Tag warcraft

I haven’t been playing a whole lot of WoW over recent months.  I have been in the game for over 2 and a half years now.  The majority of my in game buddies have left the game for one reason or another.  The only real friend I have in the game anymore is Charlie and he has been playing on a different server with some guys he works with.  The days of me staying up till 1am during the work week to gain just one more level are far behind me.  I am working towards getting the last two of my characters to the game’s maximum level of 70.  There are routinely days that I don’t play the game at all and it doesn’t bother me in the least.  It’s just a fun way for me to entertain myself at this point as opposed to the burning obsession it held for me for awhile.

Last night  I was in Zul’Furrak with my paladin running with a group.  I was happy when the one boss guy dropped a sword I had been looking for awhile.  It was the second piece of the puzzle I needed to create the ultra-cool sword you see pictured here.  It is called Sul’thraze the Lasher.  Look at it’s stats!

It is an EPIC sword, meaning it is very rare and very powerful.   If I had this drop 2 years ago for one of my early characters I would have nearly wet my pants with excitement.  However now, it got a brief grin to my face and then it was back to business.  It’s all about grinding XP.

Playing the paladin can be fun and frustrating at the same time.  A paladin is a hybrid class.  He has a huge collection of buffs, blessings and auras that are very beneficial to a group.  A paladin primarily does melee damage but also when properly specc’d and geared can be a very good main healer for a group.  A paladin can also be incredibly difficult to kill when facing in pvp battle.  Their ability to heal themselves can make them nearly immortal.  The downside of a paladin is they kill things slowly.  Where some classes can rip down a bad guy in 10 or 15 seconds, a paladin can be chopping on the same bad guy for 45 seconds or more. 

 Other than our dinner plans for Saturday evening, the weekend should be straight forward.  I still have lots of things to do around the house which will keep me quite busy.  We still have a backlog of shows on the Tivo and movies on my computer to check out which hopefully we can chop into a bit over the two days.  The Eagles play the Jets Sunday too.

I have been looking more and more at robotic mowers.  Realistically I certainly don’t need one.  The pitch for getting one has several positives.  They are much more environmentally green than pollution spewing two cycle motors.  They save the homeowner time spent mowing grass.  They keep the grass looking good all the time as they go out daily to maintain the lawn as opposed to once a week. And of course the biggest plus for someone like me is they are just geeky and cool.

On the downside is the initial setup of the property for a robotic mower which requires you to lay down boundary wire to act as an invisible fence for your robot.  The standing water we sometimes get would translate into a mess for a robot.  We have too much grass to expect the robot to maintain it all.  I would in all likelihood confine it’s mowing to the areas immediately around the house.  It wouldn’t eliminate mowing or weed whacking for us.  It would cut the time down significantly though. Plus they aren’t cheap.  On the low end you can snag one for around a grand, on the high end you can spend 2500 or more. 

There are many home projects on the list I would rather complete first before jumping into a robomower.  That hasn’t stopped me from mentally laying out it’s boundaries and imagining it buzzing around our yard keeping our grass looking good, constantly. Yep, I just love robots.

Yesterday before I went to the gym I went out and grabbed a SpotBot to add to my robotic army.  Last night I put it to the test with a stain that has been in the carpet in our bedroom for ever.  It was the end result of Nicki chewing a rawhide that was “beef basted”.  It was brownish, reddish in color.  Evidently the combination of whatever colored the bone and Nicki’s saliva created a substance that has resisted all attempts to clean it. 

I had a problem initially getting the SpotBot to spray down solution, I had to push down harder on the cleaning solution tank.  Operation of the unit is a no-brainer.  Push the appropriate button depending if it is a set or fresh stain and walk away.  The light cycle takes 3 minutes, the deep cycle takes 6.  Well I ran it through two deep cycles and one light cycle and the stain remained.  It was lighter so it gave me some hope if I continued to let the SpotBot work on it, it may eventually clean up.

