State of affairs

I am back from my unanounced vacation. Unannounced because I have a tendency to take an impromptu vacation when I feel like I need to unwind for a while and I am 'blessed' with a decent enough job where skipping out for a few weeks is accepted (albeit not always appreciated).

And since I have been playing WoW even through my vacation (maybe moreso than usual) it's hard to see what is different now than in comparison to two weeks ago.

The fire festival has ended, much to the dismay of all my character who were neatly stacked near the festival bonfire for the daily juggling quests (10% of a level each day).

Despite WotLK looming in the distance people are still farming badges like there is no expansion (or tomorrow for that matter).

More and more people are prancing around in merciless gladiators and vengeful gear and you can actually see a few duelists, challengers and whatnot now that Season 3 has ended.

For some strange reason, at least on my server, guilds seem to be popping out of the ground like mushrooms. The format is sickeningly generic as either a 'raiding' guild or a pvp guild with the arbitrary usage of hardcore or casual thrown in. Still not a real guild to be found anywhere (I'll get into what I consider real some other time, or did I already? ... hmmm... curse you faulty memory)

I myself have been spreading my attentions around a little to all my characters fighting the good fight against rested xp. All this in a bid to get most of them up to 30 before 2.4.3 hits so that they can all mount up and put the days of crawling through the landscape to an end.

The protection paladin is still heavily invested in pvp and has been acting as a rear-guard against various stealthers in AV. Which earned him a bit of appreciation from people that still believe in defense and a lot of AFK reports from people that don't.
Still, my main hand fish has seen a lot of action but not enough action for me to be able to upgrade to the more desireable gladiator's gavel. Even with that I still seem to be unable to kill an AFK player unless I whip out a big two hander and have at it.
Maybe I should weapon-switch more... maybe I should trade a few points from prot to ret... maybe maybe... I like prot so much because I am virtually unkillable by rogues or warriors. I don't mind being deep-fried by mages or warlocks but there has to be something I can use to start doing a little damage against single targets...

Wonder if I can get a rogue to poison my fish... ... wonder if I can enchant my fish... can you enchant a fish?

The warlock is comfortably parked in the AH and is now somewhat semi-officially a bank toon only getting out of town when something needs to be hurt badly (which is a very comfortable fall-back from the 'can't hurt anything paladin').

In a bid to clean up my bank-space I decided to auction off some garbage and start collecting cards. Clearly that strategy was faulty since I now have 35+ slots taken up by cards and only 1 full deck to show for it (elementals). Still, the cards seem a good way to increase value per slot. The only alternative would be to upgrade all my bag slots to primal mooncloth ones but I am not sickeningly rich yet.

Beyond that lots of levelling and lots of exploring that netted me a neat engineering plan for a deepdive helmet I forgot about (very very very useful).