Been Busy

Lots and lots going on lately. Have been meaning to write regularly, if only to clear my mind.

Well, first:  Lina had her surgery, and there turned out to be more than expected. The mass seen on ultrasound was removed, but there was another deeper mass, approximately 8 cm, and based on its location and the vessels, it was decided to leave it for a surgeon. She didn’t feel comfortable removing it, or even aspirating for a sample. She did remove the mass we expected, plus another, and took biopsy samples. That was Thursday. Lina didn’t start eating til Sunday night, but she’ll only eat a few bites of chicken then stop. At least she’s eating. I would like to let her recover before removing the other mass, and I want to know the results from the sample sent in. Hopefully I’ll hear back in a day or two.

I’ve been paying for all this, and I plan to pay to have part of a fence put up in my parents yard so our other two dogs never learn they can jump out. It’s been expensive, and I’m worried about the cost of another surgery. My other dogs are old, so I know insuring them would be pricey (I looked when I started vet school) but any new puppies I get, I will have to look into insurance. If they’d pay even half this bill, it would have ben worth it. Hindsight, huh? Well, realistically- 3 large dogs, each were what, $40 or so a month for the two years I’ve been in school (assuming I had gotten coverage then, which I didn’t because of the price), would have been the cost of the surgery. Though ideally my dogs would be happy and healthy and not need expensive things, Lina apparently decided she was a vet student’s dog, so she had to have something wrong.

So after her surgery on Thursday, my little brother graduated high school on Friday. Where I got a lecture from my dad about proper ways to tell people you are engaged (hint- it wasn’t facebook). I do feel awful for not telling my grandparents sooner, it just honestly didn’t occur to me they wouldn’t know.  I told my mom (because she had know before hand he was going to ask) and she spread the word, and it was put on facebook. In Grenada, I only have e-mail and a cheap local phone. It honestly didn’t occur to me to send out an e-mail. Possibly because my cousins never did… heck, I only recently learned one of them had gotten married. But that’s no excuse for me.

And that weekend was full of drama. My dad, without talking to my mom or brothers, decided to have a graduation party for my younger brother, to be held at my older brother’s house. Not the ideal location. It is large, but not well kept. 6 kids live there, though not all full time, and it is well lived in. So we moved it to my moms, which upset my older brother. This was all handled poorly and at the last minute. Then there was some kerfuffle with the grill, and arguments with my mom, my dad, and my brother. Then me and my brother. Fun times. But party done, we just finished of the last of the cake and currently have a bunch of leftovers. The sangria was great, I loved it. Which is odd, since usually anything with even the slightest hint of alcohol in it I have trouble drinking. 

And then on the WoW front- we had that lesson in accepting invites, and on Friday started fresh since people were getting tired of wiping on Garrosh. Saturday evening was flex, which went well. Matty got the shaman transmog set I am trying to get, so grats! My shaman is jealous. 

Monday, my computer was in the shop for, as it turns out, a problem they couldn’t find. I got WoW running on my mother’s laptop (she says she may try to play, so it’s there if she does) and jumped on, prepared to kill Garrosh quickly and do CM. Neither of which happened, but I was there! Raiding without any add-ons at all was odd. Very quiet without DBM shouting at me, and GTFO making noise. 

I got my laptop back in time for Tuesday’s raid. We started at heroic Imm again, but were missing too many regulars to make a good go of it, so did an alt run. My druid got to come out and play.

Oh! My horde druid got her cloak. Only took 3 tries in the 4th wing of ToT LFR to get it complete- stupid server restarts <grumble> but cloak she has, and ilevel 545, enough to get into some decent pugs if I am bored.

And this next week looks to be interesting. We have an officer’s meeting on Sunday. No clue what it’s about, our GM didn’t answer the other officer when he asked. I’m still a little sad she never said anything to me about the promotion of the other officer- re-promoted. He stepped down, and was promoted back. Not that I’d object or anything, but I felt it would have been polite to say “hey, he’s back” or something.  I feel like we three were promoted as officers solely to be able to invite people since the original officer core isn’t on much. We can’t make decisions about things we run as guild events, even if supposedly in charge of, we aren’t talked to about things until we push because something small has blown up into a huge issue. I still like the people in that guild, I am just occasionally disappointed when I think about how things have been handled recently.

