Gone tomorrow… The year 2014, almost over… I can’t say that I’ll miss it, exactly – from our point of view, a lot of not terribly nice things happened, but, on the other hand, a lot of good things happened too, so it is with somewhat mixed feelings that I wave 2014 a fond adieu. I ended up in hospital twice – but, I also found a fantastic new doctor 🙂 I determined to lose weight – by diet alone, sans surgery, something that all the doctors told me that I wouldn’t be able to do (I love proving them wrong! 😀 ) – and I’ve lost 24kg in four months – and I’m a-telling you, I ain’t a-missin’ them thar kilos one tiny little bit! 🙂 But… I’m only half way in my weight loss program. The ubiquitous “They” tell me that each journey starts with the first step in the right direction… and “They” also tell me that “all diets fail in the end”, except, I think, where the dieter really wakes up to themselves and is determined not to fall back into… eating half a packet of biscuits at a time, because “they taste nice”… or… sitting watching television, mindlessly popping Malteasers into their mouth “because they’re there, and they taste nice”. I have also proved to myself since August that I do not get hungry – not even a little bit – when I don’t eat those things, so hunger was never the problem. I never did have a big appetite, but I was lazy, and bored, and if the goodies were there, I’d sit and eat them, for no better reason than that they were there, and they tasted nice. Simple solution. Make sure they’re not there. If they’re not there, I can’t even be tempted (though I don’t think I would be any longer, anyway because the mere thought of eating those things again makes me shudder and feel ill!) Enough about the weight loss, more about the year that almost isn’t any more! 🙂 What else have I accomplished? I’ve started this blog, and kept at it. I’ve started lots of blogs in the past and never posted more than about once or twice in them – I’ve always given up on them with the attitude of “Uh! Who’s going to give a damn what I think, and what I feel, anyway!” Well, with this blog, it’s me who really “doesn’t give a damn” what anyone else thinks about my ramblings, because this blog is for me, as well as about me! What else… I’ve made a friend – well, I hope he’s a friend – and I’ve gone back to my graphics, tentatively, anyway. So… while bad things happened to me and mine, there were a lot of positive things too… so as I said, it is with somewhat mixed feelings that I wave goodbye to 2014. And I wonder, with no little trepidation, what 2015 has in store for us all…

I got a good long session of Rifting in this morning – himself went over to my favourite youngest daughter’s place to set up her new laptop properly, and to get her email working – and I sat and ran gaily through Telara, killing Goblins, Aelfwar, Satyrs, and sort-of wolves, with happy abandon (did I ever mention the fact that I want a keyboard that isn’t one key to the right out of synch with my hands?!!! (and I just had to go and correct two typos in that sentence, caused by that very problem, and I was looking at the keyboard the whole time, ‘coz I can’t touch type!) Grrr! However, I do have a birthday coming up in March… hint? hint? So, anyway, I sat and Telara’d until lunch time… Then I thought to myself “I’ll have another go at creating pretty baubles with lots of bling on them!” and then my favourite youngest daughter rang up and I sat and talked to her instead, so not much bauble-ing got done, but I have the beginnings of a pretty ruby one saved, and as I really don’t get a chance to talk to my favourite youngest daughter very often, I made the most of the opportunity 🙂 Then himself came home, and I went up to the lounge to have a (most welcome) cup of tea and read with him for a bit. We had an early dinner (my soup was Chicken tonight – tomorrow night it’s back to Tomato!), and watched what passes for news these days. Then we watched two episodes of Star Trek Enterprise, and now here I am! 🙂 Writing another missile missive to you all…

Weigh-in this morning was even more proof that things are back to what is laughingly called “normal”. I went down 3 points to 110.1kg, where I was last Sunday, and the Friday before that. Talk about a see-saw! So who knows where it’ll be tomorrow – hopefully my body will start the New Year as it means to go on… and that is, down! Tomorrow I also start back on those wretched pills that make me retain fluid, so I hope I go down a reasonable lot so that the extra fluid I’ll accumulate won’t bounce me back into the mid 110kgs!

So tune in again tomorrow night – find out what the fireworks over the city were like from our lounge room, and if we toasted the New Year in with a daring champagne flute of sparkling mineral water… and most importantly, of course, how this recalcitrant body of mine decided to start off the New Year! 😉

🙂 HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!! 🙂

I received an unexpected present in my email this morning, from WordPress! A summary of my 2014 blogging activities, and seeing as how I didn’t even start this blog until August sometime, it makes for quite interesting reading. I didn’t realise that I had more than just one or two readers, so thanks everyone for looking in on my sometimes slightly unorthodox musings! 🙂 I hope you’ve enjoyed, and will continue to enjoy, reading about the trials and tribulations in my dieting and weight loss endeavours, and in my otherwise quiet and totally uneventful life… Ahhhh… and I have this great bridge for sale, too – only one owner, a little old lady who rode her shark with feet over it every week on her way to the Auction House… 🙂 (Uneventful? I should be so lucky! 😉 ) As I was given the option to share the results with you, I posted it, and if you want to have a look at it, it follows this post.

