I can has Morgenstern?

Nothing major for today. It was one of those days where I wondered why I logged on. Did some mediocre farming with Keri on some Tonberries in the Temple of Uggalepih. No Flickering Lanterns, but a Water Spirit pact did drop for Keri and a coffer key for me. I need the map for here. At least we didn't wipe like last time. :P

Tried to do a Crawler's Nest escort, but Keri didn't have it flagged. Also tried to hash out some details for a SMN burn of Contaminated Colosseum with Captsassypants. I have plenty of seals to burn, need the money and would really like to add the Morgenstern to my collection of clubs for WHM/NIN. 4SMN, WHM (for buffs and insurance) and RDM (Refresh and debuffs if she has a chance) should make for a good fight. We're hoping to get a few in before Kirin on Saturday.

EDIT: Couldn't sleep, so I played Halo 3 for about an hour. Finished up the mission I was on. This new mission has an epic air battle. I died a few times for accidentally jumping out of my VTOL while mashing the trigger. Oh well, it gave me the chance to play it over a few times.

I Pick Up Chicks This Way, Too!

DeAnn and I decided to pick up where we left off on our mall walking. Our mall, like most malls, has booths and carts set up in the middle of the wings – cell phones, cheap jewelry, witty t-shirts, knick-knacks and sweet snacks all reside in these little make-shift shops. The difference between this mall and most I’ve been to is that here, the shopkeepers feel the need to holler at you to gain your attention. I’ll be walking along, talking to my wife or on the phone, minding my own business when some schmuck in a sideways Spurs cap, baggy jeans and neon orange rubber clogs hollers 3 feet from me “HEY! C’MERE AN’ BUY MY PHONES! WHY AIN’CHA STOPPIN’? HEY! COME BACK!!!” Loser. What business owner in their right mind believes that to be a viable business tactic? If I want a cheap cell phone, silver plated brass jewelry, a bobble-head dashboard statue or a t-shirt that says “Now Hiring Apply Below,” I’ll find you. Until then, stop being a jackass and for the love of all things holy, buy real shoes.

Our linkshell’s scheduled Dynamis-Tavnazia was cancelled tonight due to lack of required jobs. We’ll reschedule it when more people have access. With the night off, Keri and I drummed up some support for another subligar hunt. Demetrion came to help us again on his BST, along with Kactuar as NIN and his attack mule Vudian bringing the treasure hunter on THF. Kactuar was as confused as Rhykar was the first time when I said we were doing the Lv40 capped area. I guess the norm is to do the Lv50 area instead. I also found out that several subligar don’t drop in the Lv40 area – including the SAM piece that Demetrion needed. We got Keri hers and a WAR one for Demetrion for when he’s done with SAM. Demetrion wants to drum up support for a Swift Belt/Subligar hunt in the Lv50 area sometime soon, so I’ll definitely help him with that. After the drops, we decided to attempt Eba, a DRK fomor that runs around in the area we were farming. It was epic fail. She has a nasty AoE attack that she only needed to use twice. We home pointed out and were left with the question: What now?

Keri and I decided to head back to Beadeaux and try to get the other coffer key we needed and maybe a scroll we’ll need for BLM off the Sapphire Quadav. Talonshard came out to lend us his treasure hunter. Keri’s key dropped after about an hour of hunting. Only the Scrolls of Bind and Blind dropped – damned stingy turtles. We need two coffer keys for Garlaige and Crawler’s Nest, as well as two chest keys for Castle Oztroja, so we will probably not be heading back to Beadeaux just for a couple of scrolls with rather limited use.

The House of Pizza (and Hamburgers and Italian and Chinese Food)

My birthday is coming up this Friday, so we decided to go out for dinner tonight to a place we’d been talking about for a while now: The House of Pizza. But it’s not just ye run-o-the-mill pizza joint. Oh no. It also serves hamburgers, sub sandwiches, Italian and, most strange of all, Chinese. We’ve been getting flyers for the place every other week for the past few months, and we’ve always wondered, “How can a place that does all this do any one of them well?”

