It has been a while since I have made any meaningful post about WoW. And that's for good reason. I simply haven't been playing very much lately. Between watching baseball, playing softball, and taking care of my dog WoW seems to be getting the short end of the stick. One could make a very good argument that I'm finally getting my priorities straight, but I feel bad for my poor lvl 49 druid just sitting there hoping to get to 50 so he gets his improved Mark.

Laila came over last night and things continue to go really well with her. At one point we were discussing movies, and she confessed to loving "mobster" style movies (Godfather, Scarface, etc). So I told her that she'd probably enjoy Grand Theft Auto: Vice City because of the heavy mob elements, and she actually wanted to try it out! What a catch! She then told me a story about how when she was in college her roommate got her hooked on the 007 game and she used to play it nonstop when she got home from class. So she has at least a LITTLE BIT of gamer in her. Beautiful. I have no idea how this girl is single ... but I intend to do something about it.

Not much else going on. Things continue to move forward with the potential hot roommates. We've talked enough via email that she wants to maybe be friends and hang out even if the roommate situation doesn't fly ... which is both good and bad. She seems like a very nice girl, but with things going so well with Laila I really don't need hot girls to just hang out with, I need them for helping with the mortgage. ;-) Oh, the life......

Things continue to progress with Laila. She came over Friday night and we just hung out and watched a movie while the dogs played. Our dogs get along tremendously, which is a huge plus. We had pizza for dinner and it was an easy order ... no f'n half and half like I had to do with Amber because she was a vegetarian. I'm starting to really like Laila, but I see two roadbumps. 1) She's not very "forward." I'm used to girls that really show an active interest, initiate cuddling and stuff like that. Laila seems more subdued, which leaves it on my shoulders to make moves and initiate things, which I'm not the best at. 2) She takes her time getting back to me ... whether it's email or phone, I don't get a quick reply very often. I'm more used to constant "pinging." So I have had to exercise extreme patience ... not my strongest quality. But when she DOES get back to me it's always good and she's giving me great non-forward vibes. She just bought and is moving into her house this past month (concluding this Friday). So she has a lot of reasons to be a bit scatterbrained.

Softball has officially started. I played a doubleheader yesterday and am surprisingly not sore today. Tomorrow I plan on resuming my gym running ... yuck. I hate running.

I talked to Michelle, the potential roommate, yesterday and she seems very nice. I guess her friend and other potential roomy is in my area this week, so I'll probably meet up with her at some point to show her my house. I'd give this whole thing a 75% chance of working right now. She says that right now I am their best option, and since there are two of them and they're already friends, they're my best option as well.

So earlier in the month I got knocked around a little, but I'm rebounding nicely. It takes a pretty good shot to get me down. ;-)

Man I suck at keeping this journal updated. I tend to be somewhat moody, so I try my best not to make entries when I'm too high or low just because I don't want to go back and read them later and be disgusted at what I was thinking. Lately things have been both very good and pretty bad, so I guess I'm balanced out enough for an entry today.

I finally bumped into Laila at the dog park and got her number. I forgot how awkward it feels to me to stone cold ask a person out, so I talked to her about softball and got her number so that she can play on a team with me this year. We went to the batting cages this past Saturday, and I was able to parlay that into going to a AAA baseball game that night. Overall things went really well. I really like this girl and I get a good vibe from her. So, of course, when I called Monday I got her VM and I left a simple message saying that I had fun Saturday and wanted to see if she was up for anything this coming weekend. No call back so far ... which isn't horribly unexpected because it took her a few days to get back to me the first time, but I just hate waiting for calls.

With both of my roommates moving out I have advertised on a website called roommates.com that I have a space for rent. The best possibility is a couple of girls that want to move out here in September and live together. It would be perfect for me since I was really only looking to rent out a single room, but renting both (and getting paid double) is a big bonus. The other good / bad side is that one of the girls looks REALLY cute. And I'm all for being around cute girls, but even thinking about dating a roommate seems like bad karma ... and it opens all sorts of doors for uncomfortableness. Hopefully by then I'll be with Laila anyway and it won't be an issue. :-P And that's IF they decide that they want to live at my place, which at this point they haven't. I like to drive with the wagon in front of the horse.....

