Day of Thanks

I kiss you!

There's a few thanks long past due. Days like today are good to set aside to think about how things affect our lives and touch us in profound ways. Therefore, I'd like to start by thanking my Season 2 swords, [Merciless Gladiator's Slicer] and [Merciless Gladiator's Quickblade]. You look so awesome and you hit so hard it makes me want to cry sometimes. I'm thankful for the Mongoose enchant on both of my weapons, because nothing is better than proccing dual Lightning Speed with 240 Agility, 240 Attack Power and 4% Haste. I'm thankful for my two pieces of Netherblade giving me the 2 piece set bonus increasing my Slice and Dice duration by 3 seconds. There's a lot of other pieces of gear for which I'm thankful. Every one of them, in fact. From my new [Dragonspine Trophy] to every one of my non-combat pets, like my new [Tiny Spore Bat].

And as you can tell from the last paragraph, I'm thankful for WowHead and how easy they made it to include tooltips on a site. WoWHead is always improving, like a Google of the WoW data reference community. Along with WoWWiki, they've changed the way I research information about the game.

I'd like to say how glad I am to have found the blogging community and be introduced to it and encouraged into it by Phaelia and so many others. There so many people theorycrafting and sharing their experiences, it is amazing. I track over 217 WoW Blogs on my Google Reader. Many are semi-inactive, but many are incredibly prolific generating over a post a day, and I skim every one of them — even the Shaman ones. ;D And Google Reader makes it possible, because without it I wouldn't have the time to visit each of them looking to see which ones posted something new.

I want to thank Blizzard for making something so fun to play. Like Phaelia posted on her blog, Blizzard filled World of Warcraft with multiple ways to feel like you're improving your character constantly. I'm so thankful for every thing on that list. Not only is the process fun because of that, but they filled the World with wonder, awe and humor. Before WoW, I'd only play most MMOs about 3 months before I just didn't feel like there was much of a reason to play. I've been playing WoW since beta, and though I did take a short break, I can't see myself ever leaving such a fun place.

But when it comes to WoW and life, what I'm really thankful for is the people. I am so lucky to be able to play with a great guild. We aren't the 'litist and we aren't the biggest, but it's filled with my friends, both local and distant. We've had at least 3 RL guild parties with over twenty players attending, some driving hundreds and hundreds of miles. I'm glad I have friends to play with, because without them the game would lose it's magic. It would lose the spark that I hold so dear. I'm so glad when I came back from my break I moved to Scarlet Crusade to join all my real life friends and I made so many other friends I hold so dear now. Just look at the guild roster and you'll see their names. They are Valenna's family.

Lastly, I'd like to thank the people standing in line when I bought my copies of World of Warcraft: Phaelia, Ebene and Khatrina. We have had so much fun together in game. Leveling our first characters, leveling horde, leveling and playing Burning Crusade. But more than anyone I have to thank Khatrina, my wife, for letting me play the game so much and for everything she does for me in our life together.