Day Twelve: A Day In The Life

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.


DAY TWELVE: A DAY IN THE LIFE

"Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and had a cup; and looking up, I noticed I was late. Found my coat and grabbed my hat; made the bus in seconds flat. Made my way upstairs and had a smoke and somebody spoke and I went into a dream..." - The Beatles

In my mind, the true test of any writer is making an uninteresting topic read as if it's the last chapter of an epic novel.

Talking about my typical day is, at this point in my life, like writing a 400 page novel describing whaling in excruciating detail and expecting people to read it and stay awake.

Oh wait. Somebody already did that. Damn you, Herman Melville.

Anyway, literary criticism aside, my days right now are dull. I get up, I go to work, I try to sell stuff while I'm there. If there is nothing else to do I try to squeeze in some writing. Then I go home and take care of the Dwarfling for a while so my wife doesn't pull her hair out in great, screaming fits of exasperation. It's not exactly the stuff of great literature. In fact, I think I can hear the snores from here.

However, given that this is a World of Warcraft blog, I thought that it might be more interesting to let you in on how I squeeze WoW into my day. The Dwarfling has seen to it that my hours of WoW time are restricted, regardless of what plans or agreements I may have made before she showed up. She's the boss now.

I mentioned in a previous post that I am a car salesman at a luxury dealership. There can be an excruciating amount of downtime at my job, so I am able to spend some of my time thinking about WoW during the day. I follow Twitter (my follow list is almost exclusively WoW people) and am able to read a fair number of blogs when things aren't busy.

At about 4:30 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, things slow down and most people who come in at that point are just there to pick up their vehicle from Service, which gives me a chance to write. This time of day is when I get the vast majority of my blogging done. I know, I'm horrible for doing this at work - but I don't often get a chance to do it any other time.

Baby aggro is much more
frightening than any Raid Boss.
Please don't ask about the wipes.

When I leave work at 6, I have a half-hour drive before I get home and immediately have a baby dropped into my arms. I love my daughter, and I love holding her, but she is needy in the evening; the price we pay for having her sleep through most of the night, I guess.

So the amount of WoW that I can play really is determined by the Dwarfling. She loves being held, and so putting her down to play results in getting screamed at by both baby and mommy (I'm not really sure which is worse, honestly). Playing WoW one-handed is tricky and not very efficient; especially if I want to run a dungeon or raid where I can't stop and turn it off at a moments notice.

I can normally slip in an hour or so of gaming spread throughout the evening whilst the Dwarfling is napping or feeding off of Mrs. Fannon. It's rare to get any uninterrupted gaming time, except for my two raid nights a week, which my wife has accepted somewhat grudgingly. I can count the number of heroics that I've managed to complete on one hand in the past couple of weeks.

Writing time is very hard to come by at home as well. There is rarely a moment that is quiet enough that I can let my mind wander into the creative space that I pull all of this gibberish from. Most of the time my mind is on other things - diapers, soothers, cranky wife or barking dog.

Still, Dwarfling smiles are worth it.  Azerwhat?

Yesterday, DAY ELEVEN: FAULTS, FLAWS AND BAD HABITS
Tomorrow, PEOPLE THAT I ADMIRE