We have a raid meeting next Wednesday. No clue why, not even sure if the raid leader knows about it. I haven’t had much of a chance to chat with him. I’m curious to know what these meetings are about. I’ve decided to tell the other tank I am leaving after Garrosh. She’s cool, and fun to play with. She was someone I had issues with raiding because she was missing some pretty major class mechanics, but if you talk to her she is willing to try and learn which is really all I want from raiders. Not perfection, but willingness to try to improve.

Anyways, that is a lot of drama. I like to think of myself as a dram-free person surrounded by soap operas, but I did contribute to it a little this weekend. My brother was the last person I got in a screaming row with, and I guess I am still mad at him for a few things. I don’t have the energy to be constantly mad though, which is why I ended up stuck babysitting his 6 kids today. Not worth it to say no. But I was tryng to stop writing.

Well, I’ll end with the hope that I get lab results back for my dog soon and she starts eating regularly again.

A Lesson in Accepting Invites

Well, I did not accomplish any unpacking goals today, but it was a busy day nonetheless. Started the day very relaxed with pedicures with my Mom, then ended up driving around with my younger brother since he had to do a favor for my grandmother, and she’s tough to deal with alone sometimes. By the time that was done, it was late afternoon and I was really tired. 

Scheduled the surgery for my dog, tomorrow morning. We managed to get her to eat some food- just had to make her think it came from the treat box. She’s a good, sweet dog, but not the brightest. Hopefully I can get a fecal from her tomorrow morning, and I hope the surgery goes well. And hopefully that is the issue and she feels better once its all done. 

So new plan for tomorrow is put up shelves and finish unpacking the boxes of my stuff in the garage, followed by powerwashing the deck.

Raid tonight was canceled for a few reasons. Only 5 people had responded to their raid invites, and 2 of those 5 were feeling a little crappy and tired of Garrosh, so today turned into a lesson on accepting calendar invites. Whoo. That is something that bugs me so much- it takes 2 seconds to accept, I put them up usually during the first raid of the week, so for those who only log on to raid, it’s there when you are on during raids. And people still don’t accept. I am not expecting much of an effect, truthfully.

But anyway, hopefully we’ll kill him Friday and be done. There was talk of a fresh run, cause people are getting tired of Garrosh. I am hoping we just kill him. I want it done. 

Close Sorta Counts

Ok, so I didn’t quite obey the spirit of my plan to unpack everything in my room, even if I did follow the letter. Got everything but one box that I moved to the study last week so it would be out of the way when the movers put the furniture in. So it technically wasn’t in my room. I would have unpacked it, but I didn’t start til after raid ended at 10, by which point my parents were asleep. And to unpack that box, I need to put up shelves to put but I didn’t want to be hammering that late.

We did heroic Norushen tonight, and made good progress on Immerseus. We had some people coming and going, which made it tough. I got my boots from him, yay, making my monk 570 and officially my best geared toon. 

For my Wed/Fri raid, I believe the plan is more work on Garrosh. Hopefully we down him. We certainly have the DPS for it, it’s just a matter of people doing what they are supposed to in a timely manner. By now everyone should know what that is. A fresh start, after Friday off, hopefully did folks good and we can knock him out fast. 

My rogue got her cloak, and my horde druid ended the week 2 runestones short, so next week I can get her stuff knocked out and be done with LFR. I don’t know what I want to do with her- maybe gear up, PUG some normals. Why not? I don’t know, I’m not sure why I went and got her the cloak.Or rather, will get her it for her next week.

Heard back from the vet, looks like the aspirate of the mass showed necrotic cells and some inflammatory cells, but no bacteria. She is recommending an exploratory to take it out, with some intestinal biopsies to be thorough. My dog still won’t eat her food, but she’ll eat treats. Tomorrow I might buy another kind of food to try for her, see if maybe she just associates this food with feeling bad or something and won’t eat it. I might be personifying here, not sure how much of an issue that is in dogs like it can be with people. 

Also, I got my shado-pan geyser, finally. Way back in that ToT PUG was someone who was good at jumping, had a mammoth, and had a friend who also needed the gun and he kindly jumped me around too. Here’s a pic of me turning Moth blue with it.

Also, because I am going through my screenshots, here’s a pic of my Tues/Thurs raid’s first “official” Garrosh kill. We’d all killed him before, but on different toons and stacking the odds in our favor somewhat. This was the first kill on our normal raiding toons. I had my watergun out, turning people blue :)

Here’s a pic of when Navi stopped by. That’s the challenge mode transmog, with the staff it took forever to get from Ulduar. It doesn’t quite match, but I love it too much to change it.

