The Daily Grind

It's been drawn to my attention how important images are when doing posts. So I'm going to try to have a "related image" for every post from now on. Today, I'll be talking about daily routines - but not just any daily routine, my own personal daily rotation in WoW.

As everyone knows, WoW is my primary de-stresser. I play the game most every day for an hour or two after work to relax and calm down, and I generally do exactly the same thing over and over.

My first stop is Tol Barad - the interior if Alliance is in control, the exterior if they aren't. And I'll queue for the battle if it's coming up - no turning down that extra 3 Commendations. I need to grind out 400 of the dang things as quickly as possible so I can get the Drake mount and the Fox Kit pet before the area becomes essentially abandoned with the hit of MoP.

The next place I head to is quite a long way away - Dalaran. From there, I fly to the Argent Tournament grounds. I'm already exalted with every faction, but still grinding the Crusader's Marks so that I can collect all of those mounts. Tomorrow, I'll have enough to get the Argent Hippogryph, and I already have the Silver Covenant version. Then I'll have all the Hippogryphs that are available within the game without TCG mounts and the like. But I still have 5 faction mounts and all the pets to go.

My first stop at the Argent Tournament grounds is the Silver Covenant Pavilion, where I pick up the 3 daily quests there. Then across the grounds to grab the Argent Crusade's and the general Tournament dailies. I have a well worn circuit for completing the entire set within half an hour or so, given that I don't have to wait for anything to respawn before I can take it down.

Once I return to the tournament grounds and turn in all the quests, it's time to move on to the chance-based parts of my day. I fly back to Dalaran, take the Stormwind portal, and go right through the portal to Blasted Lands and into Outland. I hop a Gryphon to Shattrath. While I'm in flight, I set my dungeon difficulty to heroic. And when I land, I take off again for Sethekk Halls, going after the Reins of the Raven Lord mount.

So far I haven't had any luck with Anzu dropping my pretty raptor-esque mount. From there, it's back to Shattrath and through the portal to the Isle of Quel'danas. With my dungeon difficulty still set to heroic, I then run Magister's Terrace - which I was quite lucky with today. After less than ten runs, today I got the achievement above - and made the Swift White Hawkstrider mine. :) I'll still be running it awhile longer - I don't have the phoenix hatchling pet that drops from the same boss. No need to do it on Heroic anymore, though. So that's nice and fast.

From there, I take the portal at the end of the dungeon to get back out, and fly from the Isle south down to Northpass Tower - the closest flight point to the Service Entrance of Stratholme. This dungeon doesn't have a heroic version - I run it four or five times a day, trying to get my coveted undead horsie - Deathcharger's Reins. Call me morbid, but the bone-collector in me LOVES the look of the undead horses, and being Alliance, this is the only one I'll ever get a chance to own. (I own all the default ones on my Troll druid, though. ;) ) This mount has been my holy grail for awhile - a couple of years, I've been after it. In that time I've never seen it drop - with the new Account Wide mounts and pets, I'd be happy to win it on a character that's of level, but it just refuses to drop. My bony unicorn.

When I'm done there, then I decide what I want to do next, but Stratholme is the final stop for my daily grind in WoW. And as proven today with my Swift White Hawkstrider, it pays off in time.

So that's how I know - one day, ONE DAY, the Deathcharger will be mine!

Sublime Elk Overture

So I play this excellent hunting game that I've talked about before. Only recently, though, have I gotten into the site wide competitions. I've placed a couple of times in the top ten, and that's made me feel awesome. But I really would like to win. There're some awesome prizes. And right now, the competition I have my eye on is arguably the most difficult one in the game.

The challenge is one of distance and the power of a firearm. Your score is based on your distance from the animal in question upon firing, but it also has a lot to do with shot placement, because you see, the challenge is to hit an elk (cow or bull) in such a way that the bullet penetrates both lungs and the heart. This is where the power of a rifle comes in, as only the high powered rifles (the .300 or the .308 - which I use) have the stopping power to penetrate all 3 organs from 100 feet or more away.

So I have the right firearm, we know that. My biggest issue is that I'm shooting at what's usually a moving target, and trying to hit an area that is ultimately about the size of my fist.

Here, have some visual aids. :P





As you can see, in order to make this shot, I'm aiming for a spot only a hair behind the front leg. Too far forward, and the leg bones will catch the bullet. Too far back and I hit the lungs but miss the heart (or, more likely with my aim these days, I hit the gut and wind up chasing the dang thing for two miles before it dies). The heart is the bullseye in a target that's very tiny for the size of the animal I'm aiming at.