It’s cool watching the cleaner do it’s thing.  It sprays, scrubs and vacuums in cycles.  The scrubbing action reverses direction often to work the stain from different angles.  I will mess with it some more over other stains that reside throughout the house until I give it a final grade.

My robotic arsenal is quite large.  It includes 3 Roombas, 1 Scooba, 1 Dirt Dog, 1 SpotBot, a Littermaid automatic litterbox, and the automatic hand soap dispenser we got from Sharper Image. 

Lately I have been trying to do a few things around the house at night instead of spending most the evening sitting on my ass either watching stuff on the Tivo or playing WoW.  The other night I walked around with a can of WD-40 and sprayed the hinges of several doors that were habitual squeakers.  Last night I washed and vacuumed my truck as the sun was going down.  It was very dirty.  There are tons of little, easy things that need to be done around the house that seem to get continually shelved  for one reason or another.

Speaking of WoW, I just got my 7th character to the games highest level of 70.  My ultimate goal is to get all 9 of my characters there.  I have one character for each class in the game.  If you play WoW, you know how long it takes to get seven 70’s. Yay.  My buddy had a virtual disaster happen this week.  Someone broke into his WoW account and stole all of his items, all of his money and even transferred two of his characters to other realms.  He had a trojan on his computer that stole his account information.  This is a huge problem in WoW and happens quite often.  These cyber criminals break into an account, clean it out and sell all of the virtual loot for real world dollars.  My buddy has no idea how he got the trojan on his computer, he generally practices “safe” computing.  It makes me paranoid as well that my virtual empire could disappear very easily.

So I am four days into my different regimen which to this point has just been basically substituting eggs (egg beaters), oj and toast for the bowl of cereal I normally have.  In reality I doubt that this small change will have a big effect.  My dinners this week have not been ideal as we have been trying to eat through the various leftovers from the weekend buffet.  At the gym I am trying to superset exercises with minimal rest to make my lunch time workouts more effective.

  The one visual change that is easy to identify is the hair on my face.  It’s funny at work how the women are divided on my look with a hairy face.  Some like it, but more do not.  Some say I look handsome with it, more mature (old), more rugged.  Some just crinkle their nose and shake their head.  One woman even went as far to say that I looked like a “pervert” with the facial hair. That was not a comment I expected.  Anyway, I have a long way to go until I shave again, it will be interesting to see what a month of hair growth will wind up looking like.

Yesterday for some reason I was thinking about playing golf at Manor golf course.  When I was younger I played golf much more than I do nowadays and I played at Manor golf course more than any other place.  Manor was located near our house and had been around for a long time.  It seemed every time I went there, there was the same old, grumpy guy behind the desk.  I always had the feeling he looked down on me because I was typically wearing sneakers and a t-shirt as opposed to golf spikes and a collared shirt.  The clubhouse itself was very small and very old.  The cashier area lead to a small flight of stairs down to the bar area where they had a small tv that was normally playing some sporting event.  It was cozy.

Manor had some memorable holes.  Number one was dead straight but went up a huge hill.  I rarely got off the tee there well.  The course itself was pretty open, despite being nestled among the trees.  There were a decent amount of fairways that were hemmed in with trees.  Those holes were the ones were I lost the most balls as I never was one to hit the ball straight with any consistency. Hole 10 was across a huge valley with a road running through it.  The green was doglegged to the right, you couldn’t see it from the tee box.  Hole 15 was a short par 3 but you were shooting over a road and a pond.  I rarely hit the green there.  The final hole was again up a hill, over a ravine with trees lining the “fairway”.  It was a challenging way to wind things up.

The entire course was up and down hills with each hole holding a rather unique personality.  I only used a cart a few times there, even with the long hilly terrain.  At that age, saving a few dollars was worth the added exercise.  I have played golf down here in SW Florida at a number of courses and even though they are typically beautifully landscaped with hardly a blade of grass out of place, they feel generic and manufactured.  I’d take old Manor golf course located outside of Gouglersville, PA any day, even with the grumpy old man behind the counter.