Not really, I was only kidding! 🙂  Just more of the same old, same old… 🙂

Just before I tell you about this morning’s weigh-in, let me tell you another boring but weird fact about myself. I have this very strange right ear. It gets cold. It gets really cold, for no apparent reason; cold to the point where I get an earache. Go figure. The rest of me isn’t cold – in fact, it can be the middle of summer and blistering hot… except for my right ear which gets cold.  It’s become worse as I get older, too. I hear perfectly well with it, it doesn’t get numb or tingly, it just. gets. cold. I usually wrap a scarf over my head, or wear a pair of fluffy earmuffs (can you imagine how odd that looks, in the middle of summer? You’re wearing a skimpy top, and light clothes…. and a pair of fluffy earmuffs…  *rolls eyes*

And now that I’ve bored you all with that somewhat irrelevant fact, I can tell you about my weigh-in this morning 🙂 Hallelujah, and praise the gremlins!  I went down! 😀 127.1kg!  Who knows? Tomorrow I might have broken through the 127kg barrier!  One can only cross one’s fingers, eyes and nostrils, touch wood, and wish upon a star…

Oh, interesting side note about my celery elephant pills.  Even breaking them in half I nearly choke to death on them, so I persuaded himself to take me shopping today at Knox City because their Terry White Chemist is one of the only ones that I can (a) get into, and (b) navigate what most Chemist Shops laughingly call “aisles”.  They also seem to have a larger range of everything from vitamins to band-aids (it’s a very big shop!) Anyway, I wanted to see what they had in the range of celery capsules and the like… They actually had two different brands – the Blackmoores that I choke on, and Thompsons celery capsules – real capsules, too! About two thirds the size of the Blackmoores ones.  However, the Blackmoores elephant pills are 3000mg, the Thompsons ones are only 2000mg. Then we went to a sort of a health care/herbal remedy type store and they had another sort, called Micro Genics. They’re 4000mg! So… dilemma!  Which one to take?  The 2000mg ones?  Should I take two? Or only one? Should I take the 4000mg ones?  I can’t cut them in half, they’re proper capsules…  In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter much as long as (a) I take them consistently, and (b) I notify Dorevetch Warfarin department of the change next time I have my blood test (October 9th)

So that’s about it tonight from me – cross your fingers for me! 🙂  Will let you know how I go tomorrow! 🙂

“Stressful Day? What you need is a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down!” 🙂 I wonder if anyone still remembers that old ad that was shown, and heard on the radio, almost constantly, many, many years ago 🙂 “Bex” was supposedly a headache powder, but was pretty much “Mother’s little helper”. It consisted of aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine, was highly addictive, and probably responsible for destroying more kidneys than it cured headaches.

Why do I bring this up? I hear you mutter under your collective breaths… Well, as I think I mentioned yestereve, our cleaning lady was coming today. She did.  She came, she cleaned (sort of), she went… and I spent the evening tidying up the things she messed up or left in the wrong place. Don’t get me wrong!  She’s a wonderful person, and kind, and generous, and we love her. But it’s just that…. let me put it this way. Once upon a time, I too used to do house cleaning for fun and profit!  Yes!  This lazy, good for nothing, lay about excuse for a woman used to go cleaning other people’s houses with a girl friend.  We got $20 an hour each – she did the “wet areas” (bathrooms, kitchen and laundry), and I did the general dusting, polishing, and vacuuming. I took my work reasonably seriously… I dusted from the top down before vacuuming, and I polished last, as my mother had taught me. And as I went from shelf to mantlepiece to bookcases, I’d pick up each ornament and/or doo-dad, dust underneath it, give it a quick swipe with a duster, and put it down again in the same spot.  This is something that our cleaning lady has yet to master.

Well, I have the cup of tea (thanks love!), and I’ll lie down when I go to bed… Shame you can’t get Bex any more though….

So, enough for the grizzling for tonight… or maybe not… Weigh-in this morning saw me back to what I was the day before yesterday, 127.6kg. In other words, I went up point one of a kg and then down point 1 of a kg, like this:  /\

Hopefully I’ll do better tomorrow! 🙂

Ah well, it’s as I expected… my weight went up a bit this morning… from 127.6kg to 127.7kg 😦 For some weird reason I seem to go up a bit about once a week (more or less) – maybe my body gets bored with only going down?  Well, let me tell you, body, I’m not the slightest bit bored with my weight going down! So stop doing this to me, alright?! (grrrr!)

Not much else has been happening – Julian and I have been playing a bit of “Tex Murphy, Tesla Effect” – probably the swan song of the Tex Murphy adventures, which is a bit sad as they’re good games.  We actually finished it this afternoon and as you can choose whether you play nice, or whether you play nasty, we’ve decided to play it again as a bad/nasty Tex, just to see what happens in the end.

