Rainbow Tentacles

This morning is a getting to a bit of a late start because reasons.  Firstly I am off for Veterans day, and I want to take a brief moment to thank those who fought to protect our country.  Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, my wife’s step-dad fought as part of the Chosin Few in Korea, and various sundry other family members have been in the military during peace and war time.  If you see anyone out and about, take a moment to thank them for their service.  The little things like that, feel all the more important during these last few days because of the sequence of events that has happened from essentially Tuesday onwards.  As for me… its been a weird series of days.  Firstly I just couldn’t put myself in the mindset of being able to write a blog post, so instead you got an intermission.  I genuinely expected to pick up Thursday morning and begin blogging as normal once again.  However fate seemed to conspire against me because in the middle of the crushing depression that I was going through Tuesday…  my blog disappeared off the face of the internet.  It seems my web host had some sort of catastrophic hardware failure, and that since I had yet to migrate to newer harder…  partially my own fault…  the site went down until it could get moved completely.  The positive is that I seem to have lost nothing in the process other than I am sure readers who probably thought I was going dark… given the post that I had left that morning.  It feels odd to have taken a somewhat forced break… and then be back just for Friday before taking the weekend off.

wow-64-2016-11-09-20-39-01-17

As far as my own mental state… I have to say raiding with the guild on Wednesday helped it immensely.  For some reason it has become what seems like a new tradition to paint me with the rainbow generator before battles.  Here we are waiting on the Xavius fight to begin… and I am glowing with really strange rainbow tentacles as I tend to think of them.  I always feel like I am straight out of whimsyshire.  On a more serious note though… I could not be more proud of my guild and the raid attached to it.  The position I have assumed in the world is vastly different, because I am not leading the guild… and to some extent that still feels odd.  Kylana assumed the reins after Rylacus went into Final Fantasy XIV… and I have to say that while Ry and I were essentially the same sort of leader…  Kylana is way better than I have ever been at the day to day administrata.  That is really the place where he shines, and doing things like making sure everyone gets guild rank promotions on time… without having to be pestered about it a dozen times.  As for me…  I pretty much live in this position of guild mascot.  Folks still ask me to do responsible adult style things, but mostly I try to defer to the judgement of Ky.  I am still very much the chief recruiter and tour guide, but it feels okay to not be the king.

As for raiding…  there are certain fights where I am taking a much bigger role at least in communicating the mechanics.  I’ve started barking orders on Iggy and it seems to go more smoothly when I let folks know what they should be fighting and when… and roughly how much time we have left to burn.  As far as Emerald Nightmare in general… other than us tanks completely screwing up Ursoc…  we had probably the smoothest night we have ever had and made a really quick work of the entire instance.  We had enough time to put in about thirty minutes of attempts on Heroic Nythendra…  which is way rougher than the original.  I remember rolling into Emerald Nightmare for the first time and feeling amazing when we oneshot her…  only to feel frustration again when we struggled with SpiderBirb.  Ultimately more than anything I feel happy we have made progress.  It feels like we started as a disconnected group of folks that sometimes ran dungeons together… and have exited a highly functional team.  I mean I had worked in the past a few times with Art, when I had to fill in tanking during our Warlords raid… but he is a super dependaeble tanking partner.  Of course I also love tanking beside Ashgar who fills in when Art has not been able to make it.

As far as other matters go… I am trying my best to focus on the positive things in life for awhile.  This is not me burying my head in the sand, but me trying to return to a sense of normality for my own mental health.  I am just as confused and frustrated as anyone by the recent turn of events, but I also know that there is very little that is directly in my realm of control.  So I am going to focus on the things I do control, and try my best to get happy again.  For those of you who are reading this… thanks so much for sticking by me throughout the years.  You all mean so much to me.

1 thought on “Rainbow Tentacles”

Comments are closed.