Saturday, November 24, 2007

11/23: What I Accomplished Today

1. Level 38 Human Mage. Stranglethorn. Dinged 39. Stockades.

2. Television and Pogo badges.

3. Read several magazines and a little more in The Secrets of Judas.

4. Level 39 Human Mage. Dustwallow (including first aid quest) and Gadgetzan/Racetrack. Back to Southshore. Dinged 40. Auction stuff.

Don't really feel like going to bed, but it's late.

Friday, November 23, 2007

11/22: What I Accomplished Today

1. Thanksgiving!

2. Watched several episodes of The Planet Earth while working on Pogo badges.

3. Read a little in The Secrets of Judas.

4. WOW. Played the Level 38 Human Mage a little in Stranglethorn. My buddy helped me get all my characters into my guild, and I gave everyone rights to the guild bank; people loaded it up. (In fact, it's full.)

5. Played a Play First trial game. Pretty fun.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

11/21: What I Accomplished Today

1. Mandatory workshop on Sexual Harassment. Got that done.

2. Took a nap.

3. Read the last three Little House books. Observations:

a. Almanzo's age doesn't square. In either Silvery Lake or Little Town, he's 19 to Laura's not-quite 14; he's underage when he files his claim, but everyone ignores that. In The First Four Years, Laura turns 19 near the time when Almanzo turns 29. Hmm.

b. The beginning of The First Four Years and the end of These Happy Golden Years don't match. I know she didn't get to edit The First Four Years as she did the others, but frankly, that beginning seems more likely than the really vague ending to Happy Golden.

c. First Four Years is rather depressing for a number of reasons. In many ways, Laura epitomizes women up until quite recently (and perhaps for too many even now): she doesn't like being a schoolteacher; she hated being a farmer's wife; she wasn't crazy about keeping house. She seemed happiest when she got to be outside and active, but that came at a cost (at first the constant refrain of "You'll ruin your complexion" was funny, but it eventually became oppressive). She didn't edit it, so it's more a summary than the other books, and that's a shame; I was looking forward to seeing how she was going to perform all these tasks we'd seen her learn on her own, and we didn't get much of that. But it almost seems to be a book about a woman being utterly crushed by her lot, though she seems quite happy about her husband and loves her daughter. She seems to spend much of the book in a daze; the baby who dies before he's a month old is relayed almost in a daze, as though, even 60-odd years later, she's still in shock.

4. Kooky thing happened in WOW. I did some auction stuff and played the level 37 Human Mage a bit, and as I was skippin' through Stormwind, some guy basically offered to give me a guild. It had no members, but it's a guild. Now I've been thinking about starting a guild because part of the new patch is Guild Banks, and I think it'd be really handy to have 98 inventory slots all characters can access without having to mail stuff around or remember who's storing what Elemental.

The trick is that, in order to invite someone to be in a guild, you appear to have to be online at the same time, and since all of my characters are on the same account, that obviously isn't possible. I'll talk to one of my adventuring buddies tomorrow to see if I can put them in the guild and make them an officer and then log from character to character for the invite. That should work.

There are actually several other things I'd like to do now, but tomorrow/today is Thanksgiving, and I need to sleep before the festivities.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

11/20: What I Accomplished Today

1. Prepped a class, graded a class, taught a class.

2. Pogo badges. Watched a Netflix movie, Separate Tables. Loneliness and missed connections.

3. Last night, I finished On the Banks of Plum Creek. Then I finished and By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter. Now I'm going to read Little Town on the Prairie.

4. WOW auction junk.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

11/19: What I Accomplished Today

1. Prepped a class, graded a class, taught a class.

2. Television and Pogo badges.

3. Last night, I finished Little House on the Prairie. I'm almost done with On the Banks of Plum Creek now; I'll probably start the next one (which I believe is By the Shores of Silver Lake or some such) tonight. They're as good as I remember; she's very good with giving a sense of the day-to-day logistics. I hadn't read Farmer Boy before, I don't think. That's about her future husband, Almanzo, who spent his early years on a farm in New York; they lived very near a town, and his father was rather wealthy, so the social class is rather different than the Ingalls'. Interesting comparisons and contrast. (Mr. Wilder tells his son Almanzo that they're not going to use a threshing machine because such machines do a poor job and waste much of the grain; Charles Ingalls is big on progress and also has the threshing machine do its thing on his grain.)

4. Did some WOW auction work.

Monday, November 19, 2007

11/18: What I Accomplished Today

1. Puzzle Day. We had four weeks worth of puzzles to grade. We lost two, won one, and came in second one. Not a stellar performance. We also cooked.

2. Took a nap.

3. While I was sleeping, Co-Vivant set up the newer TiVo on the network rather than dialing on the phone. We spent some time poking around to see what some of the new features were.

4. Played Cindy's Sundaes. I thought this would be time management, but it's just a three-matchy. Not a bad three-matchy, but I don't see a need to spend money on three-matchies. The world has enough.

5. Level 37 Human Mage. Stranglethorn. Dinged 38.

6. Finished Farmer Boy and started Little House on the Prairie.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

11/17: What I Accomplished Today

1. Level 35 Human Mage. Desolace. Dinged 36.

2. Took home lady who cleans the house.

3. Co-Vivant and I had dinner and shopped a little.

4. Television and Pogo badges.

5. Level 36 Human Mage. Desolace. Dinged 37.