Chill up the spine

I found myself sitting on the couch for a brief stint this weekend and thumbing the channels to see if there were any interesting movies coming on.

As the channels scrolled by and I found myself wondering how there can be so many different movie channels and nothing ever good on, I saw it.

It sat there taunting me… a movie I hadn’t seen since I was a child.  This movie was the sole source of every nightmare I experienced through my entire childhood and into adolescence.  I had seen it once and it had frightened me to the core of my being and I swore I would never watch it again…

And I never had.

And there it was… just about to start.

I nervously pondered the intelligence of tempting fate once again.  Sure, it has been nearly 30 years since my first viewing, but how could it be anything but horrifying… even today?

Finally, I screwed up my courage hoping that I wouldn’t end up lying awake all night with the blankets pulled up to wide-terror filled eyes while I waited for the safety of dawn to approach.

I flipped the channel and sat down to face my fears and watch…

The Shining.

/sigh

I guess to a 9 year old boy, the movie was traumatic and terrifying, but I sat there yesterday laughing as I kept having a mental picture of Shelley Duvall looking over at Jack Nicholson and saying, “Oh Popeye, why is Sweet-Pea talking with his finger… and what are you doing with that axe?”

Emerging from the pit

Being sick sucks.  I generally don’t get sick often, but it sure seems to have piled up on me the last 6 months.  This last one was a good one too… sinus infection, resperatory infection, and ear infection followed by a healty dose of allergic reaction to the medicine I was taking for it all.  That allergic reaction led to 3 days of intense competitive-grade Olympic quality projectile vomiting.  Great ab workout, but I don’t recommend it as a general rule.

I finally began crawling back into the sunlight where the living reside on Saturday.  I wasn’t healthy enough to do anything productive, but at least I was able to sit upright and have thoughts other than, “Where did I leave the toilet again?”

How did I celebrate?

Lots and lots of EQ2 of course.

Most of the time was spent running the quest lines in Steamfont… all quests that I have done previously on my dirge.  Still, they are somewhat more enjoyable with the 2-box crew because I get to take more chances, run the quests earlier, and tempt fate a bit more.  Of course, my instictive habit of always saying to myself, “Oooh!  I wonder what would happen if I…” got me killed quite a few times, but it was still fun.

I got to exact a lot of revenge on the named mobs in that zone… mobs that smoked my solo dirge handily.  They all fell to the combined might of the brigand/wizard group.

Well, except for that pesky named spider in the caves.  I didn’t realize that mob was a triple up heroic until AFTER I had pulled her.

I camped my toons in the Gnomeland Security village yesterday afternoon planning on just taking a break and coming back.  Later on, I decided that I was done for the day.  I’m not sure why, but I decided to log back on anyway and move them home before calling it a night.  Right after I logged on, some random ranger in the zone asked if I would help him kill some named.

I decided to give it a whirl just for fun and joined up… and we got smoked.  He was a level 40 triple up heroic down in one of the craters.  While we were recovering, the ranger told me to shoot a group invite to another guy.  I grabbed him up and went went back and dropped the named easily.  Of course, I am the kiss of death for chest drops and he just dropped a wood chest.

We decided to stay together and head over to the crater with the ore fragments you need to harvest for a quest.  I took point and we roamed the crater killing mobs and harvesting ore.  During the course of that, we died a few more times due to untimely adds, picked up another random person and lost one from our group.

It is all noteworthy primarily because I have a long-standing phobia for pick-up groups.  My luck through EQ1, DAoC, and EQ2 with pick-up groups has been horrible and I finally swore off of them some time ago.  Generally, if some random person in a zone asks me to group, I will tell them that I was just wrapping up and head somewhere else.

I’m not sure why I decided to stay last night.  For the hour or so that I was with them, I died more times than I normally would soloing in a week.  They all finished several quests they were working on and I didn’t even touch any of mine.

Still, it was fun.  It was great to get out there and meet a couple of new people again.  For a short time, I felt like I was back in my first ever pick-up group back in Crushbone back in early EQ1.  We talked, laughed, and had a great time together.

Unfortunately, it had to end.  It was already getting late when we started and I needed to get some sleep.  I said my “goodnights” and called back to town.

My forward movement was nice though.  My brigand and wizard both leveled from 38 to 41 over the weekend and they each got several AA’s.  I also leveled my provisioner up to 38, my sage to 34, my alchemist to 27, and my tailor to 30.

I expect that the next couple of nights will be harvest/craft nights.  After a weekend like this past one, I generally need a few days off from hunting.  Besides, with the brigand and wizard about to hit the next tier for gear, I need to get off my butt and get my crafters caught up.  I priced the next tier gear last night before I logged off and it is definately out of my price range.