The sound of a dentist’s drill! At least this time it only sounded horrible – no pain now though, even without a needle, as there are no tooth nerves to twinge. I rather thought that Dr. N. would have removed the bridge section with the cracked screw, and drilled it out at a bench or something – he didn’t. He drilled it out “in situ” (i.e. in my mouth) It took for–evah! (it was only supposed to be a half hour appointment!) He’d got the special, tiny, terribly thin drills in specially – and don’t forget, he had to drill out a titanium screw that had broken in half, and become very firmly wedged inside the bridge, all without damaging the thread! He broke 5 drill bits on it, then used a tungsten drill… and finally broke through. The thread was still intact, so after cleaning out where he’d drilled, all that was left to do was for a nice, shiny, unbroken, brand new screw to be put in, and that was that – “See you in October 2015” for the upper bridge maintenance that I was supposed to have had done last time 🙂 (and he still hasn’t noticed the broken tooth!) Er… and apparently he’s been reading this blog, too, so… (*waves at screen*) “Hi Dr. N.!” 🙂

We’re both feeling a bit better today, thank goodness, but by the time we got home after all of that, our tongues were really hanging out for a cup of coffee. We had lunch, and I don’t know about himself, but I was getting more and more agitated because we hadn’t heard anything from his sister. I kept whinging at him to call her, but he just kept saying, in a terribly laid back fashion (how could he be so calm!) – “Oh, she’ll call when she has the time…” I just wanted to know what was happening! The electrician came very promptly at 2.00pm to install the new, replacement oven, which only goes to prove that miracles do still happen! A tradesman arrived, not early…. not late… but exactly on time! Incredible! Still nothing from his sister. I’m sitting on an ant hill… Melissa finally called close to 5-ish. Apparently his mother had allowed herself to become terribly undernourished and dehydrated (again!) They’ve got her on all sorts of drips and stuff, and she’ll (probably) remain in hospital for another couple of days – she’s already fighting to go back home (which at this stage of the proceedings would not be a good idea!), and she’ll have to have someone to call in every day and do bits and pieces around the home – make the bed, cook meals, do the laundry – that sort of stuff. However, going by the last time this happened, the poor hapless individual helping out will be sent packing after a day or two, and the whole pattern, over the course of about eight or so months, will repeat.

Oh joy! 🙂 Christmas has come to Telara! Of course, “Telara” being in the USA (I mean, where else would you expect to find it? Isn’t the USA the only country in the world? Worth mentioning, that is!) it’s winter time, and snow is falling in all the capital cities! 🙂 Lots of fun games to play and get little “rewards” for – like hitting 8 merrymakers with a snowball! Or lighting the way for lost travelers! Or tossing a Christmas present to someone with a grey cloud and the word “Humbug” hanging over their heads! Or, you can go and join in the toboggan slide where you have to hit a certain number of snowmen who are lining the path on the way down. If you miss one, you can toboggan back uphill to go back and get them! 😉 The “rewards” are special “Snowflake” tokens with which you can buy all sorts of goodies from the special World Event merchants located near the gigantic Christmas Tree in your nearest capital city! 🙂 So, what with all of that, and Minions to be sent off on Adventures, who has the time for questing anymore? 😉

Weigh-in this morning was disheartening. I only went down one point, to 113.4kg 😦 Well, I did go down, even if not by much… but what’s going on? Is my body on a “Go Slow” strike or something? Have they forgotten that I’m their Union rep.?! What would my body do if I went on strike, hmmm?! At this rate I’ll never get down to the 112kg range before Christmas! And now I’m hearing traitorous mutterings that I have to have just a little Eggnog! One teaspoon is all I’ll have, one teaspoon! And, I’ll go without morning and afternoon tea! (I might even skip lunch!) That Eggnog is almost lethal, and terribly rich! If I have more than one teaspoon of it I’ll probably put on 8 kilos, and break out in spots! Ackshally, I’ll post the recipe here tomorrow night – and you’ll see what I mean! 😉

So stay tuned for your very own copy of “Winter’s Official Eggnog Recipe”, and tomorrow night’s installment of “The Trials and Tribulations of a Dedicated Dieter at Christmas Time”, plus other world shattering “News Stories of the Day!” 🙂

Remembering things. I forgot two important items when we did our “surgical strike” yesterday (was it really only yesterday? It feels as though it were sometime last week…) I forgot that it was not only Christmas I had to worry about, it was also two VIP Birthdays, and of equal importance, an Anniversary, that I had to get “bits and pieces” for! (did that last sentence make sense? Maybe…) “Oh well”, thought I this afternoon, “I can always talk Julian into calling calling in at the shops tomorrow after I’ve had my screw replaced, or at the very least, get him to drop me off and drive around the block a couple of times whilst I purchase these most important of articles”… I thought…

