Called Margle Palace, which is what we found when we arrived in Draumheim (please don’t ask me how to pronounce it!) this morning. Draumheim is the second of the three new areas/zones that opened up with the new expansion, and is (supposedly) for levels 62 to 63 (we’re both level 63) It’s reasonably large, and we’ve discovered a whole new major Hub called Margle Palace. In case you’re wondering, Hubs are where you get a lot of your quests, and where you might find a few Professional trainers and workbenches, depending on the size and importance of the hub. Major Hubs are where you’ll find the majority of your quest givers, your Class trainers, major merchants, banks, auction houses, professional workshops, and Profession trainers. They always have one or two Porticulums (think “Beam me up, Scottie!” transporters 🙂 ), and a hairdresser. Yes, a hairdresser! Where you can change just about anything about your appearance, depending on how much gold and platinum you want to spend – you can even change your sex! 🙂 When you first start out in Rift, you usually make the run to your Major Hub/capital city pretty quickly and “bind” your soul there, as it’s generally a more convenient place to go back to, with its banks, auction houses, merchants and trainers (for those with a World of Warcraft background, think “Hearthing” – for those without that background, think of it as clicking your heels three times, and saying “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”, and viola, as the French say, you’re back in Kansas!) Sanctum is the Major Hub/capital of the Guardians, the Major Hub/capital of the Defiants is called Meridian. When you get to level 50, you can move on to another Major Hub called Tempest Bay, which is multi faction – it has everything that the other two Major Hubs have, and more, but it’s newer, more compact, and more interesting. Now, however, we’ve come to Margle Palace, and it’s gi-normous! I reckon, looking at the map, that it takes up a good three quarters of the entire area/zone! It’s so big that it has to have three or four (we haven’t really counted them all yet!) mini porticulums, to get you from one part of the palace to another (you could run to all those places, but it would waste too much time – and besides, not all the areas of the palace are safe…) It’s pretty mind boggling, to tell the truth! It’s going to take a l-o-n-g time to learn our way around it (by which time I hope we’ll be heading off to the third and final area of the new expansion – I’m not even sure what it’s called!) There’s one very strange area in this palace – if you stand too close to what looks like a bulbous jelly fish floating in mid air, you get bounced up into the sky… and bob up on the surface of the water! To go back, you just swim straight down, and end up falling (gently!) down to the ground. As I said… it’s mind boggling… 🙂

Anyway, we had a good, if occasionally confusing, run today. Himself died a couple of times (I didn’t! *smirk*), and went up about …. a third of a level? Leveling up starts to get painfully slow when you get to about level 50 or so… you can take “boosters” to help you level faster – and I admit that I did, to get my other girls to level 50 as quickly as possible – but since the expansion we haven’t bothered doing that… yet, anyway… We’ve been reasonably content to muddle along, picking the flowers (grass, actually) (NO! Not that kind of grass, grass grass!) as we go along… curing our own hides for sale on the auction house, and mining and smelting our own ores, also for sale on the auction house. And so another Sunday Traipsing Through Telara passed in relative harmony (I only yelled at him once or twice, I think…)

Weigh-in this morning was encouraging, considering that it’s getting closer to the time when my weight usually shoots right up for a couple of days… I clocked in at 114.9kg, so not quite low enough for me to consider myself “safe” in the 114kg zone, but encouraging, none the less. I seem to be shedding a kilo about every four to five days, which is good. I’ve lost almost 20kg since I started on August 18th this year… and I’m still not even half way! Waaaaa! Still, it’s a start… 🙂

So tune in again tomorrow night – find out if I’ve gone down a bit more, or if I’ve started on my hated and dreaded few days gain… Who knows what might happen tomorrow, eh? There’s always something different and new around every corner, and I, for one, want to know what it is! 🙂

Is the colour of one of the nail polishes that I got today! It’s by O.P.I. and actually called “Significant Other Color” (!!), but it’s a sort of a pale mauve-rose-pearl. The other one is also by O.P.I., and is a frosted(ish) palest, pale grey-ish colour – just enough grey in it so that it’s not a stark white. It’s called “Int’l Crime Caper” for some totally incomprehensible reason, and comes from their ‘Muppets Most Wanted’ Collection. Anyway, they’re both very nice, and I’m currently wearing “Significant Other Color” (two coats – no base, no sealer) – I’ll see how it lasts, and try the other one next time.

