Resolute

Every year I make resolutions and every year I break them all, usually before January has bleed into February. In fact like many traditions observed in our house, it’s a pointless exercise but as the musical says ….. it’s all about balance.

This year though, my focus will be slightly different. We know there is a new expansion coming and I want to focus more on “spring cleaning” than anything else.

Warcraft

• Gear up my 90s properly so that they are all ready for a spot of time travel.
• Sort out their Transmogrifications. Too many of my characters are still wearing a mishmash of items even though I have so many outfits made up in MogIt. It’s time to start farming them rather than just playing with the addon.
• Clear out the banks. At the moment, especially on the characters I play regularly, my banks are full of junk. Does Snowflower really need enough preserved holly to kit out an entire 40 man raid in Reindeer? Probably not. Neither does she need 12 Frayed Abomination Stitchings or various volumes of Draconic for Beginners.
• Sort out the alt situation. I have a bad habit of making alts all over place and never doing anything with them. I need to go through them all carefully and decide who I should keep out of my 50 characters and who I’m never ever going to play and might as well slide off to the twisted nether.

Crafting

• I still haven’t made the grown up version of my tree of life, which I’ve been talking about doing for around 3 years.
• I want to try and make a papier mache Harpy.

Blogging

• Go through my drafts folder and finish all those half written posts and random ideas scrawled on bits of paper.
• Update my blog list to reflect all the stuff I read.

Personal

• I need to cook more. I have a brand new kitchen plus a whole bookcase full of cookery books which I haven’t made anything out of yet.
• Try and find away of dealing with my biggest issue at the moment which is anxiety in group situations both in game and out. I focus too much on my own performance, analyzing it in real time, searching out flaws which in turn hurts my ability to play properly. It’s hard to avoid always standing in bad when you’re desperately comparing your performance with other people in the raid. Gear seems to count for more than ever, Snowflower hit 90 and has around half the spell power of my Monk who in turn has considerably less spell power than most people, the ones who manage to do LFR and wear legendary cloaks that is. I know that invalidates straight forward comparisons but I can’t help but make them. I suppose it’s made worse by the fact that I feel I should have farmed better gear myself but the thought of doing content with strangers makes me sick to my stomach before I even queue up. PvP I can mostly manage simply because as long as you’re actually playing, you won’t get kicked and you can always turn off the chat log  if people start bitching too much. Although I haven’t logged my level 20 Paladin since she was told by a suicidal rogue who ran into the entire enemy team that she was the worse healer ever.  I don’t know if this lack of self-esteem is fixable or whether I’ve got too many years of my Mother telling me how useless I am under my belt but if I don’t try, I might as well just parcel up my stuff and cancel my subscription.
• Get fitter. It’s hard to believe I was once the terror of our hockey team (yes, the “enemy” players would sometimes just get out of the way to avoid my runs on goal) or that I ran for fun and peace of mind. I like hill walking and love riding, both of which have been massively neglected.

Here’s hoping that 2014 is a good year.