I started playing PlugY (a Diablo 2 "unofficial" content patch) and really getting into hell difficulty. I was doing countess runs, because I'm even too pitiful to do pits on players 1. Anyway, Last night Diablo clone spawns, and I'm curious. So I check it out. I end up planning for like 45 minutes what gear I have,m what runes I can afford to combine...all that that. I beat him! That was last night.

Well, what makes this post isn't that. It's that I'm just sitting in town, today, waiting for my roommate and friend to join the game after she's done eating dinner (after work). Well, sure enough, Diablo clone comes back, and I'm like O_o "really?" and OF COURSE Anne wants to see it. We totally forget she can join, as right then she was in spectator mode. Again, I use the same plan, I end up feeling like I just went to a sleazy payday loan place in act 1 trying to pawn off anything I can to get my merc rezzed. I must remind you all, I'm level 82. I have SOME good gear, but not much. It's SUPPOSED to be done like level 90...but anyway, we can't resist.

I run down to the dregs and tell Anne "I gotta throw in the towel. I just can't afford to pawn off the rest of my stuff." I mean, I sold gems and shhhh to Akara I was so on point to SHOW Anne I could do it. Then I'm like, off handed "I wish there was some way I could do this. I wish you could join the game" then I looked up, and remembered. I'm in a LAN! I STARTED the game to item gift her stuff.

Anyway, we beat him. Through grit and MUCH crushing blow and DEATH...and a playlist of fight songs. But we beat it,m andf right then! The Chiefs win the superbowl (at least I <>think</i> they did) and fireworks go off. I couldn't care less, but I don't...oh! another firework! Anyway....I don't begrudge people who are sports fans, as stated before, I loved that with Tetris. I live in Johnson County Kansas, so yeah, Chiefs winning the super bowl (???) is going to turn Anne's school and work into a PTO. Which is sweet! I just thought it epic that the fireworks went off, RIGHT, after I beat Diablo (again) lmao. For those who aren't familiar, I mean the Realms event Diablo; not typical Chaos Sanctuary. xD Okay? Just in case you haven't played since it was in patch....oh god...like ywhat 17 years ago?! This is suped up version of Diablo. It's how you get a unique charm. Just saying, it wasn't just hell Diablo. Anyway...

So...it's been a while.  About time someone posted something here again, even if it's a stupid-simple thing...

A friend of mine does event entertainment production.  That is, event planners contact her to book entertainment of various sorts.  She's been having, understandably, a pretty lean year.  I usually help out with some of the events...in some cases, I'm even part of the entertainment...but with no events happening, I haven't gotten to play a whole lot this summer.

Tonight was the first event I've worked in ages.  And it was...kinda weird, actually.  A charity group set up in a Parade-of-Homes house and...just invited people, I guess.  There was no real coherent theme to anything.  It was a HUGE house...three stories, any one of which was probably four times larger than my entire apartment PLUS the storage space there PLUS the storage space I'm renting.  There was one room up on the second floor that was a Cinderella bedroom.  The Rec Room (adjacent to the in-home theater) had a Star Wars themed mural painted on one wall.  They had Cinderella upstairs with her fairy godmother.  There was also an area company that brought animals to events for photo ops (didn't see what they brought...probably puppies or something...)  I was dressed as an X-Wing pilot, together with Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper, in the rec room.  All we did was stand there and take pictures with people.  We had someone dressed as Moana that was roaming the ground floor (upstairs from us) and outside, with another company that brought snakes and lizards and other creepy-crawlies for photo ops (that guy, I actually know...he's done booth at local cons, and I have some pretty cool pictures of me in various costumes with five or six huge snakes draped around my neck...)  And at the end of the night, they had a Polynesian fire-dancer and a fire-breather.  Like I said, no real theme...just a chance for people to wander around an insanely large house with all kinds of cool stuff in it, and take pictures.

But it felt so refreshingly normal, for just a few hours...

I love a good epistolary, and I just read a nice one.

Dang, people need to find more joy in their lives... October of last year?!

Okay, here's something more current. :)

I've been healing up after a surgery early this month. I'm back up to lifting - as of tonight! - 50 pounds. (I unloaded a 50 pound bag of grain, yay!) I also had to get more regular feed for my horses today. Those are 80 pound bags. I still can't lift that much, but I can drag it. So I got 10 bags at the mill, figuring I'd have to leave half in my truck and keep it tarped... but it turns out my tailgate is 4 bags high, so it wasn't that much harder to drag that 5th bag up onto the 4th. Two stacks of five, and I've unloaded all my feed myself! Yay!

