I have raided and stopped in ToR in the past 2 months. Lets put it this way, the guild lead and I don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on how to do things. There’s a set method of gear progression in the game. You get gear like this, 1.1 (Tionese), 1.2 (Columi),  and 1.3 (Rakatta). His logic has been lets do stuff to get 1.3 gear to do harder bosses that drop 1.3 gear. Instead of using 1.2 to get 1.3. I can kind of understand his logic about the gear making it a little easier, but it’s just not that logical. Either way, I’m pretty sure I’m done with MMO’s on the large scale now. WoW was great, but I don’t have the energy to do that again.

We’ve been bumped up in dodgeball leagues, we’re now in Tier A and it’s a little challenging. Definitely have to play harder and we have done better for the most part, but man the games are getting a little tougher. My right ring finger is perma-jammed. It is swollen all the time Also playing on a Thursday team now with a few new dodgeball friends. I have to admit, the community around the game is so fun and awesome. In the year and a half that I’ve been playing I’ve made more new friends than in the past 6 of volleyball.

Speaking of volleyball we’re in the winning tier of playoffs again. We’ve gone 17-2 in the last 2 rounds of round robin play. We won our first two games so now we can do no worse than 4th. But this is the closest we’ve come to first, fingers crossed we’ll get it.

So what has made my life so busy since the last post? Here are the events that have occurred in each of the consecutive weekends:

• Helped my buddy Lindz move into his new house.
• Empty weekend actually, not sure what ended up happening this weekend.
• Birthday get together.
• Out of town training, roommate opening for one of the biggest names in the trance world. Paul van Dyk, huge for him and he played an awesome set. If he ever puts something like that up, I’ll link it here. On this day at 4 AM after the show, I was awake for 23 of the past 24 hours.
• Volleyball tournament, placed 2nd because we choked. It was one of those, “They didn’t win it, we lost it” situations.
• Bachelor party (paintballing), separate birthday party afterwards for two other friends.

And for the weekends coming up, this is what is planned so far, again each point is a weekend:

• Avengers movie night. Giving blood, haircut, hopefully a bit of relaxing.
• LAN Party for Diablo 3. Having a bunch of friends over for a nerd weekend during the long weekend.
• Wedding to attend.
• Dodgeball tournament.

So yeah, it’s been a busy bit of time and the next few weeks are still as busy. Then later on there’s still another wedding to attend (which I’m in the wedding party of), so there’s another associated bachelor’s party.

Busy times, busy times indeed.

Current Track: Gareth Emery feat. Christna Novelli – Concrete Angel

I just watched this and it’s something that everyone should give some time to see.

Also, We are the Wednesday night Rec B dodgeball champs

I heard this early in my life and thought that I wouldn’t be one of those statistics. Not only just in that regard, but towards almost everything in life. I don’t want to become some statistic, I don’t live normally, I don’t follow convention. I live my life diversely, do as much as I can, be as impactful in the lives of others as possible. No one ever remembers the average guy, the one who just fades into the background, the one who doesn’t say much. Do his/her job, go home, watch TV/read by themselves, go to bed, repeat. That’s not something I ever wanted to become.

At this point in my life I can honestly say that I honestly could not have imagined that my changed outlook on life would come to this point 11 years later. Engaged, own my own house, an amazing circle of friends, living a life of perfection. That said, I’m about 4 years behind on my 10 year plan when I left high school, sorta. My plan back then was set like this:

• 18-21/22: Get my degree.
• 22-25ish: Move to the states and make money to pay off student loans and to build up a chunk and move back to Saskatoon.
• 25: Get married.
• 27: Have first kid.

Track of the week: Bryson Andres Covers Pumped Up Kicks

So I got engaged mentioned in the previous post, volleyball started up again, and 2 dodgeball teams. And also The Old Republic takes up the rest of the spare time. So far things have been going pretty good.

I dropped my second volleyball team in favour of a dodgeball one because I just could not stand one of the players. He just…. doesn’t try hard enough I find. It was frustrating because he is a player that goes to camps and doesn’t get better. He plays his defensive position wrong, I’ve tried suggesting to him to change where he stands so that he can be better defensively, but he still makes the same mistakes over and over. That said though, all the other players try, they have fun, but this guy is just a bit of a killjoy too. Ah well though, ended up on a dodgeball team on the same night so I’m still keeping active on that night.  That second night is less intense for sure.

