Let's try getting on a schedule?

Updates galore! (really need to do as the title says... honestly)

So, last update I'd said I was going to see someone that may have been able to help me with the VA stuff. Unfortunately, they don't handle VA claims or cases. They however gave me a number to someone that they knew that would. Contacted them right as I exited the original person's building, and got a phone interview thing set up for later in the week. They call back and come to find out, not only do they prefer NOT to take cases against / for the VA ... they normally have to give up on them because the VA doesn't respond... they stated I should just get in contact with the VA myself. Oh hay! A circle! ... ::sigh::

The social worker that got me the number of one person had also gotten me in contact with the social worker in a different county (why I'll still never know...perhaps he was just wanting to be lazy? maybe he just liked her voice?)...She however, couldn't help me at all... but also stated it looked like in the system that the VA has another scheduled rating review scheduled for December. She stated by the looks of the records of what's in my case files, that they may be very well attempting to lower my rating AGAIN! Asking her for advice (which is what they're supposed to do), she couldn't actually give me any direct advice other than to contact my doc.

So I do that... and proceed to get up front and nuts... or at least saying that I will get this way if I don't get shit done the way I think it should be done. I simply asked if I should be calling her and having her put in the system EVERY time that I take a fall due to my back going out? Should I be noting it and bringing the log of my falls? Should I do the same for my lockups? How about my muscle spasms? Her response was what I expected, that of "NO" ... and the part of me documenting and bringing it in? yea, she said that'd have little to no weight in the review, seeing as it's not an official DOCTOR's documentation of this stuff happening. She also stated that they'd look at the fact that I have refills available of pain meds but I haven't used them... I responded simply with the fact that I had already called and told her nurse that the meds were doing NOTHING for me... so, why in the fuck should I continue putting meds in my system if they're not benefiting me?

I know for a fact right now as I type, she still hasn't documented, nor taken off those meds and their refills off my records. Why? Well, a couple things HAVE happened since then... She has me re-scheduled for pain management review (supposedly going in March for a review on if an Epidural injection would help me or not). She also has scheduled me for Physical Therapy. Also, I've done the sleep study, and have been found to have sleep apnea. Now, in the latest appointment at the VA hospital (that which I went to get my auto-PAP machine), they handed me a piece of paper with current stuff on it from their records... on which was those meds previously mentioned, with their refills still available. So, I still have some more PT appointments... well, only one ... and that's this Wednesday. Then the next appt isn't until the 1st, which is for my pain thing.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Gaming front of things?

Well, I'd been playing the snot out of Minecraft for a while (again), and started up an old challenge map (desert survival) from ages ago... back before hunger was a thing... or villages, or endermen, or mine shafts... etc etc... So, why start it up? Well, my friend and I decided to start up an "ultimate" mod pack, which combined two packs of mods through the Feed-The-Beast launcher. We wanted to "fix" the world in a legit manner using the mods. Well, at least, fix the surface of the world to where the map would look as "natural" as possible. We went crazy on it honestly... the first RL day was spent mostly in a hole hiding together where we were trying to build our base up. The first minecraft day was spent running to separate places for each of us. I ran to one place to get what dirt could be salvaged from the land, and the single cacti that I had found in previous runs of the map so long ago. My friend Chthon was running to the single oak tree that was above a pillar of lava to start digging the "moat" that would be around our base.

We spent a few days in a 2x2x1 hole in the ground waiting for the day to come around. After some time, we got enough sand dug up to get enough sandstone to be safe and get the tree down, and hope for some saplings. Luckily the tree yielded us a few saplings. I brought all that down, and started our first make-shift tree-farm. I eventually got m'self a wood pick to go down and mine out some stone for other tools, and the furnace that would be able to get us the trees cooked down to charcoal so we could get the torches to light up the area and not be hiding in our "oh shit" hole.

Eventually I decided to try to build a village out in the distance and hope to eventually get into the nether and harvest a blaze rod or a bunch of them so we could get the potion necessary to heal a zombie villager and stick in a house... I decided on a dungeon of sorts to try to get as many villagers to spawn as possible...Gradually we got our portal to the nether up, and we weren't too terribly far from a fortress. Found a blaze spawner, and got the few rods necessary. We managed to find a zombie villager before this, but he wasn't one that could carry anything, so he eventually de-spawned when our friend Spelguru got disconnected (he was keeping him loaded by standing at a window looking at him LOL)

We got fairly good with the base, and I managed to start messing with the minium stones (Equivalent exchange 3) from killing mobs and getting shards. I went crazy with some stuff, and managed to get enough zombie and skele kills (thanks to a couple spawners we had found) to have a full soul shard so I could build a mass spawner thing... Which worked like a charm... We could get to level 30+ with just a splash healing potion, and about 1 minute of the spawners being turned on. With those minium stones I was able to get grass spread in our basement, which then spawned livestock (and unfortunately wolves... which proceeded to kill off the sheep we needed for a bed... yes we still hadn't gotten a bed! Give me a break, I hate fighting spiders on servers.) Luckily the wolves left the cows alone, and we got some leather so we could then make books. I can't remember where we got the water from... but we did get water somewhere along the lines. So we were able to get the paper (again for the books), and a farm going.

With that water also, and the lovely minium stone exchanging trees for eventually diamonds, we made a portal to the enchanted forest. Got a load more books from there, and other miscellaneous ores that we couldn't get where we started (because it was not generated with all the mods, it was a pre-generated map... which meant we have no thaumcraft nodes either). We started getting into myst-worlds too. Eventually I'd created enough worlds (I think I was on 154) to eventually get the crystal formations, as well as glowstone formations. One of the worlds I'd created was a single biome desert... but there were oil deposits all over the place... so we nick-named it "Middle East" ... and started doing oil harvesting and processing for energy. One max sized iron tank in the base later, and some umpteen crazy number of engines, we now have enough fuel and power capability to last us for 2 years real time! We got other things going and whatnot...

I'd streamed the beginning of the world,  and some of the early stuff... but me being the goof that I was... didn't stream the middle (basically most of what I stated here) ... but towards the end there, I had streamed again. We had a few people viewing and interacting with us. Eventually we had questions and requests for help on a different server as they were having some problems with some stuff. Chthon went over to attempt to help some, and admittedly they were further along than we were (but come now... we were dealing with a world that had no resources for the mods for the longest amount of time). I eventually popped over there, and helped with some stuff. I did pop on a couple weeks later to find that they'd changed more things around. No-one was on at the time for me to be able to find out if they needed anything more. And seeing as Chthon didn't have the MC server up and running, I couldn't get on the desert survival map :(

---------------------------------

Lately however, I've been playing Path of Exile. It's been a blast honestly... It has a skill system much like Final Fantasy 7, that of materia ... I mean, Skill Gems ... And a passive skill tree that is insane. I've been told it's like Final Fantasy 10... but I never played that to know. The fact that it's free to play? so much the cooler ... add in the fact that the micro-transactions they have, and will have in the future, are mostly cosmetic, nothing that will allow you to "win" more than another person ... in other words... no "wallet warrior" items.

----------------------------------

I'll be trying to get in a pattern of streaming, as well as doing blog posts, seeing as some stuff is getting steady around here with schedules and all the kids back in school and other craziness.