"Talk to the claws."



Level 85, yep. Juuuust geared enough to queue for normal heroics. Ultimately, I want to get her to the point of being able to queue for LFR, but I just have no patience for gear grinding. Oh, well. It'll come.

Feeling kinda 'meh' about her guild. I joined looking for a homey type of atmosphere, but while everyone is nice enough, generally they only log in for raids. Bleh. At least I get to soak up the Level 25 perks?

GarouMUSH still humming along!

Instead of paying Blizzard for a character transfer (and faction change), I simply rerolled Greysmoke as a worgen druid on Sentinels. That was end of November. And a few weeks ago, finally got her to 85. My first 85 Alliance character! Not to mention my second 85 ever. :)

A link to something close to her DING moment. With /played in the chat box.

Woot.

OK, wow. GarouMUSH is hoppin' again. Holy crap! A combination of finally doing serious kick-off of the brambles plot combined with promoting everyone in rank (as well as making changes to how quickly cub->cliath->fostern should go) and not only are people RPing again, but we've had all kinds of players return after being away forever. And people apping! Even new people! WHEE.

I think it's been about a month since the ball started rolling, and I hope it lasts for many years. I'm still boggled, observing it. The game was slumping toward a quiet death for so long that I didn't think it would ever recover, but looks like all it needed was a serious injection of Not The Status Quo (tm). Freakin' awesome.

Semester's started off well, I think. My prof for Painting Composition seems to like my approach to the first project, and my Illustration prof had NOTHING bad to say about my first exercise (three wolves on scratchboard). Which is a first for her -- I had her last semester and she always had something to say that could be improved or whatever. So I'm pretty psyched. But also nervous. This is the semester that, more than others, I have GOT to bring my A-game, because at the end of the semester I need to submit to join a concentration. I'm really hoping I can get into Illustration as a concentration, but word is that it's tough to get into. Painting/Drawing will be a solid backup, but I worry they'll be just as picky for that, too.

My third class this semester is Health, which I'm only being forced to take because my Health transfer credit from Wake Forest University isn't enough. I need 2 credits for this class and WFU, being on a quarter system (or was when I went), it was something like 1.something. Bah! But it should at least be an easy A.

My overall GPA has finally hit 3.0. Not a small thing considering all the credit hours and crap grades from ten+ years ago. (I wish I could just have a do-over, start fresh, but there ain't no statue of limitations on college credits, alas.)

Now, if only ECU would use their budget increase to give K some more classes to adjunct teach. He was GOOD at it, his former students STILL greet him warmly when we run into them around town, and his fellow faculty liked him, too. And he LIKED it. It would solve a lot of our problems, if he could teach.

Still, I can't complain too much. We're pretty fortunate in a lot of ways.

Even so, fingers crossed!

In my previous post, I mentioned having some ideas for a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game...

( Details under the cut to prevent Friendspage Wall O' Text(tm). )

Another semester draws to a close, and as usual this one was kind of fraught with unpleasant surprises. Really, one unpleasant surprise -- my mother abruptly changing her mind on being my cosigner for my student loan for this year and then, without talking to me about it, cancelling the spring semester portion of said loan. So instead of being certain of my academic funding for BOTH fall and spring, I was left to scramble to find another cosigner for spring. Plus, of course, the absolute rage and frustration at my parents, who proved that they really have no clue at all. My mother didn't even understand why I could possibly be angry at her.

The silver lining in this is that after many many months of stressful-careful-hopeful edging toward having contact with my parents -- after years of deliberately holding them at arms' length -- after finally starting to think that I might actually be able to have an ADULT relationship with my parents, the kind of thing approaching to the kind of relationship K has with HIS parents -- I just... well. I don't feel at all obligated to try to be close to them anymore. Email only. No phones (I hate phones), no physical visits, maybe a card at Christmas.

Thank goodness for my inlaws, though. My inlaws are lovely, wonderful, supportive people and I'm looking forward to yet another Christmas in Ocean City, MD, with Mom-Mom (gramma-in-law) and the rest of K's family. (Mom-Mom agreed, even, to cosign for a loan for Spring, so that at least is taken care of.) (My mother-in-law is this amazingly intelligent together lady who'd be intimidating if she wasn't so warm and friendly; I hope I'm half the woman she is when I'm her age. My father-in-law is kind of like The Dude.)

On a more geekly note, GarouMUSH continues to, well, kinda limp along. :/ And I'm kinda out of ideas. RP still happens, but not every day, and usually just one scene. I just... I dunno.

Still playing WoW, and kinda wishing that Blizzard wouldn't charge so freaking much for some of their character services. I'd really like to faction change Greysmoke to worgen, but thirty dollars is kind of a lot of money, so I'm hesitant to even do it with any Christmas cash -- I mean, a little voice keeps saying how there's way better things I could do with thirty dollars. Yeah, sure, I could level a worgen druid, I certainly have started a zillion of them (only slight exaggeration) but leveling's gotten to be a chore and frankly I feel bad about abandoning all the work I've done on Greysmoke.

