Braiding worms together....

It is my birthday. I’m 63.

I would have liked to go to Eastercon, which is in Belfast, but I couldn’t afford it. Spit.

My plan for today, therefore, is to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my PlayStation.

I’ve reached the Grymforge. In the Grymforge I have discovered an automaton called Grym. And, boy, does he live down to his name.

He only takes damage when he’s been standing in lava, and takes more bludgeoning damage than any other kind. In particular, magic attacks do not appear to have much success unless they are cold based. Which, of course, means that the heat from the lava is reduced that much quicker. I spent all yesterday evening on Grym and got nowhere.

My cunning plan, which I came up with overnight, is to load a previous save and go back to the Emerald Grove. There is a reliable vendor there and I will buy a bludgeoning weapon for my whole party. With those, we might make some progress.

On the Wiki for the game there’s a method of killing Grym with one blow but it involves more hand/eye coordination than I’m capable of.

Cats

I took Smokey (my black cat) to the vet for her annual check up. She’s in good condition, but had lost 800g, meaning she’s a bit skinny, and she has a small hernia. Nobody in their right mind would give a general anaesthetic to a 19 year old cat. So we keep a careful eye on her.

The same week, I had to take Opal (the tabby) to the vet because she was walking funny. You may recall that she came to me with a broken pelvis. Her walk was reminiscent of then. She was prescribed Gabapentin and Loxicom. She does seem much better when on the medication. Which is good, because the vet said that if the problem continued we might have to x-ray her, and perhaps refer her to a specialist vet in either Liverpool or Chester.

Opal hates being in her carrier and both Liverpool and Chester are a long way from here. Carrying her in her basket on a train would suck like a vacuum cleaner.

Please note: this is fairly long and very image heavy. It's primarily for myself, but I've made it public to share with anyone who'd like to read.





I've been trying to write this post for a week and a half, since Sasha left us, but I've found it really hard - harder than memorial posts I've written for other cats over the years. It's not because losing Sasha was any more or less painful than losing any of those other cats. They've all left empty spaces that will never quite be filled, because they were all unique.

I think it's that losing Sasha marks a bit of an end of an era. He was the last of the group of cats that we had in the first decade of the century, the last of a generation of our cats - and the last of the cats from when we lived in the Blue Mountains before coming here. I was used to thinking of him as young in comparison to the (*counts*) eight cats that came before. I think, also, there was always a bit of a youthful quality to Sasha, even when he got old. It was hard to believe, this last year, that he was the oldest cat. It's even harder now to believe that he's gone.

And now I've worked all that out, I'll finally tell Sasha's story.

( Sasha's story )