980309 - Splitting my shop in Vesper turned out to be a smart move. Now I sell almost twice as much, this morning both my vendors were holding nearly 15 k for me together, and neither did carry any cash at all last night. I could deposit nearly 10 k in my bank account, using the rest of the money to buy new raw materials. I had a difficult time replenishing everything again, especially so since I was simultaneously processing an order of two do-it-yourself Transport Kits, that's 44 scrolls only there. I'm over 96 in inscribing now, and closing in on Grand Master. I also scribed some Resurrection scrolls for special purposes. SatansKing dropped by today with the unfortunate news that he had been PK:ed and insta resurrected by mistake, that must have hurt. A stupid throwaway thief, FOLIO, followed StormKnight to my shop and harassed him for a while. When StormKnight recalled out, the little thief turned on me. Suddenly I got a message that he was attacking me. Anticipating a trick as usual I moved my mouse over him, and strangely enough he flashed red. A quick call for the guards killed the little moron, and before he had resurrected himself, I had picked him clean of any valuables he had, not much of course, but I did manage to get some of his items, especially food, and recall away myself. I'm stocking up on food and drink now, attending PhantomY's and Elana's engagement party yesterday made me realize just how much food only 7 persons can consume. If I will ever host a big party up on my roof, (and I probably will someday), I would anticipate 20-30 guests, this would call for a huge food and wine cellar. But as I said, I'm working on it.

I also scribed a lot of scrolls today - for some reason I seem to sell out on 2nd circle fastest, what is the reason for that? I don't get it, 2nd circle is very easy to come by almost everywhere, I only sell those (and 1st circle) for completeness sake. I met OS again today, and offered to show him my tower. We made a tour through the building, it is almost completely furnished now and starts to look very nice indeed, I think he got a bit impressed, and I'm proud of it. Just a few final touches here and there for style and I will be satisfied. Now I will buy myself a horse, that and a larger ship are the only things I want and don't yet have. No, I do not desire a private keep or castle, those structures are just too big. They might be great for a large guild, but for a private person they would spell more trouble than they are worth, decorating the tower alone has been a tedious process indeed. Also, the interior of a castle is not very well planned at all, one might imagine that a structure that large should have a least some huge rooms, but they do not, a lot of the floor-plan is not possible to furnish at all.

980308 - I had to split my shop in Vesper. Now a second vendor, Bryant, accompanies Dulcie. I finally seem to manage keeping a full supply of what I carry. I added an item, a rune for the entrance to Wind. You might remember that recalling straight into Wind was made impossible by a patch a while ago. But going to Wind is certainly a fashion statement, only an experienced witch is allowed to enter through the teleporter. I marked a couple of runes on top of the entrance, making a fashion statement that way, and I am selling those together with my other runes, same nice price of course. Rearranging my vendors was big trouble. It took forever and ever, mostly due to the horde of players that insist on stopping by to talk. While I do like to talk to my customers, my shop is not a coffee shop for slackers. If you don't intend to buy anything, then I might have limited time talking to you, please respect that, when I'm busy, I'm busy. However, it seems a lot of players are using me as a sort of counselor to get advice on all kinds of aspect of the game. If I have time to answer, and if I'm able to, I usually will, but as I said, when I'm preoccupied with other things I might not be willing to talk all that much. I'm not your mother, damn it!

I didn't see any monsters on my hunting trip today, but I killed a fair number of large sized animals, including one grizzly bear, with my archery alone. It's nice to getting some archery practice too every now and then, I use my bow and arrows on animals, only when a monster comes along I switch to magery. In my travels today I had to enter Covetous again to meet a supplier and to pick up some backpacks - I can actually use those backpacks in my business. While prancing around level 1 in my rustproof swimsuit, I suddenly saw a Dread Lord named Flash Gordon fleeing from multiple opponents. He hid behind some rocks. Only moments later his followers appeared, spurting Vas Flam and Corp Por left and right. I cast a Fire Field straight onto the hidden Dread Lord to flush him out, and he immediately kept on running, at top speed, for the exit. I don't know what happened with him, but it's always nice seeing a PK:er running for a change. A Dread Lord in Covetous is a PK:er by definition, don't have to stop and ask him about that. I don't care if his pursuers were notoriety-killers, Dread Lords are scum, kill them all and sort them out later... Eventually I found my supplier and got what I wanted from him, after which I returned to Vesper to fiddle a bit more with my vendors.