I Rifted this morning, but it was a late start – someone must have tripped over one of the cables at Trion or something, because first the shards were a bit shaky, then they came down altogether, and didn’t come back online until well after 10.30am. I’d noticed that it seemed a little jerky last night, too, and what’s more (or it may be the true culprit!), Glyph crashed on me last night, right in the middle of logging on – sent an error report, and proceeded to work just fine *shrug* – who knows? Anyway, once it was back up this morning I quested Gingerlilly until lunchtime (so not really all that long, after all!)

After lunch I drifted back to graphics for a while – made some little buttons/gems – “thingies” – for my project… and this time I did make sure to keep saving things! 🙂 I’m not sure if I like them though – they’re nice enough, I suppose, but I really wanted something more… dazzling? They need a bit more “bling”, or something… I’ll keep working on them. So far I’ve made 5 round ones, and 5 diamond shaped (i.e. squares sitting on a corner!) ones, but as I said, I really wanted them brighter. I’m having to dredge deep in my almost forgotten store of graphics know-how, trying to remember how I used to do things – actually that’s not quite right – I do remember how I used to do things, it’s just that this new version of Eye Candy is different from the one I used to use – and quite frankly, it’s not even remotely as good. In a totally misguided attempt to make things “slicker” and more “streamlined” and “modern”, they’ve changed, or rather, omitted, a lot of very useful and necessary controls! Especially in the drop shadow controls… I miss the old one a lot. Oh well, such is the price of progress. A prettier package at the expense of useful tools! So what else is new? I’m not impressed, Alien Skin! Yes, there are work-arounds, yes, they do take longer to produce what isn’t, in my opinion, a comparable result. Back to the drawing board…

I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow, New Year’s Eve; we’ll probably treat it as just another night (and probably be spending a bit of it in Telara, too 😉 ), only we’ll open the blinds and turn the lights down so that we can watch the fireworks on the city skyline when they start popping, and maybe, just maybe… if we’re feeling really festive, we’ll toast each other with mineral water – in champagne flutes! 🙂 As for New Year Resolutions? I think we resolved not to make any, many years ago! Is anyone else doing anything special for New Year’s? Do drop us a line and tell us all about it!

Weigh-in this morning found my scales and my body in collusion again… Yes, I went up. Only one point, to 110.4kg, but my traitorous body put on weight! I was not pleased! Especially after being so good, and going down almost a kilo in one day… so on the other hand, maybe it went down so much because it knew it was about to go up, and rather than go up a lot, it went down a lot first, so as not to make to going up look so bad? I hope that made sense… if you read it through three times slowly, like I just did, it does… sort of…

So stay tuned tomorrow night – never mind the celebrations, this is more important – and find out if I went up again, in which case I shall be most upset, or if I went down… or, heaven help us, I stayed the same… and if you’re very, very good, on Thursday night I might even tell you what the fireworks were like 🙂

A present from WordPress that arrived in my email this morning! I was given the option of sharing it with all my readers (and it seems that there’s a few more than I thought there were!), so here it is – regular blog follows (or perhaps precedes, whichever comes first…)

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 660 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 11 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

