General Update

I promised on Saturday that I’d have an update on me in a previous post, and here it is.

Without going into too much detail, I’ve been burned out at my job for a while. Previous posts have alluded to that. I worked in retail as a store manager, and the past several months have been difficult. High stress, high volume, and low payroll allocations made for a rough summer, fall, and holiday season, and it didn’t really let up as the new year started rolling by. I found it more and more difficult to complete everything I needed to, and I took a lot of my stress home with me. It found its way into my relationships with friends and family, my experiences with others in WoW, and so on. I couldn’t sleep properly, I ground my teeth most nights, and I was generally very unhappy.

So at the end of February I decided that it was time to take a break. I’ve been preparing financially for this possibility for several months, so I did not quit my job with prospects of a) living on the street or b) mooching off someone else.

Most of all, I need this to be a time of rest and renewal. Of course, the first five days of “vacation,” as some friends have put it, have been a complete waste of time. At least they appear to be, on the surface. I’m so burned out that I have spent my days tired, and have gotten little accomplished. That’s ok, I just have to accept that it’s taking a few days to get re-oriented.

Once I do, I’d like to spend some time renewing my relationships with things I love. The first would be with the guitar. Although I wrote an extensive list of things I’d like to do this year previously, I have done none of them, because I just haven’t been able to enjoy them.

One thing I have done that isn’t a total waste of time has been to begin walking again, now that the horrible weather has gone away for a while. It’s virtually springtime, and that is a very good thing! As the weather continues to improve, I hope to have some nice photos to post as well.

That’s where I am today. I have time; I hope to rest, rebuild my body and spirit, spend some time with friends and family, and do some things that I enjoy. Hopefully that will mean that there is more content here as well!

Hellishness

New releases + crazy people who have to buy them on launch day + tight payroll + rain = hell.

For me, anyway.

How about you?

Snowy Saturday odds and ends

*Note: Some of the information in this article is outdated, as it was written prior to Patch 4.0.1 or the launch of Cataclysm. Please do not take the following info as gospel, as it is not current!

Since it has been a few days since I’ve posted anything, and since I’m not going anywhere tonight due to accumulated snow footage, I thought I’d make this a general post where I ramble a little bit about what I’ve been up to…

World of Warcraft

Fishing & Cooking Achievements

1. Old Man Barlowned
2. The Fishing Diplomat
3. Outland Angler
4. The Cake Is Not A Lie

While “completing Fishing and Cooking achievements” was one of the items in my recent post, Things I’d like to accomplish before the Cataclysm, that I thought I would probably not be able to accomplish, I’ve found myself drawn to them over the past few days. With a little time on my hands here and there, I’ve decided to knock out some of the easier ones that I still need, and it has been a nice change of pace to fish for fun rather than with the purpose of farming for Fish Feasts or Agility food.

Raid Happenings

1. The Ashen Verdict – I now proudly wear the Ashen Band of Endless Vengeance!
2. We finally downed Rotface in  Icecrown Citadel (10-player), the first time in four weeks of attempts! We made several attempts on Professor Putricide on Thursday, and made some progress, but let it go after eight or nine attempts.
3. After taking a week off from ICC while we disassembled and rebuilt our guild’s flailing 25-player ICC team, we regrouped last night for a new attempt on Lord Marrowgar. Not only did we succeed in killing him for the first time, we recorded kills on the first four bosses, including an incredible one-shot of Deathbringer Saurfang on our first ever attempt! This earned us the Storming The Citadel (25-player) achievement, with a little I’ve Gone And Made A Mess (25-player) to boot. On a personal note, I won a Vanquisher’s Mark Of Sanctification, which allowed me to upgrade my T10 chest piece to the Sanctified Lasherweave Raiment. It’s the first time I’ve won a trophy in a 25-player raid, so I was very excited to be able to make that upgrade.

Questing

1. Veteran of the Wrathgate – Thursday, while doing some reading online about some of the history that leads to the final boss fight of ICC and its aftermath, I came upon an event that I had been sure I would not be able to do, since I had long ago dropped the questline somewhere along the way. The event is called Battle for the Undercity, and from what I had heard, it is one of the highlights of the current expansion. After letting it the idea simmer for a while, I just had to see what I could do about it. I set out to trace the quest chains back to the beginning, and followed them all from NPC to NPC until I picked up the trail. It turned out that I had left off only two quests away from the Angrathar: The Wrathgate cinematic, which is itself pretty epic. Naturally, I completed those…
2. …which led me to the quests leading up to and including the Battle for the Undercity. This was indeed an awesome event. Going into the Undercity, the ruins of Lordaeron, with King Varian Wrynn, Jaina Proudmoore and a small army of grunts to kill Apothecary Putress was totally fun, and I am still pumped that I was able to actually experience it on my druid.

