Jun 2005
Read me first (unless you've read me before)
Some of you will notice that suddenly a bunch of blog entries have appeared dated last Sunday. How can this be you ask? The answer, I've discovered time travel. Okay actually I can set the date and time to anything on these things.

The entries below were written last week, I just never posted them to the site as I was waiting to take a couple more photos. But here they finally are. I divided them up into topics so that you can easily skip the WoW update if you want. There will be a little bit of a WoW update later here too (hey it's been a week).

First I'd like to say hello to the ever growing Rocky fan club. I had no idea the little bugger was so popular. I'm not going to be telling him that he has a fan club though. His ego is big enough already. But welcome all the same and feel free to browse the rest of the site or drop me (yes, or Rocky) a line via the recently fixed contact page if you feel so moved.

Well it's been an exciting week again. Despite what last week's entries say, there are no new Rocky videos. Sorry about that, there was a problem with cutting them down a size that could be easily downloaded. But the pictures are there as promised. He's been as nuts as ever this week. He goes to the vet on Wednesday for a booster shot so we'll see how brave he feels then.

Today was the first official day of summer for me, as it was the first day without teachers or students at school. Ah, a month and a half of somewhat quiet. I started doing book inventory in the library Friday and have a good portion of it done. Plus Dana was in today and finished most of the Non-fiction section. She said she's coming in tomorrow too. I'm not sure if she's planning on coming in the whole week or what, but it does go much faster with two people.

This past Friday was also Pika's 5th birthday. Happy Birthday Pikachu!

Saturday was spent have on a roof shingling, half in the yard mowing and raking, and half out with Mike, Amy and friends (don't know if they mind having their names mentioned). Yes I know that I just named 3 halves. What can I say, it was a long, but fun, day. Of course that means that Sunday was a blur. I slept until 3pm and then went to bed again at 11pm. Ah the price we aged people pay for a night out.

Earlier this week, Jason and Tascha came over for dinner. That's a bit of a story too (and it leads nicely into my next topic). As some of you maybe know, Tascha is VERY allergic to eggs. Now I don't know if any of you have noticed this but there are eggs in damn near everything. We decided to order pizza. The short of the story is that we ended up ordering from the very last place in town that was available (Kozy Korner). But we decided also to watch a movie. As I have like 8 billion movies, we first narrowed it down to 80's horror movie and then decided on "Sleepaway Camp". It was by far the WORST movie ever made. I've seen movies via Mystery Science Theater 3000 that could win oscars compared to this movie. Sadly, I was at Best Buy Thursday night and discovered they have a box set of Sleepaway Camp 1, 2 & 3.

This brings us to the next topic, movie reviews. I finally got around to watching "The Grudge" this last week. I was not impressed. If the idea was to scare me, they really needed to go back to the drawing board. That's really all I'm going to say about it as it isn't worth my time to review it further. Actually, the special features of the cast and crew interviews were much more entertaining.

I also watched "National Treasure" the other day. I saw the movie in theaters and must say it didn't suck. It's actually a pretty well thought out and entertaining plot. Plus it has a decent cast, provided you can accept Nicholas Cage as an action star. It's nice to see Jon Voight being cast as a good guy. It's not a roll he gets to play often and in my opinion, plays the good guy better than the bad guy.

Finally a quick note on WoW. I finally made it into Alterac Valley last Monday night. Alterac kicks butt. I was in there for a few hours and managed to rack up over 500 Honorable Kills, which brought me back up to Sergeant in the rankings. The only down side was that I spent about 2 hours in line waiting to get in. So if you only have a few hours to play at night you may as well forget it. But in any case there are a bunch of new screen shots up from WoW including a couple from Alterac.

Before I go I just wanted to mention the picture of my house. There are a few pictures of my new shingles. I don't know how well they will look on your screen. They normally aren't that dark but it had just rained when I took the photos so they are wet. And yes the house is some sort of mustard orange color with brown trim. It will eventually be white with green windows, shutters and door. Thanks again to my parents and aunt and uncle for helping with the shingling project (okay so my step-father did most of the work). THANKS!
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IMPORTANT CONTACT PAGE INFO
I must apologize to all those who have tried to send me email via the contact page. It turns out that there were some issues with the form, first I forgot to setup postfix on the server so all messages were going to /dev/null (it's just what it sounds like, oblivion) and then the address the messages were getting forwarded to was rejecting connections from my server. So if I didn't reply to an email, it might not be that I don't like you, I might not have received the message.