And here’s a picture of me on a giant yak, just cause.

Quiet Weekend

I’m going to try to get back in the groove of writing more regularly. I didn’t mention it earlier, but Navi stopped by a while ago. I was excited to get a chance to catch up, though she popped on in the middle of arenas. My friends were nice enough to give me some time to go catch up with her (as I keep being told, 100K will forgive all) so we got a brief chance to chat.  Not quite long enough, I felt bad keeping them waiting.

Someday I’ll have to put together an IOU for them. They know there’s no chance of my ever paying up, but I think they’ll get a kick out of it. 

I had a chance to join Matty for an OLRG run through ICC. Only 3 of us but we rocked out heroic ICC in the hour I had before flex. Missed 2 achievements, but Full House is easy, and it’s tough to do the one for the meta from the LK on heroic. More chances to die.

We did flex 1 and 2 last night, and I have definitive proof the shamans transmog set drops in flex. Unfortunately it wasn’t for me. :( But oh well, now I know you only get 1 chance per week no matter which difficulty, so I can quit trying for multiple difficulties. We had 23 (!) people, the most we’ve ever had. A big thanks to my Sacred friends who came and tanked and then swapped to better geared toons at the first sign of trouble.

I really need to get somethings going to finish out my achievements. I still need HoF normal achievements and heroic kills, and same for ToES. If I can find an heroic ToT PUG and knock that out, I might try to get a guild group going for the regular achievements. I’m not too sure, apparently last time they were there they had a lot more struggles than I would have expected. But now we have more people with better gear who are also becoming trained to listen to me, we might fare a bit better. And since I’ve been extending my heroic lockout from a few weeks ago, at twins, and one of my RLs has been itching to get to it, I might get lucky and run just the last 3 instead of the whole of ToT again.

This weekend was pretty quiet. I got a bit of motivation, and at least all my clothes are unpacked. Next up: get another bookshelf so I can unpack the rest of my things. I thought I had all my books, but as I was putting them away I kept discovering books missing. Tomorrow’s goal is to at least get the shelves up and the boxes in my room unpacked. I’ll leave the ones I found in the garage til Wednesday. You heard it, I am getting all my stuff done on Wednesday. 

No challenge modes this week, and I was trying this thing where I don’t bug people to do things with me because I am bored. So instead I spent some time in proving grounds. Managed to get you’re doing it wrong with the monk, fistweaving for the DPS ones. I made it to wave 28 on the druid, then screwed up my typhoon direction and lost it. That was my best attempt. The plan is to go back to it one morning next week, but since tomorrow is Tuesday I am going to try to knock out LFR first thing for the rogue and get her last runestone. Hopefully I can find some flexes for the druid easily, then knock out ToT in LFRs. She’s 6 runestones away. 

So to sum up: -finish runestones for rogue, try to finish them for horde druid, and unpack all the things currently in my room.

I also have a normal raid tomorrow, where I think the plan is heroic Immerseus, and if we get him, then Protectors and Norushen. Our Wednesday raid will continue on Garrosh, so here’s hoping we get him down and I have Friday free and can talk my arena buddies into some PvP then.

So What's Been Happening to Me?

It has been quite some time since I sat down to write anything. I have been busy: we moved house, and officially everything is out of the townhouse and in the new house. And my motivation to unpack has just plummeted since we got the last big pieces of furniture in place. The garage is full of boxes, a lot of which have been in storage for years because the townhouse was smaller than the previous house, so we got a storage shed. Then I had an apartment in college, and didn’t want to throw anything away, so I got a storage shed. Eventually they were combined, along with my brother’s (my family can’t throw anything away) but now all of that is in our garage at the new house. That’s my goal for the summer: clean out the garage. We’ve made some progress by giving back to their original owners anything that didn’t belong to anyone currently living in the house. 

The other thing keeping me busy is my dogs. One is unwell. Poor girl, and now she isn’t eating at all. I’m worried about her, but I hope the cytology from the visit to the internist shows something. I’ll have to look up or ask if eosinophilia from  mast cell tumors can come and go, otherwise that’s what I am thinking it might be. Unfortunately the nearest internists are about an hour away in opposite directions, so taking her up there was an all day thing for me. I did discover (eventually) where the library was, so I’ll have something to do if I need to go back, as well as a Sweet Frog and a great bakery, so I know where to hang out and eat while she’s there, if we have to go back. Aside from not eating and diarrhea, she still acts mostly the same, perks up when you grab the leash or a tennis ball, which is keeping my worry a bit a bay. I should hear back by Monday, hopefully with some news.

