real life

Health Update: On A Good Path

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For a post that I did not share publicly… I am somewhat shocked by how much traction my Wednesday post managed to get. Sometimes, I forget how many of you will read this blog regardless of what I do to promote it. I appreciate all the people who reached out to me in private… and there were so damned many of you. As a result, I thought it was probably a good idea to talk a bit about the situation I found myself in and what the resolution is looking like thus far. Yesterday I had my follow-up visit with my primary care provider, and essentially I now join the legion of folks on a daily blood pressure medication. I also did not fully realize how much it was impacting my life until after being medicated. There were a lot of things that I had just chalked up to getting older… that seemed to have magically gone away within roughly two hours of taking the meds for the first time. For literally a decade or more… I have dealt with pretty much a constant headache. I even went so far as to have assorted tests trying to figure out what was causing this. I tried migraine medication even and it never really seemed to help so I kinda of just assumed it was something that I would have to live with. Just doing normal stuff would make me out of breath sometimes… especially bending over for long periods of time… which I just assumed was my sedentary nature and being as big as I was… and also just a sign of getting older. I would have dizzy spells and was a bit wobbly on my feet, which I just assumed was more wear and tear on my body from being rather large. Additionally, everything sorta ached all of the time and I just didn’t really seem to have any energy. This had been the background noise of my life and it is shocking how much you can get used to it and just assume it is normal. Legitimately by the end of yesterday… almost all of this went away. I am more clear-headed, nothing hurts anywhere near as bad as it did… and my headache essentially disappeared. This is trite but it legitimately feels a bit like I am a new person. So I said this the other day but when I was in the ER my blood pressure was 210/110 and even after sitting there for a few hours it was only down to 180/95. In the Doctor’s office yesterday it was 165/90, and then two hours after taking my new blood pressure medication it was down to 130/80 by yesterday evening I took it again and it was down to 104/70. I am shocked that it worked that quickly… and caused such a wild result. I am partially kicking myself for not taking all of these little things more seriously and secondly wondering just how close I was to having a stroke. That prospect seems all the more scary in the rearview mirror after seeing how radical the impact of being medicated seems to have been. I think on some level this latest round of crisis was brought on by some events happening in my life. A bunch of stressful situations have collided at once to push me beyond my normal limits. I spent some time venting about it to a friend yesterday, and once that dam cracked… a deluge came rushing out about all of the effects it has had on me. I think on some level I had not even realized fully the toll it had on me. So all of this… the pathological, the emotional, and the mental wear… seemed to just culminate in a medical crisis. I guess I am thankful that per the doctors and my otherwise clean bill of health… I did not seem to do permanent damage as of yet. I am shocked that was the case though given how much I had seemingly stressed my systems. The hardest thing right now for me to get used to… is the absence of all of the things I was just dealing with. I’ve had a constant headache living in the back of my skull for longer than I can remember… maybe even for the better part of two decades. I’ve also just dealt with subtle aches and pains that I assumed were just the toll of the poor shape that I am in and carrying around as much weight as I do. But with all of that gone or at least lessened to a point where it does not even feel like it exists anymore… it is just surreal. I keep expecting reactions from my body to the things I am doing that are no longer there. It will take some getting used to everything and developing a new baseline. Anyways! Thanks for everyone sticking with me through this and checking in on me. It meant a lot. The post Health Update: On A Good Path appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Precarious Potty

