Change of Plans

 Well that was short-lived. After a couple of forays into the current housing market, we found that we are WOEFULLY unprepared for what's happening at the moment. People are getting 20-30 offers, and then the house is going for 100k over asking. So we're stepping back from that for a moment and working on the current house.

Plans are now to do some quality-of-life upgrades to the place, move some stuff around, and paint. Probably replace flooring. Soundproofing. Finish perimeter surveillance system. Fix the shed storage situation and get the stuff from the storage unit back into the shed. Maybe finally install the wired ethernet outlets I've been planning for years, and get a networking rack going. Just enough projects to (hopefully) ride out this bubble and get a plan in place to move, with this place nicely upgraded to give us a little more capital to get into something suitable.

On the game streaming front, I recently changed my work schedule - I'm still working from home though - and that sorta interrupted plans for that. I just finished week 3 of the new schedule and we're still not really 100% on our daily routine. It's put us both off JUST enough that we're having a hard time adjusting and figuring out what we should be doing on off-times. I still plan on making that happen, but I need to get myself sorted with my schedule so I can get it done on a regular basis.

On another note, I got myself jabbed with the Pfizer Covid Vaccine today (Sunday May 2nd). For a couple of hours my arm didn't even hurt, but it's been 3 now and it's just starting to get sore. One of my co-workers got the Pfizer recently, and he had what you'd consider 2nd-shot symptoms on the first shot. I hope tomorrow isn't any worse, but knowing my luck I'll be sick and out of commission for my weekend. :(

I got distracted (read: tipsy) and didn't finish this, and then the next day I was a both a little hungover and a smidge under the weather due to the vaccine. It wasn't horrible, but I didn't get much of anything done. With the house project happening above, not doing anything on my day off is a big hit to the productivity front. I've been trying to get *something* house related accomplished most days. I'm writing this paragraph like 4 days after the one above and since then I've gotten new motion sensor lighting installed around the outside of the house, preliminary lighting installed in the den with a tasmota-flashed sonoff, and a good plan in place for all of the other things. 

 I attempted to go to the storage unit and grab some stuff that I'd packed away that I NOW realize I need for the house upgrades, but the alternator in the Outback finally died on me and I didn't even make it out of the neighborhood. That was an adventure. You wouldn't think that it'd be so bad to charge up the battery just enough to drive a whole 500m, but let me tell you - when you're sitting next to the car with another car and jumper cables attached, a single minute feels like 10. I didn't even close the hood because I didn't feel like I had the time in the battery to waste, and I didn't even make it that 500m. I had to push the last 50-100m. But got it back to the house and have an alternator ordered. This weekend will be BUSY.

New Home Things

 This is kinda exciting. We've been looking into moving from the place we've lived in for the past ~8 years. Tonight we found a place in Newberg that is in the range we're looking for, and actually contacted the agent. We've really been dragging our feet on that part so it's a huge step for us. Unfortunately the showings for this evening dropped off the site while we were discussing if we wanted to do this, so we HAD to get ahold of someone so that we might be able to go see it tonight. 

It's exciting and anxiety-inducing at the same time. We want to do this, but it's a ginormous step and there's a LOT of stuff involved. After moving nearly every year of my life prior to coming here, I feel like I've put some roots down. Jaime was the same way in her life as well, and so this place that we're in now is where we've been the longest, and it's hard to think about. But this place doesn't seem fully like 'home', either. So it's good and bad and strange and everything all at once.

We're both excited and scared to move. Next chapter please!

Streaming Redux

 So the main reason I've never streamed my gaming is really because I figured my gaming system wasn't good enough to do so. I'm rarely above 30fps in most of my games and if I'm that low on the regular, adding in the streaming requirements to my system will make things nigh unplayable, and thus mostly unwatchable. However, after the tests I've done over the past couple of days it looks like I was wrong in my assumptions.

720p gaming in Star Citizen (https://youtu.be/fdRMY3hYZn8) went fine. I had fun playing and talking at the same time. There were a couple of dog and Jaime interruptions, but I don't have a dedicated space for this stuff. We have a computer area in the living room (it's a HUGE living room) and so it kindof becomes a do-everything area. We're looking to move in the next couple of months, so this will likely change.

