The Littlest Tree (or, So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish)

It’s been two months since I posted anything here, and they have been a long two months for me indeed.  To those few of you who comprised my little bloggy world and checked in with me regularly and (gasp!) even left a comment sometimes, I apologize sincerely for the utter lack of communication.  When I started blogging, I knew that it was joining in a conversation – one in which it was important for both sides to talk – and I’ve fallen down on my half of the job.  If it’s any comfort, I’ve been pretty quiet at home as well and near silent on WoW.

You see, shortly after my last post, my paladin and I discovered that my constant nausea was not, in fact, Electro Gonorrhea (The Noisy Killer), as we feared, but rather the beginning of my now-11-weeks-and-counting pregnancy.  Since then, I have become employed, been nauseous on a daily basis, had weird cravings for foods I don’t normally enjoy, cried a lot at commercials, and held my pally’s hand so tightly he probably worried about bone breakage as we saw our little creation swimming around via a TV-sized ultrasound screen, its heartbeat so much faster than ours, its little world so complete for the moment, and ours completed in that moment as well.

What I haven’t done is play WoW other than my twice-weekly 10-man raids, for which I have logged on approximately 10 minutes beforehand and logged off immediately after.  There have been a lot of factors leading to my decline in playing – my morning sickness is worst in the evenings so I enjoy huddling on a couch instead of trying to suffer through talking to people and doing randoms, the constant need to do stuff (like heal) has tended to increase my icky feeling, and I’ve felt a general lack of caring for my characters, with the possible (and only slight) exception of Tazha.

The truth is that I only log on for the 10-man raids because I love the people I raid with, and I’m willing to suffer through a little nausea to hang out with them.  Plus we still haven’t killed the Lich King (although we’re knocking on his door.)  But the rest of WoW is lost to me for the moment in a wild combination of burnout, exhaustion, lack of new content, and pregnancy-related apathy towards video games…

This being the case (not to mention the impending addition to our little family), I am ending Wild Growth permanently.  I hope that as I finish out the first trimester, my interest in WoW will return somewhat, but with a full and active career and a full and active little tree growing inside of me, I know I won’t have time to devote to this blog.

I am keeping you all in my Google Reader, and I hope you won’t mind me popping in now and then on your blogs with a comment or two.  I want to say thank you to each and every one of you who read my blog, who participated in our dialogue, and who wrote your own blogs, since you have made my days brighter and more thoughtful.  The WoW community is blessed with a chorus of intelligent, inspired, funny, and caring voices, and I hope I added to that for the brief time I wrote this blog.  Just as I cherish most the connections with my friends-from-all-over in-game, I have cherished the connections I have made here as well.

So I’m off to my next great adventure.  Take care of yourselves, and thanks for reading.

Tazha and her newest little companion back in Teldrassil where her WoW adventure began.

Tornainbow

Last Monday was just one of those nights for my beloved 10-man raid.  (Secretly, I blame Super Bowl-related exhaustion, as we had cancelled our Sunday raid for football fans.)

You know a raid is off to a bad start when we wipe on trash mobs after managing to aggro not one, not two, but all four Deathbound Wards while clearing the last room before Marrowgar.  (The best I can guess is that after the first two were accidentally released by our hunter’s pet, the helpful NPC Alliance running through the first hall tripped the other two traps.)  We ran back in, pulled ourselves together, and wiped again.  On the trash.

Love is in the Breakfast

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, my hubby made me pancakes.

In the spirit of WoW, he made them into shapes:

WoW-Flavored Breakfast

Ah, to be young and a nerd and in love (with a pally willing to make delicious food for you).  Is there anything finer?

Disclaimer: WoW-Flavored Breakfast contains only milk, eggs, flour and other pantry goods.  No bones or other bits from “worthwhile enemies” included.

The Non-Tree Resto Druid

Sometimes it's more fun to just be an elf...

In this post over at Righteous Orbs, Chastity rightfully lambasts people who are blithely not trying in the current heroics and raids because their gear is so good, they don’t “need” to try.  Which is how, when last week’s raid weekly was Instructor Razuvious, most groups I went in with had half-assed-to-nearly-fail attempts because everyone was of the “whatever-it’s-Razuvious-I-could-do-this-with-one-hand-behind-my-back” mentality.  As a result, it was some of the sloppiest raiding I’d ever seen.  People ran all over, lost the bosses, and died left and right as I vainly tried to heal them through the insanity.  So, bravo, Chastity, for demanding that we do better.

That said, this post is actually about Taz and heroics.  Taz is geared to the nines and can heal most heroics pretty easily at this point.  She runs them to (a) earn frost badges and (b) help out guildies who need more badges.  And she often runs them in her regular Night Elf state, rather than tree form.  In Chastity’s post, the main example of “whatever” attitude was a Resto Druid who didn’t bother to heal in tree form and was proud of it simply because they “don’t need to.”  It made me think about why I heal in Taz form all too often in heroics (unless it’s Halls of Reflection) instead of gussied up like a tree, as nature and Blizzard intended.