I’d jumped off a ledge or something and landed square in the middle of the circle of death. Couldn’t have planned that if I’d tried.

I have no proof but there’s a reason for that. I was fighting a masked badger, NOT the Mad Badger, I swear! It wasn’t until the masked badger died that he revealed his secret identity as the Mad Badger. Had I know the little bitty badger would morph into the corpse of the Mad Badger on death, I would have taken a before shot.

Last night I was running around my neighborhood hoping to find someone who had it open for anyone to decorate so I could place a tree in their yard. I’ve ‘gifted’ people before with the beaver statues, Kranklucks (sp?) hammer, …. I couldn’t find anyone to give the tree to but I did wander in a few houses and look around. One person had a HUGE turtle head on their wall. I went over to see it better and clicked on it to see if it was usable. I’m assuming that’s why Ranni’s eyes got so huge and were literally twitching around in their sockets. This was one of the more amusing screenshots.

It’s been far too long in coming but last night, Captain Condi finally hit 60! I wish I could say I’m an awesome Captain but, alas, I’m not. I still have a ton of fun playing her though and now that she’s 60, need to finish traiting her up. Oh, and buy her last skills. I didn’t have time to do so last night as my video card crashed, again (does it within 24 hours of my husband mentioning my video card, EVERY. SINGLE. TIME!) and I had to log into Ranni for another CD run. They suggested I take Condi but I don’t have the faith in her yet as I do my LM. Heh.

Anyway, I’m stoked I finally got her to 60. She would be my third at max but I deleted my minstrel at 58. Now to decide which character to work next: my new minstrel or my hunter. Decisions decisions. I may go with my minstrel as I’m a much better minstrel than I am a hunter (or captain, for that matter) but my hunter is so much fun! Working up another character is a great break when hitting that ole’ deed wall grind on another!

I did a Carn Dum run with my kinmates from KaTet tonight. I’ve been playing with these friends for a LONG time. We’re family it’s been so long. My weekend was so rotten I didn’t even want to log in but I knew they A) needed me and B) that I had the keys. So, reluctanly, I logged in.

And boy howdy am I so glad I did.

It wasn’t because we were kicking butt. It wasn’t because I made everyone laugh when, after being rezzed out of the insta-death sewer water I immediately ran across the path and into the death water on the OTHER side (because, you know, I’m a dolt). It wasn’t because we accomplished what we’d set out to and then some. Or because we did it in record time.

It was the fellowship with good friends that flat turned my mood around and didn’t just have me smiling for the first time all weekend, but made me laugh as well. This is what it’s all about for me. Not radiance armour or boss kills on my belt, but fellowship, fun and family.

I love my friends.

Have to edit because although I said what I meant, it may not have come across the right way. I *DO* love instances and boss kills and want the rest of my rad pieces. Badly!! But what makes it, all of it, is the fellowship with my friends.

I have this Burg buddy that when you get him on his Burg, and me on my LM, add an awesome Champ to the mix, and we can do a LOT together! Neeva, my burg buddy, and I went with another LM and a grd once and beat several bosses, including Barashal, in CD back when 50 was the level cap. In the interest of full disclosure, we did have a Captain with us that run but he spent more time having little temper tantrums than playing and didn’t join in the Barashal fight at all until he was almost dead.

Anyway, Neeva and I, along with the most awesome Champ in game I’ve ever seen, did the HoM instance in one run with no deaths, all the way through. The last boss went down easy, thanks to Neeva’s CJ’s (and a few random ones I should admit). The whole run was as smooth as butter, which surprised us. Next we headed to the Water Wheels instance for Vol 2 Book 8.

What. An. Awesome. Instance!

Skorrin, the Champ, and Neeva handled all the levers and managed to figure out the puzzle with them. Luckily. ‘Cause I have no idea what they pulled or when, or in what order. I was just running around trying to find them. At one point I was standing on a grate bridge when they must have pulled a lever somewhere. I know this because the grate rolled back, under my feet, and I suddenly found myself falling to my death! Another time I thought I saw a glitch behind the gate that held two of the elite cold worms on the other side of it. I was pressing my character against the gate which, as you know, lets me slide up and down the width of the gate, trying to click on the “glitch” and see what it was. Yeah, I suddenly found myself on top of the 17K worms, by myself, as they’d figured out how to open that gate. Heh. Lucky for me they move very slowly and I was able to just run up and down the path, out of their reach, until my buddies could come help me kill them.

Did you know that you can’t jump on the massive water wheels? Nope, sure can’t. It’s like instant death when you try.

