On Being Completely Off-Topic – Most of today’s musings don’t have much of anything to do with WoW, so if you came here looking for something druid, or WoW, related you may want to check back tomorrow! Today I’m going to talk about the family of squirrels that have been living in the wall of our apartment.
This whole Squirrel Saga started back on April 1st – which is oddly fitting when you come to think of it. You see Brade heard what he thought was a squirrel fall down our chimney. We called the office to inform them that a live squirrel was in our chimney only to be repeatedly told “sorry, we can’t do anything about it until Monday”. After listening to it bang around and cry for 24 hours, we decided that “waiting until Monday” was insufficient.
The long story short – Brade and I ended up contacting someone to come out and remove the squirrel from the chimney. Only to find out that it’s not a squirrel that had fallen down our chimney – a momma squirrel had gotten into the wall behind the chimney and had nested. So there was now a momma squirrel and 3-4 baby squirrels living in the wall behind our chimney. The banging we heard were the baby squirrels moving around, and the crying we heard were them letting momma know that they were hungry.
Somewhat dissatisfied with how things had gone to date, we figured we’d just get it resolved quickly so that we can move along with our lives. Only that didn’t happen. Not only did that not happen, but on my first call with our apartment’s management the woman made me so angry that I immediately called Brade and told him that I wanted to move. I hate moving.
He told me to wait a day and see how I felt then.
So I waited a day. In fact, I waited over a week and a half to hear back from the apartment management (who was going to contact me “tomorrow”) on how they were going to resolve this issue. And still, we heard nothing from them. Finally Brade called them – deciding that almost two weeks was pretty much sufficient time for them to have gotten back to us. And after that phone call calm, level headed Brade called me to advise me that “that woman” (the apartment management) was “a piece of work”. Not only did she deal with him poorly – but she actually hung up on him. HUNG UP. On a four year tenant.
Many phone calls later, including a conference call with the apartment management and a conference call to the corporate office, everything is still pretty much unresolved. Well, that is not entirely true. Brade and I pretty much resolved to move. And now, 17 days after the original incident, our resolve to move is still pretty much the only thing that has been sorted out.
We went out this weekend and searched high and low for a new place to call “home” and were fortunate enough to find a new place (squirrel free! and with 24 hours maintenance 7 days a week!), where we will be moving at the end of May. (Oh God – the packing).
Why am I telling you this? Partly because the saga of the Squirrel has been dominating my life for the past 17 days. (No, really, it’s driving me nuts!). But mostly because I wanted to let you know that if I’m somewhat sporadic over the next month it’s because I’m packing, scheduling the appropriate appointments, and pretty much in a constant state of panic about the upcoming move.
If you email me, it may take me longer than usual to get back to you, so please don’t be offended! The same will probably go for replying to comments the closer it gets to our move date. Also if I seem grouchier than usual – don’t take it personally! Just blame the damn squirrels!
(Oh, I suppose there is some WoW thoughts after the break…if you’ve made it with me this far!)
On Raiding – We saw our first phase 3 during Heroic Nef last night. I was pretty happy about that. Now just to figure out how to get people to stop blowing up their platforms (just MOVE for crying out loud!) and how in the hell I’m going to have enough mana to finish out the fight! We did manage to knock out 25% of Nef’s life in phase 3 before falling apart, so I am optimistic that once we start consistently making it into phase 3 it’s only a matter of time before we can tick Nef off of our “to do” list.
I’m two days away from my Tol’Barad trinket, and I was starting getting very worried about losing my Doll (oh god, my mana!). But in doing the math, I’m pretty sure that I can reforge haste onto it and stay above my breakpoint, which means I get to keep my precious doll and all of her mana! Hooray!
Oddly, several of the people that were opposed to our request that everyone get the trinket have obtained theirs and were utilizing it last night, and were somewhat vocal about how much they liked it and how much it helped in certain parts of the fight. I was really glad to have the feedback – and we’ve gone ahead and made the decision to make it a mandatory item for the encounter.
Outside of Nef, we’ve instituted a 10 wipe rule on all of our farmed content. It’s gone very well, and we’ve yet to fail to get everything down. I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out – and it’s taken a lot of stress off of me. Either we get it, or we don’t. It’s 100% in the raid’s hands.