Yes, we went out early this morning, before it got too hot – we didn’t have to vote today because we’d already Postal Voted on Thursday (or was it Wednesday? I fergit…) I just wanted to look for some nice nail polishes… I was originally going to go to Priceline to look for nail polishes, but as we came in next to DJ’s, I went in there first, and got totally distracted by the number of fancy-smantzy scented candles they have out – no doubt for Christmas – and was so distracted that I ended up talking himself into buying one 🙂 It’s a double wicked one called “Galapagos”, by Glasshouse Fragrances, and is Kaffir Lime and Cocoa Butter scented. Very nice! 🙂 And then… we came home again 🙂

Once home, it was head down, tail up, shifting (eternally shifting, it feels like!) Dimension goods from one landing place to the next. B.E. (Before the Expansion), I used a very handy addon called ‘Dimension Tools’, which was essentially a tool to create co-ordinates which make copying, pasting, moving, scaling, and rotating easier and faster. The so-called “tools” (and I use the term loosely!) that come native with Dimensions are, well, useless… and time consuming, and totally user hostile. Unfortunately, with the advent of the expansion, Dimension Tools stopped working – as is to be expected with utilities and addons when a large update or expansion is enabled, so we were expecting that… What we weren’t expecting was that the writer of the addon decided that they weren’t interested in upgrading the older version, and we were left up the creek without a Dimensional paddle! After a short while, another ambitious person decided that they’d write their own version of a Dimension Toolbox, and, we thought, all would be well again. This new addon worked just fine, at first… well, it was a little “lumpy”, but it moved the things around… Lately however, it’s been getting a lot “lumpier”; jerkiness, the occasional error message telling you to close the program, that sort of thing. The errors started getting more frequent, and today, I couldn’t get it to do anything at all without the [insert very rude word] error messages. I’m really fed up! I can’t do anything useful or significant with the clumsy so-called tools available, and the two would-be addon writers seem to have given up on our only hope(s) of Dimension building (I wonder if their names are “Ben” and “Kenobi”? – after all, they seem to be our only hope(s) of managing Dimension construction and decoration!) Ah well, now I have two girls with all bags and banks full of Dimension items, and no way of placing them in “storage” that isn’t going to take many, many hours of dull, boring, tedious and eye straining work! 😦 Not. Happy. Jan!

Anyway, I fiddled with that until about half past three this afternoon, whereupon I gave up, went and washed my hands, and repaired to the lounge room to try out my new nail polishes – er… one of them. Not both. I think I did an OK job – been a couple of years since I bothered to do my nails, but I managed not to spill the nail polish into the grouting, and most of it stayed on my nails, and not on my fingers or the furniture… So I’ll count that as “job well done” 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was a bit boring – I stayed the same, at 115.3kg Disappointing, but them’s the breaks, I guess… Oh well, maybe I’ll be down tomorrow… Here’s hoping… 🙂

It looks as though we’re in for another fardling Labor Government – honestly, I really don’t know which of the two so-called “major” parties is the worst! They’re both bumbling, inept, lying, scheming, and couldn’t care less about the people they’re supposed to be governing, bunches of losers! I don’t know what the answer is (I wish I did!), I just know it’s neither Labor, Liberal, nor Green… Heaven help Australia, and Victoria in particular!

Tune in again tomorrow night, after our weekly bash around Telara, and find out if my weight stayed the same, or if it went up… or down. Join us for a wake for Victoria, because no matter who gets across the line, it won’t be good news for us, and, most importantly, find out if either of us went up another level in our Sunday rampage romp! 😉

It’s Friday again… to be followed tomorrow by another Saturday, etc., etc… It’s getting entirely too close to Christmas, you know, and we haven’t even started doing our Christmas Cards, or organising most of the Christmas presents… Some of the Christmas presents are on their way though, and should probably arrive on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest. Favourite eldest daughter’s husband won’t be a problem, neither will favourite youngest daughter or her husband… but himself’s going to be a headache and three quarters! He keeps promising me a list of things he wouldn’t mind getting, but I’ve seen no sign of it yet… Crikey, I’ve even managed to come up with something that I want for Christmas – and he keeps forgetting, and asking me what I want. Hmmm. This is either a sign of rapidly advancing dementia on his part, or else he just doesn’t want to give me a nice, leather manicure set (with at least six or seven pieces in it, hint, hint!) I’d say “perfume”, but we just bought two bottles of Estee Lauder’s Cinnabar (my favourite!) the week before last, and although I like it very much, I don’t really want to swim in it. Flipper will probably get a couple of tins of her favourite dinner, and maybe, if she’s really good 😉 a small bag of her second favourite treats (as she’s only just been bought a big bag of her very favourite ones). A present for a very good friend of ours who lives way out in woop-woop (Kurunjang, I think it is), and something edible for Emma, our cleaning lady (who did not look at all well today, in fact we’re quite worried about her She didn’t even stop for her usual gossip before she started, either!) And you know? That’s about the size of our Melbourne family! In Adelaide we have Julian’s mother, so we have to get something nice to be shipped over there, along with a few old family friends and relations (boxes of shortbread and chocolates are the usual fare in that department) Something for Julian’s sister in Sydney, and a special Christmas Card for the rest of the family in Israel, and that’s it! Better get cracking if we’re to get all those things in time for Christmas! 😉

