Round 1 Passed and Various other sundries

I have determined my new favorite way of logging in.  Logging into my guild and seeing "Congrats on making it to round 2 Kare!" from JD of the Amateur Azerothian.  He happens to be in my guild and is an awesome guy (and I'm not just saying that because he's a judge!).  So I ran over to his round 1 finalists post and yup!  There I am!  I was number 12.  Yay!

So, I dug around yesterday morning and came up with an outfit for round 2 which I'm now farming.  (I actually have all pieces but 1, the shoulders.  Those are going to be a PAIN.)  I even got the weapon we're basing it off 1st try.  Woot woot!  I do know I can use a mogging program to do this but I'm going to try to get the outfits together instead.  More fun for me that way :D

This weekend, we took a couple swings at H Ultraxion.  Not nearly as annoying as H Warlord Z.  That makes me want to curl up in a fetal position and cry.  I felt bad because my head wasn't in the game.  I kept trying to focus but my attention was immediately drawn to something else.  And I kept having a hard time with in game depth perception.  When we were doing the Hour of Twilight heroics I was really screwing up left and right.  When I was mage-ing it up, my DPS was really awful.  When I was healing, I just kept spamming heals because I couldn't handle the way things were moving.

It got worse when we went to do Firelands on Sunday.  Drives me crazy when I can't tell where things are.  Go go, standing in the fire!  I spent all day Sunday working on either my warrior's blacksmithing or farming for my round 2 transmog set.  (Because I'm on a new server and ZOMG I NEED CRAFTERS.  Or something OCD like that.)  My warrior's blacksmithing is at 200 right now, so yay.  I can go back out and start leveling again.  She's level 50 now.  I don't know where she was when I left her.  (EDIT: Apparently 48.)

Anyway.  I realized I didn't cap my guild exp last week so now I'm behind the husband.  :( Booooo.  I did get capped last night so yay there.  Halfway to exalted (I think).

And now, I must get to work.  It's been quiet the last few days.  Which is very nice but I think it's going to pick up now.  So, I will leave you with a picture of my office cat.  Who was asleep but the second I started moving around did this:

Happy Monday!

Stagnation

My raiding team is stagnating.  I'm feeling constrained by this yet I'm not sure what to do.  Last night, we had 8 people show up for raid.  Two of our members didn't sign up (everyone who did sign up, showed up!), one of them was the aforementioned mage who just had a baby boy.  The other one is our last remaining death knight.  (We had about 5-7 of them that raided back in the day but now they've all left and it's just this one.)  He's great and all I'm just concerned about him.

So, real life is kicking us in the teeth.  Yay real life.  Tonight is shaping up to be a carbon copy of last night.  Which sucks.  People are getting frustrated at our lack of raiding.  Everyone has been very gracious so far, but still.  It's very defeating every week.

However, last week I managed to cap my valor points.  This week, it looks like we might cap them again.  We did some heroics yesterday instead of raiding, and then after I went to take a break, we pugged enough to do Baradon Hold.  So that's a nice little chunk.  I'm not going to kill myself to cap each week but since I want to get some mail intellect heirlooms, I'm not too concerned about running heroics.

In the Hyjal dailies department, Husband and I unlocked the moonwell first so that I could get all my healing stuff, new relic and new offhand. Pretty pleased with that, plus I got some cool stuff for my kitty set.  That's coming along nicely!  I'm not sure what we'll unlock next, I think I'll leave that up to him.  So he can get something nice this time.

I'm just feeling very blah right now.  I need to kick myself in the butt.  Suggestions for doing so?

Off and on

I have bipolar type II.  As a result, I will start something and midway through it, will get distracted or frustrated and stop doing it.  I am a infrequent blogger in my personal life, and I don't expect to be much better on this blog as well.

However, despite making my first post and then abandoning my blog to the nether, I will make more in the future as .... MY GUILD IS RAIDING AGAIN!

Yes, you heard me.  I'm raiding again.  And this time, it's not reluctantly.  I'm 100% into it now.  Apparently, getting a good solid 7-9 hours of sleep a night will do wonders for your motivation!

We did really well for a group just shaking the cobwebs off.  We beat the loot pinata that is Baradon Hold, and then went to Blackwing Descent.  With only 5 of our 'original' group and 4 other guildies, we cleared all the way to Chimareon, aka my bracers, and we're talking about extending next week to get some good attempts in on Nefarion.

We're currently rebuilding our raiding team.  We lost one of our tanks, one of healers and a couple dps to various things.  And we're a small guild so it hurts to lose these people.  However, we did really well, and we got a good pug warlock to fill in our 10th spot.  He got some loot I think, so that's good.  We didn't hold anything back from him, and he seemed happy with us.

There was none of the frustration that we had during the last month of raiding.  So, I'm really happy about that.  My husband was the main tank and my best friend's husband was our other tank.  He used to play a mage but we need a good tank so there he switched.  I think he's just happy to see the content and it doesn't matter what character it is on.  The healers were myself, my best friend and my favorite priest.  The priest is usually shadow but she flips to disc when we need her.  Which makes me really happy.  These are my favorite people to heal with.

Hopefully we will pick up where we left off and make good progress!  Wish us luck!