3-day *&%$in’ weekend

It never fails.  The Monday after a 3-day weekend sucks.  Knowing that going in, why do I still look forward to 3-day weekends?

Today has been hell day.  One of my co-workers is out with health issues and the boss is out due to a family issue.  Neither will be returning until next week.  That leaves me here with a guy who sits at his desk playing World of Warcraft all day and gets stumped if anyone asks him how to reboot a PC.

Our network backbone has been trying to die for several months.  It should have been replaced years ago, but no one wanted to spend the money.  Now we are on borrowed time.  Some days, it works fine.  Others, it will bounce random people whenever it freaking feels like it.

I arrived at the office at 7:15 this morning and got to my desk around 7:20.  There were 2 people waiting on me.  They were down.  I got them fixed and returned to my desk to the evil red light indicating a voice mail and someone sitting in my chair.  More people down.

In all, half the building bounced this morning and half of those bounced more than once.  After about 5 hours, I finally got everyone online and sweat talked (threatened) the backbone enough that it stabilized for now.

On the upside, my co-”worker” was uninterupted on his morning World of Warcraft battlegrounds outing.

I’m in the process of putting together a new site.  Like this one, it is nothing fancy.  I have little desire to tweak websites or make them all fancy.  I don’t even know if I’ll actually launch the new site.  I just know that the people who come here looking for gaming stuff expressed some mild annoyance when I started spending more time talking about working out than I did gaming.  The new readers I got when I was talking fitness got annoyed when they returned and found posts about gaming.  So, I am working to split the two.

One possible side-effect is that this site will be updated less frequently.  I have always tried to maintain writing at least 1 new post each weekday.  I haven’t always kept that up, but I have come close.  I simply don’t have time to write one post here and one post on another site.

Truth be told, I feel like I’m running out of things to say about gaming right now anyway.  I might still be playing, but I’m not doing anything new.  If anything, I am doing things less as I start to move away from raiding and more towards and even more casual approach.

And how many times can I tell a story about clearing Deep Forge for the 2000th time?

I’m still eyeing all of my old games.  My collection is starting to grow.  I have my Wizardry disks sitting on the desk alongside my Baldur’s Gate disks and my Heros of Might and Magic disks.  I dug around in my closet and found my Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9 CD’s for the Playstation.  Hell, I even ordered a couple of old games from Amazon… games I had never played but that people always raved about.

For the PC games, I need to hook up (and probably reload) one of my older systems as some of these games actually require a floppy drive and it is doubtful that many (if any) would run on Vista.

Once I start dabbling in some of these old favorites, I might feel like I have something interesting to write about gaming again.  Right this second though, I don’t.

For example, I spent my 3-day bonus exp weekend crafting, hunting in Bonemire with my ranger, starting the Kylong quests on my ranger, and starting the Fens quests on my wizard.  I seriously doubt that there is much in there that everyone else hasn’t already done a hundred times and, even if there is, all you have to do is glance back through my archives and you could find the same stories at least 2 other times as I took other toons through the same areas.

I started work on a library in our new t3 guild hall, but it is nothing fancy or spectacular.  I went for an ordinary look rather than trying to come up with something new.  Oddly enough, the simplicity of it actually garnered a few compliments… something that caught me a bit off guard.  But I guess with so many people spending so much time trying to do things over-the-top these days, something simple and straight-forward actually has become unusual.