My husband and I went to one of the Florissant civic centers (it used to be The Civic Center, but they built another one; this one's named for longtime mayor James Eagan). We bought the membership to use the gym, so we may as well use it.

Of course, we have a treadmill at home, and what do we both end up on? Treadmills. Then again, this means no waiting. I still plan on alternating with the recumbent bike they have, but there are 5 treadmills and only one recumbent bike, so I imagine there will be more likely to be one of the former open than the latter on any given day. (I won't use the regular stationary bikes 'cause my ass hurts for 2 days after that.)

I did pretty well. I started out with 3mph on a 2% grade, then went to 3.2mph, then to 1% with 3.4mph. I stayed there for a bit, then lowered the grade to zero 'cause it seemed like that was starting to hurt my heels a bit. Then I went down to 3.3mph, then eventually back up to 3.4, then 3.5, then stayed at a whopping 3.6mph for a while. (Yes, I'm that out of shape. Then again, give me a little credit: I do only have a 27" inseam, so walking that fast is pretty tough anyway, especially given ze finally-starting-to-heal heel spurs.) In the last minute or two I slowed down to 3, then 2 to cool down and end at 30 minutes. Can't tell you how far I walked, though it was over a mile, 'cause I forgot to look before I stopped.

That's day 1. We plan on going back today. J did, of course, phenomenally better than I did. He ran 2 miles at 6mph then did some cooldown for a bit, not wanting to push it too much so he could go back today. Of course, he says that because he could only do 2 miles at that pace it indicates he's woefully out of shape, but I reminded him it could still be worse. The only worrying factor is that his knee is giving him trouble, but he's hoping once he gets into the routine and drops a little of the excess weight it'll stop complaining.

I'm hoping after a week or two I'll be able to sleep better (I always wake up to partial consciousness or more at least twice a night, unless I'm dead tired). That would give me hope that I'll be able to get on a more regular sleep schedule. Then I want to start getting up a half hour earlier so I can do some moderate walking on the treadmill in the basement. The idea is that before you eat your first meal is the best time for some light exercise: when you have absolutely no fresh carbs floating around in your system waiting to be burned, since you've not eaten for 10+ hours. It's a bad time to do anything incredibly strenuous, as you can start burning muscle in addition to fat. However, if you do light jogging or moderate walking, you avoid that, plus you burn a lot more fat then than if you did the same workout during the day given most people generally eat during the day, hehe. So... yeah. I hope to try that suggestion, but I want to get my sleep schedule more constant. No more of this 4-5 hours a night during the week, 10-12 on weekends thing. Not good.

If I can get going on the exercise during the morning, I can make my afternoons alternate between more cardio and some strength and tone weight training.

I definitely need to take it one day at a time though. However, I need to make exercise a daily part of my life. With the specters of adult diabetes, heart disease, and circulatory problems looming in the distant shadows, and with me approaching 30, it's time I started not just worrying vaguely about them but actually doing something to keep them away. I also want to be into a strong habit-formed routine of exercise (habits are hard to break, after all) by the time we start trying to have a child. I don't want pregnancy to make my health fall apart, and I want to have the energy to keep up with the demands of parenthood. Hell, I wouldn't mind having more energy in the bedroom either, which I'm sure J would appreciate.

... who also are into World of Warcraft. There is a site called PlayOn run by the Palo Alto Research Center that is tracking all sorts of different statistics regarding how people play the game. There are graphs on class distribution, race distribution, grouping vs. soloing, how big guilds are on different servers, and more. It looks like it was started in mid-May, but is also being regularly updated. So, if you're interested in those sort of statistics, it's the site for you.

I logged on via webmail to my default email address for my website, i.e. <username>@ that apparently my POP3 client isn't checking automatically (I thought it was). Yeeeeah. I should mention before I rant away that this email address hasn't been published anywhere. I don't use it. I haven't given it to a single soul. No one outside of my provider should even know my username; this email address isn't even listed as my whois contact.

Some asshole guessed it or something, and used it as the spoof "from" address to send out fake "update your eBay account" messages to all and sundry, regardless of whether the email addresses being sent to even existed. Basically brute force spamming. Guess how many failure messages this has resulted in. Just... think about it. Go ahead, take a wild ass guess.

