Odds and Ends

Pretty busy today at work. With the new trainee, one of our coworkers on a special project and one calling in sick, there were all of two people to handle all the calls. This would be, of course, the time for development to test load handling… On a production server… in the middle of the day… Yeah, we got hit and hard. The errors produced from this also flooded the email system, backlogging an entire exchange server. Would not have been fun for a fully staffed desk, let alone for only two people. Good news is that I think the new trainee will catch on pretty quick and work out very well.

I decided to work on my poor yard today when I got home. The bush on the end closest to my front door in particular was in a sorry shape, so I decided to prune them away from the house, under the height of the window and any dead/diseased looking branches, and finished with a good watering. I hope my yard can pick up a little bit – I’m starting to get concerned. >.<

I wasn’t feeling up to much after that. I have been having either a sinus infection or some serious allergies lately. I felt much better after a nap, and decided to try to make Limbus. I logged in and had about an hour to kill, so I went and camped Centurio for the Shaman’s Cloak. It must have been awhile since the last camper, cause I only had to kill one placeholder to get him to pop. After a bit of a fight and much linkage, I took Centurio down and was rewarded with 3k in gil, a scroll of Quake and a brand new cloak! ^_^/

Limbus this week was a metal chip run. That is, it was a run that was a reward for a previous job well done instead of working on a Ultima or Omega pop set. It was simple enough – run through the area and kill anything that moves. The trick was killing them, as the monsters we were fighting had a bad habit of reraising 1-2 times each. The run netted each member about 3 coins and one point, not a bad haul really.

DeAnn and the kids leave tomorrow for El Paso. I’m kinda bittersweet about it: I’ll enjoy the quiet, but I’m going to miss them. Thankfully it’s only until Sunday. Her family needs her, and my thoughts and prayers are with them and on their safe travel and return.

I Blame The Cat

So it looks like the new guy will work out nicely. He’s had call center experience before, was remarking at how nice the environment is here, and seemed genuinely glad to be there. I have to admit that, even after being here 6 months, I like the job, too. I remember being in that same thankful state at finally having the nights and weekends to myself and family, and he seems bright and intelligent. It’s not incredibly difficult work, maybe a bit busied at times, but not harsh. If he only just tries, he should do well.

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather lately. There’s apparently something going around the office, and I think the wind is kicking up something that is forming an unholy alliance with the cat. It made for a rough time when I got home. Clara has some serious volume control issues that we’ve been trying to work with her on, but I was just in no mood for it tonight, and insisted that she go to bed right after supper.

I logged into game after dinner. Amelisa was already on, and Keri was ready soon after, but we hadn’t seen anything of Talon all night. I heard that he had a bad run with some turtles in Beadeaux and had logged off to avoid getting home pointed. At any rate, he did not log in for static the whole night. I dual boxed his character and mine for a while, just long enough for us all to ding 58. We’re all starting to look a little more like our jobs now that we can wear the majority of our AF. I would have liked to get a better buffer, but the sinus headache was making it nauseating to focus on the laptop screen. I called it an early night after scrounging around for some ideas for a new signature.

Might make it to Limbus tomorrow night, if they need a MNK or WHM. If no Limbus, I’m going to Ro'Maeve to farm up some Illumininks. We have a Divine Might FNLE scheduled for next week, so I want to be prepared for a few fights.

Something Fishy This Way Swims

Looks like we finally might be getting a new person in to help out with calls. It’ll be a welcome addition after the craziness of the past few days. As long as he can be willing to simply try, he’ll be a vast improvement.

When I got home, I was going to go to Ro’Moaeve to farm up a few Illumininks for Ark Pentaspheres, since there’s been renewed talk about doing Divine Might lately. I got derailed halfway there with the news that we had claimed Fafnir and they needed all hands on deck. We made a good run of it, but we didn’t have the numbers we needed and couldn’t damage him fast enough. Fafnir went into rage mode and we wiped at 12%, after it regened from 9%.

