Time Sinks

Guiltily, I’ve realised it’s been almost a month since I last posted. My bad, I keep saying I have no time, but really I could have more time if I just organised things a little better. Unfortunately, that takes energy, and that’s something I don’t have a lot of at the moment.

Sort of brings me onto the title of today. Everyone has a limited amount of time and energy, and sometimes (like it has been for the past while) my cap is lowered due to my anaemia. And whilst naps are delicious, it means that I’m not doing other things.

So what have I been up to lately?

Well World of Warcraft: Legion got released on the 30th August. After waiting in all day for amazon to deliver my collectors edition (I’m a sucker for the art books), I got it, and I haven’t really stopped playing it since. Well, there’s been food and sleeping, but I took a week off work so that I could play it, and it was so worth it.

Trying not to spoil anything whilst still enthusing: This expansion is about the return of the burning legion to Azeroth, and so we’ve gone back to the Broken Isles where they first invaded 10,000 years ago, and that’s the home place of the Highborn (elves) and druidism. As someone who plays a Night Elf druid, I have been hyper about this for a while, and playing it has absolutely lived up to my expectations. The lore and the quests have had me amazed and tearful at times, but really, it’s an amazing expansion, and the first raid is going to be The Emerald Nightmare, something I have been waiting YEARS for. That, and the artefact weapons are really, really cool. I love how they’ve implemented them.

So that took up a week. And then I managed to pick up an infection, so I was ill for some days, got dragged to the doctor by my boyfriend (i’m one of those people who’s really resistant to going to doctors, although I have no idea why, they’re actually quite lovely), diagnosed and given antibiotics, and then I spent a week off work being ill and having side effects. I mean, I could still play Legion, but that was about the only good thing. And I watched a lot of daytime TV.

One bad thing, because the illness took a lot out of me, I didn’t end up going to the last Empire of the year. It was the right decision, and I know that I feel a lot better for having had a weekend of nothing rather than trying to push myself when I had no energy left, but still, it is the first time I’ve ever missed one.

Basically, now I’m back at work, and trying to pick up on all the things I’ve been ignoring (registered for my new uni year, paid my fees and chose my optional module yesterday, which felt good to have gotten done), and I’ve been reflecting on the last couple of weeks a bit.

Yes, I spent a lot of time on WoW, and no I don’t regret that, (being ill sucked, but what can you really do about it) but it does make you think – when you only have so much time and energy, how is it that we choose what to spend it on? I had a lot of things I could be doing, but mostly I want to play the new expansion, so I did, to the exclusion of a lot of other things. It is a huge time sink. I also find that when I watch TV, I end up watching more than I planned to, and suddenly three hours have gone by. I’ll be listening to a new tune I’ve just put on my music player, and then suddenly it’s 1am and I should have gone to bed an hour ago. Stuff like that.

Maybe it’s because I know I was ignoring a lot of things that I’m having a bit of a weird brain loop thinking day today, but it is just something that strikes me. I have a lot of things to do, and I don’t always make time for them all.

In better news, I’ve managed to write 7,000 words over the last few days, so I’m catching up where I should be with the 365K challenge! Although I think I would do much better with everything if this hot weather would go away. Honestly, it’s an English September, it really shouldn’t be 27 degrees out.

August Life

First of all, apologies for a couple of weeks absence. Empire as always was fun, but draining and there was so much politics going on this time that I was busy the entire weekend despite planning on having a more relaxed weekend, but that’s always how it goes.

Since then, I’ve hit an energy low, culminating in being ill and off work yesterday. It was one of those things where you have low level background illness, but you have a full weekend of stuff lined up, so you just ignore the illness, and then as soon as you stop it catches up to you and slams into you.

On the other hand, I have been doing a lot of cool things, so I’ll just catch you up with some of them.

Photo Credit – Charlotte Moss

Empire

So, only a three day event but that just meant everything was packed into a shorter time frame:

• Started the weekend with a combat linear for my mages. Got to beat up an ice giant, and we rocked it!
• Got invited to a banquet in the summer realm (which was really tasty roast)
• Found out there what the linear had allowed an Eternal to do and caused drama – whoops!
• Culminated in one of the Eternals getting super mad (that part wasn’t me) and flipped her food across the entire table!
• Record length conclave sessions
• Didn’t die during battle
• Attempted to join mage coven and was prevented by yet more drama
• A meteor is crashing into the Empire and one of my nation persuaded conclave to vote to crash it on our territory, striaght onto the Vallorn – TERRIBLE IDEA
• Spent a good day running around undoing that decisions
• Got that decision undone and it is now crashing somewhere much more sensible

So yeah, that was an interesting weekend. Bring on event 4. See above for a really cool photo taken by the brilliant Charlotte Moss of me striding through the forest. As far as I remember this was at the start of the battle on Saturday and the guy that you can just see under the tree tripped and hurt his ankle so I was making sure he was okay before going back to join in the battle.

Adara

Long Weekend

So I had a five day weekend the next weekend. I was supposed to be going somewhere, but due to drama and funding issues, cancelled those plans and had a lovely five day weekend just relaxing at home. Boyfriend was also off, which was nice, although his cats were a nightmare, bless their little derp faces.

