Kenzie.exe is hibernating
This morning is one of those mornings when I am not exactly sure what to write about, so as a result I figured I would give an update on Kenzie. Some weeks back in a stress filled post I talked about her being diagnosed with diabetes. In the time since then we have begun an insulin regiment in the morning and evening and are going back for another round of tests on Friday morning. The good news is that the insulin has seemingly halted the weight loss, and she may have gained some back but I am not sure if I am imagining that or not. The bad news is that due to some miscommunications the Vet was not able to successfully complete a glucose curve last week and we have to reattempt it this Friday.
A very tiny shoulder mounted Kenzie
Another positive however is that because she has been with me since a kitten, she pretty much will tolerate me doing anything that needs to happen. That is not to say that she does not protest furiously when I do have to poke her with a needle, but she more or less forgives me immediately. I am so thankful that if I were to have any cat come down with this disease… that it is Kenzie, because there is no way in hell that I could have given twice a day shots to Mollie. I can barely even pick her up without her freaking the hell out. Kenzie on the other hand I can carry around on my shoulder indefinitely because I have done so since she was super tiny. Above is photo evidence of this era when she would sit on my shoulder and watch me game.
While not super evident by the fact that I am only level 50… I have been spending a lot of time playing Diablo III on the Switch. This has recently replaced Dragalia Lost as my before sleep game that I am playing while laying down in bed. Last night I was not feeling super great and wound up going to bed around 9 pm and then hanging out and playing D3 until the news came on. I am mostly spending my time going through bounties, and I doubt that I will complete the seasons journey on console… but it does give me something to work towards. Seeing how freaking brutal Kolrath was I opted to play as a Barbarian, and I like the female Barb way better than the male one.
Another thing that has been going on recently is that I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. I opted to start in creative mode and started piddling around on a giant castle project. I started work on this as some point during Saturday and this is around the time of recording the podcast Saturday night. You can see that I started putting up a giant wall but hadn’t made much progress in actually hollowing anything out. I find the whole process relaxing as hell and lately I have been in this weird funk of not really knowing what to play. I could be finishing up Outer Worlds and I could also be finishing up Jedi Fallen Order, but instead I have spent my time building a castle.
This screenshot is from this morning and hopefully shows off some of the scale of this monstrosity. Inside there are four levels worth of construction, and the “ground floor” enters into what is effectively the 3rd floor going up, with two floors below the ground. I am not entirely certain what I am going to do with the 1st and 2nd floor as of yet, but I think the next big project is to build essentially a “keep” on top of the peak that you can see on the right side of the walled city area.
Since I have been building on creative mode, I have not been super concerned with torching things off and as a result I have a basement full of monsters that have spawned in. This is the second floor or Basement 1 depending on how you think about it, and I need to sort out what I have planned for down here. My general idea was that the ground floor would be shops and this floor would be small houses/apartments and maybe the same for the lowest floor, but ritzier houses since everything floats out over a giant underground lake of sorts. I want to build some other buildings out along the countryside as well, because there would be an assemblage of housing NEAR the walled city but not quite in it as well. Maybe build up a walled farm or two that are protected to feed resources into the city.
I am back playing the Java version of Minecraft because for a bit I kicked around starting a server in my home for this map. I also really miss the minimap addon whenever I am playing on the Windows 10 client. Ultimately this is sorta what I do when I am playing the game. I invent civilizations and build the structures that they would have used. The funny thing is… once the process is over I do absolutely nothing with the end product and often times just discard the maps after having spent hundreds of hours working on them. All that ultimately remains is a series of screenshots to prove that I did the thing.
This is Kenzie. In one of the yesterday’s photos she was the one laying on my legs while Allie was laying beside me. She is my crazy monkey girl and is currently screaming at me to throw a hairband for her to fetch while I am typing this. Along with everything I talked about yesterday, we got some bad news about Kenzie recently as well. It turns out she is Diabetic and after taking a second round of bloodwork to verify it… we will have to very soon begin giving her insulin shots every morning and evening. Insulin is nonsensically expensive and while an injection pen is in theory going to last us a good while with Kenzie, I am now deeply concerned about the expense for those who have to take way more doses.
I was at first appalled when the vet said that in a lot of cases folks end up putting the animal down when they have diabetes. I could never consider something like that with Kenzie, but when the cost of upkeep is going to add one to three hundred dollars a month depending on severity I guess I can see how that would put folks in a really tough spot. I am thankful that we will be able to weather the burden and that our Vet did a ton of legwork for us and found the cheapest place for insulin pens and needles and we just had to then go acquire them. At some point this weekend we will be taking her into the Vet to be taught how to deliver the shots correctly, and then this gets added to my daily routine.
