blustery, overcast, gray ...

... funny how the weather sometimes echoes the thoughts rambling, crashing, spilling from your mind in a cacophonous disarray of chaotic blather ...

Anyway, the weather changed abruptly yesterday. Went from all too sunny and all too hot to gusty, rainy and dreary. A tropical storm was passing south of Guam, and its feeder bands were slapping us silly, like a drunken angry woman who isn't ready to go home at the end of a debauchery of a night in a shitty, rundown dive.

Hmm ... too many bad novels perused.

Gusts got up close to 50 mph. The wind whistled and moaned through my apartment all night. The following morning, the shears of wind knocked out my power, then again later while playing WOW during lunch. Got bad enough that it knocked down some old wooden power poles. A lot of places lost power, at least temporarily, from branches knocking down lines. In the south, a dog was killed when a live power line struck it.

This is what it looked like as I made my way back, and this wasn't a bad patch:



• Lunch was crappy. A couple of plain hotdogs. Tried to improve on it afterward, stopping at a coffeehouse/bakery. I couldn't decide between peach and blueberry mini-pies, so I got one of each. Back in the office, I discovered the blueberry wasn't a pie ... it was a fruit-filled hockey puck. Crust was thick and hard. Bleah. Peach pie was worse ... overweening amounts of ginger. With peach pie? Bleah Part II. Even the coffee sucked.

• Redemption at dinner: yakisoba, chopsteak and yakitori at a little Japanese place close to my apartment.

• Was going to do laundry right after work, but because of the weather, it was pack-jam. I didn't feel like waiting around for a half hour or more before I had access to a washing machine. Hopefully not so crowded tomorrow.

• Have started taking more photos on a daily basis, with the occasional video, as evidenced above. Will try to keep it up.

• Toying with the idea of a webcam. Had one ages ago but it didn't work when I bought this new computer. So might get one that will work with this one ... and my beautiful little Mac mini, which should be in sometime this week. Not like I had serious plans for the $1,500 for the computer, flatscreen and new keyboard/mouse. At least work will load it up with all the necessary top-flight programs ... so I can be more effective at work, even when at home.

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taking time away from WOW ...

the blue is tape ... need to replace my frames this week ...

... OK, not a TON of time away. I still play a lot.

But those of you who have actually sniffed around here over the last week have probably noticed (but then again, maybe not), that I've been posting much more often than has been my "usual" once per week.

This last week, I have also spent two evenings playing poker, which meant about 4-5 hours of WOW "lost" each night.

Twice this week, I feel asleep around 6:30-7 p.m. and didn't wake up till after midnight once, and after 1 a.m. the second time. Again, a good 5+ hours of "lost" WOW time.

Earlier tonight (Sunday night for me), I went over to my godsons' house for dinner and to spend some time with the boys. R made lasagna, which was quite tasty ... best I've had in forever. Before and after, I played a lot with A, the older godson, who loves me because I'm big and strong enough to play rough with him, as he is a big, husky boy. I can't lift him up over my head and toss him around like I used to -- and doubt that anyone outside of the World's Strongest Man competition could -- but I can still manage much better than most. Again, more "lost" WOW time.

Maybe it's because my two main characters are both the max level, 70.

My woman gnome warrior, Butchie, also has some pretty fancy stuff, though still far from the uber stuff you can get. The problem is she's a type of warrior (DPS) that doesn't get a lot of dungeon/instance runs. People want warriors they take to instances to tank. So the end result is she probably won't get all that much better unless I switch her spec, but I hate tanking, so there ya go. I will use her to "farm" (make money) and help out other people in the guild with normal, non-instance quests.

As for my druid, Treebrother, he's been respec'd to resto (healer) from Moonkin (aka Boomkin, aka DPS class) so he can help other high-level members of the guild in instances, as he's the only high-level healer. But that means he mostly sucks at anything except healing, for quests or for instances. When he goes out solo, he has a hard time killing the things that used to be easy, and hence dies pretty often and pretty quick. So he's kind of in a limbo too.

I've spent some time having Butchie learn and level cooking and fishing talents, which have and will mean more gold making ability, but the fishing has been kinda slow and, after a while, boring.

I do have another character, a level 7 dwarven priest, but frankly I haven't been in the mood to slowly level another character lately.

So, that gives me a little more time to post, and to do other things.

Oh ... and I think I should probably get to the doctor sometime this week ... cold that I caught weeks and weeks ago still hasn't gone completely away and I have been sleeping a lot and have a marked loss of appetite ... which probably means I have something a bit more than a cold ... so we'll see.

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6 a.m.

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