Belated Blogiversary

I just realized I missed my 1 year blogiversary! I started this blog and posted my first post on May 6, 2008. Now it's almost June. /blush

I am not as active as I used to be but I'm busier than usual. It is nice to see I did keep this up for so long!

For the Alliance!

I have a serious addition to Mt. Dew. Have for years. Every so often I get it into my head to quit but I always come back to it. Sort of like WoW, actually. This combination just makes sense to me. Right now I'm back on the juice for its caffine goodness for this sleep deprived mama.

Thanks to Good Morning Azeroth for sharing this!

For the alliance!

Snazzy New Hat!

I actually saved up enough cooking awards to obtain the Chef's Hat. It took 100 awards but unlike other dailies, there is a chance to obtain more than one award each day. I also got the achievement for buying the hat.

Luckily I had kept up doing these dailies even after obtaining all the cooking recipes. My reasoning was that if they added new recipes, it would be put on that vendor and I'd be all prepared to buy whatever I was missing.

About a month ago I discovered the Chef's Hat on the vendor (yeah I don't read patch notes anymore). Luckily I already had 60 some awards stored up so in about a month I was able to earn the extra 40.

The crazy thing is that with the addition of this hat, I now have gotten all the cooking achievements available. I focus on the silliest things.

I don't know if I'm going to continue doing the cooking daily. I may just take a break from it for a bit. For one thing I have 200 Northern Spices in my bank. This even while I was using them to make fish feasts for raids. That's a lot of stinking spices. I'll probably pick back up on the daily when this stock gets a little low.

Of the Exodar

I started the Argent Tournament quests later than most. Gee kept telling me how great jousting was and I honestly just wasn't interested. I just kept doing my own little round of dailies and completely ignored that little patch in Icecrown.

That was until Gabi notified me that there were pets to be had from this jousting nonsense. Damn. Now I have to do it.

My first experience with jousting was something along the lines of, "oh my god this is way too flipping hard. I hate it forevers." I couldn't really figure it out and kept dying in attempts to defeat anything.

Gabi and Dumadin came and assisted me with my quests and thank goodness they did or I wouldn't of gotten them done at all. Gabi then helped explain what buttons he was mashing and in what sequence so I could stop dying and maybe actually do the quests on my own.

So thanks to my gnome coach I was able to start adding these dailies to my task list and actually complete them on my own. I made it all the way to Champion and got my "Desdarii of the Exodar" title.

I also got a little squire for a pet. It sounds so wrong to call this little boy that faithfully follows me around a pet. I'm pretty sure I'm breaking some child labor laws by having him carry all my stuff, too. At least I don't miss my little orphan from Children's Week as much now.

Achievement update: I am now 7 pets away from Lil' Game Hunter. Go me!

A Small Jewelcrafting Rant

Specifically I would like to voice my official complaint about the skill Prospecting. Basically, it doesn't work for poo and I'm fed up with it. I have very limited time to play. Mostly I get to login, do a few dailies and then I'm off for the remainder of the day. Sometimes I'm so busy with my new mommyhood that I have to spread those few dailies out between nap times just to complete them.

To sum it up: I don't have 3 trillion hours to hunt for ore that doesn't have gems worth a turd in them.

Beorr was kind enough to go out and spend his free time mining and sent me 5 stacks of ore. Every 5 pieces of ore can be prospected to look for gem so I had 20 chances to get a nice blue quality gem to be cut and given to guildies to use.

Not counting the shiny Scarlet Ruby that Beorr must of obtained mining, out of my 20 prospects I got 2 blue quality gems. 2 sapphires. That's it. Sure that equals a 10% return on my prospecting attempts but I'm saying that's not good enough. The entire process is too random.

I'm not able to keep up with the guild's needs for gems. I have a ton of sapphires and opals in the bank but never any ruby or topaz gems to share. What did I get. More damn sapphires that no one wants. It's very frustrating.

I think my main cause of frustration is that I'm not able to farm for my items like other professions are. I can't go, "oh I'm out of rubies, time to go find some ruby gem nodes to mine". No I have to cross my fingers and toes and hope that the gems that pop out of the prospecting is the ones I require.

Not to mention I'm absolutely swimming in green quality uncut gems that no one wants. They don't even sell well on the auction house.