I also started a bit of a challenge that a friend put up. 1 push up, per day, accumulating through the year. I did a test at the beginning of the year, 14 push-ups before I had to stop. As of this morning, 20 before I had to take a break. It’s been getting a little harder for the past week or so, eventually I’ll have to put more time into it, but I think it’s going to help out in the end. I just wish I could lose the gut. It really is my own personal biggest sore spot. It jiggles

No new track this time, but you get this instead. One of the teammates has started recording videos and attached is the highlights vid of the first game. Note my fast hands @ 1:55. Duck Dodgers Game 1 Highlights.

It’s official now, I’m engaged.

Proposal Video

Onto other news.

The holidays put a damper on my updating, as did the release of The Old Republic. The game is taking up a pretty decent chunk of my spare time which is good and great and fun for holidays, but I’ll need to get back into exercise and my regular social schedule to ensure that I don’t drop all my time into this game.

The funny thing is that this time around, almost everyone I know is going healing, myself included and it’s going to make it a little difficult to ensure that we have a proper group balance, but I’m sure we can find ways of making things work. Fortunately it seems that there is a lot of flexibility in the talent trees to allow for a healer to swap over to DPS with little or no gear change. Time and more in-depth research will tell though since the game is still so new.

Christmas was pretty good, I got a Playstation Move, a few books, a nice red sweater, and a few other odds and ends that are Rider related.

Other random news, blood donation #25 just passed, they sent me a fancy new gold card. I’ll get a picture of that up at some point as well.

Current track: David Guetta – Without You ft. Usher – (Piano/Cello) Cover

Earning my way up to my current reputation level of 4750. Just to give you an idea, you only get 10 points for each upvote (people who think that your answer was helpful) and only 15 points if your answer is accepted as the answer by the person asking the question.

Anyway they tossed this up: http://meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/3375/gaming-promotional-grant-winter-holiday-season to give away and help support people in their community. I got chosen!! So what that means is that I’ll essentially be getting my copy of TOR for free next week

/happy dance

Current Track: Ellie Goulding – Lights (Enjoy the experience)

Christmas shopping will be done this weekend. Can’t believe that it’s only 2 weeks away…

Going to be the first winter in this house, time to see how it fairs. So far I’ve had to re-weather strip the front door. That landing got mighty cold in the early bits of cold snaps that we’ve had so far. But we’ll see how it holds up.

Instead of a current track I want to share this with all of you:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePianoGuys

They are fan-freaking-tastic.

I was on Vacation (I’m using this term loosely) with Chrystal, Steve, and Diana we were there for a short amount of time, but I couldn’t really remember for what reason. I do remember that were were on a lake in some wooded area when there was a wolf attack, like 4 packs of 4, but we jumped in the lake and swam across and they didn’t get to us. So we slowly made our way to somewhere in Germany. All the while trying to hire a sniper (this part I can attribute to this week’s episode of Castle).

I woke up with a very intense feeling of having to get back to Paris from Germany. Fell back asleep and the dream continued. People in my dream spoke French, I remember asking a bus drive “Parlez-vouz Anglais?” And found out there was a bus that would take us to the bullet train station that would get us back to Paris on time to catch our flight.

Sometimes my dreams are more entertaining than TV shows now a days. I fear that the future generation will not have the ability to be “bored” and let their imagination run wild.

Volleyball:
I seem to have found a tournament only team that consists of myself, my cousin, and 4 other friends. The funny thing about this team is that we only ever play together for tournaments that are held by the Calgary Sports and Social Club. We didn’t do too bad, we’re playing at the Intermediate Plus level which is just one tier down from competitive. We’ve placed 2nd and 3rd in the tournaments that we’ve played in.

We do need to play as a team more often to be honest. I takes time to build a cohesion and it seems that we just reset every time we end up playing together. It takes a game or two, but in a tournament setting, every point counts and it ends up hurting us. Ah well, it’s still a fun day spent with a pretty fun group of people.

That said, I feel that I could certainly work on getting my game up more. Drop some more weight (currently at 216) so that I can move faster and jump higher. Maybe then I can get to be really competitive. I don’t know what it is either, but I have felt that I compete at a lower competitive level now. I felt something click a few weeks ago, maybe a few months ago now, but it certainly made me view my game play differently. I feel like I play much better, but not at my maximum potential yet.

