More Flora
It feels really strange to follow up yesterdays post. Those were a bunch of things that I felt like I needed to get out there, and to be honest about the doubt that I had been struggling with. As it stands right now I am for certain taking a break over Memorial Day weekend rather than either pre-writing posts or arranging for guest posts. I am also contemplating starting to make weekends optional. Sunday is really the day that becomes madness for me because I am also scurrying around that morning trying to wrap up the various stuff required for posting an episode of aggrochat. As far as this weekend, it was honestly one without a ton of gaming. Instead I spent a large amount of time hanging out in the backyard. Scope creep is a term we use in development when a project has gone beyond its boundaries in the number of features the user is requesting. Our backyard has long since entered scope creep territory and that’s okay. The original goal was just to make it more livable, and this has involved a whole sequence of smaller steps leading up to where we are today. Once again I took a panorama of the progress, and you can see the larger version here.
We have now kept the original batch of flowers alive and actually thriving for two weeks now… so of course we doubled down on the proposition. We spent a bit of Saturday afternoon tracking down more of the shepherds hooks so that we could have matching ones to the ones we had picked up at ALDI a few weeks back. The other night while walking with a friend, my wife saw a hanging basket at a near by pop up nursery that she really liked. We also happened to have a coupon from that same pop-up that if we spent $20 we could get a free hanging basket, so the end result is us adopting the purple, yellow and white hanging baskets and adding them to my “flower babies” as I have taken to calling them. The only big things left are to wait on the grass to finish filling in where the weed treatments left barren patches… and so far it has started. Then there is of course the idea kicking around about replacing the table we have with something that sits a little lower to the ground and that we could use our pseudo-Adirondack chairs with. Then I am contemplating getting another of the umbrellas we found on sale to go in a post on the far deck side of the pool to add a little shade there from within the pool. Like I said…. scope creep abounds.
The most interesting piece of scope creep over the last week however is the fact that we have entered the realm of bird stewardship. I’ve not been able to take a great shot of them but we have soooo many birds. In the panoramic shot you can see on the right side that I have a feeder hanging in among the tree that is really an overgrown hedge. I’ve begun feeding fairly regularly, a first a blend from the Audubon soceity and later a bulk blend we got from Sam’s that fairly closely matched the nutritional mix of the first one. Sunday morning while watering the flowers I filled the feeder up to roughly the halfway mark because it was ultimately what was left in the 40 pound bag after dumping the rest into a tightly sealed container. This was at roughly 9 am… by the time we were out in the yard after my wife got home from church around 11 am… the feeder was completely empty again. There have been times I have counted a dozen tiny sparrows feeding at the same time, with a bunch of cardinals, bluejays, and various sundry other birds that I cannot yet identify roaming around. We have a couple that look like doves of some sort, and another couple that look like pidgeons. Basically the entire time we have lived here I have wanted birds to hang out in the backyard and in the evenings I have been able to watch the baby sparrows hop and play around on the deck. Unfortunately they are all pretty skittish at the moment, except for the Robins… they seem more than happy to roam within close distance of us looking for worms. In any case… this is the non-gaming activity that is taking up a good chunk of my time. On the weekends and evenings we tend to eat outdoors hanging out in our rockers watching the flora and fauna. Yup… I am officially old, but not minding a minute of it.
Surprising Whim
Most of my weekend gaming was spent in Diablo 3, doing various things… and largely without purpose. I managed to get my stash tab on Friday, and from this point on everything else is gravy in Season 6. For awhile now even before the season, Diablo was the game I played when I didn’t know what else to play… and I spent a huge chunk of the weekend not knowing what else to play. Normally Destiny would fill this niche but I didn’t really want to hang out upstairs when the couch was so damned comfy. During the weekend I found out that my good friends Chestnut and Chaide from Wildstar have decided to re-up World of Warcraft, and the glory that is our collective community managed to recruit them to hang out on Argent Dawn Alliance with us. I ended up logging in to do some invites last night and wound up sticking around and playing my Druid. There was a part of me that thought… wouldn’t it be glorious if I could somehow ride into Legion with a full army of level 100 characters. The actual leveling game of World of Warcraft is something that I have enjoyed greatly… it is just the Garrison busywork that ends up getting me down and making me no longer want to play.
So the idea is simple… if I can focus heavily on leveling and or gearing my characters I might be able to get back into the game for a bit. While watching my Sunday night shows, I managed to push from 91 to 93 and make a big dent in Shadowmoon Valley. Normally speaking I take this abbreviated path around Draenor, jumping each time a new zone opens up to me. This time around however I think I am going to just focus on the questing, because that is the thing that seems to be able to hold my focus even when the rush to end game doesn’t. I mean with this character I am not pushing to get anywhere, and Hellfire Citadel feels stifling at the moment so I am in no rush to get back there with LFR. As it stands I have my Druid, Priest, Rogue, Mage, Warlock and Monk to level… and I am sure that this current burst of interest in World of Warcraft won’t probably sustain my way through all of them, but I might be able to at least springboard this into a renewed interest in MMOs as a whole. The absolute hardest for me is going to be the Mage because… really I could care less about finger wigglers and the least is always the pure finger wigglers. I can pretend the Discipline Priest is a cloth tank, and I can focus on the awesome demon pets on the Warlock. However with that mage… all I am left with is the fact that I am slinging spells which never really feels amazing. Anyways who knows how long I will be around for, but I enjoyed myself last night.