That the Christmas Cards came down… the tree will probably come down next Sunday, anyway, and getting rid of the cards might give me a bit more desk space. Unfortunately, that means that my pretty plastic-resin-crystal stag will have to be packed away until next Christmas too, and I rather like him sitting there on my giant pill box… I suppose I could make the case that he’s a stag, not a reindeer, and therefore is not traditionally bound to Christmas per se… Hmmm… good point! I think I’ll leave him out – I have the perfect spot already picked out for him to live in, too! 🙂 This morning we plotted and schemed for some exciting new hair colours for me – I hope they’re not too extreme, but hang it all, I don’t really care if they are! I want something different… Later, I experimented a bit with a super new ummm.. utility? App? I’m not sure what you’d call it, but it makes “draw your own nebulas”. I’m not even sure of it’s name, but you can find it here. My favourite eldest daughter posted about it on Facebook, and when I went and had a look at it I was instantly hooked! It’s basically a black background, with 8 different colours you can use to make your “nebula” with – red, yellow, grass green, teal, ultramarine, purple, black (on a black background???), and white. On the right hand side it has a set of controllers and sliders, and some “presets”, including “fine”, “intense”, “smooth”, “worms”, and a few other ones, which dictate the strength and cloudiness of your “nebula”. It’s quite mesmerising, and while every time I use it I fully intend to use only two colours, to make something that I can turn into “gems” for yet another of my projects (this time for myself), I find myself thinking: “I wonder what some blue (or green, or purple, or whatever I haven’t already used) would look like in there…”, and before I know it, I have a whole jumble of colours instead of just the two I started out with. I’ll try again tomorrow… 🙂 After lunch I got stuck into some serious Rifting (well, not really serious serious, but certainly “head down, tail up” questing – leveling up my new and improved Gingerlilly), though the “baby” quests I’m going through at the moment I could probably do with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back – as long as it was my left hand, that is. I had the same problem with World of Warcraft, too, and it’s because I’m an altoholic… I create an awful lot of characters, and of course, they all have to start off at level 1… so by the time you’ve run, ummm…. 20+ level 1 characters through all the “starter” quests and up to about level 35, everything starts to get a little boring and humdrum. Also, I always intend to use different Classes, and different “builds” – that is the type of character: Warrior (well, duh!), Cleric (read: Priest), Rogue (read: Hunter), and Mage (read: Magic User). Each Class is made up of several sub-Classes, and each sub-Class has different – sometimes very different – fighting “styles”. So I always intend to try something different, but somehow I always seem to gravitate back to the style that I find the easiest (for me) and the most effective. I have a level 60 Rogue (Hunter), who’s quite fun to work with, but I find her much more fragile and “delicate” than my Mages, and I had a level 60 Warrior, but I hated playing a Warrior, and found it very hard work and not much fun – so she, unfortunately, no longer exists. Personally, I find Mages the easiest and most effective to play – unlike World of Warcraft, Rift’s Mages are not delicate little “Clothies” (Mages wear cloth armor, which is supposedly “fragile”) who fall over if you sneeze on them – no, we’re made of much sterner stuff, and can do a lot of damage, when riled! 😉 Although there are a lot of ready-made builds for each Class, where your soul points go as you level is pre-determined by whichever build you’ve chosen. I prefer to construct my own build, and put my points where I want them to go, and not where the game thinks they should go… So I always seem to end up with the same old build – a Warlock (good for Damage over Time spells), Necromancer (because you get a pet to fight with you, a few DoTs, and a lot of very damaging Primary Bolts (a sort of a “Zap!”spell)), and a Dominator (because you get at least one very good Primary Bolt) So as I said… it can get a bit boring and humdrum, unless you’re playing with someone else.

Weigh-in this morning, I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear, was back to “situation normal” again. That’s right, I went up… to where I was the day before yesterday, at 110.3kg. So now it looks like I’m back to the old “gnaw on the nails and fret myself into a nervous breakdown if I go up too much, or stay the same for too long, or don’t go down enough to please my anxious little brain” state of existence. Ah well, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – the more things change, the more they stay the same 🙂

So Call in again tomorrow night, and find out if I’ve made any headway in making little gems out of pretty nebulae for my latest project – or if I’ve thought of another possible build to use on one of my Mages… but most importantly, to find out if my nails are chewed down to the quick yet! 😉 Catchyas on the flip side! 🙂

Is what I’ve chosen tonight. On this diet, I have a “proper” breakfast, two Vita Brits with extra bran, half a sliced banana, and 200ml of skim milk. For lunch, I have one of the Optifast Bars – either Berry Crunch or Cappuccino, and for dinner at night I have one of the three available Optifast Soups – Tomato, Vegetable, or Chicken (tonight’s was chicken), with a diet jelly and three prunes (well, I have to get my fibre from somewhere!) for dessert. Each packet of diet jelly crystals contains two sachets, and each sachet makes four small ramekins of jelly. Tonight I ate the last of four strawberry jellies made last Wednesday, and himself has just been down to ask me which sort I wanted made next – I said “Pineapple, please!” – and there it was! The inspiration for tonight’s Blog title! 😉

Today, of course, was our “tra-la-la-ing in Telara” day, so off we chuffed after breakfast, armed with nothing but our magical weapons and a cup of coffee. We had a really good day today – neither of us died, for once (and think of all the Guild Bank platinum we saved! 😉 ) however the first part of our travails took place in that horrible new area where there’s a constant and unrelenting blizzard howling, and visibility is reduced to about two pixels! I sure Julian got totally sick and tired of me constantly whining  “where’s my cursor gone?!”, and “I can’t find my [insert rude word here] cursor!”, through all the swirling snowflakes. Ah well, that only lasted until lunchtime, thank heavens, and I did notice that he did his fair share of grizzling about the blizzard conditions when neither of us could see the interactive “sparkles” on the things we had to pick up (or bury, in this particular case. Skeletons. We had to find and bury skeletons) That part of the quest chain took a long time to finish! Sometimes when you’re working as a group, what one person gets done will count as being “done” for the other members of the group too. Other times, each group member has to pick up or find their own whatever-it-is, and this quest was one of those. We had to find, and bury, 10 skeletons each, in blizzard conditions, visibility nil, and with mob densities (the number of nasties trying to kill us) on a par with a newly opened tin of sardines, well, let me just say that it wasn’t easy! To give you some idea of how many creatures we had to kill, I ended up with 115 hides taken from the creatures I could skin, and they were only a very small part of the number of nasties we had to contend with! Anyway, we had a good run, and as I said earlier, neither of us died (though to be honest, we did come close a couple of times!) We packed it in and headed back to base around 4.50pm and dusted down – processed all our trophies, and called it a day.