Dodgeball:
This game has ended up being a lot more fun than one would think. It makes you sweat pretty good, we play in the rec division due to a few of our players not being on the same level athletically as everyone else. But the games are still fun and we do well as a team. We’ve been improving every season and even last season we had our chance to play for first. Ended up second. This season is coming to a close pretty quickly and we’re ranked 4th so we’ll still have a shot at first.

Video games:
Starcraft 2 wise as a single player I’m ranked somewhere in the top 30% of the players world wide. 2 seasons ago I was among the top 13%. I guess it’s not too bad I defintely want to play it more, but it is just so much of a time sink to move up higher. Granted the pros get paid 50k for winning a tournament. I really would need to quit my job and focus on it if I wanted to do that. I just feel that I was born 10 years too late to do this as a job. Don’t get me wrong, players like White-Ra are 30 and still doing well in tournaments and pulling in some decent coin, but I’ll just do it as a hobby.

Dungeon Defenders is another game I’ve been playing recently with some friends as well. It’s a tower defence game that integrates a first/third person RPG interaction/elements. You protect a crystal from the monsters that spawn by building a variety of different towers, auras, barriers, and traps. There are scaling levels of difficulty and challenges. You also accumulate gear and have options to upgrade the gear as well. So there is a lot of customization available for the game. If you so feel like it, shoot me an e-mail (address in the right) with your Steam account and we can play together, the game is only 15 bucks.

Now the big news I suppose. I thought I had passed on playing The Old Republic, well I was wrong. I got into the closed beta 2 weekends ago and Bioware has me hooked. Now I’ve loved their RPGs that they’ve made, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, I even tried Jade Empire (didn’t get around to finishing that one though). The fully voiced quest interaction is phenomenal. It really gets you into the story like the Bioware RPGs do, but there are some MMO elements added in as well. Like elite mobs that you cannot solo. There are dungeons as well, called Flashpoints, that are very fun and challenging. That said though, my buddy and I were able to duo a 4 man instance with our companions.

So a few of my old WoW guildies will be joining me in this endeavour as well. I got into a friend’s guild and they had a open door policy so we’ve added about 50% to their current roster size. It’s going to be great to play with all these people again. I do miss that bit of socialization with that game. I also look forward to doing something challenging in a game that requires a group of people to do.

Social life/Random Stuff:
I gave blood for the 25th time in my life just this past weekend. Considering that I can only do this every 2 months, I can back track that I’ve been doing it consistently for at least the past 3 years… that’s quite a bit of time to be devoting to it. Like I’ve said before, I’m not doing it to get karma points, or even to brag about it, but I feel like it is something that I should be doing. I’m a healthy young man, and realistically, it’s a renewable resource. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be helping.

Had friends over a few weekends ago for Thanksgiving 2. I believe I should make this an annual occurance. It started a few years ago when a few of us friends got together for Thanksgiving because all our families are in other provinces/cities, or we all just ended up with no plans for it. Well now it’s just a group of friends getting together, potluck style, and having some good food and some great company. Crokinole was busted out, so was an old school Nintendo and some head to head Dr. Mario action. Apparently you can be a douche-bag playing that game… but I’m still the overall winner, douche-bag and all.

The house is still great, (I need to get pictures up here), but there is a few things that I need to fix. Loose floorboards, 2 bathroom fans that need to be replaced, drafty doors (which should be taken care of tomorrow). I technically own it, but it really doesn’t feel like it’s my house, like possession-wise it’s just somewhere I’m living. I do enjoy coming home to it every day, but it hasn’t really sunk in that “I own this place”. Not like the realization of the time where I got, “Holy crap, I’m buying a house”. Maybe it’s supposed to be the same feeling, but I think they should be different.

Alright, so as far as updates are concerned, I think I’m going to try to do weekly updates.

Current Track:
Usher – DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love ft. Pitbull
(This song makes me wants to dance pretty hard).

Okay, well quick notes, bought a town house.
Went on an awesome canoe/portaging trip. Dodgeball team has solidified nicely, volleyball still ongoing. But I’ll start posting more soon.