This Week in Pictures

Posted on by

Because I’m too lazy to write…

Oh, OK maybe a few things then. The 35% boost to heroic XP (for VIPs, 20% for other DDO players) worked out very useful as we had Friday off work. Thursday night we ran the Orchard of the Macabre quests, which gave us enough XP to level up to 17 (18 banked). On Friday we hit Litany, running elite x 2 (Vol & Cinnis), hard x 1 (Mentau) and normal x 1 (Cholthulzz). So, guildies – we’re flagged for Abbot this life if you fancy running it…
Continue reading →

Sands

Posted on by

A quickie, from something that occurred to me last night.

We had decided to squeeze just a little bit more XP out before we leveled to 16 (we had a rank to spare) and settled upon running explorers & slays out in the Menechtarun desert. Off we went, settling into a run without too much discussion on direction, knowing fairly instinctively which way to go.


It was as we ran up from getting the explorer outside the quest Raid the Vulkoorim that it hit me – we used to get lost out here! A lot! I mentioned it to Rach and she started laughing, remembering the time she dropped off a cliff edge and ended up in one of the lower canyons trying to find her way out. “Where are you guys? Come back for me you bastards!”

Good times 😀

Have fun, see you around!

This Weeks Shenanigans

Posted on by

This week has gone back to my usual TR split.

Weekdays are spent running Hymm, duo’ing with Rach’s current TR. We finished all the level 12’s we wanted to get done, then leveled up to 15 & got the 2nd Lordsmarch chain, Gianthold walkups & Mired in Kobolds done. Usually at this point we rerun the Gianthold walkups, running them on hard & normal. But we couldn’t be bothered and we both have a nice stash of daily dice XP stones in bank characters for just this situation. So we’re now ready to level up to 16.

Cry for Help, Gianthold

Continue reading →

Back in the Game – Life 13

Posted on by

It’s been a busy 6 weeks. We moved house at the beginning of August, moving into a property with no internet. Then we went on holiday. When we got back, we still had no internet but I tried my mobile phone’s 3G tethering and found it worked surprisingly well for playing DDO. Then Rachel’s hard drive died and she couldn’t play 😦 so we stopped while I had a new drive ordered & delivered & I had time to put it in.

So the past week has been the first time we’ve properly been back in DDO for a while. Surprisingly I didn’t really miss it that much (yep, there goes my DDO street cred!).
Continue reading →

San Francisco 2014 Pictures

Posted on by

OK here’s the last of my holiday blurb. I’ll stop boring you all with it after this 😛 Also, be warned, there are a lot of pictures on this page. If you have a slow connection (or are using IE) I’d recommend going and putting the kettle on, go make yourself a nice cuppa then bring it back with you 🙂

The apartment

I don’t think I really mentioned where we were staying. A friend from work recommended trying to get apartments through a few web sites she has used in the past, renting accommodation directly from the owners. We did this last year when we went to New York and, although that apartment was a good size and great for transport, the apartment itself wasn’t great.

So we booked an apartment I had seen for San Francisco that looked great and had great reviews, but decided if this one turned out like the New York apartment, we’d be going back to hotels.

But it was nothing like the place in New York. The apartment is located in the Marina district, so it’s the northern area of San Francisco and quite close to the Golden Gate bridge. In fact, we could see that from our window 🙂
Continue reading →

OK here’s the last of my holiday blurb. I’ll stop boring you all with it after this 😛 Also, be warned, there are a lot of pictures on this page. If you have a slow connection (or are using IE) I’d recommend going and putting the kettle on, go make yourself a nice cuppa then bring it back with you 🙂

The apartment

I don’t think I really mentioned where we were staying. A friend from work recommended trying to get apartments through a few web sites she has used in the past, renting accommodation directly from the owners. We did this last year when we went to New York and, although that apartment was a good size and great for transport, the apartment itself wasn’t great.

So we booked an apartment I had seen for San Francisco that looked great and had great reviews, but decided if this one turned out like the New York apartment, we’d be going back to hotels.

But it was nothing like the place in New York. The apartment is located in the Marina district, so it’s the northern area of San Francisco and quite close to the Golden Gate bridge. In fact, we could see that from our window 🙂
Continue reading →

GenCon 2014 Pictures

Posted on by

Unfortunately I didn’t take a lot of pictures at GenCon. For some reason I decided not to get the camera out, used my phone instead and even then I didn’t take very many. So Torrance has kindly let me raid her pictures 😀

There are also a few that I posted on twitter, so if you follow me you’ve probably already seen them
Continue reading →

GenCon & San Francisco: Day 10 – Whale Watching

Posted on by

Today was probably the day we were most looking forward to in San Francisco. Up early, we had to be at the pier by 7.30am to set off at 8am. We were off to the Farallon Islands in the Pacific to go looking for whales!

It was cloudy when we set off, but reasonably warm. That changed as we got further out to sea. The cloud stayed with us and it got colder. But the sea was calm and the journey lovely.

We didn’t get to go over the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday, but we sailed under it today 😀 (um…… you guys know its red rather than golden – right?) On the way out to the islands we spotted several pods of porpoises, a few sea lions and lots of sea birds. Once we reached the islands about 90 minutes later we were told to be on whale watch, we were heading in to deeper waters. It took a while, about 30 people all peering about looking for the telltale water spout or fin, but somebody eventually spotted one. We had found a female humpback whale and her year old calf.
Continue reading →

GenCon & San Francisco: Day 9 – Nothing to See Here

Posted on by

We had plans for today. We were going to look at the Palace of Fine Arts then go across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Then we woke up.

I slept badly because of this bloody cold I’ve picked up. Rachel slept badly because of this bloody cold I’ve picked up :-\ We were both knackered when we got up this morning – so we decided to have a lazy day.

We wandered around the neighbourhood a bit, making sure to find a pharmacists to pick up cold remedies for me, bite remedies for Rachel.

And we did go look around the Palace of Fine Arts later today. It is just down the street from us, after all. But mostly we have chilled out and taken it easy, which I think we needed as we do have a busy day planned tomorrow – whale watching!

Definitely a mini blog today 😀

GenCon & San Francisco: Day 8 – Golden Gate Park & California Academy of Sciences

Posted on by

Thursday was another day with a pre-planned event. I had bought tickets for the California Academy of Sciences nightlife tour. This means the museum is open from 6-10pm for people with tickets and over 21 years of age.

Because the museum is situated in Golden Gate Park we decided to spend most of the day there. We had a leisurely breakfast at the Squat & Gobble (much nicer than yesterday’s although we noticed they too do the blancmange like omelettes – must be a west coast thing). Then we caught a tram back to Union Sq. While there we did what we should have done while we were in Indianapolis, bought a burner phone. We’d tried to book a taxi online but we need a US phone number to do so. So I now have a nice cheap little smart phone for emergencies over here and can bring back with me for the next GenCon we go to. I have been really tempted to send Samius some weird texts while I’m still here… 😀
Continue reading →