A Night in the Life of a Druid

So in my previous post I mentioned something about an obsession with World of Warcraft (WoW). This week I've finally been able to spend some dedicated time on the game.

Playing my Night Elf Druid (Thalasa) is a bit odd for me because of the definite lack of friendly banter that usually surrounds my bubbly self. The friend that invited me to play on this server hasn't logged in to the game in three days (well, as of last night anyway). Our guild, which has a grand total of fifteen members, only has four people who have made an appearance in the last week. Needless to say, guild chat is a bit quiet these days.

Also, usually by now I've made a few friends along the way. The way the game works is that your character goes running around different towns trying to save the world. As you run around, you generally come across other adventurers who are trying to complete the same tasks you are. It's amazing how much easier it is to kill those darn crocolisks when there are two or five of you blasting the same one all at once. But, Thalasa's friend list is a grand total of five people long. And those people aren't online very often. It kind of makes me wonder how she met them in the first place.

So, things that Thalasa has learned while trying to save Azeroth from the various creepy crawlies that roam the land:

1) Dwarves are a bunch of whiny, wimpy brats. Last night, while wandering around Menethil Harbor, she came across a little dwarven woman who lost a bag full of stuff. Apparently, she was exploring around an old tomb, and suddenly these slimy globs attacked her (oh noes!). So, she threw her bag at the slime closest to her and took off running. However, now that she's done panicking, she's realized she needs that bag after all -- or at least its contents. Would Thalasa be kind enough to go find it for her? The slimes are too scary to go get it herself. Sheesh.

2) Humans are a bunch of arrogant, lazy bums. There are too many examples to cite. Leaving Menethil Harbor, a distraught husband assumed Thalasa was the scout that is supposed to go find the excavation team, which his wife was a part of. He can't go look himself? And Marshal Marris in Lakeshire needs to be a little more descriptive in his orders. "Go thin out the orcs that are keeping our citizens penned in the city like cattle, and bring me ten of their axes as proof." What he means is, go slaughter the entire camp, because only about one in five actually utilizes an axe to beat you with. Most just use the brute force of their fists. Next time he can get his own axes.

3) Gnomes have ADHD. Enough said.

Ok, well I suppose that's enough babble for now. Onward and upward!

WoW and Roller Skates

One of my lifetime passions is World of Warcraft (WoW), which I've sadly been unable to play much these last few weeks.

The obsession started when Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) came out with the New Game Enhancements (NGE). The NGE totally screwed up the game play of a really truly fabulous game. SWG was so completely customizable. Every character was unique according to how the player wanted to make the character. This went beyond mere appearances, but also included the skill build as well (there, called professions). There was no such thing as a cookie-cutter character. If you wanted a character that had a little bit of rifle skill, a little bit of hunting skills, and a little bit of bio-engineering skills, you could do that. Heck, you could even add tailoring, cooking, and architecture to that if you wanted. Not sure how good you'd be at any of it.. but you could do it.

BUT, "They" decided that the game needed an upgrade, and came out with the NGE. While it was great for people who'd never played the game before and didn't know what it was like previous to the launch of the NGE, those of us who had experienced life pre-NGE thought it totally sucked. Especially those of us who were pigeon holed into professions we didn't really want.

Ok, that's a whole new set of griefs there. This post is about roller skates. So anyway, I started playing WoW after giving the NGE a small chance (two months). Some friends who played SWG before had been trying to get me to move to WoW for a year at that point, and it seemed like a good time to make the jump. After a small dab at playing an Alliance character (technically, "the good guys"), I was persuaded to play a Horde character.

My first reaction was "I'm a bad guy again?" -- to which I was quickly reminded that good and bad are clearly in the eyes of the beholder. Technically, the humans (Alliance) were encroaching on long-held orc (Horde) territory. The humans are the bad guys, here.

My next reaction was "But they're ugly!" How can I play my usual bubbly self if I have to play an ugly, mean character? The closest I could get to "pretty" is the troll... which, by the way, hate every living thing on the planet. They tolerate other members of their tribe, have a truce with the orcs because the orcs saved their hides once or twice, grudgingly respect the tauren because they're just mean fighters, and clearly, definitely, hate the forsaken (undead humans--they can't be trusted--they were human after all). So, my "pretty" troll shaman immediately allies herself with a group of undead. Makes sense, right?

Eventually, my shaman makes it to level 60. I'm not really sure how she got there, considering it's such a sllooooww climb. But making friends makes the climb lots easier. So, let's fast forward a bit.

Now, I'm playing on another server, as an Alliance character this time (yay!), because of a friend I met on the first server. This character is a Night Elf Druid. She's cute and bubbly (although, not nearly as cute and bubbly as the gnome mage I made elsewhere). So, anyway, I'm working on leveling my druid today because I actually have time to play for a while. I actually managed to get two and a half levels on her. Now, instead of being level 19, she's well on her way to being level 22! Woohoo!

And, I made a new friend, which brings me to the thought of roller skates. When your character first starts out in WoW, there are two speeds for transportation - walk (incredibly unbelievably slow) and run (just incredibly slow). Get your character to level 40, and you can buy a mount (horse, ram, tiger, mechanical chicken, raptor, wolf, or kodo depending on your race). The mount increases your speed by 40%. But, you have to wait until you're level 40. Which, for me, will be sometime in the year 2007, I believe.