But the best part of the day came in the evening. PhantomY and Elana invited me to a small party. Naturally I accepted, it's very much in fashion going to a society party. As I was the most competent mage amongst the guests, I gated the entire party to their hall. Besides the hosting couple and myself the distinguished guests numbered sucraM II, el-mirt, Nightrunner and OS. Once there we had a lot of food and a lot to drink, when suddenly PhantomY wanted to make an announcement.

PhantomY and Elana is going to get married! This was their engagement party. A big hooray for the happy couple! It was a terrific evening, everybody toasted the bride and groom to be, and many fun and good stories were told most notably OS's story about the teleporting ettin. That is a fun story, but it's better if you hear it from him, I will not retell it here. After a long and merry dinner I finally gated sucraM and myself back to Vesper, and very content with the day, I went to rest. Now I must figure out a suitable wedding-gift for the two of them, I gave them some useful scrolls as an engagement present, but for a wedding I have to figure out something more innovative.

980307 - Yesterday I did nothing, but refresh my buildings and continue to decorate my tower, the dozens of things I got from Cloud's friend Woody really helped a lot. It's starting to look very nice now. The roof is almost finished, I needed 12 tables and nearly 30 chairs for that part of my home. Today I went picking up some things from one of my suppliers, that was *very* nice things he brought me this time, including one vanquishing weapon and several weapons of power. I also obtained that exceedingly accurate mace-like weapon I promised to get for Cess. Sorry, but these weapons are already reserved for special clients and will not appear with my vendor, unless of course a customer forgets to pick them up in time... I'm having trouble with Dulcie, she refuses to carry enough of my goods, maybe I should get another vendor to put up beside her, I really like to be able to offer the full range of runes, sets, scrolls, city outfits, weapons and magical accessories that I have for sale.

The notoriety system definitely needs an overhaul, here I've been out slaughtering hordes of big monsters, and today I finally made Lady status. From what, you might wonder? A stupid mongbat, that's what. As usual when a mongbat attacks, I often don't have the time to react, my auto-defend mechanism kills it. Lady Mongbat killer - ha! But since I *am* the Fashion Queen of Vesper, I will naturally show you a picture of my new status. As you can see, I sometimes do wear armor, this particular outfit makes me look like I'm trying to do an impersonation of Xena, it might look great on younger women, but I don't know about me anymore. You decide for yourself. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Morkai for supplying me with those female plate armors, since I cannot manufacture them anymore myself. It's especially nice that you are such a good blacksmith, that some of your products turn out to be of excellent quality.

Other than this, I have my hands full with my business. I don't have much time to go out hunting at all. I've started to walk around in town with a wand in my hand. It's empty but that particular wand I choose to carry looks really neat, and is very much in-fashion for a seamstress-witch as myself. One odd thing though, when I change facing on my avatar, the wand transfers from my left to my right hand by itself. Gee, it must be some kind of magic, or what do you think? One more issue today, incorrect names! No I'm not talking about those k00lD00dS and Lord Beavises, I'm talking about other things you might come across in your business- or pleasure-travels, have a look at these small pictures...

After that I met up with Balata again. He was planning to go down to Orc Fort at Cove. Now Orc Fort is pretty fun, so I asked if I could join him. Unfortunately the place was totally barren, only eager players paced back and forth waiting for an odd orc to come along. We saw no monsters whatsoever, not very fun at all. But then Balata suggested we go to a dungeon instead. Covetous is situated pretty conveniently close by.... You probably know how I feel about going to Covetous, but I though let's be reckless for once. I gathered some more pieces of armor, including a bone helmet for protection, and off we went. Yes it's true, what a shame, The Fashion Queen of Vesper wears bone-helmets, but at least I don't show myself like that in a city. Covetous was filled with creatures. On level 1 we fought a lot of harpies and corpsers, but the gazer living there was suspiciously absent. When we entered level 2 I was in for a rude shock however, we were met by more than a dozen of sewer rats, giant rats and slimes. Now I don't like to fight with weapons, but wrestling a horde of those pests in a cramped area was almost too much for me. When I can't run around casting spells and scream, I'm not at my best at all. Luckily I was saved by Balata and Lord Morpheus before I went down, but it was a close call - I can tell you that. We killed a few more monsters, but then I ran out both of reagents and time, and had to return to Vesper. Still, it was a fun excursion, plenty of action and no PK:ers whatsoever. I enclose a picture of me and Balata in Covetous, showing us resting after killing our 6th harpy.

