A bit of a personal update, since I’m avoiding work on a beautiful Friday… Much of my free time has been devoted to really three major areas recently.

First, this cam watching the nest of a pair of bald eagles and their 3 newly-hatched eaglets is absolutely fascinating. I am a closet naturist (my first major in college was Environmental Studies until I realized that has more to do with water dynamics and even engineering than biology and ecology…) and love me things like this. The eaglets are still tiny and awfully adorable, having all 3 hatched over the last week and a half. Oh, and they’re in Iowa.

Second, I’ve recently, FINALLY, bought into the smartphone market (and android market and e-book reader market…) with my HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon as well as my Nook Color which I have rooted to allow the installation of market apps and such. The phone is really cool and fills some gaps in my ability to be connected and use things away from a desk. Laptops are great, but admittedly bulky and so 2002. Netbooks are fine, but for being just a little bit too bulky, they end up having far less power than I hope. Even with proper expectations and usage, netbooks just feel weak (I personally believe it is the bloated and needs-rebuilt-badly OS on top of them). I just found I didn’t use the Netbook much. But, the Nook Color is one of the best things I’ve bought in some time and am completely happy with it; I’m pleasantly happy reading books on it as well.

Third, I still play WoW, and I still don’t raid. I just level up my toons, run instances, gear up, and do heroics until I’m satisfied. Basically, for a casual player like me, my characters are done when they can run through all the heroic 5-man content without too much problem.

My healers are an 85 shaman and an 85 aa/disc priest. I really absolutely love the heal role, but since they’ve both done all the heroics with no issues anymore, I don’t play them much. I have done holy and that’s fine, but I really like the mechanic of the smite/shield focus for the aa/disc priest. No, I don’t get excited about the dps; I rather just like the amount of busy-ness it affords and how it sets up everything else and has good mana-management. The shaman is a busier healer (especially when using lightning bolts to regen mana), but I feel the priest is the easier one.

My tanks are an 85 warrior, 81 death knight, and 39 druid. The warrior was a surprise for me; an old bank toon, I got bored waiting for Cata so leveled him up almost exclusively tanking instances from level 24 up. He’s only done 2 heroics, but I’ve also only ever tried 2 heroics on him. Surprisingly, I found him fun and somewhat easy. Just last weekend I started in on the death knight and am only now getting my head wrapped around blood tanking. Other than having issues getting AoE threat with out-of-control PUG DPSers, it’s been an experiment. My Bear tank is my original worgen whom I am leveling up with a friend, and has gotten behind as our schedules haven’t matched up lately. Eventually the druid will also dual-spec as a healer, just so I can see what rolling hots is like on a druid.

My sole dps toon is my original toon, an 85 warlock. Even with all the changes in Cata, my afflication warlock still plays roughly the same as he always has, which has caused me to get bored pretty quickly with him once I hit 85. I’ve not taken him into a heroic yet, since I’m not even geared for one…plus he’s still only teasing 7-8k dps, which is my personal cutoff for being able to be successful in a heroic (7k dps or higher).