Got a good high number ready?

You sure?

12291. That is how many failure messages, including some temporary ones telling me that I didn't need to take action yet, that were sitting in my email box. 65MB of messages, all failures. The first was dated May 21. Then there aren't any until May 28, and from that point forward it was pretty much a constant stream until they stopped on June 7. Over twelve thousand failure messages, all for me.

I'm going to have to talk to Crosswinds to see if I can somehow disable message receiving for that account, I guess. I'm quite sure they didn't leak that email address to anyone; apparently someone just made a good guess as to what my account username would be, and that there would be an email address set up there. Or they've been doing it with that and many other addresses that don't exist. I'd never see bounce messages for those; I round-file any email messages that are addressed to email addies that don't exist at my domain. So perhaps there were thousands upon thousands more that got dumped into the ether. I don't know. I just... this pisses me off. What if I get blacklisted by a major ISP, say SBC? My parents and I all use SBC for our DSL service, and their primary addies are with them. What if I couldn't send email to them from that address? All because of not doing anything wrong? Granted I have other addresses I can write them with, including my own SBC email address. But it's the principle of the thing, y'know?

People who get caught doing this should be charged with a count of impersonation for each email they sent out with a fake "from" email address. But they don't get caught, and on the rare chance they do and they're in a country with laws against that kind of thing, they only get charged with sending unsolicited email. I say that's not enough; they should also get charged with identity theft, or falsely impersonating another person, or whatever.

Anyway, I'm now debating whether I should leave them on the server and retrieve them this evening into my POP client, as slow as that would be, or if I should just delete them through webmail. If I'm going to sift through them all to see if there are any clues as to the real culprit, or to see if anything not related to this came through, I'd much rather do it at home on my own PC. I simply don't have time for this at work. However, I could just delete 'em 100 at a time through the webmail interface. That's only 123 pages of the stuff, right?

*sigh*

Oh yes. I'm back from vacation. It was wonderful, and we enjoyed it immensely. We got back about 2am Sunday morning, brought in a very few things from the car, then crashed. We spent Sunday totally slacking off. We made new WoW characters on Cenarion Circle and joined the F'opolis-run Northrend Commonwealth guild. We're still going to play on Whisperwind for the 5-man high level instances; we have a plan to run BRD on Thursday @ 7pm CDT, in fact. However, it's incredibly difficult for our comparatively tiny Whisperwind guild to get to run raid instances, so this way we can get characters up to 60 on CC and actually get to do the huge raids. An additional plus there is that the NC guild is partnered with, from what I can tell, at least 2 or 3 other guilds as a sort of uberguild, so there are a ton of people to run with. Plus, everyone is always creating alts so there are lower level players for us to play with.

Anyway, enough rambling. I spent yesterday doing nothing but playing catch-up, and hopefully I can actually start doing real work today. While I was bad and didn't insist on it yesterday, I plan on starting to work out regularly with J going with me to do so as well. My end goal is to lose between 35 and 40 pounds. If I could just lose 15 by the end of the summer I think that'd be a great start.

I have to mention this song is beautifully haunting.

Well, I didn't hit 57 in WoW Wednesday. I got close; only two bubbles (20K) of XP needed. That was with J leading me through the Blightcaller chain up to where I'm actually supposed to kill him (need a good sized raid for that). I did get a ton of experience doing that one, and it required nothing to be killed for it (well, on my own trying to find the stuff probably would have, which would've meant me not being ready for it yet).

Anyway, I was going to finish last night. I got home at 6:30 from my hair appointment, which is at least a half hour earlier than I'd guessed. Then I talked to my mom for a while, then did email and web board checks until J got up from WoW to have a shower and make dinner. That took to about 8pm, and since he didn't want my help in the kitchen I turned on the tube. Found a show on TLC called "Haunting in Georgia" or something, where this kid sees ghosts, then the whole family sees 'em and even the kid and daddy both get big scratches on 'em, more for the dad than the kid. All this other stuff. It ended up being a 2 hour program that we watched till the end. Of course, that meant it was 10pm, and well... we still wanted to get up to bedroom boogying still. By then it was 11pm and I didn't want to be super tired for work, so I didn't level. I have tonight to do it, but I also have a host of other things to do.

