Busy Busy/Random Thoughts

It's been a bit nuts at work this week so far (or was it last week?) so pardon the lack of blogging. We had a user conference for the past few days and it's been off a bit. I've been working on a couple posts about acid mine drainage which I hope to have up in the next couple of days. I also have a couple of stories about working at that small town newspaper that I've been sitting on for a while now. I needed some distance before I could go into it.

I'm hoping that I also be able to get to a state park this coming weekend, maybe Sunday morning. It's been tough because Heather's schedule and mine never really line up. She's working at an overpriced European style bakery/market for now while she decides where she wants to go for school (illustration seems to be the most likely candidate right now). I work mornings, she works nights, so it's tough to find time to do anything together, much less a day of hiking.

I hit the jackpot the other day. I found a cardboard storage tube filled with old wildlife posters tucked away in our basement that I had totally forgotten about, behind the mountain of boxed books. I have family members that have friends that work for DNR and the Forest Service, and I was given the posters a couple of years before. They must have been put in storage. So, I've got lots of neat posters to hang, plus some duplicates to bring to work so I can spread my socialist tree-hugging propaganda about "saving wolves" and "preventing forest fires."

In WoW news, we've finally built up enough people in the guild to tackle the 25 person content, starting with Gruul's Lair last Saturday. Karazhan is cleared entirely, and we took down the first boss in Zul'Aman on our first solid night in there, though we didn't get the timer. I was a bit disappointed, actually, with the boss difficulty and the loot. I thought each boss would drop two epics/two badges in there, but I suppose Blizzard wants you to jump through a few more hoops. The good news is that the anvil at IQD is almost unlocked and most of our raiders have enough badges to pick up some big upgrades, so that should speed progression a bit; I'm assuming that's what Blizzard's intentions were in the first place with adding BT equivalent loot to a badge vendor, to speed up the progress of guilds like us, who built up from scratch and are relatively new to the scene.

But anyway, enough nerdspeak. I want to get back to my biomes posts soon. I left off working on tundra I believe, and I would like to highlight mountains after that. Then it's off to aquatic and marine systems.

Is the weekend here yet?

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I like how you just coined the term "nerdspeak". Awesome. (I read "1984" recently, btw. Assuming your were playing off of "newspeak" . . .)
Anyway.
Reading BBC Science, I thought of you.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7346789.stm
Check it out. Ion Engines enter space race!
ION ENGINES!
maybe they'll eventually stick two of them together and get some T.I.E. fighters developed. This excited me...

Miss you!

rofl

I already built one for the Star Wars convention. It's in my basement, right next to the time machine.

When are you coming to Atlanta?

[geek]I imagine you did the bear boss first (that's what I did with my guild). He's the only boss that only drops one badge- the other three animal bosses drop two badges each, and Hexlord and Zul'jin drop three.

The bear trash was a bit of a pain, but once we got it down, that first timer came really easily. Eagle isn't so bad, once you get the trick (I have people turn off everything but ambient sound and collapse when they hear the rain, since the timers are still fairly borked).[/geek]

I know the feeling about schedules. I have a job similar to Heather's (for a similar reason- fund your local grad student, folks), but I have to work mornings, whereas my husband teaches a late afternoon class. We share a car, so that means 12-hour days for both of us.