24 years ago… 🙂 At the time, people were astonished… horrified… amused… said things like “Oh, it won’t last!”, or made snide remarks about Miller* and her toy boy 🙂 But, I guess they were all wrong (and as anyone who knows me well will tell you, I’m the sort of person who gets great enjoyment out of proving people wrong! 😛 ) Yes, 24 years ago himself and I, my two daughters, my mother, and Julian’s parents, turned up at the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in Melbourne, and were married by a Mr. Dullard. We’d been living together for five years, so you couldn’t really say that it was a hasty, or a spur of the moment decision… but I was more terrified, this second time around, than I think I had ever been in my life – what on earth was I doing, marrying someone who was 20 years my junior?! I needn’t have worried – it was the best decision I think I ever made! 🙂 After all, who else would have put up with me for 24 years? It’s been a fun ride, and hopefully there’ll be many more years of me stubbornly refusing to pick up his dirty socks! 😉 He gave me roses, and I gave him a heart shaped stone… we never buy each other a big, “special” Anniversary present, just something little for the day itself, then we go out and get ourselves something nice, together.
Enough “mush”! 🙂
Despite it being our Anniversary, it was also a Sunday, so off we went, hand in hand, and singing gaily, into Telara. Well, after killing a second big, bad Boss (another Dragon – I think I died twice there – himself didn’t! *pout*), we figured, after looking at the map, that that was about it for that area! I’d hit level 64 – only one more level to go – himself was close to levelling, and the second of the three new areas, Drauheim, was completed. Time to move on to the third and last new area, The Tarken Glacier (level 64 – 65). We thought. No, the big blue dude had another nasty up his sleeve for us. This time we had to head off to kill not one, not two, but three, big, nasty Bosses! This was where I died big time! I think I died about 8 or 9 times… cost a Pope and an Emperor’s ransom in healing! 😦 We killed the first one with only major difficulties, we managed to bump off the second one with a great deal of trouble (we both died multiple times here!), but the third one? We didn’t have a clue how to handle him, so we went looking for strategies on the ‘Net… one of the videos showed a level 65 and his companion tackling him… the companion got killed very early in the piece, but apparently couldn’t get back into the area to assist her friend, so the poor guy had to try to solo this monster… Throwing loaves of bread at him weakened him (??? apparently), and there were sorts of pustules growing around the circle which healed him, I think (or was that the second Boss, and it was himself who used the pustules while I was recovering from getting killed, yet again?) Anyway, it was a very long fight – he was doing it solo – but he did manage to kill him in the end. Julian and I decided that there was no way a level 64 and a level 63 were going to be able to manage him, so deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, we left it until another day – when we’re both level 65!
As we had already started a couple of the Tarken Glacier quests, we went there and got a fair bit done, but it was starting to get late-ish (we usually finish up around 4.45pm or so), so we went back home to Draumheim, dusted down, and called it a day. I can’t help thinking, though, if that last Boss in Draumheim (a level 63 – 64 area), wot we couldn’t manage was so tough that a level 65 had trouble handling him, what can possibly await us in Tarken Glacier, a level 64 – 65 area? I shudder to think…. 
Weigh-in this morning went very well… down to 113.0kg! Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be in the 112kg zone – wouldn’t that be good! In fact, wouldn’t it be really, really good if I could get into the 111kg zone by Christmas! Dream on, Winter, dream on! 🙂
So that was our 24th Anniversary day! Julian actually went and dug out our Marriage Certicate, cos neither of us could remember if it’d been 23 years, or 24 years, and it was December 14th, 1990 – so that makes it 24 years.. 🙂
Tune in again tomorrow night – find out if I relented and picked up his dirty socks (I won’t!), see if I sank below 113kg and into 112kg waters, or if I spent yet another day treading water at the same weight (again!) Who knows? Tomorrow night, all will be revealed… 😉
*Miller – back in those days I was known by the surname of “Miller” – don’t ask! It’d take too long to explain at this point in the blog! If you really want to know, ask, and all shall be revealed….
My Word! 