Winter’s log, earthdate 201512.27

Ah, Sunday evening, after a successful day in Azeroth! 🙂 Having finally finished all the quests in Eversong Woods, the Blood Elf newbie, or “junior” area, We took Cassändra (me) and Bræ (Julian) on into The Ghostlands – a dim and dank, perpetually twilight area that I don’t particularly like very much – the vegetation is thick and rank, and difficult to see through (Blood Elves, I might add, are one of the shortest of the races – with only the Dwarves, Gnomes, and Goblins being ever-so-slightly shorter!) We started our two girls out on a realm (server) called “Scarlet Crusade” – why we chose “Scarlet Crusade”, I can’t remember now, but I suppose that it must have seemed like a good idea at the time! Anyway, there was a Guild there, but no Guild Bank, because everyone was too poor to be able to afford one (the first bank “vault” would have cost us 100 gold pieces, and we didn’t even have 20 gold pieces between us!) The idea is to recruit lots and lots of people to your Guild, and then get everyone to work really, really hard to make a lot of money – either by “farming” materials (going out and picking herbs, mining and smelting ore, and skinning lots of animals) that can be sold profitably on the Auction House, or by making the sort of things that people will always want to buy – like weapons, and armour, and clothes, potions, bags… they all sell well, especially if you’re a good enough Craftsperson to “enhance” the items that you make with spells, runes, or special gems! But that all takes time, and we’re impatient players! We want the Bank vault now, or preferably last week! 🙂 It also means having to interact with a whole lot of strange people that you don’t know from a bar of soap, and what’s more, that you’d prefer to get to know your bar of soap, before these other players! In fact, we’re the sort of people who always had the words “Does not play well with other children” written on our school reports… Anyway, I had the brilliant idea that one of us could transfer one of our other characters over from a different realm, getting them to bring along enough money with which to buy a couple of bank vaults (one vault is never enough!) so I looked to our richest realm, Quel’Dorei, thinking that they could well afford to lose a bit of their ill-gotten gold… but in order to be able to hand the gold over when they got to Scarlet Crusade, they’d have to be Horde members too, because the two factions don’t even talk to eachother – it’s a “Kill On Sight” situation between the two factions – and neither of us had a Horde character who could carry that much money. Dilemma! But there is a very sneaky way of transferring money from one faction to the other, involving the Auction House – but you really have to be on your toes, and pretty quick, in case someone grabs the goods that you’re “transferring” instead of your intended recipient. If it’s money you want to transfer, you put up one slice of bread, worth only one copper, and you put a buy-out price (i.e you don’t put in a bid for it, you offer to buy it at the highest asking price) So, you put your cheap and worthless piece of bread up for auction, with an “asking price” (the buyout price)  of, say, 100,000 gold pieces! Your opposite faction friend buys the piece of bread for this ridiculous price, and you have the money that they’d brought over to give you, and they have a very expensive piece of stale bread, which they can either toast, put butter and Vegemite on it, and have it for breakfast – or they can throw it away, mission accomplished! However, if it happens to be goods rather than just cash that’s being transferred, that “exclusive and terribly expensive object” that you brought over to give to your friend, will be auctioned off for, say, a stupidly cheap buyout price of 1 gold… and you have to be very quick off the mark to hit “buy” at the right moment, because a lot of unscrupulous people do nothing – all day and every day – except scan the Auction House continually, for precisely those sorts of transactions – and as I said, if you’re not extremely quick off the mark, they can rip that “exclusive and terribly expensive object” right out from under your nose before you can even say “Bother!” Well, we didn’t want to have to go through all that – besides, there aren’t very many Auction Houses where both Factions can buy and sell – so when Quel’Dorei turned out not to have any suitable candidates to act as a courier, I went looking around at the other realms, to see who had what, and what sort of “deal” we could do with them… I’d looked at about three, when I came across a realm whose population (that is, the bulk of my characters!) were Horde, and they had a Guild, with a Guild Bank, that had three Bank vaults, stuffed full of very helpful goodies (like great big bags, and healing potions, and all sorts of cool stuff!)…. and well over a thousand gold pieces! Problem! It would be very, very awkward, if not impossible, to transfer most of that to another realm. Solution! Move our characters to the realm with the nice, big Guild Bank! Transferring a character on Rift is free, and you can only transfer a particular character every seven days. On World of Warcraft, transferring a particular character costs $27.00 in real money, and you can only transfer that particular character every three days – though I reckon you’d have to be pretty desperate to want, or even need, to transfer a particular character more than once in three days! So anyway, that’s what we’ve done. The Transfers were labeled “Successful”, but unlike Rift, it’s not instantaneous – it takes anywhere from 3 hours to 24 hours, depending on how busy they are… whenever I’ve transferred characters before it’s usually taken a couple of hours, but we’ll see…. Then of course, we’re going to have to get ourselves invited into the Guild, but after that, as they say in the classics, “The World is My Oyster!” 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Oh dear… up another three points, from 65.0kg to 65.3kg! That was probably the cold pudding and mince tart with a little bit of light cream that I had for dessert last night, after my delicious omelet, because I can’t really see an omelet being calorie-high! Well, all the high calorie stuff is being whittled away, and won’t be replaced until next Christmas – the pudding is all gone, though I think there are two mince tarts left; there’s only one more Panettone breakfast left for tomorrow, and I think there are about 5 chocolates left. The lovely Siena Cake that Mitta brought with her from Sydney is all gone – so very soon there won’t be anything left to indulge myself with – which is good. Things will get back to what laughingly  passes for “normal” around here, and hopefully, with the longer walks I’m having (2.10km this morning, and 2.17km this afternoon, each walk taking between 33 and 37 minutes..) my weight will start to subside again… but if it doesn’t, well, I have almost a whole five kilos to go before I get to the “Diet Cut-Off Point” of 70kg, but I don’t intend to let my weight get anywhere near that! Hopefully I’ll be a little lighter tomorrow… but I’m not holding my breath – especially if there’s another mince tart in the offering for dessert tonight! 😉

Tomorrow we’re hopefully going to start getting back to “work” – Julian has a lot of tidying up to do, and I want to make a few changes around my desk, to give myself more room – I’ll just need Julian to move my little chest of drawers thingy – it is on wheels (I think!) but on carpet, you wouldn’t know it – it’s like trying to move Mt. Everest! Once we’ve got all the Christmas bits and pieces tidied away, I hope we’ll be able to start dealing with all the boxes in the Library, because it won’t be long before we have to get the last of our gear – and all our books – out of the apartment in Doncaster, and at the moment we don’t have any room here to put everything! We also need to start planting a few vegetables (!!) Anyway, now that I’ve bored you all to tears with my treatise on “How to Cheat On The WoW Auction House”, I have to tell you that once again, that’s about it from me for this evening! 🙂 Do drop in again tomorrow night – find out if my weight did go up again (it probably will!) if we’ve made any progress in the tidying, planting, and box-unpacking areas, as well as any other adventures we might have had (I’ve actually got my fingers crossed that we might visit a couple of Nurseries, if it’s not too hot!) But until then, please continue to bee good (because it’s better than being badd!) remember that we all have problems, but the way we solve them is what makes us different. Don’t forget to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on this wonderful Melbourne weather – but most importantly – don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