Uninvited tentacle

Well, I didn't completely finish the Fire Festival with everyone, but I almost did. (I would have, but I was away from home for a couple of days in the middle of it.) I did it with seven of the remaining eight, so it's just Elsie who needs to catch up next year. I say 'need to', but I'm not sure how it will all work with account-wide achievements due to appear… but even if she's already got the achievements by default, the XP will still come in handy. Everyone else went up several levels on the bonfire tour, and there's the bonus that Katisha, Santuzza and Gattara now have all the Outland flight points, which they didn't before.

Also, they've all finally finished enough Darnassus cooking quests to buy all the recipes. Katisha finished first, and I was going to take her to Outland to do the Shattrath ones, but it turns out you have to be L70 to do that, and she isn't quite. So everyone's now on plan B, which is to do archaeology until they're high enough level for Outland. Not just archaeology, of course - as other events come up, they can do those - but it seems like a better solution than random questing, because (a) it makes money; (b) it gives lots of XP, both for finding stuff and for exploring; ( c) it raises archaeology skill and works towards achievements; and (d) it solves the main problem with doing quests, which is that if I do some then my obsessive nature will want to do all of them!

Iolanthe and MadMargaret are both doing occasional bits of archaeology too, just so they don't feel I'm neglecting them, but mainly I've been playing Mabel. She finished Deepholm and then raced through Uldum (which was, as usual, the most fun of all the Cataclysm zones, mainly due to Gnomebliteration but helped by the Harrison Jones rescue, which I love just as much even when I know what's going to happen). She's almost done everything in Twilight Highlands - she's done all of it except the last section (at the Twilight Gate), but we're taking an enforced break because my subscription has expired and I can't afford to renew it just yet. Soon, though!