June update

Above, some new pictures which were taken recently.  Letitia’s parents are staying with us at the moment so Maia is enjoying all the attention.  She is doing really well, learning so many words (in both English and Cantonese), and eating lots of different foods.  We’re starting the arduous task of potty training, but its slow going.   She is nearly 21 months now and she already has a girly fascination with shoes, she loves trying on everyones shoes no matter what size they are, and then tries to walk around the house in them.

Spending a lot more time outdoors now its nice weather, and hoping to get the garden landscaped so we can enjoy relaxing out there more.

I’ve been playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, I’m up to about 68 stars now, it is really an amazing game full of charm and clever level design.  I can’t believe I let it sit on my shelf for so long.

There was big waves made in Final Fantasy XI last week due to the announcement of FFXIV, which in effect will be the successor to XI (it is online only).   We only get to play some evenings these days, and it makes sense for us to do scheduled events which are fun and allow us to make use of our powerful characters we’ve built up over the years, but even that can be awkward if Maia decides not to sleep.  The more casual games on the Wii and PS3 are suddenly getting more attractive again (at least they have a pause button), just need to find some we can play together.

Will we avoid FFXIV altogether? I don’t know yet, we have lots to think about.

The Sun does exist…

Photo’s from last weekend…

Game related news:  Finished up my Denali set, you can see my new corsair merit gear set over here, WS set here and Quickdraw set here.

I also got the Faith Baghnakhs from Jailer of Faith (really want that torque though).  The Baghnakhs are loads of fun to play with, on average they do a tad more damage than my destroyers over time, but they also give a lot more TP to the mobs (and me), so I think I’ll keep them just for MNK/DNC situations.

Jailer of Fortitude – COR/NIN

A bit of gaming news concerning a sea jailer I have been planning to beat for ages now, ever since I heard it was possible to solo as COR.  Jailer of Fortitude is one of the tier 1 sea jailers that is popped inside The Garden of Ru’Hmet.  He drops 2 items 100%, and the 3rd item (the Fortitude Torque) is about a 20% drop apparently.

I was mainly waiting for Wimpy to be around before I killed this jailer since one of the 100% drops is a very nice Great Axe called the Fortitude Axe, and like all the jailer weapons gives an almost permanent double attack trait as long as you have Virtue Stones equiped (I have about 6 stacks of these stashed away which equates to 7128 stones).  I can’t use the axe, and its rare/ex so I can’t trade it either.  But alas Wimpy hasn’t been back in-game since before Christmas and I had a spare evening so I decided to give it a shot anyway.

Rok came along for support as RDM/BLM and I did a bit of testing with kiting the pots and spider/ball thingies and found that I could lose aggro after a short while thanks to my +12% movement speed feet.  Typically the pop spawn position was in the last tower we checked (it doesn’t move around like the Faith one thank god), and I put up Dancer’s Roll and Ninja Roll.

I popped the Jailer and checked it was claimed to me, which is was, and proceeded to run back to the middle of map.   The door to the pop room had closed behind me so I had to waste some time waiting for that to open again, which saw my 3 shadows disappear in no time.  I ran around the corner where Rok had slept the first few Pots and Spiders, I thought to myself I was in the clear, then the next damn spider cast gravity on me.  I couldn’t believe it, shadows were down and I was reduced to a crawl, so it didn’t take long for the NM + aggro to beat me down about 3 corridors away from the spawn.

I reraised up, put new shadows on and dancer’s roll and ran back to re-claim it.  I managed to claim and get enough of the head start to avoid getting hit back and ran again for the middle of the map.  However once I got to the middle I noticed the NM had de-aggroed (jesus) so I had to run back almost to the spawn point to re-claim it.

I was planning on running around the middle of map for a while to lose the NMs helpers, but found they had de-aggroed quite early on, so I headed for the nearest free tower (Elvaan) to get into the main kiting position.  I arrived at the centre of the Elvaan tower and started my circling, I looked back and found 2 flowers, 2 spiders and 1 pot had joined the chase, but I was successfully kiting them all without getting hit.  I did this until Rok caught up, she did a sleepga on the aggro and then attempted to log out, but one woke just before she could log and she died.  Unfortunately she also tried to force DC which lost her reraise as well, so she had to home point and run all the way back to assist me.

By this time I had got the NM down to 80% with Ice Shots only.  Riverwind came on and offered to help so I asked him to come SAM/THF for treasure hunter.  Once he arrived he tried to do a weapon skill on Fortitude and found he hit for 1 dmg (lol), so that wasn’t going to help much (he is highly melee resistant).  He resorted to using arrows for about 60 dmg per shot.  However we did find if he transferred his TP to me, I was able to fire off Leaden Salute which was doing 500-600 dmg a shot.  I managed to get about 3 of those off in total.  With Wizards Roll on 11, all my m.att gear on and ice day I was hitting for 344 per Ice Shot, or 318 with a 5 roll.  My top Leaden Salute was 594 dmg.