Highly recommended article for feral druids

• Vallen at Feral Aggression posted an article this week, Understanding Hit, Exp & The Attack Table, that does a great job clarifying how your attacks work, and helped clear up a couple of questions that I have had regarding how Critical Strike Rating works. Personally, I worked for a long time to get my unbuffed Crit above 50%, and then I started stacking Armor Penetration while maintaining or increasing my Agility/Crit with each gear piece that I added. I wanted to have my Crit above 50% in order to facilitate my rotation, which requires keeping the [Savage Roar] buff and [Mangle], [Rip] and [Rake] debuffs up as close to ALWAYS as possible in most encounters. Critical yellow hits (from special attacks) equal double combo points, which help conserve energy, so that was my priority. As my Crit approached 60%, I started wondering if there was a cap for it. This article paints a clear picture of how far I am from the cap (I’m at 65.22% in cat form right now), which isn’t a bad thing. It means I won’t make any stupid decisions about new gear because I mistakenly think that increases in Agility and Critical Strike Rating have less (or no) value at this level.

Real life (also known as “my little adventure in and around the snow storm”)

Last night, large portions of the Northeast were hit with a snow storm, the likes of which I have not seen here in a while. Perhaps I am incorrect, but I’m pretty sure that this is the largest snowfall we’ve had the past five years. As such, we got crushed at the store until about 8pm last night, and then the rush died off quickly. This morning, while everything else in town was closed, I had to go in to work because my store is not in a mall, and our company is all about maximizing sales…

Of course, after digging my car out and sliding around the sheet of ice that currently serves as the surface of the parking lots around here, I got to work… and promptly got the go-ahead from my boss to NOT open my store. This was fine with me, in spite of my troubles, because the parking lot was so bad that I had to park in the neighboring grocery store lot in order to ensure that I would be able to get my vehicle back on the road later in the day. No reason to encourage customers and employees to brave the weather.

So I put in a couple of hours getting some work done and fielding several phone calls from people who actually wondered if we were open today. It’s amazing when someone calls your store during a heavy snowstorm, and you answer, and they’re surprised that you’re “open.” After too many years in retail, nothing shocks me anymore, but that doesn’t mean that stuff like this lacks noteworthiness.

I was out of there by about 12:45pm, and as I headed across the parking lots to drive home, I slipped and fell… twice. Fortunately, I was able to make it home on the treacherous roads with no major incidents. It has been an otherwise uneventful day, which is something much-needed in my life right now.

** Note: I originally had more topics in mind here, but after writing about them a bit, I decided to pull them out and make them into separate near-future posts. Hence, the intended general catch-all post turned into a largely WoW-related post. Again. Sorry about that!

It’s been a long long time… and the beauty of silence

Not-so-extreme make-over: sweet new title, killer new staff (Fordragon Blades), blue hair, 2 Tier-9 pieces, and a newly designed guild tabard!

So here I am, after about five weeks of inactivity where this blog is concerned, and looking to make up a little bit for it. There have been a few times over the past month where I have told myself I was going to make a contribution, but due to a combination of distraction/exhaustion/indifference, I’ve never actually made it back here.

What have I been up to? For starters, the retail holiday season is in full swing. I’ve been spending a lot of my time at work preparing for the holidays, dealing with busy crowds, opening at midnight for big new releases, etc. Additionally, the added stress comes with me when I’m at home, so I’ve been dealing with that. Retail during the holidays can swallow up your soul if you’re not careful, and each year I try to retain my sanity through it all.

The Druid

Secondly, I have been playing a lot of World of Warcraft. After ten or eleven hours on my feet all day, it feels good to just sit down and enjoy myself for a few hours. I’ve been raiding 10-man Onyxia, Vault of Archavon, and Trial of the Crusader each week, along with our weekly try-and-fail of the Northrend Beasts portion of 10-man Trial of the Grand Crusader. We actually got them down the week before Thanksgiving, but usually we don’t have the combination of firepower and coordination (read: we need five people at around 4k DPS, and we usually have two or three around 4k and two or three at 3.3k… makes it tough when you have approximately 150 seconds to complete each phase before the next boss(es) come(s) out). In addition, I have made it to a few of our guild’s 25-man Onyxia & Trial of the Crusader runs, although I am pretty much done with those for the duration of 2009 because of my work schedule on Friday nights. I have gotten a few pieces of sweet gear, although I still have no trophy gear, and I am still able to be a dependable top-end DPS-er in our guild.