Anyone who's ever seen an Elk can tell you - they're very large deer. VERY large. Not as big as Red Deer, but still very large. But for their size, their hearts are actually fairly small, and not placed as far forward as some other deer species. (I make heart shots on Whitetails all the time - not just with a rifle, but with a compound bow. The elk is MUCH more difficult.)

First of all, in order to even aim properly to take this shot, you need to get the elk broadside to you. The game is programmed that, when the animals respond to your call, they come straight at you. So every time I call, I then have to inch around, keeping my eyes on the animal and reacting to any time it pauses or looks around to make sure I stay hidden. I have to monitor my distance via a rangefinder (and I usually have the competition leaderboard open in another window so I can see the distance I'm trying to beat, too), make sure the animal doesn't see, smell, or hear me, and get into position so that I'm on flat ground with the animal broadside to me.

Then the really hard part. I can't lie prone on the ground, which gives my gun it's highest stability, because then I'm shooting UP, and the bullet will hit the lung and liver instead of lung and heart (yes, I've made this mistake before. :( ). I have to be crouching, which means my gun isn't as stable. To make matters worse, my hands shake when I get excited, so my hand on my mouse is sometimes actually trembling. I wait for the animal to stop moving. I aim, and I wait - in order to get the best shot, I can't fire while the animal is standing still. I need it to move the foreleg that's facing me to take a step, leaving the area just behind and above the elbow wide open for the shot. Once all of these conditions are met, I fire.

I've made the shot once. Only once. And it wasn't enough for me to win the competition. However, I'm trying to do it constantly now, even when not in the competition, as training, basically. I try for heart shots on any animal I hunt now, because that's a requirement of the sharpshooter competitions, too. And I wouldn't mind winning those, either.

Basically, if you fire and the elk falls, right then and there, you have a good chance that you actually pulled it off. Because if the bullet glanced off the leg bone or a rib, or buried in the gut, the elk will run. So when they run, I curse, chase them down, claim them, then go off to start the whole process all over again when I can find another elk. When they fall, my heart jumps into my throat and I wonder - did I do it? Was this the shot? Is this the elk that wins me the tournament?

And yet, time and time again, it isn't. But I'm getting better. I got 3 pure heart shots in a row yesterday, and one that COULD'VE been an entrant, except that I was a little too far away for even my .308 rifle...I got one lung and the heart, but the bullet didn't have the power to penetrate the second lung. That was the one that hurt. :P

But, I WILL get it. Some day soon, Sublime Elk Overture will be mine. Expect a blog gloating about THAT when it happens. :P

Glitches Galore AND Trolled?!

