I got my first Christmas Card today… from old family friends, and it’s funny, you know, but I had just been wondering if they were still alive, and hey presto, a Christmas Card arrives from them. I guess the Great Ceiling Cat sent me the answer to my musings… 🙂 I’m glad though, because they’re really nice people, and I haven’t seen them since Mum died, in 2007…

I Rifted this morning, plotting and planning my scheme for urban development… I still haven’t made up my mind about who will live where, or just how I’ll move things around without the help of a usable Dimension Toolbox addon – the houses might even have to wait until someone else decides to write a working version of the currently unworking one 😦 In the meantime, I took Jademoss to stay overnight at her sister Wyntercat’s “Hobbit Manor”, in Anywhere. The house is finished, but the garden is still being worked on. Actually, that’s not quite true – although the house has two bathrooms, and two toilets, it doesn’t have a bath or a shower… In fact most of my so-called “finished” houses don’t have them either… I guess that means that they’re not finished, after all… *sigh* Back to the drawing board… Actually, one finished (though sparsely furnished) house does have a very nice bathroom, with a beautiful big semi-circular bath, and all mod cons! Visit Mossrose’s “Inside the Icehouse” in Icewatch Outpost to have a look! It took me forever to hang the floral drapes across the bathroom door in a double straight line, too! I shudder to think how totally impossible it would have been to hang them without the original old Toolbox (which was still working back then)! I really should keep on checking back at Curse to see if a new version is available yet… and leave a lot of “suggestive” messages about it on their Forum (I presume they have a Forum?) Well, I just went and had a look… No, there’s no new version yet, though it was originally uploaded in January this year… and no, there’s no Forum visible, unless it’s a Registered member feature. I’ll go and register later, and see if that produces a Forum for me to grizzle and complain in…. 🙂

After lunch I got out last year’s Christmas Card list. There were 32 names on it… now there are 17 🙂 And because my handwriting has deteriorated so much (due to me seldom using it except to madly scribble notes on my desktop notebook – things like unusual names I might try out for a new character, endless lists of mysterious numbers, which are in fact RGB colours, lists of Fonts to use on some project or other… which get scrawled down so quickly, usually when I’m still looking at the screen instead of what I’m writing – well, it’s actually a wonder that it’s still legible!) Anyway, because my handwriting is so messy these days, I use Word to design a name and address label with a Christmas ornament or decoration on it, and print them all out on peel-off label sheets… which we then stick onto the envelope. Besides, my handwriting always slopes up, instead of going in a straight line… So that’s the Christmas Card List done. Now I just have to scribble a quick note inside the Cards, which I intend to do on Thursday, get Julian to print and guillotine the labels (Friday?), bung ’em on the envelopes (Monday!), and post them. Anyway, I aim to have them in the mail by next Tuesday, latest! 🙂

By the time I’d finished all that, it was too late to go through my wardrobe, so I still have that chore to look forward to tomorrow morning Still, it shouldn’t take too long – it’s not as though I can stop and examine every second item, saying  “Oh, I love that top – I think I’ll keep it!”, because I wouldn’t be able to wear them again even if I did! Sometimes, one just has to be ruthless! 😉 If it’s an XL, it goes! End of story!

Weigh-in this morning was a bit of an anti-climax… Yes, it was the same again – third day in a row at 114.9kg! I’ll be somewhat stroppy if it’s the same again tomorrow, or if it goes up… I deserve a weight loss! I’ve worked hard for it, and I’ve damned well earned one, scales, so don’t you dare tell me I’m still at 114.9kg, or higher, tomorrow, or I’ll… I’ll… get the sledge hammer! Or cry… well, maybe snivel a bit, anyway…

So stay tuned tomorrow, folks, to see if Winter did actually go through her wardrobe, and to see if the scales are still intact, if they happen to give her bad news… Did she snivel, or did she not? Is there room to fit a small pony in her wardrobe, or only enough room to swing a cat? We’ll see… 😉

Black, so I decided to change it 🙂 Do you like the new decor? 🙂 Today was quite a good day – had my hair done this morning, and cut quite a lot shorter at the back – I like it, I think I look better without bits of hair sticking out around my neck… I also decided that since Rift doesn’t have Inns, as such, that I would try to create cosy homes for my girls to retire to after a hard day’s work (so to speak) In WoW (World of Warcraft), there were Inns where you could run upstairs, lie down on a bed, go to “sleep”, and logout. And you’d “wake up” there next time you logged on, too!  It was fun, but many’s the time when you’d just lie down on the bed  to go to “sleep”, and someone else would suddenly materialise on top of you, having just logged on and “woken up” 🙂 So anyway, Rift doesn’t have any of that, but we do have our own Dimensions, and we can enter our Dimension, lie down on a bed, “sleep”, and log straight out. Of course, you don’t wake up in bed in the Dimension, you wake up in the same place you were when you entered your Dimension… So… although I have an average of three Dimensions per girl, not all of them are finished enough to go and have a nice lie down in. This will be remedied toot sweet (as the French say), and I shall start whisking the girls home after their long, arduous days of questing and fighting nasties, to first a nice bath, then a banquet in the dining hall, and finally to a nice comfy bed, before I log them out… The Minions can take care of the cleaning and washing up… 😉

So that’s what I started doing this afternoon, and shall probably continue with tomorrow, but then I remembered that I was going to look for a couple of Photoshop filters that I’d been missing – “Kaleidoscope” and “Seamless Border 2”, by Mehdi – and after locating, downloading, and installing them, I thought that since I was already in Photoshop, it seemed silly not to do a bit of work… and you’re looking at the result of that work right now! 🙂

Actually, tomorrow looks like being a busy day – I have to go through my wardrobe and remove all the “falling off me” clothes, and get them ready to go off to St. Vinnies… They’ve all been dry cleaned (cost us a fortune!) so now they just need to be gathered up and taken off… and all of a sudden, I’m going to have heaps of room in my wardrobe again! It’s a shame, really – some of the clothes are very nice, and have only been worn once or twice – but they’re no use to me now, and I have absolutely no intention of putting the weight back on again, ever!

After I’ve dealt with the clothes, I have to get out the Christmas Card list, and the Christmas present list, and start working on those. You know, every Christmas we send out around about 32 Christmas Cards… and we get about 4 back! Not going to happen this year! This year I’m “culling” everyone from the list who didn’t send us a card last year, or the year before! Of course, all the Adelaide mob will get one, and the Israeli chapter will get one, and himself’s sister in Sydney… but the rest? Let me just say that we’ll probably need less that 20 cards this year! *severe look at screen* So, if you haven’t sent us a card for the last two years (yes, you know who you are!), you have been warned! *another severe look at screen* 😉

Weigh-in this morning was pleasantly surprising… I was expecting to go up, as I’m back on the Provera for 10 days But I stayed the same, at 114.9kg, which I thought was rather good! 🙂 Of course, it remains to be seen what happens tomorrow… I shall probably go up, but at least I’ll have had two days of not shooting right up into the 115kg zone (which is probably be where I’ll be at tomorrow) *sigh* Say la vee, as the French say…

So call in again tomorrow night to see whether I have an almost empty wardrobe… and If I’ve culled about 15 or so people from the Christmas Card list, and made a start on the Christmas Present list (uuuhh… does anyone know how to wrap a pigeon? 😉 ) And if my weight went up… or down… or stayed the same, for the third day in a row… 🙂