Favourite eldest daughter was over today, but sadly there was no episode of Agents of Shield 😦 The Silly Season is truly upon us! We did watch a few episodes of Person of Interest, and it’s really getting nail bitingly tense at the moment! We didn’t have time to watch the final episode in this particular story arc as we simply ran out of time. And now I shall probably have nightmares until next Friday! 😦

Oh, our oven blew up tonight! Well, it didn’t exactly go *BANG* and burst into flames, or anything – actually it just… stopped working, with himself’s dinner half cooked! Luckily it was something that he could finish off on the stove, so he didn’t go hungry, but wasn’t it lucky that it died now, instead of the day before Christmas, or even Christmas Day itself! Hopefully we’ll be able to get it fixed, or replaced, before Christmas, or it’ll be “O.K! All over to Lisa and Neale’s for Christmas Dinner!“, or perhaps more likely “O.K! All over to Kate and Terry’s for Christmas Dinner!“, and poor Flipper would have to stay home all on her own – she doesn’t travel well or gracefully, and she’d probably die of fright, or try to run away, if we let her out in a strange place… 😦

Weigh-in this morning went well – down to 115.3kg today, so I’ve been going down 3 points a day since Wednesday. I am most pleased! 🙂 Maybe I’ll go down to 115.0kg tomorrow – though it would be nicer if it went down to, say, 114.8kg ? (but I don’t think that’s likely to happen!)

And that’s about it from me tonight – “Watch This Space” tomorrow – to find out if we can get the oven fixed before Christmas, who won the election (if you care enough about it, that is), did my favourite eldest daughter win a Parliamentary seat, and what happened at my weigh-in. Yes, folks, step right up and get allll your answers here, while they’re hot! 😉

Well, I did get to work on my new Bookmarks page today, and what’s more, I finished it! I’m not quite sure what I originally had in mind for it, but this morning amongst my spam email I received a message from one of my old graphics sites, offering freebie Photoshop brushes – a lot of them snowflake brushes! Well, I just couldn’t resist, and downloaded the lot of ’em… unzipped them, and of course, had to try them out like yesterday. Coupled with styles (mostly ones I’d made for other projects), they looked quite pretty… so with Christmas galloping rapidly towards us, I thought why not a “Christmas, but not quite!” theme – lots of grey skies threatening snow storms, and lots of snowflakes! And topped it all off with the gold(ish) title “WinterHome” (I told you it’d be completely different! 😉 ) I then dug out Kompozer, the free WYSIWYG HTML editor, and proceeded to (try to) organise the 10 sites I visit most frequently into some sort of semi-intelligible order. I failed. In the end I just bunged them all into two columns, hoping that they wouldn’t look too unbalanced. They do a bit, but that’s because there are more short names than long ones, so the long ones look a little… untidy. I had a lot of trouble with the HTML – Kompozer is even worse than Front Page in that regard – and quite frankly, I didn’t really think that was possible – but at least with Front Page you could break up the lines, read them, make some sort of sense out of them, alter a few things, switch back to the visual side, check it, then re-enter the HTML editor, without the ruddy program slamming shut the editor and obliterating all your carefully separated lines, like Kompozer does! Aaarrggghh! What’s more, it chops the lines up into itty-bitty pieces, so you seem to get half of one line, then half of the next line on the same line, then a nonsensical break and then the rest of the previous line, bunged in with about a third of the next line. I’m no HTML guru; I couldn’t write a page in straight HTML to save my soul, but I can get by doing simple editing – I was actually quite good at correcting Front Page’s mistakes, and it looked like “proper” HTML when I’d finished, all nice and neat and tidy – but with this program? I took one look, shuddered, and decided that if it worked, I didn’t [insert rude word here] care what the damned HTML looked like!