Geez, this turned out to be a pretty whiny, mopey entry, didn't it? Truthfully, I'm doing good emotionally these days. Getting shit done, feeling all "challenge accepted" to my artwork and improving myself as an artist, getting a better handle on my procrastination and fear-of-failure. Christmas break is coming up, and while money will be tight, the holidays are always a good time, especially Christmas.

I also kind of have ideas for a fairly radical W:tA MUSH. Radical in terms of how theme is handled, and definitely radical on mood. More on that in another entry, presuming I don't flake out and not write in this thing again for another zillion months. :)

Ta!

Oh! Postscript: K and I are back into Dr Who! :D New show is yay (though I still have some issues with some things) and rediscovering my love for the classic stories. Woo!

I am (that is, Salem is) Truthcatching for a Moot on GarouMUSH and there's only 7 of us players attending.

Seven.

This depresses the fuck out of me.

Came to work today to find that the school's IT dept had replaced all the lab's rickety old PCs with shiny new ones.

Except for the lab assistant's computer.

What the fuckety fuck. >:[

Horribly hot and muggy today. Eight-thirty in the morning should NOT be so hideous to walk in. I dread what it'll be like when I leave work at noon. :(

Today's 4.2 Patch Day for WoW and I feel... kinda meh about it in general. This isn't the fault of the patch itself, and my interest in WoW is actually pretty good right now (evidenced by the fact that I'm annoyed that I won't be able to play most of today), but the only 85 I have right now is Greysmoke on Shadow Council, a server I really can't play well on anymore due to latency crap.

I'm kinda... floating free right now, feeling a little adrift because I don't feel like I have a main or even a main server. The Scryers is nice but the lack of population is discouraging. I don't see RP there, and I don't see a lot of raiding, either. (Not that I raid much at all, but I'd prefer a server with a good raiding population JUST IN CASE. Like how I occasionally got into a raid on SC during Wrath. I want to feel like there's a possibility, yanno?) Been trying out Scilla, which is a PVP server, and so far it seems good, but I still don't feel attached to it. Or even to my guild there.

Qirzix the shaman's kinda stalled out in the low 70s. Plus I really want to level an Alliance character past Outlands. As a side project, I'm levelling a blood elf hunter to see if I can make the jump from Ghostlands to Northern Stranglethorn, thereby completely bypassing both Hillsbrad Foothills and Ashenvale; the former zone is just helping the Forsaken be ick and evil, and the latter is all about fighting the Alliance. Doing this 'cause the spouse is vaguely interested in WoW again and wants to play a blood elf... but he /doesn't/ want to fight the Alliance.

In general, it's like I said, I actually want to play WoW but I don't feel attached anywhere. So... blehgh.

Previous crisis solved. Turned out it was the graphics card, dying. Fortunately, we had an older one sitting around (K is very good about saving stuff like that, in protective packaging and all) and once we'd replaced the dying one, everything was fine. Yay!

I had, oh, less than a day to enjoy this, because DING DING DING new piece of shit cropped up!

Late last night, checked my bank account and discovered that my payroll direct deposit was VERY VERY SMALL. Checked my paystub online, and I had less than HALF of the hours on it that I should have had. I suspect some timesheets got lost. :| :| >:(

Emailed my manager, who emailed me back this morning, cc'd to dept head, that he'd look into it. Most likely what will happen is that I'll get my missing money, but it'll be on the NEXT paycheck.

FML.

Cripes.

First my monitor dies. Fixed by getting a loaner.

My computer's been fan-loud and low-fps in WoW for ages. Fixed by cleaning the dust from it.

Then the ISP is crappy-slow. Fixed by tech visit. Plus a switching of wireless adapters.

Now? NOW it's gone completely freeze-happy on WoW, Firefox, Morrowind, even going through file folders. A couple of error messages have pointed to the graphics card as a possibility. Or the graphics driver. (But this was after virus scans, scan disk, defragging, restarting--ugh. All day yesterday futzing with this fucking machine rather than relaxing with it.)

Reinstalling the video driver did nothing. Using the default video driver did nothing. In the (probably vain) hope that it's NOT a hardware issue, gonna research all the processes currently running (which is how I discovered a trojan the last time I was infected; despite Avast saying everything's good I'm still wary), and if that doesn't work, the last step is to move my precious documents to the portable hard driver and then do a clean wipe and reboot. And pray.

Stupid machine. It couldn't wait a few more months, nooooo. Then it could retire with dignity, be discharged with honors. >:P

Oh, and this RIGHT after I re-upped for another month of WoW. Which, okay, I can still play on K's computer, but hotseating is never ideal. I mean, the man is in the middle of learning CG modelling and animation; he kinda needs his computer. He's super-sweet about it all, but that doesn't mean I still don't feel like I'm hogging his machine. :/

SIGH.