I’ve spent my last three workdays in mandatory training classes taught by an instructor who I suspect to be a malevolent insect wearing an poorly-fitting skin suit.

It has not been a good time, for me or – presumably – for the instructor.  I can’t imagine that having your forelegs bound up against your thorax all day is particularly comfortable.

What has kept me sane is coming home and spending my evenings in, respectively, Norrath and Azeroth.  I can’t speak to any particularly outstanding accomplishments in EQ2, so I’ll do my typical rundown of Where I Am In My Whirlwind Tour Of Wow:

Today’s dungeons completed:

The Oculus was a weird one.  You start off in it on foot, then spend most of the instance flying around on drake-back.  This was an entirely new skill set for me to pick up, and I learned how to dismount from a vehicle pretty quickly.

And associated achievement:

I also completed the “Trial of the Champion” instance.  No achievement for this one, oddly.

Kind of a peculiar instance, starting with riding around on horses and jousting and then fighting multiple bosses at once on foot.  It definitely pushed my ability to pump out heals fast enough, but I got a very nice piece of gear from it and hit a new level milestone:

So, at this point I’ve unlocked two new Lich King dungeons that, when completed, allow me access to the final dungeon which actually has the Big Bad Guy in it.

My big decision is this:  Go straight for Mr. Dark & Broody, or start on the Cataclysm content.  I’m  tempted to dive into Cataclysm, but I really think I need to see WotLK through to its bitter end first.

I have now caught up with the Warlock I started back in 2004 and that got to level 80 by way of a “please try WoW again for a weekend!” promotion and character boost, so now I technically have TWO level 80 characters, but I suspect she will continue to warm the bench.  I joke with my wife that I occasionally need to wait TWO or even THREE minutes for a group on the Priest, and I don’t have the patience to try getting groups as a random DPS class.