Mostly what happened then was a lot of roleplaying. Monday was Princess, and Princess continues to be great. The GM is encouraging me to write a lot of fan fiction about it and my character, and I am happy to supply him with that. I have my special snowflake thing and a friend who’s visiting for the entire month came in and played a DPC (directed player character, somewhere between an NPC and PC) to help us with plot. It was fun!

Friday we then started up D&D again!!! The last time we played that was in January sometime, and we had the break because we hit level 11 and changed tiers. Admittedly we filled the gap with a Star Wars game, which was fun, but I had missed D&D so! Playing my hot-headed Ardent, making the bad decisions, getting talked down and round into the sensible thing and then running off straight into the terrible mist of death was so much fun. That, and our paragon path powers are amazing!

NAMA August Graders

Last Weekend

So, Saturday during the day I clean the flat because people will be coming round and I’ve been putting it off for weeks and weeks. That was exhausting, but did mean that I didn’t have to stress about it when I went to my party in the evening. We saw Suicide Squad – enjoyable but messy is my official verdict – and then went for Nandos which is always fun in a large group. then back to mine for board games.

Sunday had to get up early so that I could go and grade for my next Taekwondo belt. As you can see from the photo above, I passed – First Class Pass! Although I was so nervous (and this is the ill as well) that I didn’t sleep the night before and my instructor said that she could tell I was practically terrified because when I did my Kata (set routine of moves) I was so wooden. Admittedly, I was, because brain weasels kept telling me I was failing. Silly brain weasels, I did fine. I now have an orange belt.

Straight after that I went to IoD to roleplay my changeling and werewolf. I was so tired I gave the last game of the day, Mage, a skip. And since I was grading I turned up late to the first game. But that was fine, that character’s a bitch so I can be exhausted in character and just avoid responsibility and doing things. Werewolf was the issue as the STs once again find new and interesting ways to cause my character feelings and yank her chain around. She went from confused to lamenting to lust to terror to rage to determined to full on lethal damage and hurt to extraordinarily upset and convinced that she’s got to break up with her boyfriend. Seriously. All in one game. I love the STs. And hate them. Mostly love though.

Birthday Dragon

This Week

Of course because I was putting off my ill when I did all that, waking up on Monday was fun and after calling in ill I spent most of the day sleeping. Sleeping is great. Eating not so much. Back in work today but my boss has said if I feel particularly bad I can probably go home. Hooray for summer holidays and college being so quiet it could be called dead.

Tomorrow I do have the day off though because it’s my birthday! Hoping that if I take it really easy today then I can enjoy myself tomorrow, but actually I don’t have to leave the flat and I have some presents to open and I can have a super chill day, which’ll be nice. The legion pre-patch is live and awesome and I suspect that my partner is upgrading my computer with a couple of new bits as my present so I’ll probably play that. Might also see if I can get the N64 working and blast from the past with Pokemon Snap. Maybe some sushi. It’ll be chill and great.

I also have some fun things lined up for this weekend, so as long as this illness starts going away, I should be having a pretty good week overall 🙂

Empire, Ills and lots of Dragons

I am sorry that I have not posted in a while my lovely readers!

Over the weekend I was, of course, attending an Empire event. It was super good, and I imagine I’ll make a very long and rambling post about it in the near future.

However, the bad part of the weekend was that I managed to pick up some sort of bug whilst there. It started off with a really upset stomach, and has been working its way upwards over the last few days, so it’s gone through a sore throat and achy neck and has rounded off with a headache. It’s starting to go now, so I should be able to get to work tomorrow (unless something else crops up tonight) but it does mean that I’ve been on the sofa watching TV or sleeping for the last few days. Restful, but not very productive.

But, just to let you know I am not dead, I thought I would share these lovelies with you.

Last week, just before I went off to be a mage in a field, I was in town and wandered into Waterstones. I’m not sure what the occasion is (perhaps the upcoming GoGo Dragons Trail) but they had a whole table full of dragon books and toys. I resisted picking up to toys, and had a fair few of the books already, but I did pick up the ones I didn’t. There’s two fact books, the brown one and the black and white one. The top right is the continuation of A Natural History of Dragons series, which I am totally in love with, and the middle one is called ‘Tell Me A Dragon’ and is a gorgeous picture book of loads of different dragons – seriously, the art work is completely gorgeous.

I cannot tell you how happy I was to come across it, and the window display was pretty epic as well!

Winter Ills

I had so many plans for this weekend. So many. Most on them involving reading or re-reading all my books on editing and then taking my hesitant first glances over my novel again.

But no. Instead I come down with a horrid cough, cold, chest mutiny. My lungs clearly hate me. And continue to do so even now.

Four days of nothing but slumping on the sofa, curled up in a blanket, watching the TV, and occasionally moving to the computer to play some Warcraft when energy levels were high. Would have been nice, apart from the racking cough, pounding headaches and inability to breath through my nose.

Was also going to update this blog, but my brain has basically been cotton wool for the past four days, so that went out the window as well.

Hopefully this’ll be my last ill for a while, so I can actually get on with doing things rather than slumping over all day in a cotton wool coma.