I am also thankful that Kenzie takes meds well and will pretty much tolerate us doing anything. I hope that streak continues when that “anything” is poking her with a needle twice a day. She has finally stopped screaming and is laying down beside me now on the box that a PC Tower Case came in. I was so slow getting my system transferred over into it that she claimed the box as her domain, giving her a way to be close to me while I sit in my office chair. When I finally swapped over to the new case, I put the old case in the box and taped it back shut so she would continue to have her own personal perch. For the longest time she laid beside me on my desk, and there is a blanket sitting there still for that purpose… but she prefers the cardboard box.
Now we get on to the title of this post that is both figurative and literal. We are going through a nonsensical amount of rain right now and coming home from the store yesterday I got completely drenched, along with the four sacks of groceries I was carrying. When I got everything into the kitchen I went back into the living room to take off my jacket and lay it up to dry when I noticed a bunch of water on the coffee table. I had a moment where I was trying to figure out if I accidentally sat the wet sacks down on the table, or if it was something else. Then while trying to figure this out I heard a distinct drip coming from the rafter above the table. We have a very slow leak and it has happened once or twice before, generally speaking when the rain is blowing horizontally due to the wind. So that is another thing on the list that will have to be dealt with as we get someone to come out and look it over. I am hoping it is just a case of the flashing pulling up or something like that.
Tonight however… I am hoping to get some relaxation in the form of mindless Diablo 3 grinding. It is the opening of a new season and with it comes something I have never done before. I have a plethora of Demon Hunters, Crusaders, Barbarians and Necromancers… but I have never before gotten a Wizard or a Witch Doctor to 70. Grace confirmed that the Haedrigs set this time is a good one for Wizards and as a result I am planning on pushing myself well out of my comfort zone and running up a finger wiggler. If this works I might even knock out the Witch Doctor next season.
There is just something relaxing about our quarterly ritual of grinding up fresh characters in Diablo 3. Given all of the nonsense happening right now in my life I really need something peaceful and relaxing. I’ve had pretty fraught evenings of late where I never could quite settle into playing anything in particular. So I am looking forward to having a purpose tonight.
Lastly before I close things out. I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their comments yesterday. They really do mean a lot even though I told you that you didn’t have to make them. I mean I knew that my admonishment would do nothing, but I also sorta felt like I needed to let people off the hook. We all have a lot of things that we are dealing with and my burden is by no means more significant than anyone else. That said I really do appreciate the constant reminder that I have a bunch of people out there that care about me.
Last night was effectively a repeat of Monday, but seemingly with more activity going on. I lost track of the number of Tornado warnings we were under at various points during the evening. The above photo is not mine but it is of a tornado that formed in my town. I quite possibly did the most Oklahoman thing ever and stood out on the front porch watching it happen. Before you chide me for not being safe… the storm cell was headed the opposite direction and at this point it was several miles away. Now this is not the first Tornado I have watched, but there is something mesmerizing about the process of watching it. It isn’t like the movies… the clouds feel like they are moving impossibly slowly as a plume of clouds begins to snake down towards the ground. In truth they are moving insanely fast but you just happen to be watching something massive occurring and the scale throws off any gauge of speed.
While we spent the night watching out for storms… the more insidious concern is the fact that we are having significant flooding. Thankfully where I live specifically… there isn’t much of a chance of flooding as I live outside of even what is the 500 year estimate floodplain. That said it is making travel around the area pretty rough as several of the roads that are normally completely safe to take are under water. Essentially we are in a rough spot as a state because all of the dams in this area are beyond safe capacity… meaning they are having to release way more water than they normally would. Effectively I think we are going to be past the 100 year floodplain estimates and will be setting ourselves up for the levels we have not seen since the “great flood” of 1986.
One of the things that you don’t expect in Oklahoma is the fact that we have the largest inland shipping port, and with it a huge navigational system. To add another monkey wrench into the works, last night two barges loaded with stuff broke free of their moorings and were heading towards one of the lock gates. The tugs were not available to try and round them up, because they had already rounded up two other barges that broke free earlier. So the concern is that if they slammed into the dam that is part of the lock system, and if it were to break… an entire town would effectively be wiped off the map not to mention other less immediate ramifications. For the time being however they appear to be hung up on some rocks and are still tied to each other… so folks are scrambling to try and anchor them in some more permanent fashion. Regardless the town in question has been evacuated in case things go south.
Basically right now we are living in a really weird time, and as such my game time has suffered. What you are getting from me instead in the meantime is a lot of random commentary about my life. I want to emphasize that I personally am safe and that my home is safe. The world around me however is less so… and it is interesting to be a spectator to all of the calamity going on around me. The area will most certainly be dealing with the ramifications going forward for a long time. I did however get some time to briefly play a bit of Necromancer in Elder Scrolls Online… and I have to say that the new game experience is a little weird. I am used to having the entire skill tree available to me from the start, and it seems like you only get access to something once you have used it? I didn’t get Two Handed Weapons for example until I had killed some stuff with one, at which point the skills opened up.