The contact page has been fixed and will work correctly now. I even tested it and everything. Of course most of the people reading this probably have my email address or know someone who does.
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Welcome back sports fans
Yes after many weeks, I've finally managed to write up an update. Sorry about that but there was a shingling project, baseball game and some other events that kept me distracted (I've posted some pictures of the shingling).
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Rocky news
Ah, Rocky. Yes, Rocky. I've started calling him Satan for short. I know what you are thinking, "Satan isn't any shorter than Rocky." Well you are right there. But it is shorter than "hellspawn" which is another of his names. As you may have guessed by this point, Rocky is becoming quite the handful. He can coat the bathroom in kitty litter in the blink of an eye. Some of you may think I'm exaggerating but believe me, I'm not. In less than 3 minutes this morning he had litter everywhere. The floor, the toilet seat cover, the counter, the sink, everywhere.

He's also decided to declare war on my clock/radio in the bathroom. He completely chewed the wire antenna off, it's just a little stub now. Then Saturday he tried to finish it off by pushing it into the sink.

Now some of you would probably say that he just has too much energy and needs to be released from the bathroom so he can run around during the day. To those people I would say simply, I know. But Rocky is in the bathroom during the day for his own safety. And no I'm not worried that the other cats would hurt him. I'm worried that I'd come home and have to hurt him. I came to this conclusion this weekend when he began to climb the cloth covers of my stereo speakers. It was in that moment that I decided that Rocky's daily imprisonment is for his own good. So until the claws are removed, Rocky shall remain in the bathroom during the day. It's going to be tough sharing the bathroom with him until August but we'll manage.

I've posted a bunch of new Rocky pictures as well as some movie clips. Most of the pictures and movies involve Rocky attacking Daimao, but then again that's pretty much all he does when he isn't biting or clawing me.
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Now on to Azeroth...
Last week I logged on to find a LARGE patch needed to be downloaded. But it was well worth the wait as it was the long awaited 1.5 patch. What does that mean? It means the introduction of Battlegrounds. And I must say it was well worth the wait. But as I would learn once the patch finished, it wasn't my last wait. Yes quite quickly I, along with many other Alliance players, discovered that there is a great imbalance in the number of players on each side. The line to get into Alterac Valley was hours long. Not to be detered, I crossed the vast sea to Kalimdor to see if the line for Warsong Gulch was smaller. Thankfully it was.

That first night I only made it into Warsong once and we were handily defeated 3-0. For those who didn't click the link and read up on the different Battlegrounds, Warsong Gulch is a 10 vs 10 capture the flag match. But of course this isn't touch football, so you can kill opposing players. Those players can then be brought back to life within 30 seconds. So I was slightly disappointed my first night. I only received 13 HKs (honorable kills) and had the humiliation of a 3-0 loss. The next night was more of the same. More kills but we were still being defeated 3-0 in all matches. Then I had quite possibly the weirdest experience. I was put into a game in progress. We were down 2-0 already, our flag had been stolen and when I materialized in our base, there were 3 enemy soldiers attacking me. I died and then the match was over. We lost.

After such a confusing and crushing defeat you would think I would learn my lesson and give up for the night. But no. I got back into the queue and headed towards Felwood to farm elementals while I waited to be called back to Warsong. I didn't even make it to Felwood before I was called back. This time I was in at the beginning and through the end of our 3-0 victory. It was by far the most organized group I've been partied with in Battlegrounds. Everyone stuck together with their group and each group did their job, 1 group attack the other defend. It almost seemed easy. Not that the Horde members didn't do a good job, they did make the match last almost an hour. That last flag was quite the challenge to get back to our base. They had almost everyone guarding at that point, but our strategy of 1 group attack and the other defend eventually paid off with a 3-0 victory.

I still haven't made it into Alterac Valley. Perhaps this week I'll head back over there. I still have 3 more levels until Hedana hits 60, so I should work on finishing those too. You don't receive XP for Battleground, unless you win the match. So it would take a while to finish her levels in Warsong. I may have to go and do some killing in Winterspring, Felwood or Azshara to get some more XP too. I'll have to see what quests I have in my
log. I know I have quite a few for Blackrock Mountain, maybe I'll see if anyone in the guild wants to go there.

I'm also going to have to start working on Gnick one of these days. Although now that I've seen the huge imbalance between Horde and Alliance on Malygos I may have to start leveling Mortir, my Undead Warlock.
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