So we decided to check the place out. DeAnn looked up the directions and we set out, through rush hour(s) traffic, to the House of Pizza. About half an hour and 2 miles later, we arrived at the address Google gave us. I kid you not, the place was a lean-to shack. It had a certain hole-in-the-wall roadside café quality that you’d expect from a horror novel or scary movie. Not a good first impression. We had to ask ourselves if we really wanted to do this, but resolved to not leave until we could give the place a thumbs up or a thumbs down. That and the kids ate free.

In we went. It was clean, if not worn in – the kind of place that has a stained floor and bathroom sink and graffiti on the tables, but sure has pretty light fixtures. The kid that was our server greeted us politely and helped us get a highchair for Clara. We sat down and ordered drinks before diving into the smorgasbord of food offerings. Colin had a cheese pizza, while the rest of us had varied flavors of Chinese chicken, with a side of cheese rangoons. When the rangoons came out, they were not folded in the typical rangoony way. They were more like cream cheese empanadas… Not that they were bad, just interesting and unexpected and not rangoons. The rest of the dinner wasn’t bad: to their credit it was quickly prepared, nicely presented and didn’t taste half bad either. They didn’t HQ any of it to be sure (the eggrolls left much to be desired), but it definitely wasn’t bad. We tipped well and ventured back home.

With the rampant plant sex filling the air, my allergies have been leaving me feeling very run down. I decided to take a nap before Einherjar. I woke up in time to fully gear up and run out to the Testing Grounds. We took down the first set of mobs with little difficulty. The boss this time was a buffalo. The buffalo has a nasty knock-back attack that scatters people and makes you have to run around to get back in range. I lost 2 TP moves and half my 2hr to that thing tromping around. We wore the buffalo boss down to 30% before we were kicked out. If we’d done what we were doing for the last 3 minutes, we would have had a real chance at winning. Still is not my favorite event, but it’s come a long way from the last few times I went.
Keri and I rounded out the evening chasing around turtles in Beadeux. The Sapphire Quadav dropps scrolls that we both need for BLM, and all of the coffer Quadav drop keys we’ll need on our BST. We went through two rounds of repops before we called it a night. Got one key of the two we need, and no scrolls, so we’ll be back…

Publicity Stunts

DeAnn decided to post a link to my blog on our linkshell’s forum. I’ll have to watch what I say now. My forum profile had been linked here for some time, but now people might actually read it! :P

Anyway, it was just another crazy Monday in the real world. A position opened up with the Network Operations Center where I work. I talked with the supervisor there expressing my interest. I hope that goes through: it’s a nice place to work for as a contractor, but a really good place to work for if you’re a full time employee.

Our linkshell does a sky hunt every Monday night. On the way up to sky Brickhouse, our linkshell leader, announced that Zhefer, our sky leader, was promoted to sackholder. Congrats, Zhef! And sorry for making you late… >.> On the docket were drops from Zipacna and Ullikummi. Once assembled, we rolled out to Zip. He was walking around and waiting for us to be ready. Another shell arrived soon after, so we quickly pulled him without being completely ready. Things got a bit hairy, but we took him down and got our drop: all within the first 15 minutes of starting.

Not quite so easy for Ulli. We chased off the other LS waiting for Faust and camped there for a while, with no luck. After about half an hour, we took the last teleporter to Ulli’s room and killed Aura Statues for a diorite – the pop item for Ullikummi. We had a large group up there, and before long we were competing with each other for statue spawns. I sat back and watched for a bit – it was kinda like an LS Capture the Flag, but with big, ugly demon-rocks for flags. At one point, Azmodius got a parry skillup from taking hate off one of the tanks, and he was rather pleased with himself. The statue was not nearly as impressed, and proceeded to squish him into an epic pancake.

I lost track of how long we were trying for a diorite, but one never dropped. No matter though, we’ll get one next time. That was the most fun I’ve had at a sky hunt in a really long time, and it gave me a chance to get to know some of the new applicants better. I had to go to bed, but I hear tell they went back to Faust and got the kill.

Flight of the Ravioli

Slept in far too late on Sunday. As a result, we were unable to make it to church. >.<" Gonna have to catch the message on audio later this week. Took a late breakfast and goofed around a bit. Someone in linkchat said there was a GM in La Theine at the Crag of Holla, so I jet out there quickly to snap a screenie and pose with him. I'll post it here later today when I get home. Gotta wonder if they hate that or get a kick out of it. It wasn't until we were going to sit down and merit a little bit that we ran headlong into a wall of chaos.