Rok was getting everything she was doing re-cast back onto her, which was fun.  For the final 6% I asked her to Chainspell which worked well and the NM died.  It took us exactly 1 hour from spawn to kill him, which was pretty damn good considering 22 mins of that were getting him into position before doing damage.

Of course the best part was when he finally died and this happened:

Here is a a screenshot of the log showing Leaden Salute and a few other things…

And the final few lines of log before Fortitude goes down…

[00:18:32]Rokada uses Chainspell.
[00:18:42]Rokada starts casting Fire III on the Jailer of Fortitude.
[00:18:43]The Jailer of Fortitude starts casting Fire III.
[00:18:45]Rokada casts Fire III.
[00:18:45]The Jailer of Fortitude takes 474 points of damage.
[00:18:45]The Jailer of Fortitude casts Fire III.
[00:18:45]Rokada takes 11 points of damage.
[00:18:47]Rokada starts casting Fire III on the Jailer of Fortitude.
[00:18:47]Rokada casts Fire III.
[00:18:47]The Jailer of Fortitude takes 474 points of damage.
[00:18:47]The Jailer of Fortitude starts casting Fire III.
[00:18:50]1 of Rokada’s shadows absorbs the damage and disappears.
[00:18:51]Rokada starts casting Fire III on the Jailer of Fortitude.
[00:18:53]Amarok uses Ice Shot.
[00:18:53]The Jailer of Fortitude takes 318 points of damage.
[00:18:53]Rokada casts Fire III.
[00:18:53]The Jailer of Fortitude takes 474 points of damage.
[00:18:55]Rokada defeats the Jailer of Fortitude.

Fortitude Torque 1/1

Hong Kong Phooey

Just a quick update with some recent photos, and a few videos.  Most of when Let and Maia were in Hong Kong.  Hopefully Let will get some time to write a few things about their holiday later.  Sorry for the quality of the videos, the camera was in low res mode.

Some Christmas Fun…

We Elf’ed ourselves *click here*

Good nursery, Bad nursery

Maia has been at the new Nursery nearer my work for 3 weeks now, and we’ve decided we don’t like it.  The previous nursery was great, and we’re going to put her back there starting from Monday.  Originally we didn’t think we could because of my shift pattern, but we’re going to work around that.

I really liked all the people at the old nursery, and they had sensible rules like adults having to take their shoes off before walking into the childrens rooms.  Also I went to pick up Maia from the new place last Wednesday and found her crying up against the door, which I could only just about see her behind through the small glass window at the top.  If someone had opened that door, she would have gone flying, and the two people inside that were meant to be looking after her were just doing their own thing in the corner.  It really upset me to think she was so miserable.  Today is her last day there, and I just can’t wait to leave and get her after work.

We never had any problems with the old place, and I would usually find Maia in the arms of one of the staff when I arrived.

We went to the doctors yesterday to check on her face rash, and he thinks its eczema, so we’ve got some new creams to try.  She doesn’t seem to be irritated by it, but sometimes it looks pretty bad, with all the red spots and blotches she gets on her cheeks.

On a lighter note, we had all the staff laughing at the pharmacy where Maia was walking up and down the isle cackling like a mad chicken.

Santa’s Little Helper…

A Good Week in Vana’diel

Its turning out to be a really good week in Fanal Fantasy XI so far.

Starting with Saturday night, all our old friends were logged in to the linkshell to help Minda, Snokyd and Hikitsune with their Vahzl mission.  It was a long time coming since Rok and I have been so busy with Maia we haven’t been able to help with planning big events in-game like before.  But I decided to scale down the original plan which included popping all the pop NMs we had the items for (we must have about 15+ between us all), and just getting on with the Vahzl mission while Maia was asleep.

Of course Maia’s NM radar was working on overtime, so shortly after getting prepared for the night ahead in our games room, in walks Maia after getting off our bed by herself.  She’s very clever at doing this now, she hangs her legs over the edge, grabs hold of the duvet and lets her body weight slide her off the side, while the duvet slows her decent and keeps her upright.  Its really funny to watch.

However my Mum was in the area doing taxi work (or not, since it was very quiet outside), and phoned up to see how we all were.  After telling her about our little problem she offered to come and babysit while we carried on with our plans.  It didn’t take long before she was back in bed.