I’m toying with the idea of creating a blog header to match… but I’ve been neglecting Cersie and her Dimensionable a lot lately (well, it gets terribly boring, stacking furniture, and walls, and pot plants, and rocks, and rugs, and food, and…. well, you get the idea! 😉 ) And the Dimensionables just keep on coming… Maybe it’d be a better idea if I created a fully decorated Dimension, rather than just stacking the stuff… lord knows, I have enough empty Dimensions and Keys to create a whole kingdom! (well, a very small kingdom, anyway…) So tonight it’s back to the Minions, and if it’s still daylight in Telara, maybe a small bit of questing before bed time.. 🙂

Favourite eldest daughter is coming over tomorrow – and so is our cleaning lady, so it’s probably going to get quite noisy here for a while, but by the time we’ve had lunch it should be a little quieter, and hopefully we’ll get to watch some “Agents of Shield” and “Person of Interest” – speaking of “Person of Interest”, it’ll be interesting to see which person claims the Political victory on Saturday night. Unfortunately, it won’t be anyone I want to lead our state – I can’t stand either of the two major parties, and I wouldn’t vote Greens if they were the only political party left in Australia – but then, that’s what you get when you live in a Democracy, I guess.  Oh well. We’ve already voted – we sent off our postal vote the other day… I am annoyed that it’s going to be hot on Saturday though – I wanted to go shopping to get some nail polish, and it’s going to be unpleasantly hot 😦 Favourite youngest daughter was over last Saturday, and her nails looked really good – I just wanted to be a copy cat 🙂 Well, we’ll see… if I can persuade himself to go out, I might brave the heat… then again, I might just be my usual cowardly self and stay home… 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was quite good – down three points to 115.6kg, which was very pleasing. Hopefully it’ll be down again tomorrow (but I’m not going to hold my breath!) I had both morning tea and afternoon tea today, so I might even go up… I hope not….

Anyway, tune in again tomorrow night to find out all the latest comings and goings, of weight and other mundane occurences, at chez nous (that’s French, for “at our place” – yeah, I’m a showoff, too! 😉 )

WHY can’t I ever write a short blog??!!

🙂 or me either, for that matter! This morning started out ordinarily enough – weigh-in, cup of tea, breakfast… and that’s where the mundane stopped, and rush hour began! I logged in to Rift, checked my auctions (the Dagger sold, Josh – your gold is in the mail! 😉 ) and my Minion’s offerings. Because we had to leave early for my exercise class and we were going to have an early lunch, I didn’t really want to start questing, or moving Dimension bits and pieces around, so I logged off and started… working on my new Bookmarks page for Chrome, instead! 🙂 It’ll have an entirely new design, concept, and contents when it’s finished, and I did get a fair way into it before I had to stop to gobble down my lunch bar and get ready to depart. I don’t even remember having morning tea…  (apparently I didn’t!) You know, it’s been years – quite literally! 2005 – 2006 is when I stopped doing any serious graphics work, and at first I’d found it really, really hard to get back into the swing of it, but since I’ve been doing a bit every day for a couple of weeks, the old habits are starting to come back, and I’m remembering more and more of the techniques and “tricks of the trade” that I used to use 🙂

So off we went to the torture chamber exercise gym, where once again, I was given a whole lot of new exercises with which to fold, spindle and mutilate my muscles… though thankfully, I have to do these ones lying down! (a good excuse for a snooze, if you ask me! 😉 ) My right arm has been getting very sore lately – f’rinstance, by the time I finish writing this, if I try to straighten my arm out, it’s going to hurt a lot. Ditto after I’ve been Rifting for any length of time, ditto whatever I’m doing at the computer… I may have to do some more knitting… Oh well, torture exercise class over, we headed off to The Glen. Since my little shopping trip last week, I have come to realise that one shirt and two Tee shirts are not enough to keep me going for more than two or three days, so The Glen, being the closest to the exercise place, was where we headed next, and I got another six Tee-shirty items, and another of the first shirt I bought last week, ‘coz I really love it… Greatly daring because it was school getting out time, and the roads and streets were clogged solid with school kids and the parents of said school kids on their pick-up runs, we next took ourselves off to a Gentleman’s clothing shoppe in Moorabbin, where himself got three nice new Sport Coats, four shirts, three pairs of trews, and one pair of shoes. Oh, and a double sided belt (black on one side, brown on the other, with a snazzy little “flip switch” thingy to reverse the buckle!) 🙂

[ I hate him! Himself has just informed me that he “felt old”, because the pilot of the original Star Trek series was shot 50 years ago, two years before he was born! Why do I hate him for that? Because Mum and Dad and I used to sit on the couch in the lounge room watching that series (later syndicated) religiously. If he feels old because it started two years before he was born, how does he think that makes me feel?!? ]

Anyway, a good day’s shopping was had by all; we arrived home exhausted, ready to collapse in a heap, and totally craving coffee… and you know what I did? Back to my graphics… 🙂

