05.00 pm
Oh dear – I cowered when I put the date in up there! It’s the end of the month… and tomorrow (shudder) I have to start taking those horrible pills again – what’s even worse is that my spiteful, turn-coat body seems to be already gearing up for the inevitable weight gain that will occur when those wretched pills start “conserving” every single drop of liquid that passes my lips, be it tea, coffee, or just plain water! *sigh* Still, it’s only for ten days (but a veritable lifetime for someone trying hard to keep the weight off!) and I’m going to try, very hard, to ignore the slowly rising graph line from my daily weigh-ins… but it’s not going to be easy! 
However, on a happier note, Julian and I had a great time in Dun Morogh (where Ironforge, the Dwarven Capital is) and Loch Modan (the area immediately north-east of Dun Morogh) Gnomes start out very close to the Dwarven starting area and share quite a few of the early quests, especially the “beginner” ones! Last week, when we first created Dulcineà (me) and Tourbillon (Julian) we didn’t really get very far, what with all the setting up of each character, organising bags, healing potions, money, and what-not, as well as getting ourselves into our Guild, “Grumpy Old Farts” – so we only made it to level 5 last week! However I’m very happy to report that we made up for last week’s very slow start today, going up a very cool 12 levels, to level 17, and we even managed to keep pretty much even with eachother, too, which is a big bonus!
Unfortunately, we did die once today, and as many times as I’ve done this particular quest (which I have to admit is only about ten times, as I don’t often roll Dwarves or Gnomes!) I’ve always died! Personally, I think it’s a very badly written and constructed quest, especially considering that it’s the last one you do in the pretty much “No Kill” Baby area! You have your Grand Illustrious Leader-type person, sitting astride a mechanical emu, or ostrich, or whatever, and he gives this big, long-winded speech about getting back the Gnome Capital City, Gnomeregan from some sort of Mad Scientist (I think!) and off we’re all supposed to charge. Which we do, across a frozen lake, to an island where this Mad Scientist and all his Insane Leper Gnomes (hereinafter referred to as “Hench People”!) are waiting for you. But you can’t fight them yet, no, you have to wait through some more terribly long-winded exchanges between the two Leaders, then, when you’re distracted with boredom, the two sides finally get it on. Now, this is what kills me, every time, and it killed the two of us today too. According to the Unwritten Rules of fighting Boss mobs in WoW, you take down the Hench People first, then you work on the Boss – it makes sense, you take out the distractions that are going to hit you, and try to kill you, while you’re smacking their Boss around, right? And it nearly always works too, because in Boss fights, the Hench People you’ve taken out generally don’t re-spawn – or not terribly quickly, anyway. However, in this particular Boss fight, (a) he was extraordinarily tough! (far too tough for a Starting Area Boss, in my opinion, anyway!) Even with both Julian and I – and my Pet – fighting him, we were hardly making a dent in his armor! In fact, it was taking so damn long to even tickle him that all his Hench People re-spawned… and started killing us! We had two options, neither of them very workable! (1) We could stop fighting the Boss, and try to take down his Hench People again, during which time the Boss would be able to kill us at his leisure. Or, (2) We could try to ignore all the newly re-spawned Hench People and keep on doing our best to take down the Boss – who, after all this time, was only just under half health – before all these newly re-spawned Hench People of his polished us off! In other words, you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. I’m not quite sure which option Julian chose, but I chose option #2, which is the way I usually tackle these types of fights, but I dunno, maybe I should have tried option #1 in this case, because my usual choice of option #2 – in this particular fight, anyway – always ends up with me getting rather deaded! So there we were, both dead, running back from the local Graveyard, to reclaim our bodies, when Mr. Kingpin on the mechanical emu (or ostrich, or whatever!) suddenly rallies, kills the Mad Scientist, and wins the day! Now, normally in a Boss fight, if something like this happens and you end up dead, the Boss returns to full health, and you’ve “failed” the particular quest which demanded that you kill this Boss – and you have to keep doing the whole thing over and over, until you get it right! In this fight though, it almost seems as though the Kingpin, perched on his robotic bird, had simply been waiting for us to die, so that he could start his rally, and win the day! I mean, it took literally for-evah to get the Mad Scientist down to half health, but only seconds after we’d died, Kingpin and his men kill the Boss, in one foul swoop? What’s more, we didn’t “fail” the quest (even though, technically speaking, we did!) we’re treated as true heroes, as in being immediately sent off to somewhere else to kill more monsters for other quest givers!