We've been raiding fairly regularly now for the last couple of months. Since the first time we downed Deathwing, we've completed the raid every week, once. Until this last week. We had quite a bit of difficulty with the second half of the raid - a couple of wipes on Ultraxion, so many wipes on Warmaster Blackhorn that we decided to call the raid for the first day there without finishing it. On Saturday, we managed to get Blackhorn down, but not until after several MORE wipes. Then we proceeded to wipe repeatedly on Spine of Deathwing as well, until finally we hit on a winning combination of DPS and skill and took that down as well. We know Madness of Deathwing very well at this point - in fact, every time we've taken it down, we've done it with me as the single tank for the encounter. This means most of our DPS have to be pulling at least 30,000 damage per second in order to kill the Mutated Corruption before it can impale me a second time (an unavoidable death). We haven't had any issues with this, though we have cut it close. This week, however, things started going a bit...cockeyed. It started with a glitch we've had before, in which an enemy refuses to focus on me despite me throwing every taunt I've got at it (Growl AND Challenging Roar), and slamming it with every bit of damage I can muster. This causes the aggro to go everywhere, and the party wiped twice because of this glitch. However, as I said, this is a glitch we've had before - if we keep "resetting the fight" by wiping the party, eventually the mechanic works properly again and I gain aggro immediately upon tossing my Growl at the enemy. And that was true - the third or fourth time through, it worked properly...and that was when we started to see the evidence that something was strange and different with this particular dungeon run - besides other things being a bit more difficult than they usually are all the way through. We had most of our DPS ABOVE 30k damage per second. In fact, four out of five dps were doing over 40k. So why weren't we able to kill the Mutated Corruption before the Elementium Bolt came down? On ANY of the platforms? This wasn't player error - everyone was focused on exactly what they were supposed to be focused on. Everyone was damaging everything they were supposed to. Throwing everything they had at each threat in succession - and no matter what we did, the corruption wouldn't go down before that Bolt came UP. Now we're all good players. We did what we were supposed to do. Another common glitch wiped the party, though. During this last fight, each of the Aspects gives the party a buff to help them through the battle. Thrall is simultaneously the most useless and useFUL one - he gives you the ability to leap between the widely spaced platforms with a gust of wind at the right time to blow you across. The down side to this being that when Thrall's buff fails, which it does occasionally (and it isn't SUPPOSED to - that's the glitch), the player effected by the glitch is dropped to their death...and they are NOT within reach of any battle rez in the game. In a 10 man raid, every bit of DPS counts. Losing one player to a Thrall glitch means we are going to hit the Cataclysm timer on the last platform and the entire party will die. So during that run, though we did everything right, we still died, thanks to Thrall dropping our Warlock in a dramatic fashion as we lept toward the last platform. It was at this point on the second day that we decided to call the Raid again. We had a glitched instance, obviously - if it wasn't one glitch, it was another, and it wasn't getting easier. Tempers were flaring, and the last thing you want is to snap at people because of a game. So we let it go and the raiding party broke up for the second time. We got together again to try one last time - it hurt so bad to have the raid sitting there within fifteen minutes of completion and NOT completing it. So we got the group together AGAIN. Now all five of our DPS were pulling over 40k. We were failing to get the Mutated Corruption down before the second Impale. After the second time, we decided to go with the classic way for this to be performed - we dual tanked it. The idea being that each tank can take one Impale, and before a third goes up, the Corruption will be dead. That worked, and we progressed. Still, though, that last platform was SO HARD. The corruption wasn't down, the Bolt came out, forcing everyone to switch from the Corruption to the Bolt before it killed everyone. The Corruption was still up when Hemorage came down, but we got past THAT. And there we were, blasting everything we had at the Arm Tentacle, trying desperately to finish. The timer for Cataclysm - the party wiping mechanic that goes off if the Tentacle isn't killed in a certain amount of time - was ticking down. We were all focused, we were good. We killed the tentacle with 3 seconds to spare on the timer. The timer didn't stop. Cataclysm went off anyway. Mumble erupted with everyone shouting and cursing at the game - THAT glitch, after all we'd done, that was INTOLERABLE!! It was horrible! How could ANYONE be expected to get that thing down ANY faster?! We BEAT the timer and we STILL died?! Ok, that was it. We were done. The Raid broke up for the final time and we all slunk off, licking our respective wounds and growling about how unfair the game was being. Later on, those of us in our Guild were talking about it. Forget the Cataclysm glitch - there was NO WAY with our DPS numbers that we shouldn't have been able to single tank that fight. So why were the Corruptions staying alive so long? Why was everything so hard to kill? A theory was hit upon, but none of us wanted to believe it...See, since Dragon Soul came out, the Raid has been "nerfed" (made easier) several times. At this moment, all of the enemies in the Raid both do 20% less damage over-all, AND have 20% less health than when the Raid was originally released. At the beginning of the Raid there is an NPC standing by that will allow you to "turn off" this nerf, and make the Raid as hard as it originally was - for those people who feel their guild is prepared for that challenge. The trick is - ANY member of the party can talk to that NPC and "un-nerf" the Raid. There's no warning that it's been done. And right at the very beginning of our Raid, on Friday, we got a couple of jerks in the pick-up part of our group who hated on us for (of all things) using Mumble instead of Ventrillo (both are VOIP programs that allow all of us in the Raid to hear and talk to each other for ease of communication and a lack of a need to type anything). We have a paid-for Mumble server, thanks to a wonderful member of our Guild, so we use Mumble. The jerks insisted Vent was better and refused to use Mumble, then left the group. The thing is - we were already inside the instance. Just inside the portal. Right next to that NPC. You see where I'm going with this, no doubt. The theory we came up with was that just before they left, one of the jerks talked to the NPC and un-nerfed the dungeon on purpose to troll us. There was, of course, no warning or notification that this had been done. Of course, this was just a theory - but the extra 20% health would explain our inability to kill the Corruptions before the second Impale, as well as just how HARD everything kept hitting, with the extra 20% damage from everything. Lona sent in a trouble ticket about it, asking if there was any way we could check and find out if our group had been un-nerfed. Several hours later, our theory became fact when a GM confirmed that our raid lock for the week was to an un-nerfed dungeon. On top of all the glitches, the game itself had been set to "hard mode". No WONDER we hadn't finished it! Yes, we were angry at the jerks for having done it. No there was no way for the GM to find out who in the party did it, because it works as a party-wide thing. However, suddenly not finishing the dungeon seemed like almost more of an accomplishment than it normally would have. We went through all of Dragon Soul, all the way up to the final boss, at it's original difficulty - without even KNOWING it until we got to that point. Our Raid team has come a LONG way from where we were two months ago, barely knowing what we were doing. SO yes, we were plagued with glitches, and ultimately the trolls won the day. Still...I'm very impressed with our performance. This week, we'll take the whole thing down in it's nerfed form in one day - no problem. After all - now we know how much harder it COULD be.