The mission went flawlessly, in-fact possibly a bit too well.  Everyone did their jobs well and with all the Anima we had with us, I actually felt sorry for the monsters.  But to spice things up a bit we also went into the ENM as two groups of five.  Both parties won the ENM but it wasn’t easy, almost everyone finished with very little HP left, so that got everyones heart pumping.

So on Sunday I had some free time and joined an “Under Observation” lvl 40 BCNM run.  It was YOYD (Your Orb Your Drops), so I was hoping for a miracle of getting a Peacock Charm worth 1.8m.  I went as the Kiting Beastmaster, which I’ve seen done before but this was a first for me since my BST had only just got to lvl 43.  And then this dropped on my orb:

This was just the start of my good luck week though.  This piece is worth 1.8m but I couldn’t bring myself to sell it, it is just such a nice piece for my leveling Beastmaster, and even my 75 jobs, especially COR.  So I agonised for a whole day.  You see the reason I wanted exactly 1.8m was to buy the Hermes Sandals, which are a new feet item that gives MNK and COR 12% movement boost.  But I couldn’t decide which one I wanted more.  I had about 1m on Amarok, and about 400k on my Oshinoshi mule, and I popped the question to Rok – how much money do you have?  400k came the reply.  erm, any chance I could have it for these really nice feet I want that are going for 1.8m on the AH (they had been 2.1m a few days before).  One cheeky little trade with a Taru, and I had 1.8m in my grubby Galka mitts.

I had both pieces within a day of each other, but now Rok and I were broke.  So I joined another PCC BCNM, and Utsusemi: Ni dropped !!!!!!!!  Thats worth 400-500k.

With all my new toys I went back to leveling Beastmaster, and got that to lvl 45 on Tuesday (This is a nice level for Beastmaster since you get your last pet command “Snarl” which can transfer any hate on you to your pet, and can be used every 30 seconds).  After the party I joined Rok on the Mhaura-Selbina boat so she could fish up some Tuna for me to synth into Tuna Sushi, then I went for a stroll around Valkurm Dunes.

Nobody was around at the Valkurm Emperor spawn so I used my Beastmaster widescan to kill the place holder a few times, and VE popped.  I killed him but didn’t get the drop, so I logged out there for the night.

Enter Wednesday night, I logged back in and started to kill the PH again, a DRK75 joined the camp but didn’t seem to have any idea how the pop worked, he was just killing random dragonflies.  After about 1 hour a PLD75 joined the hunt also.  Then suddenly VE pops between all 3 of us, I saw it pop (luckily I wasn’t in the widescan map at the time) and ran over to it.  Realising I don’t have any fast claiming abilities, or so I thought, I tried the only thing I did know would be instant and tried to Charm him.  Of course since he’s an NM I can’t charm him and instead claimed him as an enemy.  The PLD and DRK just stood there, they didn’t even move from their camping positions.  I didn’t take me long as BST45 to beat VE down, and then this dropped:

As I already have the rare Emperor Hairpin, I can now sell that (for around 370k).

Peacock Charm + Hermes’ Sandals + Utsusemi: Ni + Empress Hairpin makes for a good week indeed.

Quick update

Well at last Maia has got over her long term cold. which was mainly a nasty cough that would make her sick sometimes, and kept interrupting her sleep.  Now she is sleeping much better (and so are we) and she’s happy and bouncy once again.

I’ve started a new shift pattern at work which means we’ve had to find a new nursery for Maia.  She’ll be starting there in 2 weeks’ time.  Its a shame because we like the current nursery but their opening times have just been changed making it impossible for me to get to work on time.  Hopefully the new nursery will be as good.  She only goes to nursery 2 times a week, but both days will be long (7:45am – 6:15pm).  She’s always happy when I pick her up after work, and I really look forward to that bit.

She now says “ball ball”, “bubble”, “hai hai” (Chinese for crab) and “Ut oh” (which I’m sure she learned from the Telly Tubbies !), and we’ve had a few “Mama”’s, but mostly everyone is still “Dada” including herself according to her pointing.  Here are a few recent pics…

Maia’s first birthday

Busy, busy, busy… I was meant to update on Maia’s birthday party but didn’t get a chance to do so until now. Maia had her 1st birthday party on 28 Sept (her actual birthday was on 30 Sept). A few friends (James, Kate and baby Luke, Tim and Cassie, Andy, Marie and the bump) and family (mum, Sue, Chrissie, Chris, Stacey, Ben, Ally and the bump) as well as my group of mums and babies (Michelle and Jamie, Pippa and Ella, Helen and Connie, Karen and Nathan) came round to celebrate with her. Maia totally enjoyed the party – lots of food (half on the floor!), balloons, cakes and presents. See the photos… Thanks to everyone who made Maia’s first birthday so memorable!