By the Light of the Moon

Another workday went by at a good clip. Having something to do at all times really has a way of making the day fly by. Before I knew it, the day was nearly over. I got permission to head home a little bit early, and traffic was very good to me.

I wanted to get home as soon as I could to make as much of the full moon as possible. I got home just as the window for the Qu’Hau Spring was opening. Finally, a clear night! Just as I traded, it started to rain, but I got my Ark Pentasphere for Friday. I logged Keri in, who had logged out in the Hall of the Gods. She got into the area just as the rain stopped, so she was able to get one as well. Mcleod was there for a pop item, so we have at least 3 for Friday.

I took a break from the excitement to get some house maintenance work done. Tossed the old deathtrap of a car seat in exchange for the brand new car seat that DeAnn had brought back from El Paso, which had been sitting in the back of the Vue since she got home. That cleared the back of the Vue for the carpet cleaner, which I’ve needed to return to the coworker who lent it to me. Once the carpet cleaner was out of the way in the garage, I hooked up the hose to the hot water heater and drained the reservoir to clean out the deposits.

After dinner, we got set up in San d’Oria for a Dynamis – San d’Oria run. I made a new raise macro, making a play on words how the player needing a raise sure goes down like a pro. Double Entendre'd! XD I got one of the 2 Cleric Caps that dropped that run, so I’m 3/5 on WHM relic. The only pieces I need left are Jeuno and lolXarcabard. I have no chance on Xarcabard until I make WHM main, so I’m not stressing it.

Static tomorrow night. DeAnn will be at a hob-nobbing thingummy, so I’ll have to dual-box until she gets back. Mcleod will finally be joining us, though I heard tell he might actually be bringing BLM to our static instead of RDM. That’d be sweet, too – needs moar firepower!

Splat Rat is Droppin’ Bombs

The day seems to fly by on shift lead. If I’m not answering emails, I’m calling back voicemail. If there’s no voicemail, I’m pushing software or finishing tickets. By the time I’m done with tickets, there are emails again and it starts all over again. But its all at my pace, and I don’t take nearly as many random calls. I had to post a crisis when our remote server went down, but that was pretty simple and didn’t come back to bite me.

I got home and was more tired than I realized, and daycare said Clara didn’t have a nap. I fell asleep on the bed until DeAnn got home and brought the baby in with her. Something happened that I hadn’t noticed before. While I was giving D a hug and talking to her about her day, Clara started doing things to get attention and was upset when I didn’t look at her. She got jealous! :O She wasn’t long to be awake, though. After dinner, she got really crabby and we just put her to bed.

Our gaming night consisted of leveling BLM. Everyone gathered in Whitegate after another attempt on Centurio for Talon’s cloak, but there were too many botters and they didn’t get it. We made the hard +15k push to 59 on our respective jobs. It was easier than ever before: resist rates were very low, we easily had enough MP for two volleys of ancient magic and MP to spare, and damage was up with our 2/3 shiny new Shaman’s Cloaks. We tore through them much faster than they could respawn, and as a result had a bit more downtime than before.

It was during these downtimes that we decided to try our hand at the other mobs in this room. You see, the RNG Qiqirn are not the only things inhabiting the room. There are a ton of leeches, there’s a Qiqirn Lieuter away from the rest of the rats, and there a worm that spawns way off next to the farthest RNG spawn. We tried the worm first in our downtime. The nice thing about the worm is that, like the RNG, it couldn’t melee us if we kept a distance. The bad thing was that it had some nasty spells: Stone IV, Stonega III, Quake and Rasp to name a few. Rasp could be particularly nasty, because we’re not high enough to have erase and couldn’t rest with that DoT in effect. We tried the Lieuter as well. I think he might be a THF mob, but I can’t be sure. We timed our AM, followed it with Ame’s lullaby and another timed AM. Then the rat bastard did something I’d never seen before. He dropped a land mine and ran like hell, dropping bombs along the way! The one he dropped near us, like about half the ones he dropped throughout the evening, was a dud and didn’t go off. The next one blew up in a massive fireball and the crazy rat was still booking it and dropping bombs. It took a second for him to stop those shenanigans and Ame to pull him back to camp. We fought a few of those and they were not entirely bad. They went down easily enough (when they weren’t trying to blow the crap out of us), but they would melee us if we didn’t keep up the timed nukes followed with a sleep. We’ll need to work on our timing tactics.

Tomorrow I’m going to take Keri and Shrade to the Qu’Hau Spring in Ro’Maeve and see if the weather will be a bit more cooperative this time around. If I can get some Pentaspheres, I’ll head to Dynamis – San d’Oria, but the Divine Might event is @1 for me this time.

Little Hands, Little Feet

Kind of a crazed Monday. One of my co-workers decided to take a vacation day, so I still had to answer the phones, look after all the email issues and pick up the loose ends from the week before. At least there was no major outage. Everyone is due back tomorrow, so we’ll see how it goes.

