No ball, The Tank

Last night they cancelled volleyball since we had our fourth consecutive day of heavy rain. When I drove home yesterday the southern end of the road that leads to our development had some pretty significant flooding. Luckily my house and seemingly the entire development sits on high ground. The only thing that holds water is the area where I have the garden and that still drains quickly.

As I was walking Elsa last night I was remembering just how miserable storm events like this would be at my old house which had a ton of low areas that would collect water. I have no doubt that right now there are spots in that yard that have close to a foot of water on them. Once the water level got that bad it would take forever to recede, weeks in some situations. It turned the property into genuine swampland and I absolutely hated it. When I had chickens it became even more aggravating.

Despite my efforts to keep the birds dry by spending a ton of money and effort on fill to raise the ground where they lived it would still flood in heavy rains. The chickens were not rocket scientists and would insist on drinking the dirty, bacteria filled ground water despite my having clean water at multiple spots. I have no doubt it contributed to more than one of them getting sick. Seeing my property inundated made me feel out of control and powerless to fix it. I don’t sit well with that feeling. Not having to deal with that mess anymore is yet another of the long list of reasons why I am so much happier with my new living situation. It’s been a year and 3 months now, I wonder how much longer I should refer to it as “new”.

Since I had a free night I got some chores done, including the laundry. Elsa for some odd reason enjoys when I cover her with folded laundry. I’m always happy to oblige as she looks ridiculously cute in the process.

I also had time to play more WoW, embarking on leveling yet another character. This time I decided to work on my warrior which was the very first character I created and played back in 2005 so I am a bit sentimental about him. His name is IronDuf.

A warrior is a tank class meaning his job in a group is to keep the attention of the bad guys and take the majority of the damage. Being the tank has a lot of responsibilities, if you screw up there is a good chance others will die. You have to know where you are going and how fights work to be a good tank. It can be a lot of pressure as it requires you to do a lot more work and thinking than a DPS class where all you do is damage. Healing classes are behind the tanks as far as stress and responsibility goes but I typically will heal before I tank.

I had not tanked dungeons in a long time so I was not all that confident how it would go. In addition my warrior has poor gear which can make the task more difficult. I wound up having a good time tanking two dungeons. I managed not to die and the only players in my groups that died were the ones that did ignorant things so I can’t do much about that. I also gained three levels during the play session which is the most I have done in one sitting in quite awhile. I’m actually looking forward to getting back in there and going again.

It looks like we should have a half decent day weather-wise, finally, today. I am hoping to play my first pickleball all week at lunch. This weekend I plan to get some more play time balanced with non-recreational things I would like to accomplish as well. If I go hard at pickleball all morning I find it drains my motivation reserves to do other things the rest of the day.

Last year I was talking about fresh beginnings, new starts and finding peace. This evidently was just lip service because I instead chose to step backwards instead of forward in reality.