That leads to how I'm roughly thinking tonight will go:

• Between getting home from work and going to my parents' for dinner:
  • Complete dump, scrub, & refill of litterboxes
  • Typed instructions to leave for kitties & plants, plus details of where we'll be staying
  • Some clothing organization to prep for packing
• Parents' house for dinner, where we'll also pick up their heating/cooling electric cooler since they offered, for which they now have not only the car adapter but a wall adapter
• Go shoe shopping w/ mom at this shoe outlet store that she knows of, to get some decent hiking boots for me and some good walking shoes for her, then possibly find somewhere to get a really nice skirt or dress that fits for a nice evening out next week, plus stop by Walgreens to get more calcium supplements since I have maybe 3 left; hopefully this won't last longer than an hour to 90 minutes
• Come home and get things packed and make some attempt at cleaning up clothes that I don't pack
• If, after all of the above, it's not past midnight, get my hunter to level 57

We're going to spend a little over a week in Colorado.

My stipulation given we planned so late was that we had to go somewhere within one days' driving distance (i.e. no more than 14-15 hours max), since it was far too late to get decently priced plane tickets.

Most of our time will be spent staying in Pueblo, which is a bit south of Colorado Springs. We'll be staying at the Abriendo Inn in the Orman room from this Saturday night through Friday morning. There's apparently a huge hot rod convention the following weekend in Co. Springs so they and everyone else nearby has been booked for months. Since we wanted to leave Saturday, not Friday, we're currently looking for another place for Friday. No reservations yet, but we will have by this afternoon. We're wanting to either stay at The Gilded Pine or The Moose. J said he didn't care a whole lot what rooms, so I picked out the Sterling room for the former, and either the Mary Jane or Iron Horse rooms for the latter (with the first being the primary choice).

Edit: We're staying in the Sterling room at the Gilded Pine. As J said, they're cheaper, plus after having talked to both places he felt they were friendlier and easier to deal with.

It should be fun. AAA even had guide books and a map of the state on hand in their office so we can pick them up (the last time we did guide books they had to mail them to us, which took a little over a week, which we don't have). We're gonna check out some dinosaur dig sites, hiking trails, maybe go up Pike's Peak. Then Friday we'll find something to do in Rocky Mountain National Park, since we'll be staying near there that night (should be far enough away from Co. Springs to still have something open).

Then we'll leave Saturday, and either do it all at once and rest up all Sunday, or take our sweet ass time coming home and get back some time mid-Sunday.

This is gonna be fun. Since we're driving, we don't have to be super restrictive on the size of souvenirs we grab, or even quite as much on what we pack. I mentioned we ought to take the picnic basket and one of the days hit a grocery store for some cold cuts or something and head up a trail for a picnic lunch.

Should be a good time. Now, my worries are getting my WoW character to 57 tonight (she's over halfway there from 56, and has tons of quests in the log), remembering my probably-3-hour-long hair appointment at 4pm tomorrow after work, and then packing stuff. Plus, do I feel like getting some decent hiking boots or are my sneakers fine? And do I want to shop for something nice on the one night we'll end up dressing up for a really nice dinner for our anniversary itself?

I know it may just be lip service, but given why the note went out in the first place, I'd say not completely. I must say I'm just a little more proud to work for this company:

Subject: Gay Pride Month in context

June is Gay Pride Month, when we celebrate the contributions that this particular group of employees has made to Boeing's success. Since first publication of the Gay Pride Month link in Boeing News Now earlier this month, I and members of the Executive Council have received a number of negative and derogatory messages against the company's support of Gay Pride Month.

Boeing observes various “heritage months”: Black History Month in February; Women's History Month in March; Asian Pacific Month in May; Gay Pride Month in June; Hispanic Heritage Month in September, Disability Awareness Month in October, American Indian Month in November, and Multicultural Celebration Day in December. The point of all of these is to drive inclusion, fight harassment and discrimination, and remind us to value people as individuals. Recognizing diversity—all elements of it—is a key component of our business strategy.

