Work: Super busy lately, which is good for everything except my sleeping schedule.

Warcraft: Haven’t played since Tuesday (Monday?) when I joined up with an Upper Blackrock Spire pickup raid, and made it all the way through the instance for the first time. It took three and a half hours, and I didn’t get any Beaststalker set pieces, but I had a good time anyway.

Everything else: I can’t complain, really. Money’s tight right now, but not as tight as it’s been in the past, and I survived that (unless I’m secretly undead right now). Coming home to Chris continues to be the best part of my day. You might think I’d sort of get used to it, now that we’ve been living together for a year and change, but no - it’s still awesome.

So far this season I have been able to pretend that it’s fall and not spring, and that the pleasantly crisp air means that soon it will be Halloween, not summer. But today it got genuinely warm and tomorrow it’s supposed to be even more so - I guess now is the time to jump off a bridge. Or hibernate until September.

I’ll get the Warcraft stuff out of the way right now so that those of you who don’t play (are there any such people?) can just skip this paragraph and we’ll all be better off. I hit 60 on Saturday, finally. Since then I’ve been doing a little pvp, a little gold farming (for the epic, not for eBay), a little easter egg hunting. But while I understand that the acquisition of a new mount and my class set are important goals, I just can’t muster that much interest in the endgame raid content necessary for the new gear, at least. And even if I could muster much interest, I literally do not have the time to do any raiding more than, say, once a week. I’ve been playing a little with my much-neglected alts, and I do really enjoy pvp now that level isn’t an issue, but I think I’ll end up playing even less than I have been recently.

Which is good, because my secondary gig is turning into something a little bigger, a little more exciting, and a lot more time consuming. I think it’s going to be a really great thing for me, but given that I already have a full time job, that’s my nights and weekends pretty much spoken for.

Anyway. I got on the F this morning and sat down across from this adorable little Asian girl in pigtails, who promptly puked her adorable little guts out. Someone dropped a newspaper on the seeping horror that resulted, and the rest of us breathed through our sleeves and moved as far away as possible. As it was rush hour, this was not very far away at all. I was very glad that I had not eaten breakfast, at least. Happy Monday!

Happy spring. Enjoy the incredibly awful snow/sleet/freezing rain! I know I’ve said a thousand times that I’ll take fall and winter over spring and summer any day, but this weather: it fucking sucks.

I mentioned the other day that I’ve been playing less Warcraft, which is true. Now that I’m near the level cap, there’s not a whole lot that I can solo, and the majority of my guildmates aren’t yet high-level enough to do nightly raids or anything, so often I’ll log in and grind for a little bit and then just log out again. But last night Chris suggested that I go and do one of my few remaining soloable quests in Winterspring, and three hours later I’d finished eight quests (mainly in Felwood) and had joined up with a Blightcaller raid. I ended up getting to bed about an hour and a half later than I wanted to, but I haven’t had that much fun playing in a while.

Regarding the Blightcaller: there were twenty-eight of us, and we still wiped. But we took him down with us, at least, so we got credit for the quest and I have my new bow. It should have been super easy with so many people, except that the person who was supposed to pull a single dog for us to kill ended up pulling both dogs plus Captain Nasty himself, and we weren’t quite prepared for it. Some of us continued fighting the original dog we’d selected, but when almost everyone abandoned it in favor of the Blightcaller, it ended up aggroing on me because I was a mere 58 and had hit it with an aimed shot that crit for just over 1300. I died.

I guess I’m supposed to tell you all what’s up, but the answer is, as always: not a lot. It’s amazing how quickly the weeks go by when your schedule doesn’t change completely every three months anymore. Anyhow, work is good. We had a really successful launch earlier in the week, so my stress level has gone down a little, at least until crunch time hits again.

Warcraft is good. I’m 57 with my main now, but I’ve been spending some time with my alts, so I don’t know when I’ll actually get to 60. I’m definitely playing less than I did when I first got the game, but it’s still a lot of fun. What I do pretty frequently now is just join up with some guildmates and mess with the gold farmers for a while at their favorite farming spots. We’ll just take the entire thing over and drive them to another one, but then we’ll take that one over too. It’s a lot of fun, and they generally call us names in other languages.

The new NIN single: I didn’t like it at all the first time I heard it, but it’s grown on me. And yes, I’ve seen the rehearsal footage. The sound isn’t a live recording, so it’s hard to tell what the song will be like on tour, but it’s nice to see they all have the same haircut, I guess.

It’s Favor-Asking Day! Hurray!

1. Would some kind Winamp user with a streamripping utility be interested in creating me an mp3 of “The Hand That Feeds”? You can listen to it here, but for obvious reasons, I can’t. One thing, though - I’ve already heard the song on the radio, I’m just interested in hearing a higher quality version. If that one is crappy also, then don’t bother. Ok, I’ve got my mp3. Thanks!

2. And speaking of NIN: I need someone in the UK to pick me up a copy of the limited edition single when it comes out. I will pay the fat sacks of cash money.

I think I’m spending too much time staring at a monitor lately. By the time I get home from work, my eyes are actually aching and are usually bloodshot, and I wasn’t even in the mood for Warcraft tonight just because I couldn’t bear to look at a monitor anymore. Which is what I’m doing right now, by the way. I think I’ll call it a night.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Sisters, Cure, and Smiths lately. It tends to make me miss being eighteen and/or a freshman in college, but I think I’ve mentioned that before. It seems kind of bizarre to me now that I used to get all gothed up just to go to classes - I can barely be bothered to pluck my eyebrows before I go to work these days, but I distinctly remember breaking out the fishnets and big boots just to go sit in a lecture hall. I guess I wasn’t getting up at 5am then, but still.

Because I’m still a teenager at heart, my first thought when I started seeing those NIN posters I mentioned the other day was to steal one. Unfortunately, they’re placed in the part of the subway car that’s above the seats. The first time I saw one, I wasn’t able to grab it because there were people sitting beneath it, and reaching it would have required climbing into their respective laps. Same thing with the second one. The third time, I lucked out and had nearly the whole car to myself - but unfortunately, I succeeded only in ripping the thing in half when I tried to get it out from behind its big plastic cover.

I bitched about the whole situation to a couple of my coworkers a couple days ago, and lo and behold - this morning one of them walked in with a fresh, untained NIN poster, free not only of creases and rips but even of fingerprints. It turns out that his stop is at the end of the line, and he happened to see the guy there who puts up the ads in the first place, and said guy happened to have a couple of spare posters.

So now I have my very own stolen NIN poster - I just have to figure out where to put it up.