit point regeneration… which was extremely slow… but just enough to help take the edge off things a bit.

With these added bonuses… we were able to push through to the third set of stages and down two world bosses. I have to say the game just keeps getting more enjoyable and trickier. It seems like each of the character classes has some really strong abilities. The paladin that I was playing eventually got the ability to proc a stun on mobs, as well as the ability to deflect missile attacks from an ever widening frontal arc. The warlock began getting some life drain abilities which greatly improved its sustain. While I didn’t pay that close of attention to the Ranger or Wizard they both also seemed to get more and more lethal over time. I have to say sale or no, this game is very much worth picking up. The above image if from a really cool Gauntlet bonus level that we unlocked. So much nostalgia. so many feels.