I then went off to remove my old nail polish, clean and re-shape my nails (they feel much better shorter!), and applied my new amethyst nail polish. It looks nice, but I’m finding it hard to get used to – I’m not used to wearing nail polish as dark as this, and every time I look down I get a bit of a startle – I’m used to seeing really pastel pearl colours on the ends of my fingers… even back when I was a teenager and I had really nice hands, I used to wear light pearl colours… but I’ll get used to it, and I do love the colour!

Weigh-in this morning was…. Let me put it this way. I didn’t go up, as I fully expected that I would, and I didn’t stay the same, as was equally as probable. I went down again, a whole ‘nother 2 points, to 110.1kg! On Friday I weighed in at 111.1kg, today, Sunday, I weighed in at 110.1kg. A whole kilo, in two days! I’m not complaining, I’m very pleased to be going down so… uumm  well… I’m just mystified and perplexed… and just a little concerned, because I’m not doing anything different to what I’ve been doing since August 18th this year. Let’s see what happens tomorrow… I’ll probably be back to 111.3kg or something equally depressing 🙂

So tune in again tomorrow night – will I have gone back up again? Will I be sitting pretty on 110.1kg again tomorrow? Or will the mystery deepen, and I’ll have gone down even more? Who knows? You will! This time tomorrow night! See you then… 😉

Saturday today? For the past week and a half, no day has really felt like the day it was supposed to have been, know what I mean? Well, perhaps more than any other day so far, today just hasn’t felt like a Saturday. So. What does a Saturday feel like, anyway? It used to feel like: today we go shopping for our nibblies night – prosciutto, melon, brie, bikkies, and maybe a dip… and of course, smoked salmon for himself. But we haven’t had nibblies for dinner on a Saturday night since August 18th, when I started this diet business, so that can’t be it. Yes, we did go shopping, and bought things like the smoked salmon for himself, cream and cottage cheese, also for himself, and various other items, so it’s obviously not the shopping experience that makes a Saturday feel like a Saturday. So what is it? And why didn’t today feel so totally not like a Saturday? (in fact, every day this week has felt “off”, too!) I keep having to tell myself, very firmly, that tomorrow is Sunday, and we’re going tra-la-la-ing in Telara!

Well, anyway, we went shopping early on this non-Saturday Saturday, and just as well, too! By the time we were on our way home the place was so packed it was literally (for me, anyway) “bumper to bumper” – as in the front of my wheelchair kept bumping into the backs of other shopper’s legs – and I wasn’t even speeding! Still, we got what we needed to, and I got a lovely amethyst coloured “breathable” nail polish (and some eyeshadow) at Inglot. I wondered what they meant by “breathable” nail polish, so when I got home, I looked it up. It was a very interesting article – you really should read it. After that I did a bit of Rifting for a while, then went and updated the graphic I should have updated two days ago, and decided to try out some new kaleidoscope techniques that I’d thought up. I found a really pretty graphic, enlarged it, took a nice square sample of it to work with, got a basic effect that I liked, and tried out a few other filters on it. Of course I didn’t save the preliminaries first, did I!! And so, as naturally as night follows day, one of the filters crashed the program, and I had nothing… nothing! left of about an hour’s work. I decided that I didn’t really want to work on graphics today, anyway, and fired up my Kindle reader on the PC, and sat in here and read my book instead (so there, Photoshop! 😛 ). At least reading at the computer didn’t send me to sleep 🙂 I did think about going and taking off my old nail polish and getting my nails ready to be amethysted tomorrow, but I couldn’t be bothered – it’s very unsettling when the day that you’re in doesn’t feel “right”…

So, essentially nothing very much was accomplished by me today, apart from fixing that graphic (which I did save!) and escaping unscathed from the shops, with my little bottle of amethyst nail polish (and some eyeshadow); himself was much more enterprising – he did the washing, broke a couple of glasses when an old (empty) pasta container fell off the back of a shelf, knocking something else onto a couple of wine glasses, and sending them crashing to the tiled floor… But that’s OK, they’ve got some really nice wine glasses over at Wheel & Barrow, and of course, I’ll have to go along too, to “help” choose them 😉 (I do love shopping!)