My favourite eldest daughter was over today, and unfortunately we had no episodes of “Agents of Shield” to watch, so we watched “Person of Interest instead”. It’s really getting gritty at the moment, occasionally a trifle hard to follow (though I suspect that that was largely due to my head cold!) All the “threads” are beginning to come together, and various seemingly random events are being explained, and/or tidied up. As well as having lunch and watching taped shows, tentative arrangements were made for The Great Family Birthday Feast, now to be held on the 21st (if Kate agrees!), because this Sunday is our Anniversary and there was some slight tetchiness regarding having to share it with Birthday celebrations… Also discussed were Christmas Eve, and Winter’s Lethal Eggnog (well, maybe not “lethal”, but very definitely “extremely potent”!) Now, I guess everything’s sort of on hold, because…

This afternoon while himself was dropping my favourite eldest daughter home, his sister rang, sounding somewhat distressed and agitated. She said she’d just rung (from Sydney) for an ambulance to go and attend her mother (in Adelaide) as she was very poorly. When himself arrived I told him what his sister had said, and he rang her back. Little was known at that stage other than that she was too weak to walk and sounded terrible. Melissa, Julian’s sister, isn’t too crash hot herself, having had surgery to fix a broken tendon in her shoulder not that long ago, and then falling down a flight of stairs a few days ago! Anyway, she’s off to Adelaide tomorrow, and it may be that himself will have to go over too. A bit more news came through later this evening – his mother has a very nasty chest infection (let’s hope it isn’t, and doesn’t develop into the terrible bout of double pneumonia she had some time back!) We’ll know more in the morning, but now I’m worried about the wretched cold that Julian has – he’s a lot worse than I am, and I only feel pretty lousy… plus the fact that a nasty summer cold isn’t exactly the very best medicine for his mother at this particular point in time. I fear that this is going to complicate our Christmas arrangements more than somewhat… Oh, and our brand new replacement oven is being installed tomorrow, at 2.00pm – unless himself is winging his way to Adelaide instead…

And in my spare moments between all of the above, I Rifted, and have almost got my newest creation, Belezza to level 15 (it should be spelt “Bellezza”, but that was already taken, however the Italian – English dictionary also recognizes the single “l” version) It means “Beauty” 🙂 I have already transferred one of the Laethys girls across to make room for her, and with a bit of luck (and a clearer head than I have at time of writing!) I’ll get her across, and into the Guild, tonight.

Weigh-in this morning was starting to look more promising 🙂 Down to 113.5kg, two points down from yesterday, and I had to start a new sheet of graph paper! (I keep a visual record of my weight loss on graph paper – it looks much more gratifying, seeing it in a nice, steady, downward path on graph paper, than it does just writing down a list of weight numbers! 😉 )

Anyway, stay tuned for all the latest about Julian’s mother, Christmas, Birthday and Anniversary plans, whether my broken screw got fixed, and if my weight has gone up, down, or… stayed exactly the same, as it does occasionally – or should I perhaps say “all too often”!? 😉 News at nine…

Is what himself and I both sound like tonight. We both have a very nasty summer cold. Because it’s our wedding anniversary coming up this Sunday, we both, simultaneously, came up with the idea of giving the other one a cold, as an early anniversary present – wasn’t that romantic? 😉 He’s sneezing, and I’m shivering… and we both feel like something that even a dog wouldn’t eat, even if it was starving!  😦

That said, we decided to make our “surgical strike” on the Christmas Presents today, instead of tomorrow, because the replacement oven is being delivered tomorrow morning… at the same time that himself is supposed to be picking up my favourite eldest daughter, who is coming over tomorrow, instead of Friday, because on Friday I’m having my loose screw fixed. Errr.. that is, I have an appointment at the Prosthodontist to have the broken (and loose!) screw in my bottom implant bridge repaired. So you can see that this wunnerful cold may have contributed… just a little, to our uncharacteristic state of confusion Hopefully the oven will arrive very early – before himself goes off to get Lee… I can’t let the delivery people in because they have to bring it in through the loading bay, which means that someone has to be able to go down and manually open the roller doors – which I can’t. *sigh* You know, when people ask me how I am, I nearly always say “Oh, muddling along, as usual 🙂 ” This week, I’m afraid we’re both “muddling along”, though not “as usual” (it’s only me wot does that 😉 )

Well, we took off for the “surgical strike” just after lunch – around 12.30pm? – and the place was sheer bedlam! We mostly park over in the Valet Car Park, as it’s usually much quieter, more “refeened”, less stress getting the wheelchair out of the car, and you don’t have to fight for the next to last parking spot this side of the black stump. Usually! I have never seen the place so stuffed to the gunnels (that’s “gunwales“, to you land lubbers 😉 ), ever! There were cars everywhere! It was total and utter chaos! Until we got inside, and then it was just’business as usual’. It might be because Christmas is getting very close, but the crowds of shoppers didn’t seem… “Christmas-y” enough, if you know what I mean? They were almost blaze… Anyway, we did our “surgical strike”, and got presents for all the Adelaide people, including himself’s mother and sister (she doesn’t live there anymore, but she’ll be there this Christmas), a combined Birthday/Christmas present for my favourite youngest daughter (sorry Kate! ) the present for my favourite oldest daughter had already arrived (teehee!), a present for Mr. Thorne (Kate’s husband), a Birthday and a Christmas present for Wolfie (Lee’s husband), and… even something for himself! 🙂

