Being a Gentleman of Leisure – Part 1

Since last week was my birthday, I decided to treat myself to a small vacation, and took Wednesday through Friday off to enjoy some leisure time. A mental health holiday, as it were. It I had quite a good time doing it, too.

Wednesday – June 25

This is the day that I officially turned 26.¹ Didn’t find it so much of a big deal…just a day older than I was on Tuesday, but I appreciated all the well-wishes from my friends. I got a couple of nice e-cards, and some real cards as well. kitanzi tried to let me sleep in, but I got a work-related call which roused me from bed just before she left, so she gave me my birthday presents: three new t-shirts, and the first three volumes of the webcomic Jesus and Mo. I found this a delightful way to start the day.

I logged on to IRC and hopped onto World of Warcraft. I spent most of the morning playing my newest alt, a Blood Elf Warlock over on Earthen Ring². This is a bit of a departure for me, as I’ve never played on the Horde side even semi-seriously. But I wanted to do something new, and switching factions means getting to do quests I’ve never seen before. Ironically, I chose that realm to roll a character almost on a whim, after having listened to The Instance podcast for the better part of a year³, and only remembered afterwards that I have friends on that server….on the Alliance side. Ah well, odds life.

The Ghostlands quests are all pretty cool (of course, those had the advantage of coming out with the first expansion, and thus had the benefit of being designed AFTER the game had been out a while and Blizzard had figured out what worked and what didn’t.) By the end of the weekend, I’d gotten up to level 20, and wasn’t bored yet, so that’s a good sign. I don’t really know how much time I’m going to give this alt, as I still have a lot to do with my Ally characters on VeCo, but it’s nice to have a change of pace every now and again. It’s also interesting to see how well I can generate gold on a character where I actually have to, rather than relying on a rich level 70 main to supply all my finances. At level 20, I’ve got over 12 gold so far, which is pretty darn good, though I’m lamenting the lack of bigger bags, which is usually the first generous gift I pass to my alts when I can. 🙂

I went out for lunch, but got frustrated at my inability to find anything to read that I wanted to read, and so I went over to Best Buy and picked up a new camera for myself (a Canon SD870 to replace my old SD300, which went missing a year ago.⁴ At some point, I may actually want to invest again in a “serious” camera, but for now, I just wanted another device I could slip into a pocket and carry around with me. No matter how good your camera is, its no good if you don’t have it with you.

kitanzi got home at 4pm and we immediately set out for the Cobb Energy Center in Atlanta to see Eddie Izzard in concert. When I found out he was touring, I immediately checked his schedule, and when I found out he was going to be in Atlanta on my birthday, well, that was just too good to pass up. We got to the venue and verified the parking area a good 2.5 hours before the show was scheduled to start, so we backtracked slightly and had a yummy dinner at the Old Mill Steakhouse, about which we had heard nothing, but it was right there and looked like it would be a good time. We were right. We got a massive amount of delicious food, and while our waiter was a bit haphazard (I think he was new), he was trying really hard, so we made sure to leave him a good tip.

Stuffed to the gills, we then spent a few minutes driving in circles looking for an ATM, then parked and made our way into the theatre.⁵ We found our seats, which were up in the balcony (or, as they called it, the Grand Tier), but towards the front, and there are no bad sight lines in the place, as near as I can tell. (According to one of the ushers I chatted with on my way to fetch drinks, the house holds about 2500 people.) It’s definitely a place I will consider coming to see a show again.

The show was brilliant. Eddie was very loose, bantering with the audience, and going off on mad tangents at the slightest provocation. The underlying theme of the show was religion, and the evolution of human society, and there were some bits where I thought I was actually going to hurt myself from laughing so hard. I was particular amused at the way he engaged hecklers in the audience. At one point, he was talking about how various words came to English from the Vikings, like yogurt and kiosk.

Eddie: “Kiosk? What would they do with a kiosk? Hello, we’ve just raped, burned and pillaged our way across all of western England….and if you’d like some lovely souvenirs…”
Audience member: They were selling their yogurt!
Eddie: What? (pause) Oh, right, selling their yogurt. That’s funny. Look, just let me do it, ok? it’s no good if you do it.

We ended up getting home at about 11pm and immediately went to bed. It was a very tiring, but very good birthday.

This actually got longer than I intended, so I’ll wrap it up here and do the rest of the weekend in another post. 🙂

¹ In hexadecimal.
² I couldn’t roll a horde character on my primary server, because PvP servers don’t allow you to have characters from both factions on the same server.
³ The hosts of the Instance are also the leaders of a large Horde-side guild on Earthen Ring. They seem like nice folks.
⁴ Actually, I know precisely where it is. I just haven’t managed to retrieve it yet.
⁵ Which involved me falling down when I missed the top step of a flight of stairs. I didn’t injure anything but my pride, and the ushers were very nice about checking up on me.