After everyone got home and situated, I grilled some burgers and sat people down to eat. Clara made a complete mess of herself: there was burger under her fingernails, down her pants and in her hair. It was an adventure in self-feeding: seems she fed everything but her mouth. She was making sleepy signals, so I decided to take her upstairs and clean her off a bit and put her to bed. When we got to the changing table, she had a surprise for me. A thick, foul orange glue was starting to spill over. If that wasn’t surprising enough, she had more for me. Following some primitive monkey instinct, before I could stop her, she thrust her hands straight down and stuck them in the diaper. She followed this by flinging her arms up and sticking her feet in the diaper as well. Poo went everywhere! She smeared it on herself, on me and my shirt. I had it all up and down both of my arms and little hand and footprints on my shirt. She even managed to fling poo on the changing table and walls. I finally got the little monkey under control and gave her a bath in baby wipes. I felt violated…

After my traumatic episode with toddler excrement, the night was fairly uneventful. I logged in and camped Centurio for Talon, getting claim but no cloak. I led a small group of people to farm Ulli stones in sky, but I decided to log early and spend some quality time with my wife. I really needed to reconnect with her after being away for the weekend, and we both fell asleep happy.

We’re supposed to static tomorrow, and maybe get 59. At that point, Amelisa’s boyfriend Mcleod is joining us on his RDM. Might need to find a new camp at that point, but that’s still a ways off to worry about now.

Weekend Intelligence: Bach-in’ it up!

Well, I had the house all to myself this weekend. DeAnn and the kids went out to El Paso to spend some time with family and friends and help D’s mom take care of final arrangements for her aunt. I was a bachelor in my castle for a weekend! So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights!

House and Home:

It was my week to stay late on Friday, so I got home about the same time DeAnn did. We followed the whole “get to the airport 2 hours early” advice: hurried to get baby and boy and wife all ready to go, and it ended up being way too early. Knowing Mr. Murphy, if we would have gotten there any later, she’d have missed the flight…

I decided that this weekend I was going to do all the things that I can’t do with the rest of the family around. Anyway, since I was in the area, I decided to stop by my old theater and see some people I haven’t seen in over a year. They really fixed the place up! It has more of a modern Starbuck feel to it: they cleaned up the café and pizzeria, gave it a fresh coat of paint and added in two plasma screen menu boards. They also fixed up the outside courtyard – looks gorgeous! I ate at Peng’s and didn’t have to worry about getting on Colin to eat something. I tried to game a little bit, but my heart just wasn’t into it. I decided to go out MD’s (a place where several people I used to work with are working now) and won $25 off a drunk guy playing pool. I ended up buying him and several friends there a round of drinks with the money I won, and shot another game just for kicks. Made a quick stop at certain store ( -.^ ) before heading home and calling it a night. Shrade’s carousing skills rise .3 points! :D

I got up relatively early considering the drunken shenanigans of the night before. I had borrowed a carpet cleaner from a coworker last week, and decided to get the big stains hit while the family was out. One bottle of cleaner did the just about all the carpets, and I got up just about every major stain in the house. Ended the evening gaming with a large Canadian Bacon pizza from Papa John’s: I NEVER get to order Canadian Bacon! ^_^

By Sunday, I was ready for my family to get back. The peace and quiet was nice and all, but I was starting to miss them. Lucky for me, that’s just when they came back. They arrived back in San Antonio around 1:30. Getting back to the airport was an adventure in itself. The roads in this city change daily, so I had to find a different way back to the airport than how I got there on Friday. They were completely jet lagged (even the baby) and were out for the better part of the afternoon.

In Game:

Friday’s FNLE was Jormungand. I love them, but the 2-week dragon kick has been maddening. I’m so sick of dragons. Talon and I decided to hit up Centurio and Tribunus. We didn’t get claim on Centurio, but we popped a Tribunus and I got a Tungi for my BST finally. Followed that with a quick Ro’Maeve Illuminink hunt and got all three inks we needed in the course of 30mins. Went back to Quicksand Caves just in time to try for one last Centurio, but someone else got it. Talon needed to log off and I decided to go out on the town and see what trouble I could rustle up.

Saturday morning and early afternoon was largely game-free. I set up Talon, Keri and Shrade in the Centurio campground to track ToD while I shampooed the carpets. We did get one and Keri got her cloak, followed by a Tungi for her BST. Now we just need to get Talon his cloak (hoping sometime this week) and we’ll be set. I had a blast at sky gods later that evening: I had my beer, I had my favorite pizza, and I had my friends all in the same place. We popped a bunch of sets and I have a full Kirin set for the next run in two weeks. Hopefully it has an Osode with my name on it. I went to bed after trying my hand at being a MNK/WHM in Campaign. It’s just not as good as my WHM/NIN. I kept dying and it was hard to keep reraise on with the little MP I had. My last try with MNK/NIN didn’t go so well either, so I will just keep going on my WHM and leave the MNK experience for merit parties.

I was up kinda early on Sunday, trying to get Pentaspheres for next week’s FNLE: Divine Might run. SE has got to do something about the weather in Ro’Maeve, because it rained every flipping night during the Full Moon. I couldn’t get any of the pentaspheres, but I think we have one or two people floating around with them. I didn’t get back into the game until Dynamis – Beaucedine, where we did both an attestation run and a win run. Poor Jevot went home empty handed yet again, but at least we were able to salvage the night with several AF2 drops and a win. Rounded out the evening with Keri in Campaign Battles.

I have my first real turn at shift lead starting tomorrow at work. If nothing crazy happens, the day should be relatively light, but if anything major goes wrong, I’m gonna have a major headache by the end of the day. WalMart run will be going in there somewhere, too, and if time permits, I’m going to try to organize a farming Ulli sky night. We have enough Despot drops for 3 Byakko pop sets, now we just need the Ulli stones to match.