It’s hard for me to believe that 2016 is almost over. This year has been such a mixture of emotions that I honestly don’t know if I’m happy to be starting 2017 or if I’m sad to be leaving the year behind. Even though I haven’t been posting very frequently here on MmoQuests, I HAVE been getting some gaming in daily – in between doing the whole new Mom thing which eats up about 99.9% of my time. I’m STILL recuperating from my c-section back in September. My hematoma isn’t completely healed, and I still have home nurses coming to pack and bandage the wound. I had hoped this would be over by now but apparently my body had other ideas.
Leo is now 13 weeks old, 8 weeks adjusted (because he was 5 weeks early). He’s thriving, and growing by leaps and bounds – but it’s also a difficult time as he has pretty bad colic and suffers from gas, so he spends a lot of his days crying every time he wants to fart or poop. It makes for a very tired Mommy and Daddy but we hang in there.
This Christmas is the first where I won’t be doing many of my traditions because I’m just too tired and there simply isn’t enough hours in the day. I have no family here, so I don’t have any parties or dinners to go to, but I still have simple traditions I like to keep up. I didn’t get myself (or Leo, too young) an advent calendar, and because money is tight we only bought Leo two presents and we’re going to hold off on anything more. I did send a few gifts as a secret santa exchange with my family, but I didn’t even get around to mailing out Christmas cards this year, and I only received two cards from others where I’d normally have 15+ displayed on my walls. I did put up the Christmas tree, but after a week the lights all burnt out and I haven’t replaced them. Sounds pretty pathetic, but I’m hoping that next year when Leo is older things will slowly get back to what I consider “normal”. I’m quickly learning that parenting is hard, and as much as I love kids I may not actually be that fond of babies. I haven’t had a lot of chances to vent (or places to vent) so.. there you have it. Now, lets get on to gaming!
After attempting to play on the EverQuest progression server I decided that it just required way too much time and attention, so I swapped over to EverQuest 2 and my old characters there. I quickly fell in love as I was reminded of all the joyous occasions I’ve had in game even though it has gone through some significant changes. I purchased the latest expansion, and my little guild of three people have been playing together once again.
Things have changed since Daybreak became a thing. Antonia Bayle is no longer the most populated server, and groups are hard to come by. Since I don’t really have time to do dungeons this doesn’t bother me too much. What I’ve been doing is working on getting my characters to 100, in both adventuring and crafting, doing the Kunark Ascended timeline, and then ascending my characters into their respective classes. I also created two new characters, a troubador named Mousical (ratonga of course), and a necromancer named Quails (also a ratonga). Add that to the 9 characters I already had, and it’s a pretty full house.
I haven’t started the crafting timeline yet, but it rewards a really nice cloak and that’s next on my list of things to do. There have been plenty of in-game events with Frostfell going on, and I may have spent a day or two crafting various housing items so I could decorate the guild hall for Christmas. My guild mates have been fantastic about my need to randomly go AFK, so I spend a lot of time on autofollow as we complete various solo / advanced solo dungeons, or just play around in older raids. We attempted a few of the “new” (a few expansions old now) fabled raids, but those kicked our asses, so they’re on a wait list while we gear up.
Inflation has become a HUGE issue. A krono sells for 300,000 plat, and people are not shy about throwing that sort of money around. I have a grand total of 40,000 plat, and thought that was a large amount. I often see loot being sold on the auction channel for 100-400k which is just insane to me.
Despite all of this I’m having a lot of fun. If you happen to be in game, please don’t hesitate to look me up! You can typically find me as the two characters mentioned above, or Stargrace, or some other rendition of me. Doing a /who all torrent knights will bring up either myself or one of my two guild mates.
I’m also contemplating diving back into EVE Online as it’s something I could play without too much trouble from my laptop, and hanging out in highsec doing mining missions or some such wouldn’t be that difficult if I had to randomly AFK. I spend most of my days with twitch on the television and I’ve had an absolute blast getting to know other streamers and refining what it is I like about some streamers vs. others.
All in all, things are going. It’s not always bad, it’s certainly not always good, but the days keep passing and we all keep trying our best.
Happy holidays, from my little family to yours.
stargrace 
