Laura Hits Level 5

NavyMom59 hits level 5 today. Laura and I were out for about 4 hours.  First we farmed in the Evergreen Cemetery, there were two missions that cover the same set of portals, so we accomplished them both.  We picked this area, because there were a lot of level 7 and 8 portals, and I was in need of level 7 bursters. Another nice thing was that all portals were reachable by car.  Considering the distance between the portals, this is neccesary.

So after loading up on gear, we hit a couple of long blockers made by FlatStan and CenNova. and then we headed to Lowry which at this time was 14 portals all neutral or "ghosted".  This did require some walking.  The difficult thing for me was to let Laura have all the opportunities to make links and field up the place to grab all the AP.

But I need about 230K for the next level, and Laura needed about 36K. As a team we're better if Laura could throw level 5 bursters ( B5's for short.)

And we achieved it, Laura made L5 from Lowry and we headed for home. I thought I might get out again and work Charlotte Premium Outlets, but I have had enough exercise for the day.  It's time to take the shoes off.

A Full Day of Ingress

Laura ( NavyMom59 ) and I managed to get out of the house and on the road about 10:00 once I finally decided on what we should do.  We were going to be over Fatiallians and bookwyrm1216's house at 18:00 for a camp on using IITC. Also, we planned to go visit St Ann's about 15:00.  So I thought we could complete a mission and visit Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden which required a hacking of 14 portals. 

And as you might imagine it was a great visit even in mid February.

Of course the best part was the green house where the orchids could be sheltered from typical mid-February weather.  This place is on the West side of Lake Wylie, and we're not over there very often except to buy gasoline.  (The difference in NC and SC taxes make it worth the trip)

So we completed the mission, threw up a few Control Fields for AP, and I figured we had the time to squeeze in one more mission near the Rivergate shopping area.  I expected it to be easy as I thought all the portals could be hacked from the car.  Well, all but one as it turned out, and that wasn't a bad walk.

In fact, as we walked back I was stopped by a young boy who was interested in a Naval career and was just about to join the sea cadets, in preparation for Annapolis.   So we exchanged e-mail addresses in case he wanted to hear any of my sea stories. 

So as we begin driving up I-77, I check my GroupMe and find the SkyBlast is very concerned about a multi-layer that the smurfs have put up.  I didn't know that the Check Point was at 16:00, so I figured I could take it down after we finished with St. Ann's.  

MoxieKai stepped in and was able to attack the North East corner, and since I saw him on the IITC, I figured we had time to hit the lighthouse on the North West corner, before appearing at St. Ann's.  This was nearly a "Leroy Jenkins" move. I had no idea I would be dealing with a Level 8 portal that was well shielded.

Look before you attack - very important!

I suppose I should have known better.  It was the critical anchor for their layer cake. I might have been able to take it out, but I was too lazy to get out of the car, and I wasn't directly on top of the portal for the first L7 Burster.  I was able to take out 3 resonators pretty easily, and had I been centered I think I would have succeeded. 

But one thing to know about an L8.  It takes 8 L8 or higher agents to build one, because no agent can put more than one Level 8 resonator on a portal (Jarvis / ADA excepted) and that means when you hit a portal, at least eight agents are going to get a report, and they can all recharge remotely if they have keys - and you bet that they do!

So I expended all my L7 and L6 bursters, which was about 150 each, and realized it was a lost cause. NavyMom59 also threw what she could, but as she's still L3, it wasn't much help.  We need both of us to L8 ASAP. 

We moved onto St. Ann's after announcing we had to give it up.

Then, we picked up our daughter Hylidae59 and the three of us when to the class taught by Xzre.  
FringeDynamic, AlphaWolfHybrid, and boyintub were also in attendance. It was very helpful, as I didn't quite know how to use bookmarks, and how that made drawing fields so much easier.  We also discussed various ways to throw large fields.

I think we may host the next one.

 

"Curse You, Red Baron!"

So I was out at the First Presbyterian Cemetery on Steele Creek Road, which is a nice concentration of portals that in Ingress is known as a 'farm'.  I had hoped to blow up some blue fields, but someone got to them before I did, and it wasn't as lucrative for my AP balance as I had hoped.   However there were blue portals to hit, and as I did, CenNova was getting attack reports.

He was close by and decided to drive over to catch me.  At this cemetery there are some iron gates that they close and lock at night to keep cars out.  However, you can enter on foot, and I'm told they don't mind if agents do.

So I was half way into the place and I see a white bronco sized vehicle in the distance and someone pops out a hand and waves very cheerfully.  I wondered if this was an agent, and in particular CenNova.

