Up! 🙂 The wreath is on the door, and Julian is off to Adelaide – only for the day this time – tomorrow morning at sparrow’s, ummm… “yawn”? 😉 My favourite eldest daughter is coming over under her own steam to keep me company, make me cups of coffee, and watch “Agents of Shield” and “Person of Interest” with me, and himself touches down in Melbourne again at 7.00pm, so Flipper and I will get dinner 😉
We had the lift repairmen in today – we only have the one lift, and although it’s being fully dismantled, repaired, refurbished, and re-mantled again in February, it’s been very rattly and jerky for the last few days, so rather than wait for Christmas Day and a major lift outage, we called in the repair guys and it’s now faster, smoother, and quieter than it’s been for about five years! Apparently something went bung in one of the guide rollers under the lift… it only took them about 25 minutes to fix, so I hope they did it properly! I worked on my project today – mainly downloading brushes, gradients, patterns, styles, and textures that I might use with it – at the moment I’m having the most problems creating a suitable style for some of the elements in it. Oh, a style? A style is a way of applying a colour, bevel, effects, and/or texture to an image, all in one foul swoop 🙂 They’re very handy little beasties, but sometimes you can spend quite literally days, trying to get just the right look… and that’s exactly where I’m at with my project! 
My main problem today has been tiredness. All day, I’ve had trouble keeping my eyes open – I have no idea why, I slept well last night, and I feel perfectly well… it’s been most annoying!
We put the Christmas Tree up about mid-morning, and it’s looking very pretty indeed, with twinkling stars and pretty baubles! Flipper was asleep in her lounge room basket when we started, and was most intrigued when we took the tree out of its box! If it had been Artie, he would have had a field day, diving in one end of the long, narrow box, pelting along it, and out the other end, then reversing the process and scuttling, helter skelter down it the other way! Flipper, as I said, was most intrigued, but contented herself with peering down one end of the box, walking down the outside of it, and peering through the other end. She’s an old girl, and getting quite stiff, despite the injections of cartrophen that she gets for her arthritis, but she had fun 🙂 All that’s left to do now for Christmas is wrap the presents… I was going to give himself’s present(s) to my favourite eldest daughter to take home and wrap for me, and I was a little worried as to how she was going to get it home without himself to drive her… until it was pointed out to me that she didn’t have to take it home to wrap it where himself wouldn’t be able to see it – because he’s not going to be home tomorrow, is he, so she can do it in comfort, on the dining room table, over here, and it can go straight under the tree! (if I can find the wrapping paper, gift cards, and the sticky tape!) 🙂
I know I rabbited on a bit last night about presentation (of places), and the general attitude to people with weight problems, but it also occurred to me that there is a genuine lack of thought in food that is prepared, by the weight loss industry, for meal replacement products and supplements. Everything is sweet! Milkshakes come in chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, and so do their “desserts”. Meal replacement bars come in chocolate, berry, and cappuccino, and probably other assorted sweet flavours… Can anyone spot the problem with this? No? If I were a cynical person (which I am!), I would say that this was a deliberate ploy by the weight loss industry to reinforce the desire for sweet foods… Shouldn’t they rather be attempting to steer the overweight person away from sweet foods (and when they’ve finished their weight loss course, probably towards more sugary foods) It’s a problem. As far as I’ve been able to find, and I have been looking, Optifast are about the only meal replacement program that offer soups as part of their products – only three, Tomato, Vegetable, and Chicken. I also went looking for both calorie-less or low calorie savory essences, or food additives, which could be used to make more savory alternatives in meal replacement foods… I didn’t find very many. Why? There seems to be a plethora of low calorie sweet additives, but only about one or two of the more savory kind. If the powers that be are truly interested in reducing the amount of obesity in the country, why isn’t more research being done?! Or is there too much money at stake? (see? I’m cynical…)
Weigh-in this morning. It was not good, and I have a horrible confession to make. I hopped on the scales, and they said I’d gone back up again to 113.0kg. They said this three times. So I cheated. I’ve found that what you weigh depends (a bit) on how you stand on the scales… So I weighed myself a fourth time, standing just a little differently. Bingo! 112.7kg, one down on yesterday, and back to what I was two days ago. I did it again twice more, with the same result. So while my graph shows a drop, I know, and now you know too, that I cheated. I’m not sorry, I’m human, but I do feel bad about it. In the end, I really only cheated myself – but I’ve probably disappointed some of you, and I am sorry for that 😦
Tune in again tomorrow night – find out all the latest in news, gossip, and gripes. See if I’m still cheating (hey! At least I was honest enough to tell you – I didn’t have to, you know! 😉 ) or if the scales have finally got it right 🙂 Catchya then! 🙂
My Word! 