Yes, yes, I know.  I have not been very good at posting this week.  I sat down on Monday and really tried to come up with a rant, but again I failed.  Soon, I really must return to my normal posting schedule and post rants, even if they are lame or, relatively speaking, repeats.

 

On the bright side, this coming Tuesday should be a nice picture post.  Tomorrow morning, Spiff and I are going to walk up to Memorial Park and watch the annual Balloon Classic take place.  This means three things:  First, we’ll be doing about ninety minutes of walking.  B, we’ll be getting up really early to do so.  And roman numeral iii, I will be taking pictures.  Thus, I will have some new material for a picture post.

 

Meanwhile, it has been an eventful week.  Saturday, I headed for work and got about three blocks before the scooter ran out of gas.  The nearest gas station was at least seven or eight blocks away.  I haven’t measured it; it may be as much as a mile.  With a significant uphill push and a mild downhill glide.  (If I were going the other way, I confess I might have a different opinion.)  I got to the gas station, filled up the tank…and it wouldn’t start.  I let work know I would be late or (more likely) absent.  The battery on the scooter gave out, so I called home and had Spiff come to meet me with a screwdriver.  I pushed the bike to a Memorial Park parking lot, as I knew I could not leave the scooter at the gas station.  We got the battery home and charged it up.  I went back to where I left the scooter (having given up on work by this point, by the way), hooked the battery back up, but no, it still would not start.  Somewhere along the way I remembered that I had roadside service, as I had just signed for insurance earlier in the week which included it.  Two guys showed up with a big pickup truck, we loaded the scooter into the back, and then we got it (and me) home.

 

Sunday, the scooter decided it was done throwing a tantrum and started right up the first time I tried to start it.  But my ill weekend was not over.

 

Sundays are normally very quiet at work.  I support business customers in my job, and many businesses don’t do much on Sundays so don’t require the support I provide on that day.  I can go through all of Sunday and only receive five or six calls.

 

This past Sunday I received one-hundred sixty-two calls.  Non-stop answering of the phone and, quite soon, saying the same thing over and over and over again:  “There’s a big problem going on, and you are in an affected area.”  That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close enough.  I was taking thirty to sixty seconds per call, as were my colleagues.  (At one point, just to make matters worse, I had only one person working with me.)  We finally cleared the call queue about a half hour before my shift was over, by which point the problem was mostly fixed.  I still took a few calls in that last half hour; the problem was not fully corrected until sometime Monday evening.

 

That’s right, the onslaught of calls continued on Monday.  Many of the calls were coming from residential customers, as, on top of everything else, we had a call routing problem.  That problem was still unresolved on Wednesday, but we were told they had found the source of the problem and would shortly fix it.

 

Tuesday and Wednesday’s call volumes were normal.  Busy-ish early, quieter after about six or seven.  We were back to a normal routine.

 

Due to the scooter problems on Saturday, Spiff and I did some walking on that day we did not plan on.  I want to have two days of rest after a week of walking, so we skipped Monday.  Tuesday through Thursday, we did our normal walk thing, but today we skipped as we are walking for ninety minutes (give or take) tomorrow.  We’ll then take two days of rest and on Tuesday we’ll add a lap.

 

Enough of the real life stuff.  In EverQuest, I have returned to working on the current expansion content.  Dan will simply have to get his previous expansion progression done some other way or much later on.

 

Tuesday evening I had a beneficially interesting thing happen.  I was about to log out of EverQuest.  I had taken Shaka to where she needed to be for the night’s raid, or at least somewhere convenient to where I expected it to be.  I got a tell (message) from somebody I did not know, asking if I wanted a weapon from a raid they had just completed.  Nobody in their raid needed it, and they did not want it to go to waste.  Unlooted items vanish (“rot”) after about twenty or thirty minutes if they are not claimed by somebody.  The weapon was a significant upgrade, so I went and got it.  I may have eventually gotten the weapon or something like it from my new raid team, but given how new I am to the team, odds are it will be awhile before I am allowed to claim any really good loot like that.

 

The new weapon is awesome.  Let me see if I can explain this:  First, weapons are judged, naturally, by how much damage they do over a period of time.  Each weapon has what’s called a “ratio” equal to the amount of damage divided by the weapon’s “delay”, or the amount of time between each use of it in a constant attack.  I am honestly not sure what the time unit the delay represents, but a lower number is obviously better.  So a weapon with a higher amount of damage may not be better if its delay is also higher.  Most weapon upgrades will give you a fractional increase in the damage ratio; it’s a hard thing to raise.  I gained over a full point in ratio, going from (if I remember my calculations correctly) roughly 4.6 to 5.7.  Given that it took me eight years to get to 4.6 on my damage ratio, that is a huge change.

 

Then there’s the other stats on the weapon.  Three things nearly every item in the game are measured on are hit points (health), mana (magic energy) and endurance.  Most items, including my new weapon, have roughly the same number for all three of these attributes.  Most upgrades are considered good if there’s a hundred point gain on these things, I gained five hundred points on them with my new weapon.  Plus small gains on a number of other attributes over the weapon it replaced.

 

As I said, the weapon was an awesome thing to randomly gain like that.

 

Meanwhile, I am pursuing epic quests on the characters on Shaka’s account who do not already have theirs.  This is not without difficulty, but mostly it is going smoothly.

 

That’s more than enough for today, for this week, for both my real and virtual worlds.  Here’s a little poem to end the week on:

 

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Forever and a Year

 

Trials and tribulations
Joys and the evils of life
So much variety we know
In this journey we all take
Challenges are met
Seen as pain or glory or both
Lessons learned either way
Sometimes forgotten in the wake
Of the hardship we feel
Until we see a lesson which was not there
It matters not
It’s just life
Glorious, wonderful life
I hope to live mine
Forever
And a year!

 

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