I find it uncomfortable to ask for help in providing basic care for my animals on any kind of a long-term basis, so being able to do the work myself is important. :)

When Good is normal, it is sometimes easy not to appreciate it, till is isn't.

In reply to Fyrerain (msg # 854):

I feel your pain. Going in for shoulder surgery next week. Fortunately, our mill only does 50 pound bags of feed (that's horses, dogs, chickens, etc) so I've been handling that when I must but I'm not supposed to lift over 20 pounds. Now, 2 to 4 weeks in a sling and 4 to 8 weeks recovery... gotta ask for help even though we don't want to.

Ouch. One of my best friends is having surgery on her shoulder in the next month or so. She just found out this week the severe pain in her shoulder is because a muscle is torn 70% through. Her husband already does all the livestock care,  though - probably why this happened "spontaneously." Lifting her purse has been the extent of her exercising for years now. :/

Good luck on your surgery and recovery. Hope it goes as smoothly as possible!

8 feel much better about the tendonitis I've been recovering from for a month, now...at least it didn't require surgery and it wasn't disabling...just highly inconvenient.  Shoving around scenery that weighs twice as much as you do in 95-plus degree weather is bad enough when you aren't limping...

I also "inherited" two pets...one of the illusions in the show was going to involve a bird...as they started coming to terms with the logistics of it all, they decided to change illusions...which meant they no longer needed the two parakeets they bought. And since I was the only one on the crew who had experience taking care of birds, they went home with me.  Not only two free parakeets, but a $100+ cage, another $100 in toys and cleaning supplies, and several weeks worth of food.  For free.

It's nice having someone/some thing in my apartment when I get home at night.  They haven't yet warmed to me the way my other bird did...but he had almost ten years and they've been with me less than a month.  There's time...

I'll go ahead and share more good stuff.

In May, the testing that I was having done finally came back with a definitive diagnosis: endometrial adenocarcinoma.  On June 17, I had surgery.  I've had my post op visit and the pathology shows no sign of spread, with a staging of 1b, so that means that all of the cancer was removed.  Recovery is going well.

In addition, the diet that I've been on since January has resulted in a substantial weight loss (still more to lose, but slow and steady is the way) and my fasting glucose levels have been dropping from just short of getting that type II diabetes diagnosis and now 33 points below that high point.  I'm in good standing to beat the family history (my dad is generation 7) and break the chain.  My oncologist also thought that the weight loss may have caused the hormonal shifts that triggered the symptom that led me to testing that got the cancer diagnosed before it progressed to a later stage.

Two parakeets are much better than one as they are flocking birds and need the company.
A "feathered friend" is still a friend and we all can use friends.

I joined a company soccer team and we played our first game last night. We won, and I even feel like I contributed.

I guess it is only right I add my own "Good Stuff".
We remodeled our master bathroom and when we were done, it was all paid for.

As for gaming, I created a mod for Tabletop Simulator and over 400 people have subscribed to it. It makes me happy that people find it useful.

The new kitties are settling in a month or so after their adoptions, and we have finally wrangled and medicated some bugs one picked up in the shelter.  They're cute as buttons, and are providing us with a lot of fun and affection (and chaos).

My 11-month-old gave me a smooch on the cheek for the first time ever yesterday.

Needless to say, my chest is ten times too small to contain all the feels about it.
Life is good. <3 :)

So my home was burglarized in spring of 2020. One of the many things stolen that day was my trusty Necchi sewing machine (a birthday gift from my mother). It was bought used, and nothing fancy, mostly just basic stitches, but it was a solidly reliable machine. I've missed it.

Today, I got a smoking deal on its replacements. Some lady was dealing with her late father's effects, which included over 40 sewing machines (she has no idea why he was collecting sewing machines). Nothing new, but all working, and cheaply priced. So I bought a nice little Kenmore, with a small selection of computerized stitches. And a slightly less computerized Euro Pro, with manuals, for $25 each. :)

Good weekend. I rescued a lost dog, and made some folks' weekend a great deal better than it started out. :)

Found the dog Friday night a few miles from home. I thought it was a vulture or raven standing at the edge of the road, heading into the sunset. Only as I passed did I realize it was a little Chihuahua-mix dog. He look very lost and unsure. So I turned around and went back. It's all farmland there, more than a mile to the nearest home, too far to be safe for a small dog (we have coyotes, foxes, hawks, and owls, never mind the cars). Surprisingly, he didn't immediately run away (like the last little dog I stopped for in almost the same spot). So I sweet-talked him and coaxed him to me. He was shy and uncertain, but not really fearful.

