For you! This morning was to be my last outing before the lift is shut down on Monday morning. We had a relatively quick breakfast – we wanted to make the most of the day before it got too hot – I (reluctantly) put my torture devices shoes on, and we sallied forth; locked the door, and called the lift. Silence. No lift light lit up. Nothing. Nada. Not a sausage. The lift was out! We straggled back inside and Julian went off to find out what was wrong with the lift. Apparently the motor controller had failed, making the lift carriage uneven, jerky, and in one resident’s words, “terrifying”, so the lift mechanic had been called and the whole thing shut down while he put in a replacement. Please note: this was not one of the things that was scheduled to be “refurbished” during the The Great Lift Outage Of Nearly Three Weeks! As far as the “Refurbishers” were concerned, this particular component didn’t need refurbishment! Not impressed, “Refurbishers”!

So while we cooled our heels, I played Rift until lunchtime, and managed to find out exactly where Winterthyme had got up to, with her Foraging, Mining, and Butchering. She’s pretty much up to where she has to be with her Butchering, but woefully behind in her Foraging and Mining. Looks like I’ll have to spend a lot longer in Scarwood Reach than I was planning on. Oh well, it’s all experience! 🙂  The lift was back in action again by about 12.30pm, so we had an early lunch and a cup of tea and were finally able to take off for The Pines. I would really have liked to have gone to Office Works as well, but because it was so much later than we’d planned on, we didn’t have time for both, so we just went to The Pines. It’s a rather strange shopping centre – it has Coles, Woolworths and Aldi, and it has Autograph and My Size (both of which were “out of” just about everything I was interested in!) and lots of other… what’s the word I’m groping for? Mediocre? mmmm… it’ll do… mediocre shops, not really worth writing home about… (yes, I know I’m fussy!) There’s a pet shop that has a lot of dog beds, pet food, shredded paper in empty cages, and little else. A couple of “home ware and kitchen ware shops that don’t stock such a simple, everyday object as a kitchen timer, several shoe shops, dress shops, a travel agent – you know – typical, slightly run down, small suburban shopping centre. One thing they do have though, apart from Autograph and My Size, is a really fantastic Chemist shop! They even sell all of the Optifast products! (some Chemists sell a few Optifast products, but I’ve never seen a Chemist shop that sold all of them before!) so that’s a real “plus” in my books! 🙂 (after all, one never knows when one might run out of Tomato, Vegetable, or Chicken soup, or find oneself short of Cappuccino or Berry Crunch Bars!) I ended up buying a few tops from My Size, but the main reason I wanted to go to My Size was that I need more T-shirts, and they had plenty online (but I won’t buy from My Size online any more – they keep “losing” my orders, or they take so long to deliver them that I have to keep ringing up to find out what the problem is!) unfortunately they’d “run out” of just about every T-shirt they normally sell, apart from a few wishy-washy white ones, lemon meringue pie yellow ones, and some sort of hideous cross between “chartreuse” and lime green T-shirts. Then the clever girl found a black one and a lilac one (in a smaller size – hopefully it’ll fit!) on a rack on the other side of the shop (I wonder how they got there?) so I got those too. I also bought a couple of tops from Autograph (but I’m a bit annoyed about the T-shirts – all of a sudden neither shop has any left in dark colours!? It must be a conspiracy…) So after that we hit the supermarket and did rather an enormous shop – it won’t tide us over for the entire time the lift will be out, but hopefully himself will only have to make a few short forays out for essentials, like milk and bread and other sundry staples.

Home again, and after a life saving transfusion of coffee, I traded my torture devices shoes for running socks, and did my Stair Walk. It’s starting to get a bit warm in the stairwell, but hasn’t become too bad yet – give it another couple of over 30C days and it’ll be a different story! Still, I skipped down the stairs (well, I didn’t really skip, I went one step at a time, but each day gets easier…) and then back up them again – himself says that in another couple of days he’ll get me to go another half level lower! The chairs have been put on the landings for the elderly to have a rest on while they’re doing their best impressions of mountain goats, but I dunno – those chairs look a bit flimsy to me! I know I’ve lost nearly 30kg, but I still don’t think I’d better sit on them… yet! When I get down to double figures, then I might risk sitting on them (but by then they’ll be gone, because the lift will be back in operation again (we hope!) – and somehow I don’t think I’m going to lose six kilos in three weeks! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning was a little more encouraging – I went down to 105.2kg, a drop of three points, so that wasn’t too bad, I suppose… but it’s still too slow! Hopefully I’ll be down a bit more tomorrow, but I’m not counting on it… Of course, I would be totally ecstatic if I dropped below 105.0kg, to something like 104.8kg – but it ain’t gunna happen! Not tomorrow, anyway…

So tune back in again tomorrow night – tomorrow is our day for running amok in Telara – or Freemarch, to be more precise – so find out how our adventures went, and if we’ve died yet or not (would you believe you actually get experience points for dying and visiting the Soul Healer?! Well, you do, but only for the first time – after that it’s a matter of “Oh, it’s you again!” and “will that be cash or Guild Credit?” from the Healer, when she heals you!) Oh, I forgot to mention before, I have decided who’s going to do what, Skill-wise, on my newly set up shard, Hailol – but I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow night, won’t that be exciting? 😀 I’ll also fill you in on what my weight decides to do – will it stay the same? Go up? Or decide it’s teased me enough, and go down? The answer to all life’s questions, and more, will be here, on this blog site, tomorrow night, so don’t miss out! 😉 Until then, bee good, and please stay safe! ciao, all! 🙂