Friday, January 28, 2011

Well THIS update sure is a bit long overdue...

Hey there folks, long time no post! Sorry about that. I actually had a couple posts I wrote up on Christmas where I had a two week or so bout of no internet that I'd planned to post when I did get internet but, gah, when I re-read them I just couldn't bear to post them. Of course if I read over most of the stuff I've posted, I'd probably wish I hadn't to some extent or another, so that's not much of an excuse.

Anyway this morning I've got a little bit of time in between things and since I'm feeling somewhat human in between doses of cough syrup I figured I'd get a post up on here, since I've not only been meaning to for, well, over a month now, but I've really been wanting to write again, and I've got so much on my mind to let out.

For starters, since I don't know if I mentioned it anywhere really before now, I did end up joining Fox's promo team. Probably not a huge surprise there. I think I joined it around the time of my last blog post actually, let me see... Yes, about two days before, though I hadn't been moved up to the more difficult stuff at that point. Obviously, since then, I have... and then some. Hoo boy, that kept me busy-busy for a long while, to the point I was substituting energy drinks for sleep for days on end trying to get more done. Bit of a bad problem trying to carry too much myself, I guess. That was interrupted--for about two weeks--due to a rather sudden loss of internet, in which the techs said there wasn't a problem when, obviously, yes, yes there was. Highly dissatisfied with the cable company we'd switched to for internet, we switched back to the phone company, and internet was returned around the first of the year (actually, I think it was the first...). At some point as well, I believe before the internet incident, and I may have wrote about this so if I did, pardon the repetition, the last working fan in the laptop I had went out, so I was without a computer for a couple days waiting for the temporary replacement computer I ordered to come in (yay for next-day shipping!). After I got internet back I went back to devoting more time than is really healthy to promo, at least until Silv stepped in with threats of tieing me off somewhere and forcing me to get adequate sleep if I didn't start doing so myself, so I now, rather grudgingly, have a schedule to stick to that also leaves a rather convenient time gap every day, though I'll get into that more later on.

One thing, out of all of this that I didn't really expect... Well, okay, it turns out I do miss WoW, quite a bit more than expected, and that's not what I'm getting at though it's an important little preamble or sorts, though it's not just the people which I expected to miss but really random aspects of it. Most of which have since been destroyed by Cataclysm, anyway. However realistically I still really can't and shouldn't afford the time to play even if I am missing it, so I've been sort of trying to treat it as an addiction, trying not to think of it and finding other things to occupy my mind when I'm missing it something fierce, and just trying to distance myself from it as much as I can. And so at one point I informed my friends of this, and asked them if they could refrain from mentioning it at least for a while. Of course one of my friends just didn't listen at all and kept prattling on about it to me which, okay, I sort of knew that would happen, considering that friend, but I didn't expect another one to, I don't know, take it as a challenge or something. I'm not really sure how he viewed that other than "Ooh, Deni's missing WoW, I bet I can get her to come back!" And of course, silly me, I thought he was just being forgetful like most of my friends until Eric goes and says he's doing it on purpose. Honestly, if it wasn't for some of the measures I took trying to stop myself from missing the game in the first place, between the two friends they probably would have had me back in by now even though I really shouldn't, but it's sort of hard to just "come back" when I don't even have access to the account anymore. Still, they're tempting me with keys for vanilla, BC, and Wrath, which is still very frustratingly tempting, sadly...

Amongst all the tempting, though, I ended up in the new mumble server which is apparently like a vent server but free (supposedly? From what I can tell they're paying for servers just like I had to with vent, so I don't know), talking with Eric, Ev and Silv, along with a good chunk of the reformed Tattered Legends that Eric made on another server after we sort of fell apart. The crew is pretty awesome, actually, and the conversation was really fun, and I enjoyed talking with them (after my initial panic of "oh god, new people, so many new people") while doing promo. At least, until the sound card problems... or what I'm assuming is issues with the sound card in the temporary replacement laptop (which was admittedly quite an old model, comparatively). They weren't exactly problems I could easily fix, either. So I thought of my first laptop that was gifted to me so I could play WoW in the first place (ironic, isn't that), which I thought if I could just get rid of the system monitor it had somehow contracted that put it down before, I'd be set. I was very wrong.

