Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, that applies even to alarm clocks. My clock knows daylight savings time exists, it knows it has to move forward an hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall. It just doesn't know what exact day to do it. It helpfully changed my clock back an hour last night...

Nothing like waking up, checking your watch, and finding you need to be at work in 15 minutes.

Sorry I've not been posting much lately! Life is BUSY. Or rather, my job in the new group is. I haven't taken a lunch break all week, which is depressing as heck. I need to write more about job foo behind a locked post.

I saw my second Romney political ad last night. I swear, if he believes the things being said about him in them, someone should lock him up in a mental hospital. This one claimed that the world hated Obama, but if Romney was elected the world would love America again. (How exactly would that work? "LOVE US OR WE'LL BOMB YOU!!!"?) Reminds me of my favorite bumper sticker: American flag background with the words: Do what we say or we'll bring democracy to your country, too.

I'm feeling less nervous about the election. Most polls/experts I'm hearing are saying it's going to be pretty hard for Romney to win.

WoW is slowing down for me. Less/no time in the morning to play and not going home for lunch to check auctions = I'm getting reamed in the AH game. BUT! I keep telling myself I don't care. I'm crawling slowly towards gold cap again, I'm back at a comfortable (for me) level of gold. I don't like dailies. I'm back to not enjoying the game in general very much (outside of RP). I keep telling myself there's NO reason for me to begrudge putting time towards my paying job over putting it towards WoW. Most days I actually believe that, too.

Speaking of, time to get to work! Even if I'm not posting as much, I do make time to read my friendslist. It's often the bright point of my work day. :)

For you all: I'm in love with this gif. So peaceful.


For cats tossed into the air: Bad dreams are one thing. Everyone has them, they're normal. I just hate it when my brain comes up with a bad dream so stereotypical that it's laughable. Last night I had a dream that I was an act in a small circus. I juggled. Cats. We were about to go on, I was standing just off stage, and I realized I didn't know how to juggle. (Let alone juggle cats.) That's right up there with showing up in the school classroom without your pants on!

For non-flying cats: I had to go to the pet store today to get more food/litter, and of course the adoption group had a bunch of kittens out for adoption. The one I had been considering (the one with a missing front paw) got adopted (YAY!), but the other ones were darned cute and sweet and... sigh. Now I want a second cat again.

I've been going back and forth on this issue for months now: I want a second cat, I'm happy as-is with one cat, but if one is good two are better! Etc. I decided to move across the country with a tiny fraction of the thought and stress I'm putting into this second cat issue. I just don't know how I'm supposed to decide on something when I don't have basic facts. I'm happy now. Will I be happier with a second cat? If I could answer that, I could decide on this issue, but it's impossible to know without having that second one to see. (But the kittens are SOOOO cute!)

For me/WoW: It's finally hitting me. Two weeks until MoP. My to-do list is unreasonable.

In a perfect world, before MoP I'd:
Level Sedgegrass to 85 (80.5 now).
Level Meadowsedge to 85 (80.5 now).
Level Icerime to 85 (61 now).

Level Meadowsedge's mining and herb to max (both 300s now).
Level Sedgegrass's mining and herb to max (herb 82, mining 300-something).
Decide on professions for Icerime, level both to max.

Cap honor and VP (selling honor for VP) on my two PvP alts.

Organize my mats and things to sell. I have three six tab guild banks and a crapton of personal banks full of things for MoP drop. When am I going to start selling them? How?

That is an amazingly unlikely list of things, especially since I'm reading a good book now and would rather read than play. (And notice RP isn't on that list, I haven't RPed outside of Twitter for ages. D: )

A more reasonable list:
Icerime to 68 so he can fly in Northrend (and thus be a better bank/AH alt). That's about four dungeon runs from one of my 85s. Doable.
Level herb and mining on both Sedge alts. Likely doable; doable on at least one.
Organize mats -- this is a must.

Two weeks to go. Arg! I'm so not ready, but it sure will be nice to have space back as things sell. (Edit: Apparently my dates are off!)

