Archive for the “real life” Category

/falls over dead

Wow, okay this has been a week. The teachers raided my store. I spent most of the week shut into my office frantically ordering anything teacher-ish in a vain attempt to stay ahead of their buying. To say we’re a success with them is putting it, erm, mildly. >.>

As a result, I had to back out of almost all raiding this week. Coming home exhausted was the norm, as was falling asleep on the couch while the Olympics played out on the TV. I’m refusing to give up tomorrow night’s ZA guild run tho. Dammit, that’s our fun run! I need silliness! I need carnage! I need… well more sleep.

So no drama (/cheer!), no raiding (/boo!), and no me to tease Breana with cries of “I have fountain pens and youuuuu dooooon’t! /cackle”. Thanks to those that listened to the Twisted Nether podcast and my insane ramblings. God knows why I was deemed interesting but hopefully I was at least entertaining (please feel free to not delusion me :D)

But there is something that I found in my screenshot gallery that I had to show. Something… odd…

Wait… what was that? HUH?!

…

::throwing down gauntlet:: Damn you, Bre, you taunted me into it. I rolled a ‘lock. A GNOME ‘lock. She’s lvl 11. I got her that far on my “crapIhavenotimeGAH!” schedule this week. You. Will. Pay. Remember: I still haven’t shown you the paperclips! MWHAHAHAHAHAhahahahaAHHAHAHAH!

Yep, the store that was the cause of me uprooting my life in Atlanta, moving two states over with two frazzled cats and a ever-calm boyfriend, and my reason for not being in WoW nearly as much as I had been, is now finally open. /dies

For those that are interested in the whole morbid thing, here’s a link to pics on how we went from this to this.

And now if you all will excuse me, I’ll be up to my eyeballs with attempting to hire one more person and not be completely dead from exhaustion by the end of the week. ^^;

Okay, not a REAL truck, but that’s about what it felt like. -.-

This past week, I took off of WoW. I had a good reason: the store that I’m going to be managing as soon as it’s finished, stocked, properly licensed, and has one more employee other than the one I hired last week. Right now, it’s in yet another critical phase, with upteen boxes of merchandise all sitting in a (conveniently empty) store next to mine. All of those have to be opened, checked, priced and put out onto the floor. The floor that still needs some guys in here to move some stuff around, since I can’t move huge fricken metal shelving units. Strong? I have my moments, but they’re more nice spurts of “POWER WOMAN!”, not sustained “excuse me, I need to move this house I’m carrying and you’re standing in the way” kinda moments. And when I say umpteen boxes, I’m not kidding. Friday, a semi showed up. Thankfully, it wasn’t all for us. Just the 5 pallets, 42″x42″ square and 6 to 7 feet tall each, stacked high with art supplies and held together with wonderful heavy duty cling wrap. Guess what didn’t fit through a standard size door? You guessed it! So Mom (down visiting and helping get everything set up), The Boyfriend and I frantically unloaded the pallets to get the sidewalk they were on free and clear again.

Oh yeah, the store isn’t in a mall. It’s in the middle of the downtown area on a street, in one of the renovated buildings. Lovely place. Parking’s not great. But damn, the deli 3 stores down is amazing!

So this past week was getting computer systems set up, stock unloaded from trucks, training from the company that sold us the systems, interviewing another prospective employee, having Employee #1 fill out her forms and get started on setting up the teacher supplies section (holy crap teachers have a lot of stuff to buy these days), and close on my house back in Georgia. Yep, house finally got sold. Thank god.

After ALL of that, I’d have to be insane to play WoW, right? Apparently, I’m insane, cos Saturday I walked into ZA after the longest damned time away with a group of guildies. It didn’t start well. We wiped on the last group before the bear boss twice before we got it down and tackled him. We lost out on the timer chests, but we did clear out all of the animal bosses, which was as good a job as we’d ever done when we were serious about it. Then someone said “Hey it’s kinda early, anyone up for a speed Kara run?”

Not only am I insane, I’m a dumbass, too. I heard myself saying “Sure! Count me in on Siana!” Next thing I know, we’re in Kara and cruising along. 3.5 hours later, I left with my badges, tossed them into the bank, then saw I had 100 badges. Wait, wasn’t there something I wanted? Oh hells yes! So Siana is now the proud wearer of Leggings of the Pursuit, gemmed and patched (even if it’s not the patch I wanted, at least it’s something).

