Citizen Azeroth: A new blog

I decided to start a new blog that will just discuss World of Warcraft.

I think that this blog was trying to do too many things at once: knitting, cats, WoW, my house, personal stuff. While I am sure there were a few people interested in those things not related to WoW, I also think that a more focused blog on living in the game might encourage me to write down more of my thoughts on the subject. Not having any idea of a target audience makes it hard to write.

So, for those of you who are interested in the gaming stuff, here's Citizen Azeroth, a (hopefully) more regular blog on the game.

Why I don't let the cats in the bedroom

My cats would sooo do this.

Rediscovering ProgressQuest

ProgressQuest is a totally, completely, pointless game. In fact, it's not really a game, but rather an everchanging display of gamer cliches. It is to real video games what filk songs are to folk songs.

Simply put, it's a video game that plays itself. Seriously. There is no interaction other than running it on your computer. You create a character on a server who explores, fights, completes quests, sells goods, and buys upgrades, without any direction from you. You can't give your character any direction if you wanted to. The only control you exercise is in the beginning, where you pick the character's name, race, class, and roll up their stats. (Keep rerolling til the box turns red, which indicates the highest level of rolls). Races include game standards like half orc and low elf, but also such, er, less common ones such as talking pony, demicanadian, and enchanted motorcycle. Classes include fighter/organist, tickle-mimic, puma burgler, and inner mason, but there's a lot more besides.

So I "rolled up" a character named Renata on Pemptus server, started a guild (Warcast -- feel free to join if you want). She's a battle finch voodoo princess who's recently upgraded her shield from Pie Plate to -1 Corroded Carapace. Some of her exciting adventures include "deliver this pole", "placate the bone demons" and "find me a nail". Seriously, do quests from other games such as Everquest or World of Warcraft make any more or less sense than these?

http://www.progressquest.com

I won't see you in game!

PS. And yes, I have also played Kingdom of Loathing. It's funny, but it's also interactive and requires actual time to play.

What tarot card am I?

You are The High Priestess: Science, Wisdom, Knowledge, Education.The High Priestess is the card of knowledge, instinctual, supernatural, secret knowledge. She holds scrolls of arcane information that she might, or might not reveal to you. The moon crown on her head as well as the crescent by her foot indicates her willingness to illuminate what you otherwise might not see, reveal the secrets you need to know. The High Priestess is also associated with the moon however and can also indicate change or fluxuation, particularily when it comes to your moods.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

"MMORPG: Many Men Online Role Playing Girls"

I love this one.

Not.

Yes, there are males who play female toons. But not all.

I don't know why I always feel so insulted when I see posts like the recent thread on the WoW official forums stating (without any actual facts to back him up) that all female toons are played by men, and that anyone who says they're actually female is lying. I've heard various versions of this, but they all boil down to one sentiment: all online game players are male or liars.

Anyone who listens to my podcast knows that I'm female. Heck, my mother reads my blog (Hi Mom!) and she can verify that I'm female and have been for the past 40+ years. I expect to remain so indefinitely.

The other assumption I hate is that if I'm female and I game, then my husband must have gotten me into it.

Wrong again.

I was playing video games back when you had to write your own in BASIC. I was playing paper-based roleplaying games four years before I even met my husband, and I got into it based on my own interests. As far as MMORPGs are concerned, I got my husband hooked, not the other way around. I bought our first copies of Everquest, and later, World of Warcraft.

I've had people online in games tell me they won't believe I'm female unless they have "proof". Sorry, hon -- I'm not sending you naked pictures of myself, so just lose that idea. And I don't have to prove who I am to you.

One poster had a great comment that shouting "ANY CHICKS HERE?" is unlikely to bring females flocking out of the woodwork to greet this gallant and refined sally. We're here to play the game, just like every other player, not to feed adolescent fantasies. (And BTW, I'm not a "chick". A bitch maybe, but not a chick).

I'm forty, female, married, an entrepreneur, well educated, secure... and I game.

Put it this way: if you find it less threatening to believe I'm just a guy in disguise, then that's your insecurity talking, and not mine. It's another case where feedback says a great deal more about the person giving it than about the person receiving it.

What it's like to be self employed

About two or three times a month, I receive an email from a fan who has heard me talk about being a self-employed web designer on the show. Although the letters vary in content, some recurring themes abound:

- The person wants to work at home at a web based business and wants to know about how to get started.
- The person is a web designer who /isn't finding work for other people/is unhappy where they are working now/is concerned about the viability of the business where they work now and wants to try striking out alone.
- The person has a baby or children and wants to work at home to spend more time with the kids.
- The person wants some great tips on how to get started in business.

I decided to make a rather long blog entry about my own experience of being self-employed, how I got there, and how I stay in business, mostly because I'm getting sick of repeating myself in so many letters. I waffled between making a form letter and posting here, and since I hate form letters, I decided instead to post a blog entry about it.

