20 Days of Blogging: Your workplace/desk

Day 01 – Introduce yourself
Day 02 – Why you decided to start a blog
Day 03 – Your first day playing WoW
Day 04 – Your best WoW memory
Day 05 – Favourite item(s) in game
Day 06 – Your workplace/desk (photo and/or description)
Day 07 – The reason behind your blog’s name
Day 08 – 10 things we don’t know about you
Day 09 – Your first blog post
Day 10 – Blog/Website favourites
Day 11 – Bad habits and flaws
Day 12 – A usual day in your life/online time
Day 13 – People (players/bloggers) that you admire
Day 14 – This upsets you
Day 15 – Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it
Day 16 – Things you miss (post Cataclysm)
Day 17 – Your favourite spot (in game or outside it)
Day 18 – Your favourite outfit
Day 19 – In your bags/bank
Day 20 – If this was your last day playing WoW, what would you do?

I started Saga’s challenge back in March 2012 and as you can see from the list above, still haven’t come anywhere close to completing it.  Hopefully 2014 will be the year which brings closure to a number of things, this list of prompts included.

This is the chaos which passes for my desk area these days. I have a bad habit of sticking anything and everything which takes my fancy to the wall, sketches of my own, postcards, printouts of graffiti, poems and a tooth fairy bag containing one of my four wisdom teeth. Yes my keyboard could probably do with a clean and I have a tendency to harbor all my junk around my monitor. The little witch sitting on the right hand side is Vera from Veracruz, a Halloween gift who was carried across Mexico and then the Atlantic from her home town, squished in amongst books, clothes and a giant wooden skeleton. The silhouette postcard of the witches flying before a full moon attached to the pink pinboard I’ve had since I was a little girl. It’s traveled across Europe and survived surprisingly well. There are homages to many of my favourite things, Moomins (long story), spaniels, Dracula and Klimt as well as a few random wild cards thrown in. In fact, it’s the story of my life give or take a few bits and pieces.

Here we have  a little close up of said “junk”, including my plush windrider cub, my wind-up glow in the dark skeleton and a pin cushion (always handy for a spot of poppet stabbing should other players annoy).

 

20 Days of Blogging: Why you decided to start a blog

Back roughly in sequence, this is day 2 of Saga’s 20 days of Blogging.

Day 01 – Introduce yourself
Day 02 – Why you decided to start a blog
Day 03 – Your first day playing WoW
Day 04 – Your best WoW memory
Day 05 – Favourite item(s) in game
Day 06 – Your workplace/desk (photo and/or description)
Day 07 – The reason behind your blog’s name
Day 08 – 10 things we don’t know about you
Day 09 – Your first blog post
Day 10 – Blog/Website favourites
Day 11 – Bad habits and flaws
Day 12 – A usual day in your life/online time
Day 13 – People (players/bloggers) that you admire
Day 14 – This upsets you
Day 15 – Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it
Day 16 – Things you miss (post Cataclysm)
Day 17 – Your favourite spot (in game or outside it)
Day 18 – Your favourite outfit
Day 19 – In your bags/bank
Day 20 – If this was your last day playing WoW, what would you do?

Why did I start blogging?

Well I’ve always been a screenshot addict, filling folder after folder and I’ve always been avid reader of other blogs, both WoW related and otherwise. At first my intention was to keep a private on-line diary about my experiences playing WoW, just a repository of the stuff I was interested in along with somewhere to store my pictures. At the time I was in a guild with Seph and when she started blogging, I decided to give it a go too. For the first year or so, I  kept quiet, making sure that if I commented on anyone else’s blog, I didn’t use a link so that no one could track down my random musings. Then when I returned to raiding full time with my old guild, I decided to transfer my blog from Blogger to WordPress and “go public” so to speak. I finally got around to signing up with Blog Azeroth and posting actual comments as Erinys rather than some anonymous lurker.

Ultimately though, I blog because I love to write. I enjoy sharing bits and pieces of my life, both in-game and out with the wonderful people I’ve met through blogging and can’t imagine not doing it anymore.

There is just something about hanging out my verbal linen which appeals to me.

20 Days of Blogging – Your first day playing WoW

Today’s random number is 3.