I need a way to turn all these cruddy green quality gems into blues I can actually use. Yes, I am aware of the Icy Prism pattern but as I mentioned, I'm not exactly going into dungeons any longer. I am woefully short of Frozen Orbs required. Even so I think there's probably better uses out there for Frozen Orbs since the Icy Prism just gives me a random assortment of gems and a good chance of more crud I don't need.

What I need is way to just take a bunch of the cruddy Bloodstone gems and fuse them together into a Scarlet Ruby. That way I know what I'm getting when I'm short on gems and can make one from spare materials in a pinch. I have a bag full and several slots in the guild vault dedicated to collecting these low quality gems we don't use. Why not let me use them towards something I do need!

Thus ended my rant. I just had to get this jewelcrafting dilemma off my chest. I'm doing what I can to keep the vaults stocked and thanks to Beorr for helping make this easier on me by sharing your ore! It's just so frustrating to have 14 Sky Sapphires in stock and ready to cut but everyone is asking for Monarch Topaz and Scarlet Rubies. Ugh!

New Pet Crab

Good news! Today after doing the fishing daily I found a Strand Crawler in my bag. I've decided to keep him and add him to my growing collection of pets. He's very tiny or at least seems rather small to me but he's friendly enough.

I was pretty excited when I got my Unusual Compass a couple days ago. I was super excited when I found a pet!

I didn't even know a pet was available from the fishing daily. I'll have to look into other items available from those quests. Perhaps there are other fun goodies I didn't know about.

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mothers Day to all the mom's and grandmom's out there!

Today's actually the day my little one was due if she hadn't decided to pop out six weeks earlier. I'm glad she's already here so I can officially celebrate my first mother's day.

I was already treated to flowers, cards and my favorite donuts this morning. I also got a nice gift card for a spa day. I'm really looking forward to that! I could get used to getting spoiled on mother's day!

Higher Learning

I forgot to mention it but a couple days ago I finally found the last book I was missing for the Higher Learning achievement. It was the book in the Dalaran Visitors Center. I stopped in there looking for it I couldn't tell you how many times. I've found many other interesting books sitting there instead of the book I needed. I've been looking for this book for probably about 2 months now.

The weird thing is that popping into the Visitor Center is such a part of my Dalaran routine, I find myself still looking inside simply out of habit. It's sort of strange not to have to do that anymore.

The best news is that I am 9 pets away from Lil' Game Hunter. Pretty exciting!

The Matron

Today I finished the Children's Week event. Only reason I completed all the tasks on day two of the event was because the achievement Daily Chores doesn't appear to be working properly. The way it reads, it makes it sound like you should get credit for doing a daily quest once a day for five days. Instead I received credit for completing any daily quests with my little orphan out.

The most difficult and irritating of was of course the School of Hard Knocks. I have had moderately good success in PvP with other characters but for some reason, I am absolute rubbish on my mage. Given the weekend battleground was Eye of the Storm, that proved to be the most popular and most difficult battleground to complete. It was for me anyway. I had no difficulty in Warsong Gulch. I've spent way too much time in that battleground in the past to not do well even as a gimped mage.

I went so far as to actually purchase my dual spec ability and start building a PvP set for Desdarii. That is something I had not planned on doing. I really didn't see a purpose for it but I ended up dead so quickly and often in EotS that I actually found it necessary.

I did get everything done thanks to Gabi and Gee's assistance. In turn, I helped Gabi with Warsong Gulch. I left him to do Arathi Basin himself. Goodness, I dislike that battleground.

I also owe a huge thank you to Gabi, Beorr and Brimlsye as they allowed me to stay in Utgarde Pinnacle with them when unexpected company arrived and I had to go AFK. I had done all the bosses but King Ymiron, which was of course the reason I was going for Hail to the King, Baby. They allowed me to stay and finished the dungeon and got me the achievement. To them I am very grateful.

All said and done it is day two of Children's Week and I am already known as Matron Desdarii. This is definitely my new favorite title.

I do love the little draenei orphan. Even after turning in the quests for the new little pets, I asked if I could continue taking Dornaa out and the Orphanage is allowing me to continue to mentor her. I'm sure there are plenty of other things I can show her that she is interested in.