On the gaming front, WoW released their PvP honor system this week. As a reminder, I play on a non-PvP server as a Horde. Well, on my server the Alliance outnumber the Horde something like 2.6 to 1. So ever since the patch it seems like whenever I travel to a Horde town there are dead guards and skeletons everywhere. On the plus side, the Alliance seem so busy killing everything in sight that they don't take time to /spit, /rude, etc anymore. So that's nice.

There's something funny about being single after having been with a girl for 5 months. It seemed like during the time I was with Amber, temptation was everywhere. There were girls right and left flirting with me, and I had to be a very responsible boyfriend to re-tune my brain to turn these girls away because I was unavailable. So, naturally, now that I am single I can't find a girl even when I go LOOKING for them. Well, that's not completely true ... but I can't find the one I'm looking for anyway.

I have done a superb job of not contacting Amber since the breakup. No calls, no emails, no nothing. I got a box and put all of her stuff that was at my place in it, but I haven't developed a delivery plan yet. My best idea is to drop it on her doorstep and call her as I'm leaving to tell her that it's there (she lives in "common door" apartments, so it's not like I can leave it on "her" doorstep without 30 other people seeing it as they come and go). I know that anything I want to say to her would just be mean and wouldn't serve any purpose, so it just seems better to not talk to her at all. I realize that my feelings of resentment and anger towards her will (mostly) pass in time, and I just need something to do in the meantime to make that time go faster.

To that end, I'm contacting all of my "long lost" friends that will become the center of my social circle when my current "best friends" move away in a month. Plus I'm going to the dog park whenever it's nice in hopes of running into temptation.

"I am ready for whatever's coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The **** hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become. The alien man waved his arms up and down and noticed that he couldn't wave in the right language so he stopped. " - Henry Rollins

I haven't had a journal entry for a while, but that's not to say there's nothing going on in my life. The last month or so everything has come crashing down. Both of my roommates told me that they are moving out, and since I own my house and they help pay a nice portion of the mortgage ... well, I'll be eating Ramen until I can find somebody else to live with. One of my best friends' wife got a job in Illinois, so they're moving there (I live in Oregon). And this weekend my girlfriend broke up with me.

So, basically, my entire social circle is leaving me and I won't have any money. Great. Some of these events have been in the works for a while and I was prepared for, but both the second roommate leaving and the girlfriend thing were a complete surprise. It's a bit of a system shock and in a couple months when the roommates and friend and actually gone I just don't know what I'll do. I'm not the most outgoing person, so making friends isn't a small thing for me. I haven't lived alone for a LONG time, and I assume I'll be spending A LOT of time at the dog park (thankfully it opens back up on weeknights now). But aside from that I won't be seeing anybody but family. It just sucks.

As for the girlfriend, I was completely shocked that she quit on me with no warning whatsoever. Still, I'm not really that torn up about it. The reason she gave, which is absolutely true, is that we're complete opposites in almost every sense and she got tired of the differences. Fine enough. But no warning that things were going wrong or that she was thinking that way was pretty pathetic on her part. Plus between the two of us I felt like I was bending MUCH more trying to accomodate her lifestyle. So in a way it's a relief ... because the more I thought about our future the more questions I had. So I guess it was inevitable, and we're both old enough that there's no use wasting time dating just for the experience of it. And I can finally go back to eating steak whenever I want. Yeah!

Er, well, I COULD eat steak whenever I wanted, if I had any money...... ;-)

If you have ever read my journal (I know you haven't) you'll see a lot of it centers around World of Warcraft lately. I have put a lot of time into the game over the past month and have developed some opinions. The main theory that I have, and I bet I'm right, is that this game is "dead" in a year.

Huh? How can somebody who has played the game nonstop for the past month say something like that? Easy. I see the huge dead end that my character is racing towards. The whole point of RPGs, to me, is building my character. Constantly upgrading items, skills, talents, professions, etc. I am working to make my guy awesome. And that's great, but what happens when he becomes awesome? Say I'm my level 60 druid and I have 300 leatherworking skill and a few purple items that I have acquired somehow and that I know, because I read message boards, are the "best" items my druid can have.