Kalitri, Destroyer's End

This last Friday, I completed a current content regular difficulty 10-man Raid in WoW for the very first time. I wasn't DPS, you know I don't heal - that's right. Not only did I complete the raid (in five hours, with Lona, Nyx, Kata, and our friend Zach by my side), but I TANKED it. I could go on and on about how it was, I could exult over having done it - and I AM very excited that I did. But I think it'd be more interesting to see it from the perspective of the character who did it. I give you Kalitri - a Worgen Druid. And she now proudly carries the title... Destroyer's End * (*Contains spoilers for the Dragon Soul raid bosses and key events within the Raid.)

The Alluded To Gaming Update

So when I did my TAE blog yesterday, I said a lot had happened in my gaming life, too. So I figured I should probably update this blog section as well! The only real question is...where do I start?

I'll start with the raiding jump - and my subsequent confidence jump that came along with it. Along with a nice side helping of drama.

A few weeks ago, my best friend and my brother fell in with another guild who's name I won't post here because of the drama that later ensued, and I'd like our sever to continue to be the nice, calm place it is. They ran regular difficulty level Dragon Soul with that group and didn't get past the 3rd boss. They were figuring it was probably some mechanic issues. The next week they asked me to come with - in fact, a lot of potchkeying was done to make sure I was ABLE and available to come with them, to get around my work schedule. And this was all because they needed a tank - and I am a very, very good bear.

How did someone who used to be incredibly terrified of dungeons at ALL find themselves tanking a regular difficulty end-game raid? Well...I learned, to put it mildly. And I researched. I owe quite a bit of what I know to WoW Insider's Shifting Perspectives column, and it's wonderful advice on everything from rotation to optimal use of cooldowns, to guides and walkthroughs of specific bosses. Here's the main problem, however...

I don't particularly like tanking. Which is weird, because honest, compared to say, kitty DPS, bear tanking is an easier rotation. There are less things to monitor, and with our Guild Mumble (thanks Zach!), I can respond immediately to someone telling me to move or do something. But I really enjoy kitty dps...More than I enjoy my hunter, these days. It's making me glad for account wide mounts and pets are coming in Mists Of Pandaria, because it means I can switch mains completely without feeling the guilt of not having all the pets, mounts, and achievements I've worked so hard to GET on Des.

However, as I've learned, when it comes down to what you want versus what your guild/pack need, the needs of the many definitely outweigh the wants of the one. (Yay for a therian reference and a paraphrased Star Trek quote in the same paragraph.) So I'm a dedicated raid tank these days. And don't get me wrong - I enjoy it. As long as I'm doing it well.

I was so afraid, going in to tanking Ultraxion the first time on reg (having only tanked him one other time on LFR difficulty). I was sure I was going to miss a Fading Light, or an Hour Of Twilight, and I was going to get flattened...but I didn't. In fact, we took him down the first try. I was EXULTANT. I was high on that for hours afterwards - the one fight might not have seemed like a big deal to anyone else, but to me, it was huge. That was the last hurdle I had. I wasn't afraid of Warmaster Blackhorn, despite the chaos of that battle, or Spine of Deathwing, which is a total timing, mechanic, and DPS check, or Madness of Deathwing, which is all in figuring out the order of the platforms so you keep the Aspect's buffs you need the most until the very end. At most, you usually die 3 or 4 times before you figure out what works properly for you. I know once we get there, it won't be long before I have my Destroyer's End title. Which I will wear with pride - because I will have gotten it off of current content, and for the first time I will feel like a real raider.

But as in any situation where there are multiple people, things get in the way. During last week's run, the other guild brought in a tank that...well, he said he was ready. But none of us in the group but him suffered from that delusion. He'd never even raided before, and he wanted to tank it....Yeah. I was main tank, and I ended up calling out instructions to him in Mumble during every fight that had anything for him to do at all. And when it came down to it, and we really needed him to pull it together for Hagara's trash before the boss...he lost it. Repeatedly.

