I am sorry for abandoning you for four days. See, on Thursday I went out with my coworkers and got more than a little sloshed. And then for the entire weekend I pretty much just played Warcraft, except when Chris was playing Warcraft. All of you who are sick of hearing about Warcraft should probably avert your eyes, I guess. The stability problems that have plagued my new server since release seem to be mellowing out a little - although I don’t want to tempt fate. All I’m saying is that this was the first weekend since I moved to this server that I didn’t get disconnected and my character didn’t get rolled back at all. It’s refreshing to be able to actually play the game with only mundane lag problems to worry about, so I’ve been playing a lot of it.

My new character who isn’t really new anymore will hit level 40 pretty soon, and I’m scraping up the last four gold I need to buy my mount (although I’ll need another couple gold on top of that for new skills). Auction house, here I come!

My coffee intake had been way down for a while, and Chris can attest that I sometimes don’t even get around to finishing my first cup in the morning before I leave for work, but unfortunately I’ve started making up for it in the afternoon. Around 3:00 or 3:30, I find myself getting sleepier and sleepier until I absolutely have to have something to wake me up. At first that something was just a tall drip coffee, but I’ve progressed over the past few weeks to a triple grande skim mocha. I mean, yow. I guess I’ll try to go back to a regular coffee again, but probably the wiser path would just be to get more sleep. (Because that’s really going to happen.)

Between the snowstorm and a sudden and unpleasant stomach bug I picked up over the weekend, we haven’t really done anything overly birthdayish yet, but we’re hoping to have time to go out sometime this week. Packages and emails continue to trickle in - thanks especially to my folks for the prints and to the readers who sent things. Mmm, Lost in Translation!

I also need to go boot shopping pretty soon. I’ve been meaning to replace my dearly departed 14-eye Docs (which I bought my senior year of high school) and pick something up for snowy weather as well. I’ll probably go with 10-eye Gripfasts for the former (perfect for wearing with pants, while my 20-eyelets are better for skirts) and something waterproof and insulated for the latter. I know that all of this is deeply important to each and every one of you - do not try to deny it.

It turns out that the way my building is shaped lends itself to bizarre and alarming wind-related noise - Chris and I both woke up during the snowstorm on Saturday night (which was actually the same snowstorm we had all weekend) and thought that the building was going to fall over. Alternatively, it may have been ghosts.

I’m not sure exactly how much snow we got, in the end, because it kept blowing around so much that some parts of our courtyard were bare and others had huge piles of it. But now that we’ve had our first snowstorm in which everything didn’t melt by the next morning, I feel more comfortable about calling this “winter.”

So it’s my birthday, and I’m a whopping 24 now. I sort of wish I could have just stopped at 21 or 22, but I suppose these things happen. (Chris gets irritated whenever I say things like that as he turned 29 in November, but I continue to do it anyway.) We don’t have any big plans for tonight as our conflicting work schedules make it difficult to do much in the evening except game or watch the occasional movie, but this weekend we’re going to birthday it up real good. I’ll let you know if there’s drinking involved, because then you will probably be invited.

I have already received a bunch of awesome presents (including the Deluxe edition of TDS, the Extended edition of ROTK, and other abbreviations), but someone apparently saw fit to get me George Bush for my birthday. I don’t mean to sound rude, but can I return him? I would settle for an exchange.

I realized this morning as I bought an album to listen to on my way to work that iTunes has really pegged the music impulse buy, at least as far as my needs are concerned. It’s probably a holdover from my days of babysitting and careful budgeting of gas money, but I still don’t think of a CD as purchase to be made lightly. It’s almost twenty dollars if you go and buy it in a regular store, which is enough to make me think twice about whether or not I actually want it (and it’s usually the second thought that’s fatal to the purchase). I can always get it cheaper online, but then I have to wait for it - and that’s not conducive to impulse buying, either.

When I’m halfway dressed and need to be out the door in twenty minutes and just want something new for the iPod, buying an album or playlist off iTunes is about as good as it gets. No hunting for real tracks or interacting with humans. I can just click a damn button and it will download while I brush my teeth. It’s ten bucks, which is only “pint and change” when translated into the terms of my native currency (known among my people as Beer Money).