Warning: If you're looking for advice on how to do this quickly, on a get-rich magic formula, or anything that doesn't translate to years of hard work, then you might as well stop reading now because I'm going to be of no help. My secrets to success don't involve anything quick and they sure don't involve getting rich. Yes, I make very good money (and no, I'm not going to tell you how much). But I also work very hard and have done so for many, many years.

I should first explain a bit about what I do. I call myself a self employed web designer, but it doesn't really cover what I do. I really do two things: I do some outside work for clients in the area of human factors, which is a fancy term meaning that I design website navigation systems that people will actually use. Second, I run a small web-based advertising business (no, I don't spam, direct mail, junk mail, gold selling, viruses, gambling, porn, or anything illegal. I cater to a targeted client base of hobbyists in a very specific niche field. And no, I'm not going to say what it is because I'm not interested in everyone knowing who I am in real life).

I am an accidental entrepreneur.

I never set out to start a business. It just happened.

In 1994 (yes, I am older than Amazon and eBay), I started the website that has become my dominant business. It was something I started in conjunction with a hobby of mine, and I wasn't looking to make it a business. In fact, I was doing it for free, as much as to learn how to create websites. By the time three years had passed, I was spending 30+ hours a week on it, while working a 40-hour-a-week day job as a college professor. I decided I needed to start charging, and promptly lost 80% of my "customers" (I put those in parentheses because these "customers" were not paying me anything to this point). However, I was getting some money in, and my workload dropped back down to a reasonable level. That didn't last, as my customers came floating back and paying for the service, and my workload began creeping upward again. In another few years, I was back to my old pattern. I worked 40+ hours a week at a demanding day job, and almost every day, I came home, ate dinner, got out the computer, and worked several more hours until bedtime. Weekends were time to get caught up on whatever I didn't get done during the week. I was also taking on some contract work (which I will talk more about in a bit) starting in 1997.

Although I started my business in 1994, and turned it into a paying business in 1997, I did not actually quit my full-time day job until 2002, eight years after I started the business. I worked seventy to eighty hour work weeks for years before I realized something had to go -- my business or my day job -- because I was literally going crazy. I was so stressed out much of the time.

So as you can see, I don't have any magic answers. I worked full time during the time I was building my business and pulled in a lot of long hours and stretches with no vacation.

Fortunately, having a spouse who is also employed full time with full benefits made the transition much, much easier -- not to mention much less expensive. Health insurance can be well over $300 a month for very basic individual coverage if you have to buy it yourself, considerably more for better plans and family plans. I have health and dental through my husband. Everything else -- life, business liability, etc -- I have to pay for on my own.

During this time, I was also doing some contract web design, which I used to do much more than I have in the past year or so simply because I don't have to work quite that hard anymore. I specialized in human factors work -- namely redesigning web navigation systems for the Intranets of two Fortune 500 companies. How did I get these jobs? An old employer who worked first for one company and then for the other called me out of the blue back in 1997 and asked me if I'd be interested in doing it. I've done that work for about seven years, though I stopped this about a year ago simply because I don't have to do it anymore. My web advertising business is profitable enough that I don't have to do the contract work on top of it.

Let's review the timeline then:

14 years ago: I began working full time as a college professor.
13 years ago: I started my primary business as a hobby.
10 years ago: I started making money from my primary business.
10 years ago: I started contract design work for a Fortune 500 company.
8 years ago: I quit working a 40-hour a week job as a professor and started working a 50-hour a week job as a web designer for a dot-com.
5 years ago: I quit working the day job and went full-time self-employed at my primary business.
1 year ago: I quit taking contract work and work solely on my advertising business.

This was hardly an overnight process. This was nearly a decade and a half of hard work.

So, web designers who want to start your own business, I have no guidance for you. I have never had to find clients or build a portfolio of work. All my clients for my advertising business come through contacts I have built through my hobby. I know many, many unemployed or underemployed web designers from my three-year gig as a web designer for a dot-com (with 500 useless shares to prove it) who complain incessantly about the work needed to find clients. The IT business is so difficult these days, you really need to do it because you love it. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly recommend the field to anyone right now.

Working at home has its good points and its bad points. You need to be realistic about both.

Most people have a fantasy about what working at home is really like. They see themselves surrounded by their creature comforts and not having to pay attention to a boss or a difficult manager. They can decide when to work and when not to work. The commute is easy and you can work in your pajamas if you want. They may have children and anticipate being able to eliminate the need for babysitters, nannies, and day care.

Yes, BUT...

I also know a lot of people who worked for themselves and hated it.

Working at home can be very isolating. Many people don't realize how much they will miss the daily contact with other people, particularly other adults if they have children at home. There is something people find energizing about bouncing ideas off one another. You can help pick up the slack for someone else, and they can help pick up the slack for you. If you work at home, home is no longer a refuge from work. Getting stir-crazy, especially during periods of bad weather, is a real problem.

