Aww, vacation's over.

It's Monday and it's back to work. I apologize for the complete lack of posts over the holiday, I was busy busy busy, and when I was on the computer, I wasn't thinking of blogging! (gasp!) So be prepared for a long post :)

Quick RL recap here.. Stuffed myself full and overly full on Thursday. I ate way too much at my parents', and could hardly eat at all once I got to my brother-in-law's house. I tried, really I did! Other than that we stayed in for the rest of the weekend. I have been known to shop on Black Friday in the past, but I didn't see anything in the ads this year that was worth the effort. And right now I'm sitting here in the lab watching the Whistler wash our food processor and get water everywhere. The man doesn't know the meaning of "nice and easy", everything is rush rush rush and we'll clean up the mess later. And he does make a mess.

Anyway.. WoW update, Asara is now level 75! We're currently questing in Dragonblight, and still having a lot of fun. One great moment from yesterday, we did the Bronze Dragonshrine quest, where you put down the hourglass and defend it from the Infinite Dragonflight, assisted by your future self. Of course, we didn't know at the time what was going to happen. Hubby went first, and oh look, there's "Future You", and he's going to help us kill dragons! He looked exactly like hubby's current character, gear-wise and all. Hubby says when we're almost done that he wished that he had been wearing his run-around-town outfit, which is red, with a big wide-brimmed red hat.. he looks like a pimp. It would have been pretty funny to see Pimp Alainds fighting all those dragons.

So since I didn't get shared credit for the quest, I put Asara in her Santa outfit before starting my turn with it. And sure enough, there's Future Asara, in the same outfit. I quickly switched to my regular gear before the actual fighting started, of course. But it was great watching her karate-chop the dragons as they spawned! I have a screenshot at home, I will try to remember to post it.

After hubby and I went to get our new skills, I talked him into going out to Sholazar Basin so I could tame a new rhino. I love the one I had, but he was always a level behind me, and I wanted one that would level with me. I dragged hubby out there so that if I had to kill stuff on the way, we would stay even xp-wise. The only ones that were level 75 were brown, not gray, but I figured that was a small price to pay for having a rhino at my level. So I found my brown rhino, tamed him, and we mounted up and headed back to Dragonblight. On the way we ran afoul of another mob or two, and I got dazed and dismounted. And was joined by a GRAY rhino. Which made my day.. I had read a while ago that these rhinos changed colors, but I had forgotten. So now Asara does not just have a rhino, she has a magical color-changing rhino.

Saraabi got a little bit of playtime this weekend as well. She has made it her personal mission to gather materials for Alainds to help him level his Engineering with a minimum of expense. So she ran around Northrend mining Cobalt, and spent some time in Sholazar Basin collecting Saronite as well. Of course, now that the expansion has been out for a few weeks, there are quite a few miners with Cold-Weather flying. She ran into several of them as she (at level 70) ran around and through level 75+ mobs trying to get to the next node on her minimap. Sometimes she was successful, sometimes not. She did, however, successfully defeat a level 76 mob on her own, on two separate occasions. She does a very good job on groups at-level as well. In Dragonblight she took on 5 or 6 level 71-72 mobs and defeated them as well.

The only issue she seems to have is a lack of mana. With Blessing of Wisdom on she gets a good regen on what she has, but now that Paladins are more dependent on Strength and Attack power, and most of the good Strength gear hasn't got Intellect on it.. she's got less than 5k mana. And when the skills she uses take up to 900 mana for one cast, it disappears like nobody's business. This is not a difficulty in an instance, when she's getting mana back from getting healed, but when she's all by herself, it can cause problems. So I think she'll be swapping out some gear before she starts leveling solo, to keep some of the AP but get some Int back. I want to keep her prot as she levels, because AOE grinding is still great, and lots of fun.