I was reaching the limit of my strength to walk, but I still had half the graveyard to visit.  I was also trying to complete a "mission" which required me to hack all the ports in that graveyard.  I am finding that if I'm not careful, I can "over do it" and exhaust myself while playing Ingress.  Sometimes as I walk out there I get a little wobbly on the legs. But I also believe that it is pushing me to the level of exercise that I need, I just have to be good to give myself adequate rest.  For example, I did go to bed about 21:00 last night.  Other nights I tire out enough and then I get Laura to do some driving as we hit some good drive by portals together.

So it was CenNova, that was waving, and he drove up the back way, where there are no gates and we had a fine chat.  He opened with "Hello, Snoopy!" so I knew it was him.

On my very first night of play, there was a blue portal with just a single resonator on it near my home.  I walked up to it with Matthew to demonstrate how this game worked to kindle interest.  So I attacked the portal with my Level 1 bursters and after throwing about 30 of them, I stopped.  I told Matthew, that I wasn't sure I was doing anything, but also wondered if the enemy was protecting the portal.  Well it was CenNova's portal to begin with.

The following night I was able to make a couple of control fields from the Charlotte Premium Outlet mall to some of the portals in the area, and covered the blue portal I tried to kill the night before.

The fields didn't last long before they were popped by CenNova, and that's when I broadcast chat to @CenNova "Curse you, Red Baron!", and thus started a relationship with the other side.

Anyway, the point is that you can't really see your enemies as enemies in this game - it's all just a game.

Stephen Captures the Nautilus

Some of the fun of ingress is that you can visit unique places and add them to your collection of mission patches.  

Here Stephen and a friend visit and capture the portal for the USS Nautilus.  A museum of the world's first nuclear submarine.

Congrats, Stephen, aka SAWNo1.

And Now Kimberley Has Joined the Enlightened!

I just finished a Skype conversation with Kim, and luckily she picked the right faction before I got to tell her that this is an Enlightened family.  So welcome Rosetalon to the family clan!

Kim will be going on a long deployment  Monday, and won't be back to her home port before October.  At that time, she'll begin her separation leave.  However, I suggested that she join Ingress early, as she will likely visit some ports with cool missions and ports to hack for her account.

Missions in Ingress are a lot like getting visa stamps in your passport book. e.g. proof that you've been to France, or someplace.  With Kim's Ingress account, should could collect missions from Singapore or Hong Kong and such.  

I also had a phone call with Mom today, and talked about Ingress - she wasn't as convinced it was for her. But she'll never know till she tries it.  

Colors

Ok I've been trying to get this new color scheme to work out so everything is readable again.

The goal was to have the green agent names to be readable against the background. They were too bright, and so I needed to have a darker background but not so dark that the default black text couldn't be read.  I also wanted the blue agents to be readable - and then there are the link colors!

Anyway if you feel these colors are hard on your eyes (we all perceive things differently) be sure to comment, and I'll see what I can do.

However, it seems I've lost all photo data - I guess that will have to wait till I get home to reload them, where I have most of the files on my desktop.  I hope I can find everything!

Actually, it turned out that the photos were still in the blog site's background, but all the linking info had been lost. I was able to recover them all.

Discovered Black Lion from an Ingress Mission

Laura and I were at the urologist Dr. Zane Basrawala yesterday. ( I think I finally learned to pronounce his name correctly) We talked about the kidney surgery which has to be deferred for 3-4 weeks as my immune system comes back from the last taxotere infusion.

After the consult, Laura and I took the time to go on our first Ingress mission. A mission is typically a series of things to do like hack six portals, or make a control field or such.  This particular mission has us hack four portals around the hospital, one which was unique to us because it was further then that others. Two portals were across the street at a store called Black Lion.

I'll have to get some pictures of the place.  It pretty much a store for of really good nick knacks for the home. And I mean a really good store for that. There's only one here in Charlotte, and the closest other one is in Hickory, well to the North.

There is also a large section of higher quality furniture than you might get at a Rooms to Go or Ashley's.  We had a good talk with Steve Lentz and I mentioned that we didn't have much discretionary income due to the medical bills arising from the cancer treatments.

Well, Steve is involved with alternative medicine, and you know how those types normally turn me off.  However, there were some nutritional adjustments he was suggesting that I believe can compliment my "Western Medicine" treatments I am currently undergoing.

Of course, he wants me off sugar, and while my good friend Gerry Benitz has been beating that drum for over 20 years, it's time to get serious.  My biggest challenge is figuring out what else I should be eating other than Captain Crunch or Lucky Charms :) ! Seriously, I have to think about things like going out on Saturdays for pancakes and the like.

