Nineteen days to go…

Well, we didn’t go off looking at mirrors or floor lamps this morning – we both chickened out because the weather was so vile – so we both more or less frittered the time away… actually, Julian frittered, for once, and I worked on… a list of possible Character names for Rift. I already had three or four lists, but over the years some had been lost, most of them duplicated, and in some cases, even triplicated. I combined all the lists, sorted them alphabetically, deleted the duplicates and triplicates, and tidied it all up. That was “phase one”. Next, I have to go through my trusty notebook wot lives on my desk, because here and there I’ve been looking for good and/or unusual names for characters, and written them down in my notebook. This was a habit that I got into when I first started running my Bulletin Board (herein after referred to as a “BBS”) It started out as “The REAL CONNECTION”, and later changed its name to “death… by chocolate” (what a way to go!) No, I’m not going to launch into fond, nostalgic reminiscences of “the good old days”, but it was then that I first started keeping some sort of spiral bound notebook, or occasionally a spiral bound notepad, next to me on the desk. I wrote anything and everything in them. I doodled in and on them… I worked out sums, jotted down telephone numbers (never with a name attached to them, oh no! I nearly always had to guess whose number it was!) No-one – not the kids, not my BBS friends who were over at our place nearly every day, not Julian – not even I was allowed to remove a page, or to even tear off a teeny little piece of a page, from my precious notebook! That rule still applies today – my notebook is sacrosanct! I usually keep several years worth of notebooks somewhere in the house – I mean, who knows when I might need to look up an anonymous telephone number that I scribbled down three years ago, hmm?! 😉 So I shall work my way through my notebook looking for possible character names, and add them to my newly consolidated list. Do you want to know why I started compiling this list this morning? No, of course you don’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway! As you know, Hailol is my personal “main” shard – that’s where Satai and Chaviv both live, and that’s usually where I hang out, except on Sundays, when Julian and I frolic happily in the Tarken Glacier area. I went to a great deal of effort to make sure that all my characters on Hailol had names that started with a different letter, so I don’t quite know how I managed to end up with two characters with names that started with “C”. But I did. Well, Chryzanthemum was the one that ended up going to Deepwood to disseminate her beautifully correct macros, and I wrote a note to myself, in my notebook, that she could come back to Hailol on August 6th… but I was looking at her empty spot this morning and thought to myself… ‘If I bring her back here, I’m going to end up with two characters whose names start with the same letter, and I’ll have to either spend money on Credits to buy a name change scroll and lose a name that I like, or put up with both their names starting with the same letter and end up disliking both of them for it!’ I stared glumly at the screen for several seconds before I though ‘Or I could leave her where she is on Deepwood, and just create another character here on Hailol with a different name! Only this time, I’m not going to get caught short with all the names I really like being “unavailable”, and having to settle for a name that I only sort-of like… a bit… because it was all I could think of on the spur of the moment! This time I’m going to be armed with a list of at least twenty names that I love!’ So I went looking for my list, and it was found to be missing a lot of excellent names… and that’s basically how I got myself all tied up in another scatter-brained, spur of the moment, totally unproductive project this morning! (and for the next few days as well, if I’m going to have to trawl through my notebooks (there are actually two here on my desk) before I complete my “project” and create my new character!)

After lunch, we actually did do something useful! We went through our bedroom chests of drawers, our bedside cupboards, and…. The Dreaded Medicine Cupboard! Lordy, lordy, lordy! Did we throw out heaps of stuff! From oversized underwear and clothes, to tubes and tubes of hand, foot, and face creams that had been confidently bought, hopefully tried out, and angrily discarded because they didn’t instantly transform me into a 26 year old again! Half used bottles of perfume (we didn’t throw them out! I didn’t realise that I still had half a bottle of my second favourite perfume, Opium, sitting there in the cupboard! 🙂 ) and band-aids! So many packets of band-aids that we could have opened our own band-aid shop! We ended up throwing some of the more dilapidated boxes of band-aids out! So now the chests of drawers, the bedside tables, and The Dreaded Medicine Cupboard are all empty – except for stuff for our immediate use, of course! 🙂 Our wardrobes are next… we’ll probably start on them on Monday, as Julian wants to get the “professional” packers in sometime this coming week… I’ve been happily thinking “Oh, we have weeks yet! No hurry…” but we don’t! It’s only a little over a fortnight until settlement! (alright, it’s really closer to three weeks than two, but what’re a few days between friends, hmm?! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning. Well, having lost almost a kilo in four days, I suppose I shouldn’t be terribly surprised that I just stayed the same today. 80.5kg. *sigh* I’ll probably sit on or around this weight for at least the next six to eight days, though it largely depends on these new pills I started today, and whether they’ll make me retain fluid like the other ones did. I guess we’ll find out in the next couple of days…

Tomorrow, of course, is our day for romping around in the Plane of Water – a new area this time, too, now that we’ve finished with Draumheim (erm… except for that last, triple-Boss’d end-fight, where we both got so ignominiously killed several times last week! That was most definitely not fun!) Tomorrow, we’ll be in Tarken Glacier, which at the moment is all impossible-to-see-where-you’re-going snow storms and blizzards. I know that it does get better further in, but where we are at the moment isn’t very nice. It’s doubtful if we’ll make it to level 65 – we’re barely half way along the experience “bubbles” to 65, and the bonus experience points that Trion were so generously donating to everyone have finished… Of course, we could swallow some experience enhancing potions, but really… it wouldn’t make that much difference… and besides, the quicker we get to level 65, the sooner we have to decide what  we’re going to do next! 😉 And that’s really about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Don’t forget to check back tomorrow night to see if those new pills are having an adverse effect on me and making me retain fluid like the other ones did, or if they’re better than the old pills, and that my weight has started on its downward journey again. And while you’re checking that, you could have a look to see how we went Rifting – did we die? Did we try those nasty three Bosses again? More to the point, did we finally reach level 65, and if we did, what are we going to do next week? Whatever happens though, you can be very sure that there’ll be heaps to tell you, and lots of well-informed gossip, so don’t miss out! Until then though, remember to bee good, don’t forget that the only expectations you should live up to are the ones you expect of yourself. Always remember to keep warm, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves, but above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