I was the only one who missed out on not being gottened a present (yet!) 😦

But we were well pleased with ourselves… feeling as rotten as we did, yet still managing to get through the crowds, the pressure to buy (from certain places which shall not be named for fear of giving secrets away – “Spoilers!” 😉 ) and for sticking through it all until we’d finished! We came home to a well earned, and well deserved, cup of tea! Then we collapsed.

Weigh-in this morning was… meh! Well, I did go down – one point, to 113.7kg, but I had expected more… Tomorrow should be better though – I missed out on morning and afternoon tea today, though I did have an iced coffee outside DJ’s this afternoon. I didn’t drink much of it though – it was supposed to be black coffee with a dash of skinny milk, but it didn’t really taste like skinny milk, so I didn’t have more than about five little sips of it… We shall see what we shall see in the morning. If I go up, I may consider suing them for not using skinny enough milk! 😉

So, tune in again this time tomorrow, to see if a certain cafe outside DJ’s will get an invitation to court, and if our colds are any better. Anyone want to place bets on whether the replacement oven will arrive before or after himself has gone off to pick up my favourite eldest daughter? The answers to all these questions, and more, will await you here, tomorrow night! 🙂

This has been, what a rare mood I’m in… No! Sorry, that’s from Brigadoon (the musical – another one of my (many) favourites!) 🙂 However, it has been quite a day! After breakfast I started off checking my Auctions and Minions – I made about 68 platinum on the Auctions, and my Minions once again came home with far too much Dimension baggage… not that I’m complaining about that, it’s just that I have nowhere to store it all! The trouble is, you can’t by-pass the available Minion Adventures – ya has to take what’s offered ya! I suppose I could sell it, but if everyone’s in the same boat (and I suspect that a great many people are!), who’d buy it? Hmmm… perhaps “they’ll” start offering more private bank vaults? (for a price, of course! 😉 ) Anyway, all that done, and true to my word, I started the Great Christmas Card Scribble, whilst himself had a shower… I finished first… 😀 So then we went to print out the address labels… and they came out looking truly terrible!! The printing was thick, gluggy, smeary, almost illegible, and looking nothing whatsoever like my pretty, neat, legible, and highly artistic originals! Whatever could have gone wrong? we wondered. The text was still smearing and smudging five minutes after printing! On closer examination, we found… that it wasn’t the right sort of white, peel-off label paper for inkjet printers, it was clear self-stick label paper for laser printers! No wonder it looked terrible and kept smudging! So, too lazy to get the car out, himself had a second “morning walk” – down to Officeworks, on Doncaster Road, to get the right sort of white, peel-off label paper for inkjet printers. Printing run number 2… turned out beautifully, looking almost as good as my original Word document 🙂 The guillotining went well too, and before we knew it, the envelopes had been address labeled, stuffed, stamped, and had “Card Only” hand printed in their top left corner! 🙂 Except for one. Julian’s sister in Sydney – we still had her old address, so there was a bit of mucking around while we waited for her to SMS us back with the necessary details, so we made it our “lunch break”. Once we had the right details, another page of addresses was quickly printed, with the right address on her label this time, guillotined, label stuck on, the Card stuffed in the prepared envelope, and my part was done! Himself had himself a third walk for the day, and sauntered over the road to post the Cards… and so, promise kept! I said I’d get all the Christmas Cards in the mail by Tuesday (today) latest, and I did! 🙂

Then I could finally get back to Rift… Bluemyst was safe and sound on Faeblight after all, and I quickly took her up to level 15, in preparation for moving her… Maybe…. You see, in the process of getting her ready, and logging off to see who I could shuffle her with, I got just a teeny bit distracted… and created another character *cringe* So now, of course, I’m all interested in her… *sigh* I definitely have too many characters… Oh well, I don’t have to make up my mind straight away – and I’d really like some think music while I mull it all over 😉 I’ll go back and have another look at all of them this evening and see if I can come to a decision…

Weigh-in this morning was a lot better – down to 113.8kg Do you realise that when I get down to 112.0kg I’ll have lost 22kg since August 18th 2014, and be half way to my goal weight? By the time I’ve got to where I want to be, I’ll have lost a grand total of 44kg! I wonder if anyone will still be able to see me, or if I’ll have disappeared into a tiny shadow?! 😉 In another 4 months, if I keep going the same way as I am now… that’ll be the end of April 2015, or more likely early May 2015 (because February is such a short month) I’ll be (or should be!) 90kg…  (cue ripply harp music: *dream* *dream* *dream* : cut ripply harp music)

