Laundry Day

I don't have a washer and dryer in my appartment so I tend to wait as long as I can before making one big trip to the laundrymat - generally 4 weeks. I've got it down to a point where I'm in and out in under two hours. The problem is... I was planning on doing laundry last Sunday but I ended up being so sick I could barely get out of my chair and I felt exactly the same way on Monday. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I still had remnants of whatever was affecting me so I just went straight home after work. By Thursday I was feeling better but, eh... I'd made it that far. Why not just wait for the weekend, right?

So here I sit at the laundrymat in (what passes for) the bad part of town (in Vermont). The tiles are cracked. The washers are old and dented. The regulars have some opinions about which dryers to use and which ones to avoid. The ceiling tiles are stained and there's fly walking on the cover of the flourescent light above me. On the other hand, it's relatively cheap and, at the moment, it's empty except for me.

What surprises me, however, is the number of wireless signals I'm getting in this part of town. I'm getting no fewer than 10 signals right now. What surprised me even more is how many of them are secured. Only two aren't and of those, one has too weak a signal to connect to and the other one is only connecting at 1-2 mbps. I can't play WoW, but I _can_ make a blog entry.

My latest WoW projects have been getting Hiahotah the "Guardin of Cenarius" title - not because he needs another title but it seems like a very druidy thing to do and because of the amount of work I've already done - and getting Hoban a "the Hallowed" title.

Hiahotah is already exalted with the Cenarion Expedition because I wanted to get the Earthwarden. I did that by getting in every Steam Vault run our guild ever did for a number of months. When that wasn't enough, I single pulled the slaves in the hallway before the bridge to the second boss in Steam Vault for hours... About 8 of them, I'd say. At 12 rep per mob and with an average of around one Coilfang Armament per reset... It was excruciating. (Hold on... Time to move the laundry...)

OK... I'm back. Sorry about that. While it's totally awesome that I can still fit in clothes I wore 15 years ago and with the changes in my body, a lot of the more cavernous articles now look less clownish... 5 weeks worth of laundry... There's a _lot_ of it. But I digress... Where was I? Oh yeah... Guardian of Cenarius.

However, when I looked at his Cenarion Circle rep, Hiahotah wasn't even half way through Friendly. It makes for a long haul. I know because I've done that grind before. Back in the day, we were running AQ20 a lot and I really wanted the sword you could get 1) if you got the drop and 2) you were exalted with Cenarion Circle. So for weeks, I ran silithyst dust. If the Alliance controlled Silithus, it was because I had made the run about 190 times that day. I ground Twilight Cultists by the hundreds. I collected hundreds of texts. And I _got_ to exalted... And the drop came. It was between me and a druid. When he found out that I'd gotten to exalted with CC, he let me have it. A pretty mature attitude for a 13 year old.

So I got my sword... And I got it enchanted and I went out and even leveled my sword skills for a bit - I was that excited... Until it got replaced about 3 weeks later with a staff from later in AQ20. Typical.

So I thought about the grind a little and decided to see how I liked it at 70. I did a few quests. I tried the combat quests and those just weren't worth the time. So I went back to just grinding cultists. While they doubled the rep gained per mob from 1 to 2, the big improvement to the rep grind is that you now get 500 rep per encrypted text turn-in - up from 100. If you happen across the Twilight prophet (who is a lot easier to solo as a level 70 feral druid than with a level 60 fire mage), that's 7 to 10 texts right there. The cultists die in a couple of mangles. And with feline Feral charge, closing the gaps between them is faster. In just a few hours, I've gotten to 4k/21k to exalted. I might be able to do that by the end of the weekend.

As for Hoban the Hallowed... That was a quirk of the RNG. I won a roll on the helm and got the squashling as a drop from trick or treating. I'd already downed the Headless Horseman so from there it was mostly a question of flying to every inn in Azeroth and getting people to hit me with the wands. I hit up all the candy buckets and just with the people who were on last night, I got all but the ninja wand. When they remove the objective to collect one of each mask as a requirement for the title, I'll just have one wand left for the title. Someone in the guild will have it.

And now my laundry is "dry" (or at least what passes for dry here) so it's time to fold it and go home... Maybe I'll try to get into a Kara raid this afternoon. We'll see.