So while dragging my new friend around everywhere (he'd only been playing the game for a few days), I thought of a great new invention for the gnomes to come up with -- roller skates. You get these metal plates about the size of your foot, attach wheels to the bottom, and strap them onto your shoes. You can now travel faster, and with less effort, than if you were running! What a great concept!

Instead of taking two hours to run (the incredibly slow pace) from Stormwind to Menethil Harbor, you could maybe skate there in say.. 90 minutes instead? It would be a slight improvement.

There, Blizzard, a free idea for you. I won't even charge you royalties. Just pleeeaase let me run faster!

Adventures in Bathroom Painting

So for a few days a month I have this incredible streak of "I must do something right now" that hits me. Usually, it's an artistic streak, but sometimes it gets about as artistic as cleaning my house from top to bottom with disinfectant. This month... this year, actually... it was a room-painting streak.

For the last few months, I've been talking about painting our master bedroom. We've had the paint (3 gallons of it) since we moved into the house. We just celebrated three years in July, by the way. We just haven't ever done it because it requires a heck of a lot of effort to paint the bedroom. It'd be a pretty huge undertaking. From taping off the wall boards, to moving the furniture, to figuring out how to reach the peak of the cathedral ceiling and not kill someone, it's quite a large task.

At some point, I decided I would start with the master bathroom instead. It's a much smaller room. There's no furniture to move except for the two mirrors, and the walls are mostly covered by doors, the window, the tub, the shower, the toilet, and the double vanity. However, the thought of remixing three-year-old paint leaves something to be desired in the motivation department.

So, last week, Lars announces that his friend Ben and Ben's girlfriend (Ben has a girlfriend?!) want to come down to visit over Labor Day weekend. So, after the initial ohmygodthat'sonlytendaysaway and wehaven'tcleanedupstairsinayear panic, I decided that it was time to paint the guest bathroom. It has all the advantages of painting the master bathroom, but mixing the paint will take about one minute instead of twenty years, seeing as how the paint had yet to be purchased and all.

So I took down the shower curtain with the intention of buying paint to match the khaki color in the small stripe, as well as purchasing a little of the navy and forest green to do squares in something like a wall-border pattern. After... discussing... with my darling husband which shade of khaki would look best as the base coat, and then continuing the discussion in regards to the blue and green, the DH picks up this paint roller kit, with a five-year-old's triumphant smile on his face, and proudly announces "This is what Dionne did to her walls!" This profound statement immediately ended the color discussion we were having. The blue and green were immediately abandoned, and the two colors of khaki we couldn't agree on suddenly both became perfect.

Thus begins my adventures in painting the guest bathroom. Now, I would just like to point out at this juncture that by the time we returned home from buying paint it was 9:00 pm. Ben and his girlfriend are expected to arrive somewhere around 1:00 pm the next day, and no, we really hadn't started cleaning out the guest room yet (which also doubles as my computer room, since we rarely have guests).

So, I read the instructions on how to do this faux-finish sponge painting thing. It seems simple. Tape the walls and ceiling up to prevent paint splatters. Pour an equal amount of the two colors of paint into the split paint tray. Roll on the paint, using the same stroke pattern throughout the room. Blend with a dry roller. Let dry, and remove the tape. Easy enough. The mirrors get removed, the walls get taped, the ceiling gets taped, and the paint gets dumped on the floor.

Ok, not dumped, but it certainly tried to be there. I managed to get it in the trays -- without mixing the colors too badly. I dipped the sponge rollers, and then I had the brilliant idea of starting on the wall over the tub. If I made a mess, it would be much easier to clean off the tub, and if I hated the result, it's the smallest section of wall to repair.

I was right, it made a mess. But it looked fabulous. Ok, so four and a half hours later... the floor was nearly the same color as the walls (thank god for linoleum and a rug that covers most of the floor space). The ceiling has a beautiful white stripe next to the walls. The walls look like someone threw mud at them (actually, the whole room sort of looks that way). And my lovely white and cream double vanity now has lovely putty-colored speckles everywhere.

But the bathroom looks fabulous, and I had a great time doing it!!!

Random Fun Fact of the Day

In an attempt to inspire my co-workers, I randomly post fun-facts and words of the day on our little dry-erase board next to our lockers (which are almost never locked). In fact, the only ones that are locked are the ones that aren't in use. Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Anywho, this week's random fun fact was that there are currently more plastic pink flamingos in the United States than real flamingos. In fact, over twenty million have been produced since they were first introduced to the American populace in 1957. (You, too, can read this great fun fact and other random useless information from Harry Bright and Harlan Briscoe's book So, Now You Know... A Compendium of Completely Useless Information)

Think about that for a moment. Some poor family has a flock of fake flamingos in their front yard. Not just one family, but several families in fact.

I actually had one co-worker tell me that when she was in college, she and some friends had thought about playing off the wandering gnome theme and "borrowing" flamingos from neighboring yards. The idea was to gather fifty of them and put them in her mother's yard to celebrate the mom's upcoming 50th birthday. They never went through with it though, much to the chagrin of all those pink flamingos, I'm sure.

Speaking of flamingos, did you know that the birds' natural pigment is actually white? They get their glorious pink color from the keratine in all the shrimp they eat (also from the Compendium).

So, I'm sure you're wondering how this is supposed to inspire my co-workers. I'm not sure it is really. But it's nice to have a different little quirky tidbit posted up there now and then. I'm trying to keep to a tropical theme, seeing as how we work at Tommy Bahama.

So there. Enjoy your random fun fact of the day. Or week. Or month. Or year. Who knows how often I'll update this page. :)