The foundation of our success at Boeing is based on our ability to attract and retain the best people possible for the jobs we have. To do that, we must create and maintain an environment where, collectively, we can design, produce, and support products and services that make our customers and shareholders successful. A key part of creating that environment is aimed at helping all employees know that they are appreciated for the contributions they make toward helping Boeing meet its business objectives.

We need to ensure we treat all employees—including gay and lesbian employees—with dignity and respect. While we could point to the law as the rationale for our actions, I believe that it's our obligation to demonstrate on a regular basis not only our commitment—but also our resolve—to provide an opportunity for each employee to learn more about the diversity that underlies this company's strength.

So they put up a link like they always do for all those other observances (this is an internal page, so this wasn't random people off the street), and a bunch of assholes who happen to be employees bitched about this one. (As far as I know that doesn't happen for the rest of them; we've never seen a note addressing this problem before for the other heritage months.) And the CEO himself, or at least his secretary directed by him on what he wanted to convey, sent out a message verbally slapping these people down. That made me smile.

We even have a broken plate from it, and a potentially lost fork.

So J thawed steaks (chuck steaks, actually quite good) for last night. And at about, oh I guess 5:30-5:45, we heard thunder start to rumble. I told him if he was gonna do 'em tonight he better do 'em now. (It did it last night too, though not as bad, but it rained for about 4 hours straight, most of which I slept through.)

So he started 'em, and I went out too to replant the damn snapdragons that the critters are getting into again, then douse them with icky anti-critter stuff (which I'd already done once) plus put sticks all in the soil to annoy them plus put garlic all over it 'cause my dad saw a gardening dude say rabbits & other critters don't like it. The weather held out long enough for J to get the grill started, steaks on & sprinkled (garlic + onion = yum!), plus get them flipped. Then... the sky opened. We're talking easterly horizontal rain from the wind, and a little thunder. And it poured. Forget choking frogs, it was choking anacondas out there. I can't believe we didn't get any hail.

So it stopped blowing hard, but was still raining, so J put on his swim trunks, took off his shirt, and put a thin slightly-waterproof jacket on, and went to retrieve the steaks. He'd left the plate and fork out there thinking it'd be faster than carrying them out with him. Yeeeah.... the plate was in tiny pieces all over the deck of our pool nearest the grill, and the fork was nowhere to be seen. J saw they were missing before he went out so he grabbed another plate and fork to take the steaks off. (They ended up being medium-rare to almost rare, and he thinks the flame -- gas grill -- blew out in the storm, otherwise they would've been solid medium-rare to maybe almost medium. They were still yummy.)

So now we have to try and find our fork (I think J's going to do that today after he's up), and pick up all the shattered pieces off the deck of our pool so when we get around to opening it we can actually walk around in our bare feet on the deck. I'm dead serious when I tell you that there weren't any pieces bigger than the palm of my hand (and none that shape, even bigger pieces were long and narrow). Thankfully our plates are Corel, plus they're plain white -- no pattern at all -- so we'll be able to replace it pretty easily. I'm interested to see what the fork looks like, if we can find it. It wouldn't shatter, given it's thick and 100% metal, but depending on what it ran into and such the tines could be rather mangled for all I know.

What amazes me, is that we're not one of the 30K people the 10 o'clock news said were without power. We did have it blink a few times, plus dim a few more times, and once it was out for a solid 3 seconds. But it held. We went out around 9:30ish to get Fritz's later (they were still open, though it's just a walk-up-to-the-counter-outside place) since the steaks were small enough that we were kinda hungry (we didn't have anything with 'em). There were tree branches down everywhere. There's someone with their back yard up against part of Fritz's parking lot, and one of their trees lost heavy enough stuff that it took out a section of fence. There was a huge branch in our street down by where it ends at the short northbound street there, too. Thankfully we didn't have any massive branches down in our yard, and all our neighbor's front yards looked similar for the most part.

The storm made my drive kinda sucky this morning though. Two of the busiest intersections along Lindbergh were four way flashing red. The lights at Patterson & street right next to it (seriously, these lights are 6 car lengths apart) were that way, and the light at Washington, where each direction has 4-5 lanes given turn lanes and straight ahead lanes. We're talking on average 12 cars at a time trying to sort out whose turn it is, with some people rolling over for everyone else and others going out of turn and screw everyone else. Of course, once we got past Washington that broke traffic up a ton, so I did 50+ the rest of the way until I crossed 270. All in all I guess it didn't take a lot longer than usual, though longer than a usual Friday. I was worried that all the lights would be that way, which would've meant probably a 20 minute delay.

