Docwagon

Will do.

I've been bit by the outdoor cooking bug pretty hard. I always grilled on occasion, but nothing "special" and maybe 5-10 times a year in total. A few months ago I bought a smoker. That's some game changing shit, right there. It's a combination hobby, science experiment, and art with the result being (usually) very tasty meat. Trying different kinds of wood, different spice mixes, different temperatures and variations...it's all quite enjoyable. I note that as I've gotten older my new hobbies are rather sedate, but here we are. Yesterday I had both the grill AND smoker going at the same time. Note they are both charcoal/wood, no cheating with gas or electric. Burgers, fish, and veggies on the grill, whole chickens and shrimp in the smoker. It's enough food for probably four days. My wife's happy, as she likes the food and the not cooking as often aspect. I'm happy because I like the food and it's fun. My son is happy because food. I'm waiting to see if a pellet grill goes on sale for Black Friday so I can do long/slow cooks while it's unattended (overnight or while I'm at work). I'm doing my own dry rubs, but not my own sauces yet. Anyone else into outdoor cooking?

I'm still playing Civ V mostly. Even with as many hours in the game as I have I'm still figuring out new things and strategies. It's still fun.

The watch gathers more info then an app. Average pulse rate over a run, for example, so you can see your fitness improving. Set a workout schedule and it reminds you it's the day to do X. Step tracking and "go move" reminders. Basically it helped me with both motivation and by showing concrete gains even if the scale didn't move that week.

Everything is going well. COVID has my son attending high school from home, which has had it's challenges. Wife's little online store is doing fine. Everyone's healthy, etc. We're hoping we can get to Spain next year so we don't lose the credits we have for airfare and hotel, but we'll see what happens.

Old topic, but I now wear a Fenix 5X most of the time, a Vivoactive 4 replaced the Vivoactive 3 and is an occaisonal wear. It's been immensely helpful in motivation and keeping activity levels up. As embarrassing as it is to admit it, I got up to around 280 lbs as a detective. I'm 216 now, which is still overweight for me but not obese. I got down to 206 for a bit but my heart rate dropped to 44 and I had to back off and let my body reset. Actually had to have a heart scan because doc was worried, but everything's fine now and I'm working my way back down with the goal of being under 200 and then maintaining 185-200, depending.

Been kind of a shit time to be a police officer in the US, but I'm on the downhill side now anyway so whatcha gonna do, amirite? I placed high enough on the LT assessment that I should get promoted sometime in 2021, early 2022 by the latest. I'm hoping to go back to Invest at some point once that's done.

It's tough to list specific complaints without going into spoiler territory, but essentially it shifts from an RPG to a combat simulator, and large scale combat is not Pathfinder rule set's strong point. It's a shit ton of micro-management at a normal difficulty since you have a party of 6 vs waves of enemies. You'll also need to rest often, which mandates cut scenes and dialogue. It just feels like stretching the game so you can say "XX hours of game play" and the game gets cheat-y. And there's still bugs. Your allies can get trapped outside of "gates" that they can normally walk through if combat starts while the party is even near one. So, defeat a few waves of meaningless enemies. Rest. Repeat. While working your way through some BS "puzzle" maze. My biggest complaint is you lose access to NPCs you've had in your party from the start. Apparently due to a bug, one is just gone forever. Not due to any in-game reason, they just don't show up to be rescued. So you take these fairly horribly spec'd NPCs and you go through the entire game with them because of the story lines associated with them (instead of just buying "mercenaries" who are blank characters you can spec as you like) only to have them removed at a crucial part in the game and what party you have now is luck based on who you find first. Except that one character, who's just gone. Now you can get free mercenaries. So here's who will enjoy the late game: Somebody who really likes making Pathfinder characters. Would you like to make 5 level 17-ish pen-and-paper characters from scratch? Here's your chance.

So for me the game got progressively less interesting. The amateurish development began to shine through and the narrative died down quite a bit. The ending is so damned dumb that I can barely make myself care enough to finish it up. I've turned it down to "story mode" difficulty just to get through the last chapter quicker. Honestly I doubt I pick up the next title and I definitely won't be in on the kickstarter since it took them so long to get this one "working". The game still crashes more then you'd expect and the longer you play the longer loading screens take. Anyway, at about the 2/3 mark I felt like the game was just killing time vs wanting to see what happened next. The biggest kick in the ass is realizing that literally none of the kingdom management stuff did anything but keep you from losing. Only companion quests mattered.

