After a many year moratorium on the game, I have again begun to play World of Warcraft. It feels a lot different now than it did way back in 2005.

It's been a while since I've been able to spend any time on Gamespot...I've been able to skim through some of my favorite unions and blogs, but nothing more. Glad I have a few free moments to update today.

2 weeks and 2 days until I leave on my cross-country road trip. I'm scouting out Starbucks along the route to be able to stop and check my email, etc, but my access to the internet will be spotty at best. Perhaps it's for the better; it will add to the experience. We've almost finalized the route: From Boston directly to Minneapolis (where we'll stay for 3 days), on through South Dakota (stopping at a couple places my partner wants to see, like Wall Drug), one night in the middle of Wyoming, 2 nights at Yellowstone, a few in Missoula, MT (if we can ever get ahold of our friend there, we may end up cutting this part out), then directly to Seatle for 3 days. We'll spend a night camping on the Oregon Coast, then on to San Fran (Los Gatos, actually), where my partner's parents main house is (they are currently at their summer house here in MA). After 3 days there, we'll cruise down to Thousand Oaks to see more friends for 3 days, then a night in Vegas. We haven't decided which southern Utah national park to hit up yet (Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, etc), but we'll spend a day and a night there, then a day at the Grand Canyon, followed by 3 nights in Phoenix with relatives. After that, it's kind of up in the air. We will end up sleeping somewhere in New Mexico, then a night in Austin with my sister, followed by a few days north of Houston with my parents. Then a sprint home so I can go to orientation for my new school.

Complicated, long, lots of driving, and hopefully a hell of a lot of fun.

Today, I clean. My in-laws and their entire family are coming over on Saturday to see the house. We've lived here for over a year, and still haven't fully unpacked or organized (in my defense, we had a 6 month long remodel of the Kitchen and baths in there). So, today and tomorrow are the days to do that.

Oh, and I'm having a blast with the Sims 3. It's truly a great game.

So, yesterday, I loaded the Sims 3 onto my good PC (some of you probably know, a technophile needs at least 3 working PC's...and preferably one self-built top of the line). And...glitchy. Because my video card just wasn't cutting it. So I cracked open my PC to see what was going on, and what I could upgrade, and realized. I built this 5 years ago. Over the years, I've scavanged some of it's RAM for another PC, and downgraded the faulty power supply to a lower wattage one I had laying around. So my machine isn't what it used to be, or even what I thought it was (I rarely use it, sadly...but was hoping to change that).

After looking at the motherboard, the 5 year old processor, and the fact that the system board can't hold more than 4G of RAM, I came to the conclusion it was time for a new machine. So I drove down to Microcenter and got a pretty pretty decent one, with a few caveats. 2.6GhZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 6GB of RAM, a craptastic onboard graphics chip, ditto with sound, and a 350GB SATA 7200 RPM Hard Drive. I found it funny that it didn't have dedicated graphics paired with some of these features. Oh, and a 250 Watt Power Supply. Which might be enough for the current machine (by a slim margin), but I need to do a few upgrades first, so that's coming out. Obviously a new video card is in the works as well. I'm a fan of NVidia GeForce cards (ATI has really turned me off as of late, as well), so I'm going to go ahead and get one of their decent (not overly fantastic) cards. And I might need a Soundblaster Card as well, I'll have to hook up my sound system and see how it goes. I'm not nearly as picky about that as the graphics, though.

I think when I'm done (hopefully sometime this afternoon - I need to head back to Microcenter today for a couple of things), I'll have a pretty decent machine to play around with. Then maybe I'll finally get around to playing the Sims.