Growing Stronger

It Fit… Barely

fridgefit Yesterday was crazy busy but we got up and around and dealt with all of the things that needed to be dealt with.  If you remember yesterday morning I was blogging in a lull between the flurry of activity, and waiting on the folks from Lowes to deliver the new fridge and haul away the old one.  We had measured the slot in the wall and the unit in store what felt like a dozen times, and we thought it was going to fit, but just barely so.  Turns out yes, we were in fact right, and as you can see from the picture to the right it is a snug fit up against the cabinet above the fridge.  Granted this cabinet now becomes completely useless since the only person who can reach it is me… and the stuff that generally got stored up there was for my wife.

It is so tight of a fit that the fridge scraped the top left side of the fridge every so slightly as it was sliding into place.  The only problem with the installation is that the hookups we have for the in door water…  are from 1980.  Meaning the equipment they sent out was completely inadequate to connect it.  However it turns that what we have is bad practice anyways… and that you can get much purer water these days.  So we are going to call the plumber and have them swap out our connection for something that will take the 10 foot braided cable that they brought with the unit.  We have lived for over sixteen years without ice and water in the door… we can live a little while longer.  We have been dealing with some issues with the washing machine that we will have them look at the way it is hooked up as well at the same time.

This means however that we are going to need to clean more.  Recently we went through our dishes and pots and pans and gave damned near everything we had to the neighbor kid that roomed with us last summer.  He got a place of his own, and for years I had been wanting to just get rid of all of that and buy back our pots and pans a single pan at a time.  Really there are very few things that I actually need to cook, and I have a really nice deep skillet that I tend to cook everything in already.  This way I can buy only the things I specifically need, and of much higher quality than we had back during our college days.  The pots and pans we had were the kind you get an entire set of for 15/20 bucks.

They exceeded their lifespan, and all of them were scratched and marred from years of cooking.  I figure they are good enough to make spaghetti in for a bachelor pad of a bunch of guys.  If we apply that same logic to the rest of our cabinets we should be able to pair everything down nicely.  We have stuff that we have never used in all the years we’ve lived in this house.  Which tells me it is high time to donate it someplace and get it out of the house.  The only real negative is, this means another weekend is going to be taken up by this sort of stuff rather than gaming.  This is the unfortunate truth of the summer, we end up either doing little projects… or leaving the house to go wandering about.  In either case… not a lot of gaming happens, and similarly I am not sure when I will return to regular Steampowered Sunday posts.

Growing Stronger

Screenshot_20140407_063112 This weekend we somehow hit 103 members in the Elder Scrolls division of House Stalwart.  One of the things over the years that we have tried to do is grow organically through friends/family and word of mouth.  This allowed us to continue growing with tight knit individuals and a shared ethic.  The launch of Elder Scrolls has seen our largest guild ever to date.  Granted in World of Warcraft we have 265 accounts in the guild, but that since the launch of the game in 2004.  At the very least this is our larges game launch.  Both Rift and SWTOR I thought we were doing pretty damned well, but in both cases the guilds were only around 40-50 players.

What I find staggering is that we just keep growing.  I have half a dozen players already waiting in the queue for me to talk to them about the guild and make sure they are a good fit for our guild ethics.  This seems to be one of those games where each person is roping several of their real life friends into playing it.  In some ways it reminds me a bit of the way World of Warcraft was at launch, and I am really hoping that reference is not a curse.  So far things are going extremely well, and I have to say were it not for the Alliance of Awesome we would still be that 40-50 member guild.  I feel like so much of this growth has nothing at all to do with me, and I am okay with that.

So far everyone seems to be getting along just fine.  Folks are either swapping stuff freely by dumping it in the guild bank, or posting things on the guild store.  In either case everything seems to be peaceful and drama free.  Guild chat is constant and lively even at 6:40 in the morning when we have seven people online.  I feel like there is a certain contingency of us that log in each morning before work, and I am guilty of specifically that this morning.  The real challenge of course is going to be what we look like in three months.  However I feel like I will still be chewing away on veteran rank 1 content at that point.  So far I am loving the quests and loving the dungeons.  Over the last few days I have not been streaming, in part because of how busy my life has been.  Hoping tonight I can get back in the swing of things and stream some more, maybe even a Wayrest Sewers dungeon run.

The Big Alpha

The rest of the gaming world that is not obsessing over finding the next skyshard has been obsessing over the slow trickle of news coming out about Warlord of Draenor.  With the launch of Elder Scrolls Online, I made a statement over twitter that I thought they would announce the start of Alpha on launch day.  I was partially right… it was leaked and verified that the alpha was starting on 4/4 but the official patch notes did not post until 4/5.  There is a lot there to talk about, and this was likely a brilliant move by Blizzard to keep themselves in the news cycle competing against the good news coming from the Elder Scrolls Online launch.  I would love to be able to say that I will ignore WoD and still be happily playing Elder Scrolls Online at the end of the year when Warlords is likely to launch.  I probably will be be honest, but I am also not a “one game guy” any longer.  I know I will pop back in and play some Warlords because it lets me hang out with the OTHER half of House Stalwart… the folks that are diehard WoW players.

I can already tell this is going to be a bad expansion for me.  Don’t get me wrong… I am amped to return to Draenor and see it in the “un-screwed” state.  The problem is that from the weapon art leaks, I basically get to choose from two different kinds of weapons.  Either bedazzled with crystals and jewels…  or primitive as hell with horns and shit lashed on for no apparent reason.  Neither are really things I go for in the weapon department.  My absolute favorite sort is the Death Knight starter weapon, and a close second is Ashkandir… so I like well defined and crafted blades.  Neither the Draenei or the Orc art styles are really something I have ever liked, so I feel like this expansion is going to involve me constantly transmogging away the offending graphics.  Then again… I guess that is why we have the transmog system.  I had just hoped to add some nifty new graphics to this mix.

Right now I am just glad that I am not in the Alpha, because I would not wanting to be trying to split time between Elder Scrolls Online and something else.  I am thankful that I am wrapped up and enthralled in ESO, because otherwise I would be like the folks waiting with baited breath for the next MMO-Champion data mine extravaganza.  That said I am periodically checking the site and seeing things like the weapon graphics, so I am still interested.  Warlords of Draenor can stay comfortably “in the future” for me for the time being.  I will always have amazing folks like the Godmother of Faff to keep me informed with what is going on.  The only thing that I regret right now is not spending more time in Landmark.  That game totally deserves more of my attention.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HouseStalwart #WoW #WarlordsofDraenor