980304 - I got fed up with geocities yesterday, and decided to move to a new address. If you can read this you obviously found my new place on the web, I'd like to say thank you to a very special friend of mine for lending me these 10 MB of space. The moving around led to the fact that I couldn't cover everything that happened yesterday. But my tower is getting an inhabited look by now, both thanks to Barak giving me a lot of furniture for free, but also thanks to Leafbeach for selling me no less than a 1000 logs. I also managed to obtain one of those braziers you can get from a lich, but I can't seem to get it out of the backpack. It's a pity, those braziers look real nice. I also had serious trouble with my client crashing all the time. I have gotten some expert help with this, and hopefully the reinstalling will do its job correctly. Yes I did remember to backup my uo.cfg and macros.txt files, so I can still walk around in Vesper saying "Thou art giving me lag. I'm not interested in this". Lag has become less of a problem with this new patch, but sometimes it shows its ugly face nevertheless, always at an inopportune occasion.

Today I almost finished restocking my vendors. As a test I put out one resurrection scroll and demanded 160 for it. It sold immediately to the first customer who laid eyes on it. I'm still not interested in scribing 8th circle commercially, too much trouble - I fail a lot, and 50 mana takes forever to regenerate. I've also rearranged my magical weaponry in a more esthetically pleasing manner, I have to live up to my reputation now that I go around carrying the title "Fashion Queen - SHF". SHF stands for Sandralene's House of Fashion of course. I also started to work on research of the new mathematics on tailoring, things have changed there - but it's still possible to make 3 k per hour if you are good enough. Problem is though, this patch has made life a lot more difficult for the unskilled, so starting up as a seamstress is more of a problem nowadays. This do not concern me personally of course, being an adept seamstress and everything, but I feel a bit sorry for newbies trying to work up their skill. I will publish an updated advice-page as soon as I get all the details for optimum performance, I really like to verify all rumors first hand myself.

Hunting was a bit scary today. I tracked down a gazer only to find it locked inside a house. The house also contained (or so I thought) two water elementals and a wisp. No doubt someone uses the house to train his magic resistance. A bit annoyed I started to walk away from the building only to suddenly find out that one of the elementals wasn't inside the house at all. It was very much outside, and very much attacking me! I ran around for a while, screaming for help (I like doing that), but when none came I readied my spells to battle the elemental. What a wimp it was, two of my energy bolts finished it off. A dead elemental doesn't leave a body of course, but I found a nice pile of gold and a backpack containing some magical armor in the spot the elemental went down. On my hunting trip I got as far as the Minoc spawning grounds, I don't like going there, too many PK:ers usually. But today there was nothing but a large number of animals. I killed a lot of boars, bears, goats and even an odd rabbit, before getting attacked by an ogre. Big mistake on the ogre's account, after my first two spells, the huge oaf didn't think it was funny anymore, and tried to run away. Good luck to anything trying to outrun me, especially when that being is seriously hurt. I obtained some more magical armor from the ogre's body and returned to Vesper to rest.

Another fun thing happened today when I stood outside my shop trying to pen 8th circle for my own amusement and talking to my friends Cloud and Bigcat II. After a while our conversation led us into discussing fighting big creatures. Bigcat had never fought a daemon, so I penned one Summon Daemon scroll. Yes I'm still much better inscribing than I am actually casting. After some preparations we went just outside Vesper. There I summoned the big purple/pink thing (summon Barney?), gave control to Bigcat, and he started to fight it. It went rather well, until suddenly his Reactive Armor dropped. It was an awfully close call, before I could get it up again, despite both me and Cloud healing Bigcat all along with Greater Heals, it's difficult to target a human in hand to hand combat with a daemon. But in the end Bigcat was victorious, now that proves how important cooperating in UO really is. And it was a nice fight, even I admit that, fighting daemons is a fashion statement in a sense.

