Big Dog, Happy Birthday, WoW Again

So I get a call from my friend Brandon who’s stuck out on a jobsite without any help.  He wanted to know if I’d snag him a couple of sandwiches from QT and bring ’em to him.  He was busy busting up concrete to dig a 6 foot deep hole to fix thier sewer line.

A chance to take a peek into the worlds largest customer motorcycle manufacturer?  Hell yeah buddy!

He was working in their brand new Education Center where they teach dealerships about the bikes, troubleshooting, etc.  Cool idea.  Setting in there was over $200,000 in bikes.  DRROOOOLLL. 

And another $100,000 in Snap-On workbenches and tools.  HOLYHELLDROOOL.

Brandon was a bit beat from the concrete work, so I took the shovel from him and started digging sand outta the hole.  We took turns at it for a while (I’m just there to deliver sandwiches, but the dude was tired as hell and could use a hand).  At about 4 feet, my shovel went “thunk” against something hard.  That was bad news – must be another layer of concrete for something in there.  And it was hollow.  WTF?

Ended up someone had put a parking lot there before, and put a building on top of the parking lot later.  But they just paved over top of the septic tank that was there – like 50 years ago.

Went home for the day, woke up with a sore back from digging 1/2 that 4′ x 6′ x 4′ hole.

Two days later I get a call from Brandon – he’s got no help, and he’s time crunched to get the job done.  The hole is filled, he just needs to pour concrete.

Ends up he help did show up (Dion, a friend of his and mine.  You’ve never heard so many racial slurs as when the three of us are working around each other! :-)  What’s my job?  I carried a bit shy of 1800 lbs of concrete from the trailer up the stairs into the building. 

Yep, sore back again :-) 

But two days later… man does that physical labor end up feeling good.  I miss doing some of the construction stuff just because I’m not as physically active.  Yes, I know – they make this thing called a Gym.  I just never go 🙂

Tammy txt’ed me today, reminding me it’s her birthday (which was a good thing, I thought it was the 11th :-)  She was having birthday that started very badly, and Billy Ray Cirus doing a cover of James Taylor’s “You’ve Got A Friend” came on, and I sent her the two verses above.

I made her cry.

I have a habit of that – without knowing it, picking the perfect time to say something incredibly sweet to her (Davis?  Good timing at saying sweet things?  Huh.  Miracles never cease!).  She had told me a couple of times that things I had said made her cry (happy tears, she always makes sure I know)  I kinda thought “oh, sure” until I said something to her one day, and she welled up with tears – she wasn’t shittin’ when she tells me those things.

While I can’t be involved in her life, and she can’t be involved in mine really, that doesn’t mean I won’t be friends with her, and talk to her.  She had a suck Christmas (she spent it alone) and a suck New Years (she spent it alone), so I wasn’t gonna let her set alone on her birthday too :-)  Took her out for Chinese (sheesh – they still recognize us, and we haven’t been there together for almost two months!  Maybe we ate there together a little too frequently 😉 and chatted. 

Problem with that whole bit about spending her holidays alone – really, it’s her choices in life that’s led to that.  And she knows it, but she doesn’t change anything.  I asked her point blank what she wanted to do with her life – she still doesn’t know, she just wants it to be something else. 

I’ll probably end up seeing her again on Friday to help her out with her Mac (she got an amazing deal that well… shit, there’s no way anyone on here could get the same discount :-)   She’s seen mine, and knows some about it, but wants a quick education on the world of Mac-ism.

Tammy is someone that most people would blow off as being beautiful, funny, but not nessisarily that bright.  It’s an act quite frequently (but not always – there are some concepts that she just doesn’t grasp at all).  We both know each other pretty well (uh, duh), so when she tilted her head forward, and looked me in the eyes with the “I’m about to drill down and find something out” look, and asked “So what have you been up to lately”, I’m not sure what’s she’s after, but I countered it with “Well, I’ve been busy with work.  One of the projects is…” and then used the “Look – shiny object!” manuver.

Not sure what she was about to dig for.  But for some reason I wasn’t in the frame of mind to let her have her way with my grey matter :-)  I’m sure if I see her Friday I’ll find out what it was.

I hope someday she gets it together.  Otherwise someday I’m gonna be getting a phone call from her brother so I can go attend the funeral.

So, I’ve been playing WoW as usual, but, four days ago I had the idea to start playing the Auction House again.  I used to be good with AH stuff – when I was doing Gamer Zone, I acutally used to be good enough at it that I handled auctions for multiple players and took a 10% split of all profits.  Nice way to keep my character in gold 🙂

I haven’t done more than put up my own stuff for auctions in quite a while.  But I started looking at a mod that exists, and decided to give it a whirl. 

World of Warcraft auctions for single items are pretty easy.  But when you start “playing” the AH, buying and selling, it gets a lot more complicated.  But I know it inside and out on pricing, including the best times to post auctions, etc (which isn’t quite as true as it used to be, since auctions can be as long as 48 hours now, instead of 24.  That extra day changes things quite a bit.)

I had 600 gold on my character – my goal is 5000 gold (actually, it’s twice that – the extra being a buffer for whatever comes along in the next expansion).  That’s enough for my ultra cool epic flying mount. 

On the 6th I threw down 200 gold in items from the auction house, and began rolling them over daily.  While the mod I have finds the lowest priced items, it doesn’t mean it helps you know what sells and what doesn’t, or how to properly price (don’t bother with lowest price, that just drives the market into a downward spiral if your selling for an extended period of time.  Instead, price things 25% more than the lowest priced item.  The market can maintain then without making it go up and down all the time.) 

Tonight I have 1200 gold on my character.  Not bad.  Now get this – I also own 10% of everything that’s on the Auction House on the horde side of my server :-)  Now that’s some serious growth 🙂

It’s starting to get noticed though, so I’m not sure how long I can maintain it.  Tonight for example, I was snagging shards as quick as they hit the AH so I could mark ’em up.  In the trade channel I hear

“Whowever just bought a small glimmering shard on the AH, screw you!”

Ok, I had to ask – she was trying to do the same thing as me apparently, and I was running just a bit faster than her on the auctions, denying her profits 🙂

Now the problem comes in – I’ve got 10% of the market, and I could maintain that for quite a while I think (until someone sets out to screw me over, which can be done, but takes work and determination).  But I don’t think I can expand upon my hold any – while talking to Nora, I noticed there weren’t enough good deals to pick up in the AH to sell anymore, I had bought most of them up already!  So it looks like the “income cap” from playing the game this way is around 700 gold a day (that’s arrived at by factoring gold in hand, products on AH value, and current bids out).  Unless I start pushing the market prices up.  THEN I view it as a problem – I’d have to buy out the lower 15% of the market instead of the lower 10% of the market.  Then 20%.  Then 25%, etc. pushing the cost of the market up every day, which results in players not getting nearly as much out of thier gold.  Kinda unfair.

A part of me wonders though – if someone starts messing up the market that way on a server, does Blizzard intervene?  Could I get banned for it? (pushing the price of the markets up by 25% would be meaner than using snake trap on low level Alliance players 😉

Brandon and I had discussed the idea of using two different characters (me running one, him running the other) and seeing what the maximum amount of the market we could control before Blizzard finally did step in.