The battery of said laptop is completely fried, and the AC adapter was trash even before the system monitor issues, honestly. I was in luck that the AC adapter for the new laptop was the same as for the old. So when I loaded it up, I found out I didn't even remember my password anymore, hadn't the vaguest idea what it was, and took me a good portion of a day to get it reset, and then I downloaded my antivirus software and it did manage to find the monitor, which I thought would be the worst of my issues, even though it took about two days for all that. I'll spare all the details but it's been one issue after another since for over a week now, probably getting closer to two, although I think (finally) I'm at the last hurdle, which is figuring out how 40GB of free space is not enough room to defragment six 3-4GB files that total 26% fragmentation on the disc... or at least trying to figure out a way to defragment them anyway. At least, I'm really, really hoping that's the last hurdle, since the browsers finally seem to be working in some manner of "stable."

I think what I may be kicking myself over the most, even more than thinking that getting this computer up and running would ever possibly be a "quick" fix, is that I had a whole lot of idiot moments where I made really stupid mistakes that have made the whole process take even longer than it should have. I've been told to blame the medicine and honestly that's probably the truth. A few days after I started working on the computer, my difficulty breathing, rattling breath, frequent and nasty cough, and discomfort in my chest turned to outright pain and having trouble breathing at all, at which point I knew it wasn't something I could put off anymore and so I went to see a doctor. They promptly informed me that I had a "severe upper respiratory infection," gave me two weeks worth of what is probably the strongest antibiotic I've ever been on, heavy heavy duty cough syrup, and more than my share of incredulous looks when I told them the symptoms started a month and a half prior. Oops. Thankfully the meds have helped, since I'm no longer taking the cough syrup that makes me more than a little out of it every time I safely can, and it doesn't hurt as much to breathe lately. Still, I probably would have saved myself time by not trying to fix this thing while I was out of it, than I did having to backtrack and fix all my screwups.

Now, as for the schedule and the time gap I mentioned earlier that I'm being held to with continued threats to tie me down if I don't. There's a sizeable chunk of time in the evenings, about two and a half hours of time, which is supposed to be a "leisure" time. That's all well and good, though I feel rather guilty that that's time I could be doing something useful, meaningful, productive and... won't... Regardless that does mean I have a good chunk more time on my hands than I figured I'd have. In theory it means I could return to WoW, though I honestly doubt I will, as things stand. If nothing else I'd have to play much, much more casually than I ever really have before, except maybe my very first twenty levels or so. I'm not sure I could. So far that time has been spent mostly reading or catching up on things here and there, like my RSS feeds in my reader I keep neglecting out of forgetfulness, or watching Day9's dailies which sort of became a kind of tradition a long time ago that was picked up again with the introduction to mumble and such. I actually have never played Starcraft, but Ev and Silv got me to watch some of the non-Starcraft stuff of his and it highly amused me, and one night we ended up in Silv's private vent and chatted through a daily, and even though I had no clue what was going on really I enjoyed it, and the tradition was born, though now (well, before the computer issues and infection) there's a lot more than just the three of us. In a lot of ways it boiled down to just friends hanging out, watching something together and discussing it, as close as we really could when we're all in different places.

On the other hand, that time slot also means I have a designated time in which I can write, where it'd be one of the more productive things I could do anyway. And that aspect actually does appeal to me, quite a lot, since I've missed writing--and blogging, really!--as well as the communication with people I'd like to consider friends of a sort where the only real communication actually was through blogging (and, well, commenting on said blogs, too, of course). So I'm hoping there will be more posts here, more often, and maybe some other little goodies if I can pick'em up off the ground again, but you'll have to wait and see for those!

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