I’ve gotten some nice achievements in the past few weeks as well. I finally started the Argent Tournament dailies, and got my Exalted Champion of Darnassus achievement last week, which comes with the “of Darnassus” title, my new favorite! I have this thing where I enjoy the lore of WoW, with some special interest in the history of druids and the Archdruid, Malfurion Stormrage (I’m really looking forward to the book on him next year). Since he was the first druid, and Darnassus is the capitol night elf city, I have this silly affinity for the new title… oh well, what can I say? Anyway, I also got the Less Is More (10-player) achievement for killing Sartharion with 8 players, Onyxia’s Lair (25-player), Knock On Wood (10-player), Cheese The Freeze (10-player), Shutout! (25-player) and Nerf Gravity Bombs (25-player) from Ulduar, Salt And Pepper (10-player) and Upper Back Pain (10-player) from Call of the Crusade, and some other silly-fun achievements. I didn’t really participate too much in the Pilgrim’s Bounty stuff, because after completing all of the cooking dailies the first day, I realized I didn’t A) have the time, and B) care. I am looking forward to Winter Veil, however. Christmas in WoW. Good stuff.

The Paladin

Finally level 80, rapidly gearing up!

In addition, I spent a significant amount of time leveling my alt, Abenadari, my dranei ret paladin. In about three and a half weeks I got her from 72 to 80, which is ridiculously fast for me leveling-wise. I just started having so much fun with her, and decided that I had changed my mind about her. I had determined a long time ago that Abenadari, who is my alchemist, existed solely for the purpose of supplying my druid with potions and elixirs. Of course, with Wrath of the Lich King, that became flasks for raiding purposes, and so leveling began to happen naturally so that I could farm the herbs I needed for that. I finally got on the horse with that in November, and started to love how invincible she seemed. I could take on multiple level 76-77 mobs at level 72, without losing much health or mana, which was awesome fun! Leveling commenced, and last Wednesday the 25th I dinged 80.

Since Wednesday night, even with the Black Friday chaos and regular raiding on Friday and Saturday on Anacrusa, I still managed to run regular Trial of the Champion a few times, Heroic Violet Hold (3 times) and Drak’Tharon Keep, 10-man Obsidian Sanctum and Vault of Archavon, and would have run a 10-man Naxxramas today, but it didn’t work out. In 5 days my wow-heroes.com gear score has shot up about 1050 points, so I’m pretty happy with that. It’s definitely easier to get the second toon to 80 and get gear for it than it was the first time. My girlfriend wants to take her into Ulduar, but I kind of want to take her into Naxx first. I’m excited to see what she can do in a mostly-Undead instance, and I’d like to get some Naxx gear and Tier-8 stuff before I go to Ulduar and get carried through, or whatever. I like to contribute, and I like to think that I have some talent and can hold my own, so I’m going to sort of do it the proper way. Besides, Naxx is fun, and I almost never go there with the druid anymore because it’s virtually pointless.

One thing that made it easier to level when I got to level 77 or 78 was the ability to start the Knights of the Ebon Blade quests, which lead to the dailies. I did them faithfully, and within 3 days of turning 80 I was revered with them, so I’m already rocking the Arcanum of Torment head enchant. It’s great that you can get XP from dailies. The whole experience was great – reputation, XP and gold – the trifecta, just for doing those quests repeatedly. I’m still wearing the tabard and doing the dailies, because when I get Exalted with Ebon Blade, there’s a pair of (I think) boots that I can buy that will help me out.