The Saga of the Stray Siamese Kitty is finally over for good. After a week and a half of not coming around, he showed up today, with a new collar and tag on. So either he was owned all along and just lost his collar, or someone took him in. I think the latter, since he wasn't starving this time (he turned up his nose at the dry food!) and looked better. I really, really wish whoever took him made him an indoor cat, but at least I can worry a little less now.

With him taken care of, I'm pondering getting a second cat/kitten. I really want one (I always want one!), but I watch Ellie run from one end of the apartment to the other and I think about how much more fun she might have with a second cat. (Or maybe she's like me and happy she's the only cat...) I wish there was a way to know for sure which she would like better.

TV is annoying me, or rather one show is. Sit Happens. A gameshow based on musical chairs. Seriously? Musical chairs? Watch the preview, the show looks like a bad joke.

WoW: Oh woe is my wallet. Two crimson deathchargers went up for 70K-80K each, so of course I snagged them. All the progress I made to recover from the last pair of horses is gone. I'm up to eight deathchargers now, which will be great IF I win this gamble. With mounts going account bound, TCG mounts have to go up in price, right? No one will need to buy a second one, but more people should want them since you will get more bang for your buck from them. This is the MoP gamble I feel the most sure about, but it's also my biggest one. I really hope I'm not wrong.

I love rare items. Usually I don't write about AH stuff, but conversation with felknight last night about the pricing of rare things in game made me think about all this.

I just sold an alchemy recipe for about 19,000. (I actually listed it at 11K, but she paid me 7K gold, 12 white kittens (she priced them at 300-500 each, but they're moving right now at 1K each), a fancy weapon, and a couple stacks of the Dream Vision potion itself. The gold and the kittens alone come to about 19K, the weapon and potions are just icing.

(Dream Vision potion lets you explore zones in your "dreams" -- your body, but you can't get aggro and you can jump really high/can't die from falling damage. Perfect for MoP coming!)

...ha ha. As usual, I forgot about the neutral AH cut (which the damned magical rooster should have made me never forget). I lost about 1K in AH fees. D: Oh well, still ahead.

Anyway! The only reason the recipe was that price was that I listed it as that. I actually bought it for 120 gold. I would have sold it for 7K straight (though 8K was really as low as I wanted to go, there was still wiggle room since I got it so cheaply). I really enjoy how the seller sets the value of the item. felknight has an old item to learn some first aid skill from, no longer needed or used in the game. But the item still has value! What value? HE decides that. And you need only one buyer to agree with you on the value to make the sale.

I love the AH. :)

Edit: Oww, my pocket. Bought a X-51 Nether-Rocket X-TREME and a X-51 Nether-Rocket to flip in MoP, 130K and 120K. D: Hopefully they should sell for a whole lot more later!

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Kitty news: I got the humane trap this afternoon and set it up, but Mr. Stray didn't come around until just now. :/ My vet closes in an hour, so I had to not catch him. Er, not TRY to catch him. He's a clever little thing and had little interest in walking into the trap.

The more I look at him, the more I see how beaten up he is. I had seen some kind of injury on his inner foreleg, but now I think he has a big scar on another leg. Something probably tried to chew him up, they look too big for cat fight wounds. :/

I'm going to try to get him tomorrow. I'm going to work from home so I can scurry him off to the vet as soon as I catch him. If I do. Hopefully I will.

How fitting is that sign for my LJ? :P

TV: Confession time! I wasn't in love with the first season of Game of Thrones. Sure I watched it, I even sometimes looked forward to it, but at least once per ep I got bored in the middle of things. I have no idea why, I loved the books, but the show didn't hook me.

I'm happy to say, this season is different. I've been looking forward to the new eps ("Hey, tomorrow is Sunday, yay!"), and they seem to be over in the blink of an eye. Was I expecting less of the show this season, since I didn't really love it last season? Or is it actually better now? I'm not sure.

However, it's not my favorite show currently on TV. That honor goes to Korra. Seems like my entire friends list wrote about it this weekend, so I'll keep this brief: The show is perfect in every way. It's a children's cartoon, yet it treats the audience like an adult. Even just a few eps into the series, and it's endlessly cool and has had honestly creepy moments. So nicely mature.

