December 10, 2010 12:24AM
Cataclysmic Winter Wonderland
It was snowmegedon here in London Ontario this week, a non-stop snowstorm of death. We got almost four feet of snow, and the city had a snow day for three days, where public services were shut down and everyone was stuck inside.
Fanshawe was closed, London Transit was not running, all malls and most stores were closed... everything was just closed. However, this much snow will do nothing to stop World of Warcraft players from going out to get Cataclysm.
Even though it was super dangerous out, the streets were full of snow and it was 11pm at night, Ben and I went to Futureshop for the midnight release. Ben came over around 11pm... he said it took him twenty minutes to clean off his car, and once he got here, I ran down and met him on the street. The streets were completely abandonded, it was dark and creepy out because of this, the snow was kind of blocking out the street lights, there were no other cars on the road, and you just couldn't really see anything around you. We were driving around 10 kmph, slipping around and almost got stuck a few times, but we eventually made it to Futureshop, where there was about ten other people waiting, which was both surprising, yet expected, if you know what I mean. I'm sure if the weather was normal and not deadly, there would've been many more people, like.. 50.. maybe 100 people, but instead, just those few people braved death by snow to buy it at midnight.
I had overdressed for the occasion apparently because I figured we would be standing outside for a half an hour in this giant blizzard, so I wrote longjohns, an undershirt, scarf, coat, three pairs of socks and so on, but when we got to Futureshop, they had opened the front doors (that purgatory area between the front doors to the doors leading into the store), blasted the heat, and let us wait in there. I stood outside for most of it, while Ben stood inside, so I just stood on one side of the door and he stood on the other.
Generally speaking I can interact with other nerds pretty easily, not only because I'm a nerd, but because I'm a nice person who's easy to get along with usually. The ten people there were okay, one of the girls was a pretty big nerd and overcompensating for something... but that was kind of expected. We waited for the thirty minutes, and by the time we were let in to purchase (five people at a time) there were about 20 or 25 people there, but also the weather had gotten much worse with almost zero visibilty out the window. Ben and I got in around 9th or 10th, and there was still around four or five collectors editions left, so we both grabbed on, and since we were one of the first fifteen people there, we got a free shirt (I got a blue alliance shirt that said Gnomeregan on it), a free mousepad, free poster and the game of course. The collectors edition contains another, awesome quality mousepad, official soundtrack, behind the scenes and interview DVD, cards for the trading card game, a huge hard cover art book, the game, an ingame deathwing pet, two SC2 avatars and probably something I'm forogetting.
Getting home was pretty brutal, we couldn't see a thing, no cars around, and we got on a backstreet where we had to drive in the only tracks that were there or we would've got stuck. We weren't sure where we were going but eventually and slowly made it back on to Wellington and got back on track. I let Ben just drop me off on Wharncliffe instead of driving me to my house because if he had went down Langarth he most likely wouldn't have been able to get back.
It continued to snow all night and all day for days, Tuesday and Wednesday, everything was closed. Snow was all over everything, it was crazy!
When I got home from picking up Cata (around 12:30am) I installed and logged on right away, and since Cata was going live at 12am PST (3:00am for me), I hung out with guildies in Stormwind and partied while we waited. At like.. 3:05am or something, a yellow message appeared in the chat window telling everyone to close their WoW clients and log back in and Cataclysm would be all ready! Oh crap, I've never had so many problems logging in. Blizzards website immediately went down, and logging in took around 20 minutes, every single person was triyng to log in at the same time and it just ruined the whole experience haha. Once I got in, everyone was surrounding the "fly in Azeroth" trainer, so that was fun to deal with, but yeah, at around 3:10am, the time to begin the journey to 85 started.
We all got in vent, levelled through quests, dungeons, it was a lot of fun. I stayed up until 10am, level 82, but as I was trying to log back in after an addon crash, it would either freeze on the loading screen, or it would try to load but eventually crash with a "character not found" error, so after playing non-stop for eight hours or so, I figured it was time to go sleep.
People in my guild Pandemic did poopsock though, and we got realm first Pally and Druid (Bolaski and Shifty) and a lot of people hit 85 really fast but not realm first, like Chef, Terra, Jack, Kaz... all these people stayed up until they hit 85... 33 hours in some cases, and that's insane. I didn't play non-stop and while I was snowed in the house, I did manage to walk to the variety store and take some pictures of the snow, which I'll post tomorrow. I did play WoW a loooot though, if I wasn't sleeping or eating dinner, I was most likely at the computer playing. I hit 85 (the new max) today around dinner time, and it feels so good to have things to do again, and I had a lot of fun leveling. I have a mental list of items I need to farm dungeons for, and soon I'll be farming heroics to gear up for raiding, and it's all fun and exciting again!
Fanshawe finally re-opened today, but due to the closure, an exam of mine was cancelled and moved to Friday of next week, a time when I would've normally been working, so that creates a bit of an inconvenience for me, but meh, what're you going to do. Today I finally broke away from WoW and was sent back into the real world to take an exam at school. It was my Cisco practical exam, and I was really nervous about it, as I knew it was about configuring a router, and I didn't really know much of what to do, but I went in, and through trial and error and some memory, I managed to get 100% on the exam (which was worth 15%) and it felt great. I went straight home after the successful exam, and planned dinner.
For dinner I had a seared rack of lamb, mashed potatos, corn and a bunch of veggies, and it was awesome. After dinner I played more WoW, got some more gear, did some more dungeons, and even did a few quests on my new 80 Hunter, which was also fun.
Tomorrow I've got a final test in Programming... my last class, at 8am, so I took a sleeping pill about an hour and a half ago, so I'm really feeling the effects right now. I really need to sleep...
It's so awesome that World of Warcraft is fun again, super fun even. All I want to do is play, but sadly... I have an exam tomorrow, then work at night, then work 10-9 Saturday, then work Sunday, so finding time to play over the next few days is going to be difficult.
1344 words
Timeline
- I lived on Langarth St.
- I worked at Windermere
- Michelle was my Roommate
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