Who are you?

“Oh, yes, I’m glad you asked that again.  Bit of adrenaline, dash of outrage, and a hint of panic knitted my brain back together.  I know EXACTLY who I am.”

The Dark Side

Well, maybe not so dark.

There are some things related to Star Wars that I do not like.  Toxic fanboyism aside, I’m referring to merchandising.

Sure, I’m a sucker for anything Boba Fett/Millennium Falcon/Porg related, but the latest thing that annoys me is Fantasy Flight Games’ X-Wing Miniatures game, which recently went to version 2.0.

As part of this new version, players are expected to buy conversion kits for their existing miniatures to make them ‘2.0 compatible’.  The problem is that each of the 3 conversion kits are $50 (retail) and cover a broad range of ships within each faction (Rebel, Imperial, Mercs).

Fair enough, but for the most part, the kits either have too few or too many of ships I own, or are mostly for ships that I don’t own.  I hope they come out with individual ship conversion kits, but I’m not holding my breath.

This is the main reason I’m not getting into their Armada (capital ships) game, which I fully expect to to undergo the same 2.0 revamp.

I have a different strategy with their other miniatures offerings, however.

I’ve gotten back into playing Imperial Assault, and collecting the miniatures/expansions for this game, to prevent myself from getting into their other miniatures battle game, Legion.

I feel that skirmish level games are what my friends and I are more interested in playing anyways.

TV 2018-19

This season’s viewing schedule:

Tuesday:
The Gifted (FOX)

Mid-season replacement shows, time/day TBD:

The Orville
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I’m more than half a season behind on all the CW DC shows, and frankly I was getting tired of all of them, so they’re totally off my viewing schedule.  I may end up binge watching them, or switching to them as my morning exercise show.  We’ll see.

None of the new shows interest me.  Though I may end up checking a few of them out over the next week or so.

Game Play Update: Fall 2018 Edition

  1. Hornet Leader
  2. Sherman Leader
  3. Bataan!
  4. Comancheria
  5. Field Commander: Alexander
  6. Tiger Leader
  7. Star Trek Attack Wing
  8. Batman Miniatures Game
  9. Star Wars: Rebellion
  10. Kill Team
  11. Massive Darkness
  12. 7TV
  13. Ghostbusters II
  14. Legendary: Firefly
  15. Legendary: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  16. Dinosaur Island
  17. Gloomhaven
  18. Down In Flames: Aces High
  19. The Dresden Files
  20. Doctor Who: Time of the Daleks

I seem to be getting nowhere with this list.  And there are additional games that have and have not been played, too, since the last time I did this.

On major change is that instead of Warhammer 40K and variations, I only have Kill Team listed.

I also removed print-and-play games, and games that have not arrived yet.

Post-Stone Post

Friday afternoon.

I still didn’t feel 100% this morning, so I stayed home.

I managed to shower at my usual time.  The new scale still says I’ve lost about 8 pounds since the stone appeared.  Surprisingly I can see and feel a difference in my face and my clothes.

I made breakfast, eggs, which I hadn’t had in about a week.  Most of this week was 3am-4am wake up calls to urinate and rehydrate and falling back to sleep until about 7am-8am.  Though I did manage to have oatmeal on Wednesday.

I decided to do what I meant to do last weekend, and went out to get a haircut.  On reflection this should have been done Thursday afternoon, since I was in the area, dropping off the stone to my doctor’s office.

On the way home I stopped by Best Buy, since there was an email from after 11pm last night, telling me that Spider-Man for PS4 was available.  I was asleep at the time.

Once home I popped in the Spider-Man disk, and marveled (heh) at the speed which the game was downloading, minutes instead of HOURS.

I began to watch Iron Fist season 2, which seems better than I was expecting it to be.  I then jumped back to the PS4 and entered the download code for the pre-order bonus stuff, including Peter’s Infinity War suit.

I then started to play Spider-Man.  It’s fun, but I only got [redacted] before I stopped, though I wasn’t feeling anything wrong with my hands.  The PS4 controller just seems more comfortable in my hands than the XBox controller.  We’ll see if this changes as I try to play the game further.

I went back to Iron Fist.  The first episode was good, and I’m currently in the second.  I don’t think I’m going to binge this over the weekend, since there’s other stuff I need to do.

I made the congratulatory frozen pizza that I bought earlier this week, to be eaten post-stone.

