Life

It’s cold and dreary today in central Texas. Freezing rain is making overpasses dangerous, so if you’re in the area, be careful out there. Yesterday was 70°F and mostly sunny, so I can’t complain too much, but seeing how this is my blog… yes I can. 😂

The cold makes me want to huddle inside and drink hot tea all day, so that’s pretty much the plan. The fantasy romance is over 30k words now, and I’m still having fun with it, so I’ll be trying to make that word count go up this week. Not having a deadline is super nice, but at the end of the day, I still need to get words on the page.

We spent the weekend playing Satisfactory, and we’re almost through all the levels again. If you’re not familiar, it’s a game about building factories on an alien planet to produce widgets for your company. You start with a couple machines gathering a few resources, then you expand as you get better technology.

Last time we played, we absolutely wrecked said alien planet with miles and miles and miles of conveyor belts and pipes running between the resources and the factories. This time, Mr. M decided to use trucks to move supplies, and it worked surprisingly well! They’re finicky to set up, but once they’re going, they’re far better than they were when we played a couple of years ago. And now I don’t have to feel so bad about destroying nature, lol.

You can also tell which factories he built—beautiful, precise, enormous—versus which I built—sort of slapdash, but gets the job done, and takes waaaaaay less time. :)

We also got to drive an Ioniq 5 this weekend, a car we’ve been trying to buy since they opened “reservations.” I’ll spare you the saga, but it’s been over a year, and I’m unhappy with how Hyundai handled the entire process. But the car was lovely! Supposedly they have one that matches our reservation coming in March, so maybe we’ll get a new car this year. At this point, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Now I’m going to make some tea and some words, and I hope that you’re warm and cosy wherever you are!

I turned in the page proofs for Capture the Sun on Friday, so I got to spend the weekend having fun. On Saturday, we had a lovely dinner with friends we hadn’t seen since before the pandemic, then on Sunday, I built my new gaming PC.

We’ve been meaning to upgrade our computers forever it seems like, but thanks to the aforementioned pandemic, parts have been in short supply and expensive. We built our existing computers in 2013, then upgraded the video cards in 2018, so I’d say we got our money’s worth. Fingers crossed the new systems last as long.

Behold, my new precious!

Yes, I forgot to take a picture once it was all together until after I’d already put it under my desk and hooked up all the cables. Pretend you see no mess.

We did a mini-ITX build, so the case is adorably tiny, and it has a pop-up handle on top. A handle! Do I need a handle? Yes, absolutely, obviously. 😂

That glorious rectangle of black mesh started out like this:

It may have been ten years since I built a computer, but the process has only gotten easier. All of the cables had nice labels, and the front IO was in one solid block instead of trying to put each connector on the pins individually. There were only two tricky bits. First, an ITX build is tiny, and there’s not a lot of room to work. Getting the cable routing right took some fiddling. The second was the force required to clamp in the CPU: it seemed like A LOT, but it was fine.

Mr. M’s motherboard arrives on Wednesday, so next weekend will be computer building part two. For those of you interested in specs, prepare to be whelmed: we generally build middle of the road PCs with whatever the newest tech at the time is, then run them forever.

The build is in a HYTE Revolt 3 case. The CPU is an Intel 13600k with an ASRock Z790M-ITX motherboard, 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 2TB M.2 drive, and a giant Noctura air cooler, plus another Noctura 140mm fan that didn’t make the first picture. We’re keeping our existing ancient video cards for a bit until the sting of all these new parts wears off, lol.

But considering my previous computer was too old to run Windows 11 and only had 8GB of ram (a lot at the time!), this is a massive upgrade.

We’ve started playing Satisfactory again, and Mr. M was off today, so we spent the whole day testing out the new system. It works! And the CPU temperature stayed reasonable, which is always a concern with these tiny cases.

We’ll probably have to upgrade our video cards when Diablo IV comes out, or maybe Starfield, if it’s first, but for now, it’s perfect.

And so cute! 😍