Bud Light Fest, et al.

[ehowton]

When my son and I returned from Munich and mentioned we'd attended Ocktoberfest many assumed we meant we'd gone to Hays, KS. After my shoot of the Hosington Cardinals middle school football game (I don't know what the football equivalent of, "little league" would be) I drove the extra 45-minutes to attend Ocktoberfest in Hays as I was already awake, dressed, and North of home. To call it a bitter disappointment would not be an understatement. First of all, they had no German beer. To their credit, they did have a handful of "German-style" beers on tap, but to their detriment, they were out of everything but cans of Bud Light. Awkwardly, Bud Light was the biggest draw of the Hays, KS Ocktoberfest because of course it was. I'd turned down lunch earlier that day in order to grab some authentic German food from the vendors at Ocktoberfest - notably the kuchen - which much to my dismay was also sold out. The entire trip was a bust, so I drove back home to work on post-processing the football photos.

The last two times I've stayed up overnight were both with the same person - Tabatha. She has this odd timing about her where she contacts me just as I am crawling into bed and we end up staying awake all night. The first time was to decorate her boss' office for her birthday, which concluded with breakfast at Perkins, and the most recent was the football photos. Sure I'd invited her over to work on them with me, but unbeknownst to me, after the shoot, she'd gone home and slept the rest of the day. Accordingly, she arrived at 0100 and left when the sun came up. We didn't even get all the pictures done!

If I haven't blogged this previously, the motherboard went out on my primary desktop. It took many hours of troubleshooting to determine the cause, and ofc complete dismantlement of the desktop to pull the mobo. The MSI x790 ACE was $600, but thankfully still under warranty. I was approved for an RMA but that was the same weekend I first went to Oklahoma (binge-watching Dexter: Resurrection with Jennifer), then Nebraska (second date with Melissa) effectively tanking my timeline for a quick turnaround. Several weeks later I received a replacement motherboard, but left for Topeka the next day. To offset the loss of my primary desktop, I installed Windows 10 on the box with the RTX3070 in it and relied heavily upon my MacBook Pro and Mac mini to fill in the gaps. This is also where I discovered I was gravely mistaken about the $100 Parallels program I purchased for the MacBook last year. That price is a yearly subscription fee - yikes! Hence the Windows 10 on the 3070 box as I generally have one Microsoft computer for gaming.

Speaking of gaming, I'd gone into Gabby's office one day and saw her playing a new game. I was kind of enthralled (which doesn't happen often). "What is this game?" I asked, with the follow-up comment, "The graphics are impressive!" The game was Once Human and I've invested nearly 200-hours in it since. I'm not normally one for 3rd person shooters, apocalyptic games, nor games where crafting is how you get your best gear. However, these elements were so highly integrated into the game play, it not only made sense to do those things, it works really well and proved to be a lot of fun. And the graphics really are impressive - not like Cyberpunk 2077 for example where the RTX4090 is a must-have for insane ray-tracing. Sadly, it does not play natively on the MacBook, and my aversion to the BlueStacks interface caused to die almost immediately reinforcing that I'll wait until I get home and reassemble the desktop before I play again. That shall be my motivation to complete the project. The MacBook really can do almost everything it can, albeit slower.

Then there was Cass. Re: my last post on the subejct she did reply...two very flattering selfies with the caption, "You should come visit. No pressure though." It was difficult to NOT read pressure from her expression in the selfies, and damn near the polar opposite of my thoughts to her question. Or, as my therapist intoned, "Oh my."

We're going to the Asian market in KC today after work, then back home Sunday, Tess Tuesday, a pregnancy photoshoot in Larned next weekend (with production maintenance smack dab in the middle Saturday evening), and Tabatha's co-worker saw the football shots and now wants to hire me to do her son's senior photos. After that? Tentative plans to binge both seasons of Wednesday with a new girl also in Oklahoma. My life is nuts.