So tune in again tomorrow night to find out who, if anyone, I’ve decided to play Character Shuffle with, or if I’ve done a massive massacre, and purged a lot of the extraneous denizens from the alternate shards… and if the weight I was so pleased with this morning has gone up, down, or stayed exactly the same (again! grrrr!) 🙂

Drawn to a close. It was a good day today – I had my hair chopped off, really, really short! 🙂 It might make you do a bit of a double take at first, but I think it suits me, and that it looks good, and that’s the main thing! (Ahem! Perhaps it might also make me weigh a bit less now? 😉 No, I don’t really think that – but it’s a good theory though! 🙂 ) Then we spent the rest of the morning talking about the genetics – or possible genetic properties – of pigeons 🙂 I wish I could find my books on cat genetics… I think they’re unpacked – they’re either in the Library/Office, or the [dreaded!] “spare room” (read: “don’t know where to put this? Throw it in here and wait for a miracle!”) I’ll get himself to have a look later… who knows? It might be helpful – the principles would be the same though, wouldn’t they? I also did a bit of building in Rift, carrying on from the other day. I was proudly showing off how far I’d got, when I noticed that I’d put the staircase up to the first floor… ending in the side wall! Ooops! 😉 Rather than try to move the staircase (it was hard enough to find somewhere to put it in the first place!) I think I’ll e-x-t-e-n-d the house out a little there, making a nice balcony to overlook the pond at the foot of the hill. Yes, excellent save, Winter! 😉 After lunch, I went off to Faeblight to where my new girl Rivergold was… *wince* and created another character. I know, I know, but I can’t help it! I’m an altoholic! 😦 *sigh* I think I like her better than Rivergold, so she might be the one to move when she’s old enough… Her name is Bluemyst, and she’s currently level 12… and she has her “Merchant of Death” title already, too! 🙂 Oh dear! I just realised! I was in such a hurry to get her into Meridian (she’s a Defiant) after getting that title that I might have forgotten to bring her back from the shard I had to transfer her to to get the title! I think it was Hilol… You see, if you can’t find what you’re looking for on your own shard, like this merchant wot you’ve got to kill, you can temporarily transfer yourself to up to about six shards to look for him, and complete the challenge there. Then you’re supposed to return to your original shard… but I might have forgotten to go back. I think it was originally introduced just after we were given Dimensions to play with. People who do Dimension “tours” (go around looking at, and voting for, other people’s Dimensions (and yes, you can visit, and vote for mine if you like! *hint* *hint*)) …people doing Dimension “tours” might have read about a Dimension on another shard and want to go and have a look at it – so rather than force people to create a character on that shard, or transfer an existing character to that shard, just to look at a Dimension, we suddenly found ourselves with the ability to temporarily change shards… Crikey… I hope I haven’t stuffed things up…

By then it was after 3 o’clock, so I wandered off to the lounge room to read a bit, and do crosswords on my tablet (but I ended up just reading), and that was about the end of my usefulness for the day… well, afternoon, anyway. I know I said, a couple of posts back, that I intended to have the Christmas Cards in the mail by Tuesday – that’s tomorrow – and I still intend to do so! We have the sticky label paper on which to print the fancy addresses that I made, so while I’m head down tail up, scribbling furiously in 19 Christmas Cards, himself will be busy printing and guillotining the labels, which we will then carefully stick onto the envelopes, doing our level best to keep them straight. So the Cards should be ready to be mailed by early afternoon, and I will have stuck to my promise 😛

I went without morning or afternoon tea yesterday, in protest about my lack of any sensible sort of weight loss that morning, and I went without morning tea this morning (though I did have a small, fresh apricot for afternoon tea) This morning’s weigh-in proved without a doubt that the proof of the pudding is definitely in the not eating thereof! And I was down to 114.1kg! Hurray! (with apologies to Banjo Patterson:) “There was movement on the scales, for the word had got around, that Winter wasn’t eating morning tea…” – something along those lines, anyway 🙂 Oh, I hope that eating that apricot for afternoon tea isn’t going to make me go up again, or worse! stay the same! It was a very small apricot… and I didn’t eat the stone… (*anxious look*) Oh dear, I shall probably worry the weight off now… (good point! [makes note to self] “Worry more!”) 😉

So stop by tomorrow night – find out if Bluemyst is stuck in a foreign shard, or is back in Faeblight, and whether or not Winter did keep her word and get the Cards posted on time! Take a peek over Winter’s shoulder at the scales – see if that apricot has put her into damage mode because she didn’t lose any weight (or has stayed the same), or if the extra worrying has knocked a few extra grams off her stubbornly fat behind! 😉