Once again, weigh-in this morning wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be – I did go up, but only by one point, to 115.9kg – what will happen tomorrow is anyone’s guess… I not only missed morning tea today, but I missed afternoon tea as well, as it was after 5 by the time we got home. Maybe that’ll help…

So if you want to find out if my new clothes fit, and if I went up, down or stayed the same, weight-wise, tune in tomorrow night, same bat time, same bat channel, and find out the answers to these many weighty questions – and I can assure you, the answer is not 42! 😉

I’ve been working extra hard today – I finally got the last of my Speed Dial Bookmark groups transferred across to Chrome – no easy task – the last three were… somewhat on the large side. There were all the Rift links – mostly lists of materials for Crafting, what zones they were found in, or what dropped them, and Dimension item databases and the like… with a few maps thrown in for good measure. Then there was the group of Old song lyrics – musical comedy, Josephine Baker songs from w-a-y back, a lot of Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six lyrics, and the inimitable Felix Hagan and The Family. If anyone’s interested in the last two, I can post links… 🙂 Last, but certainly not least – in fact I think it was the biggest! – was my group of “Favourite Authors and Books to watch out for”. The problem with the last two groups was that I kept getting distracted, stopping to look back over some of my favourite lyrics (even the ones in French), and the almost entire libretto of the musical “Camelot” (not my most favourite musical, but hey! I liked it well enough 🙂 My most favourite musical, ever, is “South Pacific” (I have the complete, original score for the Melbourne stage version in 1952, too!)) Then there were the books… also very distracting, as it was quicker to visit each site to get the url than to open up each Speed Dial box and extract it from there – and of course, I spotted new books here and there along the way which I had to stop and read about… 🙂 However, ’tis all done now, and Firefox can be “retired” (and I won’t have to open up an Explorer window in which to do my nightly Crossword! 😛 )

Then I went on to Rift. I also worked poor old Jademoss’s Crafting fingers down to the bone, making bags, clothes, and Augments for said clothes. It’s very annoying, really, you make good, enhanced gear for your characters, but it’s sort-of “staggered” – f’rinstance, Cotton robes, gloves, and cowl, are for level 19, right? Which is really just a little too low for my girls… unless you stack them up with Augments and Runes. Then the next “upgrade” is to Wool – but woolen breeches, shoulderpads, shoes and belt are for level 23… just a tad too high for my girls! What to do? I ended up making the woolen gear which they’ll have to hang onto for another two levels (they’re all sitting at around level 21 at the moment) Tiring of that, I thought I’d move a bit more Dimension gear around – poor Cersie’s mail box was starting to overflow again. Something went a wee bit haywire with my ui (user interface – i.e. the placement of your setup on the screen) Layout, so instead of moving Dimension items, I had to move the invisible boxes that contain Action Bars and Quest stickies – in fact the whole weird layout I was suddenly presented with. It took forever, as it’s all invisible except when you’re actually in the editing window, so it was largely “hit and miss” (“Hmmm… needs to move about [squints at screen] another… 1/4 inch?? to the left… no! I mean right!” sort of stuff. Tres annoyment!) But I got it right again in the end… 🙂

By this time I was a trifle fed up with computers, so I dutifully had my afternoon tea (a very nice nectarine!) and fled to the lounge room to read… 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was quite astonishing! 🙂 I went down to 115.8kg! a most excellent drop! Actually, maybe a little too excellent? That’s another 1/2 kilo… Overnight??!! I mean, I don’t mind going down 1/2 a kilo a night – I wish I could do it every night! But you know what “they” say… “If something seems too good to be true, it’s because it is (too good to be true!)” …I’ll probably go up a kilo and a half tomorrow! 😦

So, tune in again tomorrow night to see if I did… or if I went down another half a kilo… or if I just stay the same! 🙂 Whatever – I still have to go to my exercise class tomorrow afternoon- and for once in my life I can’t think of a plausible excuse to wriggle out of it! 😉