My friends, I have nothing left to do. I don't enjoy grouping with people whom I don't know outside of the game. Guilds are a total pitfall where the "good" ones expect you to spend a lot of your own time supporting the guild and participating in certain guild functions ... which I don't have time for. The rest are just misfit groups of completely random people who happened to click "yes" when somebody asked them to. There is no loyalty and everybody just uses everybody else to get what they need. Not my thing either. So "raids" are not in my future. And even if they were, it's hard to imaging them not getting old pretty fast.

Being a company that made Diablo, I expect more from Blizzard. I don't understand why they went so far away from Diablo's item system when they made Diablo II, but WoW goes even further from what I consider "good" from an item standpoint. Look, as much as I enjoy finding a blue item ... I know it's templated and I know it's the "best" that I'm going to find for a very long time. I also know that hundreds of other people have the EXACT SAME item that I have. I don't like that. Things should be different. I liked that in Diablo items had ranges ... like the plate armor that I picked up would have a base armor of maybe 700-800 and a random number of bonuses would have random potencies to them. So when I found my godly plate of the whale, it was not only awesome but it was UNIQUE (the ultimate slap was in Diablo II where they named a templated class of items "unique" ... when thousands of people all have the same thing, it is NOT "unique").

So that's #1 on my list of things that I don't like. Not that the items will ever get an overhaul, but I wish a game would mock Diablo's item system. Because it was and will always be the best, IMO.

The next thing that has to go is the cap at lvl 60. Does anybody else smell an expansion pack? WoW: The Lost Dungeons. Terrible marketing name, but you get the idea. Don't think for a second that it won't happen. Because, simply put, there is an "end" to this game. And when games have "ends," people stop playing. That's why games like UO endured for so long. The graphics sucked, but there was so much to do and no "experience cap" ... not even a "class" system. Regardless of who you were or what you did, there was always something else to do.

Anyway, that's my prediction. I assume an expansion pack will be released in a year or so ... but without it (or maybe before it hits) I think the player base will be dramatically decreased. Because when you're done, you're done.

It's been a long time since I have made a journal entry. It's been a rocky last week or so. I had my first "fight" with my girlfriend. Nothing too major and we're better now. The only lingering problem that I don't know what to do about is that she's a vegetarian and I'm an omnivore that leans towards carnivorism. So she conplains that a lot of the time when we kiss my mouth tastes like meat, and this disgusts her. Since I brush my teeth all the time directly before kissing, I am at a loss on what else to do. It's not like I can take up vegetarianism any more than she can start liking meat. Hopefully we can find a happy middle ground, but it's a concerning problem.

She has also still been sick, which means lots of WoW time for me. My druid is up to lvl 33, so he's not progressing very quickly anymore. The main reason for this is my hunter, who is now lvl 27. I think the hunter is much more fun to play, and suits my playstyle a little better than the druid. But as the druid, I ran into a situation where I was having trouble finding appropriate quests. Everything kept pointing me towards Stranglethorn Vale, so I went there and as a skinner / leatherworker the quests are GREAT because most focus on killing animals. So I get gobs of exp plus leather. Win /win. The only problem is that I noticed that when I finished talking to the quest givers they kept saying, "for the Alliance." So apparently I'm doing "Alliance" quests, which ticks me off as a member of the Horde. It's doubly annoying that the area is crawling with Alliance and most seem to enjoy slapping me as they run by. Har har, so funny.

Not much else going on. Looking forward to a three day weekend and hopefully *fingers crossed* some "quality time" with Amber.

So this was Super Bowl weekend and my team, the Pats, were in it again for the third time in four years. Being a fan of New England sports teams has been painful ever since I started following in the early 90's (and I got in at the tail end). But lately it has been just awesome. Four titles in four years, three of them in the past ~365 days. It has been an unreal ride, and it's very probably I will live my entire life without seeing anything like it again.