I believe our only deaths while fighting happened against the big green Lesser Caerlug (sp?) in his piston filled chamber. Very interesting fight that at one time had me question if it was really just a 3 man instance. We got him down though and moved on to the next part that involved a lot of running around trying to figure out which levers to pull and when.

The last fight we did was against 3 something or others that looked like their mama was an armadillo and their daddy a balrog! Those suckers came running at us super fast and packed a serious wallop (got me down to around 120 something health right off the bat) but Neeva and I quickly mezzed a couple, I healed and we had a blast killing them.

You’d think that with all the fun we had, and we had a ton of it last night, I’d have taken a few screenshots or something. As it were, the only screenie I thought to take was of Neeva, dead, on top of a crystal lamp post thingy. He’d jumped to get to a lower platform as it was a small short jump. Turns out that doesn’t matter in this instance. You jump, you’re more likely to land in a kneel than not!

I absolutely *love* my bear. He earned his name, IIRC, back in beta while I was fighting goblins in the Midgewater Marshes. That fool ran around and aggro’d all the goblins he could find and then left me to fight them on my own as he had a more pressing mission. There was a frog nearby that he had to kill. That scenario played itself out a LOT. Frogs, snakes, … didn’t matter. He’d happily abandon me in a heartbeat to go kill some poor innocent creature but usually, only at the worst of times.

Since then he’s gone to extreme efforts to keep up his ‘Diva Status’. At one time he was fairly well known on Windfola for his lore breaking antics and temper tantrums. Here are some pictures to prove it. (May need to click them to view them larger.)

During the fight in Book 15 chapter 12, he saw early on that it was going to be a wipe and tried to dig his way to safety.

Here we are in the Forgotten Treasury. In this instance, he’s my lookout. Apparently.

He took extra lessons from Radagast the Brown to perfect his Swami act.

Mad that I wouldn’t give him a bio break, he took matters into his own paws, right there in BG.

He said he wasn’t coming down until I promised that we’d never go free Dori again.

One of his favorite cubhood games was hide and seek. He hides better than those little hobbits in Michel Delving!

He’s my favorite pet to play with, despite his antics. Thankfully he’s gotten over his obsession with goblins and spiders and hasn’t wiped any groups lately. The biggest group wipe that I can remember happened while a group of kinmates and I were killing giants in the Trollshaws (think it was there). I’d gone AFK as my daughter was running down the stairs, puking the whole way. When I came back my fellow was dead thanks to Frogbiter. In my absence, he’d suddenly run around and grabbed a ton of giants and brought them back to my fellow. I swear, he was on passive!!! When I keyed the mic and asked, “WHAT HAPPENED???” the first thing I heard was, “You won’t believe what that #$@! bear of yours did THIS TIME!”. Heh.

Oddly enough, the biggest diva I have is my eagle. He’s pure evil I tell you. He’s only ever rezzed me twice and both times were on suicide runs. I think he’s trying to tell me something …..

That is the question, is it not? And the song, of course, is,

‘dead ant, dead ant, dead ant dead ant dead ant dead ant dead annnnnn nnnnnt’.

Two hundred points of uncoolness (cause old people, like myself, are uncool it seems) if you can guess the reference. That’d help me out as although I hear it in my head, I have forgotten the ref. Go figure.

Anyway, wow. Book 8. I was looking to Book 8 as a way to rejuvenate my game. See, I’m experiencing my typical summer burnout. I don’t know what causes it nor do I know a way to prevent it. It just seems to happen in the summer. I get bored with playing and find myself fiddling with other games and or activities. I have so much time on my hands this summer as my kids are now all old enough for me to be completely uncool to be around. They are teens and I’m ancient, they say. They’re gone with friends or whatnot a lot, leaving me with not much to do.

So Book 8 was going to kick drive my LoTRo addiction back to it’s ‘Girl, have you even been outside this week??’ status. Did it? Let’s start with what happened first.

I logged in to reclaim space. Bag space, vault space, storage toon space. It took a little doing, going through both my houses and all my toons and their vaults, but I double stacked mats and found I had so much roomy and glorious space. Let me tell you, Turbine, my cook and my scholar thank you! Tremendously!

Anyone want to bet how long it takes me to fill all that new found space back up???