Weigh-in this morning gave me quite a scare! Oh, I went down alright! I went from 111.1kg to 110.3kg overnight! That’s almost a whole kilo in the one go, and that’s scary! You’re not supposed to lose that much that quickly! Well, I know I did when I first started on the anti-fluid tablets, but that was just me getting rid of all the excess fluid I was carrying, and it’s not something that you do more than once… so I’m quite trepidated! Mind you, I don’t expect to still be way down there tomorrow morning – I’m almost positive that I’ll go back up again – probably to… oh, I don’t know, ummm… 111.6kg? Or maybe 110.8kg? Something more believable than *gulp* 110.3kg! I weighed myself twice at 110.5kg first off, then we decided to weigh me a third time “for luck”, which was when we got the 110.3kg reading… so of course I had to re-weigh myself another twice, just to make sure… In the end I got two readings at 110.5kg, followed by three readings at 110.3kg, and I didn’t cheat, and Julian watched me like a hawk. Scary stuff, eh? (No! Not him watching me like a hawk – he does that all the time – the fact that I lost so much weight overnight is what’s scary!)

Anyway, tune in again tomorrow night to find out if it was only a “fluke” reading and that I’ve gone back to a more “normal” type of weight, like around 110.9kg, or whether I’ve spiraled, out of control, upwards… to something really gross, like 113.9kg – or whether I’ve stayed the same, which I wouldn’t mind, for once, because that would mean that perhaps I really am 110.3kg, and that it wasn’t just a fluke reading… See you then! 🙂

you get mobbed by early morning crowds lining up outside the shops! When himself went for his walk this morning, around about 8-ish, he had difficulty navigating Shoppingtown, because of the number of people literally streaming in to participate in the Boxing Day sales… Half the time it’s not even for things that they want, or need, it’s simply to get something – anything! cheaper. We watched the city scenes of the “Gran’ Sale” on the news tonight – some people had been queuing up outside Myer since 6 o’clock the night before! Honestly, is getting some item that you don’t even want a few dollars cheaper really worth it?! Obviously some people with more money than cents sense think so, but not this little black duck! Gimme a nice warm, comfortable bed and a sleep in, any day! Whilst I am desirous of getting to the shops again – I want to see if DJ’s have got my nail polish in stock yet – I can wait until next week… on the other hand, I might go over tomorrow… 😉

Today we decided to have a real bludge day – no work was done… apart from ripping the “Callan” and “Enterprise” episodes so that we can watch them from the file server in the lounge room, and apart from me working on my brand new Gingerlilly, and both of us tidying up the remains of the stocking fillers in the lounge, and Julian working out how much Panettone I can substitute for my regular breakfast and morning tea (about 1320kj in total) At the moment I’m not having morning or afternoon tea, a total of 628kj ( or 314kj each) Breakfast is 1001kj, so I do have a bit to play with. A “serving” of Panettone is one 7th of the cake (loaf/whatever) so if Julian cuts it into quarters, then halves each of those quarters, I should be able to eat a one 8th piece of that instead of my usual breakfast, and still be within my limits. Of course, it’ll mean that technically speaking, it’ll count as having “morning tea” as well, which I’m not having at the moment, but once we’ve eaten all the Panettone, I’ll be back to my normal breakfast, and no morning (or afternoon) tea. Hopefully I won’t put on too much weight… Mind you, if it looks like I am, I’ll switch back to my normal routine straight away – not even Motta Panettone is worth going backwards, weight-wise! But apart from those things, neither of us did anything today – a real (but well earned!) bludge! 🙂

I’m not too sure what’s happening tomorrow, but I’m guessing that it’s going to be fairly low-key too. I’ll probably Rift for a bit, and do a bit of graphic work that I’ve fallen behind on lately… and read. I might try firing up the Kindle on my PC again – reading in the lounge room with my feet up tends to send me to sleep, and that annoys me, so I might try reading at the computer – definitely not as comfortable, but I want to finish my book, not fall asleep for the afternoon! I also have a bit of sewing to do, which I’ve been putting off for so long that I’m not sure if I even remember how to sew by hand – there’s always an excuse – “the light’s not good enough!” or “trying to sew black on black is giving me a headache!”, and not that long ago, the very plaintive “where’s my sewing box?!” which isn’t an excuse, it’s a real question! I have (had?) a nice little red wooden sewing box that sort of opens up like a concertina, and we can’t find it! We both know it’s here, we’ve both seen it here, but we can’t find the wretched thing! Eventually it got to the point where I bought a new sewing box, not nearly as nice as my little red one, and the items I bought to go in it aren’t nearly as good, or as nice, as those in the old box (some of which were heirlooms!) and I thought (there goes that “and I thought” hex again!), I thought that I knew where the new box was… *blink* I just looked up at the shelf that I was sure it was on, and… it’s not there! Oh, OK, finally, I get the message… it has suddenly become very obvious to me that “The Powers That Be” don’t want me to sew any more, and that’s why they keep taking and hiding my sewing boxes! So, I give in! If I promise never to sew again, can I have my sewing boxes back, please?!

