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WoW mostly

I’ve been in a gaming mood lately, which is unusual for me. I’ve managed to level 2 times in the last week, which sounds lame but the gap from 85-86 and 86-87 is a hefty one to cross. I’m now only 3 levels away from cap, which is really exciting. I’m very much a mood gamer – restraint isn’t usually an issue for me, as when I generally game it’s only for an hour or two until I get bored. Occasionally I’ll have periods, like this/last week and a few weeks over the summer, where I just feel like playing to my hearts content and find the whole experience enjoyable (if I were to push myself to do that, I’d have an hour of fun, and then just be bored).
I’m finally in Pandaria, which is beautiful. It’s obvious that Blizzard put a lot of effort into it – and it’s better than when I tested it in Beta last spring. I love being somewhat immersed in story lines when I’m on these gaming kicks, and that’s what makes it fun for me.
Anyway, I’ve been gaming extensively for the last week and a half. I forgot where this was going other than to maybe prove and remind myself that I’m allowed to indulge and game all I want when I feel like I want to – it happens so rarely that there’s no need to be judgey about it. Then, when I’m done, I can go back to being a responsible adult.
But for however long this lasts, I’m going to continue to run around, pick flowers, defeat beasts, and fly on kites.
kite flying

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Ding!

Fun Stuff

I hit level 75 in WoW today, finally! I’ve been super super awful about playing lately, so today I decided to just do that instead of sitting at my computer debating about doing that, story boarding, or making the bed and spending the whole time flicking through facebook, etsy, pinterest, and random blogs until I came to a conclusion. Yeah, that’s usually what happens when I can’t decide what to do next.
Also, our new, bigger, muslin green-screen and clamps and lens cleaner came in today! so I expect that I’ll be spending the evening playing with the green screen and maybe doing some more storyboarding.

Etsy

Yesterday I launched the 2nd painting in my Thing-A-Week promo. So far it’s all watercolors that I’ve painted before and wasn’t sure about listing. I’ve been wanting to list them, but just didn’t know how to introduce them, but then I started the Thing-A-Week, and it just seemed perfect, so this weeks watercolor painting is Blue Shadows.

 New Look

You might have noticed, also, that I changed some things on the front page. I created a logo, favicon, and updated the banner. I also redesigned my etsy banner and profile images – finally. Last night I was finally able to get a copy of Fireworks CS3 running on my macbook pro. I’ve been trying for ages but it never actually worked – until last night. So I spent all evening updating my banners and such and enjoying playing with that again. It looks sooooo much better than before.

Reading

I finished Faerie Wars the other day and started The Last Unicorn. Faerie wars was amazing and I can’t wait to get the other books from the library. I’m a little over half-way through The Last Unicorn, and at first it wasn’t as interesting, but then I ended up spending all of yesterday afternoon glued to the pages. I have a lot of ideas and new images for when I start painting again. I’ve taken a break, unintentionally – moving furniture around has some of my painting-ness a little discombobulated. I need to find another corner for my easel.
 

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How to Make a Disaster (and then do something with it)

Yesterday, I spent all afternoon making a paper chain of rainbow hearts to put over the office door. Kind of like the bead things, but cheaper, because I had paper,markers, super glue and string. It looked fantastic

I don’t know whether to blame the cat or the slightly open window for the chain-turned-distaster last night, but this morning when I woke up, it was all a pile on the floor and looked like this. 

I spent the same amount of time making it yesterday as I did trying to untangle it today. But I couldn’t untangle it. I was too tired and frustrated and so I decided to just give up and do something else with it. So I grabbed some more tape and a chair and decided to make a ceiling decoration instead.

So now there’s a pretty rainbow paper chandelier near the door in my office, that hopefully won’t fall down again tomorrow morning.

Life

Today I’m going to make into a personal day, at least what’s left of it. I’m tired, I haven’t played World of Warcraft in ages and I spent most of the day trying to fix something that didn’t work. So I’m going to play World of Warcraft at some point and then maybe do some reading up on things and maybe, *maybe* work on some crocheting for International Yarn Bombing day. It’s one of those I-feel-frustrated-and-angsty-and-restless-but-too-tired-to-do-anything days, which are horribly frustrating. I’m *not* going to make myself spend it cleaning (as much as that needs to be done) because that’ll kind of defeat the purpose.

