I would like to think that I’m a calm, collected, and patient person. Work with 2.5 – 6-year-olds on a daily basis, and you kind of need to have a ton of the above in order to work peacefully with that age group. So, I guess I should be ashamed of myself when Orophen is trying to explain the battle plan to everyone last Sunday and I’m… huffing, puffing, and getting super antsy because we haven’t started yet. Heck, I even started to zone out mentally and verbalize how badly I just wanted to get going to the point of not reading the wall of text that was attacking my already poor eye sight!

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Having a three day weekend, I thought I’d sleep more, maybe poke around on FFXI more, and maybe get my homework done. Sadly, none of that really happened. I did play FFXI, I am getting my homework done, but the sleep part? Hah! Despite this, I managed to have a lot of fun this weekend. I was mostly in Seattle on Saturday, and then dragged people out to do avatar fights the following day. As we went through the runs, I remembered why I was so gung ho about leveling BRD and why I still love it to this day (despite my complaints from time to time). I still remember watching in fascination how a BRD from another server ran back and forth and really helped his party out win against Garuda. I don’t remember the name of the person anymore, but that image was always in my mind and I remember wanting to do something like that for the longest time. Granted I had already done these fights before, it was still a lot of fun to go through them again. Though not so much fun when Mekare and Makai was hit with an unresisted Shiva 2-HR. I totally panicked when I saw that they went from wihte to 0 in a second, while Orophen and I were trying to duke it out and then run like crazy from that icy demon. Thankfully Reiokyu came to our rescue, and we managed to go through the rest of the fights very easily.

As for today? I had thought of dragging them to go do the rest of the avatar fights, but then I made a last minute call of having everyone do Promyvion-Vahzl. I’m sure some were annoyed at having to be called out all the way there, haul out their level 50 gear, etc… but I’m really glad that we were able to go and I’m sure the others felt the same way in the end. We managed to get to the top most floor very easily, and it was miraculous that we didn’t run into a SINGLE fake MR! We also had one death on the way there, and I’m not even sure how that happened to begin with. I’ll just say its karma on Orophen, since he can’t learn to shut his mouth when he needs to! ;P

When we managed to make it to the top and kill off the last NM, we started to talk about the BCNM fight and the strategies we would be using for it. We had already used two hours for the fun of it, and were planning to go down when I chirped that we could spend the last few minutes trying the bosses out for ourselves! Everyone agreed and we headed out for a test run in the Spire. We managed to get our second mob down to less than 15% (I died at this time), and commented how we could have kept going if I actually had medicines. Mekare mentioned it would be cake if we had items with us, and it pretty much was the case before we wiped. We’ll be doing our official run next week Sunday, so I’m really looking forward to hacking and slashing it out with the rest of them.

Besides having a pretty shitty week last week with JUST health problems, I feel mounting stress from in game stuff and also commuting problems. I’m not even sure if the stress from the game is really stress or me just… not really sure about certain things and feeling really insecure. It drove me to the point of wanting to play WoW, but I just started a new segment on my training and need to focus on getting it done instead of messing around too much. So, instead I just sat around feeling really meh and kinda beating myself up on things I probably shouldn’t have.

Besides attempting to farm spells for BLU, helping my brother get AF, and doing Campaign in attempt to get my WHM to 60 (don’t want to take it up past this… for now), I met two nice people who had actually stayed awhile when trying to get my brother’s AF key. If it weren’t for Mekare telling me to ask them to team up, we wouldn’t have met them or been able to help them get the testimony that they needed. So, yeah! Thanks to Apotaru and congratulations to Libent on getting a MNK testimony! We wish you the best for your Maat fight!

While I was duoing with Orophen, Mekare and I got into a lengthy conversation about some things. Some of it had to do with our frustrations and the other part had to do with our fond memories of when the game was a little harder. It seemed kind of funny that we both missed the trains of mobs in zones, the fun times of old Dunes parties (gotta admit most of mine were entertaining and enjoyable), and just the whole feel of what the game was like before some of the updates S-E has made. Granted those updates were a little necessary to stop MPKs and such, but those memories were actually nice. Its how I met several friends and where I usually remember lots of good stuff. Like… meeting Scoobysnacks or Chakura poking at a former player from long ago.

Part of me feels guilty and a little dirty about this mission. Why? Mostly because I had to make sure people were going to be there by sending out mass text messages to those I could the day before, to ensure people were going to attend and even going so far as to tell them what the schedule will be. Thankfully, I don’t think I have to do that this time around… but I still felt dirty doing it. On the plus side… people were there and my brother managed to make it before we said he had to be there!

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