Monday (9 May) - Hitting The Road

Monday (9 May) - Hitting The Road

The Trip is finally here. We hope to be on the road early Tuesday morning. I was able to squeeze WoW into our laptop, but that is only so that Happy and Lost can continue to work their magic on the Auction House. There may be a chance to do something more during the week we're at my Mom's house, but I can never be sure what the state of her computer will be when we visit.

I'll keep adding bits and pieces to this over the weekend.

Friday Night - No MM raid, for the third straight week. It was disappointing, to say the least. Wild's other cabal partner who is still in MM, Rs, had also signed up for the raid, so he missed out as well. We had only four show up for the raid. Wild could have run BT with MM2 on Thursday, but waited for the Friday MM raid. Wild talked to Bd Friday night, and Wild has an invite to the MM2 Saturday BWD run, but the weekend will be pretty frantic tying up all the loose ends before we head out. The MM raid problems stem from the raid leader, Fn, being very sick the past couple of weeks. That should be a temporary issue. More seriously, though, is that many of the core raiders in our group have stopped signing up for the raid, and are seen less and less in game. Wild spoke with Fn Friday and he said he was hunting down our regulars to find out what the issues are. Of course, who knows what the situation will be by the time we get back from the trip.

About two weeks ago Happy bored us all to tears with a dissertation on the Cataclysm economy, specifically the new Cata enchanting mats. Happy summed it up like this: "... am I becoming too conservative? Happy's profits are down, and the times when he pulls in over 1,000 gold a day have grown fewer."

Happy would now like to report that as a result of that research he began actively trading those new cata enchanting mats he'd been leery about before - volatiles, celestial essences, heavenly shards, and hypnotic dust. To Happy's great joy, there is profit to be made, and sales are going very well. Wild may get his Repair NPC equipped Mammoth mount after all. Lost planned the same thing for the alliance side, but those cagey alliance traders maintain pretty tight pricing and so far Lost has not found an opening. Of course, it didn't hurt that Happy made 3,000 gold selling an Ace of Waves card (bought it Alliance side for 900g and sold it Horde side for 4k gold). Happy is still holding three waves cards with about 2,500 gold invested in them he may never be able to sell. Another Horde side trader posted an ace card for 3100 gold after Happy sold his - it's still sitting there after two days, un-bought. It's really an expensive crap shoot.

Oh, by the way, Did Lao ever sell that second chest piece she was waving about on the Auction House? Or did she, [[Horrors!]] end up equipping it? Lao is still Happy's Heroine for that prior monster sale.

With all of Hunter Fortress getting to level 20 and being able to dual wield two weapons, Wild asked Mery to go do some farming in Silithus for Essence of Air. The intent was to make the +15 Agility enchants for weapons. The recipe calls for four large brilliant shards and four Essence of Air per enchant. The shards are expensive but plentiful on the AH. The Essence of Air, though, rarely show up on the AH and have to be farmed. Happy knows, he and Lost have been checking for Essence of Air for the past week on both the Horde and Alliance Auction Houses and haven't found a single one. Wild and Wild family members have farmed the Dust Stormers in the northwest corner of Silithus for those essences for years. But, after nearly an hour of farming dozens and dozens of Dust Stormers, Mery collected just one Essence of Air. I would have expected 4-6 easily. Checking with Wowhead, it seems that since the Cataclysm the drop rate of essences have been severely nerfed. No wonder the few +15 agi scrolls that get to the AH are so expensive now.

Sunday night Wild had an unexpected pleasure. Lady Hunter was in game. Wild hasn't seen her around it quite some time. Her work schedule had changed and there were was some other RL issues going on as well. Wild chatted with her for quite awhile. She has a lot of catching up to do. Of course, she asked Wild to join MM2. Wild said no, but that things could still be like old times - Wild in one guild with Lady Hunter in another, but Wild running raids with both guilds.

The big push to get everything packed up and ready to go started Sunday. It was exhausting and we ran out of gas around 9:30pm and went to bed. We are usually go to bed a lot later than that. We were both awake and up this morning (Monday) at 4am. There are plenty of final things to do and a couple of new challenges that popped up. The latch to the side door of the RV broke on Sunday. That's a must fix issue, but RV shops don't work on Sundays. I hope they carry the same type of latch we have. Otherwise it will be harder to fix. We did a trial run a few days ago with our three cats and dog. The cats did fine, although our newest (his first time in a moving RV) got pretty excited. We made a mistake with our dog. We were trying out a soft-side kennel under the table in the RV to keep the big galoot out of the cab when we're on the road. She kennels fine in the car, and did fine in the RV as well. That is, until we got home and left her in the kennel while we took the cats back inside. She panicked, thinking we were leaving her, I guess, and tore a hole in the front of the kennel. Judi got that patched up on Sunday.

Our neighbor is going to be taking care of the six cats that are not going on the trip. The two "beach boys" and our semi-feral female will be staying in the garage, which is their usual haunt. The other three girls (Mom and her two daughters, none of which get along with each other) will have the whole house to themselves. We're hoping that's enough space to keep things civil.

Who knows what fun and challenging puzzles will come our way today as we finish up.

I doubt that I will be posting anything on the WoW blog while we're gone, but Judi will be posting a daily report of our trip on her blog. If you'd like to follow along, here is the URL:

http://tazzydbell.blogspot.com/