Now, keep in mind - nothing overt was said to him in voice or chat. But after we wiped a couple of times on the chat, one of their guild members remarked to my brother that that he "owed him five bucks". Because the two of them had been talking privately earlier and my brother had said, based on the off tank's reputation, that we'd make it to Hagara and then wipe on the trash. There was nothing to show what he was talking about - he could've been talking about a bet that we wouldn't get through half the raid in one day. Or really anything. It could have been ANYTHING.

The other guildmaster spoke to my brother and asked him what it was about. My brother answered honestly, in private, telling him about the comment and what it was in reference to. The guildmaster then took that and kicked our friend out of their guild for "badmouthing a guildmember" or something like that. Nothing was done in public, and it was very obvious that his GM had been looking for a reason to kick him. They were both ex-military, different branches, and butted heads constantly. So what did we do? We invited the newly un-guilded guy into our guild. :)

Now my brother's building up a hand-picked raid team for us that will meet this Friday and hopefully get at least through Hagara in 2 hours. Then on Saturday we'll meet and tear through Fall Of Deathwing, and come out with our respective "Destroyer's End" title. And I will have tanked an entire raid.

In other game news, I play Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds on my phone...and on my Nook Color. I play Castleville on Facebook when I'm not overwhelmed by the sheer number of quests...and I've recently re-upped my subscription to my favorite hunting game, TheHunter, which has added a whole new area with gorgeous scenery and new species to hunt - Roe Deer and Wild Boar. I can't wait until I have a morning to set aside for a proper hunting expedition.

I think that's it for my gaming news update. :) Expect more posts soon as I can find the time to type!

The Call Of The Horde

Maybe I should've called this blog "the siren's song," however I suppose it isn't really.

I've been playing WoW for several years now, and while I've max leveled 2 (almost 3) characters, they've all been Alliance side. Given the pressure that's coming up on the Horde vs. Alliance conflict in the upcoming expansion, Mists of Pandaria, I've found myself again being drawn to seeing the Horde side of things.

It isn't that I don't have any Horde characters - I do. Quite a few, actually, and a couple that I really like. I'm thinking of devoting some time and trying to get at least Ionaria, my Troll Druid, up to max level, so that when the expansion is released, I'll be able to see the escalating conflict from both sides.

Why am I drawn to Ionaria? Well, druids are essentially meant to be neutral. And in being so, I feel that perhaps Kalitri, my Night Elf-turned-Worgen druid and my troll druid might actually know each other. Playing through Pandaria's new content on both of those characters would be an interesting experience, to say the least. And as we get closer and closer to Pandaria's release, I'm feeling more and more the need to witness the other side of the coin, as it were.

For a time, I thought perhaps I was getting bored with WoW, but I had a minor epiphany today while reading a blog on WoW Insider that talked about the conflict already apparent in the beta of the new expansion, and I realized that I wasn't tired of the game - I was tired of it being one-sided. There's a whole other world in Azeroth, a whole other storyline that I've not experienced.

And I think perhaps now is the time for me to do just that. Expect future posts on differences between Alliance and Horde, as I level Ionaria up to cap, and find the truth behind the myths the Alliance have built up around their enemies - all the while discovering exactly what the counterparts are from the other side.

I'm answering the call of the Horde....

Elune, save me.

LFR Conqueror & Other Updates

I've come a long way since I was afraid of dungeons in WoW. Admittedly I haven't come far enough that the concept of going into a dungeon that I've never been in before alone isn't something that scares me, but I've still come a long way.

With the recent WoW patch, the "Endgame" portion of Cataclysm was introduced. The last three major dungeons that set up the final raid in which Deathwing meets his end and the threat he presents to Azeroth is averted. This patch also added something completely new to the game - the Looking For Raid feature. It works much like the random dungeon finder, but on a larger scale, building a group of two tanks, five healers, and seventeen DPS to create a 25 man Raid Group, and then you go through a simplifed version of the Dragon Soul raid - the Deathwing fight.

Since it came out, my brother's been running it on his awesome Mage, Skyfox.  He knew the fights, knew what we needed to do - it was just a matter of the other three of us getting proper gear from the new Heroic dungeons so we would have access.

Within the last week, Nyx, Lona, and I have all gotten enough Heroic gear that the Raid Finder would let us in. And so began my first raid.

