It was quite an interesting…

Day, today! Poor old Flipper had her visit to the Vet – she was “most put out!”, and yelled blue murder when Julian put her in her carry cage… She had her regular examination, including having her temperature taken. I don’t know, I think if anyone tried to shove a thermometer up my, ummm… well, you know where they take a cat’s temperature – surely I don’t have to spell it out! Yeah, if anyone tried to do that to me, I reckon they’d be bleeding out on the floor, and I’d be on my way to hide in Peru, or somewhere else, far, far, away! The she had her Cartrophen injection, which she doesn’t seem to mind too much – probably because she knows that she doesn’t feel so stiff and sore after she’s had it – and she had a couple of mats cut out of her fur. She’s a Norwegian Forest Cat with long fur, and as she’s become older and stiffer, it isn’t as easy for her to groom herself as well as she used to, and unfortunately, that means that she gets little mats here and there in her fur. Normally we snip them out ourselves, but when they’re in places that are hard to get to, or around the front of her neck where we might cut her if she struggled the wrong way (she hates being picked up and held!) we take her up to the Vet and get them to cut those ones out. Anyway, she had one on the inside of her thigh, and one on her backside, and it’s just as well that we got the Vet to do those ones, because she objected very strongly, and struggled a lot. As much as she hated the whole procedure, apart from a lot of indignant squawks, she settled down the minute she got home and out of her carry cage. Then we went off for my Warfarin blood test, and apparently I’m stable and still on the same dosage (2.5mg per night), and my INR (rate at which the blood clots – for someone like me, high is good, low is bad!) has gone up to 2.1, which is good, and about where it’s supposed to be if I don’t want to get another couple of lungfuls of blood clots! Next test is due on February 17th (I’d better write that in my diary before I forget! – Done!) After that, I went off to Inglot, as I said I would, and had a look at the colours they had in the “breathable” nail polishes. I came home with two of them. Unfortunately they don’t have names, only numbers, but one is a sort of pearlescent, slightly sparkly, red-ish colour which goes extremely well with the red streaks in my hair, and the other is the most gorgeous, fantabulous pearlescent, deep kingfisher/peacock blue! If they turn out as well, and wear as well, as the pretty purple one I’m currently wearing, I shall be very well pleased indeed! 🙂

Remember how I said yesterday that I needed to create a Weaponsmith in Rift, so that I’d be able to make shields and maces for Julian (and anyone else who wanted them, for that matter)? Well, I made a bit of a mistake this morning, and wasted the credits I spent for an extra Skill slot on the wrong girl! 😦 She could have done it, but I would have had to keep buying skill boosters to get her to level up quickly… so I sighed, forked out some more $$$, and bought another Skill slot, and this time gave it to someone who had a Trove of Experience Boosters – Crystalcat. I started this morning; by the time Flipper had come back from the Vet and we’d had a cup of coffee, I had her almost up to Grandmaster (second highest crafting skill level) – I gave her a short break while we were over the road, doing our bits and pieces, and continued again when we got home. She’s now a Savant – 450/450 Weaponsmith. So now, between Wyntercat and Crystalcat, there’s no weapon that I can’t make! If only the Augments weren’t so…so… insipid! Of course, I can buy other recipes, and some of them even look reasonably useful, but the two girls will have to do a lot of manufacturing runs (which I’m not really looking forward to!) to earn the Artisan Marks they’re going to need to purchase said recipes! Oh well, say la vee, as the French say 🙂 Now, having done all that work in Rift today, I’m left with all the junk weapons she had to make to earn her brownie points! I’ve disassembled half of them, but now the other half have to be Auctioned off. It’ll take forever to put them all up, and there are so many of them (grizzle, grizzle) 😦 But it has to be done, if we’re to refill the coffers of the Guild Bank – and we were starting to, too – but we’d just barely managed to get our noses over the 1000 platinum mark, and I had to “borrow” 400 platinum to finish that training today… However, I can happily say that I’ve now got girls up to the level of “Savant” in every single Artisan Skill! The Fishing and Survival skill set I’m not interested in – they’re mainly for people who like to run large (read: 20 person) raids, and need someone to provide booster food and “rest time” without having to go back to base camp, for the party. The Gathering skills, Foraging, Mining and Butchering, all get leveled up with the girls, as they go questing – you can’t go into higher level areas to pick herbs, mine ore, and collect animal hides, because even if you did manage not to get killed, you wouldn’t be able to pick them up. So, no more raids on the Guild Bank, I hope – not even to gear people up, because I can make all those sorts of things now!

So that was my day – as I said, it was quite an interesting one! 🙂 Except for…

Weigh-in this morning. That was not “interesting”, it was horrible! I stayed the same… 107.8kg… for the fourth day in a row!! I swear, if I stay the same again tomorrow, I won’t weigh myself for a whole month! (Well, I will, but I won’t want to! 😦 ) Why is this happening to me? Have I plateau’d out? Should I eat something fattening, just to break this wretched cycle? I’m really most distressed about it all 😦 Honestly, if I don’t move up or down (preferably down!) tomorrow, I’ll cry…

So tune in again tomorrow night and find out all the latest! Have Rift decided to introduce another Crafting skill? Will I need to raid the Guild Bank one more time in order to create another Savant Crafter? And what about my beautiful new nail polishes? Will I be able to resist the temptation to remove this pretty purple early, and try out one of the new ones? And if so, which one will it be? The luscious, fiery red, to match my hair? Or the sumptuous, opulent peacock blue, just because it looks so fabulous (in the bottle, anyway!)? What about my weight? Well, if you happen to hear a Banshee-like mournful wailing and sobbing noise, around 8.00am-ish, you’ll know that the weigh-in hasn’t gone well, and I’ve gone up… If, on the other hand, you hear an earth shattering “kaboom”, you’ll know that I stayed the same and have blown myself, and the stupid scales, to kingdom come… and If, on the third hand, you don’t hear anything at all, well… you’ll just have to wait for me to tell you, tomorrow night! 🙂 Until then, stay well – ciao, all! 🙂