Teacher, but I had another go today, and I hope I didn’t do too badly 🙂 Time will tell, I guess. Rift isn’t a very easy game to learn, especially when you haven’t had the benefit of just sitting and watching a professional like my favourite eldest daughter playing for a couple of years 🙂 Still an’ all, I think we covered quite a bit, and hopefully some of it will stick 😉 Tomorrow, after I’ve transferred the rest of my bookmarks to Chrome, I have to set too and do some serious re-crafting for my younger characters – I have been an extremely lazy and lax older sister to them, and they all need new gear. Now that some funds are starting to trickle back into the Guild Bank (after Wyntercat almost stripped it bare upping her Artificing to “Savant”!), I’ll be starting to make new and enhanced weapons and rings for three of them, and Jademoss will be busy at her virtual sewing machine making new robes, leggings, boots and gloves for everyone. Wot fun! 🙂 Diaphanous cloth hasn’t been selling well on the Auction House, so I’ve sort of been stockpiling it “for a rainy day”, and the young’uns will benefit from that when they grow up – unfortunately they’re still too young to wear such sumptuous gear at the moment – they’ll just have to make do with wool or silk 😉 Speaking of the low prices on the Auction House, I think I’ve discovered the true purpose of the Minions and their gathering adventures! I think it’s all a wicked plot by Trion, to artificially lower the Auction House prices in order to keep all us players in the (virtual) poor house. Some of us (rolls eyes) used to make quite a nice living from the Auction House, thank you very much, but at the moment I’m only bringing in about a third of what I used to, BM (Before Minions)! I’m thinking: Mats (materials) aren’t selling as well as they used to, because with Minions bringing the stuff in for us without us having to go out and mine for it, or pick it, or get the hides to turn into leather, everyone has enough of their own materials to work with and so have no need to buy it from the Auction House… But, without buying new Skill slots, you can only have three skills (professions, really) apart from Fishing and Survival, so it stands to reason that most people can only make one or two different types of ready made gear… However, if you spend the money (or Credits, I think) and buy a few more Skills (as I did, quite some time ago 😉 ) like, say, Weaponsmithing, or Outfitter (or whatever) you could quite happily supply ready made weapons or clothing (cloth or leather, and I think chain? Can Outfitters make chain mail? I can’t remember – I’ll have to check!) to be sold on the Auction House! Hmmm! Maybe the time has come to stop selling materials, and start selling gear! I might see how that works out, actually… (in the past, the materials to make something generally sold for more than the finished article, but now with a surplus of materials…) We shall see…

I spent the rest of the afternoon ferrying bookmarks (read: Speed Dial links) from Firefox to Chrome, and it all went very smoothly, and surprisingly quickly! I now have just about everything I need here (on Chrome), and I should get the last of it copied across by tomorrow afternoon. Then I can ditch Firefox, and start on a new “Winter’s Bookmarks” Home Page 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was as I expected, but not nearly as bad as I was dreading…. I did go up, but only by one point, to 116.4kg! So I’m not too distraught 🙂 What remains to be seen, though, is if I go up again tomorrow, or back down. Damn! I wish weight loss wasn’t such a see-saw business! 😦 It’s very unsettling!

So, tune in this time tomorrow night and find out if I’m dancing on the ceiling, or weeping in the cellar… waiting for a Fairy Godmother to come and wave her magic wand over me and make me 25 again! 😉 (I was slim then, you see! 🙂 )

Listening to: Felix Hagan and The Family (Debt Records), “Dawn Breaks, The Monster Wakes

Today being Sunday, was, of course, our traditional “Day in Telara”, or “Dying to Quest” 🙂 Well, today we did die a lot more than we usually do – mostly through inattention and “accidentally” bumping into creatures who either didn’t like being bumped into, or who were just plain ornery to start off with (like the Bloodthirsty Sheep and Cows on the farm ) I only died twice, but I think himself died about three times… (must have, because by the time we got back to Tempest Bay, it cost him a whole platinum to heal his soul… and that was his second visit to the Healer for the day! (It only cost me 37gold, and it was my second visit to the Healer’s, too!)) Still and all, I went up to level 63 (only two more levels to go! 🙂 ), and Julian came within a cat’s whisker of levelling up, so I think we did pretty well, all told. There was a bit of underwater swimming, but all the Gribblies must have been asleep or something, because we weren’t challenged even once, which is most unusual, and I wish happened a lot more often! 😉 Though on second thoughts, if it happened more often, we’d miss out on a lot of experience points! Hmmm…  Bring on the Gribblies! 🙂

This morning, before breakfast (and during it), I pondered the ramifications of ditching Firefox and swapping to either Opera or Chrome… I think it’s probably a good idea – Firefox has problems with Windowblinds (skins I use to disguise the truly horrible, puerile, and totally boring  surrounds that Windows sees fit to inflict upon us poor, innocent users!) I usually have to re-start Firefox every night in order to be able to play my nightly crossword and solitaire games without the wretched thing going into “Go Slow” mode, plus the fact that it seems to be not only ignoring my attempts to set a specific font size, but to size up graphics to match the font size it apparently thinks that I need! Not Happy, Jan! I was also thinking that it’s probably time I updated my bookmarks – the ones currently on my Home screen are terribly out of date and about the only ones I really still use are The Age, Wincustomize, Your TV, and the Dictionary! Occasionally I use things like Digital Tapestries (my old site), Village Cinemas,  and The White Pages. Apart from those, the rest are really redundant… The rest of the sites I go to regularly are all stored in groups within Speed Dial, and could probably be better organised on my Bookmarks Homepage. It’ll be an awful lot of tedious, boring work, transferring them over, plus having to find a Speed Dial equivalent that works with Chrome, and then transferring the rest of all my “favourite places” into it (and there really are a hell of a lot of them!) Hmmm… will I be lazy, stick with Firefox and save myself a lot of work, and put up with giant graphics and text? Or will I be noble and self sacrificing, and knuckle down to the hard, boring and repetitive work of transferring a lot of data across to a new system, of which I will be able to feel justifiably proud? 😉 You tell me! 😉