There is also a danger in turning your hobby into your business. While it's important to do something you love and something you're passionate about, the hobby loses its escapism. Although I stay involved with the hobby related to my business, I no longer participate in it directly because -- well, because it's work now.

Being self employed, especially being self employed and working at home, requires a great deal of self discipline and self direction. Nobody is going to tell you what to do or when to do it. You order your time yourself. If you decide to give yourself the day off, that has a price in what you do tomorrow. Going on vacation means that nobody does your work while you're gone (you may have also had this problem when you had a day job though) and it's all waiting there for you when you get back. If you are a person who needs approval and praise, realize nobody is going to pat you on the back or tell you what a great job you're doing, except maybe your client when you're done. It's tempting not to work if you're feeling a little ill or just don't feel like working on a glorious, sunny day, but you need to be adult about deciding when this is and is not a good thing to pursue.

If you have children, don't kid yourself about your productivity. I know many work-at-homes who still have to hire someone to watch the child while they are working because they wouldn't get anything done otherwise. I know many who told themselves that "my child will be fine" who found out otherwise.

I don't work well in my pajamas. I am not in "work brain" in my PJs.

There are a lot of responsibilities you have to accrue yourself when you are self employed, such as billing, invoicing, bookkeeping, chasing down bad check passers, figuring out and paying estimated income taxes, budgeting, getting credit card processing accounts (no one these days should be without the ability to accept credit cards), balancing your incomes and outflows, deciding whether you can really afford to upgrade the RAM in your computer, etc. There are a lot of laws and responsibilities. You have to file at least a DBA (doing business as) with your county, if not consider looking into incorporation depending on your business. You need an excellent insurance agent, a tax accountant, and an attorney, preferably a tax attorney with a strong small business background. You need to keep good records. You need to find out if you need to charge sales tax and how to go about doing that. If you're going to need employees, that's a whole 'nother set of rules I don't even want to think about, having successfully avoided having to hire anyone for years (if I could afford an employee, it would be a bookkeeper. I am a good bookkeeper because I have to be one, but I hate it). You have to work on finding new business and keep the customers you have. People think about starting a business and don't realize that they will have to do all of it, even the parts they don't like.

All that said, I love it. I've learned to adapt to the parts that are difficult.

I am an introvert and don't mind the isolation. In fact, I prefer a quiet office and didn't like the hectic cubicle environment.

I do make it a point to get out every day, however, whether that's out to lunch with my husband or just a quick road trip to the post office to get my mail. I purposely got a post office box so I would have to leave the house to get my work mail. This is especially important when the weather is bad.

I go to work around the same time every day and leave it around the same time, give or take an hour or two. I dress for work, including shoes -- I don't have a dress code but I am at least wearing a shirt, shorts or pants, and sandals. I can't get into work if I am not dressed like I am working.

I have a dedicated office in my house. This suits two purposes. One, it gives me a space that is not "home" and the rest of the house can still be home and a refuge from the office. Two, it makes it easy to deduct the space on my income taxes for a home office deduction. (I have two computers for the same reason -- a work computer and a personal computer. The IRS is very fussy about home office computer deductions, so I can show that my work computer is only used for work, and I have a second computer where all my personal stuff goes).

I am self disciplined and self directed, but it helps to keep a daily work journal. I have a Franklin planner where I write down everything I did and all the tasks I need to do. I forward the "need to dos" from day to day as needed, but I can easily look back and see what I have already accomplished. If I send our payment reminders to clients with a deadline, I can write a note to myself on the deadline day to check the payment status.

Even the parts I hate I have learned to work through, by interspersing them with tasks I find more enjoyable. I just realize they need to get done and I do them.

I have changed my work computer to a laptop so I can take my computer with me on vacations, at least to check mail and make sure no disasters are hitting while I'm gone. It does mean I end up working most vacations, though, at least for a little while. It's a sacrifice I make.

I do just give myself time off when I want it, and the flexibility is very convenient. As we have been buying our house it's been great to tell the builder and the lawyer and the banker and whoever else that I can schedule meetings whenever needed because I am not required to do any of my work at a particular time. It has to get done, but I can say when.

I do not have children, but based just on how much my cats get in the way sometimes, I can't imagine trying to get work done while being responsible for a child. I'd have to hire a sitter to be with them or else I'd never get my work finished.

Let's just say this: starting a web business is no different from starting any other kind of business, except the delivery system. Any good book on business plans and running a home based business will tell you what you need to know. Contrary to what people would have you believe, there are no "easy" get rich home businesses (well, legal ones anyway). While self employment has its rewards, it also has significant challenges and is probably harder than working for someone else, in terms of effort, breadth of skills required, time, and demands on your life. Mostly I prize the flexibility; as I am fond of saying, "my boss is a total bitch but she offers a great vacation plan".