No doubt if we can make these changes it will help Laura with her diabetes as well.  So I promised to get in contact with Steve via e-mail, and he intends to share some of his recipes which I will likely post here. So stay tuned.

The bottom line though is that we owe this contact to Ingress, which is getting us to explore our city more.

Oh also, I spent time with Kate last night training her as a Ingress agent, and she knocked off her first enemy portal after I had weakened it so that her level 2 bursters could finish the job.  She picked the agent name Hylidae59.  The 59 we've been adding to show the family relation with my name Brangus59 and Laura as NavyMom59.

Oh and FYI, Hylidae is a a family of frogs.  I suggested that since the pejorative from the enemy faction is that the Enlighted are frogs, maybe we could find a term that would be interesting, and Kate settled on this name, because it does have a bit of a feminine ring to it.

I had to agree to upgrade Hylidae59's data plan from 2Gb to 5Gb per month - hopefully that will be sufficient. Also while shopping online at the Verizon site it seems, we can get Matthew a smart phone for $4.50 per month - though I bet I need a $20 data plan for him.  However with him working at McDonald's, he'd be happy to pay for his data.

So he's going to have to play Ingress too :P.

Is the Current Thinking on ADT Correct?

This came up in Google news today.
While it's very brief, and lacks detail, it points to information that I should get more involved with before assenting to the new androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) that Dr Burgess suggested yesterday.

While I don't think my genes are expressing much in the way of cardio-vascular risks, based on family history, I still wonder about the general lack of testosterone as being a very good thing.

This article has a bit more content, and yes it seems the trade off is cancer vs cadio-vascular disease.

However, this article points out risks to the skeletal system.

One thing that remains dubious for me is that all three posts I have cited are on sites largely made of "click bait" so they are more about advertising than medical content. I haven't really found the actual source material to read.  More on this later if I find it.  

Ingress and Other Updates

Yes, this Ingress thing has got me hooked. I've made it Level 6 and I earned my first silver medal.

Laura has also played, she's almost to L3.  We spent a good day Saturday running around showing Laura the game.  We made a big field that crossed over Lake Wyliey, and it stayed up until this evening when CenNova killed it by taking over "Charlotte Post Office" on Westinghouse Blvd.

Getting back to Saturday, Laura and I were still on the West side of Lake Wyliey when I started to get alerts that a Level 15 agent named illiane was attacking the Charlotte Premium Outlets (CPO) on exit 4 of I-485. There are eight portals there, all were green until she attacked. But she only flipped two of the portals to the enemy side. It took Laura and I about 20 minutes to get there.

As I tried to repair the damage by flipping one of the two portals back, bam, bam, bam, illiane started flipping the other portals!  So Laura and I tried to intercept her to see if we could have a friendly chat.  My aim was to show Laura that this game is largely social.

Well illiane was not to be found, so we moved to the last portal I had green, and sat on it for about ten minutes. She didn't show up. I was in groupme with SkyBlast trying to get a description of her. He said "She's a nice lady despite her smurfieness." "Long hair, Asian, about 30, but hard to tell because well, Asian."

So I then figured out that she was playing cat and mouse with me. She was likely in one of the nearby stores trying to get eyeballs on me. So Laura and I tried to see if we could find her, and I assumed she'd have to come out to sit on the portal to kill the shielding I had placed.  

Well I was wrong, with her Level 8 gear, she could kill it without getting so close.  So we didn't see her, and she left.  Only then did she respond to my invitation to got to the pretzel place at the mall. She said she just then read it, but I tend to doubt her statement based on the timing of events.

My point is however, the this game gets interesting and it allows you to get clever like illane was.  There are cross faction social events, and I bet I will finally meet her then.

Here we see the fielding I did today.  My intention was to make all the orange links. However, I would still need help in finishing off the CPO. The field crossing Lake Wyliey was the one Laura and I did Saturday. But when CenNova flipped the post office, it took down 4 of the Control Fields (CF's) we had created.  Again, his shielding is a bit too much for me to take without using a lot of L6 weapons and I'm getting low. 

I think at this point I need to work on farming and leveling up to 8 before making "big" fields like this again. 

So who's my nemisis ? At this point it's a toss up between illane and CenNova, but I think CenNova is slightly in the lead.  I keep a sense of humor, and when he does damage to my set ups, I frequently send out the chat "Curse you, Red Baron!" in the "All channel". 

