Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

As much as I loved my Helm of Lupine Grace, I got a better helmet tonight. To my delight, though, my new Blood Knight Helm of the Monkey also looks badass.

It Burns When I PVP

I realized that I hadn’t ever posted any screenshots of Bulwyrth. With his latest Burning Crusade gear, I think he’s looking pretty badass. One of my guild members, Pureagony, made me a full set of Felscale gear. I really love the way that gear looks. That being said, a Boulderfist Mage generously dropped Ironspine Legguards of the Soldier for me tonight, which don’t look nearly as awesome, but increase my crit chance too much to justify keeping the Felscale Pants equipped. The new leggings don’t look half bad, but I do really dig the look of the Felscale gear. Oh well, at least the other 3 pieces of the set still warrant staying equipped still (for now). In addition, I recently got a new badass helmet as well, Helm of Lupine Grace. The way it looks on my big Tauren head is insanely cool. Last, I found a new melee weapon while randomly exploring yesterday. I ran into a blade vendor in Nagrand that was selling Arkadian Claymore. While the stats are pretty freakin good for a vendor item, it also scales nicely on a Tauren. It ends up looking much bigger on me than on smaller races, adding nicely to the overall badassery. I took some screen shots tonight to show case all of this sweet new gear as well as my new BC pet, a ravager.

Better Pictures!

Here is my flickr set with the pictures of me riding Better:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/schmickie/sets/72157594547843516/

It Just Keeps Getting Better

This weekend, I drove down to Felton to see my friend Libby’s horse, Natural Ice, who is also a Spotted Saddle Horse, like Apache. She has him in training down there with Nicole Schoppe at Hidden Gait Ranch. She wanted me to come down and see how he was doing and the progress they’ve made, as well as check out his new home. While I was down there, Nicole let me ride her walking horse gelding Better. He is a big black walker with a big, strong jawed Midnight Sun type head, which I really like. He has a cute little black spot right on the end of his nose in the middle of his white strip. She let me work him at the flat walk, running walk, and canter. Once we were in the arena, and I got to work him out on the rail, he really opened up his running walk for me. I got a few good passes and he felt awesome. He’s got a hell of a reach and really rolls once he hits his stride. It was quite an experience. I will have pictures up soon.

Ice was looking in good physical shape and seemed a lot happier too. He was a little annoyed with me when he tried to sit on me, to let me know that he wanted his butt scratched, and I responded by shoving him off of me instead of complying. He tried it about 10 more times, getting shoved back each time and finally, he pinned his ears and barred his teeth at me. After that, though, he realized he wasn’t gonna be able to bully me into anything and gave up. He was grumpy with me for a few minutes, but then got over it and came over to get some pats on the nose.

The show season will be starting soon and these guys will both be amongst my competition. Should be an interesting year. : )

Bittersweet Valentine’s Day

So my friend Jess had a “Bittersweet Valentine’s Day” party for singles. We all brought food a la single people (i.e., pre-cooked food bought from Safeway, Boston Market, etc.). For dessert, fondue was planned. We had pre-melted the chocolate and cream mixture for the fondue before eating dinner. It had cooled off entirely by the time we got through dinner and were ready for dessert, so we put it in the fondue pot and lit the Sterno. However, even after a good 10-15 minutes, the chocolate was still at best lukewarm. So, I had the idea of heating it up again for a bit on the stove. While that was going on, the Sterno continued to heat up the base that the fondue pot sits on. Once we had heated up the chocolate sufficiently on the stove, we returned it to the fondue base and began dipping in our fruit. After a few minutes of finally getting to enjoy the fondue, I noticed the chocolate was starting to boil. It turned out that by the time we put the stove-heated chocolate back onto the heated up fondue base, the combination was just too much. The chocolate continued boiling and then started separating out into oil and what looked like potting soil, a mixture we dubbed ‘fondont’. We let it cool off and stirred it for a while in the vain hopes that it might all come back together, knowing of course that it wouldn’t. I had to make the observation that our little fondue disaster was an apt metaphor on the day’s theme. Much like our lot in love, there was only a brief window of enjoyment before it all turned to crap. It was much appreciated by all. In the end, we heated up another batch of chocolate and everyone got to eat their fill. We also made a lovely video of the fondont, which now lives here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1RFzc7CcCE