But it was a fun day – we really achieved an awful lot – and next Sunday should be even betterer! 🙂
So, now on to the good bits! 😉
Food stuffs. Last night we had the Outback Spirit Beef and Bush Tomato sausages for dinner, with our usual chips, steamed green beans, and half a tomato, and for dessert I had a “bald-kiwifruit-brown” skinned Nashi pear, and another Apple Le Rice. For lunch we had a “different” type of wrap, with some of the Sesame and Sumac hummus, sandwich-sliced turkey, red capsicum batons, Beerenberg Tomato Chutney, and some Nimbin “elbo-style” cheese (yes, it is spelt “elbo”, and it was quite delicious!) and – this seems to be becoming a bit of a habit – once again I managed to devour it all without getting sauce all over my fingers, or spilling half of it down my front, or onto the keyboard! 🙂 Tonight, because it’s Sunday night, we’re having omelets! I can’t tell you what’s going to be in it yet, coz I don’t know – you’ll have to wait for tomorrow night to find that out! 😉 For dessert I’ll probably be having one of my Corella pears, and one of the Le Rice tubs.
Weigh-in this morning. Was horrible, and a snide omen of the week to come, no doubt! I went from 64.0 kg to 64.5 kg 😦 Mind you, it was probably mostly the yummy lunch I had yesterday, with the fruit and white chocolate scone, so “mea culpa” and all that, but I was not happy about this morning’s weigh-in at all! So, in a fit of pique, I decided not to do my morning walk! *pout* Well, it was late, coz we’d slept in (being Sunday!) and I didn’t want to get too late a start with WoW – so it’s (quite literally!) back to the treadmill tomorrow morning, sore foot be damned!
And once again, this brings me back to tomorrow! Tomorrow morning our cleaning lady will be here, and once more I’ll be on my own because Julian has a doctor’s appointment at 10.30 am. I’ll probably be working with Phaédra a bit, as well as working on my Blog Project, and Josh will be here in the afternoon – so a full day for me! 🙂 Oh, remember I said that Julian changed the fish’s water over yesterday, and set up the small tank for Lemon and Butter (temporary names only, at this stage!) Well, he tested the water today, around lunch time, and it was awful! The PH level was far too high, and so was the Ammonia – so he hastily changed about 30% of the water in there, and he’ll test it again after dinner, to see if we can work out what’s going wrong… We’re wondering if maybe it was the water that they arrived in that was the problem, because a couple of hours after Julian changed out the water this afternoon, it was a lot better. When we got them, the Pet Barn place person half filled up a large-ish plastic bag (complete with logos and colourful printing on the outside of it, and probably who-knows-what sort of chemical residue on the inside of it) from an (empty of fish) tank above the one that Butter and Lemon were in, scooped the two fish up in a net, deposited them into the bag, then blew into the bag a bit, folded the top up tightly, and secured it with an elastic band… and we finally brought them home, sloshing around in their bag of water every time the car went over a bump, or turned a corner. Once home, we balanced their bag of water inside their new (temporary) home for about half an hour, then cut open their bag, depositing them, and the water that they came home in, into the small holding tank that was more than half full of water from Auric and Dapple’s Fish House. Hopefully, by the time they’re ready to go into the Fish House with Auric and Dapple, the two lots of water should be pretty much the same, chemically. I’m not sure when we’ll move them all in together… and as they say in the Classics, “but that’s a story for another night!” 😉 And now it’s time for me to say goodnight, and that’s about “it” from me this evening! Why not call in again tomorrow night, to find out more about “The Great Saga Of The Fishies and What They Did Next”(or “what Auric and Dapple thought of their new playmates”) what my weight has been up to (or hopefully – but not very optimistically – down to) how Julian’s visit to the doctor’s went, and what the outcome of his tests were… but until then, do try very hard to bee good, don’t forget that if you obey all the rules, you’ll miss all the fun, and remember to keep warm and dry in this highly changeable weather, to look after yourselves, and to always drive carefully… but above all, please, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 