Amber has been broken lately. She has some sort of lingering cold that has kept her down and out for basically the last month. Thanks to WoW it hasn't bothered me too much since I've had other things to do, but it's starting to get me down. Having a girlfriend that you never see is worse than being single in some ways ... certainly more frustrating. And the times that I have seen her the past month, it has only been for a few hours at a time and we never really do anything. I bring all of this up because she came over briefly on Saturday evening, but didn't stay the night. Then Sunday she was supposed to come over for the Super Bowl but bailed instead. So with Valentine's Day coming up it makes my life tough because I have no idea what to plan for. Frustrating.

Friday night my friend dropped off his golden retriever for me to dogsit. I'm very much a dog person, and much more a small dog person than big dog. I have a Jack Russell Terrier, and he's awesome. High energy, in your face, "big dog in a small dog's body" style. The golden retriever is so slobbery and gross, it disgusts me. Plus he always has the most blank look on his face. I think he's a pretty smart dog, but he doesn't look it. So anyway, those two played all weekend and it wore ME out. You see, my Jack Russell likes to rape the golden ... which is sort of amusing unless you're the one trying to get him to not do that and he tries every single minute.

And yet, somewhere in between the raping dogs, super bowl victories, and defunct girlfriends I managed to get some time in with WoW. Damn addictions.

So, probably like most people who play WoW, I have started to accumulate a large number of "alts." I did this because of the (lame) skill system where I can only do two things. My blacksmith needed leather. My leatherworked needed potions. All of my characters needed bags. So I started making different characters to cover all of these bases, as trying to buy the items I need from the auction house is painful at best. Not because it's difficult, but because if you're a crafter and you're buying your supplies at the AH you're bound to be losing tons and tons of money.

This process lead me to create one of each of the four Horde races. My latest creation is an undead mage, and after playing the previous three races I have to say that being undead is really freakin cool! The atmosphere is appropriately a lot more "dark." After a tough battle I can eat the victim's corpse, which is just awesome. That ability doesn't even need to have any benefit for me, it's just a nice punctuation to show an enemy who's the man. Plus the undead have great one liners when you leave their shops like "beware the living." I'm telling you, I heard that. Those living MFers are always causing me problems. Plus the undead ride bats instead of giant winged lion things, and the ride into the Undercity is really, REALLY breathtaking and cool.

My only gripe with the undead is that a lot of the missions deal with killing other undead, which seems like the opposite of what I want to do. I guess there's some evil "Lich King" or something ... I'd have thought the undead would have a tough enough time of things without having pety squabbles and killing their own, but I guess not.

In real life news, Valentine's Day is coming up this month and I still have to determine where to take Amber for the weekend. I already have her flowers ordered though, so give me SOME credit.

Hours on end of WoW continue. I have chosen to play Horde characters, which is a lot out of the norm for me considering that they're the "bad guys" and I always lean towards the "good guy" end of the spectrum. But I thought the Tauren looked pretty sweet and their story sounds more like the innocent guys caught in the middle of a battle and having to choose a side. At least that's how I justified it. So anyway, I'm a Tauren and I have to say: It's tough being a Horde member in an Alliance dominated world. Somehow somebody got a hold of the numbers, and on my server it's 3:1 Alliance to Horde, and even a bigger gap in the 55+ lvl characters.

So what? Well, Horde towns are CONSTANTLY being raided. And on a non-PVP server it's not lethal, but it certainly is annoying when you finally finish some horribly annoying quest only to go back and realize that the person you have to report to is dead. Plus you can barely carry on a conversation between all of the "The Crossroads is under attack!!" messages. But what's really irritating is that these lvl 55+ Alliance guys are picking on the STARTER towns. It takes a lot of balls to be lvl 55 and walk into a town full of lvl 6-10 characters and start blowing things up. It's like the U.S. attacking Canada. Total joke.

I convinced a friend to play and we finally met up in-game the other night. It's fun being the established "big brother" and pointing out the simple things that I wasted hours discovering like how flight paths work, where major towns are, weapon trainers, etc. I just hope he doesn't ask about fishing, because I never did get that to work.

Anyway, I continue to grind along. Where I "should" be is becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. I still can't venture into the lands that are all dark and creepy, although I have tried a few times. I learned that lvl ?? means RUN. Or, more accurately, just stand there and take your (quick) beating and then figure out how far your corpse run will be.