Assorted Nuts

I think I have probably spent more time playing this week than I have for months.  I don’t claim to understand the ebb and flow of my interest in the game these days, but there are times when it is there and times when it isn’t.  Right now, it seems to be more present than it has been for a while.
 
Maybe it is the things I’ve been doing that make it more fun though.  I haven’t seriously tried to join a group for several weeks now.  Groups happen, but I’m not going out of my way for them.
 
There are still frustrations of course, but rather than trying to push through the frustrations, I now just log off when they hit.  If I’m not in the mood to play Rao and I immediately get asked to, “Sorry.  Not staying online.”
 
I’ve mostly been running around by myself, mostly on alts.  I’ve been chasing some achievements and collecting shinies.  I’ve stopped by the dudes that will lower your level and send you off to old zones, but I end up waving at them and continuing on.  I’ll do them some day, but I’m just not driven right now.
 
On other fronts, work has been so busy and so crazy the last few months that… well, I honestly don’t even know how to articulate it.  Suffice it to say that I don’t think I’m going to make it to my vacation at the end of December.  Between that vacation and the first I took, I didn’t actually schedule my full 80 hours this year.  I was planning on carrying over the rest so that I could take some 3-day weekend biking trips in the spring, but I’m starting to feel that it might be more important for me to take a couple of days off now rather than carry them over.  We’ll see though.
 
Which leads to the biking.  I won’t go into it here much.  If you are even interested, I expect you have already checked out my other site where I talk about it in more detail.  All I will say here is that it is continuing to be of growing importance to me and I am now riding every day of the week… and I love it more each time I climb into the saddle. 
 
Finally, there is NaNo.  I wish I could say that I was enjoying NaNo as much this year as I did last year, but I have to be honest and say that I have pretty much hated every minute of it so far.  I picked a story that I wasn’t too excited to write, I quickly learned to hate all of my characters, and completely lost what little interest I had in the story after about 500 words.
 
I’m still plugging away though.  I’m determined to finish regardless of how much I would rather just quit.  I’m nearing the halfway point in my word count and expect I will hit that tonight.  Then it is just a matter of pushing through to the end and then I can strike this whole NaNo year as a bad experience that I survived.  I don’t expect I’ll even keep this story once it is done and I have kept nearly every word I have ever written in my life.  I hate this one that bad.  Once it is done, I just want to delete it from my hard drive and put it out of my mind.

Harumph

People keep e-mailing me or shooting me tells online when I log in saying that I can’t quit this site.

So, here’s the deal.  I’ll keep posting, but I’m no longer going to try to post every day.  I might post a couple of times a week or I might post a couple of times a month.

We’ll just see how it goes.

Closing up shop

I think it is finally time to admit defeat here.  I’ve been trying to continue posting here most days, but it is more and more difficult to find things to write about these days as my interest in gaming continues to decline.  I’m not even picking up inspiration from other posts on my blogroll any longer because I am no longer reading other sites.  It is no reflection on any of them, but I really can’t seem to find the interest in anything related to gaming any longer.
 
To be honest, I have written a ‘goodbye’ post every day for the last 3+ weeks only to delete it and try to muddle through something else.
 
At this point, I think the best thing to do is just a simple “Goodbye… and thank you for stopping by.  It has meant a lot to me and I have enjoyed the company.” is the best way to go.  Everything else I have written in the various attempts at this post have all come out wrong.
 
I’ll still be around though… posting on my other site.  If you want to keep up with me, feel free to stop in from time to time.  I’ll leave this site open as is, but unless something drastically changes somewhere down the road, I expect this will be the final post.
 
So, without any further babbling from me…
 
Goodbye… and thank you for stopping by.  It has meant a lot to me and I have enjoyed the company.
 
Rao out.

Slow Starter

My gaming was really sporadic this weekend.  I expect that this is kind of how things will be from now on.  I simply have too many other things that I want to do to be spending every waking moment online any longer.
 
That’s good though.  I think I’m happier than I have been in years as a result.  It is nice to be spending most of my time in the real world these days.  I’m not so sure how excited my guildmates are about it though.  There have been a few comments tossed around on the boards and in chat that make me think not everyone is thrilled at how far into the backseat I have thrown EQ2.
 
Oh well.  They will get over it or they won’t, but this is how things are.
 
I did manage to reach a goal this weekend that I have had since I first returned to EQ2 3 years ago.  When I came back, my wizard was the first toon that I created.  This weekend, at long last, he finally reached level 80 which makes him my forth level 80 toon.  Once he finally dinged, I spent some time crafting adept 3’s for him and had enough rares to make all but 2 of his 71 – 80 spells.  I’m not too concerned about those 2 though because those are 2 spells that I have literally never cast even a single time.  I then made what shard armor I could for him, but my shard stash is pretty sparse these days.  I had enough to make him 5 pieces of T1 gear, so he’s definitely in far better shape than he was.
 
Later on, we put a group together and hit a couple of Kunark instances.  It’s too bad that it wasn’t pre-TSO because I am not exaggerating when I say that the full suit of Kunark caster gear dropped between those 2 instances.
 
Afterwards, we reformed with mains and hit one of the Guk’s.  I’m not sure which one it was.  I want to say Outer Corridors.  It is the one with all of the ring events.  Only 2 of us had ever been in the zone before and we had people telling us to expect lots of wipes while we figured it all out, but I actually thought the zone was really easy.  I think we had 1 wipe and that was only because of an unfortunate pathing coupled with an unfortunate out of encounter AE.  Other than that, it was close to flawless and all of the named mobs went down on the first pull.  The drops were nice… although smart loot was again on vacation.  Thanks to the new heirloom feature though, several alts got some really nice upgrades.
 
The raid last night… well, I don’t know much about what happened.  I was there, but I wasn’t there if that makes any sense.  NaNo kicked off yesterday and I spent most of the day slacking on it… which meant I spent the raid splitting my attention between the raid and working on NaNo.  What I do know is that we were in Tome of the Mad Crusader and that Snake Lady gave us a few problems although we did eventually drop her.  I also know that my NaNo got off to a slower start this year than it did last year.  I think I hit roughly 5000 words on my first day last year.  This year, I hit about half that.  No biggie though.  That still puts me ahead of schedule.  To reach 50,000 words by November 30, I need to average 1667 words per day and I hit about 2300 yesterday.  I’m kind of fumbling in the dark on this particular story though, so I can only hope at this point that I don’t sputter out before I reach my goal.

Free time? What’s that?

Sorry for the lack of posts this week.  It has been a crazy week both at work and outside of work.  I haven’t even had the time to boot up my computer at home to say nothing of playing.  I’m signed up to head to WoE with some guildies tonight, so hopefully things will calm down enough to let me do that.
 
Tomorrow, I’m supposed to go for a relatively short sprint ride with some guys after work, so I doubt that will interfere with my Friday night gaming any.  I just hope that I’m still in the mood to play once I get home.
 
It is always funny to me how when I don’t have the time to play, that’s all I want to do.  When I have all the time in the world, I have no interest in logging on.
 
I think my internal wiring is crossed.