Somewhere along the way I noticed my outfit. I’d just ported home and out of darkness when I saw my cloak. It was a most beautiful, vibrant, deep and lush shade of burgundy. I’ve never seen dye take so well and so deep in game before! The color was simply stunning. Thing was, it totally borked the look I had going. Put that deep gorgeous color on the elven rep dress, or the ceremonial dress and I’ll probably never take them off! But on my cloak, paired with my burgundy LM rad robe? Eh. Not so much. I stopped what I was doing and went to my vault in search of a new outfit. Long story short and after checking all the outfitters hoping to find something that would work with the cloak well, I bought dye wash and ‘fixed it’. Bummer, as it really was beautiful. It’s still not what I had but I can live with it for now I think.

Next I made sure I had all my optional crit mats together so I could go turn them in. And turn them in I did. I was in voice with a good friend who I hadn’t seen in awhile. While we chatted and caught up on things, I was busy working my left click finger so hard it gained a whole new muscle group! Right as I went to turn in the last, and I mean, VERY last optional, I noticed something funny. Thanks to the shear exhaustion, my finger slipped and rolled the cursor over a description. On further inspection, I realized some of the optionals could be turned in for different items. Hmm. Did I get the ones my characters need? Well, somewhat. Not a real biggie as I have kinmates who will need, but it did make me feel a little stupid. Lesson learned, and passed on to kinnies.

I then turned in enough gold leaves and silver branches to get two of the Loth gift boxes. In one I found a rune for 100K item xp. Given that the last one I received had a single, solitary tier 5 relic in it, I was stoked! The second box had a lvl 59 second age staff! Another woot! Until I realized I couldn’t slot it as all my slots are full. So it’s now taking up a newly found space in my vault.

The festival had started so I went to check it out. First up was the Shire. Can I just say I adore the new races? They are cute, I can’t figure out how a winner is chosen unless it’s just a random number generator, and I actually won my second bet. Thanks Daffodilly! The fishing for tokens I did only because I wanted more tokens. I’m really not fond of that activity, but it was neat standing on the banks of the river with so many people, fishing away hoping for a good catch!

When I started the Keg race I got super lucky and chose the winner right off the bat. I followed him around, cheering him on the whole time. When he won I was almost jumping up and down in my seat! My problem came when I tried to turn in to get my winnings. After a couple of minutes I realized I’d never turned in the token to place my bet. So I’d not actually won anything. Instead, I’d just followed the winner around like a drunken idiot with no purpose at all. Consequently, I lost both times once I had my bets placed. That Signar really IS too old for the race I think.

I fished at all four locations. I turned in fireworks and replaced my Summerworks Fireworks. I bartered for a most awesome Summerfest painting!! I can’t tell you just how long I’ve been wanting a new painting for my walls and this one was perfect! And big! I also got the Summerfest bed. I *love* it! I also need to redecorate my bedroom as it doesn’t match a thing. Oh, and I got the hokey looking Summerfest cloak. Today I hope to procure the hokey hat, too.

I think that’s pretty much all I did yesterday. So do I rant or not?

Nah. The cloak caught me off guard and as pretty as it was, it got to me as I’d been searching for 2 years for the perfect cloak when I got this one for completing Book 7. Everything else came down to user-stupidity, or, lack of sleep as it were. Will Book 8 be enough to fix my summertime blues? I don’t know. I am looking forward to doing the new Bree quests on my hunter and my minstrel. I’d love to try some of the new instances on my LM but she doesn’t have a full rad set yet. I still haven’t done the turtle either. I tried to get in to a turtle group when it was new but was told,

“You’re a Lore Master. We don’t need weak ones. We need DPS.”.

I haven’t tried since. No fault of Turbine’s there, just me being grumpy. I am looking forward to experiencing more of Book 8 though.

I like to think I take pride in Ranni’s appearance. She must look well groomed and as pretty as she can at all times. Unless, of course, I’m wearing a hat from my ‘Hokey Hat’ collection. (which should be another post all it’s own one day).  Knowing my penchant for outfits, a friend of mine sent me an elven circlet as a surprise gift in the mail one day. Oh the joy I knew I would experience in this new piece of costumery! Imagine my shock when I tried it on and saw this.

Yeah, not quite the look I was going for. At all. After the initial shock wore off, I did have a laugh running through Bree with a growing train of people behind me, all either sending me tells asking how I’d shaved my head or emoting at me. Heh.

To my dismay, my bald gene was passed down to my daughter, Kritkeeper. She was a hobbit on my other account that I’d adopted. If I hadn’t, who would have wanted her after all??

The fun isn’t over yet. Tonight, after buying our kinhouse, we celebrated by trying on the General’s armour. Yep, you guessed it. Ranni was once again bald. With a 5 o’clock shadow at that!