And the forecast says we potentially get to do this again tonight, Saturday night, Sunday night, and Monday night. Wheeeeee!!

(I just talked to my coworker who lives in St. Charles, and they got nothing. He was at work when the rain hit, with the wind straight at the windows, etc., so he stayed later so he wouldn't have to go out in it. Driving home he crossed a practically solid demarcation from super wet to absolutely dry. His house didn't get a thing.)

If you do, do I have a link for you. It's the blog of a 16 year old gay kid whose parents decided to force him into a brainwashing reprogramming camp when he came out to them. He hasn't posted since a few days before he was scheduled to go in. It contains the complete rules that must be followed, which while a few are benign (no violence -- don't be fighting each other, etc.) many are quite ridiculous.

Needless to say, since this link apparently was posted at SomethingAwful he's gotten rather a lot of attention. He's from TN, and apparently several local to him have found out about it and are doing everything from staging protests and informing the written and TV media, to digging up illegal activities about them to report to the police, to contacting the ACLU. I do hope they get this place shut down, and he and the rest of the poor kids forced into the program by their parents rescued. It's one of the camps on US soil as opposed to ones located overseas, so stricter US jurisdiction applies. (There are loads of camps that are located in places that don't give a shit to care about them, so they often can't be shut down.)

I think if I were in his situation, I would've found a friend to live with (whose parents were willing to take him in) and called TN's CPS immediately, and refused to go back. At least, I sure hope I would. Not only does this kind of thing not work (how many of these places keep track of their attendees after they've left?), due to various abuses of power that often occur people stuck there often end up with worse problems than they ever might have had before going in. (Note, I'm not calling non-heterosexuality a mental problem here; I'm referring to any other problems that any individual, heterosexual or otherwise, anyone could possibly have anyway.)

Bleh. I'm glad there are lots of organizations out there, many with legal teeth, that fight against this sort of thing.

It's 10:30 Monday morning, and I still just want to crawl back in bed for a few more hours' sleep. I even turned out the light a little after 11 last night, though it did take a while to fall asleep.

Morning didn't start that well. I was trying to update my Quattro Pro spreadsheet of our checking & savings accounts, and it took forever to open. It took so long, that I killed it via task manager at least twice thinking it was just opening badly.

I figured out what's wrong, but not how to fix it to my satisfaction. I installed WindowBlinds (which likes to pop up its nag screen while I am playing WoW, which means if it does it when I'm fighting something I'll probably now die) and things have been fine. However, while it's running, Quattro Pro will take 2 minutes to do anything. Ooh, looks like I started typing something, better think about that for a bit. Ooh, I clicked the save button, how 'bout we just close without saving? Yea! So after a reboot, given I hadn't in about 2 weeks, I figured things might be better. Nope. I even put qpw.exe in the list of programs to completely ignore, no skinning at all, and it still does it. Only when I unload WB will it perform normally. WTF?! Of course that made me run a few minutes late leaving for work, which kinda pissed me off.

If you have any ideas I'd love to hear 'em. I've installed WordPerfect Office Suite 2000, and am trying to use Quattro Pro 9 (I assume it'd also have an issue with WordPerfect 9 as well, but I haven't tried it). Do I need to figure out what all their DLLs are and list them too? Will I just have to unload WB when I want to run QP, then load it again when I'm done? Should I go get OpenOffice instead, and use that? (Does OpenOffice even open old versions of WP and QP files?) Am I just fucked?

Mrf. I may give up on WB anyway. I can accept that the free version doesn't let you skin everything; I use LiteStep as an alternate shell anyway, and was just poking around to see about styling the title bars of program differently. However, it kinda pisses me off that it feels it has to tell me I'm using an unregistered version every few hours with a front & center nag window that forces focus no matter what else you're doing, and of course their download page did not make any mention of that fact. At least, I didn't see it, so if they did say it had nag screens galore it was in small print somewhere off to the bottom of the download screen. A nag screen when I first load it, fine. But stop interrupting my WoW sessions, damnit! I know I'm only using the free version, I'm the one who downloaded it, you don't need to remind me every 4 hours or whatever.