On Archeology – Dear Tol’vir dig sites and RNG, FU. Love, Beru.
I just want my damn hand pet.
As an aside, did you know that if you get two of them out together that they play Rock, Paper, Scissors? I can’t make this stuff up! I really, really want mine dammit!
On Video Guides –
I’m really enjoying making these (even if I do sound like a chipmunk – seriously why did no one in my guild tell me this!). I have footage for Heroic Halfus, Heroic Conclave and got some footage of Normal Al’Akir last night. Of those, if anyone has something they have a preference on seeing please don’t hesitate to let me know!
I’m still trying to get relatively clean footage of Heroic Atramedes, Heroic Omnitron and Heroic Dragons. I know it doesn’t have to be perfect – but I also don’t want to show you footage where my raid is limping along at the end with only 10 people alive! *ahem* (We all know it happens, and I won’t deny it, but I’d rather show you all something where more things go right than wrong 😉 )
On Guest Posts – I contributed to an article on Healer Mastery over at Healbot, specifically discussing Druid Mastery. Gina’s compiled a look at mastery for all 5 healing classes/specs. It’s a great read, so I’d definitely recommend heading over and giving it a look!
On Books – I am pleased to finally be able to state that I have finally finished the entire JD Robb “In Death” series! At least until the very prolific author publishes another one. I’ve throughly enjoyed them, but after 32 some odd books, I’m ready for a change of pace.
I have picked up a guilty pleasure of mine in the newest John Grisham novel, but I’m open to any suggestions that folks might have for some new reading material!
Phew! That’s a lot! What have you all been up to? Anything exciting?
Falling Leaves and Wings 
Could you explain the 10 wipe rule? Do you drop down to normal mode if you hit 10 wipes?
This was actually something that we derived after one extremely horrible night of Heroic Conclave. The theory of it started based on a suggestion made by @perculia on twitter on her guild handles repeat kills (they assign an amount of time).
Basically what we did was set a rule that for any content that we have killed at least one time, the raid has 10 pulls in any subsequent visits to the encounter to kill it on heroic. If we do not kill it in those 10 pulls, we switch it back to normal, kill it on normal, and then move on to our next target.
I feel this does a few things. The most important of which is it takes a lot of the pressure of the raids success off of me as a leader, and empowers the raid to drive their own success. The raid knows that there is a limited amount of time that we will spend on a boss, and if they want to kill it it must be achieved in that amount of time. The decision on if it gets killed in normal mode or heroic mode rests solely in their hands.
Since we’ve implemented the rule, we’ve yet to fail getting a boss down, and we’ve yet to have another night like the conclave night from hell that spawned the rule. It’s also made me a lot more relaxed in raids – so I’d say that it’s been pretty successful so far! 🙂
Squirrels… that are driving you nuts.
The pun was TOTALLY intended! I’m so glad that someone picked up on it 🙂
Heroic Halfus! Any info on that would be awesome as we only just started into heroics and that’s our first target.
Also, real estates suck, that’s why I’m building my own house 🙂
“As an aside, did you know that if you get two of them out together that they play Rock, Paper, Scissors?”
… 😀 MUST FIND SOMEONE ELSE ON US-ELUNE WITH THE HAND PET. (yes, I has one)
Personally, I’d like the bug mount, please & thank you. & then another rare for my title (currently? I’m 18/20).
It’s weird being on somewhat of a ‘out of the woodwork’ posting rampage at the moment, but I’ll add another comment!
I must say I really like your posts where you deal with guild matters and give little snippets of insight as to how you do things within your guild. Sure, I came for the resto stuff (but let’s face it, there are SO many resto blogs out there, MANY of them brilliant) but what sets you and keeva apart (for me) are the posts where you do shed some light on guild leading and the way you do things.
I’d love to see some more posts with that focus if you’re up for it! I only suggest this because it seems many bloggers like some reader suggestions and that’s mine (not like you asked haha!) but yeah, you mentioning the nef trinket sort of reminded me about how much I love guild focused posts as we implemented the same rule for Nef awhile ago and were met with the exact same reaction… so nice to know that we’re not the only big-bad-nasty guild making people do those dailies!
Also, “awww” at the squirrels of course, but yeah, I can see how they would get annoying fast! We have a possum that frequents our front yard… early morning clicking and cute sounds get boring fast…