My copy of World of Warcraft finally arrived on Friday. Four CDs is a painful installation process when you've been waiting for something for over a week. Then I had problems with the client patch program that took me a good hour to resolve and made me wonder if the game would even run for me. I finally got it up and running, selected my world, made four or five attempts at a name (damn you fools who name yourself Dragula!) and started playing.

Now it's Tuesday. My shoulders ache. My eyes hurt. I have 18 unfulfilled quests on my mind and I'm mentally preparing tonight's best route to solve a few of them. It has taken over.

In a brilliant stroke of luck there was an ice storm in Portland this weekend. No driving on the freeways without chains. So the delayed family Christmas thing that was supposed to happen on Saturday didn't (more gaming time) and I had a very real excuse to ignore the girlfriend in favor of the game. Of course by Sunday afternoon it was melted and I spent some time with Amber, which was both a nice break from the game and a refreshing reminder of why I like her so much. I took yesterday off (floating holiday, great timing) and spent more time with WoW.

So after four days I'm up to level 19, which is maybe a little low considering how much I played ... but I'm so used to Ultima that I took my leatherworking skill very seriously and worked for a long time to build it up only to realize that now I can't even wear the items I make. Whoops. Plus for the longest time I couldn't find any monsters above level 12 or 13 and I was level 15, so killing them didn't net me very much exp.

Anyway, blah blah blah. Overall, great game. I wish travel was maybe a LITTLE faster, but what can you do?