Alright, end rant. Maybe I'll be more chipper and less cranky and sleepy after lunch.

I just got an email stating that since I'm hitting my 5 year mark with the company, I'm entitled to order a "service award". Basically I get a catalog that will give me stuff to pick from. I've seen 'em before; my dad hit 30 years and had a really nice selection, all of which he didn't want. So he grabbed the microwave and gave it to me. Floored me at the time, but he said there was absolutely nothing, including the microwave, he wanted at all.

So I'm sure I'll have lots of smaller stuff to pick from, but it might be neat. I'm forwarding the email home since there's an external web access point to check (rather than having to order online while on our company intranet, which is also available). So I'll have to have J sit in so we can check it out together. We'll see if I can find anything interesting.

This is primarily for J and Mark, who were with me Wednesday night when we saw the sign stating that Saturday night the Lindbergh tunnel would be closed. Well, all of us at work got an email about road closings nearby, and the reason for the tunnel being closed this weekend from 10pm Saturday to 10pm Sunday is exhaust fan repairs. Just so you know.

Epic WANG for sale...

I also need to make myself a WoW icon for LJ, probably from the character bubble (or whatever it's called, that shows one's own char's face plus life and health, etc.) of my main, and currently only, character. I'd make it now, but of course I don't have WoW installed at work and thus cannot log in and take a screencap to work with, nor can I access the screencaps I've taken to see if I took any recently without turning off the UI. (Most of my shots have been sans UI because they were awesome scenery shots.)

I was peeking at my website stats, specifically the "last 100 visitors" section in cPanel, which groups files viewed by IP address and shows what the referrer for each file was (images and other resources that are linked with the img tag, link tag, etc., show up here) and when it was. Well... one IP was using the Italian Google image search (i.e. google.it instead of google.com) to specifically search my site for images. As in, they used my URL to look through my images. I guess the fact that I have my pictures file set to no-index pissed someone off and they felt they had the right to see everything anyway. Then, I saw another IP doing the same thing, only with Brazil's Google image search (I assume that's what the .br is for).

That doesn't seem quite right. Perhaps it'd be wise to find a way of denying images.google.* from hitting my images or something. If there's a way of doing that, either with cPanel or .htaccess or whatever. I'm just uneasy that someone would be searching through my images that way; I do have a few things up there (test stuff) that I don't want people screwing with (no, nothing I'd be embarrassed for someone to see, outside of flopped attempts at web backgrounds for myself) that I don't have linked. I figured it was alright if I left 'em up there. I guess not so much. Or, do I misunderstand, and Google can't get to any images that there aren't links or img tags to? If that's the case it's not as big a deal, I guess, though I didn't think it was that hard to find most of these images "the hard way", i.e. by navigating my site.

(By the way, if the person who was doing it was doing so for a specific, totally legit & normal reason, and would like to ease my mind, I'd appreciate it if you commented, emailed, or wrote me on the forum. I'm not directly angry per se, just... concerned. I don't like the idea of a stalker, nor do I like the idea of someone farming my site for images to use, or whatever. But if you were just looking for pics of my cats that you forgot exactly what they were called, or something, well then that doesn't freak me out so much.)

All I have that comes to mind are a few random things.

Over the weekend, we were briefly discussing those new backscatter scanners they're going to put in a few test airports. I did learn that they are only going to be used on someone they'd normally do a big-time patdown on, because they're not fast enough to be practical to scan people as they walk by the way the metal detectors are. However, that's not my funny tidbit. I made the somewhat common and typical comment that I didn't want any strange man seeing my naughty bits without even having bought me a drink. My mom said (I'm paraphrasing a bit since this was last Sunday), "No, no, they're not naughty bits, they're fun bits. Don't want to give it a negative connotation, ya know." I find it so amusing that my mom said that.