Weigh-in this morning was another big surprise, and I tell you, has been making me feel somewhat uneasy all day… While losing weight can make one proud, you know what the ubiquitous “they” say about Pride coming before a fall? well, I’m pretty sure they’re not talking a bout a fall in weight… like the one I had this morning. I think they’re talking about a “comeuppance”, or a “slap down” 😦 which is what I’m now uneasily expecting tomorrow morning You see, this morning I weighed in at 116.3kg… “Fantastic!” I hear you cry! Well, it was… but as I said, it’s making me feel… edgy. That’s over half a kilo in 24 hours! That’s gotta bounce back at me! I know I want to lose weight, and I want to lose it quickly, but really, I’d much rather go down 2 or 3 points a day, rather than half a kilo overnight… Ah well, we’ll see what happens tomorrow… I just hope I don’t bounce back up to 116.9kg!

Tune in tomorrow night to see if Fate has a nice, or a nasty surprise for me! 🙂 I won’t get too upset if I go back up (well, alright, I will get upset, but I’ll try to be brave… 😉 ) Wish me luck! 🙂

Firefox. Damn it! I don’t like it any more 😦 Why it’s insisting on re-scaling everything on my screen to stupidly ridiculous sizes, I have no idea, but… I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more! 😉 First, they take away my blue cats, and now they re-size me out of… of… of the size I want to see my graphics and read my text at! Grrr! I can’t stand Explorer (though I’m using it at the moment), so I’m thinking of switching to Chrome, or Opera… (though it means migrating all my groups of bookmarks across – somehow) Anyway, we’ll see… By the way, how do you like the new header I made for the blog? 🙂 I made it this afternoon, though I probably didn’t really need to do it… but the way I was seeing the page made it look enormous and “top heavy”, if you know what I mean. What alerted me to Firefox’s misdemeanours was that the new header looked out of focus and top heavy too… and yet it looked just right in Explorer (and so did the original one! 😛 ) So after a lot of fiddling around by me, and then by Julian, it was discovered that Firefox was the culprit, and I decided I’d have to change browsers. Roll on next week…. 🙂

Oh! Good news! We had a phone call from Autograph this morning! My left behind in the shopping trolley slacks were handed in to them by the man who found them. There are honest people in the world, after all! My faith in humanity is renewed! (well, partly, anyway… maybe just a smidge… or perhaps they didn’t fit his wife and he didn’t know what else to do with them… 😉 ) Julian went and picked them up this afternoon, and I now have 3 pairs of slacks again! 🙂 I am well pleased… 🙂

My favourite youngest daughter and her equal but more practical half paid us a visit this morning, and we spent part of the time discussing Christmas, who would be here, who wouldn’t, what did they want for Christmas, and no, I would not be partaking of the (rather lethal!) Christmas Egg Nog on Christmas Eve this year, etc., etc… (and I managed to sneak past morning tea again, un-noticed! 😉 ) Kate said that that was very naughty and would have the opposite effect to the one that I expect (i.e. losing a bit more weight), and that if I did it too often it would back-fire on me and make me heavier in the long run. I don’t know whether to believe her or not – I sort of do, I mean, she worked for Jenny Craig (no, no link back to them!) for 15 years – first as a Consultant, then as a Centre Manager, then in Admin, writing the training courses for the Consultants, so I reckon she has a fair idea of how weight loss works 🙂 Then they went home and I started to play Rift, but I got bored (*shock* *horror*), and decided to make the new blog Header instead, which I did. Then we pretty much spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find out why Firefox was being so… mean and pig-headed

Weigh-in this morning was OK… not as good as I would have liked – I went down to 116.9kg – only one point down from yesterday… (maybe Kate was right! Maybe I have skipped one too many morning and/or afternoon teas! Perhaps I’d better have both, tomorrow!) *sigh*