Weigh-in this morning was very nice! 🙂 Down to 111.1kg, three points down on yesterday and the day before. I can live quite happily with that 🙂 Let’s hope that the Panettone doesn’t undo all the good work! (crosses fingers… eyes… realizes that she can’t type with fingers crossed, let alone see to type with eyes crossed… uncrosses both…) So, would everyone be kind enough to cross their fingers, eyes, and ears on my behalf – thanks! 🙂

Tune in again this time tomorrow – hopefully my weight will be down again, but don’t forget that the results of eating a one 8th piece of a Panettone instead of breakfast and morning tea won’t be obvious for a day or two… 🙂

At our place. It goes something like this: It’s Christmas Eve – the kids are either in bed, asleep (we hope!), or have departed for their own homes. Wearily, we totter around, picking up the mess, and cleaning up Mince Tart crumbs and the remains of the Eggnog. Can we go to bed yet? No, there’s still the stockings to be filled… we’ve already sorted them out into four bags and removed any price stickers, so all that remains to do is fit everything in to the individual stockings. As we work at that, we discuss the program for the next day… who’ll do what, when, and did you remember to get the gravy? The kids stockings done, I repair to the bathroom to get ready for bed, while himself goes to see if Father Christmas has seen fit to leave anything for my stocking. Then we swap places, and, without even glancing at my stocking (well, maybe a quick peek? 😉 ), I find that Mother Christmas has left me with a pile of stocking fillers for himself. We go to bed…

Christmas morning: Why do I always wake up around 5.30am? So I just lie there with my eyes closed, wishing that I could get back to sleep… Is he awake or asleep? I don’t know – but he’s not snoring… After what feels like at least a week, the alarm goes off at 7.30am, we both groan, and winkle ourselves out of bed. “Merry Christmas, sweetheart!”, “Unnngh, Merry *yawn* Christmas, dear”. I head off to my bathroom, he heads off to his (yes, we have separate bathrooms! I don’t have to put up with beard hairs in my sink, and he doesn’t have to put up with… well, my stuff… it works well! 😉 ) I scamper (scamper? Since when have I ever been able to scamper?!) into the Den for my weigh-in, then back to the bathroom to get ready for the day. Back to the Den for a cup of tea, check our email, and then it’s time for breakfast. Are we done here yet? Can we go and see what Father Christmas has brought us yet? We try to race each other to the lounge room, and fall upon our stockings, as gleeful as small children at what we find. Then we give each other the presents that Father and Mother Christmas have left us. Himself got a new HP Netbook from me, a black mug and apron with the words “Grumpy Old Man” in white on them from the mysterious Mother Christmas, and a calendar from Flipper. I got a Dyson Fan for the bathroom – it has one of those tall, narrow oval tops with no blades, does everything except whistle Dixie, and is remote controlled. I’ve wanted one for a very long time, so I was very well pleased! 🙂

By this time it was about time to start cooking lunch: roast turkey breast, baked smoked ham, roast potatoes, roast pumpkin, tomato and onion pie, and snow peas. He did forget to get the gravy, but there was Cranberry jelly, so it was OK… There was also plum pudding for dessert (with extra brandy added, for those not driving), and cream to go with it. There was Chandon Brut champagne, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of white wine, and mineral water to drink, and Christmas Crackers to pull – and a table to set, as soon as my favourite youngest daughter arrived.

Lee and Neale arrived around 12.30pm – Kate and Terry just after 1.00pm, and once again stockings were attacked and presents were passed around. Kate got a new Toshiba laptop, Terry got a Garmin GPS what’sit for his car from us, and Terry also got a toy boat from Lee and Neale – but I can’t remember what they gave Kate!  Sorry… Himself got the entire 4 seasons of “Enterprise”, starring Scott Bakula, from Lee and Neale, and “Callan, the Colour Years” (6 CDs – 1000 minutes worth!), starring Edward Woodward, from Kate and Terry. I got a DJ’s voucher for a bottle of Estee Lauder’s Chrome Violet nail polish, which they didn’t have in stock, and a small, “plushie” Darth Vader from Lee and Neale, and a bottle of my very favourite perfume, “Cinnabar”, also by Estee Lauder, from Kate and Terry. Julian and I also got a desktop calendar each from a friend who knows our sense of humour all too well! 🙂

A huge lunch was eaten by everyone – I had my Optifast Berry Crunch Bar and some mineral water, as usual. Almost too full to leave the table, everyone stumbled into the lounge for coffee – I just walked as usual 😉 And after said coffee and some more chatter, the kids left around 4.00pm. Himself had a postprandial snooze, I repaired down here to the Den and decided to shuffle off (yet another) Rift level 50 character, to make room for a new character (with the same name), because I didn’t want to have to play another level 50 girl by myself, and besides, I wanted to try another race – Mathosian, this time.