Day 01 – Introduce yourself
Day 02 – Why you decided to start a blog
Day 03 – Your first day playing WoW
Day 04 – Your best WoW memory
Day 05 – Favourite item(s) in game
Day 06 – Your workplace/desk (photo and/or description)
Day 07 – The reason behind your blog’s name
Day 08 – 10 things we don’t know about you
Day 09 – Your first blog post
Day 10 – Blog/Website favourites
Day 11 – Bad habits and flaws
Day 12 – A usual day in your life/online time
Day 13 – People (players/bloggers) that you admire
Day 14 – This upsets you
Day 15 – Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it
Day 16 – Things you miss (post Cataclysm)
Day 17 – Your favourite spot (in game or outside it)
Day 18 – Your favourite outfit
Day 19 – In your bags/bank
Day 20 – If this was your last day playing WoW, what would you do?

I have to admit I wasn’t convinced when Mr Harpy pointed out World of Warcraft on the shelf. Prior to that point, the only computer games I’d played seriously were first person shooters and I had mixed feelings about the multi-player aspect of the game*. We picked up one copy and brought it home and got it installed. In fact at first I wasn’t convinced at all, we died to owls, spiders (lots and lots and lots of spiders) and cats. We got lost in caves and fell off things. There were other people with weird names running around and everything seemed dark and depressed. Oh and did I mention the dying to random things. In fact I think I gave up between levels 4 and 10, by which time Mr Harpy had found a guild, a boat to Auberdine and discovered sea monsters. In the end it was the baby Loch Ness monsters and the sheer size of the world which dragged me back in. At first we thought Teldressil seemed huge and so finding it out that it was just a tiny acorn compared to what else existed out there for us to explore…. well that took our breathe away.

It didn’t take long until sitting sharing a character wasn’t good enough and I went out and bought my own version of the game. I promptly rolled a Warlock and then discovered PvP….. the rest as they say is history.

*In fact thinking about it, I still do have my reservations about that area of the game. In many ways my comfort zone is playing pretty much solo because that way if I screw up, there is no one there to see it. Plus in what I’m doing now which is primarily random battlegrounds, everyone else seems to be doing the same, i.e playing “interestingly” or worse. Sure I miss raiding, or rather I miss feeling like part of a team but then I’m too insecure to play well with others because at the slightest hint of a mistake, I’m fighting the urge to delete my character. It’s weird because in real life, I’m actually far more confident or perhaps I’ve just got a whole lot better at hiding it. I deal with confrontations on a daily basis, people screaming abuse in my face, crying, screaming and throwing blame around like candy but that’s fine, it’s roughly what I get paid for but switch that to an on-line situation and I struggle to cope. Maybe it’s because I know I’m good at my job but less convinced about WoW or perhaps it’s because I know I suck at WoW and I hate having it pointed out. Who knows, maybe I’m just weird..

20 Days of Blogging – Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it

Okay, it turned out that doing this in order doesn’t work for me so today I’m doing number 15 – My Desktop background. (from Saga’s 20 days of Blogging).

Day 01 – Introduce yourself
Day 02 – Why you decided to start a blog
Day 03 – Your first day playing WoW
Day 04 – Your best WoW memory
Day 05 – Favourite item(s) in game
Day 06 – Your workplace/desk (photo and/or description)
Day 07 – The reason behind your blog’s name
Day 08 – 10 things we don’t know about you
Day 09 – Your first blog post
Day 10 – Blog/Website favourites
Day 11 – Bad habits and flaws
Day 12 – A usual day in your life/online time
Day 13 – People (players/bloggers) that you admire
Day 14 – This upsets you
Day 15 – Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it
Day 16 – Things you miss (post Cataclysm)
Day 17 – Your favourite spot (in game or outside it)
Day 18 – Your favourite outfit
Day 19 – In your bags/bank
Day 20 – If this was your last day playing WoW, what would you do?

This is my current desktop background, a picture of Dorrie the little witch and her cat sitting reading in a library. When I was small, I loved these books by Patricia Coombs both for the stories and the pictures.

Before that, I’ve had a mix of things. Some WoW screenshots like this one:

and proper photographs like these two:

Basically I pick images I like either from my own photo collection or from the random images on the internet I have access to.

20 days of Blogging: Introduce yourself

A while ago now, I started Saga’s 20 days of blogging challenge but then I promptly got distracted and forgot all about. That is until now, when lots of other bloggers have started completing it and I realised that I’d abandoned it part way through.

