Turtles, rats, weird, floating eye-balls..?

I wish I could be all sage and grown-up about it, but this will bug me. I've decided to not go for the For the Children-achievement this year, mainly because I can't make myself do School of Hard Knocks. My PvP-skills as a huntress are basically non-existant, and I can't work up enough energy to find a premade that would be OK with my nab-ishness.

While I know it's the best I can do in order to keep my sanity, the little OCD-part of me is going "WTF GO FOR IT!!! COMPLETE THE ACHIEVEMENT!!! KILL!!! KILL!!!", and well, I suppose I could complete it. But I wouldn't have fun, and that's ultimately what I'm after when playing the game.

Maybe I'll have had the opportunity to improve my hunter PvP-ing in time for next year's Children's Week, but for now, I'm happy with the pets. I'm a bit bummed we didn't get a Northrend version of the event, though :/

Anyway, a big, giant congrats to all the players who have gotten their Matron/Patron title, and a big, warm hug of encouragement to those still working towards theirs :)

OK, I'm off to get some lunch, and then my retired druid will be getting her Willy, and with him Veteran Nanny <3 (It might be just me, but that sounds awfully wrong. Still, leaving it as it is :P)

Lunch FTW + my little friend

Just finished my lunch, so comfortably full. I've been doing some cleaning up in my Firefox bookmark list, reading up on blogs I haven't visited for a while, and browsing iTunes. The snow we had last week is way gone now, and yay, one can go outside without putting on the whole hat-scarf-mittens-mega moonboots of doom-extravaganza! Jeans, hoodie and sneakers is perfect - my kind of weather.

The state of my new druid:

Half-way through level 28,
half-way through the quests in Ashenvale,
in love with the idea of getting her a mount in less than two levels :) Spotted Frostsaber on the horizon!
A bit of a weird spec, but I refuse to respec her before 3.1, since talents will be reset when said patch arrives. I'm hoping to get her to 40 by then, so that I can kick off the tree/moonkin plan as soon as possible. So, keeping fingers crossed the "dual spec at 40"-thing makes it to the live servers - can't see any reason why it shouldn't, though.

Been poking around a bit on the PTR version of wowhead, and am very much looking forward to getting this cutie! Being the pet collector that I am, I'll be going for all of them, of course (a bit bummed I don't have a high level horde character, so I could really get all of the pets easily), but the thought of a tree druid with a tiny tree companion is almost too good to be true. Moonkin baby companion, that, on the other hand, would be too good to be true.

And finally, I'd love for the Frostsaber mentioned above to sport some nifty exhaust pipes and awesome flamez!

Late Night Fishing.

I was up late last night, flying around Northrend to get all the fish and meat I needed to get 450 in cooking, and after learning and cooking the Fish Feast recipe, I went to Outland to do a couple of BC-dailies before heading off to bed. I'm slowly grinding Sha'tari Skyguard rep on Bunnyhop, so I headed up to Skettis, and on my way there, I fished out all of the Highland Mixed schools I could find, 'cause that's what I usually do when I'm in those parts. After finishing the Skettis quests, I see a yellow dot on the minimap as I head back down towards Alliance Stronghold, so I land, cast, and this happens:

Woot! As I have never caught one of those before, I could hardly believe it, but there it was! Then, after getting over the initial shock, I use my first wish:
Double woot!!! I've been trying to get one ever since I first heard about them, when my druid learned to fly back in 2007, and you could make some cash from Furious Crawdad. If it hadn't been so late, I would have gone looking for the Time-Lost Proto Drake, gold at the end of the rainbow or something like that :D

About the TLPD, I do keep my eyes open, and my finger scrolling the target macro whenever I'm in the supposed spawn/patrol area in Stormpeaks, but since virtually the whole server wants that fancy mount, my chances of getting the kill while casually looking for it are pretty slim. I have been thinking a bit about camping for it, but camping the books for the Kirin Tor Familiar for several days really got to me, and some people speculate that the TLPD shares it's spawn with Vyragosa, and that 9 times out of 10 Vyragosa spawns instead of the more sought-after, mount dropping TLPD, so it could end up being a ridiculously long camp. Also, some say the Vyragosa/TLPD spawn is on a 6-24 hour timer, so until further notice, I'm just hoping to get incredibly lucky. It worked with Loque - could work again ;) (Yeah, yeah, I'll get that mount when hell freezes over and Elvis kicks off the event by selling popcorn. (And no, I'm not insinuating that Elvis ended up in one place or the other.))