Overall, WoW has been a fun diversion from real life. There has been a lot to enjoy over the past month or so from playing, with the only problem being that it can be difficult to get to bed at a decent hour when there’s so much fun to be had!

iMac

As sort of an update to my earlier post about the new iMacs, I had been checking weekly to see if they had any updated shipping info on the 27-inch quad-core equipped iMac, and they finally did a couple of weeks ago. So last Monday I ordered mine. I’m hoping that I receive it by next weekend – it will be fun to set it up with WoW, configure it with the add-ons I need, and test it out in Dalaran and some raids. It’s time for it – everything, from the internet to applications and games, has gotten so much heavier in the three-plus years since I bought this one, and the computer is starting to rebel. It seems like every day it will lock up, requiring a reboot, and I’m looking forward to not having that frustration. I’m also excited to see the amazing graphics, although I’m a little anxious about the 27-inch screen. It’s a full 10 inches bigger than my current iMac, and I’m worried that it’s too big, but it was the only way to get quad-core processing from Apple without paying way more than I wanted to (by getting a Mac Pro). If I play WoW in a window, which I do anyway, I should be able to adjust it for a more comfortable view.

Music

I’ve been listening to a lot of music – it is my constant companion when I’m playing or otherwise occupied on the computer – but I’ve barely been playing my guitars lately. I just feel too tired. Unmotivated. However, the love is still there – I dug out my Strat today and played a song I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year, called Dead Wolves. I played it a few times, very poorly, and let it go after 15 minutes or so – I don’t need to add carpal tunnel to the list of things that stress me out, so maybe I’ll pick it up again tomorrow and jam for 15-20 minutes.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to lots of Christmas music. It helps me stay grounded, as far as the holidays go, since I’m so involved in the commercial side of it all (money! money! sales! sales! etc.). I loved Christmas as a child, loved the decorations and the music and the atmosphere and the smells of the tree and the food. I have fond memories of our family on Christmas Eve, when we had our big dinner and followed with Christmas stories and cookies before bed. I never want to lose the respect for that time of my life and the memories made back then. Christmas music really resonates with me, and that’s one reason why I really enjoy it.

…the beauty of silence

This week was a big week, and sleep was hard to come by. I can never sleep well the night before Black Friday, and this year it was particularly difficult. I was really nervous, because it was the first Black Friday where I wasn’t managing a mall store. I was panicking  - “I didn’t schedule enough people for the morning shift! Oh my God!” It ended up being fine, but before Saturday night’s raid, I had decided that I was going to wear earplugs to bed that night. I went to bed at around 1 am this morning, and all I could think was how amazing the sound of relative silence was! It was so peaceful, and I was so ready to sleep well. And I did. Other than the fact that somebody called my cell phone at 8am today, I slept in until 10am, which is really late for me. It was so… I’ve worn earplugs before, but I’ve never felt so wonderfully grateful for the peace and silence that I experienced last night.

That’s about it for this update. I expect that it will NOT be another five weeks until I write again. To anyone who reads this, I hope that you had a great Thanksgiving, and I wish you the best this holiday season. Thanks for reading my ramblings. Cheers!

It’s that time of year again (early)

This morning, as I walked up to the front door of my store, I felt that feeling, that dreaded feeling that tells me that I’m in trouble. It wasn’t about how the store would look when I got there, or any other day-to-day stuff. Rather, it was that there is no going back – the retail holiday season is here, and I feel about as unprepared as I can possibly be.

I’ve felt squeezed tight and stressed out, like I do during the holiday season, since the beginning of July, when our company dropped severe payroll cuts on us – cuts that have never truly eased since. The tough economy has hit retail, obviously, but we haven’t really seen less traffic or reduced activity… just smaller purchases. So a 25% cut in payroll to match a 25% drop in sales for several weeks this summer wasn’t really good math, because there was still almost as much work as there was last year. And now, we’re still seeing bare-bones payroll while making or beating last year’s sales comps. I’m supposed to hire and prep for the holidays, deal with all the new product, and give great customer service, all with relatively little help from my employees, who can’t make much of an impact when they’re not allowed to clock in more than 3-4 hours per week.

As a salaried employee, I get to make up any shortfalls. I’ve been doing it for months now, and I’m fine with that, to a reasonable point. I try to be philosophical, telling myself things like “Remember, at least you have a job, one that pays well…” and “Well, you’ll just have to power through it.” The thing is, I basically like my job, and I am thankful that I have it, and that it pays well. It has been a very stressful job this year, though, and I feel like I’m heading into prime-time running on fumes.

So yeah, the feeling… it was exhaustion and dread, a burning in my brain, with a feeling like I hadn’t showered yet, and like there was crust in my eyes and my scalp itched. I was wearing a heavy backpack filled with pressure that was seeping out and enveloping me. It’s the feeling I get every year at some point during the retail holidays, but this time it seems like the earliest that I’ve felt it in years.