Was what we ended up with this afternoon… unfortunately we didn’t get paid for it – well, not in real time money, anyway! 😉 We started off this morning, bright and early after a slightly belated breakfast (we sleep in until 8.15am on Sundays! 😉 ), and sallied forth to slay beast and foe in Telara. Actually, it was all pretty straight forward – the usual types of “fetch me that book that’s next to my left elbow” quests (i.e. pretty easy and pointless quests), and quests which required a fair bit of running around in circles for absolutely worthless gear rewards! I think that out of all the gear rewards we were offered today (and let’s face it, about 82% of the quests are gear rewards), I kept two – for “costume use only” (being leather, they weren’t suitable for my Class, anyway, but they looked quite good on, so I took them instead of what was actually being offered to me!), and only two were actually worth having. For the rest, I just picked the ones that sold for the most gold. So we trundled around, having quite an easy time of it, if the truth be known… until after lunch. We’d rescued this great big dude and brought him home to his daughter, the Princess, who’d been giving us such an easy time (even if we did have to do a lot of running around in circles) But did he give us an easy time of it? Nooooo! He wanted us to go into this big temple-type place that looked exactly like a clone of Sanctum, the Guardians Capital city, and kill just about all of the principal characters who live in the real Sanctum, all of whom are high level and as tough as nails! To make this task just a little easier, we also had to do battle with the dozens of flame guards and temple devotees! Still, all in a day’s work – we managed all of that, and I think both of us died once or twice. Then, just as we thought we’d be able to gallop home, hand in the finished quest and gain our reward, we’re told to go through a portal and kill the big boss who was waiting outside for us. Strangely enough, we both had a lot of bad feelings about this, but decided to give it a go, anyway. I mean, what was the worst that could happen to us, hmmm? Now this boss (a nasty big, huge, horrible dragon) had some sneaky and wikkid fire attacks. Not only did you have to bash him, you had to keep moving all the time in order to keep out of the way of his pink semi circular domes (which do you a heap of fire damage), flame sectors (truncated triangular areas doing even more fire damage), his fiery breath (talk about garlic!), and his claws and bite. Moving around, of course, means that you can’t cast spells – the movement “interrupts” these, so all you get is a few seconds when you can cast your worst at him while he’s “gathering all his resources”, then you run around like mad trying to stay alive until the next few seconds when you get your chance to hit him again. This is where being a Warlock comes in handy! 🙂 You get the chance to hurl all your DOTs (Damage Over Time) spells at him, plus if you’re also a Necromancer, like I am, you can get your pet to rush in and bite him on the ankles (it annoys the hell out of him, too! 😉 ) And if you’re as lucky as I am, your partner will be a Cleric who pretty much stands back, hurls his DOTs at the beast, and then hurls healing spells at you! I did die again here though, I was trying to run backwards away from his pink domes, and got out of range of the healing spells. My bad… Only cost 1 platinum at the Healer’s though 🙂 So anyway, in the end we got him (I really didn’t think we’d stand a chance!), and you know what? He fell on top of us!

After that, we went “home” to Margle Palace, handed the quest(s) in, grizzled a bit about the silly gear rewards, tidied ourselves up, and quit for the day. “A Good Time Was Had By All”, as they say in the classics – we made a bit of money, didn’t go up a level (close though, close!) and had a fun time. Roll on next Sunday – no, scratch that! Friday is December 12th, my favourite youngest daughter’s birthday, and it’s my favourite eldest daughter’s husband’s birthday on Tuesday, so that means we’ll be having the traditional Family Birthday Feast here on the Sunday (well, they will, I’ll just have my bar) We may have to call another day next week “Sunday” instead – I’ll see what himself thinks…

Weigh-in this morning made me furious. I stayed the same, 114.3kg I felt as though I was standing in a circular sealed room, slowly filling with water, and all I could do was tread water, not going anywhere! Everyone tells me I shouldn’t get so upset, there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s the heat, the humidity, and the medication, causing me to retain fluid. They don’t seem to understand that the fact that I can’t do anything about it is exactly what upsets me! I don’t like feeling helpless, and I hate feeling as though I’m seeing all my options slowly being whittled away… Damn it all, I just want to go away for a holiday, and ghod only knows when that’ll be possible!

Stay tuned tomorrow for more on my weight miseries, how the building project in Gloamwood Glen is progressing (it’s doing very well! I found my ladders, too! 🙂 ), and whether I’ve decided to do The Great Character Shuffle with Rivergold…

Nail polish. It’s the pale pearl, slightly off-whitish one – or at least that’s the colour I thought it was… but it’s not. It’s a terribly, terribly, terribly pale pinkish colour, with a sort of an opalescent shimmer in it, and I just don’t do pink, in any of it’s forms… (I do make an exception for the fuchsia shades though) 😦 Not. Happy. Jan! …and it’s so translucent that I had to put on three layers, instead of just the two that I used with the other one, and it’s now so thick that after almost two hours it still feels slightly tacky, and doesn’t really feel completely dry. So… one bottle of O.P.I. nail polish, pretty pale pink – only used once, free to a good home! Any takers?!

