Tempting as it was to find a local store selling the World of Warcraft expansion at midnight last night, or to order it with overnight shipment for arrival today, we decided to take a more leisurely approach. Thus, we won't have it for another day or two when the postal carrier brings it from Amazon.

That's okay. I intend to savour the experience and plan to not rush through it, so starting a few days behind the early buyers is fine with me. This also gives some time for the Blizzard people to deal with issues that might affect the servers.

In the meantime, I've got work to complete on the Shoals panoramas, Flattops stuff to fix, and some pushups and crunches to catch up on from the long weekend.

I'm definitely looking forward to this new expansion and am excited about all the new things it brings to the game, and especially doing so with all the new folks we have in our guild. It will rewaken the sense of wonder from 2005, I hope, and provide us with many more hours of enjoyment.

It may even allow us to finally experience some of the existing game that's off-limits simply because we're not hard-core enough to put in the massive amounts of time it takes to be able to get the gear to go into the hardest areas already there. The expansion will allow everyone to get better gear casually and therefore have a better chance to venture into those tough areas. Of course that may leave the newer, even harder areas in much the same way, but we'll see - they've introduced scaling now, so this may be less of an issue going forward.

Early reports sound promising. I can't wait.