And that, folks, was a typical, Traditional Christmas at our place! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was exactly as I predicted – I stayed the same, at 111.4kg. After all, I did drop half a kilo the day before, so my body was probably still recovering from the shock! 🙂 But! It’d better be down again tomorrow, or I shall get really annoyed!

So tune in again this time tomorrow night to see if I went up… down… or stayed the same (again!) – and how well we recovered from our somewhat hectic “Traditional” Christmas Day! 🙂

And all through the house, himself and yours truly were darting about. The presents were snuggled all under the tree, and visions of sugar mice danced through Flipper’s head…* Well, something like that, anyway! 😀

It was a bit of a slow-ish start this morning, but just about everything (apart from the wrapping) had already been done. There was mail to pick up from the Post Office, and a few “last minute” items to get (aren’t there always?!) and I managed to get in a bit of Rifting, until lunch time..

We wrapped all the prezzies this afternoon, but instead of putting them under the tree (because there wasn’t enough room!), we put them on my half-moon adjustable desk, in front of the window (where they’ll have a good view of the city) – the Motta Panettone went under the Christmas Tree instead. The kids arrived about 7.30pm and we had a bit of chatter and discussion before Lee and Kate started making the Eggnog – the recipe says “serves 12”, but it all went, even though I didn’t have any (no, not even the teaspoon that I said I might try, just for tradition’s sake!) Julian had two glasses, Neale, Terry and Kate had a glass each, I think, and Lee…. drank the rest? (well, she wasn’t driving! 🙂 ) Anyway, it was all consumed – not even enough left to leave a glass out for Father Christmas to drink with his shortbread bikkie! Oh well, I’m sure he won’t mind, just this once 😉 Then we had our annual reading of The Night Before Christmas; it was Julian’s turn to read it this year (so I suppose it’ll be my turn again next year *grumble* *grumble*) we all take it in turns to read the story aloud, going from eldest (me) to youngest (Kate), then Julian, then me again. After that, and more chatter and discussion – would you believe that the discussion included Federal and State politics, judicial judgements (Julian’s sister, who is a Federal Court Judge, has just delivered a judgement on a case involving a really strange woman who thinks we can cure Ebola with homeopathy),  some possible similarities between homeopathy and the placebo effect, and universities and university studies? Then it was time to “hang” the stockings. Well, we don’t actually “hang” them, as we have nowhere suitable to put hooks, but we stand them up/lean the up against (the front of) the back of the couch. I’ve left it up to himself as to where we put Flipper’s bedding for the night, as it normally lives on the couch cushions… Poor Flipper will be most put out! She’ll probably elect to sleep in the Den tonight…

It’s now 10.45pm – when I finish this, we still have the fill all the stockings, check our Minions, and collect our Patron’s gifts before we can retire for the night. My present is finally under the tree – it appears to be a long square box, and I have no idea what it is! I don’t know if it’s a couple of smaller things, disguised in a long square box, or if it’s a telescope! I wish it was tomorrow morning…

Weigh-in this morning was a pleasant surprise – I was down to 111.4kg! 5 points (a whole 1/2 a kilo!) down from yesterday! I’m really chuffed! 🙂 It’d be nice to be down a bit more again tomorrow, but I doubt that I will… I’ll probably spend another day at 111.4kg (though I did do a lot of running around today – bent over double because of my back – but still, running around – surely that has to count as “exercise”? 😉 ) Anyway, we shall see what we shall see in the morning… Christmas Dinner will consist of the same items as those I had for The Great Double Birthday Bash – my Optifast bar, and a glass (or two) of mineral water – and that’s cool, it’s only for one Christmas, not the rest of my life! 🙂

Now all that remains is for me to wish you all a very wonderful, happy, and above all, safe Christmas, and may your version of Father Christmas bring you everything that you desire! 🙂 Stay tuned tomorrow night for a blow by blow description of our Christmas Day, what we all got, and how much everyone ate (on second thoughts, maybe I won’t go into that! 😉 ), and what my scales and my sometimes recalcitrant body decided between them to give me for Christmas! 😉

