Because this year hasn’t been rough enough on my family, my mother’s sister has been diagnosed with Stage III cancer.  My understanding of this in short terms is that she can beat it with six months of chemo and radiation therapy.  Unpleasant to say the least, but the possibility for a full recovery sounds good.  I know she’s a heavy smoker; I hope this gets her to quit.

Okay, I’ve given the bad news.  There’s not really “good” news to counterbalance it, so I will give some fluffy news instead.  That is, I’ll talk about what’s been going on in EverQuest.

The biggest EQ news is that I finally went and merged my guild with my friend’s guild.  The last few die hard members of Elitists, the guild I have been leader of for the last couple of years, and I moved over to Circle of Prophets.  We’ve been raiding with them, more or less, for quite some time now.  The leader put out the invite a long time ago, and after being prompted by one of the aforementioned die hard members, I decided we should make the move.  I was immediately made an Officer in CoP.  This is unusual; usually Frosty (the Circle of Prophets leader) waits six months before making a promotion.  But I am Special and nobody objected.  I was not an unknown quantity; most of the guild knows me pretty well.

Danielf, my druid named for my late son, got his epic 1.5 done.  Now he needs to get his 2.0.  Epic 2.0 quests are typically not as challenging and a whole shorter than 1.5 quests, and his is no exception.  The biggest challenge for 2.0 quests is they all require an object (an orb) from a raid zone.  The raid zone in question is now fairly lame, but being a raid zone I can’t take my mercenaries in.  So I’ll have to recruit a few folks to go hunting the orb for Danielf.  More than likely, we’ll hunt a couple of them; there’s always one or two people needing their orb.

I am also happy to report that my main character, Shakatma, has done in the new expansion in a little over a month what I still haven’t done in the previous expansion:  Progressed past the first tier.  There are only two such progressions to make in the new expansion (HoT), so I am halfway to the top.  Actually, I am further than that.  Progression past the first tier (oddly called tier 2) requires completing six missions.  Progression to the next and last tier requires completing only four missions.  So I am sixty percent of the way to the top.

Meanwhile, Dan and my other main boxed toon, Boomshakalaka, finished a couple of tasks yesterday in the lowest zone of the new expansion.  As far as the solo tasks in that zone are concerned, they and Shaka are all at the same point.  I hope to get all three of them through all of the missions and tasks in HoT eventually, but especially Shaka.  If I can accomplish this and kill all of the “named” mobs in the expansion, I get a special reward:  An item which can turn me into a white rabbit with pink polka dots.  This is a silly reward for such a huge accomplishment, but I like it anyway.

That’s it for this week.  I will have a nice poem for tomorrow, although this week I don’t know what the theme will be.  See you then.