There was a debate on whether or not we should have CFH’ed it. Personally, I find that to be completely dishonorable: if I’m going to wipe, I want to wipe with some dignity. We claimed fair and square, we made a epic fight of it and did the best with what little we had. We wiped fair and someone else took it fair. To CFH would be ruining it for others because we couldn’t handle it. That’s textbook asshattery, and it’s sad that others in my own shell can’t see that. At least we’re starting to claim a little more consistently, but we really need to make sure we have the numbers if we’re going to try to claim. We easily spent 15 of the 60 minutes before rage sleeping Fafnir and waiting for reinforcements. Would have been better to just keep ToD if we only have 8 people in the region when he pops than to doom us to wipe to a raged Fafnir, no matter how honorable the wipe. Just my opinion…

I passed the time before Einherjar fishing up Hamsi and the odd Kalamar in Whitegate, and got another .2 in skillups on the squid. The fish went to Keri’s mule to make CrabFamiliar and Courier Carrie soups, and the squid went on the auction block. All in all, I fished about 6 stacks of fish and a stack of squid before I boarded the boat for Nashmau. Once in Nashmau, I talked to a random Qiqirn NPC and got a cutscene involving that NPC and his fear of Tarutaru children. Pretty funny, I’ll have to look the quest up later.

Einherjar went better than expected – I did not die. We didn’t win, but I didn’t die. In fact, there wasn’t much death involved at all. It took us a little while longer to get situated than expected, and we got elementals and skeletons for the enemies and a bird for the mini boss. I’m not sure what all that is supposed to mean, but I’m told it’s important. The boss was a big fish that used TP moves in 3’s: he would always use 3 TP moves back-to-back-to-back. One of the moves was devastating AoE damage that if allowed to happen in 3’s would wipe the alliance. Stun kept these moves down for the most part, but we took too long on the bones and didn’t have enough time to kill the fish.

Dynamis is cancelled for tomorrow, so I’m glad I got to get in some pointworthy events. We’ll be staticing tomorrow night and maybe hit 58. Also need to get Colin started on picking up his room so I can shampoo his carpet this weekend while I have the house to myself.

Your Mom

Another Monday in Paradise. This time, we were two people short and had a Monday-style call day (read: ton of random things that broke over the weekend that we can’t/don’t fix). I know we’re gonna hear about our metrics tomorrow…

At least I got to leave early. Since its my week to stay until 4 on Friday, I don’t have to stay late everyday this week. This bought me a little extra time before DeAnn got home to do some studying and take some notes. I need to get a workbook and a reference text at least before I can really get deep, but I have just about everything else I will need. The training video stressed the importance of having hour blocks of time at regular intervals that are uninterrupted to study, do labs and take pretests. I know I can do it if I were alone, but I don’t know if the rigors of the family life I love will let me do this without putting up a fight. I’m really excited about this.

Decided not to do much of anything in game tonight. Talonshard had posted a link to a comic on the forums that he thought reminded him of Keri and her habit of replying to questions with “Your Mom.” She’d been wanting a forum signature for some time now that included her character model, so I took the opportunity to reconstruct the comic element by element and replace one of the characters with her model. The first version blew up my computer. Always save your work, kids… -_-; I created the second version in the down time between campaign battles in Rolanberry Fields [S] – the little bit of gaming that we did tonight. Truth be told, I knew what I wanted a little bit better for the second version, so I think it came out better, anyway. Finished up the evening buying out most of the tier IV BLM scrolls I will need. I'm only missing a handful of the more expensive (and arguably less useful) scrolls.

First time back to Einherjar for me in a while tomorrow night. I’m periodically assessing that event to see if it’s worth my time for me to participate. So far it has not been worthwhile, but I’m unwilling to simply strike it out as useless just yet. I’ll do some saltwater fishing while I wait in Whitegate or Nashmau. I can skill up on the Kalamar (I got a .1 skill this weekend) while I fish up Hamsi for Courier Carrie soups – Win/win situation.

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.