Our cleaning lady will be in tomorrow, thank heavens – we’re starting to get lumps of cat hair drifting along the passage way… You think you get it all, but no…. it sneaks in off your clothing and out of Flipper’s bedding, and off the carpet, and what you thought was part of a grey-ish blue flower in the rug pattern turns out to be a whorl of Flipper fur instead!

Anyway, that’s about it from me for tonight – more tomorrow night – hopefully with good news regarding my weight loss…  I think I’ll cry if it goes up again  😦

Sometimes it feels like the world is rushing past you at a million miles a second – is it really time for the Royal Melbourne Show again?! Yet at the same time, things seem to happen at an ancient, arthritic and decrepit snail’s pace…. *sigh*

Weigh in this morning was a trifle disappointing at 127.6kg – only .1kg less than yesterday. Hmmmm… maybe I should take two celery elephant pills a day? Who am I kidding?  It’s hard enough to choke one down each morning, let alone two…  I’m seriously considering taking a slightly lower dose in a slightly smaller [and proper] capsule form. Why is it that vitamin manufacturers seem to think that because it’s a vitamin, or an herbal preparation, that human throats are able to grow and stretch to twice their normal capacity? I kid you not – these celery pills are about two centimeters long, a centimeter wide, half a centimeter thick, and sort of chalky on the outside, with no nice, smooth, “normal” capsule covering. Every morning it gets harder and harder to get it down without gagging and throwing up (reprise: *sigh*) I’ll have a look online and see what’s available in celery pills or capsules… I’d have a look in Chemist shops to see what’s available except that their attitude is somewhat akin to the airlines’ motto of: “bums on seats, so make the seats smaller to get more bums on!”, only in the case of Chemist shops it’s “More junk in the aisles! Most will “walk”, but some will sell, so… more junk in the aisles!”, making it impossible to negotiate one’s way around their premises in an electric wheelchair – it’s hard enough on foot!  And they wonder why more people are buying online!? *shrug* Their loss, not mine…

🙂 And you wondered where all my grizzling and discontent had gone! It’s still here, see? 😉

Let’s hope I have some better news about my weight loss to tell you about tomorrow night, or I’ll have to grizzle again! 😉

If you’re wondering about the title to this post, it’s because I can very seldom think of anything interesting or pertinent to put there… of course, sometimes I can, but not always.  So I have decided that when I can’t think of a suitable heading, I shall simply look around my desk and call the title whatever my eyes land on first.  I have a small, smooth, flat-ish river rock, sitting in a glass pear shaped used-to-be ashtray… on it is engraved and painted the word “Serenity”. It’s what I saw first, hence the title “Serenity”, capisce? 🙂 Tomorrow, it might be “Amethyst egg”, or “Toy hamster”, or “Millefiori paperweight” – or it might even be something interesting and pertinent – who knows? 🙂

I only went down a teeny bit this morning 127.7kg 😦 Let’s hope I do better tomorrow… this is taking too long… I mean, I wanna see results in me, like looking a little thinner!  Yes, I know all my slacks are too big for me now, and that I have to un-pick the stitching in the waste bands to tighten the elastic therein, (and yes, that was a deliberate misspelling of “waste” band – it’s because it goes around a “waste” land!)* But I want to look in the mirror and see a thinner me! Ah well – maybe next week…. 🙂

Why can’t you change the size of parts of the text in these blogs? It’s most annoying not being able to…

And that’s about it from me for tonight – more news as it comes to hand tomorrow night.. 🙂

*Aside: I even had to buy some more underwear – the ones I have at the moment not only cover my nether bits, but they come up and cover my boobs as well! *giggle*.

So here I am, deliberately early tonight… (nods virtuously) just picked up my daily “gift” on Rift, checked my auctions and re-auctioned (all) the expired ones, and logged off.  Really, it’s too late to start long quest chains after about ten o’clock… I was pleased today though because I managed to get my “youngest” Mage from level 23 to level 32 in the one session… 🙂

I’m also very pleased today because my weight this morning had gone down to 127.8kg!  It’s getting to the stage (about once a week) when it does go back up again, so I await tomorrow’s weigh-in with battered breath and a fair amount of trepidation… even though I am taking those gigantic celery elephant pills…

What I am not pleased with is my youngest daughter’s back problems… I know all about back pain and it’s not good – at least I don’t go into spasms to the extent that I can’t get about at all! 😦   Get better quickly kiddo!  That’s an order! 🙂

Will let you know how it goes tomorrow…. 🙂

I feel like there should be a white rabbit running ahead of me muttering “I’m late… I’m late…”

