Slowly, slowly, catchy blog

I'm slowly getting round to spending some more time back on my blog. It's taking some time to get on top of things at work though, so apologies for the slow rate the posts are coming at you.

This weekend was a nice easy one. It’s been extremely hot and sunny all through and it was nice to spend the first full weekend with such good weather. Friday saw my mother return home after a weeks visit. Always nice to see her, but as every with any visitor, it’s nice to get our house back. Friday evening was spent having lots of fun in EQ2 running Merecraft though The Estate of Unrest for the very first time (more on that later). Saturday and Sunday were lazy days full of cold beers, take away food, slurp TV, a few beers down the Chiringhito whilst helping the kids catch crabs in the rock pools at the beach and of course EQ2.

We also had friends over for a party on Saturday night which was a huge amount of fun. The evening saw lot’s relaxing and socialising. The kids were all gathered there too and they had a load of fun playing and adding some pretty heavy duty volume to the proceedings. The highlight of the night though was when my wifey began running through our garden sprinkler system with her mate at 2am getting soaking wet as they just HAD to see if they could still do cartwheels on the grass. Monday was another day off as it was a Public Holiday and sadly that day was filled with all the chores we missed from having such a relaxed and job free weekend. Oh well, it was definitely worth it. Great fun all round.

So gaming. EQ2. The longest session I had this weekend was on Friday night. Wifey had gone out drinking with her mates so I had a quiet house and no interruptions which was the perfect setup. When I logged in I hooked up with my Bro and we decided we would head to the Estate of Unrest. We are still gathering the statues for the Knights in the Round quest (part of the Swords of Destiny questline) and I know there is one in Unrest to gather and that my Bro had never completed the zone in EQ2 before. I was pretty tempted to not tell my Bro the secrets of the zone and to let him find out the clues and puzzles as we moved though. I quickly thought it through though, remembered that when we first did the zone from scratch without any spoilers it took eight hours and re-evaluated. I would walk him through it but get him to do all of the collecting and clicking so if he ever needs to go there again he’ll know the zone. As it happens we wouldn’t have had the time (obviously) to do that and after about 10 minutes we were joined by three other guildies, Egoacia, Lusarien and Prop, so that also put pay to that idea as I am sure they wouldn’t want to be dragged round at such a slow rate.

I love the Estate of Unrest zone. Along with Nektropos Castle it is one of my favourite ‘Castle’ zones. The story line is very cool too if you take the time to research it. It’s amazing how similar in layout it is to the old EQ zone. Obviously the EQ2 one is bigger and better looking, but essentially the developers have been faithful to the original design. It’s also one of the zones that has held some good luck for me. I met the guild leader of Inquisition, the raiding guild I was a part of for a few years on an Unrest run through. It was a last minute thing and they needed dps, so both me and wifey went along to join them. Me on my Assassin, Shahlai and my wifey was on her Necromancer, Kruelah. We obviously did OK because at the end of the zone we were asked to join their raid force by Beafcake and Littlebyte the guild leaders. A couple of years of happy end game raiding followed from that little encounter in there. I also met another guild I would become involved in during an Unrest run. This was The Fellowship of the Dragon, a roleplay guild who I ended up having a lot of interaction with following that run through. All in all, a great zone for me, Unrest.

Merecraft and I have been cracking on with the Knights in the Round statuette collections too. I’m pretty sure we can’t have too many to go now. I hope we finish the questline soon as I am looking forward to organising an MMiS raid so we can go kill Mayong for the final update. We also have the Claymore line to finish for him and I know he’s working hard on some HQs, one of which is casualties of the War of the Fae. I love that HQ. Great fun indeed, apart from getting molested in the Faydark zones by rabid werewolves all the time. The epic x2 end encounter was a lot of fun back in the day. Looking forward to helping Mere with that part.

Right-o, time for more work (does it ever end!!).

Be well.