Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I left the office for lunch today in decent spirits. No major problems, though there remain some outstanding frustrations about email setup. And... it was a beautiful day. I marveled to myself about the mid-high seventies temperature and clear skies. Sure, it was a little windy, and that mussed up my hair some, but still. Lovely. About then minutes after I got back to the office, I got a little tingling in my sinuses and then my nose started running as if my brain had melted. Allergies kicked into overdrive and I spent the rest of the afternoon constantly reaching for tissues. Ugh. Darn you, weather and pollinating plants!

Now, that isn't as severe as it might sound. I'm not furiously rage-quitting. Plus, given the billing cycles I was subscribed for, I still have a good bit of paid-for time yet on my account. It is, however, a statement of a sort - a reaction to the game not being fun for me at this stage. There are several reasons, interconnected to varying degrees: - Guild/friend attendance has fallen to levels that won't support raiding. - Raid Finder/LFR is (at least in my last several samplings) not longer practical for me. Throne of Thunder instances were taking 1-2 hours to complete between overall difficulty and quantity of trash, on top of queue times around 1 hour (as DPS). I can only dedicate a 3 hour block without interruption once a week, if that, and between uncertain success/loot and company of strangers, the payoff has not even been worth that effort. - With raiding basically a no-go, that doesn't leave much in the way of PVE activities. Current dailies and dungeons

I've touched on it before and I still dont understand, but then I'm only getting half the story. And considering the half that I'm getting, there seems to be a serious failure in communicating in some ways that seem important to me. I would be the first person to agree he probably spends too much time with friends compared to wife and child. Okay, I don't have first-hand experience in balancing such things (by choice, thanks), but it just seems like he has favored the "wrong" side of that equation for a while. So, I can see how that could be a point of concern, but I've never really heard if that's been perceived as a problem. Being one of those friends, my perspective is biased, so I just don't know, but wouldn't be surprised if she felt he wasn't giving them enough attention. That's really the only thing I can see beyond the overall stress of raising a child amidst employment/financial difficulties - which is surely stress enough.

Well, our salaries were finally approved last week. While they are supposedly retroactive to the beginning of the month, this is really the "first" week for my perception. It's... bizarre to not have to clock in and out after years of doing so. All things being equal, the new salary works out to around a 17% increase over my prior wage. I'm very... neutral to that. On the up side, it's on the high end of what I considered a reasonable expectation and I still don't have any reason to think I'll be putting in so many hours as to get the bad end of the deal. On the down side, it isn't as much as I might have hoped for, it's still on the low end of what salaried employees are paid at the company, and any further raises over the next few years are unlikely. It isn't enough to support any real lifestyle changes. I'm not disappointed, per se, but nor am I notably happy over it, which I might have been a month or two ago, before seeing what oth

So let's see... Saturday was a pleasant train ride up to Cascade. The weather was nice. Of course, after five hours of sleep, the rocking of the train was lulling me toward sleep most of the ride back. We got a little spiel about railroad yard signs from one employee, part of which got me thinking. It wasn't so much the specifics, but the emphasis he placed on historical preservation. That definitely is a part of the organization behind the railroad here, but I can't help but wonder just how much we should be preserving history. While the knowledge of it is vitally important, the practical application seems less so. At what point should people "let go" of something? Hmm... WoW was quiet, with only half a dozen people on and no real drive toward any group activities. Edit: Wait, I guess we did group up (with a bunch of others) to kill the world boss Nalak. Relatively easy, and I did get a drop technically... even if it was PVP boots. GW2 saw some more assis

I suppose this came to be on my reading list due to this post. That's a little strange about this whole thing is really the other elements that came together. Even when I read that post, Michael Stackpole's name didn't really click. It didn't come together until recent articles about a failing independent publishing company, Night Shade Books, and a buyout offer, and authors' uncertainty about the whole thing. Only in following those links did I realize that he's written a fair bunch of stuff, particularly involving RPGs and some licensed novels. I don't think I've read most of his work, but I believe I did read several of his Battletech novels back in the day. And on seeing all that, I looked back at my downloaded books and said "huh, that's him." Talion: Revenant was apparently his first written (primarily back in the mid 80's), but not remotely first published, novel. Interestingly, it appears he's going to do a sequel if the

Ah, what to say. I'm feeling more "normal" this week, if still waiting to see how pay will shake out at work. Reading a book that'll get a post when I'm done. Planning to take a train ride Saturday. WoW is what it is. I've gone into greater detail before, but the lack of any practically-attainable goals and waning group activity seriously limits my interest. We finished off heroic 10-man Lich King Saturday and that's about it. That felt a little bittersweet, revisiting the site of probably out height of raiding now that things seem at pretty much their lowest point since for the guild. For now, I'm just making my lightning-infused ingots and now worrying about it. GW2 hasn't sparked much to talk about either. There was some big, dramatic discussion over guild representation that just sort of petered out with no real conclusion or concensus from what I saw. I've found the Living Story stuff hard to get into, and while the Super Adventure B

I seem to be in the midst of a "down week," which is to say struggling some with my more depressive moods. Such bouts are usually sparked by something . Worry over a friend, worry over finances, a stressful and unproductive work day... something. I get annoyed, or frustrated, or angry, and get into the mindset of wondering why I put up with such in my life. This leads to a somewhat cyclical sequence of thinking about things and feeling bad about them. I commonly come back to how I don't feel I've really accomplished anything in my life, and I don't really have any goals. I may berate or just ask myself about what value my life has in the grand scheme and that goes nowhere good. The most recent spiral was probably from work. Now, overall, I'm relatively happy with work. I still have a job that appears to be stable for a while. I have a boss who praises us, and our recent company of a board member was positive. But until numbers get hashed out by administration

So... with the abrupt departure of one of our accounting people a couple weeks ago, the IT department picked up the job of managing the company timecard system. This is not something I was terribly happy with just on my apparently philosophical belief in distribution of power. I always liked to be able to say "I don't have admin access to that," whenever an audit was done. That really was reason enough for me to want to turn that back over, though it sounds like that won't be the case. On top of that, I find it... unsettling to now, rather unavoidably, see what my coworkers are being paid. I have not had a moment of jealous fury like I did years ago, but... it does make me feel sort of underpaid. I find it mind-boggling that we have relatively new employees in our online division that make more than five times what I do, simply because that seems like a stupidly-high amount of money to be paying someone when the overall company is cutting costs elsewhere. My own pay

Happy April Fools Day. Whee. It ought to turn up some amusements. I've already seen a few things here and there, but I'm waiting for more. GW2 went into this with a colorful 16-bit "Super Adventure Box" quasi-dungeon, a jumping-heavy romp through a rather colorful virtual zone that's supposed to be up for the month. It's cute, but can take a long time if you're waiting on other people. Perhaps the best part is that it allows parties of 1-5 people, but things are so simple that it doesn't really compare to scaling a normal dungeon - skills are standardized to the in-Box weapons and only the boss monsters take more than a few hits to dispatch. Sunday was pretty normal other than spending most of it in there. There still seems to be some measure of disgruntlement over representation of guilds and there was a forum topic, but I haven't seen any great conclusion, mostly just venting. I also got sucked in Friday night for longer than intended, which