WoW: I love you, Darkmoon Faire. I bought yet another Crimson Deathcharger yesterday (gotta catch 'em all?), so my money fell below a million again, which made me flail. Stupid, stupid brain, that's no reason to panic. The horses are an investment at this point. With account-bound mounts coming for sure in MoP, I expect the price of mounts to go through the roof (you're basically getting up to 10 of them for the price of one! Or is it across servers, too? Even more, if so!). I'm hoping to sell each of them for at least 500K, when MoP drops.

So anyway. DMF. I had about 300 quest items saved up. I was certain I would never move them all, I stopped buying about two weeks before the faire, but amazingly they're almost all gone now, on the first day. I have no idea how much money I made, but I bought them all for 20 gold or less (with a few exceptions, some of the rarest ones I bought for up to 50), I've sold them all for 50-200 (with the rare ones for 200-300). It boggles me, flat out boggles me, how many people do not buy these items ahead of time. But hey, I'm willing to take advantage of their lack of planning.

I think I need to start adding 'liquid' to my amounts, when I speak of my money: Liquid gold and goods. I easily have a million in mounts, pets, Lich King drops, mats, and other assorted things waiting to sell. (Or in the LK items, just holding onto.)

Plants: Alas, my basil went the way of tersa's. I brought it home, planted it, and right away the adult plants started to die. I saw younger ones were just growing leaves, so I thought maybe the young ones would replace the older ones, but as soon as the young ones got to adult size, they all fell over dead too. No idea why. I guess it just doesn't like growing in this area.

Everything else is growing well, though the poor sunflowers are running flat along the ground. They're still so small and thin, it's really hard to stake them up.

Ellie New Cat: I got her a new carrying case (case #4... sigh). But I finally got one she's not afraid of! As in she's willing to be in the same room with it without fleeing. So I've been working with her, putting her in it (without closing it), then giving her all the pats. It's backfiring though, I'm going too fast, now she's back to being afraid of being picked up by me. :/ Sigh. Poor kitty.

It's got to be hard for her. She wants to be brushed, she seems to very much like it, but she's afraid of both the brush and being in a position where I could easily keep hold of her. She's so clearly torn between wanting to be brushed and afraid.

I feel guilty, but even now, more than a year later, I think about how things would have been if I had gotten a different cat. I'm glad to have given Ellie a home, her foster mother said she wasn't happy living with so many other cats, but a loving, not scared cat would be so nice. I know she's made lightyears of progress, and she'll still keep improving, but... :/

I didn't realize how bad I was at RPing Thistle's IC garden. My RL one is being visited by the Plagues of Egypt. Wait, there was a Plague of Powdery Mildews, right?

Yesterday I went out to check and see how my plants were doing in our uncharacteristic rain. They're under an overhang, so they don't get rained on directly, but they were still nice and damp so I was happy. Until I noticed the rosemary looked like it had been snowed on. Hm.

Google tells me it's likely Powdery Mildew, a common plant disease. If this were a flower or something, I'd be less upset, but it's on a herb I'd like to one day eat! And will it spread to the others? (Survey says... YEP!) I thought about digging up and throwing out the rosemary, since only it had signs, but it was so badly covered with the stuff that I figured the spores must have spread already.

Sigh. Growing plants is way too much trouble. Going into this, I thought my worst trouble might be squirrels eating things. Now I have bugs and mold and blah. Thistle's IC garden grew fine in RP! :P

Speaking of RP, Penny is four months old now. For those playing at home, that's this big:

She'd be looking all grown up!

And I haven't been RPing at all lately, which has me very depressed. Ore, ore, ore, ore. All I do in game anymore is make money. I spent 6 hours yesterday on it, 8 hours each night before that, and even more over the weekend. I finally crossed the million gold mark (again), but it's at a high cost. I meant to take a break and RP last night... but then a ton of cheap ore got listed at the AH. When I hit a million last night I said that would be the end of my ore buying... then this morning there were 150 seriously cheap stacks up. Sigh. I'm just going to move my buy price lower. I'll only deal with the cheapest of cheap ores. I will take my free time back! ...but there's so much money to be made.

"Three things make a post", as the saying goes.

