Cold Days
This weekend was extremely interesting. Firstly from the whole not blogging standpoint… I guess maybe it is getting a bit easier and that scares me. Secondly was the travel… which meant I spent a lot of Friday and Sunday behind the wheel. I think maybe I found a hack around this process that makes it easier for me… but unfortunately significantly harder for my wife. Over the course of the two days of driving I used it to catch up on the Harry Dresden series… or at least get closer to caught up. I had not read Cold Days or Skin Game, and on this particular trip I listened my way through the Cold Days audio book via the audible app. I have to say there are a bunch of awesome things about how the app works. Anytime I would flip the car over to Bluetooth audio it would magically start back up the app from where I left off. This made the whole stopping the audio for a pit stop effortless because as soon as I killed the car it paused the book, and upon coming back in I just had to fire the car back up and flip the audio mood to get back going. It even seemed to do a small bit of rollback which was useful as well for helping get back into the process.
Having a book to listen to made most of the drive fly by with me being able to take long stretches of road without really noticing it. This is absolutely a good thing given that the route we chose to get to St Louis was a crazy long one. Google kept trying to route us around accidents Friday afternoon, so the end result took us to Kansas City and then over to St Louis and wound up being something silly like nine hours on the road including the food stops and such. The drive home however seemed just as long with us getting home around midnight Sunday evening. However it overall worked its magic like we hoped it would and allowed me to spend two nights in my own bed to recharge and be ready for coming back to work today. I am one of those people that needs a day to chill before going back to work after a long trip. There is just so much of that process that is draining to me. The biggest take away from the weekend however is that we really need to not let seven years pass this time before making a trip up to St Louis to see our friends again.
As far as what we did on the trip… we ate way too much food at a whole bunch of different places. St Louis apparently recently got an Ikea and since we don’t have one of those anywhere near us we had to make a pilgrimage. There were a bunch of things we were looking for and wound up loading up a bag full of little things here and there. We went to the Microcenter and I managed not to walk away with anything, even thought I drooled heavily at the presence of the Nvidia GTX 1080 cards they were showcasing. I really want one, but if I consider getting one… I am going to wait a bit. I’ve heard that the reference models have some significant issues with thermal throttling. Generally speaking with any video card release it is better to wait for the second batch of cards to release with the awesome non-reference coolers like the Asus Strix or MSI lines. We also hit up Trader Joes just because it was convenient, even though we do now officially have them. We tried out the Cookie Butter that everyone has been raving about, and while it is good… I am not sure if it is the sort of thing I would ever make a trip to go get. I did pick up something called Bacon Jam… which tastes like a jam… with bits of Bacon in it. Sounds nasty, but is actually shockingly good on crackers. At their half priced books, I managed to find the treasure pictured above. For those that have no clue what it is… it is a Rifts system book… not published by Palladium. It came out sometime in the early 90s and eventually it seems like the license was revoked because I think there is only this one print run. Super limited number of books were published and the system isn’t that good… its just more of a novelty. I had to pick it up because at $8 I figured that was a steal even though I already have a copy somewhere.
Spindle Days
Once upon a time I had reached a place in Destiny where I simply was not playing it much. I had several months of bliss with the launch of The Taken King, but once my friends faded away from the game I was left with the uphill grind to try and get over 300 light… and failing to do it. One of the items we tried several times to get was the Black Spindle, and if you have read my blog for very long you will have known about my frustrations on past attempts. What you might not know is that the Black Spindle is essentially the reason why so many different things have transpired in game. Squirrel and I have been friends and guildies for years now, having played lots of games together in the past. Several months ago on a Black Spindle day he courted me to attempt to get it. So I spent time and got to know his friend Jex in the process, and even though we failed to get it in the end… we had a lot of fun doing so. It was through these two that I was introduced to the Axioma Clan, a group that has helped me immensely through me learning the ropes of modern Destiny. It was the Black Spindle that ultimately lead me to take up this banner but it continued to elude me. Every time the Black Spindle was available, either I couldn’t play… or we seemed to be unable to get the resources to make it happen.
Yesterday I had no real intentions of doing anything other than chilling on the sofa, and playing some Final Fantasy XIV. However Squirrel and Jex pinged me over twitter to see if I was around… or more so they thought that I was still on my trip. As it turned out we were able to get a group together and make it happen. After a few screw-ups, largely from me not having touched a controller in about a week… we managed to get through the ship and down all of the taken mobs with about 30 seconds left. So finally I had the damned spindle in my inventory, and happened to have a 335 hereafter ready and waiting to infuse into it. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me, to finally do this with the group that helped get me back into the game. It was Squirrel and Jex who’s siren song coaxed me back into Destiny with the promise of candy, and ultimately it was that same group that won the day and got the spindle. That said I cannot thank Axioma clan and our leader Wet enough for giving me a place to hang my hat and introducing me to so many other opportunities. Here I am sitting at 335 light and there is no way that could have happened without the clan as a whole. The frustrating part is that I often times cannot reliably join in clan Shenanigans on a regular basis, even thought I wish I could. Most of the activities happen after 9pm my time… and since I get up at 5:30 in the morning for work I just can’t handle many late nights during the week. I tried it for several weeks, falling back into the habit of getting to bed after midnight, and it destroyed my ability to function. I am hoping that once the time shifts once again I can get back to regularly joining in. It might not seem like much but that hour makes all the difference in the world. Until then I will have to keep joining in when I think I can handle having a late night.