Catchy Name Needed

Have I mentioned that Col and I are playing WoW again? Well, we are. We were trying to finish Northrend before our memberships expired, but I don't think we're quite going to make it. I'm enjoying it enough that I volunteered to pay for another month, though. That should be plenty of time, near as I can tell. We're most of the way finished with Scolazar Basin (I don't think that's spelled right, but you get the idea) and we've already finished Zul'Drak, so all that's left is Storm Peaks and Icecrown. We are level 80 (woot!) and we both have Explorer titles and I even sprung for a fast mount (4000g for the training. Whew.). Then we're going back to LOTRO when that's finished.

I am about to take my midterm in the coding class. I should be studying right now, actually.

There are a whoppin' 5 items in the Etsy store now. (A couple more may be coming sometime tomorrow.)

Rob's movie report: He went to see The Fourth Kind this afternoon, the alien-abduction movie. He seemed to like it, although he didn't really have a whole lot to say about it. (He did make some comment about whether the "documentary" part of it was fake, at which I tried not to roll my eyes too obviously. Which could be why he didn't say much more about it.)

Oh, we are overloaded with invitations for Thanksgiving - my aunt, my sister, and my dad have all invited us. Daddy was third so he's getting left out, but we are going to try to make two stops on Thanksgiving Day and go to both Bryan and Austin. That should be doable. My sister has another significant other that she thinks is serious - more so than the last one, I hope! - and she's all anxious for us to meet him. Should be interesting.

I don't think I've really talked about WoW all month, except in a tangential way. I know you've been missing it! Here's the thing: we've been questing in Outland for the past month or so, Col and I, and that's been going (mostly) fine, but I've also had this little side project going on that has necessitated many trips back to the "old country" when Col wasn't around - I've been trying to get Mellificent the Paladin's blacksmithing up to snuff. There's a whole series of quests for the Mithril Order which I had previously ignored, and then there's another quest chain for Armorsmithing. And I decided to do both of these. Mostly this has consisted of many, many mining runs in order to get enough ore - mostly mithril but also thorium and assorted other stuff - to make all the items you need for this quest. Basically, you have to do the Mithril Order part in order to get the recipes you need to become an Armorsmith. It took me many, many runs around Un'goro Crater and Tanaris to get enough to do all this. I got where I could do a Tanaris run very efficiently, in the end, which is good, because I finished up all those quests with my blacksmithing at 298, and in order to get to 300 (and be able to work with Fel Iron) I had to do one extra mining run to make two more orange items to make up those two smithing points. But it's done, and once I finally got to 300 and could use all my fel iron which I've been hoarding all this time, I had enough to move up another 20 points or so before I ran out of materials. So yay me!

My next project needs to be moving up Gelt (gnome mage) in tailoring. (WoW has a Tailoring Leveling guide that maybe I should be using.) I could also stand to do some work on cooking and fishing and first aid on both of these characters.

I thought the new computer would look just like the old one, but it's slimmer, which is nice. And has a lot more memory, etc., so yay!

WoW is downloading. Important things first!

Wow. Obama headlines, all rolled onto one page. (Although the ads at the top of that page are really obnoxious - at least, both of the two I've gotten are very blatantly anti-Obama ones.)

Consumerist confirms what I had already noticed: both Wal-Mart and Sam's Club started playing Christmas music on November 1st. I went to Wal-Mart to buy, what-do-you-call-em, the stovetop reflector thingies, and it took me three tries, believe it or not, to get the right one. (My stove has flip-up elements, it turned out, which seem to be more rare.) And I have also been to Sam's Club in the interim. And I rant about Christmas music every November, and I swear every year it gets worse. Christmas music is just not acceptable until at least Thanksgiving, and I don't know why these companies don't get that. Oh well, I keep swearing I'm going to avoid Wal-Mart, anyway - this just gives me another reason to.


I haven't talked about WoW in a while, and since I don't seem to have much else to talk about, we can talk about that! The new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, comes out next week, and there's already been a couple of patches in preparation for that. People have been coming out of the woodwork to play because of it, and things got so bad for a while that you could barely play. I'm not sure but what it's still that way on some servers, but things were bad enough that they started letting people transfer to less-crowded servers for free, and we did. Our horde characters are still on Runetotem, but our Alliance characters have moved from Aggramar - which is a really old server - to Korialstrasz, a newer one. We weren't in a guild and we don't really interact with anybody except each other, to speak of, so there wasn't any reason not to move. It's funny, because it's very different than GuildWars, where we always socialized a lot within the guild - in WoW, we just play. I tried joining a guild when we first started playing - that was on yet another server, which, um, I've actually forgotten the name of completely - and it just didn't really work out, and we never tried again. There's not a TOG guild on either of these alliance servers - there is one on Runetotem, but we don't play horde enough to have bothered with that either. I don't know, there just doesn't seem to be that much reason to look for a guild. We don't raid, we don't have any desire to get into that sort of thing, and WoW guilds are mostly very heavily into that, it seems like. I know there are exceptions but it just doesn't seem worth bothering with.

Meanwhile, I have a character at level 60, for the first time, and I have ventured into Outland. My mage, which is my solo character, the one I play when I'm playing by myself, is coming up on level 40. I don't play a whole lot of different characters, the way I did in GW, but I did make an undead warrior a couple of weeks ago and I've been playing her a good bit. Incidentally, we are still planning on going back to GuildWars someday when GW2 comes out. It just doesn't seem like that's going to be any time soon.

Video-game gender, that is.