Weekend Intelligence: Insomniac

Feels like I paid for the four-day work week dearly. x.X; Everyday this past week felt like a Monday. The weekend came on, and none too soon. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home:

Friday was absolutely brutal at work. We were half staffed and had a high-volume day. I used the extra hour that I had from getting out early and took a nap. DeAnn’s been having a hard couple of days, too. Work and home was stressful business as usual, but on top of that, her aunt was placed in hospice care this week. She’s been coordinating with her mom on a set of plane tickets for her and the kids to fly out to El Paso and visit family during this time.

We were very lazy on Saturday. We slept in until nearly noon and gamed most of the day. The only thing I did that was productive was picking up some random trash from the front yard. It’s been so dry recently that our front yard looks like a dust bowl… DeAnn thinks all it needs is some fertilizer, but there are large patches of the yard that I’m pretty sure are completely dead. >.<; We’ll look to that next month.

Sunday saw our family up and about early to catch the classic service (Coffee and Donuts, woo!) and get our WalMart run out of the way. Clara channeled the Tasmanian Devil in church, so it was my turn to hang out with her in the lobby. She’s happy, but very noisy about it. I’m glad I could take care of her while DeAnn was hearing the message. Later that day we received news that her aunt had passed away, and D got found a lot of comfort and encouragement from that message. Looked at some lawn repair things at WalMart while we were there. We planned to get that stuff in March. If this drought keeps up, we’re gonna need sprinklers, fertilizer, re-seed and some aerating tools. One of the front bushes has already been claimed a casualty of weather, so it may be a few weekends in the sun for us. That’s ok, I dare say it would do us some good to get outside more.

In Game:

Keri and I spent most of the game time Friday in the Sacrarium helping people farm up subligaria and popping two swift belt NMs. The first one went down easily enough, but we wiped to the second one with 1% HP to go. ;_; Our target fomors were the Bard and Beastmasters, and we did end up getting a few for the people who wanted them. Amelisa got the Bard one, but once I told her about the Beastmaster one, and that she could wear it on Bard, she wanted that one, too. Keri and I might have to take her to the Aqueducts and farm them there – much better drop rate there.

For as lazy as Saturday was in the real world, I was very busy in game. Talonshard has been ribbing me for some time about my body armor for Black Mage, so I decided to try my hand at Centurio X-I, the NM that drops the Shaman’s Cloak. Some would argue (pre-weskit) that it’s an endgame piece for BLM. Anyway, we spent all of 30 minutes there to get Centurio to pop, killing not only the Antican Signifier placeholders, but just about everything else in there, too. During repops, a ??? point appeared and disappeared in the course of about a minute. Talon told me it was for the Antican Tag to pop the Tungi NM. He already had a tag floating around somewhere. It reappeared in about 5 minutes, so I nabbed it. We did eventually get Centurio to pop, but did not get the cloak. I did get a nifty scroll of Stonega III though, so that’s one less I’ll have to buy. We decided to go pop our Antican Tags for a shot at Tungi. Neither one of ours dropped the axe, but mine dropped a chunk of adaman that netted 20k.

Followed this up with a Fafnir camp. We didn’t get claim, but the shell that did almost wiped, and took so long to kill that we thought they were going to put Fafnir into rage mode (a countermeasure to prevent NM holding). That gave us some excitement. The carp I fished up during that camp put me into the 7400’s – I’m about 75% with Lu Shang’s Rod! Now for the home stretch…

The main event for Saturday night was the Sleepga II fight in the Boyahda Tree. A Beastmaster can solo the fight, so we enlisted the help of Eleazar. On our way up, we saw that Aquarius was up and scuttling around. After a little bit of death due to hate management, Aquarius went down for a cool 3k apiece for all involved, and I got the Fransisca for grins. Agas (the Sleepga II NM) went down with rather unremarkably, and soon there were several more people running around with Sleepga II in their libraries. Sleepga II is currently running 345k, so the cost savings are staggering for doing the quest instead of buying the scroll. Camped Centurio for another 45 minutes, chanced upon another tag, and called it a night.

Finally, Sunday’s adventures took our BLM static back to Aydeewa Subterrane to clobber some RNG Rats. We all leveled to 57, and made it about halfway to 58 before calling it a night. We started chaining much more consistently at 57, regularly making 2’s and 3’s, so the experience was very good. And it gave us all an opportunity to keep current on our skill levels. Not sure if Ame capped her music skills, but Keri, Talon and I all had capped magic skills by the time the night was out. I finished the night with a campaign battle that gave me a rank up and my first star. I used some Allied notes to buy a Cobra Unit coat, but I’ll still try to get a Shaman’s Cloak in my spare time.

So LS off week has drawn to a close. Nothing major planned for Monday. We have too many Kirin pop sets to do a Sky Hunt. I think I might try to get some Cisco study time in and continue cleaning the house before I do much in game.