Gaming Granny

Posted By Esri on June 2, 2009

It’s been a rough couple of weeks. On the 22nd of May we learned that my husband has lung cancer. This was followed by a PET scan to see whether the cancer has spread beyond the lung and the brain. The good news — the PET scan showed nothing beyond the lung and brain. The doctors conferred and decided that the brain masses have to be dealt with first. He is scheduled for brain surgery next Tuesday. They will do another CT scan Tuesday morning, then prep him and take him into surgery. They will remove as much of the large mass in his frontal lobe as possible. There will be a pathologist on hand for immediate analysis and diagnosis, then they will decide whether to make another opening in his skull and remove the smaller mass in his cerebellum. If all goes well the surgery will take about 5 hours. He will be in ICU over night and then, believe it or not, the neurosurgeon said that if he can get up and walk around on his own, he can go home the next day. He should be able to “resume normal activities” in 2 - 3 days, which I find absolutely amazing. The bad news, of course, is that for us “normal activities” will be dealing with the lung cancer.

Thanks again for the thoughts, prayers and good vibes.

Category: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Tags: Personal

Posted By Esri on May 16, 2009

Well, thinking positively and being optimistic has gotten a little easier this week. We met with both a neurosurgeon and a radiation oncologists this week about my husband’s case. Both are optimistic that neither the lung mass nor the brain mass are malignant. The brain mass is a fluid-filled cyst, almost certainly benign (if something the size of a lemon in the frontal lobe of your brain can be described as “benign”). The neurologist told us there may be a small, low-grade tumor attached to one end of that, but they won’t know until they get in there. He will have to have brain surgery, which is nothing to sneeze at, but at least I’m not seeing a big sign above his head that says “He’s going to die” any longer. Both doctors said that we need to find out what is in the lung before we make any treatment plans — so we know what we are looking at in both places and can prioritize accordingly. He has a biopsy scheduled for next Wednesday and we have an appointment with his pulmonologist on Friday to discuss the results. Then we’ll see where we go from here.

The really good news is that the steroids he is taking for the swelling around the brain cyst have almost eliminated the severe headaches he has been having. He had the hiccups for a week, but those too are gone, apparently thanks to Prilosec. (Thanks for the good advice, Doctor Pablo!)

Thanks all for your thoughts, prayers and good vibes, cat and otherwise.

Category: Personal | 3 Comments »
Tags: Personal

Posted By Esri on May 10, 2009

Monday my biggest worry was passing an inspection that now rates a “this place can go to hell”. Those are my boss’s words and they were not spoken as an evaluation of my attitude, but how she would feel if she were in my shoes. Tuesday we found out that the shadow on my husband’s chest x-ray that they thought was scar tissue, wasn’t. Then on Thursday my whole world came crashing down when we found out that he has two masses in his brain as well. We don’t know what any of the three masses are — I’m not stupid though. We have some hope that they aren’t cancer because he has neurofribromatosis — a congenital condition that causes cysts to form all over the body. His are mostly at skin level, but there is a (probably small) chance that all three masses are nfm cysts. I don’t know what the odds are because there are no “odds” — we won’t know until they biopsy something. I don’t think the odds that the masses are unrelated are very good — although I’m neither a bookmaker nor a doctor, of course. That means the coin probably has two sides: nfm or metastatic cancer.

The doctors tell us to remain positive. We don’t know that it is cancer. We are assured that they have a great team that works together often - oncologists, pulmonologists, a neurosurgeon. They work out of the J. C. and Nancy Lewis Cancer & Research Center in Savannah. We’re trying — we even went to see “Star Trek” yesterday. I recommend it highly — I almost didn’t think about brain tumors for two hours. We’ll be thinking about it today though — we need to go through and make sure we know where all the insurance policies are and I know his accounts and passwords. Tomorrow he has a “super dimension” CT scan on his chest and abdomen, lab work and we meet with the neurosurgeon for the first time. After that, who knows.

I don’t know if this is too much personal information. If it is, I apologize.

Category: Personal, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Tags: Personal

Posted By Esri on May 4, 2009

We have a HUGE inspection at work next week and then we’ll be spending the next 9 weeks rectifying the problems found in that inspection. Then in July we have a team coming to recertify our network for permission to operate on the enterprise WAN. I’m going to be working a lot of overtime… *sigh*

I did find a few hours on Sunday to play some EVE and some Free Realms though. I spent a couple of hours mining and manufacturing. I totally sold out on ammunition, missiles, microwarpdrives and salvagers over the last couple of weeks. I can do 4 manufacturing jobs at a time, so it’s going to take about 5 days to restock everything I sell — except shuttles and core probes because I’m selling ones that I bought from people selling them cheap.

After I got my manufacturing jobs done, I did a couple of level 2 combat missions. One of those, “Gone Berserk” made me almost a million isk between mission fees, bounties, loot and salvage. That’s not including the loot I didn’t sell because it’s worth more reprocessed.

