Dondy154

I’ve killed three bears so far.

The lp is good, the meat is useful. But the wilderness has pushed back so now I am very seldom in territory where bears can be found. They don’t come around my farm.

All three of the bears I’ve killed have been by archery, from the water. One was actually in my yard, and one upstream a little way from my farm. Then all the animals slipped down to level I and II and there were no more bears. The third bear I shot and killed while exploring the lake’s edge near a village I was visiting.

This was worth it.

The delay was lack of opportunity -lack of bears. It actually wasn’t too difficult.

Someday I would like to kill a bear with unarmed combat…

Not likely to be soon!

I started playing again with an entirely new character after the map reset. Eight days after I started my new character she found a bear near the edge of the river.

I fired one shot and then ran madly for the water. I wasn’t fast enough. One or two swipes from the bear shredded my armour and eroded my hit points to minimal. But I did make it into the water. In the water I was safe.

So I stood waist deep in water and emptied my quiver into the creature. It was wounded badly, probably not as badly as me. And my quiver was empty.

What to do next?

I was going to sneak downstream wading until I was far enough away, then come ashore. The bear would then have rushed down the bank towards me. I would have nipped back into the water, snuck back to where my arrows were, reloaded and gone back to shooting. That was the plan.

Pop up: The server is being reset in one minute

So… well, normally you can’t log out when something is aggro’ed on you, but server resets are special. They throw you out of game willy nilly. Arrows on the ground during a server reset decay and are eradicated. Animals also are eradicated and a new batch are respawned. So wham, I can only log in at home hearth half a mile away, my arrows are gone, the bear is gone…

So close!!

Today we got the tax bill. They had charged us $2.99 in interest and then reversed it. I had deliberately overpaid them 2c and they added 2c to the bill to clear it to zero. I think it’s cute.

The reason I overpaid was to make sure we didn’t have a zero balance. Sometimes when you have a zero balance an organization won’t send you a bill. It can be hard to tell then if we still owe interest but the bill got lost. I had my credit card bill go astray that way, and they got really shirty about it, so I like to throw some small change onto things just to keep getting the bills.

The reason they charged us the extra 2c is because they have a policy of neither charging nor refunding balances less than about five dollars. It’s not worth the processing to them.

This is good. The debt now stands at $5,387.83

But man, will we be able to pay it off before the EI runs out? I don’t think so, but it might be close…