Yesterday was nice though, Alex surprised me with an adorable shirt from Gap and then took me to see Bridesmaids after we went grocery shopping.

Food

We got bagels yesterday, so we had some for breakfast – I’m not sure what we’re having for dinner yet, probably just something easy. We need to run and get all the fresh and cold things we didn’t get yesterday.

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Keep Off the Dirigible Plums

I decided to try something new today and paint standing up. I held my palette of watercolors in one hand, brush in the other and had a cup of water on the desk beside me. It worked out pretty well actually, and I think I hurt my shoulders less than I usually do, so that’s a plus. Anyway, I decided to take another thing from Harry Potter and paint Dirigible Plums. We were introduced to them in the last movie, and thought they were cool, especially how they kinda floated and grew upside down – I reached that part of the book today, and as I’m (intending on) only reading listening to half of the Deathly Hallows until the last half of the movie comes out. Mostly because Alex wants to keep up with the story the way we have been and doesn’t think a month with one of us knowing the ending would be very fun – I’m going to wait until we reach chapter 24 and go from there, it might drive me nuts. 😉

I’m trying to decide if I should keep everything to one post a day and have art mixed in with dinner and life and World of Warcraft, or if I should separate them into separate posts spaced out every few hours. While I’m thinking about that, I’ll just go mush it all into one post for now.
*World of Warcraft*
I spent the morning doing some more quests around Dragonblight, and I really like Emerald Dragonshire, it’s pretty and there are birds and flowers, admittedly, they try to kill you, but if you kill them first you can gather herbs or watch them reincarnate, which is nice and makes you feel good about yourself. I also ended up getting some nice armor that I can sell once I get to some vendors or an auction house, raking in the gold nicely too, eventually I’ll make enough to buy a fast flying mount and training for it.
*Cooking*
I had every intention of making soup (and tea, darn) this afternoon, like, 2 hours ago, but then I started painting. I suppose I could make it the old fashioned non-crockpot way, but I feel like that involves a lot more standing and stirring, and I’ve just been standing for the last 2 hours, and walked a little over a mile before that, and my legs are still sore and stiff from all the walking and extra exercising with the kinect I did yesterday (and need to do again today come to think of it). So I think I’ll make chicken with a spinach salad instead…or something.

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Sluggish

I thought I was tired yesterday. I’m beginning to think that I need the sun to like, live and stuff.
I can’t seem to muster up the energy to do much of anything. I did play World of Warcraft until the lag or connection or something overtook it and I was wandering around Azshara waiting for snipers to come out of trees and they never did, and my companion stopped following me, it wasn’t until I tried to exit my machine 30 minutes later that I realized something must not be working right.
It’s that kind of day. My brain is slow.
So, I went on a walk, and came back and decided I didn’t want to make soup for dinner after all, and I didn’t want to do the dishes, and I didn’t have the energy to paint (seriously, the last time there was a *glimpse* of sun was sometime last week) because it would involve doing dishes so I could clean my palette.  Although, I did come up with a brilliant idea of *what* to paint when my energy returns to me.
The golden snitch! It’s yellowish. When I paint again, and consequently, use my last canvas – I want to paint something bright…and Harry Potter related. The Snitch is perfect for that.
I’ve spent the time since then on Pinterest -where I’ve been finding cool artistic things and pinning them. I have a board for things to inspire me, and things that I like, and house things, and cool things. I’ve had way too much fun with it – you can even follow me here: http://pinterest.com/kiery/
Lastly, dinner is frozen steak fajitas from TGI Friday’s, because…….I’m freezing, tired, and neither of us feel like actually cooking.

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Bubble Fairy (and Transmutation)

