Rift became adrift…

This afternoon – but that comes later in the blog – it made quite an effective title though, I thought! 🙂 Actually, I was quite late coming into Rift this morning. I was going through my pitiful excuse for email this morning, when I received an email from Brusheezy, a graphics site I sometimes frequent for their free Photoshop utilities (brushes, gradients, patterns, textures, etc.) Basically, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – Premium membership (for a price, of course! but quite a reasonable one) I usually go there when I need brushes, for example, for a particular project, or textures and patterns for a new blog header, and I scour their freebies for anything useful. Premium membership gives me a lot more, as well as much better quality, graphics to chose from. So I joined… and spent the rest of the morning going through all their Premium brushes and gradients. Tomorrow (or maybe the next day), I’ll sift through their patterns and textures 🙂 This morning, by the time I’d done that, got back to my email and finished there, it was after 11 o’clock and I hadn’t checked my Minions, or done anything meaningful in Rift! (*gasp* *shock* *horror*!) So I logged on, and this time took Jadenfyre for a bit of a run until lunchtime. After lunch, himself and I went for another romp through Stonefield… and quite a romp it was, too! We were sent to the next area in Stonefield where we had to talk to ghosts, kill a Captain and his pet Croco-monster-dile (called “Bramble”, or “Bracken”, or something – cute name for a monster, I thought!), kill lots of nasty Lizardmen called Sobeks, and fight rock Giants (which you could then mine for ores, once you killed them) As usual, there were Rifts every which-where, and also as usual, we decided to pitch in and help close a Fire Rift. I don’t like Fire Rifts (do I really like any of them? Well, no, I don’t – apart from the experience and planarite you get when you close them 🙂 ) I don’t like Fire Rifts because they have these horrible Hell Bug thingies that look like a giant four legged spider with a shark’s mouth, and enormous fangs, and they’re really, really horrible (never mind that my Pet Phluffie looks like one 🙂 Phluffie is cute!) Well, there we were, in mortal combat with about four of these Hell Bug thingies, and… *glinck* we were tossed out. Never mind, get back in and hope to goodness that we were still alive! Nope, couldn’t get back in – someone had tripped over a plug somewhere, big time! We kept trying, but things got even worse! First, our shard (Laethys) went down (i.e. offline), then all the rest of the shards went down, too! They stayed down for about twenty minutes or so, then they gradually all came back online – except for Laethys. When I’ve finished writing this, we’ll log on together, to see if we’re still alive, somewhere in the middle of a paddock in Stonefield (and hopefully not in the middle of another Rift! Somehow, I don’t much like our chances!) So that’s what I meant in the blog title 🙂 “Rift became adrift… this afternoon”

I went for the first of my morning Stair Walk today – after a miserable weigh-in, and before breakfast. I don’t think that early morning walking up and down stairs likes me very much – it was [insert mild expletive here] tough going, and I only did two levels, instead of my usual three. Then this afternoon, I was going to do my second Stair Walk after we finished Rifting, but when Laethys refused to come back up, I thought “bugger this! I’ll go now!”, so I did. I think it must be the morning that doesn’t like me – this afternoon’s walk wasn’t nearly as tough as this morning’s – but I still only did two levels. I will work up to three (and possibly four) levels – and I will, of course, be keeping this regimen up after the lift is fixed – I’m not doing this simply because the lift is out, you know – in fact, the lift has nothing to do with the Stair Walking. I’m doing this as a part of my weight loss program (seeing as the diet doesn’t seem to be working any more! 😦 ) Hopefully, I’ll be able to go up and down all five flights of stairs within a couple of months – so even if I don’t lose any more weight (bloody diet!) at least I’ll be fit (well, fitter than I was, anyway)

Weigh-in this morning. As I said, it was a miserable one. The scales told me 105.2kg or something, but as I think I told you a while ago, if you stand “just so” on the scales, you can get them to tell you something slightly “different”. I stood “just so”, and immediately went down to 104.9kg – the same as yesterday. My weight, in effect, has come to a complete and utter stop. It’s been well over a week of staying within one point of the same weight, every day. Am I depressed? Where’s the knife… or the Warfarin bottle, and you’ll find out. Am I angry? If my weight were a living entity, I’d be up for murder. Am I totally and thoroughly sick and tired and fed up? I just want to walk away. So I’ll walk. If doing a Stair Walk twice a day doesn’t make any difference, I’ll do three! If I could possibly eat any less, I would. I’ll do whatever it takes – bugger the fates, bugger the doctors, and bugger my body. I’ll lose the damn weight if I have to die to do it! A small anecdote: many, many years ago (when I was young and charming), BJ (Before Julian), I was living with someone who’s mother owned a beach house down at Corinella. We used to go down there regularly with the kids, and we used to do a lot of walking. I won’t say that I was terribly fit, but I was fit enough – the arthritis in my ankles was only just beginning to bother me. I decided to go on a medically supervised diet – supervised because the doctor had me on a (prescription) course of Duromine (basically speed – he wanted to see if it would help speed up my metabolism – it did) When I started, I weighed about 16 stone (more or less what I weigh now – 104.something kg) and I lost a lot of weight, very quickly. We were all very pleased. I didn’t feel any better, I got breathless a lot more often and more quickly, and my feet and ankles felt a lot worse. But that was OK, I was losing weight! I got down to about 10.5 stone (66.5kg) and there I stopped. I never lost another ounce. For six whole months, I never lost another ounce. It got to the point where I was living on black coffee (no sugar), water, and six prunes a day. I kept having dizzy spells and had absolutely no energy. A walk to the end of the drive exhausted me. In the end, Ray (that was his name) got in the car and went up to the local shops. He came home with a salad roll and stood over me and made me eat it. That was the end of my ill advised medically supervised diet. Of course I put on weight, and my lifestyle after that put on even more. So here I am now, getting just a bit of a feeling of deja vu. Why am I depressed? You tell me.

So, call in again tomorrow night – see if we woke up dead in a paddock in Stonefield 🙂 Find out if my beautiful new nail polish has lasted another day (so far, so good! 🙂 ) Naturally I’ll let you know how my weight and my walking are going (I used the fire escape stairs again today – it’s even more comfortable walking in bare feet than in socks!) And if any of you are concerned, don’t worry about me – nothing keeps this little black duck down for very long. I will get there! So until tomorrow night, bee good (or bee gooder!), and stay safe! ciao, all! 🙂