I think I’m going to finish this IF episode and either take a nap or do some miniatures painting.

And that elliptical looks like it’s been waiting for me to get back on it.

Stones, Conclusion

Sometime Thursday morning, I believe the stone either made it’s way to the end of the ureter or into the bladder itself.

Oddly, it didn’t appear when I peed a couple of times during the day.

Finally, after taking a #2, as I was about to flush, I saw a dark spot in the bowl (above the water line) about where my wee wee would be pointing, and discovered the stone.

4mm, as the doctor told me it was.

I washed it off and put it in a sample jar that the nurse had given to me as I was discharged from the ER on Saturday night.

I then drove it to my primary doctor’s office and dropped it off to on of her associates.

I’m glad that this one is over, and I hope it’s even longer between stones.

Thanks again to those who expressed their concerns.

Stones, Part II

Saturday morning!  I’m up and taking in a soccer match, and I’m having a light breakfast of cottage cheese and a waffle.

The kidney pain returned.

For the third day in a row.

I texted my sisters about which hospital ER I need to go to under my health plan.  They texted back that I should call a nurse on my health insurance card, and that I should ask about urgent care.

A phone call later, and texts from one sister that she’d be over to pick me up, and I was on my way to UCSF’s urgent care.

It took a couple of hours, but I finally saw a doctor, after giving a urine sample.  She confirmed that I had a kidney stone (blood in urine) and had me have a blood draw to check that everything was fine.  She also prescribed flomax for my condition.

An hour later, I found out that it wasn’t, my creatinine levels were high compared to a recent test in July.  So I was sent across the street to the hospital’s emergency room for an IV to try to get those levels down, and to get a CT scan on my kidneys.

The waiting room time was about 4 hours, and then another hour or so lying on a hospital bed in the hallway near the CT scan room.

I was given a saline drip, then brought in for the scan, and then got a shot of toredol in my IV.

I finally had the doctor arrive to tell me what was up, that the stone should pass on it’s own.  She gave me a prescription for some other pain med (which I may not need) and this time they gave me a strainer and sample container for the stone when it passes.

After I was discharged my other sister picked me up and we picked up some cranberry juice and chicken broth from Safeway.  That’s when I remembered that I forgot to pick up my multi-tool from the security desk, which was confiscated when I arrived to the waiting room.

We went back to pick it up, then went home, where my sister prepared some of the broth and cranberry juice for me.

I feel fine now, probably better once I get the new prescription.

Thanks again to my sisters who I never listen to about health matters, until it does matter.

Network Printers

My nemesis, even at home.

My main printer was listed as offline this morning, so I tried to reconnect it via the setup software, and it kept telling me to check firewall settings.

I searched the internet for firewall settings and found and applied them, both on the new router and in Windows.

No dice.

I then decided to hardcode an IP address into the printer, and that’s where I found the problem: it was set to static IP, with no IP assigned to it. Whut?

So I set it to DHCP, restarted it, and it connected.

I hate network printers.

Stones

After many years of not showing any symptoms of kidney stones, I had an incident.

I was sitting at lunch when I felt the first dull pain.  It slowly increased in intensity until both of the people sitting with me noticed that something was wrong with me.

One of them correctly identified it as a kidney stone.  She said that I should go see I doctor.  I got up and walked to the bathroom to pee.

When I got back to the table, I decided that it was time to leave, so I did.

I passed by my supervisor’s office to let her know what was up, and then collected my stuff at my cube, and left.

Luckily I drove in today.

Unluckily there was a fender bender right in front of the exit of the parking garage.  Arrgh.

A couple of minutes of the two cars moving out of the way and I was on my way home.

Since it was midday there was light traffic on the freeway home, but the pain started to ebb and flow, as it does.

I parked in the garage, stumbled upstairs, changed and lay down on my bed.

I got up a couple of times to drink some water and try to get comfortable in sitting and standing positions, but lying down seemed to be the thing I needed to do.

I lay on my left side as I figured gravity might assist the stone’s movement in my right kidney.

I kept having to move every few minutes as what felt comfortable one moment was painful the next, until finally I fell asleep.

A couple of hours I woke up, pain free.

I found the container that I used to pee in when I first had kidney stones and used it.  No stone to be found.

I feel okay.  I’ll probably go back to work tomorrow, barring any incidents between now and tomorrow morning.