1) ani_mama held a contest to give away five speed paintings ("quick 10-20 minute black and white sketches"), and eeee, I won one! She's the amazing artist behind my bestest commissions:

Haken and Morn <3
Haken alone (Look at those cheekbones! And ears! And eyes! Eeeee!)
Keen and Grace
Thistle and Squall (not WoW!Thistle)
The icon on this post.

So I was really happy to have won! I've been thinking about one of the first versions of Thistle, from the book and the MUSH, so I asked for a happy/cute saber toothed cat. "MY BONE, Mr. Butterfly!" :D :D

2) I have only one ep left of the best TV show ever. Misfits!


Simon would really like it if you gave it a watch. You can even watch it free on Hulu!

Remember the old Heroes show? It's like that, take out the silliness and plot holes and the lacking story line, add a bunch of darkness, a ton of seriousness, though a nice dash of humor as well, and the amount of sex you'd get on British TV instead of puritan American TV, and that's Misfits. Great writing, OUTSTANDING wonderful characters, dark and funny!

You really should watch it now. They're remaking it for American TV, which is going to ruin it. Don't wait until then! Watch it now, the real version!

3) I'm finally back over a million on WoW. People were right, when you cross that line, it feels like the new baseline. Million is the new zero! Now I feel like I finally have money again, which is just plain silly. I'm glad I made a new enchanter though, it's bringing in really good money.

I've been playing WoW a few years now, way long enough for FFXI to be out of my brain and WoW fully replacing it. Or should be. So there I was, happily skilling enchanting on Clove, when suddenly it became time to train for a higher skill cap. "Level 75 required." ARG! How do I forget that skill cap is tied to level EVERY SINGLE TIME!

I hate leveling. I bet people laugh when I say that, since I have 8 85s, 1 84, and level 70 Clove, but I really, really do hate leveling. I don't enjoy questing, I wouldn't mind instancing if not for the other people, and archaeology is slow and boring. But darned it all, I need to level so I can craft!

How I miss the days of FFXI, where a level 1 could be a max level crafter and I was a crafting god and the richest person on the server. Blast from the past! Let's look at my old army of crafting mules!

There's one person missing from that, my clothcrafter: Damask, elvaan from Windy. And I think I'm missing a lot of jobs/classes from that, too. I think I left the game with double that number of maxed classes... Man, that sig sure does make me smile. I worked so hard on all of them. Crafting/playing the AH is so my thing, no matter the game.

Anyway! So now I'm leveling Clove. It's too late for him to get the Professor title (I did 60-70 through nothing but dailies, hardly any digging at all), but I can pound out five levels though. At least the Northrend levels were made shorter. (And yeah, Northrend is the only place I'm willing to quest, but questing as a clothie worries me. What if something hits me!)

In RP news, eeeeee! Holy cow, such good RP tonight! And bonus: That "wanted" feeling! Thistle ICly and me OOCly got an invite to join a guild. :D Unfortunately it wouldn't work ICly (they wanted Thistle to come work for their company), but they were nice and great RPers. It's like getting a job offer for a job you're not going to take -- it's nice to know someone out there wants you. :)

Between that and the really outstanding RP (to think, I almost passed it up because the guy's RSP current setting was 'smells like armpit'! but it turned out that fit the character perfectly well). They invited me to come RP with their guild anytime, too. They offered to set Thistle up in a shop ICly, but he's fine working at home (and home is private and he doesn't have to worry about anyone else being around or keeping an eye on Penny), so he said no.

I know I've written this before (heck, I nearly write it every time I get great RP), but it always amazes me how great good RP makes me feel. My chest fills with warm feelings and I feel like I'm walking lighter.

A very, very good night. :) And hopefully 71 for Clove before I go to bed! Hope everyone else had a good day, too!

Edit: What was I saying about Clove not getting Professor? o.O

Look at him go!

Thank you, LJ's restore post function. I started writing this post last night, then closed the window because I was too depressed. Last night's writing is between the two --- lines.

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Years and years ago, back when I was still running the MUSH, I scoffed at people wanting a +roll command for RP fights. "Good, mature, adult RPers can talk about it! Decide what happens!". Well know what? Like a sadly high number of other things, I was wrong.