And now it's a house...

...more or less. At least it looks like one from the outside.

Frame sweet frame

The framing for the first two stories and the garage is up. You can see the downstairs bay window, though the garage blocks the front door.

It's supposed to rain like crazy this week. I wonder what that means for progress.

We finished picking some upgrades, and I changed my mind on a few things. We decided to upgrade from standard oak to maple cabinets, which cost us a good deal less than we had anticipated. They showed me the standard ceramic tile for the front hall, and the choices were a plain white and an ugly yellow, so we upgraded to a slate-look porcelain tile.

Goodbye Smudge

The day finally came that I've been holding my breath over for the last several months, since Smudge was diagnosed with CRF (chronic renal failure). I knew one day she'd tell me when she's had enough, and yesterday was the day.

I'd taken her to the vet on Tuesday because she had stopped eating, and what little she was eating she wasn't keeping down well. I had found her a product called CatSure, which is very much like Ensure for cats, a liquid food supplement. It was vanilla flavored but she has always liked vanilla, and that she would lick down about a teaspoon full at a time. She weighed 5 pounds, 3 ounces, so she had lost very close to 2/3 of her body weight since last November. It was getting hard to give her her fluids because there was no loose skin to get under. The vet gave me steroids to coax her appetite and some Hills a/d to syringe-feed her. She ate the a/d straight if I gave her several tiny meals throughout the day, and although she got a couple doses of steroids, they didn't seem to do a thing.

Thursday morning, I noticed a few things that told me, loud and clear, that Smudge was pretty much done. First, she'd spent most of the day either in my office closet or lying half-in, half-out of her carrier, like she was trying to hide. Second, she had obviously thrown up a mix of water and the few mouthfuls of CatSure she'd licked that morning, which was over dried brown stuff that was probably a/d from the night before. Smudge has always been a fastidious groomer, but she'd stopped taking care of herself. Third, I could not get her to purr. She almost always purrs when I groom her, but a good combing just seemed to irritate her. Ditto with pats and chin-chucks. She seemed only to want to tolerate a few moments of petting before she'd wobble off to her carrier and lie down, obviously uncomfortable, head-first inside. She could barely walk or stand.

I told Cryler that I was making an appointment for her as soon as possible. We talked about it for awhile; I think his inclination would have been to wait, but as we sat on my office floor and patted Smudge, who did come out to see him (she's very much his cat in some ways), he agreed that she probably had only a few days left on her own and seemed extremely tense and in pain. Privately, I thought that it was 2:30, her vet appointment was now set for 4:30, and she might not even make it until then.

He moved some appointments around and went with me to Smudge's final vet trip. The staff was wonderful -- they handled the paperwork and payment up front (a great kindness; if you ever have to do this, once it's over and you've had some time with your pet, you just want to leave and don't want to stand around the waiting room crying while you pay your bill) and then ushered us out of the crowded waiting room directly into a treatment room. I had brought one of Smudge's Purr Pads, her favorite thing to sleep on, so she wouldn't have to lie on the cold table. The vet was very kind, allowed us a little time to talk about her, and then carefully explained what would happen and what we might see so we wouldn't be surprised.

However, it was very quick and very peaceful. I brought Smudge out of her carrier and put her on her Purr Pad, and she lay on the pad, really not seemingly very aware of the vet gently stretching out her leg. He gave her just enough to let her fall asleep, carefully helping her lay down her head comfortably, and then gave her the rest after he was sure she was completely out. She looked more relaxed and comfortable than I'd seen her in weeks. It was over in just a few moments. He gave us some time with her alone, before we pulled ourselves together enough to leave. (I'll say it again ... it was great just to leave and not have to worry about having to do anything else). We went for a long drive afterward, and that seemed to help.

I must be grateful for the nearly sixteen years of vigorous good health Smudge had, other than some gingivitis problems that mostly required routine dental care and an eye injury when she was young that mostly cost money but didn't result in any long-term issues. It was only the last seven months of her life that had problems, and up until a few weeks ago, she had a good quality of life despite the subcutaneous fluids. Her weight loss even seemed to be a good thing, and she went through a second kittenhood where she could jump up on tables and sleep on my desk while I was working.

But I always said that when Smudge told me it was time to go, I wouldn't delay. Hard as it was, it was the right decision for her.

August 1990 - August 9, 2007

Hole sweet hole

Well, it's not much to look at, but the builders have started digging our basement. At least it's a start and it gives us some idea of when the house may be finished. They say it's usually 120 days from the time the basement is started until the end. Looking at how quickly other houses are going up, I almost wonder if it is going to take that long.

I'm getting more anxious to move everyday ... well, not to do the actual moving (all these books! Where did I get so many books!), but to be out of our apartment.