What does he *do* with all that leisure time?

When I’m not stressing about wedding plans or being nervous about the honeymoon or thinking about how I should be going to the gym more often, I have to admit I’m enjoying not having much on my plate in terms of freelance work. I’m getting caught up on sleep, reading, and back into a little bit of gaming. I’d been playing EverQuest pretty much since it launched, and EverQuest II for a few months, and of course World of Warcraft since last Thanksgiving (and huge apologies to my roommate who is now so addicted to WoW since I introduced him that he failed out of college this spring, had to get a job, and is now calling in sick to his job to stay home and play ;o)

But I’d pretty much stopped all of my gaming this past winter as I took on a major freelance project that consumed a lot of my free time. Then the wedding planning began, and apartment hunting, etc. Lately though, having much less freelance work to deal with, I’ve been sitting around at home thinking “I’m kinda bored”, so I pop in a NetFlix movie, and escape to a galaxy far, far away …

Recently, I’ve been back into Star Wars Galaxies. They’ve made vast improvements to the game and combat engine which discouraged me from playing it in the last two years. But having a character that old got me some veteran rewards and figured I’d get back into the game. I’ll probably stay away from progressing towards becomming a Jedi since I’ve never finished any of the epic quests in EQ that I started, and I’m told it’s a good 8-month journey to become a Jedi. Bleh. I’m a casual gamer: I want to plug in, shoot some stuff for an hour or two, then go to bed.

Last night, I hooked up my Belkin Nostromo N50 gamepad and started programming macros for harvesting and sampling. Some guy leaving the game saw I was a new character and gave me ton of money to start out and some nifty low-level weapons and a way to build my own house. Woke up this morning with a good collection of survey sampled stuff, and had maxxed out that level of surveying, so I went and trained up, and set up a house on Naboo, revved up the Nostromo to survey/sample some steel, and left the computer on and drove to work … Provided I didn’t get kicked off the server for being AFK, I’ll have surveying maxed out by the time I get home, and a healthy pile of steel to keep me busy crafting for a while. Might see if I can get my gamepad macro to sample different types of items.