5/18 What I Accomplished Today

1. While I was waiting to hear about various people for lunch plans, I demoed a game called Profitville. The game is fairly fun (it's a well-done sorter). However, I found it through Real Player, and I don't care for their interface; I don't have the readily-accessible option to uninstall the game, and that irritates me.

2. We had Book Group this evening. The book was About Grace, one I read about a year and a half ago, and while it wasn't bad, it wasn't good enough that I wanted to reread it. The writing was very good, but the protagonist was clunky; the book is chockful of imagery normally associated with passion (water and flooding first and foremost), but his passion is always misdirected and poorly expressed. It was hard to tell if this was a flaw with the writer or the character--and if you can't tell, it may be both, but it's at least a flaw with of the writer's.

3. Did I mention that I finished The Bill from my Father last night? I think I did. I enjoyed that. I also worked a little more on the Paul book.

4. I had been concerned because I thought PDA (an old Handspring Visor Pro) was dead, but through a combination of several soft resets and immediate cradling so that it got some power, I think it's been resuscitated. I bought it because at the time it was the cheapest Palm that was Mac-compatible out of the box, and having that function on one of the Macs has gone very well.

5. We watched some forgettable comedy and several episodes of Mad About You.

6. Worked a little on Pogo badges.

7. Level 26 Night Elf Priest. I was able to finish Culling the Thread tonight; as I turned it in, I dinged 27, spending my talent point on Improved Healing, Level 1. This brought me to Honored with Alliance.

I then did Donation of Wool at the Exodar; this brought me to Honored with Exodar. This character apparently hadn't been to Exodar before, so I picked up the flight path.

This is the sort of information that I probably should keep to myself, but I've found a little run I find profitable. From Auberdine, run south along the shore, just right at the shore where the beach meets the sea. From there, you can see Stranglekelp nodes and some mageroyal on the shore. You can also see coastal Food and Weapon crates and fishing nodes. Today, for example, on the run south, I found four Stranglekelp nodes, a food crate, and two Floating Debris nodes, which yielded a total of 17 leather, 13 cloth, 7 potions, 4 herbs, and 4 alcoholic beverages; I also leveled fishing by seven. This was quite lucrative. When I got to Zoram, I hearthed to Astrakaar. I've done it several times over the last few days, and it's usually a good run.

Yesterday, I also had the bright idea that, since running south from Auberdine is so profitable, maybe running north would be, too. So I ran north from Auberdine. As I swam out of Darkshore and into Moonglade, I seemed to swim forever. Just because I was curious to see if this was possible, I kept swimming and swimming and swimming. At first, I'd run onshore whenever there was an inlet to see if I could run into the region, but it soon became apparent that this wasn't going to happen, so I just kept swimming (I stopped to fish once or twice). About an hour later, I seemed to be on the eastern shore of Winterwhatever (I haven't been there yet, so I'm vague on the region name). I thought I might make it to Azshara, but I was killed by some sort of murloc. I hate murlocs. I also thought that was really anticlimactic to survive a swim of over an hour and then be wiped out by a crummy murloc.

8. Tonight's BigFishGame is Escape from Paradise. I hate the new downloading interface; what should have been about a three-minute process took eight. I was enjoying the game, but then about seven minutes into it, it crashed, and after several attempts, I couldn't get it to move beyond that crash, so I uninstalled the game. That was sort of a shame.

9. I'm not accomplishing a great deal this week. I should be.