Merry Christmas, everyone! 🙂

*With apologies to Clement C. Moore…

Eve, Eve! 🙂 Well, we didn’t get anything wrapped and under the Christmas Tree today – I think we were both too exhausted by the time we got home… As planned, we’d had an early(ish) breakfast, so that we could get over to Dorevitch to have my somewhat belated Warfarin blood test done. Race, race, rush, rush, catch the Tower lift to the fourth floor… The place was in darkness! Closed, for the Christmas holidays! Naughty words were said by both of us. Oh well, down we came again, and headed straight off to The Glen, where we were to meet up with my favourite eldest daughter and her husband. Well, we did make a slight detour, to look at the kiosk-y place where they sell the pretty Christmas tree ornaments that you can have personalised… Last year himself gave me a pretty red one, with white hearts surrounded by gold “tinsel” paint, and my name on it, so this year I got one for him – pretty purple, with gold snowflakes on it, and his name, written small (the snowflakes were a bit big, you see…) Then off we went to The Glen. We met up with Lee and Neale at The Shingle Inn, where they were supposed to have had their breakfast, but Neale had held them up (I think he’s a bit like Julian, and that he just doesn’t like shopping – I think it’s a “man thing” or something…) and they hadn’t had anything to eat, and Lee was angry. Not a good way to start off a shopping expedition! We had to go upstairs, so we headed of to DJ’s and their lift, where we saw a most… umm… unusual? sight. A very tall fairy (???), wearing a tulle dress of pale mauve petals , with tassels on the pointy ends of the petals… funny flappy things strapped to her back, and lots of colourful beads stuck onto her very purple eye shadow. I was so busy goggling at her that I didn’t notice the nice old man behind her – well, she was very tall! The elderly man behind her was standing on one of those large “move a lot of goods at once” trade trolley type things… he had nice, curly white hair, and a curly white beard, and… and… and he was wearing a very nice red velvet suit, trimmed in what looked like white cotton wool… It was a trifle awkward getting the wheelchair around this unusual tableau, but both our parties stopped and exchanged a few pleasant quips about had we been good or bad, and fancy seeing you here at this time of the year, and that, luckily, put Lee into a good mood, despite her not having had any breakfast (yet!) 🙂 Once we got to the place we were going to – I can’t mention the place yet or it’d give the game away to himself, who will no doubt read this – it didn’t take me long to get what I wanted, and with only a couple of very minor detours here and there, we made our way back to The Shingle Inn, where were were to rendezvous with himself, who’d gone off to do some supermarket shopping.

And now back to the blood letting – I mean blood test… There are two Dorevitch-based blood testing centres there at The Glen, and both of them were closed for the Christmas holidays, too! Grrr! However, all was not lost as there was a “dedicated” Dorevitch collection centre right across the road, so we called in there on the way home and I had my blood test done… Just as well, too! They’ve changed my dosage! My INR – this is the rate at which your blood clots – was 1.9 – the lower it is, the more likely it is that your blood will clot. The higher it is, the less likely it is that your blood will clot, and mine’s supposed to be around 2.5 So, anyway, they’ve upped my dosage of rat poison (Warfarin) from 2mg per night, and 3mg on Saturdays and Sundays, to 2.5mg per night, no odd weekend dosage. Hopefully this will keep me out of hospital with pulmonary embolisms for the foreseeable future 🙂

Back at home again, I Rifted for a bit, mainly chasing the Yule present boxes, hidden, like colourful Easter Eggs, under trees and bushes and wedged between rocks, here and there in Freemarch and Silverwood – you can get some pretty nifty Artifacts from them! I’m also chasing the perhaps not-so-nice Achievement called “Cry Me A River”, in which you have to collect 20 Squirrel tears (by killing them) 😦 There’s a set of tears you can collect that’ll get a different Achievement, but we haven’t managed to get all the tears yet because we refuse, point blank, to kill cats. You can buy most of the tears on the Auction House, but some of them (like the cat tears!) are terribly expensive…

Weigh-in this morning was another let down… I stayed the same, at 111.9kg. I suppose I should be glad that I didn’t go up… and I am! I am! (glad that I didn’t go up) It’s just that it’s so dreary and boring, staying the same… Hopefully I’ll go down a bit more tomorrow…

So, call in tomorrow night and find out if my weight did go down a bit (I won’t even bother to mention the other horrible possibilities, like “up”, or “same”!) or if we managed to get everything wrapped and under the Christmas Tree before the Eggnog Party, and whether we’re all ready and geared up for Christmas Day… where once more I shall eschew the traditional fare of Christmas, and consume a Cappuccino Bar for my Christmas Dinner instead, and quaff mineral water instead of champagne. I just hope no-one gives me chocolates for Christmas, ’cause they’d probably go stale before I got down to my goal weight of 90kg, and would allow myself to eat them! 🙂