This morning I Rifted… I did a bit more house building – I now have the kitchen stove and chimney in, and the stone posts in all the outside corners (makes it look a trifle neater, and disguises the joints where the walls overlap a bit) Then I needed some ladders and/or scaffolding, which I knew I had, but I just didn’t (and still don’t!) remember where I’d put them, and had to go searching. I found two of the scaffolding bits, but I still can’t find the ladders – I know I had quite a few of them… I wonder if I’ve already used them elsewhere? I don’t think so though… I’ll have another look when I’ve finished this… Anyway, by the time I’d almost finished sorting out Cersie’s bank vaults (looking for the ladders) it was lunch time. I also did a bit of questing on Faeblight (the shard I started the new character, Rivergold, on the other day) bringing the new girl up to level 14… One more level and I can move her, if I decide to – I still haven’t made up my mind if I will or not. We’ll see… it’ll take more character shuffling around if I do, and it’s always a bit of a mess…

Tomorrow, of course, is our “Frolicking and Fossicking in Telara for Fabulous Fun” day, so I’d better make sure that Jademoss has somewhere comfortable to sleep tonight. The poor girl spent the night out on the streets in Choreburg last night because I couldn’t be bothered sending her off to one of her sisters’ houses. Guess I’d better get on with the new building in Gloamwood Grove. I’d call it “Gothic Grove”, but I don’t think it’ll end up being a very Goth sort of place… I could also call it “Gloaming in the Grove”, but I’ve set the time there permanently to 1.00pm – which I can change, and probably will, but I’ll leave it like that until it’s all finished. There’s nothing quite as awkward as trying to build a house in the dark! 🙂

I found my little Kanji “Winter” symbol – or at least Google tells me that it means “winter” – I hope it does mean that, and not something rude… I used to use it quite a lot, back when I used to make free web sets and stationery (you can see one of them in use here, under the deco on the far left), and I went looking for it today – Neither Julian nor I could find it anywhere in our very extensive archives, so I decided to Google it to see if I could find it again… and I did 🙂 So then I spent a very pleasant hour or so re-sizing it, colouring it, and generally playing around with it. Next time I decide to do a blog makeover, I’ll try to incorporate it into the graphics somehow… 🙂

After all of that, I went up to the lounge room to… read, and do my nails. I read for a bit before falling asleep, and only decided to do my nails at around 5.00pm. As I indicated above, I was not pleased, or impressed, with the result. I am just not a pink girl! Still, it’s on now, and until I can find a better colour, I’ll live with it – grudgingly. I believe that next week himself intends to make what he terms a “surgical strike” of all the Christmas shopping. Good! I shall go with him, and, if he’s given me his list, do a little shopping of my own! As well as look for another colour nail polish, or should I say polishes. Of course, then we have to wrap everything, set up the tree, gear up for Neale (son-in-law) and Kate’s (favourite youngest daughter) Birthday on December 12th – the day I also go to get my broken screw fixed… The broken one? In my lower bridge? Tsk! I did tell you about it, ages ago! 😉

Weigh-in this morning was much more betterer – 114.3kg! Keep it up scales, and you and I could end up best friends! 😉 No more messing about with the same weight for days on end, no more “ups” – only “downs”, from now on, right? 🙂

So tune in again tomorrow night – find out if I’ve redesigned my blog page 😉 make bets on whether my nail polish is still intact, and see if I’ve become best friends with my scales, a distinct possibility if I’ve gone down again, because it’ll mean that they’re still behaving themselves! 😉 See you then…

At me from the shelf above my monitor… That’s right, another of “those” occasions when I couldn’t think of a suitable title for tonight’s missile missive… It’s a cute little white ceramic cat with blue bead eyes, sitting waving his right paw at me – I’m very fond of him, so it’s a wonder that I haven’t incorporated him (her?) into one of my passwords, like… No, I’m not going to tell you, you’d probably only try to guess the password which then might lead to certain… unpleasantness… Which brings up memories of the very early days of my BBS (Bulletin Board System), where one of my users had a really odd but also very effective password. A hacker (who shall remain nameless) decided to have a go at logging in as this user, presumably on a bit of a spying spree, and came within one letter (symbol, actually) of guessing it correctly! Hmmm… now that I think of it, I could, and probably should, start using that password myself now – it was never cracked, and even that very close call didn’t win any bananas! 😉 Most of us Sysops (Systems Operator/Ghod) went on little spying trips to other BBS’s, sometimes as ourselves, sometimes “incognito” 🙂 One particular BBS I used to visit “incognito” knew I was hanging around there, but didn’t know which user was actually me! It was great fun watching them accusing everyone except me, of being me! Ahh… nostalgia! 🙂

