Well, perhaps not my soul, but certainly the vast majority of my free time the past few weeks. Damn you, World of Warcraft, how I love you so. I’m hoping that my insatiable (note: I mistyped that as unstable twice which amuses me) desire to play will calm down over the next few weeks, ’cause it’s a little ridiculous. However, I’m still having a hell of a lot of fun playing, with the exception of yesterday morning. I was in a pick-up group playing healer for a run through Blackfathom Deeps. Frustrating as hell. BFD is the last of the lower-level instances from what I can tell, and rather than pull one mob at a time, these guys would aggro an entire room and whine for healing. We’d survive for a while, then I’d get attacked (as I was healing so often) and call for help which would arrive only about half of the time. I’d then have to spend my manna healing myself…they’d die, I’d die (or vice versa) and we’d get rezed by the one guy who’d survive. Frustrating. I managed to make enough money off of the little loot I got to pay for my repairs, but that was about it. Nothing fancy. Saturday I ran through Shadowfang Keep with a guildie and his friend and it went much better. They did a much cleaner job of pulling one (or at most two) mobs at a time, so I had an easier time keeping them alive, and we all had a really fun morning. No true phat lootz, I don’t think, but I got some decent junk. And had a fun time, which is why I’m playing.

Sorry about that. I got a little tangential there. For those of you who skimmed that last paragraph, let me summarize: “Nerd nerd nerd, nerdnerd, nerd nerd nerdnerd.” Heh.

To help tame the WoW beast a little, I’ve decided to make two deals with myself (and we’ll see how long I stick to them) and how much time I spend in game. First, for every half hour I play I’m going to spend five minutes cleaning my office until it’s done. Second, for every evening I play I’m going to spend a minimum of 20 minutes on the exercise bike. Those shouldn’t be too tough to follow and I’ll end up much happier at the end.

So what else has been going on? Work, I suppose. Work has been hella-frustrating, which is part of why I’ve just been playing WoW when I get home at night. We had a manuscript rejected last week which was annoying. It wasn’t my manuscript but the job of getting it resubmitted and published is going to fall on me. Why? Because I’m the only person left in the lab listed on the paper. Well, other than Tom, and I’m having a hard time seeing him do benchwork anytime soon.

I’m not really okay with this. Our deal was that I would repeat some of the data analysis, as we had some beautiful footprints but had only done the footprinting one time. They were clear and reproducible within that one time, but we still wanted confirmation, just to be sure. For doing this (and it ended up being a couple months’ of work) I’d learn how to do footprinting and would get my name on the manuscript, somewhere in the middle. Done and done. However…Now that the manuscript is back, Tom wants me to plan what to do next to address the reviewers’ concerns and I don’t see what I’m going to get out of it. I’ll work on the plan as an intellectual exercise and as practice for my future manuscripts, that makes some sense, but as for doing the experiments we’ll need to do? Not so much. I’m not going to become first author on this paper, and who cares if my name is third instead of fifth? You know what that’s not going to do? Get me graduated. We’ll see.

Okay. Time to stop whining for a bit and go do some work. Type to you guys later. Sooner than a week, I promise.