Because I am (late) with this tonight – sorry, sorry, sorry…

There I was, feeling very smug because I was carefully watching the time so as not to get to bed late… and it wasn’t until I was on my way to the bathroom that himself helpfully asked: “Have you written your blog yet?”  Thank you dear… No, I hadn’t.  Back on went the lights, back on came the screen, and now I’m sitting here trying to type fast, and making so many typos which I have to backtrack to and correct, that I’m not saving any time at all!  Perhaps I’d better slow down a little…

So basically, the good news is… I went down to 128.0kg this morning! 😀 I even had to start a new page on my weight loss progress graph!! 😀 Looks like the celery elephant pills are doing their job… for now, anyway.  Who knows?  Tomorrow I might be back up again.  I hope not…

Will let you know tomorrow!  ‘Night all! 🙂

Moved on down to 128.6kg this morning…  would you believe that that’s what I weighed when himself and I went to Las Vegas in 2004 for a computer seminar!?  Wow! 🙂

So I’m feeling quite happy tonight – the celery elephant pills (they’re gigantic!) seem to be working – my feet aren’t getting quite as swollen, anyway, except sometimes – mainly in the evenings, which is strange, cos that’s when I sit with my feet up – when we’re watching TV.  You’d think that it would be during the day when I’m sitting at the computer for hours at a time that they’d be swollen…  But then, I’m a topsy-turvey sort of person – I always seem react (medically) the opposite to the way other people seem to react.  Give me a tranquilizer, and I get all hyper… Give me an upper, and I promptly go to sleep…  weird! (well, I do have a reputation to maintain, after all!) 😉

Julian’s brother, his wife, and youngest son came over for a short “goodbye” visit this afternoon.  They’ve been on a six week holiday from Israel, where they live, and are flying home on Monday, though I think they’re planning on moving back to Australia permanently in a year or two.  It was good to see them again – it’s been a long time between visits! 🙂

And so that’s about it from me – more again tomorrow night…. 🙂

Down down, weight’s going down…  Ghods, I hate that jingle – except where it refers to me and my weight, that is! 🙂

128.9kg this morning! 😀 I’ve broken through the 129kg barrier!  I’d say “onwards and upwards”, but ummm… that might give the gremlins and all the powers that be, the wrong impression…  so, “onwards and downwards” shall be my catch cry from now on… 🙂 (closes eyes, crosses fingers, touches wood, and prays very hard to any gremlins or powers that be that might be listening: “please don’t let me go back up again tomorrow!”)

Do you think I’m getting paranoid?

My eldest daughter came over today for a visit – and we watched tapes of “Person of Interest” until the Podiatrist arrived to “do” our feet.  I was not pleased to be told that I have yet another infection under the toenail of my big toenail on my left foot.  It’s been in strife since I went to one of those “Spa” type places over a year ago and an over-enthusiastic young lady dug down a little too far under the toenail and damaged the nail bed which then got very nastily infected and the doctor was talking about removing the nail – luckily she didn’t have to, in the end 🙂 After over a year it’s been slowly (oh, sooo  s-l-o-w-l-y) getting better… Or so I thought.  It had almost (almost) grown all the way back on the nail bed… Now most of it has  had to be cut off so that the infection can drain properly and heal, and… I’m displeased…

But… all my clothes are getting too big for me!  Isn’t that fantastic!? 😀

More tomorrow night, as usual…

I’m almost past the 129kg marker!  This morning weighed in at 129.1kg!!!  …If there are any gods out there reading this, please don’t let me slip back up again, especially through no fault of my own!

I had my Warfarin blood test this morning – they test you to see what your clotting (Prothrombin) factor is (it’s called your “INR” – International Normalized Ratio, for some reason!).  Anyhoo, the higher the number, the thinner your blood is. (which is good, in my case). 1 (one) is the clotting factor for a normal person.  As I’ve had two episodes of multiple pulmonary embolisms (multiple blood clots in both lungs) in the last seven years I need to keep my blood thin so that it (hopefully) doesn’t happen again – I don’t think I’d survive another episode… At the moment my INR is 2.1 and that seems to be about right for me, and is remaining stable as long as I take my rat poison.  I told them (Dorevitch Pathology Warfarin Department who are monitoring me) that I’ve started taking celery seed “capsules” because I suffer from fluid retention, but they must have thought it was OK because they didn’t tell me not to, and I don’t have to have another blood test until October.

Why can’t you have celery seed, I hear someone mutter… Well, it’s because it has quite a high level of vitamin K in it, and too much vitamin K can disrupt the action of the Warfarin.  There’s a whole list of vegetables that I have to steer away from – mostly leafy greens – though as long as you either have it/them regularly, and not in heaped platefuls, it’s generally alright… though if you’re going to be making a habit of it you should tell your monitors in case they have to adjust your Warfarin dose.

So now that I’ve told you everything you wanted to know about Warfarin, but were too afraid to ask, I shall leave you until tomorrow night… Hopefully with good news… 🙂