Chasing Chickens in the Desert.

It took me a couple of days, but I eventually managed to find all the cables and stuff needed to get my PC up and running again! So far, moving has worked wonders for my workplace - apart from the mouse, keyboard, monitor and speakers, the only thing on my desk is a glass of water. I'm feeling very... Something. Spartan? Minimalistic? Organized? I'm afraid it only applies to my desk, though, since I, as usual when I move, in the end just started emptying my drawers into bags and boxes, thinking I can get all these things sorted later. Hmm. We'll see about that.

I've been reading a bit about the new seasonal event they're testing on the PTR, and it might be exhaustion or old age, but I don't really understand how it works, or what it's about. Is it a pvp event? How do you get those token thingies? I think I might just get on the PTR myself, to check things out. Those mini pets are looking mighty fine, and so are the mounts...

This afternoon I've been running my hunter around Feralas and Tanaris, doing two out of three escort quests needed to get a Mechanical Chicken! It took a while, since these chickens are slow, and I had the time to come to a few conclusions:

• I'm really glad I saved the two beacons she found while leveling, since it'll probably take a while to get the one in Hinterlands to drop.
• Yay - I'm not on a pvp-server, and hence won't get ganked when doing lengthy escort quests.
• I kind of wish I had a third conclusion, since it would look good, but no.
  

Ooh, by the way, I did get the last book needed for Higher Learning - Enchantment - and I believe it took almost three days of camping for up to an hour, with three hours in between. Seriously, I started to believe it was bugged, and that the "real" book would never spawn, but then there was a magical moment in the afternoon the Saturday before last. I'm a bad blogger, though, since I forgot to screenshot the event - me and my fellow camper, a nice paladin, went bananas when we got our final book, and we were both just so relieved to get off of that stupid balcony.

OK, enough rambling (I'm going to have to make a "real" post one of these days, organized and insightful and all that), it's time to do something about that PTR-plan before the evening gets too late.

IRL, my character's place would smell really bad.

Yeah, it's been a few days since my last post, but that's life for ya.

Anyway, I saw Guild Mum/Sephrenia had found new info on how the requirement for the new mini pet achievement has been lowered to 75, down from 100 - yay! None of my characters will complete the achievement anytime soon - as I think I've said before, my druid is leading the race with 63 - but 75 is definitely a much friendlier amount.

Now we'll just have to wait and see if anything happens with the 100 mounts achievement :) I have no idea what amount is possible, or if lowering from 100 to 75 would be a good idea - note: I'm not saying anything will happen, just speculating and keeping half a finger crossed! 50, for my moonkin, was cake - basically a matter of finances. That, and having done the attunements and/or grinds for the home cities, Kurenai, Ogri'la and Netherwing.

Even though I'm more into mini pets than mounts, I've been playing with the thought of getting tailoring and engineering on a warlock, and simply get a shitload of mounts on one character. I guess a pally would be OK too, but tailoring on a paladin... It's been done, but if I'm playing a class without any ranged attack, I at least want to be hot in plate. No mount crazy lock right now, though - I have my WoW-hands full with druid and draenei huntress (78 last night - tamed the Sapphire Hive Queen, since huge pets rock, and had to put her in the stables after a while due to a growing fear of getting seizures from looking at the huge, fluttering orange thing that took up most of my screen), and that will most likely be the case for a while.

Gotta Catch 'Em All!

Due to renting a couple of movies last night, while I was out for sushi, I didn't find enough time to get my druid started in Icecrown. I did, however, do a few dailies, and open the Mysterious Egg she's had hatching in her bags since before Christmas. In my last egg I got the stupid Aged Yolk, but yesterday I looted an über cool Proto-Drake Whelp! It has the special ability of following your character up in the air while you're out flying, and that's very nice. However, it can't keep up with epic flying speed, and I guess it ends up getting dismissed if you get too far away from it. It's a nice special effect, though, since all the old "flying" pets - parrots, whelps and so on - can't really fly.

The druid now has 63 mini pets, and I'm getting a bit curious as to how many people will be able to complete the Lil' Game Hunter achievement I've read about over at MMO-Champion (scroll down a bit, it's under "Achievements", right above the pics of the blue dragonhawk mounts).

I really don't feel like spending a lot of RL cash on in game-stuff, so all of the TCG-loot and pets from old Collector's Editions are out of bounds. New CE's are of course OK, since I already got the WotLK one :D But no ebay for me.