I still more or less plan on trying to play a Necromancer tank, but I probably should have gone through the tutorial to at least get some starter weapons. All I have found thus far in Elsweyr is a Two Handed Sword so I am using that for the moment. It feels really weird to be starved for skill points… seeing as on my main I have a stack of them that are sitting unspent. I figured a Dark Elf was probably the most likely to be a necromancer, so I went with that and with the scarred appearance. I hope to spend more time playing this when I am not dodging twisters. We were going to go buy flowers this weekend… but the Nursery is now sitting completely underwater so that won’t be happening. Memorial Day is going to be an odd one this year.
I made an attempt to write this post earlier… but my internet at home seemed to be having issues due to the storm and WordPress ate the entire thing (even though I thought it had saved a draft… not sure what I think of the latest version).
The last twenty four hours have been exceptionally strange to live through. First you have to understand that I have lived in the area known as “Tornado Alley” for my entire life, growing up an hour north of Tulsa and living in the Tulsa area since 1999. We largely take Tornados with a grain of salt, and while most of the cells that do pass overhead produce a Tornado at some point… the likelihood that you are going to get hit seems fairly small in the grand scheme of things and the prep work you go into seems often times for naught.
Yesterday however was a different beast entirely from what we are used to. We had been hearing for days that we were going to get bad storms… but given that it is May in Oklahoma that is effectively like telling me the sky is blue. What made us really take notice is when several of the school districts decided to preemptively cancel class. On the same day in 2013 a EF5 Tornado hit Moore Oklahoma and killed 24 and injured 212… including directly hitting the Plaza Towers Elementary School. When the weather folks tell you that there will be multiple major storm cells throughout the day… I guess we have learned the lesson the hard way to take note.
My wife got out a little early and I left right at 4, which allowed me to get a couple of errands done before making it home before anything major had started. My wife scrambled around and gathered all of our important stuff and some basic supplies and packed them into a rolling carry-on style duffle bag, sticking in in our “hidey hole”. The rules of shelter are basically that you need to get to a room on the lowest level of the home with no exterior walls. The problem with our house is the only place that fits these requirements that you can actually get human beings into… is the laundry room. So we created a little makeshift pantry of sorts on top of the washing machine and prepared for the worst.
There were a few of what I would call close calls, as in a storm that had produced Tornados passed within 10 miles of the house. One of which was close enough to trigger the sirens… at which point we went to the laundry room to ride it out, at least until the news that was blaring in both the livingroom and the bedroom gave us an updated trajectory. That is the thing about Tornados… they tend to behave in a fairly predictable manor. That is not to say that you should not respect every single one of them… but there are certain areas that get hit more than others. Often times the storm turns right before it gets to where I live and passes a little south of us… as did the two cases above.
The double whammy however is that as we were getting ready this morning… the news was projecting a Tornado headed directly for our house. It was serious enough that the Tornado Sirens blew seven separate times during the course of the thirty minutes it took to clear us. I am uncertain if there is any damage, but I am guessing it passed by the outskirts of my town. When it hit Tulsa International Airport however the storm turned… much like the others had and passed just south of us… by about five miles. What it largely caused is a delay in me getting ready and blogging… but we did hide out in the laundry room for a bit to make doubly sure we were safe.
Today I am sorta living in a permanent state of stupor. When you live in this region you do this thing when you finally surrender and decide you are perfectly okay with death so long as you get some sleep in the process. I finally reached that point around 10:30-11 pm and I have no clue when my wife fell asleep, but we left the television blaring in the thought that if something major was about to happen we could jump up and get into our shelter quick enough. I changed into night clothing, but I think my wife more or less slept in the clothing she had been all night long. You don’t exactly sleep soundly when you fall asleep in that state.
As far as gaming goes I spent the majority of the night playing Diablo 3 in little doses, but did manage to group up with my friend Grace during part of it. My lack of attention to detail and the fact that I am still under her level a bit… meant I largely spent the night dying a lot. That said I knocked out a few steps in the seasons journey and managed to gather up a few pieces of gear. I am one step away from completing Slayer… but that step requires me to do rounds of bounties until I gather enough crafting bits to cube a piece of jewelry. The challenge there however is that as the night went on I kept getting disconnected making a round of bounties impossible to complete.
I’ve decided that my favorite part of this season and the patch that came with it is the fact that you can now peek ahead in game to what is needed by steps in the seasons journey you have not yet reached. Previously you had to keep open a wiki and keep alt tabbing back and forth to see what you could be working on while you were waiting on something else that you could not necessarily complete at that moment. I really want the fiery cosmic bat wings that come from finishing ALL of the seasons journey steps, so I have a feeling over the coming weeks I will be spending a lot of time playing Diablo 3.
