Does this ever happen to anyone else?

I generally tend to avoid participating in seasonal or new activities on the very first day of their release, because a lot of people seem to be hell-bent on doing exactly the opposite, which often leads to lag and crowds and general unpleasantness. After a few days I'll finally get over myself and start to get involved, but in the case of events that are only available for a limited amount of time I usually won't remember until the very last day of the holiday that there's still something that I wanted to do, and eventually I end up panicking and acting like a numpty.

Latest case in point, midsummer. Having got the Flame Keeper title on my main last year I didn't feel particularly inspired to work on it again on any of my alts, but I did participate by killing Ahune a few times for cloaks and paying tribute to/extinguishing the occasional bonfire, regardless of which character I was on at the time. Today, on the last day of the event, I found myself casually exploring Outland on my night elf druid, and as I did so I also picked up a couple of burning blossoms from the Outland bonfires. I didn't really have any particular plans for them, but at the end of my exploration I realised that my count had gone up to over a hundred, which meant that I could still buy something with them before they expired.

Then I got distracted by levelling up, learning new skills, spending my talent points and so on, and absent-mindedly queued up to heal a random dungeon. Only when the Old Kingdom loading screen popped up I suddenly realised that with the time zone difference, I had less than thirty minutes left until the end of the fire festival. Crap! I contemplated immediately dropping from the group to go and spend my blossoms instead but decided that I would feel stupid and selfish if I did so. I simply should have thought of it before queuing up. Besides, we could probably finish the instance in twenty minutes or so anyway, right?

We actually did pretty well, but on the trash shortly before Jedoga we had a wipe. As I watched at least one guy not even bothering to release, I looked at the clock, said "brb" and quickly teleported to Stormwind to still hand in my blossoms. But as I mounted up after hurling myself off the mage's tower, I heard the church clock strike midnight. Uh-oh, that's just cosmetic right? Doesn't mean anything, does it? I reached the spot where all the midsummer NPCs used to hang out and still saw a couple of people mill about in what seemed like slight confusion, but nothing else. The blossoms in my bag disappeared shortly afterwards. Bugger, what a waste.

I went back to complete the instance run, but the group insisted on skipping Jedoga so I didn't even get the achievement for completing Old Kingdom. I guess this is what happens when you try to have your cake and eat it too - you end up with sticky fingers and feeling no less hungry, or in my case, wasting your burning blossoms because of an instance run that wasn't even all that great. /sigh