1080p gaming in Cyberpunk 2077 (https://youtu.be/BczSU8eWUCA) went much better than expected. That might become my default, but I'll do a few more tests with the games I play on the regular to verify. I had an audio echoing issue with CP2077, I'll have to look into that - it might just be because I had the system volume up a bit more than I did in Star Citizen, but I might switch to using my BT headset for game sounds in the future instead of the desk speakers. I've found that works better for SC anyway because the sounds are a little muted and turning it up really only amplifies the ship ambient sounds anyway.

Streaming my gaming is going much better than I expected. Which means, of course, that the trolls will be coming shortly. I need to steel myself against the YT comments that will test my spirit. They'll criticize my style, my voice, my gameplay, everything. But I'm not doing it for them, this is for me. I like doing this.

I've said fairly often in the past that there are a couple of different kinds of people - consumers and creators. If you can manage it, be a creator. It's not bad to be a consumer, but creators shape the world. Be someone who helps shape the world rather than someone who merely lives within it.

Streaming!

 I've been thinking long and hard about what I WANT to do, and one thing that has been a constant in my life is gaming. I don't know if I'll ever be able to make a living doing it, but I like doing it and lots of other people make a living streaming the shit that they do, so why not? If nothing else it is a fun distraction. I did my first stream tonight and uploaded the video to my channel. If you're interested, my stream is here: https://youtu.be/fdRMY3hYZn8

My twitch name is 'm4rsmall0w' if you'd like to follow me.

What, me, blogging again?

So why use this and not Facebook? Well, to be honest - Facebook completely bogs down my computer. Like it's unusable. It's a gaming laptop with 64gigs of ram, a 970 EVO SSD, GTX1070, i7-6700. Yeah it's a little older but a webpage like FACEBOOK should NOT bring it to it's knees, ffs. Jaime complains that her computer is slow, I upgraded it a while back with more ram (16gb) and an SSD not too long ago, I suspect that FB is doing the same on it. I have absolutely zero issues when facebook isn't one of my browsing tabs, so there you go.

It's been a few years since I've used this last. I think mainly because FB became the de-facto standard for people to write about themselves. I've also got https://volvogeek.blogspot.com/, and I stopped using that around the same time as this one. Hell, I don't even drive a Volvo anymore - I've moved on to Subarus. I've got a '96 Outback (that we're probably going to sell for a newerish Forester) and a '92 SVX. The SVX is SWEET but quirky and there are quite a few things that are just no longer available for it. I'll probably relegate it to project car status and get a BRZ or something to commute in - once I actually go back to working somewhere other than home.

Because of the PANDEMIC! Holy fuck there's a lot to unpack here. I've been WFH for a year now. We don't think we've gotten it, but we've never been tested nor have we had reason to be. Spent the first 6 months or so ordering everything online and wiping down every single item that came into the house. We do more local shopping ourselves now but everything STILL gets sanitized before use. We're waiting to be eligible for the vaccine at this point, while we do have a couple underlying conditions (mostly high BMI) we're not in the risk groups that need it so we can wait. We double-mask up when going out and use wipes frequently. One of my first posts after the pandemic started last year was about how gamers are set for handling this, and it's borne itself out every day since. I even got a 32" curved 2k monitor because I moved the old 24" dell to the work setup. (I HAD to! I promise!)

And I'm also addicted to 3D printing. I picked up a Prusa I3 MK3S in November and have been having a blast. Ordered a MMU2 and the MK3S+ kit late Feb, but it's backordered and *should* be shipping out soon. I already do manual color changes, but the MMU should make things super cool - as long as I get past the teething issues that everyone seems to have with the thing.

There are tons of political things happening too, but I won't go into them here...at least not right now. Suffice to say that I'm super liberal and Trump can go fuck himself.

I've been living in the same place since about the last time I posted here. So it's time for a change. We're looking at selling and moving, but...to where? We took a drive to Newberg last weekend just to see if it fit our expectations. See, we would like someplace with a little land, but barring that - a house in a quiet neighborhood that doesn't cost $3k/month just for the mortgage would be fine. Places in the metro area are just out of fucking control. So towns just outside are looking better and better. Just need to stay within a certain radius in case I have to return to commuting to work daily again.

Packing everything up isn't going to be fun, but we got a storage unit so that we can get a head start on it just in case. Get everything we really don't need out of the house and then go get it at our leisure once we find someplace and get it setup to our liking.

Anyway that's things in a nutshell, I'll update again once I have a topic to dive more deeply upon. This will probably be a smorgasbord of  random shit, so buckle up.