This morning while himself was picking up my favourite eldest daughter, I did a bit of Rifting – no building, just questing… with yet another new character on a different shard… Did quite well for myself, too! There’s an Achievement and a title you can earn yourself for killing a certain merchant outside the gates of Meridian, the Defiant capital. You really need to be about level 13 to be successful, and not only was I only level 11, but I was a Guardian, over in Defiant terrirory, and couldn’t risk getting too close to the gates of Meridian in case the guards spotted me… Well, I galloped up the road on my trusty black tiger cat, and… there was the merchant! I did some quick calculations – you can, usually, manage to knock off mobs two levels higher than yourself, when they’re just ordinary mobs, but this guy was a lot tougher than your usual mobs because an Achievement and a title were involved, but I decided to risk it. Man, was he a tough cookie! I did wear him down an kill him in the end… but he killed me too! I wasn’t sure if I’d get the Achievement and title because I hadn’t seen who died first, but he must have, because I’m now known as “Rivergold, Merchant of Death” – cool, eh? 🙂

Then Lee arrived, and she showed me some cut scenes from her latest favourite game, “Dragon Age Inquisition”, and also some of the Character Creation functions. I would kill for Rift to have a Character Creation platform like that one! Utterly fantastic! Move different parts of the face – nose, eyes, mouth – like soft plastic to get the look you want. Eye colours beyond real, with inner and outer iris colours, making for some truly superb combinations. The only place it fell down – badly, actually, was in hair “movement” and texture. Ah well, can’t have it all, I suppose… After fiddling around with that for a bit we went up to the lounge room and watched a new episode of “Agents of Shield”, and about three of “Person of Interest”, where they killed off one of the best characters! 😦 *cry* I’ll miss her 😦 But boy, is the plot thickening, or what?! Great show… I can’t wait to see what happens next… (but then, as my mother used to say, “What are you going to do instead?!” Kill joy! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning was quite a disappointment – I was forced to growl at the scales “I’ll get the sledge hammer!”, because they said I was at 114.5kg again, the same as yesterday Oh well, only another 5 days on these ruddy pills… maybe then I’ll start losing weight again, properly! (like about 2 or 3 points per day) S’not fair…

Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow, after I do my nails again – the last lot of polish is starting to chip and flake off, and make me look as though mice have been nibbling the ends of my fingers. I think I’ll use the other nail polish this time, the creamy, off-white, pearly colour, and see how that looks…

So tune in again tomorrow night and find out if my nails look human again, or if my fingers have taken on a creamy, off-white, pearly colour where I’ve missed the nails and got the skin instead… and if the [insert rude word here] scales are behaving themselves nicely, and telling me that I’ve started going down again – or whether I’ve had to take the sledge hammer to them, after all! 😉

When I had to ditch so many of my favourite tops… Some of them were just sort of “ordinary, do the shopping in” type tops, some of them had only been worn once or twice, because they were “Sunday best”, and we don’t often have, or go to, occasions when one does wear one’s “Sunday best” 😦 It took for ever to go through them all – I didn’t realise that I had so many clothes! (no wonder we had trouble putting the dry cleaning away!) But… everything went… well, not quite everything… there were a couple that I kept – there was one with cats on it that I’d never worn at all – it even had the shop label still on it… but it was too cute, and I thought that I’d keep it, as a memento of how big I used to be 😉 There were another couple I saved, too – because they were brand new too, and had never been worn – but they’d been a titch too small when I got them, so I want to try them on again and see if they fit now, or if they’re too big – in which case I’ll probably shed a few more tears as they go, as well, because they’re very pretty. My goodness, my side of the wardrobe looks like an empty cave now! However I’m not going to go out and re-fill it again, just yet – I still have a l-o-n-g way to go. Put it this way… I’ve lost 20kg since August 18th – when I lose another 2kg, I’ll be sitting on 112kg – and only half way to my goal weight. I’d like to get to 112kg before the New Year, but I don’t think I’ll be in the race to make it… however I do plan on being into double figures instead of three figures by the end of January. That, I’m pretty sure I can do! 🙂

I did a bit of Rifting after that – questing, not Dimension building, this time, but I didn’t get too much done – I was too distracted after the ransacking of the wardrobe… I made a couple of alterations to the Christmas Card List – I had two more names to add, so it’s not 17 people left on it, it’s 19 people left on it I debated whether or not to start scribbling in the Cards, but decided against it – yep, I was still too distracted (Hey! You try throwing out just about all your clothes, except for what’s on your back, and not be distracted! 😛 ) So… that was the afternoon pretty much frittered away… I went up to the lounge room to read, reached the end of my book and… it was a stupid ending! Yes, I realise that it was a “hook” for the next book in the series – I seem to remember the one before it ending in much the same way, only this one was breathtakingly inane! It goes something along the lines of: She: “You don’t like me because you never look at me!”, He: “Yes I do, but you deserve better than to be swept off your feet in the middle of a desert – I plan to do better” He: plants a kiss on her forehead and forces himself to step away from her. End of book. I mean… What??!!! What a wussy ending!! Now I have to wait for the next book to find out what happens next (no folks, it’s NOT a Mills & Boon romance – it has fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, chases, escapes, true love, etc…) I absolutely hate buying what I think is going to be a trilogy… and then a year or so later finding out that the author has just released a 4th book… and a couple of years after that, a 5th! (a bit like George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones!) Usually, if I know there are more books to follow, I won’t buy them until I read the blurb “… in the exciting conclusion to the xxxx series, by xxxx!” then I know that I’m going to get them all in one fell swoop.