I downloaded the base game + DLC pack from GOG on one of their clearance sales and have been enjoying it. If you liked the pen/paper version of Pathfinder DnD and/or don't mind reading up on the rules, you'll have fun with it. If you expect a standard video-game-ized version, you'll likely be disappointed. It has pros and cons to the approach, primarily in how much you have to rest at early levels since healing and spells are very limited, as you'd expect from a 1st level DnD character. You can respec for free three times. I've respec'd once at 10th level because I wasn't using two of my feats at all and for some reason long swords seem to be very uncommon in the game so I wasn't using my weapon focus at all. I'm playing a human Paladin. I don't normally go for Paladins, but I figured it would fit this game. You are trying to establish a barony from an unclaimed land full of monsters and curses, and I'm assuming from the game title you eventually develop it into a kingdom. I know how AI can be in these games so I figured I'd need a tanky character with some diplomacy skills and so far it's working out well. I'm using the tower shield specialist fighter NPC as my helper on the front line, gave both the 'shield wall' teamwork feat, and let the tower shield fighter fight defensively. With the various buffs and lots of lay on hands uses, as long as nobody gets stunned it works pretty well. The rest of my party is all standard NPCs (you can buy 'mercenaries' and spec them from scratch if you don't want the story based NPCs). I'm using a kinetics character, something I was completely unfamiliar with, a rogue/wizard/arcane trickster, a cleric, and a bard. Bards are actually pretty solid in Pathfinder and their party buffs are very helpful. I let the cleric use a heavy crossbow most of the time and hang back with the squishy characters in case something flanks us, then he can go to mace/shield and fill in the gap. This game mostly plays by the pen/paper rules. You want to cast stoneskin? You need (expensive) diamond dust. You want to cast restoration? You need an (expensive) diamond. You need to carry rations into areas you can't hunt in if you want to rest, and rations have weight, and weight leads to encumbrance. There is no fast travel. What's actually my favorite departure from standard RPGs is there *is* time pressure. Don't get your barony established in 90 days? Game over. Screw around with side quests and don't follow the main plot line? It doesn't care, the next curse is coming on X date if you're ready for it or not. If you aren't, it'll damage your barony and be harder to deal with, or cause you to lose. The troll invasion starts when it starts, not when you walk over a certain trip wire or use a certain dialogue tree. Your peasants complain about a problem, there's a deadline to set an advisor on it or if fails. Early on you may have more problems and opportunities then you have available advisors. Get a diplomat visiting from another country? He'll wait for awhile while you're out, but not forever. Some things will wait forever. Establishing a trade route with a given country seems to always be an option. Alignment actually matters. Your dialogue choices may vary based on your alignment. What sort of things you can build in your city depend on your alignment. If you get along with your advisors or not, since they aren't all going to be your alignment and apparently if you disagree with them too much they'll quit. I have a lawful evil treasurer, for example. The combat is...spotty. There are some real difficult encounters mixed in areas that you wouldn't think they'd be in. You can change the difficulty on the fly, though. I have had to do so twice to advance the story in probably 40 hours of game play. Once when I got stuck in a dungeon with no rations (cave in blocked me in and I was 3 short of being able to rest before a really tough boss fight) and once when I'd spent too much time building my barony and not enough leveling my character and was getting my ass kicked by cursed creatures. All in all, I have found it to be at least as much fun as the various NeverWinterNight games were, if perhaps just a touch more amateurish in the difficultly scaling and tutorials.

Oh, ok. I'm familiar with that as an "iron remover" where you spray it on and it changes color as it works.

Yeah, pretty different here. Outside of the larger cities, trucks are pretty practical and gas is relatively cheap. Especially at the moment. I actually prefer maintenance on the truck over cars as there's more room underneath and under the hood.