My character is plodding slowly onward in level. She's level 54 now, due in large part to the generocity of my husband with his mage, and another level 60 guildmate in our group (Destroyer, a paladin) letting me tag along in the Razelikh chain of quests. The start, freeing all the servants, was an orange quest to me. From there on out, all through Azshara and back to the Blasted Lands, was all red from that point forward. I tell you what, those higher level mobs (even the elites only one level higher than I) can smell me a mile away or something. They had to purposely draw aggro onto them, since they wouldn't get hurt too much, to keep me from dying. But, I don't even know how much XP I got from turning all those in. Turning in the quest for killing the 3 underlings (Grol, Allistarj, and Sevene) for their amulets gave me 8300 XP, and that was just one of about 8-10 other parts between the start and there. I do know that I got over half my level 53 to level 54 XP, possibly as much as 3/4 of it, on that quest chain, between killing stuff and turning in quests. I will say, Grol was a bitch. I think the three of us wiped at least 6 times. Then we brought in Mark's main Keldorn, a 48 Paladin, and I think we only wiped one or two more times. He couldn't do the "meat shield" role because Grol simply hits far too hard, but he made all the difference filling in the healing role in getting Grol dead. (It didn't help that the other ogres in that little space repop awfully fast. Hell, it didn't help that it was close quarters period.)

Edit: I guess I should mention I have my cooking, herbalism, and first aid all at 300, all but the herbalism being within the last week or so. My alchemy is only at 270, 'cause I'm having trouble finding recipes sub 275 that I don't have but are 260ish so I can level from them. They also need to be things I can get ingredients for. I also have to figure out how I missed getting the recipe for the stonescale oil reagent.

I didn't play WoW at all yesterday. I was an idiot, basically, was part of it. I had an appointment scheduled at 4pm for my toner (my "in between" hair appointment -- too soon for the full color job with roots & fresh highlights, but soon enough for the toner, i.e. longterm temp dye that adds to the red and makes the highlights red instead of blonde, to have faded). They called the afternoon before to confirm and everything. I missed it. Completely forgot. Left work thinking all I needed to do was hit the bank to remedy the $1 in my wallet, came home and talked with J for a while, then we laid down for a short nap. 5:20 rolled around and the phone rang, and J answered then handed it to a very groggy me. As soon as I heard her voice I just winced. Pretty sure I said, "SHIT!" on the phone. She said she still had time if I could get there pretty quick; her son had a baseball game but not till 7:30, so she had time to get the toner in, soaked, and then washed out and hair conditioned, just no blowdrying. (That's fine with me anyway; I rarely ever blowdry, and if I do it's the slow way using the diffuser.) So I got up there in ~5 minutes from when I hung up (it's really close). I was home at about 6:30 I think.

Then we went to Cancun (the restaurant, not the place in Mexico ) for dinner. It's about a 20 min drive each way so we weren't home till 8ish at a guess. I got into checking widgets at Konfabulator to see if I could figure out why my mini What To Do widget wouldn't let me add new to-dos since I didn't have any, and ended up going to 2.0.1 from 1.whatever. That broke my WidgetDock, which I'd been using to stick a few icons on for quick access, specifically Zuma, WoW, D-Tools, and WoWReader. Unfortunately, there isn't anything else that does this, and the author refuses to update it because of all the kludges he claims he's had to do to work around "all kinds of" Konfab bugs and it still wouldn't work on everyone's systems. From the thread I got this at, he seems like he's kind of a whiny bitch. Anyway... so I lost that. But, I grabbed the color-picker widget, which is very tiny, just click it to either pick a color or put in a hex value to see what the color looks like. When no color is chosen (You can dismiss the part that keeps one chosen) it's just a little 32x32 (I guess) circle with a rainbow color palette around it, which is awesome. Also picked up a sort of memory temp gauge, a small one, that shows how much is available, and an HTML validator widget that goes to the W3C. It's huge, so I learned about "Konsposé" mode which is a desktop overlay mode that goes away when you click on any blank parts, and to which I assigned that widget.

By then it was 10pm, too late to start playing WoW for me. So I played Zuma for a half hour, then read for about 20 minutes, then turned out the light.

Huh. *blinks* I guess I had more than a few random tidbits after all. Or maybe I'm just very good at rambling on and on about small things.