/roll or +roll makes it possible for things to happen that two people would likely never just decide to do if they were talking about it. My paladin and blightheart's DK were evenly matched, so we used /roll to decide things. The outcomes were so funny. My rolls were 10s and 20s, his were 80s and 90s. Basically, in the second(?) round of combat, the roll was something like 12 to 92 and so my guy basically ran himself through on the DK's sword. While greatly embarrassing IC (my guy lived through a war! He was in a warzone longer than most people! And he was an experienced fighter even before the war started!), it was really, really funny OOCly. "But Thistle! If they were so evenly matched, it shouldn't have happened!" But luck does come into play in RL. You hit a patch of ice, your phone rings and distracts you at just the wrong moment. Tiny little things that you wouldn't otherwise think to add into RP.
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I know there were lots and lots of good RP times on the MUSH, but it's really embarrassing to remember things like that. It's even worse knowing I'm still making the same sorts of mistakes, that I too often believe there's just One Right Way of doing things.

In TV news, I should have listened to fealubryne sooner! I LOVE the Misfits! I've only seen two or three eps so far, but I love every minute of it. It's like the Heroes TV show, but set in the UK and a ton darker, more realistic, and way more mature. I wish I had time to watch it more often!

WoW: For the longest time, I bemoaned trying to make money on a RP server. When I was in the gem market, our prices rarely hit triple digits and were slow to sell, while on other servers they were going for 250+ and flying off the AH. And then came transmogging. I've made So Much Money flipping RP item! Greens mostly, but now and then interesting higher items. Like Eye of Flame.

Eye of Flame is a silly little item. You can't hardly even see it on someone. On a belf, it makes the eye look white.

Know how many people RP missing an eye or having an engineering eye?

Lots. *rubs hands together*

I bought the eye for just over 2K, hoping to double my money. I listed it high, thinking I could slowly lower it when it didn't sell, but it sold on the first listing, just over 7K. :D

Most of the items I flip are a lot smaller profit (200-600 gold), but getting a nice one like that feels great. And I always worry that people think I'm saying I always pick right, always make a profit, but that's not the case. Now and then I try to flip a unique-seeming item, but it won't sell at all. I have lost some money, but all in all I'm way ahead of the game.

There are only two reasons I'm looking forward to MoP: More character slots and the fact that everyone will be rolling new alts and the AH will get hot again. I love that I can tell how active the game is by the volume of stuff moving through the AH. (I don't mean just my sales, I mean moving through the AH as a whole.) The game is so very dead right now -- my profits are down, yes, but I mean total postings. MoP will change that, at least for a while. People will be leveling again, alts will be leveling professions, people will return to the game. I may never, ever, ever want to see a panda character, but I'm looking forward to the increased activity that they will bring.

Rick Perry thinks Canada is part of America. The New York Times has a list of the biggest applause lines Rick Perry received on the campaign trail in Iowa. Among them:

"Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don't have to buy from a foreign source."

And Republicans loved that line...

Okay, enough political stuff! Who wants dinner? If so, please respond with "Eye do!". (The image is, alas, fake, but I didn't learn that until I had already saved it to post.)

And in the WoW end of things, SO TIRED. I boggle at how busy I am on-game. I'm so totally out of guild bank space (even with a second guild bank!) so I decided I had to level alchemy on Reed the paladin a little early (72, should have waited to 75). The guild perk Bountiful Bags is amazing, I had so many more herbs than usual! He got to 400-something alchemy, before I hit high level Northrend herbs, which he has none of (and he can't skill pass 450 until 75 anyway). That created almost a whole tab of free space. (And I have almost half the herbs Clove (warlock 51) will need for leveling!)

AH busywork expands to fill whatever free time I have. There are so many things I could be selling but don't have time to deal with, when I get extra time I make a batch of those things. Lots of mats-gathering today, including mining (ugh).

And RP! Eee! RP is in the same situation as everything else in WoW: I have so much I want to do and so many people I want to RP with, I run out of time and energy before making a dent on my list!

So, all in all, good times. :)