Before I get into this, let me share a hypothesis: The only reason mankind has lasted as long as it has and flourished is because women are far smarter than men. Despite what they'd have you believe, women know EXACTLY what they want - a baby. It's just how they're wired. Every birth can be attributed to either craftiness/trickery/Jedi mind tricks/siege tactics on the part of the woman, mental illness on the part of the man (no man in his right mind wants a baby), or a combination of both. I know my wife had been singing "Ba~by!" a good year before we got pregnant. Everytime a couple strolled by with an incognisant puddle of goop or one appeared on the TV, she'd chime in to make sure that I knew she noticed it. The Men's Retreat I went on that year didn't help either. They had a 3-day talk (no doubt orchestrated by the women in the church) on the blessings of Fatherhood, featuring a former drug addict pro-Football player turned father of 14. Yes, I said 14. That year, half the church had children. The brainwashing combined with the constant baby bombardment is what broke me. I think I did well; lasting as long as I did. It's a refrain I've heard from almost every other dad under the age of 50.

Don't get me wrong: I love Clara. I wouldn't trade her for gold. Well, maybe gold. Or cash monies. I jest: I can't imagine life without that little bundle of cute and destruction. So imagine my chagrin when, as I'm getting us ready for lunch and an afternoon of merits, said bundle decides my lunch is going to be her lunch, and pulls an entire bowl of hot ravioli all over herself, my chair, desk and the carpet. About half an hour of unbridled chaos ensued: screaming child, ravioli everywhere, scrubbing Resolve into the carpet, setting up a maze of baby barricades, vacuuming and more scrubbing. Yeah, that's never coming out.

Settled down enough for us to get in a good hour of meriting. It was a linkshell merit party, so the regular pissing match that occurs in pick-up merits was gone. Talon let me borrow his Osode for the party - that is one sexy piece of equipment. My MNK really needed that buffer - I was 1k from deleveling. We disbanded just in time to make the gather time for our Sunday dynamis run. We did a win run in Dynamis-Windurst, and there was much Haidate. >.> One pair of Cleric's Duckbills did drop, and I won the lot for it. I'm 2/5 now for Cleric! After getting back from Dynamis, we heard that a GM decided to watch the Fafnir fight. Gee, wonder why... Rounded out the evening with a Limbus run. Keri's group got 3 coins each, mine got off to a late start, but ended with 4-5 coins each. Baloo bought my coins for 30k each, paying for the entrance fee. I could have made more money bazaaring them off, but I was just looking to make the 30k back.

Cleaning Day

I resumed my role as the "Cleaning Nazi" Saturday morning. After the family visits and the holidays, our house was a wreck. I asked DeAnn and Colin what their cleaning goals were for the day, and after we agreed on what needed to be done for the day, I set a timetable of no longer than 4 hours and we set to work. Only took us about 3 hours. Cleaned up and aired the place out - so much better than before!

We got back from our WalMart run just in time to head to Dragon's Aery for another shot at Fafnir. I brought ingredients for Insect Balls, so in between spawn windows I was fishing up Moat Carp left and right. Fafnir popped on the last possible window. Our linkshell got the claim, but since no one plays fair if they can help it in this game, everyone else crowded our claim and lagged us so bad that we could not target. We lost claim to another LS, who got Spike Flailed (LOL!) who lost claim to a known botting LS. Bots don't need to see to target, so they never lost claim and eventually killed it. There was much GM calling and exchanging of nasty words, but I felt ok - I did after all fish up 15k in Moat Carp. -.^

After the dragon, Keri and I geared up our BLM's for a night of leveling. We put together a pretty decent party: PLD, WHM, RDM, DRK and BLMx2 (us). We started in Crawler's Nest, but all the prey there was a little too weak for us. We decided to try the Goblins at the Ifrit's Cauldron zone in Yhoator Jungle, but our PLD didn't tell us he didn't have that crystal. -.- My Lv1 mule has that crystal! Quick change of plans had us leveling in the Labyrinth of Onzozo. I've never leveled there at that level, but the Cockatrice and Goblins there made for very nice chains and soon we'd almost made 2 levels. We'll go out again soon and get it.