Hidden Pugmarks

Today, Holly and I are celebrating our one month anniversary. Half of me can hardly believe that we have been together for a full month, the other half can hardly believe that we have only been together for one month.

Hopefully the weather will cooperate with us and we can head back to the same beach we went to on our first date. Right now it is looking pretty grey outside though. The clouds seem heavy with rain.

I’m looking forward to everyone getting to meet Holly over Thanksgiving. Tentatively looking to fly in on October 6th and fly back out on the 9th or 10th.

My development setup at work is seriously starting to get out of hand. I’m now up to two Xbox 360s, two 23″ widescreen HDTVs, two 19″ monitors, and miscellaneous other wired contraptions running all over the place. It’s chaos I tell you! Chaos!

I wish I could take a picture of it to show everyone. There’s barely enough room on my desk to set down my book when I’m not reading.

I know it won’t be long and I’ll probably have a PS3 devkit or two wedged in here somewhere with another tv or two as well…

It’s the final game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Edmonton vs. Carolina. We have a deadline. Things are broken in the game. They need to be fixed right away.

There is no work being done. Here on the NHL 07 team everyone is huddled around tvs watching the amazing story play out before their eyes. The underdog Oilers. The 8th seed in the West. Battled there way through injuries to stars and the stellar play of opponents to get a chance at the greatest trophy in sports.

What hockey fan can focus on work when such a great story is about to come to an end?

Then it ends. A sad ending. The wrong ending. The hopes and dreams of millions of Canadians come crashing down. The underdog has lost.

Sad faces all around. “It was a good run,” people whisper. Too bad it wasn’t a great run. The cup has gone to a city that will never truly appreciate it. In a month they will be saying “What’s hockey?” In a year they will forget they won a cup.

A city like Edmonton would truly have appreciated the cup. It would have gone down in history. It would have been the stuff of legend. Bragged about left and right, near and far for years to come. Do you remember in ‘06 when we won the cup? The fans could have told you who was on the ice for the winning goal. How many minutes Pronger played. The bravado of Markannen as he stepped out of Roloson’s shadow to play some very solid hockey.

It has gone to Carolina though. This cup will dwindle away as nothing more than the answer to some sports trivia, and people will probably often get it wrong.

I salute you Edmonton Oilers. You did the unthinkable. You achieved so many playoff firsts. You were great. You earned your way to the final without taking out the opposition’s stars in each and every round. You played good, solid, honest, Canadian Hockey!

The Edmonton Oilers. The deserving winners of the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

The word tired quite simply isn’t a big enough word to describe how I feel right now. Exhausted barely even scratches the surface.

I think I may suffer from an as yet undiagnosed disease that I will dub Awakeaholism. So let me start by saying, “Hi. I’m Sean. I’m an Awakeaholic. It’s been… I’m not sure how long since I’ve had a good night’s rest.”

You see, I’m awake a lot. Even when I don’t want to be. I have no real control over it. Sometimes I just can’t stop being awake for extended periods of time.

Take last night as a perfect example. Around 10pm I started thinking “Gee, I should go to bed and get a good night’s sleep to start the week with.” Then I watched the hours tick by. 11pm. Midnight. 1am. 2am. 3am. 4am. Around 4:30am I went to sleep. My last thought was “*insert explitive of choice* tomorrow is going to be hell.”

So what happened next? I woke up just after 6am (just a little before my alarm). I’ve been up ever since. Even when I “woke up” I wasn’t tired. All day since then though, I have been tired. Not the kind of tired where you can sleep though. I know tonight I’ll go home, beyond exhausted as I am, and still not be able to sleep. The later the night continues, the more awake and alert I’ll become.

Time to go home for the day I think. Maybe I’ll just go straight to bed and see what happens.

Yesterday was kind of a sad day. Meghan resigned from the guild/raid in World of Warcraft.

It reminded me of when I stopped playing Ragnarok Online. Ilona quit, Jeff quit, Kim quit, I got really bored because none of my close friends were still playing, and then I quit. I didn’t even so much quit, as I just sort of drifted away from it. After they were all gone, other things were just more fun.

I guess I’ll see how things fall out. I don’t really have anything keeping me in the guild at this point. The beating heart and soul of the guild is gone now. I really only joined and brought a few others over because I knew it was something that Meghan always wanted. I am an “officer” of the guild, but I’m not actually involved in any decision making.

I have heard others say that they would leave if Meghan left. So I’ll see how many people are left in a week. Maybe I’ll go back to Affinity. Maybe I’ll go back to Soldiers of Ragnarok. There are probably like three people left in those guilds.

I think there are still about a dozen people in Soldiers of Ragnarok in iRO. At least there were last time I checked in on everyone.

I had some good times in iRO =) People used to stop and stare in awe as SoR rolled through the dungeons. Nothing could stop us in our prime. We were one of the only guilds that even tried to take on the world bosses. I can remember one night we were rolling through the big undead instance, which then was probably the hardest in the game, and people kept saying how they had never seen anything like that before. Even priests wanted to be in our guild.

There was a limit in iRO as to how many people could be in a guild. We always had a pretty steady flow of people wanting to join. Guild membership had a sense of pride to it. It was so much more special because it was limited. There was no room for alts (which we got around by having a few seperate guilds like Merchants of Ragnarok). It was also special to someone new to the guild, because they knew they beat out a bunch of other people to get in.

I’ve never found that feeling again since.

I have been mulling the idea of quitting WoW over for a long time. There hasn’t really been any single contributing factor to it. Just lots of little things adding up:
- The rep grinding is tedious and boring.
- The direction that the raid is heading I don’t really agree with. Mostly because I don’t enjoy AQ40. I believe there is one upgrade item in there for me. There are a couple of other items that are like 0.001% or 0.002% better than what I currently have. Hardly worth the effort.
- Work is going to be getting a lot more demanding between now and September.
- I have more and more of my friends heading out to Vancouver.
- A few other things…

But hey, maybe it’s just time for me to take a break again. I’ve had a couple of one month breaks in the past.

At the same time, I don’t want to quit. It’s cheap entertainment(fifty cents a day) that fills my days and nights with fun most of the time (although the fun factor will be significantly diminished now I think, at least for a while). At some point I know I will need to really step back and re-evaluate my life and where things fit into it (tends to happen around September and December/January of each year).

Maybe this will all pass in a couple of weeks. I honestly don’t know what I would do to fill my time if I quit playing WoW. I think that I used to write, and play other games. I seem to remember spending time in the big blue room with the bright shiny orb at the top and the living green rug once in a while as well.