Morning folks and happy Friday to you all :) A potpourri, a mélange, an olio of things today, not all of them knitting related :)

The second set is coming along and I’m really tickled with the thick bands of striping the Meileinweit yarn is producing - looks pretty cool to me.  However, as I work the sock and see what the colors actually look like, I do wonder about it’s suitability for a baby.  Oh I know he or she could wear it even if the sock was fuchsia with puce polka dots so long as the size was right and the work of decent quality.  But really, these colors look like a business suit!  Maybe I should make a tie to go with it?

I love the way the yarn blends with the Fisherman’s wool too and I think the hat is going to look very spiffy.  Now, to think up something interesting for the top...hmmm…

I received this lovely surprise this week from barb in east texas along with a beautiful pink teddy bear, a pretty little kalanchoe (with hot pink flowers!) and a box of wonderful chocolates.  The yarn is 80% baby alpaca and 20% cashmere and I can’t wait to get my hands on it :) The baby set seems extremely dull in comparison but I’m committed to getting that finished before I pick up the Ambrosia.  But oh baby - what a yarn!  And the color is just gorgeous too - a fabulous rose that just glows - so nice!  Thank you Barb - what a wonderful surprise!

Last night, I made orange beets to go along with dinner.  It was something I remembered my mother doing a long time ago.  Since I didn’t have any fresh beets, I used canned.  Surprisingly, they worked pretty well - just remember to drain them and rinse them well to get rid of as much salt as possible.  Then dump them into a microwave-proof bowl and add about 1/2 cup of orange juice.  Nuke for 2 minutes, pausing at the 1 minute mark to stir them up.  Absolutely wonderful!

Myria picked up a container and a box of pumice dust this week for the little ones.  Dust baths are a part of their life in the wild (and for some animals - chinchilla, for example - are essential) and she thought it would be a good thing to make that available to the gerbils.  It is supposed to be a bebeficial to their skin and helps to improve their coats.  They certainly do enjoy the thing!  We put it into their tank for about twenty minutes every afternoon (no longer than that because you don’t want them using it as a potty) and they dash in and out, digging in the dust and having a wonderful time.  They also try to climb the ceramic dust-container.  This is quite amusing because the container has a slick surface so they do a fair bit of tumbling around while trying to get purchase.

All of them and I wish you a happy and pleasant fall weekend!

This post is picture intensive

The Guild Wars Halloween Party

Computer games have come a long ways from the days where you hooked up a funny looking gadget to your TV set and played a black and white game resembling a cross between tennis and ping-pong.  Games now involve complicated quests, long, dangerous journeys through vast lands and characters who are actually part of the story instead of just being set decoration.  Of course there are simpler things like Bust-a-Move and Tetris, but even these are colorful and intricate, often with spiffy musical scores so that even when the game concept itself is fairly simple, the presentation is anything but.

Enter Guild Wars.  This is a multi-player, role-playing adventure game and it is designed to be played on-line.  You (alone or cooperatively with friends) choose a character - gender, appearance, hair color and build are all up to you with many variations to choose from.  You also choose the type of role your character will fulfill (warrior, necromancer, mesmer, monk, ranger or elementalist) and you fulfill that role, acquiring skills and (often) spells to help you out along the way.  You may also acquire a secondary role function which broadens your skill and spell base.

Essentially, the world of Tyria has suffered from a huge and hugely debilitating attack and much of it lies in ruin.  Your job is to help set things to rights and perhaps discover where the attack came from and why Tyria was so targeted.

The feel is medieval; castles are made of stone, swords and trebuchets are used, as is magic.  The artwork is nothing short of sensational.  You can count the leaves on the trees and people and animals (and monsters - you knew there were monsters, didn’t you?) move in a smooth and realistic fashion.

This is all background.  What I wanted to talk about is the decision of the game-makers to give the players (and there are over a million of them world-wide) a treat for Halloween.  Myria and I observed this in a city called Lion’s Arch which lies on the coast.  It’s a good sized city with enormous stone lions here and there throughout.  There is a huge and beautiful fountain in the city center, lovely old-style ships at dock in the harbor and even a lighthouse, rotating its beacon for the safety of the ships.

On Halloween, all of this changed :)

I can’t help but think that anyone growing up in a world with this kind of satellite would have no end of complexes :) Under ordinary circumstances there is no moon and it isn’t always night in Lion’s Arch.  But adding this evil looking rock to the skies certainly enhances the holiday feeling!





This lion sits near one of the more frequently used gates to the city.  It and it’s twin sit to either side of a stone staircase which leads up to a building that, unsettlingly enough, seems to have eyes and teeth!  The lions are impressive and stately and do not usually have jack o’lanterns between their paws :)





The beautiful old sailing vessels have been changed into haunted derelicts with evil, leering skeletons grinning from their sails and ghosts endlessly circling the masts.  The light from the lighthouse glows red, rather than it’s usual cool white.





The fountain in the city center has been replaced by a gigantic cauldron which contains some enormous bones and a few other things it might be better not to examine too closely.  Around the center, flowers which are normally a lovely deep red have become a poisonous, glowing green and the king’s guard (present in advance of the Mad King - more about him later!) are made of candy corn.

An amusing aside to this is that if you elect to go on a mission out of Lion’s Arch you can choose members of the King’s Guard to accompany you and fight with you.

Moonwolf is my ranger avatar and I selected that character specifically because it enabled me to have a companion animal; the ranger is the only character type that can have a pet.  Abbey is my wolf companion and she fights alongside the team, usually targeting whoever I’m firing my bow at.  Animals also evolve as the game progresses.  She began as an ordinary wolf and has evolved into a playful wolf - meaning she’s just a hair less aggressive than say a dire wolf (one of the other evolutionary paths) but a great deal hardier (more health points).  Don’t let the “playful” fool you though.  Having Abbey fighting with you is like have three extra men and a gorilla (to steal a lovely line from Peter S. Beagle’s Folk of the Air, unfortunately out of print).

The site of the Candy-corn King’s Guard following you around and engaging in battle is incredibly goofy and entertaining :)

There is also a new music theme in Lion’s Arch with a dark and threatening edge to it.

All of this leads up to Halloween itself (the changes took place about two days prior) and the arrival of Mad King Thorn.

Thorn alternately entertains and abuses the audience, leading them in rock-paper-scissors contests (if you lose, you die), playing Mad-King-Thorn says (if you lose you die) and telling jokes (Q: Why can’t you borrow anything from a dwarf? A: Because they’re always short! If you don’t laugh, you die).  Of course he always immediately resurrects the unfortunates and he also rewards those who win his contests or laugh at his jokes.  He hangs around for about 20 minutes, hands out pumpkin heads to each member of the audience, and then makes his exit.

This took place every three hours on Halloween - a nice way to handle it so that everyone in the world-wide community of Guild Wars players would have an opportunity to have their own encounter with the Mad King.

What’s so impressive about all this is that it shows that Arenanet (the creators of the game) is interested in their consumers beyond just getting them to spend the money for the game in the first place.  None of this was done on the cheap and considerable time and effort went into creating the Halloween scenarios - a presumably temporary thing.  This is totally new in on-line gaming and Arenanet has raised the bar considerably.

And I haven’t had this much fun on Halloween since I was 12!