Woody’s YAB

Jack counting with his daddy!  Easiest way to publish it was to add it to a photo… enjoy.

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I felt my first earthquake today. North Texas had a 3.3 strength earthquake today. I felt it bit at the time didn’t know what I had felt. Later I read that it was indeed an earthquake.

I’ve been other places that had quakes but this was the first that I actually felt.

I’ve hoped that I was just missing her in passing but it appears the mourning dove who had made her nest in our hanging flower basket has moved on and abandoned the nest.

She turned up missing after a couple of days of really bad storms had rolled through. I guess she couldn’t take it and moved to somewhere else. I was hoping to see our eggs hatching here soon…

One of our long standing members made this video montage from various raids Naxx, Malygos, and more recently in Ulduar… very cool.

Tonight with a fresh lockout we went back into Ulduar, easily taking the first four bosses, with only minor hiccups.  This meant that we could focus on learning the strat on our first new boss… Kologarn.  We can pretty close, but we had a few wipes and in the end couldn’t take him down before end of raid.  I’m sure when we head back in on sunday we will get him and at the very least 1 or 2 other bosses.

On another note, I took some suggestions from Meka, probably one of the most well know Restoration Shamans (one of the Guild Leaders for Ensidia - guild responsible for MANY world first boss kills).  The main change was moving away from Chain Heal, and more into Lesser Healing Wave.  Both spells heal about the same, though Chain Heal heals up to 4 targets (reducing amount healed on each successive jump).  But in general i can heal 2 targets full amount more efficiently than i can do 4, especially in typical raid situations where people are spread out.  Chain heal works best when people stay clumped together, since there is a range on the jumps.  I get more speed, plus a small respec added  Ancestral Healing, which bumps the target i get a critical heal on by 25% for 15sec.  Adding 1/4 of a targets armor is huge!  Overall the change made a noticeable difference, finishing the raid as 3rd most heals.

XT-002 Deconstructor went down pretty painlessly as we got the strat down well enough.  We then moved on to Ignis.  We had a couple attempts on him, but never got him down.  We did have 2 very close attempts, one we got him to %1, but he had started his damage stack and was systematically taking down tanks at every turn so it ended in a very disappointing wipe.  On our next attempt, there were some respawns starting to occur in the area so it was down to a single remaining attempt.  The strat was down, everything was working perfectly, until the “add” tank took a very big hit and died before heals could recover him.  Then with the large number of adds running loose they seemed to target tanks and healers in quick succession.  The 2 most critical raid groups decimated, Ignis wiped the rest of everyone quickly.  While we only got him to 15% on that attempt we only had 2 dead raid members and were well ahead of the enrage timer.  Ignis will definitly be going down on Tuesday.  We have a very solid handle on all the strats for the bosses in “Siege of Ulduar” so I expect we will be moving to the next section on tuesday.

I had let it fall the the wayside with Wrath of the Lich king, but the raid progress link has been updated, to include all raid content i’ve experienced, and will keep it updated going forward.

This morning i noticed a Mourning Dove sitting in a planter on my front porch.  Its from last year, and hadn’t been planted yet this year.  Thought it was a little odd, but I didn’t think too much about it until she had flown away and then I noticed two small eggs in the nest.    I’ll keep this updated as more develops.

link to pics on my flickr page

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