Flipper is her usual antisocial, Mummy disdaining, Daddy loving, grumpy self, sporting a shaved neck and paw (where they took the blood sample from, and where she had her blood pressure taken) so not much has changed in that department… but tune in again tomorrow to find out if I have, indeed, been doing the wrong thing, skipping morning and afternoon teas.. Will I go back up again? Will I stay on 116.9kg? Or (cross fingers, touch wood!), will I go down… ? 😉

TGIF! 🙂 Yes, ’tis the end of the week again – which means absolutely nothing, really, because my weekends are pretty much the same as my week days – except, of course, for Sunday’s, which are our “Questing for Fun and Profit in Telara” days. Today started fairly early for us, because Flipper had to be up at the Vet’s by about 8.00am, which was only accomplished after a lot of loud protests of “But we did this last week, Daddy!”, and “We don’t have to go today, Daddy! I’ve been there, done that, and I definitely do not want the T-shirt!”, with the occasional “LET ME OUT OF HERE!” on Flipper’s part… and a lot of encouraging sounding “There, there! Flipper, don’t worry little girl!” and “You’ll be back home soon, sweetheart!” on ours. Mission accomplished, Julian returned home and we had breakfast and a cup of tea, followed shortly thereafter by a cup of coffee before himself went off to pick up my favourite eldest daughter. All in all, it was a pretty rushed and busy morning – but the good side of it is, that once again, I managed to sneak past morning tea time without anyone noticing until this afternoon! 🙂 My weight’s almost guaranteed to go down, now! (oops! I shouldn’t have said that! I hope the Gremlins weren’t listening! )

After lunch, it was off to the lounge room to watch one episode of “Agents of Shield”, and two episodes of “Person of Interest”. Julian rang the Vet to see how Flipper was going, and when they wanted us to pick her up. It turned out that they wanted her for as long as possible, so Julian was to pick her up when he took my favourite eldest daughter home this evening. The upshot of Flipper’s veterinary visit was that (a) her kidney function was a little improved from last time, which is good. (b) the Vet who was looking after her today specialises in elderly cats was very pleased with her overall condition, which is also good. And (c) Her blood pressure is definitely higher, and we need to increase her medication, which is not good. She was taking 1/8 of a Norvasc tablet (Norvasc is a human blood pressure medication) Now we have to give her 1/6 of a tablet. We’re not quite sure how we’re going to accomplish that… the pills are shaped like a rectangle with the corners chopped off, about 7cm x 2.5cm in size, which were hard enough to break into 8 pieces, let alone into 6! They crumble very, very easily, and Julian was always most pleased if he could get 7 reasonably even pieces out of a tablet.

There’s another problem we’re going to have with Flipper early next year… We live on the 5th floor of a high-rise apartment, which is serviced by one lift. Early next year the lift is being “re-furbished” – in other words it’s having quite a lot of maintenance, mechanical upgrading, and inside re-paneling done, and will be totally out of operation for about 3 weeks. This is all fine and well if you’re young and fit and can trundle up and down the fire escape or the front stairs, but there are many of us in the building who are either too old, or too disabled to do that, and will probably have to move out for the duration. Which is what we’ll have to do – I don’t like the thought of being cooped up in the apartment for three weeks, and what if there’s a fire?! 😉 The thing is, what are we going to do with Flipper? The Vet wouldn’t mind “boarding” her for a couple of nights, but certainly not for three weeks, and there’s no way we’d send her off to a boarding cattery – for starters, there’s her daily medication to consider, not to mention she’s very old, and a sudden and prolonged change in her daily routine might even be enough to carry her off. Besides, she just about lives for her “Daddy pats”, and I for one wouldn’t deprive her of one of her only pleasures. I’ll have a look online tomorrow for “Pet Friendly” Hotels, Motels, or Serviced Apartments, but I don’t really like my chances of finding something that we’d be happy to stay in, too! So, if any of you out there know of anywhere we can stay, or have an alternative solution, please let me know! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was better than yesterday’s! Back down to 117.0kg, where I was the day before yesterday. (See?! I told you that missing a morning tea, or an afternoon tea (or better yet, both of them!) would work! 😉 ) Well, I went without morning tea this morning (I had a pear for afternoon tea though), so hopefully it’ll make my weigh-in tomorrow a bit less… This morning the scales dithered around 116.9kg for a couple of seconds, then changed their mind and went up to 117.0kg instead, so…. almost into the 116kg bracket… 🙂

Anyway, tune in again tomorrow to find out all the latest on Julian’s pill chopping, my weight, and Flipper’s histrionics – the cat carry basket is still living in plain sight, under the desk! 😉