Where in the world is Viv?

[Vivienne]

I've been hearing some rumors so I thought I'd step in and post here instead of my Facebook page, just to kill two birds with one big huge stone.

TLDR: I'm here, just mostly invis to everyone and working on stuff on the back end. I don't do forums much; if you really need me, just as posted a couple times elsewhere, hit me up at vivienne(dot)wot(at)gmail(dot)com. Every time anything comes to that email address I get a ping on my phone and tablet. It works pretty well, and I tend to respond a lot faster. I rarely check forums.

For those who want the longer story:

As many of you know, I don't sleep a lot and I don't stand still for very long. I do a lot of stuff. Keeping myself busy keeps me sane. I multi-task like a boss.

My dad passed away from his second diagnosis of cancer very quickly; he moved on in March 2016. He and my mom had left things in quite a shambles in terms of legal and financial stuff, and I've been dealing with all my younger siblings, life insurance, my mom, and more. I was the sole executor of his separate estate, and my Dad left everything in that to me with the instruction to parcel it all out as I saw fit, with the instruction that if anyone wanted to argue with me I was supposed to give that person a freshly minted dollar bill and that would be all. Luckily, my Dad knew that I didn't want anything so I could be very impartial, but the way my Dad set that up - designed to defray infighting with my brothers - was something I would encourage everyone to never do. Never ever. Dealing with personal overwhelming grief, and tempering that with being there for my Mom, and dealing with my brothers as in their grief they got a little emotionally grabby - that's the main reason I've been invis in the game. You guys don't need to be exposed to that roller-coaster of emotions, and I didn't want to be in there, visible, and have something hit me the wrong way.

I'm also eight months into serving as Vice President for an Association of Realtors, which has me traveling a lot for State and National meetings. I've been a lot of places, and handling things on a huge scale. The only month I haven't been "someplace else" for 5-7 days at a time was March. Great honor to be elected to the position; lots of traveling and face to face work when representing that position; I was elected in June 2015 for the 2016 term and didn't see 2016 going the way it has. I thought about resigning, and even spoke with my Dad about it before he died because I saw the way things were going with him, and he basically forbade me from doing so. Yay Dad.

I bowed out of any visible, hands-on leadership or decision making for the winery in November of 2015. I just write checks and look pretty when representing the wines. The tasting room opened six days ago (!!!) and the wines will be available for sale beginning in November. When we get to that point, I'll be sure to put it out there for those who have asked. If you've ever been part of the alcohol industry, there's a lot more involved in that for State and Federal laws, let alone distribution. Nightmare. Glad I stepped out on that end of it.

The brewery is still going strong, and two weeks ago we took a gold and a silver at the National Orange Show for the porter and the belgian. Prior to that we took a silver and a bronze at Hangar 18 for the saison and the belgian. I stepped back from that also in November, as it seemed a good time for me to do that for both endeavors since they are so closely tied. For almost the past year I've been designing our recipes and making our test batches (all grain, of course) but leaving everything else to everyone else.

I wasn't sleeping (even less that I normally do) after March, so I started brushing up on C, and I've been taking some of the online courses offered by MIT. If you don't know about that, MIT has select courses that they offer for free. You don't get college credit for it, but you do get the MIT level coursework. Check it out, it's pretty awesome. Education is valuable.

Thanks to my personal relationships with Blizzard, and also Niantic, I got in on two dev teams strictly for field testing in January. Both companies have a completely different way of working with volunteers for development and testing than I've ever seen, and it's been a blast. The level of professionalism mixed with friendship is stunning. That's grown-up game development without egos, which I've really enjoyed. I've been invited to take on a creative role in an upcoming project because of these opportunities, and I'm looking forward to seeing that through.

Oh, and this real estate company of mine? The one that puts money in the bank? It's been crazy-good, and crazy busy. Thank god for my two main assistants.

I took a 10-day vacation to Hawaii at the end of July just to try to unplug, because I know this manic level of activity and multi-tasking is superhuman and at some point I will burn out on all of it. (Timeshare investments for the win! All I had to pay for was food, basically!) I was there for the hurricane, I had a blast, I saw a ton of great scenery and have way too many photos and video to even process mentally. If you see tropical stuff creeping into the game, you can most likely blame that trip.

I have a few really close and personal friends from the game, who have been standing with me and beside me for the highs and lows of all of this, as well as occasionally telling me to sit down and just breathe. I appreciate that. They know how much I appreciate them, because I tell them almost daily. Part of my "breathing" has been staying invisible and just knocking creative things out for WoTmud, and fixing things on the back end that have been issues for a while. Some of my clans have started seeing front-forward changes, such as new quests. I'm feeling more recharged as time goes on, so you will probably see me going visible more often in days and weeks to come.

Life is good. I'm okay. You can see I've been filling my waking time with a lot of stuff to stay as busy as I can because, you know... otherwise I'd probably be a real mess. This is how I'm coping with death, and loss, and grief. It's part of life, and my way of hitting it head-on is to live it.

Have a great time in the game, and, as always, less than three!

[Firimei Lang]

Wow you have been through a lot and I don't blame you for being invisible, I would not really mud at all going through that.

I know of personal accounts of friends and so forth dying from cancer, one totally unexpected and another not so. Still hits you like a rock.

Take all the time you need, you have great assistants here as well. You pretty much run the mud I gather and we're proud of you .

Hope you are ok and so forth.

hugs

[Paigey]

Condolences on the loss in your family. Went through something very similar recently and sorting out an estate is terrible. When family doesn't cooperate its even worse.

[Melat]

Thank you for sharing. It's an honor to get a glimpse into your life.

[Razhak]

My condolences on your father. I believe we once had a conversation regarding his illness, its always a great pain to see a loved one move on after a struggle with cancer.

As an aside, i just finished Siddharta Mukerhjee's "Emperor of all Maladies, a biography of cancer" which I now consider a must read for all physicians but also all other people interested in the subject