Splashy Pony Brothers

Thanks to my Friends

This morning I had every intention to sleep in, but I guess my body the way that I have trained it over the years conspired against me.  I woke up moments after the alarm would have gone off normally, and then stayed in a sort of half sleep half awake state until I finally gave up around 6:30.  Now an hour later… I am finally pulling myself away from my insanely scrolling twitter feed to attempt to write a blog post.  I guess I had forgotten just how overwhelming being on twitter can be on your Birthday.  I love each and every one of you, and maybe this year more than most…  which is something I will elaborate on shortly.  June is the travel season for my wife, and each year she has a series of conventions and other events that she travels to.  This has been a thing for several years, but no matter how often it happens…  you never quite get used to it.  During the month of June she will be gone for a week, home a few days, gone another week etcetera.  So the best Birthday present I could possibly get right now is her flying home today… and I am really hoping that her plane is not delayed by the remnants of the Hurricane.

Now in the past I have struggled with this existence of being alone for the better part of a month.  This has generally been the time of the year when my depression flares up the most, since I am generally speaking sitting alone in a house with my thoughts and a menagerie of animals.  This year however has been different, and I think it is thanks to all of you out there that relentlessly check in on me.  I feel like I am surrounded by so many awesome people that seem to love me that I am never really completely alone.  There is always a message waiting on my response somewhere, or someone looping me into a conversation.  The AggroChat crew especially has become this second family that hunts me down if they don’t hear from me in a few days, because they know my tendencies to cocoon when the depression starts.  I want to thank all of you for essentially keeping me from dropping into my normal yearly funk.  My friends and my free company have been this offsetting force of amazing in my life and as a result have kind of made every day my wife has been away more tolerable.

Splashy Pony Brothers

I spent my final night in FFXIV before the downtime the same way I have spent many nights, hanging out on Teamspeak and helping folks do content.  It seems so strange that last night was the end of one era of Final Fantasy and tomorrow morning will begin another.  In a way I kind of like the fact that we have this entire day outage, because I guess in some way it makes the whole process seem more real.  In some games I have literally logged out of one client and back into a brand new one over the course of thirty minutes, and it always felt strange.  I am sure there are people out there that are frustrated by being locked out of the game for this period of time, but I guess for me it makes the experience more meaningful.   I am just hoping that I can get to sleep early tonight and that the excitement won’t be too overwhelming, because in many ways it feels a bit like Christmas Eve and I am five years old.

Last night we managed to down Odin with a batch of new people, and in the process met a really nice White Mage on Cactuar, that I have subsequently friended.  I am consistently surprised by just how nice people generally are when we find them through the server party finder system.  In fact this one gets bonus credit because we screwed up and originally thought we needed another dps.  Upon explaining our screw up she was cool and said that she also could heal the fight.  Moments later we were making attempts on Odin and shockingly I think it only took us three tries  before we defeated him.  After that we attempted to sort out what we were doing next, with many people mentioning Titan…  but in the end we wound up going to do Leviathan Extreme instead.  This is one of my favorite fights, but this time they needed me to be a Paladin and do the stun lock thing.  I am just not comfortable tanking as a paladin and the whole experience felt frustrating, as compared to my warrior.  However I managed to do a decent enough job that we pushed through and got the defeat.  To make things even cooler a pony whistle dropped and now Mor and I can be splashy pony brothers!

A Strange Birthday

So now that I am wrapping up my blog post I need to hurry around like mad.  I need to be at the airport to pick up my wife around 1:30, and in the meantime I need to attempt to pick up the house.  While it is not exactly in bad shape, because really I haven’t done anything that crazy since she has been gone…  it needs a round of sprucing up so she has a nice place to come home to.  Additionally I need to gather up the information I need to get my car tag, since she mentioned maybe doing that on the way home today so that we don’t have to get out of the house and do it tomorrow.  So while I would love to hang out in my pajamas and play video games all day… I suppose I will have to go off and be and adult.  It is going to be awesome to have my wife home again, but it is also a strange experience getting used to not being the only person in the room.  Unfortunately it will be a short lived experience because if I remember correctly she is heading back out again on Sunday, but this time for a much shorter trip.

In the meantime my Final Fantasy XIV client is patched, and I am floored that it was only 4.3 gig.  From what I am hearing this morning however they have apparently been patching in assets for months.  Supposedly half of the zones that we will be exploring have been in since the launch of A Realm Reborn.  I hope this all means that tomorrow is going to be an extremely smooth launch, but I still need to get my laptop started patching as well.  I am sure there will be some sort of a final patch when the servers come back up from the downtime that lets the client know it is time to be Heavensward, but I am hoping it is a small one.  I guess in theory this game is scaled to work well over consoles, so it makes complete sense that it would have really tight patches.  So far I am impressed and I am hoping that feeling continues through the launch.  This game had an exceptionally rocky start with the relaunch in August 2013, and I am hoping they have learned their lessons.