Day 01 – Introduce yourself
Day 02 – Why you decided to start a blog
Day 03 – Your first day playing WoW
Day 04 – Your best WoW memory
Day 05 – Favourite item(s) in game
Day 06 – Your workplace/desk (photo and/or description)
Day 07 – The reason behind your blog’s name
Day 08 – 10 things we don’t know about you 
Day 09 – Your first blog post
Day 10 – Blog/Website favourites
Day 11 – Bad habits and flaws
Day 12 – A usual day in your life/online time
Day 13 – People (players/bloggers) that you admire
Day 14 – This upsets you
Day 15 – Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it
Day 16 – Things you miss (post Cataclysm)
Day 17 – Your favourite spot (in game or outside it)
Day 18 – Your favourite outfit
Day 19 – In your bags/bank
Day 20 – If this was your last day playing WoW, what would you do?

Now it probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I didn’t start at the beginning before, but this time around I thought I’d be good and begin where stories are supposed to begin, at the start.

Hi, I’m Erinys, otherwise known as Sprout, Scarlet, Pip Squeak and a whole bunch of other names depending on whom you speak to. I work in Housing which is both fascinating and frustrating and spend far too much time commuting to work.

I like spicy food, crisp autumn days where the faint scent of apples lingers on the breeze and walks on the beach. Oh and I’m rather fond of a certain Chibi maker.

Other than having green hair, if I was a chibi I might look a bit like this and yes, once upon a time in my misspent youth I had shoes like that.

Oh and when I’m not commuting, working or playing WoW, I rather like taking photographs of things.

20 Days of Blogging: 10 things you didn’t know about me (Day 8)

Joining in on Saga’s 20 days of Blogging Challenge was always something I intended doing but just never got around to. So better late than never, I thought I’d start by picking a random number.

Day 8 – 10 things you didn’t know about me!

I. I hate lifts. I’d rather walk up twenty flights of stairs than set foot inside a lift because they are demonic creatures likely to turn on you the second you show weakness. When I was eleven or so, I lived on the 4th floor of an apartment building. Normally I’d always use the stairs, better exercise and I was unlikely to get stuck. However this one particularly day, a friend and I had been roller-skating and rather than take our skates off, we decided to be lazy. We had however forgotten one highly important factor, the lift always jerks slightly when moving off. Now whilst this is fine when you’re stood up, it’s not so good when you’re on wheels. So one minute we were standing there chatting, next, we were on the floor in considerable pain. To add insult to injury, at school we had to wear gym knickers (for those of you who never had the “pleasure”, think very short hotpants) for games, which did not come close to covering my rather extensive bruising. To this day, I know my teachers didn’t believe my “the lift beat me” story. They looked oddly at my father for many parent’s evenings to come. Now I’m sure most logical minds would apportion blame to the roller-skates and continue using lifts, but I swear that evil mechanical construct saw it’s chance and took it. I’ll stick to the stairs thanks.

2. I have a birthmark in the shape of a Space Invader on my stomach.

3. I once drove across Mexico, coast to coast and back in a car with no number plates. This is an “awesome” way of meeting local law enforcement. I still hear people yelling “sin placa” in my sleep. Much to our surprise, even when we were speeding, they were mostly all polite and friendly. We got told off a few times but that was it, they were more interested in where we came from and what we thought of their country than anything else.

4. I’ve been fascinated with crocodiles, dinosaurs and sharks ever since I can remember.

Look at their “hands”!

5. My nick name at University was Scarlet. You may use your imaginations to decide why. I might even award a cookie to anyone who guesses correctly in the comments.

6. My perfect meal would be Sopa de Lima, Jägerschnitzel and my Great Grandmamma’s Apple Doughnuts. If you’ve never tried the first two, shame on you! If you have tried the third, then we’re probably related… hmm this is awkward.

7. My first crush was on a guy who had the Grim Reaper tattoo’d on one arm and a naked lady on the other. He was a soldier and my Dad was his boss, he also got to babysit for me and boy, did I learn a lot from him. Including the fact that should I ever have kids, I won’t be letting a 20 year old soldier with a large porn collection and no sense of responsibility look after them. He also taught me to swear in multiple languages (handy for swearing in front of your parents when they don’t speak said languages), how to shoot and how to put my hair in a French plait, all of which are useful life skills.

8. Scooby Doo and the Headless Horseman terrified me for years. I’d just got over that when I watched Sleepy Hollow and promptly got scared again.

9. Scottish Country Dancing almost killed me and I have the scar to prove it! (I treat it with the same caution I show to lifts these days).

10. I can get lost anywhere, supermarkets, barrow dens in WoW, cities laid out on grids. Doesn’t matter how simple it may seem to most people, I can still manage to get misplaced. It annoys my husband considerably since I don’t think he’s ever been lost in his life (at least not that he’d admit to). In fact I think he’d like to keep me on one of these.