Motivational Rust
The list of things that I need to do outside of gaming is long. The list of things that I want to do inside of gaming is probably even longer.
The number of those things that I can check off of those lists after day 1 of vacation is tiny.
What can I say? Coming up with a plan for how you are going to fit everything in to a single week of being off work is all well and good and I highly recommend that everyone do so… if for no other reason than it is seriously entertaining to toss the damn thing out the window a few minutes into day 1.
That’s not to say that I haven’t gotten anything accomplished. I got lots of stuff done yesterday. Just nothing from the list.
The household chores and errands are boring, so let’s not even talk about those.
I logged on at some point yesterday morning and decided that I really needed to run a couple of quests before they vanish from the game. I still needed to do the harvesting quest for the statue on Fuzz and I also wanted to do the current world event on him. Since I have no clue when either will be patched out, I decided that they should jump to the front.
I combined the two quests together… looking ahead on the world event to where I was going next and then running to the Antonican harbor to pick up the harvesting quest before heading off. It probably extended both quests and would have been easier if I had just done one and then done the other, but combining them like that broke up the monotony of both quests.
Once that was finished, I thought about logging on Ray to work his levels but decided to get on my provo and make some food and drink first.
I have the hardest time working my provisioner. I created one originally because I thought the prices on food and drink were pretty insane. My guild has quite a few master provisioners and they all talk about how much they love the class. For me, it is by far my least favorite tradeskill. I’m not sure why exactly. Maybe it just feels so long and repetitive saying, “Okay. I have to make this recipe 10 times to get a stack of food and then that recipe to get a stack of drink.” Don’t ask me to explain it because I’m not sure why exactly myself. I just know that I dread it when my guys start to run low on food and drink because that means it’s time for me to work the provo again.
Anyway, I knocked out a stack of food and drink and then found myself over on Rao working on the To Speak as a Dragon quest. This has been a slowly evoloving quest for me for some time. I was up to gathering the bits in the Feerott… which is the main reason the quest had stalled out. I hate that zone.
I am now up to the parts in the Obelisk of Lost Souls. As I haven’t done the subquests in there to gain access to the deeper in parts, I expect it will take me a while to wrap up that quest.
In the meantime, I am trying to motivate myself into doing a hard, focused grind on Ray this morning/afternoon. I really need to get him to 75 so that he will be available to raid on nights that we are short on people. We only have 1 raiding brigand in the guild right now and he has been curiously absent on raid nights lately.
Probably just end of the summer burn though.
Vacation
Today is the first day of the first vacation I have taken in nearly a year. For whatever reason, I have the hardest time keeping this site up to date when I’m on vacation. Oh, who am I kidding? When I’m on vacation, I have the hardest time even remembering this site exists. So, there is a possibility that it won’t get updated much this week. I guess we’ll see.
This weekend was the really big bonus exp weekend in EQ2. Did I take advantage of it? I guess that depends on your point of view. It was pretty amazing to watch how quickly the levels were flying by for people dusting off alts for the weekend and I debated doing the same, but I didn’t.
I leveled my armorer from 46 to 50 and ended up getting 1 level on my provisioner, 2 levels on my sage, and 2 levels on my tailor.
I also took Ray and Fuzz back to Kunark and continued the Kylong quests with Fuzz. In doing so, they both gained a level… Ray from just kill exp. Of course, he was at like 97% when I started, so no big shock there.
Saturday evening, I took Fuzz off to join a guild group up in KoS. There was a group of alts working the KoS class hat quest. Honestly, I’ve always wanted to do that quest but had no idea what it was called or where it started. I didn’t get a chance to start it myself, but at least I now know where it is. While doing that, I hit another level on Fuzz so he is now level 68.
To cap off the weekend, I finished the Lost Legend of Lavastorm HQ on Rao and ran the next phase of the NQ world event.
This week, I’m sure I’ll end up doing a lot of playing because I don’t have any actual plans for vacation. The economy basically ensures that going somewhere or doing something is out of the question, so I’ll be spending the week doing some cleaning around the house, reading, and playing.
Sad little vacation, but hey, I’m not at work. What do I care?
Always check your spelling
How a single misspelled word changed the world…
A young monk arrives at his monastery. He is assigned to helping the other monks in copying the old canons and laws of the church by hand.
He notices, however, that all of the monks are copying from copies and not from the original manuscript. The new monk goes to the head abbot to question this pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up. In fact, that error would be continued in all of the subsequent copies.
The head monk says, “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point my son.”
The head monk goes down into the dark caves beneath the monastery where the original manuscripts were held as archives in a locked vault that hadn’t been opened for hundreds of years. Hours go by and nobody sees the old abbot.
Finally, the young monk gets worried and goes down to look for him. He sees the abbot banging his head against the wall and wailing, “We missed the R! We missed the R! We missed the R!”
His forehead is all bloody and bruised and he is crying uncontrollably. The young monk asks the old abbot, “What is wrong, father?”
With a choking voice, the old abbot replies, “We missed the R. The word was supposed to be celebRate!”
Enough already.
Warning: this will be a rare rant. I generally avoid ranting about things if I can, but I’m just sick of this and want to speak my peace on a certain situation. Flame me if you wish, but it won’t change matters any.
Next to come to the plate…
I didn’t mean to get sidetracked like this. When I was initially playing, I was intrigued by the tradeskill system. The more I tinkered around with it, the more I kind of decided to just have 1 of each tradeskiller. There is no real reason for it other than to be able to provide for my own toons anything that they might want. I rarely make anything outside of food and drink that goes on the broker.
When I finally accepted the fact that I’m crazy and that I was going to grind all tradeskillers, I began the path in a way that was probably the most grindy and frustrating. I would grind them all together. That is, if I hit level 25 on my provisioner, I wouldn’t log him on again until all my other tradeskillers hit 25. They all stayed the same level and progressed through the tiers together.
It made harvesting make more sense. I could just focus on harvesting one tier at a time and just keep everything in the shared bank. Once I exited a tier, I was done with it. It just seemed to make sense to me.
And it was also painful in ways normally reserved for medical research.
Around the time all of my crafters entered tier 5, I axed that whole mentality and began just focusing on one. Initially it was my carpenter because I had houses to decorate. Later, I shifted gears to my jeweler. Fuzz the jeweler maxed to 80 first followed by Strupus the carpenter a few days later.
Since hitting 80 on my carpenter, I’ve been trying to decide which to do next. Leveling Ray the Sage is what makes sense since I’m about to start playing Fuzz again. Fuzz is behind in his spells and having Ray be able to catch him up and keep him current is just a good idea no matter how you look at it.
Done! Sage it is.
So why have I spent the last 2 nights grinding my armorer?
Anyone? I’m actually asking. I certainly can’t come up with a reason, so maybe someone can come up with a creative explanation.
I’ve spent the majority of the last week staring at and reading through network security policy. I’ve spent roughly 6 hours non-stop this morning going through policy a line at a time and “tweaking.” I’m brain fried and borderline crosseyed from staring at it all, so I’m going to leave today’s posting short and to the pointless.