Weigh-in this morning was very pleasant… It seems that keeping the sledge hammer next to the Cat Carry Cage under the desk is working! 🙂 Down to 114.5kg this morning! Hopefully it’ll be down even more tomorrow, when favourite eldest daughter will be over (so no Rifting tomorrow, I guess 😉 )

I might scribble in some Cards tomorrow morning before she gets here, but then again, I might not 😉 So tune in again tomorrow night to find out if I scribbled, or if I fiddled with Rift or graphics… Whether I went down a little, or a lot… or if I went tragically up, instead! The answers to these questions, and more, will be waiting here for you… 🙂

Turn out as I expected. I had been expecting to go and start the mining of the wardrobe soon(ish) after breakfast, however himself declared a public holiday for me, until lunch time anyway, as he had some VIW (Very Important Work) to do with some sort of a spreadsheet for the Body Corporate. Very well, thinks I, I shall go and start building an abode for Jademoss in Gloamwood Glen, and off I sauntered… The work actually progressed quite well – I got the greenstone tile base done, some retaining walls, ‘coz it’s a very steep block, and the ground floor’s outer walls and windows put up. By then it was getting fairly close to lunch time, so I muddled around a bit longer, putting in some rather attractive and stylish concrete steps, down to the pond at the bottom of the block. Well, actually I didn’t get the steps all the way down, but it’s only a short(ish) jump from the end of the steps to the ground – not even enough to break one’s neck, or anything, and there I left it. Lunchtime came and went, and we had our cup of tea… and just as I was starting to get up to go and start on the wardrobe, the phone rang. From the Body Corporate. So I sat down again and played a couple of games of solitaire while I waited for himself to get back. And then I played a few more games… and a couple more. Then I started over from the beginning and played them all again, and by this time, the dragon was beginning to wake… (and as any Game of Thrones fan can tell you, you don’t want to wake the Dragon, do you! 😉 ) You’d think, wouldn’t you, that knowing it was going to be a long and complicated phone call, that I might have been told ‘This will probably take a while – sorry dear!’, in order to keep peace and harmony in the household, rather than leaving me twiddling my thumbs. I didn’t want to go back to Rift, because as sure as eggs get broken to make an omelette, I’d no sooner start on something and it’d be ‘Come on love, time to do the wardrobe!’ Ditto graphics.. ditto anything else worthwhile, except playing solitaire. By this time, smoke was beginning to trickle out of the Dragon’s nostrils, and it was very much awake. In more than mild annoyance, I stomped off to the lounge room to read – [insert very rude word here] the wardrobe! Needless to say, the wardrobe did not get cleaned out today, it’ll get done tomorrow, straight. after. breakfast. *sigh*

There’s a beautiful electrical storm raging outside at the moment – lightning flashing, thunder rumbling, and the rain is pouring down! 🙂 I LOVE thunder storms! 🙂 We’ve pulled the blinds down (we pull our blinds down to be able to see out as the strings for pulling them up are on the wrong side of the room to be able to get to them easily) and turned off most of the lights here in the Den, so as to be able to see the storm better – at the moment I’m typing this in semi-darkness (and making lots of typos because of it! Let me know if I’ve missed correcting any!) I wish we had more thunder storms… 🙂

Last night Jademoss spent the night at “Inside the Icehouse” in Icewatch Outpost, where she was able to have a nice hot bath and some delicious lentil stew for dinner, before retiring to bed. I had to laugh though – as I told you earlier, you don’t wake up in the Dimension, you wake up where you were when you entered it. This morning when I went to wake her, she was lying, sound asleep, in the middle of the road outside the Banking Chambers in Choreburg, the manufacturing section of Draumheim! 😀 She wasn’t fazed though, got straight up and checked her Minions! 😉

Weigh-in was a lot better this morning! (I must remember to keep that sledge hammer close by… maybe stick it under the desk bench next to Flipper’s Cat Carry Basket… ) Anyway, I’d gone down to 114.7kg – 2 points down. Hopefully tomorrow it’ll be even better (remember, I still have the sledge hammer, scales!)

So look in again tomorrow night – find out if the wardrobe finally got denuded of its over sized clothing; whether I got any more of the Gloamwood Glen House done (I must think of a better name for it! Any suggestions?), and if keeping the sledge hammer nice and close and handy got the scales to behave a little better for me, making my weight go down a bit (or a lot!) more… 😉