I sat down earlier to play some Lord of the Rings, I thought maybe I’d try and catch up on some deeds.  If you’ve not played, each area has a number of different deeds which end up giving you titles or small improvements to your character.  Among those deeds there are kill deeds, both basic and advanced.  So you may have to kill say 100 goblins for the basic deed and get a title, and then another 250 for the advanced deed and a virtue reward (character improvement).  In some locations, the quests you do end up ensuring you kill plenty of the relevant creatures, so the deeds come naturally, but if you group with a few people or move through an area quickly you find you easily move on before the deeds are complete.  Even on your own, some deeds involve creatures that are small in number, hard to kill or just out of the way – so there’s always a reason to go back and do them.

But it’s tedious.  Killing 250 wargs, especially on low DPS characters, is not something that takes a few moments.  This is doubly true in areas where the creatures still give XP, since killing them is still an effort.  Not life or death perhaps, but you still need to take care and avoid too many at once.

So it was with all that in mind that I set off to Eregion to kill wargs, half-orcs, and assorted other creatures.   I didn’t have more than 60 kills in any of the deeds and they all needed 250 in total.  I think I had maybe 15 wolf kills out of the 250.  After about 20 minutes I realised if I was going to be doing something tedious that made my hands hurt, I may as well go into the garden and chop the wood that got left over from my pruning a couple of weekends ago.

And now I can’t make a fist with either hand.  Chopping, sawing, cutting and piling.  Probably got half, or maybe just over a third of the wood chopped into less than 1 foot sections.  Some went into our brown wheelie bin (collection on Thursday), but most is piled up in the grass next to the remaining huge pile still to be sorted.

Still it feels good to make some progress with it and we’ll see how my hands are tomorrow – I may try and get some more done.  Typical British spring weather out there – windy, sunny for 10 minutes, overcast for 10 minutes.  Constantly taking my coat off, putting my coat on, taking my coat off.  Enjoyable being out in the fresh air however – and it always amuses the cats when one of us is in the back garden.  They’re not really sure how to respond when we’re in their domain, so they tend to run around being scatty and amusing.

Bubbles spent 15 mintues sitting on the shed roof staring down at me – with a sort of ‘yes minion, chop the wood, clear my grassy playground’ look on her face.