I also played a bit of Free Realms on Saturday and Sunday — maybe two hours total. I’m mostly running around exploring — I’ve got 24 of 30 possible quests in my quest journal. I keep getting sucked into the mini-games like harvesting, mining, cooking and blacksmithing instead of completing my quests! I also enjoy the pet training, although Chairman Mojo (my Siamese cat) gets bored easily. Free Realms is a lot of fun. The biggest problems I have right now are that I can’t play the card game — it crashes every time I try to load it — and the Friends list is borked. I have one friend, and I have absolutely no idea who he is — I denied his Friend request, but he’s my friend now anyway! When I type in the name of a Friend to add to my list, I get nothing. In beta, I’d get an error message if they weren’t online — now I get no indication that I even typed anything. That is a biggie in a social game.

I’ll do my best to keep up my blog posts, but with little free time, posts may be both infrequent and boring!

Category: EVE Online, Free Realms | 2 Comments »
Tags: EVE Online, Free Realms, Personal

Posted By Esri on May 1, 2009

Lion cubs in the Zurich Zoo look cute for the camera.

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Tags: Cute Animals

Posted By Esri on April 30, 2009

I was in the Free Realms beta, there I said it.

Now Free Realms has launched and I’m not only a paying “Member”, but I actually purchased twenty bucks worth of Station Cash. I even made my first RMT transaction yesterday — I purchased a Siamese Cat (now named “Chairman Mojo” - you have to work with what the name wheel gives you….). I was disappointed that the Family Membership (4 accounts for $10.00) didn’t make it in, because I had intended to buy one so my granddaughters could play the full game. I won’t pop for $4.99 each until I know whether they are going to stick with it.

Free Realms, despite being targeted at tweens, is a really fun game. The minigames are a lot of fun. I quite enjoy the harvesting, cooking and pet training games. Harvesting is a Bejeweled-like tile game, cooking has you using your mouse to control various stages of the cooking process (slicing, dicing, stirring, pouring, etc…) and pet training uses mouse gestures a la Black & White. I haven’t had a chance to play the card game — I didn’t have enough time in beta and last night it just wouldn’t launch for me. Crashed 5 times and then gave up on that. I posted on the official forums, but no response so far. Which is a shame, because I want to play the card game!!!! A certain dwarf told me that one of the booster pack loot cards is a tiny tiger pet! I could spend me some money looking for that!

I didn’t have much time for play last night (do I ever?) — I spent about an hour in Free Realms, half an hour in EVE and half an hour on Facebook. In Free Realms I managed to gain levels in Brawler and Pet Trainer while running around gawking at how pretty everything is. Except for being unable to launch the card game, everything I tried worked and I didn’t notice any leftover graphics placeholders from beta. The Friends server was borked though — so I have no friends. Why is the chat/Friends server such an issue in almost every game at launch? They’ve been doing this for more than a decade now….

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Tags: Free Realms

Posted By Esri on April 29, 2009

First MMO Played?
Asheron’s Call

First Character Class/Role Played
Dagger Chick

First MMO Subscribed For More Than A Consecutive Year?
Asheron’s Call

First MMO You Fell In Love With?
Asheron’s Call

First Guild You Really Felt Attached To?
The Blurrians (Monarch: Wren the Blurry) in Asheron’s Call

First Character/Game You Leveled To End Cap?
Never done that

First “Wow” Moment In A MMO?
A few days into playing AC, my son on one computer and me on another, he said “What’s THAT????” and I turned around and saw a Reedshark Elder and shouted “Reedshark! RUN! RUN!” My heart was literally leaping out of my chest — I was terrified of those things.

First MMO You Burned Out On?
Asheron’s Call

First MMO You Followed Avidly Prior To Launch?
Asheron’s Call 2 — and it was a terrible disappointment.

First Time You Felt Truly Noobish In A MMO?
Probably while beta testing “EVE Online” — I could not for the life of me figure out how to make that spaceship move….

First MMO You Went Alt-Crazy In?
I’m not much of an alt person — most of my alts have been created when I wanted to experience other newb areas or when new things have been added to a game like new beginner areas, races or classes.

Category: Memes, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags: Memes

Posted By Esri on April 28, 2009

… well, mostly.

I am now recovering from a weekend of too much alcohol, too much food, too little rest and too much fun at our long weekend get-together of gaming friends in the Tennessee mountains. I actually cut myself off from alcohol after Friday night, but lack of sleep has me still feeling a little “hungover”. We had a great time. We had three great volunteer cooks who made it their mission to ensure that everyone ate until they were stuffed — and I do mean STUFFED! Even my non-gaming husband is looking forward to the next Orkfest, so mission accomplished!