Stephen is also playing quite a bit and has made contact with agents in Groton CT, which should get him out more. He's made it to Level 3.  I just got Kate to open her account. It remains to be seen how much she'll like it, though she did mention it to her boyfriend, and he wants to try it. Kate wanted to wait until she could send him an official invite.

Also, I mentioned to my nurse at the Levine Cancer Institute that this game is getting me to move a lot more, which is urged by the office for the cancer patients. It's too easy to want to rest and avoid activity.  Ironically, that only increases muscle pain problems - you must force yourself to move more than you want to.

So I figured she should try it and if she liked it, to recruit more cancer patients as part of their therapy.  All for the Enlightened side!

If you're interested in playing I'd be happy if you could provide me with your e-mail address so that I can get points for recruiting you in directly.  You can of course find it an download yourself - but I would love to have the Action Points (AP)

Oh, and since I am on the Enlightened side, I figure I should change the colors of my blog to be more green.

Other than Ingress

I met with Dr. Burgess, (my oncologist) this morning before my last of the taxotere infusions.  The MRI recently done shows very good improvement of shrinking the tumors, and it did not reveal a compression fracture of the spine.  Dr. Burgess was concerned because that sort of trouble is in my potential future, and he wasn't sure if I had already succumbed to one. Well I haven't. 

We also discussed a potential new drug to suppress my testosterone levels as my PSA levels are not decreasing as quickly as he'd like.  One danger of the new drug is that I could get permanent pains in my jaw.  So I first have to see a dentist to clear me for use of the new drug.  I will name it later, but the info packet is down stairs. 

Also I asked directly what my final months may be like, just so that I might give good warning to my family if they wanted to get those 'last looks' be for I go.  Basically, he said that I will begin to get into some sever pain modes, and some heavy narcotics would be prescribed at that point.  Typically the patient would just one day not wake up from the narcotics.  It's a way off, and in that time, new treatments will likely be available. 

For example, when Kimberly first heard about the cancer last September, she was trying to organize emergency leave through the Red Cross.  Well I knew I wasn't THAT close to dying, and it wasn't important for her to get emergency leave approved.  My aim today was to have a better idea of when it would be appropriate to use such emergency leave in the future. 

I have a meeting with the urologist tomorrow, and he's wanting to put a catheter into my right kidney that will come out of my back.  As far as I know this would only last a couple of weeks and be removed.  Also, Dr. Burgess says I can not have that invasive surgery for at least another four weeks as we wait for the taxotere to leave my systems.

I'm feeling ok right at the moment, but my past experience tells me that the taxotere won't really hit till Friday, and then I'll be in bed until Monday morning. I think I will make the effort to get out to hack at least one portal each day just so I can keep my streak going - there are points for that, and I don't want to reset my number.  It would just be a quick drive some 500 meters up the street, and then I can turn around and go home.

New Game - Ingress

I don't know whether to curse or thank my co-worker Jason.  He suggested I looking into a game called Ingress that had been developed by Google originally.  It's now run by a company that split off from Goggle as far as I understand.

There are a couple of other co-workers that play it here as well.
It's a fairly simple thing, but it has caused me to get out of the house more, walk around and get exercise I hadn't been getting, and I really did need.

To play it, you must have a GPS enabled device, such as an iPhone or equivalent. It's sort of a geocaching on steroids, but all the objects are virtual and you don't need to dig anything up.

It's also an amazingly social experience. I'm encouraging Laura to join as I think she is not happy with the level of friends she's developed here in Charlotte.  I think Kate will enjoy this too.

I'm playing for the Enlightened.  That was purely an accidental choice.  Everyone in my workplace in on the green team, so I thought it would be best to join them.

This video also gives a decent idea of how it's played.  I like this team as they are willing to show their mistakes and how they fixed them.

Kidney Test Yesterday

Yesterday I had a Lasix Renal Scan at CMC Pineville.  My urologist was concerned about the right kidney as I have mentioned before. I was not convinced there was a persistant problem, and figured that since the clotting the bladder was solved, the kidney would be fine.

Well, I was allowed to see the scan while it was in progress, and it was pretty clear to me that perhaps my urologist knows his business.  I'm not sure which radio-pharmaceutical agent that they used for me - but as the right kidney showed bright white and the left was barely visible, it was clear that the right kidney wasn't draining quite as fast as the left.

I haven't heard from my urologist yet, but I expect a call for a consultation to be coming up soon.

Oh, and I just got a call about the MRI done Friday.

No new tumor growths and the existing tumors on the spine are shrinking.  Nothing to really explain the pain last Tuesday, except that it may be bulged disks.  So all in all it's a good report - just which it wasn't $2900 out of my pocket.