So today, I got in my gaming keypad and spent the morning getting used to it while listening to some podcast about Sherlock Holmes (the movie, with RDJr.). I found a sweet spot in Nagrand above the throne of elementals where, well, all the elementals live and you can farm for motes to your hearts content. I caved and bought motes of fire from the Auction House but there were no Motes of Air or Primal Air to be found (same thing with the Overcharged Capacitor. I finally gave up and abandoned the quest. If it ever comes back, I’ll pick it up again) until I found the spot where the Storming Wind-Rippers lived. I’ll be getting used to my new keypad over the next few days questing, and then when I’m used to it, maybe I’ll try it out in a dungeon or two.
It’s hard to get used to, but I really like it so far, and I think it’ll be really simple once I’m fully adapted.
So then, after the Holme’s podcast, I put in some more Harry Potter and got out my watercolors. It always helps me to do something when I’m listening to things, I don’t really know why. Habit, I guess. So while Jim Dale was talking about the Marauder’s Map and Quidditch and Dementors, I was painting a fairy floating amidst bubbles.
bubble fairy
I added a wizard hat because it seemed fun. I’ve had sort of an obsession with bubbles or polka dotted backgrounds lately. I don’t know why, it just adds a bit of interesting-ness. So I made another drawing.
fairy with polkadot backgroundI used a pen until the ink was being weird and then used the special comic-making inky marker/pen Alex got last summer. I like the effect, kinda reminds me of 101 Dalmatians….

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Brrrr

My brain has been working overtime the last few days, but today, all it can think is “COLD COLD COLD GO AWAY”. So there’s this snowstorm in April, and I’m bundled, sitting in front of a fire and still freezing. I look outside the window and all I can see is white fog, with grey outlines where trees are supposed to be, and even those are slowly fading into white as snow keeps piling up on them. It’s kinda miserable and depressing, outside there’s no color, just this whitish-grey mix with brighter or duller spots depending on if you’re looking at snowflakes or trees.
I’m losing my train of thoughts and just trying to stay awake. So I’m putting my Season fairies on etsy and making them into stamps on zazzle until my computer is charged enough to play WoW. I hope eventually my thoughts will come back, because they were interesting but too many to write down at once. Maybe when I’m warm and less tired.

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untitled

So I have this great idea for an art card – a snow at night painting, with a fairy holding a lantern. But it’s too cold, grey, and dark outside for me to paint it (read: I’m too cold and tired). I also have another idea for my last 16×20 canvas…but again with the being super tired thing. Half of me feels like I should just go do it….but the other side of me also knows I haven’t been able to work up enough energy to sweep my floors (thanks winter :P) and should probably just take a nap.
 
I was hoping to play some WoW today, but it was down (I think it’s back up now) so I finished reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets instead. I bought it while I was in Oregon, because I wanted to read something lighter than Orwell. It feels really good to read (and finish) a book again. I didn’t realize how much I missed it – or how long it’d actually been since I read a story.  Now, I can go to the library and get the rest of the series. For some reason they were always out of book #2. It’s funny, I used to eat books up when I was in school, and so did my husband, but now we don’t anymore – we read lots of things online, or get books for information, like Act or Die, but as far as sitting down and reading a story, that doesn’t happen much. Actually, it mostly happens on our iOS devices while waiting in line for a movie showing. Go figure.
 
I’d like spring to come now, cold and grey and snow for another week just sounds horribly unpleasant.

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Fire, rain, and sleepy Kiery

When the alarms went off it was raining outside and dark in the room – perfect combination for sleeping in, so I did…until I started hearing sirens. At first I thought there was just an alarm going off at Starbucks and they sent a truck, as always to check it out (almost always false alarms) but then it got louder and closer. A few minutes later, more sirens, and it sounded like they were going down our street – they were. Apparently there was something going on at the school. I woke up, looked out the window – still rainy, couldn’t see any smoke, we opened the window in the kitchen and heard radio voices – and everyone was leaving the school. When I went outside on a walk, I noticed the air did smell a little smokey. I still don’t know what happened, just that I woke up from loud noises and then hoped it wouldn’t come over here (it didn’t).
So, I was grumpy, because I was tired and I decided to take it out in WoW. Mostly because I haven’t played in a while, and killing Lake Spirits for Motes of Water sounded like a good way to blow off some steam. The one problem with working the Master of Transmutation quest in Nagrand (because I’ve been wanting to quest there for a while) is that I’m 5 levels above everything – which is great for not dying, but not so hot on filling up the 3 bars I have left before I hit level 71 and get another talent point. Although, technically it’s for levels 64-70. I think the reason I waited so long was because I was flying over once at level 62 or so, and got caught by one of the guarded pvp areas with a level 72 something, which made me think I needed to wait longer than I did. Anyway, I *know* Nagrand has all the mats I need because I’ve seen all the elements there, but after I finish the other quests  I have, I think I’ll hit Shadowmoon Valley so I can get the Explore Outland achievement before moving onto Northrend.