980303 - I did have a lot of catching up to do, marking runes, scribing scrolls and putting out more magic weapons with my vendors. Standing outside the shop is great fun however, you do meet all kinds of players, and surprisingly enough most of them are rather good role-players. But then again, the poor power-gamers rarely take their time to stop to talk to anyone anyway. I think I've pinned down the crash problems to my somewhat strange video-card. It seems to work when I play the game in a smaller window - why it's so I honestly do not have the slightest idea about. On my hunting trip today I found a lot of animals, and my archery got a good boost from that. An orc lord also came by to kill me. This meant that I could take some time practicing magic as well. Energy bolts sure does vary a lot in efficiency, my first two bolts didn't make much damage at all to the orc lord, while my 3rd one killed him outright, the randomness is a bit annoying. Unfortunately, the orc lord carried nothing more than several pieces of mundane armor, which of course got sold at the nearest provisioner the minute I got back to Vesper. Speaking of armor, I manufactured some more gloves and gorgets for my vendors as well, those small pieces of armor seem to be in demand. I cannot put out too much though, since I hit the weight limit of the vendors very fast.

I put up my "guild-stone" too today. Doesn't it look great? I named the guild "Sandralene's House of Fashion" and styled myself "Fashion Queen of Vesper"; it sounds a lot better than Guild-mistress don't you think? The stone is situated in the back-office in my tower, which by the way starts to look inhabited. First of all I'd like to thank Barak for manufacturing all those pieces of furniture for me. I have tried to publish a small picture of my library on my image-page, but since I know that geocities is acting up frequently, I cannot guarantee that it has come out correctly. I also met Balata again today in one of Vesper's provisioner shops. Unfortunately I was a little short of time but we had a nice conversation anyway. He dresses a bit differently nowadays though; I have to admit I liked his previous outfit better, it was much more stylish and neat, so I didn't recognize him at first.

980302 - Once back from my little holiday, I tried to figure out just how much this last patch really messed things up. I'm afraid that the answer to that is "A lot". First of all my client seems to be crashing at every opportune, and worse inopportune, occasion. I went out on a small hunting trip with Arthur conDoin today. First we were attacked by a water elemental. At that moment my client went down. By the time I logged back on I was of course dead, and to top it off, my ghost got stuck, and I mean really stuck. Despite this I managed to meet Arthur back at my house. He had managed to kill the elemental and was holding my things. Wondering if we maybe should try again, we went out only to be attacked by a dire wolf. My client went down the very same moment. This time I managed to log back on very fast, and wasn't completely dead when I re-attached. But, lo and behold, one second later my client crashes again! This time I reattached as a ghost of course. Not wearing armor and a crashing client can be very hazardous to your health. It seemed that I crashed every time Arthur attacked the monster?!? Anyway back to my house resurrected again I'd had enough, but I asked Arthur if I could do anything for him as a small payment for his kindness of rescuing my equipment twice. He wanted a rune marked in Vesper. While marking, Arthur cast a Bless spell on himself. At the very same moment the magic words appeared over his head, my client went down for the 4th time. I was now very convinced that my client somehow went down when other players performed some action like attacking or spell casting. I'll better stay in town before I figure this one out. This is a small picture of Arthur and me just after he had rescued my things for the second time...

One thing about this patch that's really good is that lag seems to be much less prevalent than previously. Maybe my say-macro "Thou art giving me lag. I'm not interested in that" will see less use in the future, I'm just hoping I don't have to exchange the word "lag" with "client-crashes", but then again, the latter would be tricky to say in UO when most needed... I also like not having to dig out the correct key for every house.

I'll be back with more news at the situation warrants. Until next time - stay safe from PK:ers

Even a tailor can walk around semi-nude in UO

/Sincerely