Saffron's Birthday, Bullwinkles, and Halloween

In just three days it is going to be Saffron's birthday! Seven years old already...

Yesterday I took Saffron and Corwin to the Bullwinkles Restaurant and Family Fun Center (they still exist!) in Edmonds for lunch and an hour of playing games. This is the second time we've gone. It's not as good as the old one in San Jose, but I wasn't really expecting it to be. On the other hand, in addition to the video games and ticket games, the also have a mini golf course, laser tag, bumper cars, bumper boats, batting cages, aerial jungle gym, bungie jumper, and possibly a couple of other games...it's pretty big! The food there, while not five star, is not actually that bad. And the staff is pretty friendly too.

Last week I finally made it out out of the house to go and do something geeky! I made a Meetup account and managed to join (and attend) a board game day at the 'Round the Table Gamer Pub in Edmonds. It was this locations second meetup, so it's still pretty small, but the Group (named Inclusive Geekery) is pretty well established so I expect it to grow. I'm signed up to attend the next one on November 4th as well.
In addition, Bobo and I played Battletech last night for the first time in months, which was quiet nice.

And lastly, Halloween is right around the corner! We've been getting our first real taste of Washington weather this week as well. Lots of rain, and some strong wind (gusts up to 60mph!).
The weather is supposed to be wet on Halloween, which will be exciting. Isabeau is hard at work on Saffron's Elsa dress

Here's Saffron is trying it on for size! Saffron decided that she wanted the coronation dress.
Corwin is going to be a Robot, and Osric is going as Buzz Lightyear.

Life in general, Warcraft in particular

It's Nuts.

And as a result, I keep forgetting to post.

Things haven't really changed much since the last post, though I did stop by one of the local game shops to ask about Battletech. It's called Mogu Games, and as far as Battletech is concerned it was a bust. They still have a few items on clearance but no one plays regularly, so if I want to do Battletech again I'll need to start hunting on web for groups (or start my own). There is at least one other game store in Everett that I want to check out, and if I can find a group looking for a noob then I might start playing 40k instead. I have magnetized the turrets on my Patton/Rommel tanks, so now I can start painting them! And I can magnetize my Marder tanks as well. Painting them will be interesting.

Work is work. I've been doing overtime on a fairly regular basis, usually no more than an hour a day but it adds up. I've been doing Saturdays on a regular basis as well, from 6am to 12pm.


Isabeau and I started playing World of Warcraft again, partly just to have something nerdy to do together. There have been a ton of changes in preparation for the next expansion coming out, some good and some very bad (poor Hunters). One of the good things in my opinion is the Stat Squish. The last expansion in particular (but cataclysm too) saw an insanely stupid level of Hit Point inflation and what not, with some PCs hitting the 800k range. I had something like 620k, and the squish has dropped me down to about 77k. The seem to have fixed Protection Paladins a bit, because Darthic doesn't suck anymore, which makes me happy. Blood DKs however got a bit of the short end of the stick, having lost two of their main attacks, Heart strike and Frost strike. This leaves them a little short in the rotation which could be a problem as a tank. Hunters got pretty f****d though. Bobo is mad. So am I.
But enough of that.
One of the nicest things that changed is damage scaling. Going up against a lower level target usually didn't do much other than they couldn't hurt you very well. Damage went up a little, but nothing drastic. Until Now. Bobo and I two-manned the Lich King Saturday night, steam rolling through the raid in about half an hour, and most of that was spend healing the damn green dragon. The Lich King himself died so fast that we actually skipped phases. I kept waiting for him to kill us and it just never happened. During the airship battle, I jumped to the enemy ship only to have bobo hammer it so fast that it ran away with me still on board. I had to suicide. It was sorta like "Right! Time to whoop ass! Where's everyone going?!"
We had tried to do the raid just a week before the new patch, and it had sucked horribly. We kept getting to the airship and failing. We literally could not get past it. Then, a couple days ago I was helping Bobo quest on one of her alts, and I casually smacked a target for about 300k damage. From my tank. That's when we decided to try the Lich King again.
I also finished leveling Jafnharr up to 90, so there's that too.

I'm going save what else I have for another post, which I will start prepping tomorrow.

Until next time, Good Night!