I can say that I am definitely liking the 2003 Astro Boy series. Picked it up on Sunday when I was out with The Girl as a bit of a YAY CLASS IS OVER present to myself. It doesn't come in subtitles, but the voice-acting is about regular American cartoon normal, which means it's not Oscar-winning but the actors didn't phone in their lines in one take like some anime dubs. They picked a really weird one for Dr. Tenma... he reminds me a little of a phone sex operator. XD I've noticed some of the romanizations of the names are different, and the 2003 series lacks some of the really depressing moments of the 1980's version.

Miso has been dubbed adorable by one of The Girl's coworkers.

I am envious of the NaNo participants, but realistically there's no way I can participate this year with moving and packing to do on top of my usual insane workload. I might still get off my butt and write something, though. It's been an age since I actually sat down and wrote stories, and doing a little comment flashfic for glitterbats makes me want to do something cool again. Maybe when this all-day headache goes away.

I'm having fun being a paladin. I'm going to spec her holy and take healing for a spin, since I enjoy being DPS and tanking definitely drives me up a wall. I haven't healed in years, though, and my last healie character was a shadow-specced priest, so this will be interesting. Moose even quit Demon Soul in disgust and rolled on my server on Alliance side and is considering bringing his badass prot warrior over and faction-changing to play with the rest of us gaiz. Hey, his tank will have a healer if I can settle down and play for a while.

katimus_prime came over last night and made off with the evil, evil diet coke. I also found out she's going to Otakon this year and the bachelorette party is sometime in summer. (The Girl and I are invited, natch.) Wow a lot of my friends are married/getting married.

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon yesterday playing Pandemic II. I managed to get everything but Madagascar, which makes me sadface. I might try again today to kill off the world. At least something amusing will come out of the hysteria surrounding the H1N1 flu. I suppose it's testament to the vast superiority of our medical care around here that people are whipping themselves up into a frenzy just to have something to do.

Last night Yats got back on the Friday Night Naxx roster. She finally go to ditch the rep blue shoulders she was packing. I need to get the shoulder glyph back on them, but it's a nice upgrade. I also scored the T7.5 chest (My raw attack power is down by about 30, but just looking at the Recount figures I'm actually up on DPS a bit thanks to the slam bonus and the secondary stats) and got that gemmed up. Didn't get it enchanted until after the raid, alas. And I got a cloak by default. Yay default. I'm 5 valor emblems away from getting to ditch the sad blue bracers, too, so if my class on Tuesday is over fast enough I might be able to get a spot on the OS/VoA/whatevers run and finish that chore up. I figure if I can at least get Yats up to doing 3K dps, I'll be happy with going into Uldaur.

I'm also switching Yats over to herbing/inscription. I'm completely bored with engineering since all the fun's been sucked out of the profession with no goodness in sight. With inscription I'll get the shoulder enchants of uber, the chance to complete a Nobles Deck relatively cheaply for the trinket, and a chance to actually get income off my crafting for a change. Not to mention the free HoT from herbalism that won't eat an enrage.

Today The Girl is coming over after work and we'll do.. something. We were thinking about tooling around the Inner Harbor, but it's cool and rainy today so outdoorsy-type stuff might not be as fun as otherwise. At least we'll always have movies.

1. Finished with homework for the moment. I shall unfortunately need to do a powerpoint presentation and some editing before I am completely done with graduate school stuff for the semester. If all goes according to plan, I'll have an A to boot. :D

2. Out of leftover roast from dinner last night. Boo. I am contemplating making something with the frozen shrimp in the freezer tomorrow. Possibly something with pasta since I also got myself bow tie pasta on a whim.

3. Still sad about the warrior nerf. And I would really like to get back into the rotation for 25-Naxx since there are Valor Emblems and/or tokens I need to finished upgrading a bit more of my gear before I'll be happy going into Uldaur.

4. Also back on my baby undead mage, who I rolled after hearing about the fury nerf before abandoning it to enjoy my last hurrah before the Titan's Grip damage tax went live. I've gone from averaging something close to 2500 dps back down to 2100 on Yats and I am pissed. D: (Admittedly, I am not completely kitted out so that's not bad for still dragging around in a couple old blues, but STILL. GRAWR.)

5. Obviously still nerd raging about the fury nerf. I coulda been a contenda.

6. Awaiting delivery on my new wig for my Phoenix Wright costume. (Old wig is in this pic from the last time I cosplayed Phoenix at Otakon 2007. The Girl was Godot, btw.) The old wig really isn't full enough to get the sort of spikes I'm looking for, and the new one looks like it'll be more fun. I also ordered new wig caps since heck if I know where the old one went. This year's Phoenix will be the cheapest cosplay EVAR since I'm just re-doing the wig this year. XD

7. Going to have to practice tying ties again, since I'll have to keep track of both Phoenix AND Godot's neckwear. But ties are damn sexy, so it's okay.

8. Craving donuts. The awesome kind you select carefully off the shelf in the case, not the mass-produced ones in the flimsy cardboard boxes. I also still need to pirate me a wifi signal in order to update my DSi's operating system, so I might go find myself donuts and a hotspot tomorrow.

My shirts came today.

Obligatory Cat decided to get back at me for tripping on him by throwing up on my duvet cover, so now I'm stuck doing laundry. That sort of scrapped my original plan of being a layabout in bed and playing way too much Gardening Mama.

The Girl heard back from the state about taking her exam to become a counselor-- she's all good to go. The current plan is to take it in June, since the May test is the first full week of May and she kind of wants time to study considering it's about $200 to take the thing and if you flunk you have to wait three months to pay the fee and try again.

I had to take a test like that. I actually had to take two tests like that on the same day... I'm still not 100% sure how I managed to get a perfect score on the literature test on only about two-three hours of sleep. Unless lack of sleep somehow buffs my English-fu. I'll be the first one to tell you that standardized testing is a total racket, though. Totally.

We ended up doing Sarth+0 since we were actually at 21 people for the raid. Then we split up and tried Malygos-10. That sucked, at least the bit I was involved in. I had to go after only about three tries at him since, you know, work. I'm 25 Emblems of Valor away from getting my T7.5 shoulders, which would be a major improvement over the rep blues Yats has right now. I'm also a couple quests away from trying out being a Valiant in the Argent Tournament. If I'd actually played more last week I'd be a Champion by now, but meh. Since I've been off the invite list for Naxx-25 lately, I've not been logging in quite as much.

Noblegarden starts on Sunday. I'm so going to be on that one. I want some more bunnies.

I don't think I've mentioned it, but I feel the need to brag.

Yatsumi? Has a Sprite Darter Hatchling. She farmed it in about half an hour when patch 3.1 hit, after a somewhat embarrassing mission to get herself a Westfall Chicken. I had to cluck at the darn thing for freaking ever.

The guild's going to try Sartharion+1 again tonight, and maybe VoA. I've read up on the strats involved, so we'll see what happens with that. I think we might be a little premature in wanting to run into Uldaur so soon when we just barely started reliably clearing Naxx 25, but what do I know? I just hit things.

In other news, I'm still wishing for an option to pwn Garrosh Hellscream if you happened to do the Hero of the Mag'har questline and/or got to exulted with the Mag'har. Because, dude, we all remember when Garrosh was a total crybaby pushover and no amount of overcompensating in Northrend is going to magically make him not totally suck. I am so hoping Saurfang gets to cleave his rear end when we unlock Icecrown as a raid.