The bald gene didn’t just follow Ranni from Windfola to Elendilmer. Oh no! Where’s the fun in that? Here’s a ‘Ranni’ I created on Bullroarer. Tell me I’m not cursed with the bald gene and I won’t believe you!

Or maybe it’s just a ‘freaky head’ thing rather than being coded in her DNA.

Either way, I’ve contacted Basil Gummidge in Ost Forod and put a bounty out on my hair. If you see it, kill it on sight as it’s very sneaky and stealthes away at the darndest of times. I’m sure after a quick trip to the taxidermist to weave it into a wig it’ll stay put. Right?

The stress test on Bullroarer was nothing short of total awesomeness. I rolled a Lore-Master and leveled her to 30 for the event. I chose the LM because my main, Ranni, is a LM and I wanted to make sure I knew how to play my character. That really wasn’t an issue due to the most hilarious lag I’ve ever seen. Gobs of people were moving together, one step at a time, in serious slow motion. The run from Bree-Town to the Great Barrows took a little over 15 minutes the lag was so bad. What made it so cool was seeing tons of people come out together to help stress the server. There was a wall of horses (would have made a great screenie had I been thinking) just outside of the west gate of Bree for a good few minutes, waiting to ride valiantly to the Great Barrows in search of our beloved Devs. Once I had finally made it to the door to the instance, I couldn’t see due to the sheer number of people there trying to enter the Great Barrows, all piled up on each other. Talk about sweet!

Getting to play (lag together would be more apt) with people from all of the different servers was neat. Seeing familiar names in the crowd or in OOC felt good. I’m sure the reasons for coming out varied from wanting to help make the servers better to the chance to try out a new class or level with impunity. I missed the last big Dev event thanks to my son ‘borrowing’ my connection five minutes before it started (after I’d spent all day getting the client updated and ready to roll no less!) so I really wanted to make this one. The end of beta party was a serious lag fest, too, and I didn’t do near the amount of fighting as I thought I would. This event was no different in that aspect but I did get a few good shots in on some trolls in Ost Guruth.

On that note, I will never complain about skill lag again!!

In the above screenshot I’d just gotten to cow beach in the ‘Moors when the creeps took +Sapience down. I was hoping to get one good swipe in on him but he died at my little paw feet before I could. On my screen he was still kneeling when he killed me. Talk about powerful! My LM wants a skill like that. No, I take that back. My warg wants a skill like that! Heh.

Even with the running as though we were mired down to our hips in thick cold molasses, and the incredibly long wait time between clicking a skill and it executing, the events were fun. The multi-server fellowship, so to speak, was refreshing. The Devs coming out to play with us when they really didn’t have to, rocked!

The stress test was a blast. I first started playing during the January 22nd stress test back in closed beta and was hooked. It’s been over two years and I’m still hooked on this game. Time to go make coffee as I can’t sleep and believe I hear my character calling me ……..

I broke out my brand new warg and finally got in some ‘Moors time tonight! It felt awesome to be back in the ‘Moors and to be able to show someone else what’s what. I took a friend around and got him his Grams map, the one with the 1 minute timer. He was amazed at how we skirted along back paths and used the trees, rocks and other landscape features to ‘hide’ as we went. I was explaining why you don’t stand in the slime when farming slugs for money when he got a first hand experience that explained it well. He also learned the beauty in using auto attacks when farming for money rather than spamming your power skills and getting caught with your pants down, so to speak. A burg jumped him as he was scouting TR. He’s a reaver and can’t stealth like I can. When I popped out of stealth the burg took off. Too funny!

The burg came back, with a buddy, so we ran into TR. I figured they assumed we mapped out but to play it safe, we waited a few minutes before leaving so he wouldn’t die before getting his Grams map quests done. (He’d already used the one you spawn with.)

A couple of hunter buddies of ours jumped us in the slug pits near Grams. They had no idea it was us of course, and (both!) heart seekered him to death. They didn’t get me though. Heh. I’m still wondering why they didn’t each take one of us. A good heart seeker each would have gotten them more as although we’re both “greenies”, two is better than one. Right? And they’d each have gotten a KB. Oh wells.

We’re going back out Monday evening and hopefully will have a third with us. I can’t wait! I love creepin’! Even if it’s farming slugs and doing quests for maps, I can’t get enough of the ‘Moors.

I finally feel that I’ve got Ranni moving in the right direction again. She’s been sitting, in a sense, twiddling her thumbs, for far too long! It feels great! My only regret is that I didn’t stop and think things through earlier. Still, I know what I want know and have a plan to get it.

Whew.