It's been far too long since my last Blog. My gaming plans have not gone exactly to...ummmm well plan. Starcraft has caused me some unneeded relationship grief. Not so much because it has necessarily been all consuming of my every waking thought, but rather it has been a distraction from the giant monkey that has recently made its new home on my right shoulder blade. That ever screaming metaphorical primate was my lack of employment. As you may have guessed dear reader, I lost my job in between blogs. Although tragic and disappointing the situation was preventable and very much of my own doing. I made my life very complicated over the last few weeks and now I have to patch my life back together. The sake of my sanity and more importantly the sanity of my beautiful girlfriend Jordan depends on my success.

As far as putting my game back together it's most definitely a work in progress. It seems that when I concentrate on the mechanical fundamentals necessary to improve and take my Zerg play to a higher level, such as creep spread, hot keys, larva injects, timings, and unit compositions etc., that I find myself missing one of them in any given game and getting run over by a stim’ed Terran truck or blindsided by a proxy Protoss train. I have my good ladder sessions and my bad just like every faithful ladderer. Good ladder session look something like 12 wins and 2 losses, where as a bad session may be along the lines of 6 wins and 7 losses. Losses can be chalked up to a number of reasons all of which I'm sure my Zerg family can relate if not all learning Starcraft players. I've lost pretty much every way you can lose a game of Starcraft, but as long as I learn something from a loss its worth more than the ladder points given to my nerd foe. It is knowledge gained in battle and an example of flaws that I can study and correct. So after my initial nerd rage I tend to calm down reflect and click the "find a nerd to crush" button and give it another go.

In my last blog I laid out some goals and guide lines to achieve those goals taking place over the next year as a SC2 player. My goal of hitting the Gold League by July 11 was stymied by the Blizzard ladder lock on July 6. Being in 3rd place in my Silver League on the lock day tells me that I was very close to hitting my intended target date. Since the lock I've been playing against mostly Gold and the occasional Platinum player. So tomorrow when the ladder lock is lifted and I play my placement game for season 3 I am going to crush whatever nerd Blizzard throws my way and make the leap to Gold.