Uldum spawns... or not

I sometimes wonder why I bother writing this blog when I know no-one's reading it, but it's actually quite satisfying to see that I am making progress in the game, however small. It's two months since I last got round to updating, but all my characters have gone up several levels since then. Mabel became my third L85 the other day! Very exciting. She's the only one who's currently doing any proper questing - she's currently halfway through Mount Hyjal. She does need to go back to Icecrown at some point, though, because there are several group quests she couldn't quite manage and she needs them for Loremaster. (Although since account-wide achievements are on the way, that's largely a waste of time… but she's so close!) I haven't actually tried the Icecrown hard stuff since she was L84, but I think I'll wait till she's finished Hyjal and then see if she can cope any better (one level won't make much difference, of course, but the quest rewards in Hyjal are vastly superior to what she had before, so I'm hoping she'll be in shiny new gear from head to foot by the time she's finished the zone, and that will be enough to attack Icecrown.

Mabel finally got all the cooking recipes and was able to leave Darnassus, but most of my other characters are still parked there. They've all finished all the cooking and fishing dailies now and are just repeating them to get all the cooking recipes - it'll be a while yet though. A couple of them were doing fishing dailies much longer than the others, trying to get the Captain Rumsey recipe, but they all have it now. They've all been to the Darkmoon Faire in both May and June, which definitely helps the levelling process. The only part of that that's a pain is the archaeology - it does involve a bit of running around to get 15 fossil fragments. I'm all prepared now, though, because after the faffing I had to do before the Faire's current visit I've decided that the way forward is to keep them all with 15 fragments on them, and after the Faire go immediately to top up if necessary before I forget about it.

Iolanthe and MadMargaret are doing nothing but archaeology. Iolanthe has got all the achievements, but she's keeping going because she's an alchemist and wants to try and get the Vial of the Sands recipe from a Canopic Jar… but there are so few digsites that spawn in Uldum, and even when they do they never seem to be the Canopic Jar (although she obviously must have got it once at least, because it's needed for one of the achievements), and even if it does spawn the recipe drop rate is very low, I believe. But that's her only aim, so she's flying round Kalimdor digging till Uldum sites spawn, and then being disappointed! She can at least feel useful, though, because she grabs any herbs she passes and sends them to Elsie, who's levelling Inscription.

MadMargaret has quite a few archaeology achievements to complete, but she's doing well on all of them. By chance, currently four of her projects are rare ones, which means she'll be much closer to the 20 rare achievement when they're all done, but also means she hasn't actually solved anything for ages! And she has loads still to do in Uldum. But there's no hurry.

Soon it will be the Fire Festival, which I think is my favourite. I do plan to do much more of it with my alts this time. (Annoyingly I totally missed Children's Week because it coincided with a week of cat-related trauma. I've done it lots of times before, but now I've missed a year in getting all the pets! Oh well.)