The next day, I was in bed most of the day with a headache. That’ll learn me. ::sigh::

Yeah, I know. I announce “I’m back!” then promptly not post anymore. What can I say? We’re still in the midst of unpacking and getting set up in a new town/state, and now I’m off for training for the new job. But there’s been another reason I’ve been kinda quiet, and it’s not one that I’m fond of.

See, I joined the guild I’m in just over a year and a half ago. It was a move made with my boyfriend and another friend of ours from our original guild. Most of the people in our original guild had wandered off from WoW or just weren’t interested in what we were interested in: raiding. The Boyfriend knew a guild that ran his raid group that was prepping for the switch from “classic” WoW to TBC WoW by taking in new members that they knew and liked to run the 25 man raids. I liked them, they liked us, and since our old guild was more or less dying, we announced we were leaving to go raid with the new guild. Everyone (mostly) understood and we went off to play with the new guild.

Cut to about 4 months ago. Raiding’s starting to get a bit shaky, with everyone winding down on end-of-school, new jobs, losing jobs, new babies, etc. You know: Life. Then the burnout started to show: burnout from raiding and from WoW itself. So raiding got more or less postponed. Again, totally understandable.

We now have something that’s made me want to not log into WoW cos, well, it hurts. A bunch of the core group all decided to try out Age of Conan. While I’m sure it’s a lovely game, I have two problems with it:
1. I’m on a Mac. Yes, I have Boot Camp, but still, come on.
2. I’ve never had any urge to explore the Conan universe. At all. Ever. (Really big problem. Movies were okay, but play there? Nooooo thank you.)

Add in a budget that’s really tight at the moment and yeah, trying AoC is towards the bottom of the list of things I’m interested in. Way at the bottom.

So a lot of the core group left for the new shiny that is AoC, more of the raiders went to a raiding guild or two, and we’re left with a gutted guild. The Boyfriend is now Guild Leader, and we’re both depressed over the whole thing. Yes there are still people in the guild that are happy where they are. Yes, we still have people playing. Are they the ones that we’ve grown used to playing with? Having the fun and insanity with? No.

Yes, guilds burn down like this all the time. It’s pretty common actually. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though. What hurts the most is this all happened pretty much in days. AoC came out, core group left, raid group left, and then the weekend came around and we surveyed what was left and winced. There’s hurt feelings, anger, rolled eyes, and every other emotion possible from just about everyone. I hate crap like this, so I’ve avoided logging in. Add in a move and new job and yes, things have gotten more than a bit disjointed on our side of life.

Am I moving to another guild? Who knows. I know I’m not right now. Do I want to keep raiding? Yep. Do I have any urge to log in these days? Yep, cos a friend of mine came back to WoW just in time to see an implosion. I love playing with him, and that’s giving me some much needed fun in my WoW-life right now. I have at least two if not three guilds on the server that I feel reasonable comfortable offering my “need a warm dps body?” services to. But it’s still not -our- guild and -our- friends. Will they come back with the expansion? Some will. Some won’t. We’ll see.

Breaking up is hard, whether it’s a face-to-face relationship or one born in pixels. It’s the ones that blindside you, the phone calls, text messages or board postings of “I don’t think we should see each other anymore” that hurt the most. So for now, or this week at least, I’m going to be quiet again while I try to absorb this latest kick in the teeth from WoW and try to concentrate on a new job in my “real” life.

“…how can I help you today?”

That’s right! I R BACK! /dies

Moving sucks, no matter what. I still have stuff in boxes all over the place and the computer equipment is also in complete disarray. BUT… I have internet again, and managed to indulge in a nice wallow in WoW.

The guild is in disarray as well, with some of the guild going to try Age of Conan (which while I’m sure is a lovely game, that universe has never held much appeal for me), while others have moved on to other guilds. Such is the life cycle of guilds and games. But that didn’t matter too much today. Today, I got to rampage around on my mage, finish out more Netherstorm quests I never did on her, and then help a friend out that’s recently returned to WoW do some group quests in Hellfire and Zangermarsh. All in all, a good time.

Later on tonight, I’ll be logging back into WoW to see if a second friend that had contacted me logs in like he was talking about. I’m hoping so, as it’s been ages since I’ve had a chance to commit mayhem with him. That’s one of the things that I honestly love about MMOs: the friends that you meet and keep over the years, no matter what games you all go to or what happens in everyone’s lives. I’ve had friends from just about every background you can think of, one that passed away way too soon, and a bunch of weddings and babies to welcome. And that’s something I’ll always treasure.

