Well, there it was, the first day of Autumn, and for Melbourne, the weather was, for once pleasant, cool, but not cold, warm, but not hot. There was no sign of rain, the sun shone, the birds sang (I think – we didn’t hear them – we were indoors) and the world was truly a wonderful place, as long as you lived in a nice safe city, far away from war and strife. And where were we? As I said before… huddled indoors over a hot screen and keyboard, merrily running around an imaginary land, killing imaginary monsters and gaining imaginary money for completing rather peculiar and largely senseless quests for imaginary people. When you put it like that, it makes us sound as though we’re ready for the – I was about to say “loony bin”, but then I realised that that term is probably considered extremely politically incorrect these days, so instead I’ll say… “ready for assisted living in a controlled environment”. After all, why use two simple words which say it all in a nutshell, when five will do instead? We all know what I mean, don’t we? 🙂

Yes, today was our day in beautiful downtown Telara, questing away in the Moonshade Highlands, home to Dwarven ghosts, bloodthirsty rams, and thieving Boglings. Add to the mix a lot of unhappy, zombie-like humanoids, mechanical metal giants, black wraiths, homicidal fairies, and antagonistic Guardians, and what have you got? A great game which keeps us occupied for hours and hours every day – well, it keeps me occupied for hours and hours every day, Julian doesn’t play nearly as much as I do – he spends most of his week sitting in the office, dealing with such mundane things as the banking, Body Corporate affairs, and keeping the household running. As we ran along, gathering strange items for our quests – things like shaking leaves, broken power cells, Bogling “essence” (whatever that it – all I know is that when we collected it, the Bogling it was being extracted from “disappeared“!) and things like that. We happened to run past a Rift, and we said “Shall we?” and we did. It just goes to prove the old adage “look before you leap”! If we’d looked, we would have seen that it wasn’t just your average, run of the mill Rift, it was a Nightmare Tide Rift. And what we didn’t work out until it was too late, was that we should have targeted the giant waving tentacles first! Oh well, we’ll know next time – that is if there is a next time! Personally, I don’t want to face another one of those until I’m level 65 or higher! I died. It wasn’t fair! Once we realised that we had to target the tentacles, and had almost finished closing down the Rift, I just… keeled over and died! I have no idea why, either. Oh, and guess what! It’s Carnival time in Telara at the moment, and dotted around the countryside are colourful little dragon shaped gas balloon piñatas, full of glass beads and occasionally, other goodies. Everyone rushes madly around “killing” these piñatas, and grabbing as many glass beads as they can. Why? Well, because you can exchange those glass beads at the World Event stall in the Rift Shop for all sorts of interesting things, from Venice-style face masks to costumes, to special mounts. All good fun – I think we managed to knock down about four piñatas, before we realised that we were being sidetracked and went back to our (very serious, you know!) questing. We went up two levels today – we’re now sitting at level 40, which is only 25 levels off the top of the ladder…  One of the sections we quested through today used to be a most dreaded area – the mobs are numerous, and used to be really, really tough. The quests are yellow (remember what I said a short while ago about the level of quests corresponding to the colour of the quest?) and should have been hard enough to have at least made us raise a sweat, but we were cutting through them like a hot knife through butter! No, it’s not that our playing has improved that much, and it’s not because we’re both Mages – even separating and soloing mobs was no problem – it’s a bit of a worry, actually… there simply wasn’t any challenge in it (apart from that Nightmare Tidal Rift, which should have been a “Raid” Rift (requiring twenty players or more), but there was only the two of us… I think we were pretty good to have lasted as long as we did, and that I only died once!) We’ve already decided that when we get to level 45 we’re not going to bother with any more quests in this section of the world, we’ll pack up and go straight to Ember Isle (Ember Isle used to be about as far as you could go, when the game was capped at level 50, so it’s not for babies!) And you know what? I reckon that even Ember Isle is going to be too easy for us… C’mon Trion Games! We want a little bit of a challenge put back into Rift!

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I know it was before I took that wretched fluid hugging pill this morning, but I went down to 101.4kg! Now, if I can do that tomorrow as well (I won’t, but if I did) it’d probably be within my reach to get into the 100kg zone by my Birthday! Wouldn’t that be great?! However… my 10 “doom and gloom” days have started – from here on in I shall probably either stay the same, or go up, as I slowly start to accumulate fluid 😦 I’m still considering an extra Stair Walk before lunch (well, it makes sense – before breakfast, before dinner, so why not before lunch – three meals, three Stair Walks – it just sounds right!) I think I’ve almost talked myself into it! 🙂

So tune in again this time tomorrow – there’ll be lots to tell you – my favourite eldest daughter will be over, my hair will look decent, and who knows? I might even have re-done my nails! (I didn’t get a chance to do them today – by the time we stopped playing, it was time for “walkies”, and if I’d done them after that, they wouldn’t have been dry by dinner time!) and I do so want to see what the gold (with the silver shimmer) looks like on my nails… I doubt that I’ll get much of a chance to do any Rifting, so you won’t have to put up with me telling you all about that – you will, however, have to put up with me telling you – or sobbing on your (collective) shoulders – about what my weight did, or didn’t do – whether it went up, or stayed the same (I’m betting on it going up – it was such a big drop this morning – there’s sure to be some re-bound!), and also how Lee and I spent the afternoon… So until this time tomorrow, bee good, sleep tight tonight, and please… stay safe! ciao, all! 🙂