I’ve gone and changed the blog Theme – again! Although the header and the background colour are exactly the same code, I have no idea if they look the same to you. They look fine to me on Chrome, so if they don’t match on IE, Firefox, or Opera, please don’t tell me! I don’t want to know, OK?! That said, it was done a bit piecemeal… Julian and I had intended to spend most of the after-lunchtime day Rifting – unfortunately Josh wasn’t able to join us, but it’s probably just as well he didn’t… I logged on around noon-ish, and ran around the other shards, picking up more of my ever-so-cute Black Dire Riding Squirrels, and in the middle of a very short bit of side questing, I got unceremoniously tossed out of the game – right back to the desktop! Trying to get back in again was unhelpful – the server, it appeared, was down for the count. All the shards were offline, to the point where they even disappeared off the shard list! All in all, the game was unavailable for almost two hours… so what did I do in that almost two hours? Why, made the header that you see at the top of the page, of course! What else did you expect me to do? Play solitaire? 😉 Actually, I did (play solitaire) for a bit, but then I got bored and decided to do a little bit of “maintenance” on the blog. Do you like the result? It’s a little different – the text is in “book format” (according to the blurb on the Theme description), and although there was a section for adding “Widgets” (the calender, archive list and meta info, etc.) and I did add them, they appear to have… not appeared, for some reason. I don’t know – maybe they’ll mysteriously appear tomorrow morning, maybe they won’t. Will anyone miss them? Again, I don’t know – I certainly won’t miss them, but if you do, let me know, and I’ll see if I can sweet-talk them into making a reappearance.

Once Rift came back online, we decided to see if we could finish off the last little bit of the Tarken Glacier quest chain. We had one thing left to do… I have to admit that for once in my life I was completely and utterly confused! 😉 In the end I just Tab-targeted, and lashed out with everything I had. Seemed to work, because we accomplished our goal! 🙂 I absolutely hate, loath, and detest Tab-targetting, and it takes a lot to get me to use it – but sometimes it’s the only way to get things done. You see, when you hit the Tab key, it targets (or highlights) what it thinks is the next best dressed mob, or enemy. Unfortunately, it nearly always picks the wrong next best dressed mob, or enemy, which can leave you in a real mess when multiple mobs suddenly all notice you at once, and decide that you look softer and easier to smear into the ground than the other big monsters they’d been attacking. As I said, I hate using it, and it takes a lot to get me to use it – but it’s a damn sight easier to just hit the Tab key than it is to try to mouse click-target something in the middle of a full scale battle! Well, we killed off that Boss, and then we had to go around to various places to “collect our accolades”, which was OK, except that the last one invited us to a party, where we were supposed to drink a lot of ghastly grog stuff, get roaring drunk, and punch people out. Well, I hate to be a wet blanket, but… isn’t that what we’re trying to stamp out at the moment? In Victoria, anyway. I’m sorry, but I feel it really sends the wrong message out – we want young people not to go out and get so bloody blind drunk that they start indiscriminately punching people out, not imply that it’s a really fun thing that all “mammals” (as they refer to humans) should do to have a rip-roaring good time! If people want to get drunk, fine – do it in your own home. If people want to punch things, fine – buy a punching bag and set it up in your garage! Anyway, so we get past that really, really fun time (NOT!), and guess what? We’re politely asked to take part in a “Chronicle”, to end the area, and the game so far. Chronicles, according to Rift Wiki, are instanced areas designed for 1 or 2 players to complete. Most players are able to complete this type of instance on their own. This particular Chronicle was for one player, so although we’d gone through the whole lot as a team, here we are at the end, split up! Not. Happy. Jan! Well, himself went first, to see if I’d be able to cope on my own (if we decided I wasn’t, he would have played my character for me. Not cheating, just teamwork!) The first part wasn’t too hard – I would have been able to do it reasonably easily. The second part was a lot harder – there was a really tough, mean Boss who had a lot of extremely strong attacks – at one point he managed to kill Dramiele (Julian), and re-generate himself. On his second attempt, Julian killed him off, but the wretched instance is bugged! From the number of complaints about it in the forums, apparently it happens quite a lot – you kill the big Boss, and you’re immediately told that he’s planted a bomb in the middle of the area which you have to diffuse before everything and everyone is blown to hell in a handbasket… according to what we read, when it works properly, it’s not a tough job to diffuse it, but – you guessed it! We hit a bugged patch, and now Dramiele is stranded – can’t finish the Instance, can’t finish the Chronicle, can’t finish the segment. Which means that I can’t, either. We’ll keep trying it, every couple of days, to see if we can fluke an un-bugged version, but we may have to raise a ticket (call for Moderator help) to get it completed. So, our two level 65’s, stuck in a sort of a limbo, have retired from the field for now (besides, I have Dailies to do tomorrow!), and… we’ve started up a couple of Defiant newbies – Sylversong (me) and Saudades (himself) – both Mages, so no healing, unfortunately, but it should be fun – Julian hasn’t played a Defiant for a long time, so I’m sort of showing him where everything is 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was disheartening! I did so well yesterday! Today, I only went down 1 point, to 106.3kg 😦 And I was sooo hoping to be under 106kg by Wednesday. Ah well, that’s my wretched body for you… Hopefully I’ll go down a bit tomorrow, but I’ll most likely go up, or stay the same. S’not fair…

Anyway, tune in again tomorrow night to see if I’ve changed the blog Theme yet again, or if it’s the same – or if we’ve managed to get a clear shot at that horrible Chronicle and get the segment finished, or if we’re still languishing in no-man’s land. Find out, too, if my new sparkly-pearly red-like-my-hair streaks nail polish went on OK and if it looks any good, and see if my weight stayed the same or went up – because at this stage it’s not likely to have gone down! So until this time tomorrow night, bee good, and stay safe! ciao, all! 🙂