“Your call is very important to us, so please remain on the line…”
::music::

(also known as I’m moving this week and next, so please bear with me. )

For those that were wondering what the flooring and other crap I’ve done to the house looks like (you know, that stuff that’s partially responsible for keeping me from playing WoW), well, here ya go.

Yeah I know, took forever. But now those that wanted to see can see. For everyone else, I’ll be WoWing this weekend and be all chatty over that come Monday.

Don’t mind me. I’m vanishing again for the weekend. But I have a good reason this time. No, I’m not going out of town. The Boyfriend is moving in this weekend, so I have a feeling a lot of time is going to be spent dealing with fitting his stuff into the house. Oh and some house projects I had waiting on him.

What? Why are you people grinning like that? Where’s that weird music coming from? Is that from the 70’s?! Quit that! Jeez people, get yer minds out of the gutter! >.>

In real life, I’ve been preparing a house to sell. Yeah I know, crappy timing with the market being what it is, but I have a nice job change waiting for me in another state 5 hours away. That kinda necessitates selling my house. It’s also becoming spring where I live, which means Spring Cleaning in all it’s insane glory. So I’ve been cleaning out the house of old things I don’t want/use, visiting home improvement stores practically daily, and talking to installation people about appointments to come to the house. It’s more than a little hectic over here.

I’ve found that the “change everything!” mindset has invaded my WoW-space as well. In my collection of alts, I had a human rogue named Duvesa, that I’d gotten to level 57. She was my first major alt, and until I got off my butt and leveled my mage up, she was my highest level alt for the longest time. However, she was permanently stuck at 57. Why? I just couldn’t get into her anymore. I’d loved playing her, but somewhere along the way, I fell out of love. It just wasn’t fun for me any more. I could not find anything that made me interested in playing her anymore. So yesterday, after not playing her (other than hopping onto her and unlocking a low level lockbox for a friend) for almost 2 years, I sold all of her equipment and items, mailed the proceeds to my bank toon, and deleted Duvesa.

Did it hurt? A little. But I’d found myself with no connection at all to her, and was starting to hate the fact she was in the second slot on my list, right behind Siana. Why have her there if I was never going to play her? So I deleted her and once the faint pangs of character deletion were over, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. To celebrate, I did the next obvious thing: I deleted another character. This time it was a Night Elf warrior, Ravaria, that I’d had wandering around. Only level 27, but she’d been a NE priest, a human pally, and then a NE warrior before getting deleted yet one more time. That name is one that I’ve had in previous MMOs and I have sentimental attachments to it, so I created a placeholder character with it. Will I ever play it? Who knows.

So after deleting two characters, I decided since the house feels weird with all the new paint and what not going up, I needed to change up Siana a little. So I did something that made several friends fall over into shock: I respec’d. Right now, she’s the “standard” 41/20 BM spec after being heavy MM spec (my usual choice). I raided last night with it and said I’d give it a couple more days of playing around with it. But once the time is over, I’ll be respec’ing again, this time to one of the MM/SV builds.

Why am I doing this? I’m trying to shake my mind out of any hunter ruts it’s gotten itself into. Specs are always a polarizing element in WoW, with this build or that build being held up as the Holy Grail for whatever your attempting to do, whether it’s PvP, leveling or raiding. But it’s not that simple. There’s not really one “perfect” build for each class/situation. There’s always something that affects the end result: latency, gear, random chaos, and most importantly, the person actually playing the character. It’s that human element that makes two identically geared, identically spec’d hunters have different DPS. It’s what each person brings to the table in personal experience and gaming style that affects the end results.

So I’m playing with specs, rediscovering what does and doesn’t work for me, and having a grand time doing it. I have a feeling I’ll be going back to my usual spec, but it’s always good to shake things up.

Tomorrow? I’ll be watching guys install new flooring into my house and trying to minimize the destruction to my belongings. I’ll get some daily quests done, maybe even work on some quests with my mage, or over on Moon Guard with the About Last Night group over there. Or I could say to hell with it all and hide in the bedroom with the two freaked out cats.

Since a whining bear isn’t a pretty sight (yes, I’m looking at you, Big Bear), here’s your notice that I’m afk a bit. I’m currently being forced out of game to deal with painting 4 rooms in my house, and that leaves little game time this week. Thank god the guild canceled raids for this week. With 2.4 dropping and my real life insanity, it’s been a little nuts. ^^; So yes, I’m away for at least two more days. Here’s hoping the painting gets done soon. I’m tired of the fumes, low odor or not. ::sigh::