Anyway, this is how I ended up with the wretched new Gwen Stefani album on my iPod. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but when Chris and I first started telling our friends we were moving to Roosevelt Island, one of them mentioned that it reminded him a little too much of Raccoon City. There is, after all, only a single bridge allowing access to the island by car. If the deadly T-Virus were to escape to the surface, they’d just have to suspend subway and tram service for us to be well and truly fucked. Of course, that’s one of the things we like about living here - we secretly nuture the hope that deep beneath our apartment building lies a thriving zombie lab, where things in big metal boxes are just waiting to come out and eat us.

In any case, the island felt even more like Raccoon City this morning, when the fog was so thick that we could barely see the neighboring building in our complex, much less Manhattan. For all we knew, the rest of New York was just gone, undoubtedly due to some sort of monster-related catastrophe. We can hope, right?

Sometimes I think I didn’t learn anything in college except how to worry about classes that I know perfectly well I’m going to ace. I definitely didn’t learn anything about sleeping habits - even though I’ve been trying to get more sleep lately, I end up going to bed later and later. By the end of the week I resemble nothing so much as a shuffling member of the ravenous undead. (I’m thinking specifically here of either Mindless or Wretched Zombies rather than the more energetic Flesh Eaters and/or Plague Spreaders, but this is meant to be another Warcraft-free post so I won’t mention that.)

(Come to think of it, the green or blue zombies from Eternal Darkness would be an even more apt comparison. Not the red ones, though.)

Anyway, it’s Thursday and I have a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done by tomorrow, but I went ahead and stayed up far too late last night anyway. This means that although I’ll need to stay up late again tonight, it’s not even seven in the fucking morning and I’m already exhausted. Maybe the other thing I leraned in college is how to pretend that weeks end on Thursdays and Fridays are part of the weekend.

I will make an conscious effort not to talk about Warcraft today - not the adorable Great Goretusks from whom I steal livers in order to make delicious pies, not the outrageous prices I am able to set for my potions at the auction house, and not even the pros and cons of the various mighty beasts I’m considering for my next pet. So no, none of that today.

It’s now the middle of January and we still haven’t had any amount of snow - I think there have been two mornings when there was actually snow on the ground, but the only significant quantity I’ve seen this winter has been in Massachusetts. I know it’s probably better that I don’t have to wade through snowbanks yet and that we’ll probably get our fair share and then some by April, but honestly. I’ve had enough of the whole freezing rain bit, thanks.

Work is pretty crazy; I have a couple of big projects nearing completion at the office, and then I’ve got a couple of freelance jobs with approaching deadlines as well. It’s good to be busy, I think, but I still miss school as much as I did right after graduation. More, actually, since right after graduation I was just relieved to be done with everything. I guess this means I should be saving up and studying for the GRE, but that’s no surprise.

Despite the impression you may have gotten from my site (especially recently), I don’t really think of myself as an avid gamer at all. So it surprises me as much as it does everyone else how completely I have been consumed by WoW. It’s true that I’ll occasionally get a new game and do nothing but play it for a while, but I almost always get bored of it within a week or so. Chris and I figured out that I bought WoW almost exactly a month ago, and our fervor for it remains undiminished. We probably play it more now than we did the first week, actually.

A friend and I tried to puzzle out its appeal for someone like me who hasn’t been interested in online gaming before and who doesn’t really have much of a gaming attention span, but I guess there’s not that much there to wonder about: it’s just a really, really good game. There is the MMO virgin factor, which shouldn’t be discounted, but it can’t be the only reason I would rather kill horrible monsters in game than eat my god damned dinner on any given night. Other people who are not new to the whole MMO thing have been equally drawn to WoW, often at the expense of their old games. And now that I hear more than 600,000 copies of this game have been sold in about six weeks, I understand that I am not alone.

So I guess my only question is: if you aren’t playing WoW already, why the hell not?