I took him on to my friend's house, so we could post him on the community pages on FB and Next Door, in case he had a family who wanted him back. We get a lot of dumped pets, sadly. He was small enough to take home for the night (I live in an RV; size matters). My dogs weren't sure what he was doing there, but he didn't have a Napoleon complex, so they were tolerant. My cats, OTOH, were variously offended, mortally offended, and fascinated by a dog no bigger than they are. :D

There were no bites on the ad in the morning, so my friend posted in a few more community pages -- and just before noon, the dog's people called. Turns out they live about three miles east of us, and he'd disappeared three days prior! He'd traveled nearly 5 miles across the desert, and only had one minor wound. No wonder he looked lost when I found him!

Happy ending all around. :) (My Aussie was seriously clingy that night; evidently he felt the need to remind me I already belong to someone. Heh.)

Dogs are wonderful. That is all.

My 3 year-old crawled up into bed to read her 3 month-old baby brother a story this morning, of her own accord.

...and held still long enough for me to get pictures.

However crappy the rest of this day may or may not be, it'll be a good day. =)

In reply to SunRuanEr (msg # 868):

Sounds awesome!

In reply to SunRuanEr (msg # 868):

That's terrific!  My son, who is just shy of two years older than my daughter, used to read to her all the time -- from when they were 3 and 1 up through when they were 7 and 5 and she could read for herself.  Today they are 36 and 34, and are still very good friends.  They live about 15 minutes from each other and they have 'sibling dinner' once a week (in addition to them coming to my wife's and my home for dinner once a week).  I couldn't be prouder of them.

Let's hear it for doing stuff that scares you, a little bit...

My second job is at a movie theater, where, among other things, I manage one night a week and a couple of weekend shifts each month.  Tonight is one of those weekend shifts...

Last night, our ticketing computer died.  So did the smaller kiosk-console that we tried moving from one of the concessions counters to replace it.  Replacements are coming in tomorrow...but tonight, we had to make due with one Point-of-Sale console between the ticket counter and both concessions counters.  It's also opening night (here) for a couple of movies that should be pretty big draws for us...so it was bound to be busy.

Well, hey...the late shows are all a couple of hours into playing (one of them is about to end), and we survived.  Nobody threw a major fit, nobody got in my face and complained about the inconvenience of how we ran things tonight...and we had what may be one of our busiest nights this year.  I'm brain-fried...but we did it!

I have finally started to put my short stories out. Site called Royal Road, free to read site that also allows people to publish their own original works and fan fictions. I got 3 stories there now and have read several other really good works by others.
I encourage you all to check it out.

In reply to Zag24 (msg # 870):

You have very good reasons to be very proud of them! :)

In reply to ShadoPrism (msg # 872):

Congratulations! I came very close to selling a few  of my stories years ago, and I remember the high. I can't exactly say I've never gotten one accepted, one story was officially 'sold' I guess, but they pay on publication and went out of business before my would gotten printed. Sigh...

Still, better than nothing but rejections!

If I go to Royal Road, how will I know which ones are yours? Is ShadoPrism your name there too?

In reply to Piestar (msg # 874):

My nick there is Shadow Prism. My Stories, from oldest to newest: Adventures in Wonder - A Wish of a Life Time, Alternate Worlds (This one I got 3 stories done), Beyond the Gates of Death and Time.
For some unknown reason, the first person to look at my last story gave me a 1 star rating, which is hurting getting others to even look at it.
They are all Isiaki type stories in the short or light novel kind of set up as I am not good at longer stories. Though I got around some of that with Beyond the Gates by making 3 seperate 'books'.
Alternate Worlds is set up so I can show case some of my alternate writings ideas. Something I do from time to time, take the same character and then alter the plot around them. I just finished putting out the first group of these.
I am putting them out 1 chapter a day. Mostly to draw it out and hope to pull in more readers.