Vegetable Weekend

So there are Animal Weekends - filled with action, comings and goings, arrivals and exits, and at the end of it, a feeling of exhaustion. And there are Mineral Weekends, solid, productive, cerebral - whether it is working on a freelance project or tackling a novel. Again, at the end is a feeling of progress.

And then there are the Vegetable Weekends. These are inert, lumpy things, and when you get to the end of them you can't really say you've accomplished anything.

I have just had a Vegetable Weekend - overdue after the Animal weekends around Christmas and a long Mineral phase with several deadlines forming all at once. It was a weekend without much process, made moreso by a car problem (the ancient Saturn needed new fuel injectors) that left me grounded at the house, and made even moreso by bad weather keeping me out of the yard (I went out to pull the wreath off the front of the house and was rewarded with freezing rain).

So there was a lot of nothing. Football on the tube. The premiere of Iron Chef: America. A few attempts at minerality through research or writing. And a lot of World of Warcraft, including a teamup on the Argent Dawn server with Bill and T'ed. We're running human characters in more or less a party, since we know each other in the real world.

So I spoke of the difference in the play experiences in the game, and my life as a human, the priest Samarius, is different than my life as the tauren Thunderchild. The tauren lands are open plains. The human territory I'm hanging in is a forest of twisted Disney trees, which makes for lousy sight-lines and guarentees that stuff is going to sneak up on you. The human territories are also infested with children, who are presented in a Village of the Damned look - I found a storage area of them upstairs at one of the inns - inexpressive big eyes, lumpy feet, minimal animation - scary. And lastly, these humans have a deep abiding interest in food. While my quests as a Tauren have been along the lines of purifying holy sites, most of the human quests seem to involve pie - getting a pie, delivering a pie, or picking up the ingrediants for a pie (I'm currently working on gathering goretusk livers for a goretusk pie). As a result, I am left with the feeling that these humans are fat and happy lugs that have no clue as to the dangers their world faces.

I also found out that my priest drew the monsters to himself. Apparently this is a factor of both being the lowest-level character of the group, and the fact that my curative spells are treated like attacks for purposes of determining "threat". So heal an ally, get a monster breathing down your neck. And since as a group we are taking down creatures outside our weight class (golems decked out like scarecrows), that means I spent a fraction of my time dead (which is a bad thing, since I was the only one who could raise the dead).

Yet despite the triumphs in alternate realities, it was a pretty vegetable weekend. Now back to life.

More later,