We played games of every stripe — video, board and card games of all descriptions. We had a two day screening of the extended, extended version of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. The old codgers among us actually managed to wrest the theater room away from the Rock Band crowd long enough to watch a movie in the comfort of the huge recliners with stadium style seating on Saturday night. The Rock Banders were hovering outside — going into withdrawal, I believe, for about 30 minutes before the movie was over.

We went out to dinner on Saturday evening and were mistaken for BIKERS! How cool is that? Of course, the bikers we were mistaken for were doctors and dentists who ride Harleys on the weekend, not Hell’s Angels, but still….

Sunday was the Greek Food festival and our intrepid chef and her assistants kept the food coming steadily from around noon until after 10:00 PM… I don’t think I have EVER eaten so much food… And it was all delicious! I can’t spell or pronounce most of the dishes we had, but it was all awesome. Then after gyros at 10:00 PM, they were still stuffing us with baklava, cheesecake and ice cream!

The best part of Orkfest, though, is just hanging with people you share a history with — it’s very much like a family reunion. We no longer all play the same games - some of us play this, some of us play that. We all keep hoping for the game that will get us all together, but that’ll probably never happen. Until it does, we have our forums on The Brasse, Facebook, IM and Orkfest!

Category: Orkfest | 2 Comments »
Tags: Orkfest

Posted By Esri on April 20, 2009

Jeannetta had a good weekend in EVE. She finished training Mining Barge 3 early on Saturday and purchased her Retriever and a second Strip Miner I. By mid-afternoon she had sold the Procurer for a couple of hundred thousand isk more than she paid for it — 2.4 million to be exact. She and Kesri (my mining alt) spent about three hours mining Saturday afternoon and evening and ended up with over 200k of Massive Scordite and 95k of Viscous Pyroxeres which provided way more than enough minerals to keep my science lab running full tilt through Monday morning. I built three types of missiles, three types of ammo, 10MN Microwarpdrives and Core Scanner Probes to replenish my sell orders. I do a brisk business in ammo, missiles, probes, MWDs, salvagers and Caldari shuttles. I didn’t make any shuttles because I bought about 150 of them for prices ranging from 11k to 15k isk and put them back up for sale at 60k. I bought up a hundred two weeks ago and sold all but 5 of them by Saturday at between 45k and 49k profit each, not counting transaction fees and taxes.

Sunday I decided I wanted to run combat missions so I found a level 1 and a level 2 agent a couple of systems over. Lai Dai Corporation, which I have been running Administration and Production missions for, doesn’t have any combat agents, so I picked Spacelane Patrol for my secondary mission corp. I did about 10 combat missions on Sunday. They were all level 1 because I didn’t quite have the standings required for the level 2 agent — I was at 1.68 at the end of my last mission and need 1.75 to get him to talk to me. I am currently training Connections 4 so once that is completed I should have access to the Level 2 guy. The missions were all easy in a Merlin. (I started out in a Moa cruiser, but it was like shooting fish in a barrel so I switched. It was still like shooting fish in a barrel….) I made about a million isk in agent fees, reprocessed most of my loot, but sold about 2.5 million in salvage. My wallet balance ended up about 2 million above where I started the weekend, taking everything including my new Retriever into consideration.

I’m quite enjoying the entire EVE experience from missions and mining to manufacturing and trade. I’m looking forward to Level 2 combat missions for a little more challenge in that department. Playing the market is great fun in a totally different sort of way. Manufacturing is more of a means to an end. I’m looking forward to research and invention though that will be a ways off. I’m going to train up the skills I need to talk to the R&D agents in my vicinity after I’ve done with Connections 4, before I top out my Learning skills. They’ll take longer to train that way, but they’ll still be done much sooner than if I waited until after I trained the Learning skills from 3 to 4 and trained up the tier 2 Learning skills. I play the game to have fun and I need to be able to talk to R&D agents to pursue my chosen career path. Efficiency can wait a bit — I have the tier 1 Learning skills all at 3 already.

Category: EVE Online | 1 Comment »
Tags: EVE Online

Posted By Esri on April 17, 2009

Yesterday was Patch Day in EVE Online. I DIDN’T play, but not for wont of trying. The patcher crashed during the patching process and corrupted my client — according to the error message when I tried to log in. I had to uninstall, reinstall from the CD and then download a 1.5GB patch. Needless to say, no EVE (or anything else) for me last night. Well, I did play with Larry the Dragon and harvest my crops on Facebook.

All is well that ends well though and I was able to log in to EVE this morning. Contrary to my specific instructions, the uninstaller did NOT preserve my settings so that took all of 3 minutes to fix. I’m all ready to go pick up my new Retriever and do some mining this evening. I have to work tomorrow (*cry*) and won’t get much play time on Sunday either because I have to get the laptop set up for the trip. It’s been in the bag since football season ended and needs to be patched up — including EVE so I can stay on top of my training while I’m out of town.

Category: EVE Online, Patch Day | No Comments »
Tags: EVE Online, Patch Day