In total, I think I'll only be able to round up about 84 pets, not counting Mojo, Phoenix Hatchling and the two engineering specialization pets, so getting those 100 mini pets together will certainly be an achievement! I'm assuming they'll add a few extra pets, attainable in game, to make the achievement possible to complete without going on ebay, since I'm not sure it's even possible to get 100 at the moment (without buying TCG-cards, I mean).

Through a bit of, you know, looking around on the interwebz, I stumbled upon myself in Lady Jess's blog roll! As stated earlier, I'm in no way after getting linked, but still: Cool! and /wave!

Just another one!

I overslept today. Not as badly as yesterday, but still. Got up at about 9.45, when I had planned to be up and about at 8. Still an amazing improvement compared to yesterday, though. Anyway, I'm having some tea, and in a bit I'll be off to the library, after dropping off a package at the post office.

Ever since I found out about Stinker, and what I had to do to get him (I've wanted a pet skunk from the moment I first saw them as critters in the draenei zone) I have been looking for new mini pets to get my hands on, and I've collected quite a few so far - feel free to check my collection (which spans mutliple characters) at WarcraftPets.com - including Stinker. The day before yesterday I finally got my druid to Dalaran - not by portal, but by turning 74 - and I've started working on my Kirin Tor Familiar. He's kind of the reward for completing this achievement, and so far I have found one of the books. I just tried to log in, to do a quick check of the different spawn locations before I have to be off, but alas, the servers didn't come online at 11 am as usual - they'll be down until 1 pm, and by then I hope to be on the bus. Hopefully I'll get enough work done today, to feel like I can work on this little project for a while tonight! Should fit in nicely with a bit of fishing...

Eventually I'm going to have to level up to at least 76 - in Sholazar Basin there's a weird faction called The Oracles, and when one hits revered with these guys, one can buy a Mysterious Egg, which may contain one of four different mini pets, or just an Aged Yolk (eww). So, the required level for questing with these guys seems to be 76, which shouldn't be too hard to accomplish after getting some rested bonus while camping for books and doing some fishing. While doing that, there's always the chance I pick up one of these! Fishing sure does rock.

Right, I'm off to the library.

My Flaming Friend

I finally (ooh, it was a pain, took from 8-ish last night until about an hour ago... I did get a good night's sleep, though ;) ) got my Captured Flame! Behold:
Yes, it's that orange-pink-thingie next to my sexy huntress. Nvm the quested greens, I'm only hardcore when it comes to small pets ;) Also, she's 67, dammit! All that running all over the world, honouring or putting out fires got her well on the way to 68, though. About 70 % of a level, I believe. And I'm going to keep doing the Midsummer dailies - not only do they give gold, you also get xp - a bit more than 11000 a quest! And with three quests a day, it's not bad at all! Dailies before 70 ftw!

Pre-pizza post

Still having a cold, yes, but took a shower earlier, and even if my throat is still painful, I'm dressed, and planning to go to the store for something edible.

Today is the first day of the Midsummer Fire Festival, and I'm planning to complete as many quests as possible, so I can get at least one character a Captured Flame. And no, I can't ever get enough small pets. 350 Burning Blossoms is a lot, though, and they're soulbound.

Anyway, off to get some food.

Cheaper Traveling :)

So, patch notes for 2.4.3 are here, and I'm kind of loving it. Mounts will be available at level 30, and riding skill will cost a mere 35 gold! Very nice in deed. I do have one character who's in her 30's, so I guess she'll be getting a mount as soon as the next patch is here. Of course, she is a warlock, so she wouldn't have had to pay 90 gold for training, but still - mount at 30 is so wonderful. Desolace and Badlands will probably not be the pains they've always been before. Ah. Hold on. I'll still despise them. Over all, I think this will boost the leveling of alts quite a bit - I usually start to get frustrated by how slow a character is when I get to level 25-26, which has meant 14-15 levels of frustration - now I'll only have 4-5 levels of "ohmyfuckinggodarewethereyet?".

I'm also very much looking forward to the new mini pet, the Nether Ray Fry! MMO-Champion has a picture. Not as cute as the Tiny Spore Bat, but I'm so going to get one, on the druid and on the rogue!

At the moment I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to go grocery shopping today, and get whatever I'll want to eat tomorrow, or tomorrow, when everyone else is there, and the store closes at 3pm. Decisions, decision...