On the WoW front, my rogue is 1 runestone away from her cloak, and my horde druid is about halfway done with runestones. Our test horde challenge modes went pretty well. I blame a lot of mistakes on myself for being so tired, but we got 1 done and likely would have gotten another if we had enough invis pots.

Raiding this week was kinda bleh. My Tues/Thurs group worked on heroics a bit, but only took out Norushen before switching to normal to clear the rest. And nothing like cutting it close- we killed Norushen, and he turned around and killed us right back as he died. Probably should two-heal that for less dramatic kills. My Wed/Fri group worked on Garrosh on Wed and ended up canceling on Friday due to missing people. Probably a good thing, I just really really want to get him down and kill him so I can stop raiding with them. I’m not sure how many of the group know that’s my plan. I told the raid leader and guild leader, as well as 3 others. I have a feeling the guild leader told the other 2 officers, which leaves only 2 people I am uncertain about. None of them have said anything to me, so either they get where I am coming from or don’t want to try.

It makes me sad and relieved, the idea of leaving that raid. I like hanging out with those folks, but at the same time I put a lot of time and effort into raiding and get really frustrated when I feel others aren’t even trying at all. I do think they can rebuild- they are losing 3-4 people (not sure about 1 person, but I have a feeling she might step back too) after Garrosh, but I already listed a handful of names as replacements when I first mentioned leaving. 

I read Balkoth’s post about his experiences before starting his blog, and it sounded a bit like my reaction to this situation. I push and push and push sometimes to be heard, and I know it irritates people sometimes, especially when I disagree. I’ve told people if they tell me to shut up, I will. (At least for a little while.) With this raiding issue, I didn’t give up or decide to leave lightly. I had 2 meetings with the guild leader, wrote 2 incredibly longer than needed e-mails, was trying to set up a third meeting to make myself clear once again when I realized it was pointless. I was saying one thing and she was hearing another. In theory I like her idea- a no stress, social raid, but in practice I want people to be held to certain minimum standards. Things it never occurred to me you would have to explicitly tell people who raid, simply because I do them well before raid even starts. Like look up fights, be on time, and learn how to play your class.

I started raiding as a resto druid, and at heart I still consider her my main, even though right now all the raids I do as a druid are PUGs. I ended up switching to my monk back in MSV because we were cutting it really close on an enrage timer- like 3%, so I figured that tiny extra DPS would push us over, and the other healer we had was a resto druid, so I stayed monk. I was really happy to be raiding on both of them for a while, but then we got to Garrosh and I figured double resto druid (especially since counting it up, we had very few interrupts) was tougher than needed, so I grabbed the shaman. But before I switched to these toons, I made certain I was confident healing normals on them, that they had great gear, and that I understood my spell, rotation,  CDs, and how to use all of them. It’s why I ended up on the shaman (and not so show off the pretty transmog) instead of the priest (who also has a nice transmog, and got a race/name change in anticipation of raiding). I had a few people who told me I should bring priest over shaman, but left the decision up to me.

Well, I was switching to get an extra interrupt mostly and disc priests? Not so many interrupts. Yeah yeah, druids have glyphed faerie fire that works, but swapping to bear is a pain, and time consuming when I could be healing. (it does work in p3 Garrosh- I did test that) But I did some test runs in flex on the priest, and even though she was 545 with the cloak, I was struggling way too much. My horde druid at 535 without the cloak heals better. I just don’t quite have enough of a disc priest healing grasp to heal normals, so along came the shaman.  

And the point of that was to illustrate that I make sure I can play my class before trying to raid on it. The exceptions are spur of the moment groups my friend sometimes puts together where he tells me to grab a DPS, which I only have 2 that aren’t healers or otherwise committed to other raids. And I love my mage (fire! all the fire!) and have been playing my rogue more often lately, I know I am an awful DPS. I just don’t practice it enough. And he knows that before he asks me to bring one along, and I go because they’re friends.

So anyway, that’s what’s been going on, plus some ranting. I guess I’m still sad to be leaving that raid, even though I know 2 others are leaving with me and are relieved to be doing so, and will do so regardless of what I do. And I have gotten accustomed to having them around, and certainly don’t want to raid without them there.