The Dragon Soul raid is broken up into two seperate pieces - the seige of Wyrmrest Temple, and then the Fall of Deathwing. We did them in order, doing Wyrmrest first, taking down a bunch of mini-bosses, flying on drake-back between them. It was quite epic, and within the first few moments I realized I needed to down-grade my graphics settings. Everything was freezing and the lag was throwing my timing off. My computer was built to handle normal WoW at Ultra settings, but put in the high-particle density situation of a 25 man raid, the computer said "no". I put the settings down to their lowest level, and then everything was fine. In the first half of the Raid, I didn't even die.

In the second half, thanks to a miscommunication from a Raid Leader ("Hunters - taunt the drakes down!" ...but...we don't have a taunt... He was talking about using Distracting Shot to pull the flying drakes down to the tanks. But he wasn't clear, and Kata hadn't even experienced that before. The raid wiped, and people were angry - annoying because Nyx and I were two of the four hunters people were yelling at. But obviously none of us had known what to do, so we didn't feel SO stupid), we had some issues at the beginning. But after that? It was beautiful.

We parachuted onto Deathwing's back, working tirelessly to remove some of his Elementium and Titanium armor so that Thrall could take aim with the Dragon Soul and take him down. Deathwing fell into the Malestrom. Just when we thought he was defeated, he reared up - even falling apart, dying, he was still trying to destroy the world. The final phase of the raid involved forcing him to unhook from the rocks around the Maelstrom so that he could be destroyed for good. The only bit of him that made it through was a hunk of his jaw.

Now, I have a special relationship with Deathwing, of sorts. And even as we entered the raid, I made sure to pay him as much respect as possible. I /bow-ed to him, and /saluted him a few times through the course of the fight. My respect seems to have paid off, as I won the roll on my Best-In-Slot weapon that dropped from him after the fight. It made me very happy, and really the raid wasn't very much worse than a dungeon - not even a heroic. Though I admit I'm not finding Heroics nearly as frightening as I used to. Now they're a way to gain valor and level the Guild.

The awesomeness continued however, as the next day the five of us (Kata, Nyx, Lona, me, and our friend Colten) decided to see if we could 5-man Obsidian Sanctum to get the black drake mount to drop. Turns out we not only could do it, but we did it incredibly easily - we had that dragon down before his first lava wave came all the way up. We took him out in about 20 seconds, which has me wondering if we can pull off the version that's designed for 25 man, since all that's different is that his health is higher - two and a half times higher, which means we can probably take him out in about a minute. I say we try it. :P

Last weekend (so much gaming news to catch up on!) I leveled my Druid the last five levels to hit 80 and enter Cataclysm content. I prioratized her over my DK only because I've leveled her from level 1, and it seemed cheating to have my 2nd 85 be a class that starts at L55. Today (my birthday) I get to game during the day, and I plan on working her up higher - maybe even hitting 85 today. Or at least in the next couple of weeks.

Simultaniously I finished the next-to-last World Holiday that I needed for the Long Strange Trip meta achievement, and my purple proto-drake. Love Is In The Air started, and I only had six more achievements to complete in order to get my drake. As of today, that's down to 1. And I have everything I need for it. It's just a matter of actually DOING it, which I'm going to do when everyone is available to come with me (so they won't have to worry about doing this on their own when they decide to go for the holiday achievements, and so they'll be with me when my two years of work comes down), which will probably be tomorrow evening. In the mean time, I have plenty of other things to work on in-game. I'm actively "Tol-ling the Barad," as my brother says, once again working toward the two mounts that I can get that way. I'm also finally working with the Oracles in Sholazar Basin to get the Green Proto Drake (unless I get lucky with my first few Bear Tank Call To Arms rewards, that is), and spending a bit of each day farming Lovely Charms so I can do the Love Is In The Air dailies and save up to buy the Love Bird mount...AND at the SAME TIME, I'm gathering Darkmoon Faire tickets to save up for those mounts and pets.

So yeah, gaming gives me lots to do. :P And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what I do for FUN. :P You can only imagine what my work is like.

So, happy birthday to me today. I'm 29 years old. One year to 30. :D I'm excited, and I'm sure interesting things will happen over the course of the next couple of days. :D

I already got a wonderful birthday present from my mom and dad - they got me a new bike with all the accessories! Now I can exercise in a way that won't hurt me, even when I'm not at school. :D It's wonderful and I love it. Thanks mom and dad!

There'll probably be another birthday summary post at the end of the week, but considering that I started writing this blog last Friday, I think I've stalled enough. In other blog news, still working on the new series in my spare time, and I hope to post it this summer. :)