I don't even know what fall out removers are, but I do use a citrus base tar remover if I have much build up. I'm pretty unlikely to start grinding on it...err, polishing it. 🙂

I bought an electric power washer because there was algae/lichen growing on our house and cleaning it with a brush and solution was a giant PITA. I've now gone mad with the power. My house, the police-mobile, my Camaro, my truck, the neighbor's truck, unattended children, an unlucky squirrel...all fair game. The truck also got clay-barred and waxed today. The Camaro will have it's turn on my next set of days off. You can see my new issued car behind the truck as well. 2020 Charger with AWD and the hemi V8. It's my first new police car since 2012, but I've been lucky and had three new cars over my career so far.

Oh, absolutely. We're not going to give up on traveling. Just can't do two trips at once. 🙂 I want to take the family out to deserts of the southwest next spring, so maybe October 2021?

Iberia Airlines issued us vouchers today. I think we're going to increase the length of our stay in Spain a bit and fly out of Lisbon, so now we can do everything we wanted to the first go-round. The tickets will be a bit more, but we're upgrading a class in order to take a checked bag. $900 more then our original outlay, but since we're not taking a Spring trip that's NBD.

This is off the table. My Spain trip is now going to have to be the October trip due to the Kung Flu outbreak. I'm flying home from New Mexico today. I came out here to hike the Bataan Memorial but it was cancelled. I did get to do some gorgeous hiking on my own and some with a buddy in Albuquerque.

Sure, I'd like that as well.

This probably got buried in the Madrid Airport thread and should be a topic on it's own. We'll start planning fall break as soon as we get back from Spain. I note that there are very cheap tickets to London (right at $300 round trip from Chicago) and while I've been to London it was a short stay some 14 years ago. Let's say one had 7-10 days to spend, where other than London should we also venture to? Stonehenge would have to be on the list. Is it foolish to rent a car and tour the countryside a bit? I've driven in Cyprus, so I can do the wrong-side-of-the-road thing and navigate roundabouts. Is Brexit going to have any impact on visa requirements for American visitors?

Chicago -> London is cheap enough in October that we'd consider it. Would early October be a retarded time to visit, weather wise? Let's say I had 9 days in country, where to go other than London itself? I'd be traveling with my wife and 15 year old son. We do like outdoorsy stuff and hikes, zoos, museums, historical sites, etc. Maybe Stonehinge?

We'll drive 3 hours to a theme park, no problem, 12 hours on the road is a fairly frequent vacation for us. I'd rather drive then bother with the airport and a rental car whenever possible. I just hate to waste the time when we're overseas. We'd like to revisit England. London is the only part I've seen any of and that was about 14 years ago. Ireland/England is high on our potential list. On a side note, my guide book says crossing from Gibraltar back in to Spain can take as long as 3 hours due to security concerns and screenings. That's also a "something I would have like to have seen" that we can't get to on this go. You can never do it all, though.

I sat down with an Excel spreadsheet, the Eurorail website, and various travel metasearches. Lisbon is just too much bother on this trip. The timing makes it so we always waste more than a full day between getting there and getting back to Madrid. Our flight home is just too early in the day to risk the Trenhotel. The logistics just don't make sense. Madrid -> Granada -> Seville -> Cordoba -> Madrid is a much more relaxed trip. Only one 3 hour bus ride, everything else is short bus trips. No need to bother with an airport and even if our train is delayed or we miss it we can get to the airport for the trip home easily. It's also much easier to work in travel between check-out and the next check-in times AND we never waste a day. We always arrive early enough to do things the day we arrive as opposed to 2pm to 8pm sort of day ruining schedules. Maybe next trip, we'll probably return to Europe again in 6-12 months.

Running the train schedules, flights, etc. that initial circuit turned out to be less than ideal. I think we're skipping Cordoba in exchange for Seville. Madrid -> Granada -> Seville -> Lisbon (by plane) -> Madrid. That seems to be a bit more relaxed of a pace, the legs of the trip are shorter, and the arrival/departure times are reasonable.

I've started the actual planning. I think we're going to do a Madrid -> Cordoba -> Granada -> Lisbon -> Madrid circuit if the logistics work out. I really want to see Alhambra and Mezquita, so that's got to be part of the trip.

Look through the car's rear glass starting just after the 4 minute mark. Definitely a bigfoot.