Chef Tiddlywinks...Finally

So last night, after finishing up my daily cooking quest, I went to buy the Worg Tartare and Fish Feast recipes thinking each would cost 3 dalaran cooking awards. Worg Tartare down, one recipe to go. What's this!? Fish Feast is 5 cooking awards? And it requires 450 cooking? Oh noes. I'm only at 437.

So off I went to hunt rhinos. After amassing 52 rhino meat (I had 24 Northern Spices, so I wanted to make 24 small feasts to hopefully earn those last 13 points, and I wanted 4 rhino meat left over for the cooking dailies), I then quickly fished up as many Nettlefish as I could in 30 minutes on three hooks. It was quite a few more than the 48 required which is perfectly fine with me since my raid food of choice is Nettlefish. Then to find some Arctic Salmon - not a problem. Fished up 48 of them and hurried back to the Ledgermain Lounge to look for the last book I need for Higher Learning. I quickly started cooking small feasts and earned the 13 points I needed in just 17 feasts. So there I sat - at 450 with 4 Dalaran Cooking Awards...

To prepare the the fish feast cooking in the morning, I then had to venture back out to catch some Mussleback Sculpins (luckily it uses Arctic Salmon and Nettlefish too, and I had those left over). I fished up the requisite amount, killed a couple of worgs for my Worg Tartare and went to sleep, waiting for the daily the next morning.

So early this morning I awoke to Infused Mushroom Meatloaf and luckily had just 2 chilled meats left, I gathered the mushrooms quickly, got my 5th dalaran cooking award, bought the recipe and was rewarded with Chef de Cuisine, and then cooked up 4 fish feasts for The Northrend Gourmet and, of course, Hail to the Chef!

Here I stand on the shore of a peaceful lake in Crystalsong forest with my latest pet, the adorable fawn (reward from Lil' Game Hunter achievement for 75 pets).


Yesterday I mentioned my trip to Tempest Keep, and not only did I win the Robes of Tirisfal, but I also won the Ethereum Life-Staff which you can see in the picture of me below:


As an additional bonus last night, while briefly perusing the lists of achievements, I found two new ones! Pest Control requires you to go around all over the world to slay pests such as maggots, beetles, spiders, and roaches which was quite time-consuming, especially since I couldn't find a larva for the life of me. I went into Naxxramas, but couldn't find one without going past some enemies, so I went back to the Ghostlands, where after about 10-15 minutes of running around searching for them, I finally found one.

The other achievement is a follow-up to To All The Squirrels I've Loved Before entltied, To All The Squirrels Who Shared My Life. Similar to the "loved before" achievement, you have to go around and /love a bunch of critters - most of them scattered through Northrend, but a couple in some more obscure places. After a quick loop of Northrend, I went over to the Swamp of Sorrows to find a toad and got the achievement. With the Chef achievements this morning, I hit 4,700 points exactly!

Random Thoughts

• The past few days, I've been hanging out in a channel on our server called Bookclub. With their help, I've been able to gather 7 of the 8 books required for Higher Learning. I even took lead of the channel for a while on Saturday night and Sunday as I kept the timers updated and coordinated camping of books by people in the channel. Suffice to say, I really haven't had as much fun outside of raiding for a while. The thrill of the hunt, the camaraderie, it was quite a fun experience. Hopefully tonight I can get my last book and my newest pet and while it'll be sad to leave the channel, I hope my contributions made over the past few days were helpful to the community.
  
• Today is patch day. And with it, I will be getting my Hail to the Chef and Chef de Cuisine achievements. Lately I haven't been sporting any title as they all seem to be pretty commonplace and boring these days. I'm hoping to get Champion of the Frozen Wastes this week if we can down Malygos, but if we don't, or at least until that point, I'll be Chef Tiddlywinks.
  
• Speaking of achievements, leading up to last weekend, I went 6 days without an achievement! SIX! I was stuck at 4,500 achievement points for the longest time. Luckily I've gotten back on track with some heroic achievements, some reputation achievements, some battleground achievements, and even some old school achievements. So now I'm up to 4,620 achievement points and with the Lunar Festival coming Saturday, I should blow by 4,800 with the holiday and profession achievements.
  
• Speaking of Old School raiding...last night we went into Tempest Keep for the achievement. I joined a little late, getting there just in time for High Astromancer Solarian and we easily blew through her and the trash up to Kael'thas before running into trouble. One of the main issues we ran into was our Death Knight tank and off tank. Neither can use a shield so the fireballs and pyroblasts were eating us up. Luckily we were able to make it through a couple times, but then he'd start throwing us around and just doing too much damage to the tanks. So we called in reinforcements. We added another 10 people to our group and with 21, we downed him (a mix of levels from 70-80). In the end, just 6 of us were standing and my heart was pounding like none other. Sitting there, trying my damnedest to nuke him down and get those last few points off his health...it's a shame my damage meter and timers broke during an update right before I logged in - it would have been interesting to see what my damage was like on that fight - I certainly love seeing strings of 10k+ crits. In the end, it was me and 5 others left alive that defeated him. And with that, I earned my acheivement, got Kael's Vial Remnant for The Vials of Eternity, and I should still have a shot at my Hand of A'dal title since I've been carrying around the quest for ages. I also screwed up the rolls at the end which I felt horrible for, but I did walk away with my first and only tier 5 piece, the Robes of Tirisfal.
  
• I'm a bit miffed with one of the changes in the patch today. They're going to be awarding full reputation gains for grey mobs. So what does this mean? Well, I've spent countless hours killing furlbogs, trolls, and undead to get my 32 exalted reputations. Now, anyone and everyone can go back to these old rep grinds and level them 5 times faster than I was able to. It will make all my hard work completely worthless. Even though I know I did the grinds before the patch, no one else will, and we'll suddenly start seeing a lot more people exalted with a lot more factions. On the bright side, I could probably finish up my Zandalar rep a bit quicker now with fewer gold invested in coins and bijous, but that's the only place it benefits me while everyone else will have easy grinds for the Argent Dawn, Bloodsail Buccaneers, Timbermaw, Zandalar, Kurenai, Sporeggar, etc.