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Good morning friends. I had a bit of a stressful weekend. So we have a bathroom adjoining our main bedroom and for a while now the toilet has been a bit wobbly. Saturday morning I noticed that it was more wobbly than normal. I thought maybe the bolt just needed to be tightened a thing that I could in theory do for myself because I have the barest modicum of mechanical aptitude. When I reached down to pop the plastic cap off that covered the bolt on the right side… the entire apparatus including the head of the bolt came off in my hand. The bolts themselves were just corroded and rusted messes and seemingly disintegrated. Like I had not put any effort into it… I could have just brushed it lightly aside and had it come toppling off the base. Turns out that the same thing was happening on the left side and essentially the toilet was not securely bolted to the floor anymore. Thankfully there was no leak that I could find… but in a severe panic, I called the plumber who was able to work us in that afternoon. However, the meant for the entire day the arrival of the plumber became the “main character” of that day. I am thankful that they were able to work us in but it also sort of wrecks the momentum of the day, but anything is better than a continued “precarious potty”. Everything is fixed now and the toilet is “strongk”, but the plumber seems to have used quite possibly the slickest substance on the planet when they cleaned up their work area. I have no clue what exactly they used but it had hints of Orange Oil and Anomia and feels like the floors have been permanently coated with Teflon. Despite several attempts to mop the nonsense away… we are having to cautiously tiptoe into the bathroom like we are walking on a sheet of ice so that is less than enjoyable. We did thankfully have a roll of the clingy rubber rug underlayment that we put under our bathmat so there is at least one section of the floor that is firmly anchored for when we step out of the shower.
Other than this I spent a good chunk of my time not worrying about the bathroom playing Baldur’s Gate III. I had hopes of being able to complete this game prior to the launch of the Affliction League in Path of Exile on Friday. I am no longer under this illusion because last night I finished up Act II. I realize that technically I only have a single act to go… but every act seems to get longer than the previous one. I screwed up Act II, but am mostly fine with this. Apparently, I was not spending enough time talking to Halsin and as a result, missed a critical quest chain that was required to buy off his loyalty. So basically he is no longer in my camp because he is sticking behind in the Act II area for “nature reasons”. So I am attempting to say this in the least spoilery method possible but… maybe talk to Halsin a lot so you will have a clue what this quest is and do it before leaving the Shadowlands. Also also… Owlbear Cub and Scratch are pure beyond words. I sorta wish “Owlbear Cub” had a proper name though.
I’ve continued to play a little bit of Final Fantasy XIV each day and am slowly chipping away at my jobs leveling them. I am working on Red Mage currently, and honestly… it kinda feels bad to play it in PVP. Essentially each day I have been doing a round of Elephant-Friend dailies and the Frontline roulette. This combined adds up to roughly a level, meaning that I enjoy playing a tiny bit of the game but not so much that it begins to feel bogged down. Essentially it takes me about 10 days to level a character from 80 to 90 and feels like I am making some progress. I am not really taking a logical approach to leveling, and more so I am leveling whatever characters that do not have broken gear profiles. I realize this is lazy… but I don’t want to figure out WHY the gear profiles are broken and instead just want to pop in and do my daily nonsense before getting back out and moving on with other things.
Similarly, I have been popping into Guild Wars 2 on a daily basis and playing a bit of the expansion content, and doing whatever it takes to knock out my “wizard chores” aka Astral whatever dailies. One thing that I want more than anything… is for the dumb Krait monument in my Home instance to be able to withdraw from my bank. It sucks trying to remember to pull out some Quartz crystals before I do my home instance farm for the day. I realize that a lot of the older systems of this game are prodigiously hard to update… but there are times I daydream about getting a job for Arena.net just so I can fix some of these things. The game is so fucking close to absolute greatness at times… that if you pushed a few kludgy bits out of the way it would really shine for all the world to see. Friction can be good, but the sort of friction that Guild Wars 2 has… is the unfortunate friction of “tech debt”.
Lastly I did pop back into Path of Exile since Righteous Fire may be a dead spec going forward… which will mean I have three basically useless characters from three different leagues. I had never run a simulacrum before now, and the other day Kodra mentioned that he was able to get to wave 22 and I wanted to see how far Righteous Fire could get. Essentially I gave up after wave 29. I was not going to die… but also Kosis was going to take like 20 minutes to kill and I got tired of waiting. I am certain that if I was not impatient… I could have probably cleared wave 30 because I was more than capable of surviving the incoming damage. It just took so long to rip through Kosis’s constantly regenerating energy shield and begin to whittle him down. I am still holding out some hopium that maybe there is an alternate quality version of Righteous Fire that will work like the previous one did. I don’t really want to play an Inquisitor going forward and would prefer to keep playing Juggernaut. I am really hoping that we get the big dump of information that includes all of the alternate versions of gems. I could legitimately see them favoring the edge case for Righteous Fire and wanting to push more players toward it, but I feel like they really need to keep the current version around in some form rather than decimating the best-documented build in the entire game. For the moment though I am really leaning towards Explosive Arrow Champion and maybe muling a ranger just to make it easier to start with a bow and go Lightning Arrow until the switch. The post Precarious Potty appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Old Men Warring

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Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.
I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.
I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.
This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things. The post Old Men Warring appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.