‘Tis the second day of Autumn, and as you can see, the little Header icon has changed to… er… an Autumn symbol! (quelle surprise!) Also, in honour of Autumn, I’ve changed my nail polish colour from a dark and brooding blue-black (Willow Byron Bay “Bonsoir” which, I might add, doesn’t look nearly as dark in their ad for it! The ad looks like a midnight sky lit up with starlight – in reality it looked more as though I’d painted my nails with thick, blue-black ink! A friend actually thought it was black!) So my nails are now a lovely Autumn-y gold! Actually, that’s not the reason I changed nail polish colours, I was going to change it to the gold anyway (it’s my new Willow Byron Bay “Sundance” which was next on my list to try) but it sounded good when I thought of it (well, I thought it sounded good, anyway!) Next week I’ll try out the luscious ripe, red raspberry, “Torakina” 🙂 My nails almost look as though they’ve been gilded (as in properly gilded, with real gold leaf!) Enough about my nails already! I was looking forward to seeing my favourite eldest daughter today – I haven’t been able to see her since the lift went out of commission on February 9th, but she rang this morning to say she wouldn’t be coming. She’d been in hospital overnight with chest pains and she just wanted to sleep. According to the tests they did at the hospital, she hadn’t had, and wasn’t in the process of having, (another) heart attack, and that it was probably just stress and anxiety (she’s already had one minor heart attack, so every little chest twinge starts off the worry and anxiety alarm bells) So it’s a worry. I wish I could find a way to get her to seriously start losing weight – I was 134kg when I started this diet, and she’s quite a bit bigger than that. She’s only 43 years old, and I feel quite helpless to do anything for her. Maybe this little “fright” will jolt her into action, but I really don’t feel terribly optimistic about it – and she won’t even contemplate my VLCD* 😦 I must be a bit weird, I think (no, actually I know I’m weird!) I’m eating approximately 750 calories (3138 kilojoules) a day, and I haven’t felt in the least bit hungry, all the way through this diet! I’m dropping around about a kilo a week, and if she could do that, she’d be a lot healthier – I know I am – and it might just save her life.

So anyway, after I’d had my hair done, I started fossicking around for Chinese symbols for the seasons. I already had Winter (my symbol), and now I have Autumn, Spring and Summer as well! 🙂 I plan on putting a different one up in the header each time the seasons change, with perhaps a special zodiac sign for the Birthday week of family and friends. After I’d made those, it was back to Rift again, and I worked on Persha (getting her up another level and a half) until just after lunch, when I went and started on my nails. By the time the second coat of the nail polish was dry, it was time for my afternoon Stair Walk, so I wasn’t able to get back to Rift again today. I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – himself is taking my favourite eldest daughter to see her Cardiologist tomorrow afternoon – I’ll be very interested to hear what he has to say! (probably something along the lines of “Lose some damn weight, woman!”, or words to that effect! I hope so, anyway!) so it looks like the coast is clear for me to do a bit of serious Rifting – I recorded last Thursday’s “Survivor: Worlds Apart”, and watched it yesterday. It’s an interesting premise – the eighteen contestants have been divided up into three groups of six, based on their positions/jobs and outlook on life, called respectively “White Collar”, “Blue Collar”, and “No Collar”. The “White Collar” team are exactly that – high executive type jobs. The “Blue Collars” are all manual type workers, and the “No Collars” are people without permanent employment – f’rinstance, one’s a coconut vendor, one’s a law student, one’s a trainee hairdresser (I think) – and as usual, their aim is to out-wit, out-play, and out-last everyone else, to win one million dollars. In the first immunity challence the teams had to scramble through an obstacle course. In the middle were three large boxes, all tied up with string, or chains with padlocks. The teams had the option of using keys to unlock the padlocks, or to untie all the knots in the strings. They all chose the keys and padlocks… for the first 2 minutes – but the hassle of finding which key out of a big bunch of keys unlocked a particular padlock – and they were all different – was simply too time consuming! It didn’t take long before, once again, all three teams switched to undoing the knotted strings. “White Collar” were quite a way ahead of the others. Once they got their boxes unlocked, they found a ladder inside – they were to use this ladder to help them get over the next part of the obstacle course, and then to reach one of a set of three bags containing puzzle pieces. The trick was for the team to hold the ladder upright while one person climbed up to get one of the three bags. One bag held 5 pieces, and formed a fairly simple jigsaw. One held 10 pieces of a more complicated and very visual type jigsaw, and the last bag held 50 square pieces which formed a very easy verbal and colour co-ordinated jigsaw. “Blue Collar” and “No Collar” both chose the 10 piece puzzle, “White Collar” (who were still ahead) chose… the one with 50 pieces! In the end, it was “No Collar” who won immunity, with “Blue Collar” winning second place. “White Collar” had to turn up to Tribal Council that night, and had one of their team voted out. And then they were five… It’ll be interesting to see what happens next week, with their first “reward” challenge, and their second “immunity” challenge!

Weigh-in this morning. Well, no need for the third Stair Walk just yet – I only went down one point, to 101.3kg, but still, it was down! It’ll most likely be “the same”, or up, tomorrow, and I do foresee a third Stair Walk on my horizon… Maybe tomorrow – maybe the day after… but I’m sure it’ll come to that

So look in again tomorrow night – see what’s been happening here at chez nous – will my gold nail polish have lasted? The jury’s still out on that one – one nail is still a little… sticky feeling? I’ll see how it goes over night… And what about Rift? Will I actually get poor, neglected Persha up to level 20 tomorrow? I should… shame on me if I don’t! Then there’s the question of what my weight decided to do – will I have been up and down those stairs three times, or only twice? Hopefully there’ll be some good news about my favourite eldest daughter’s health scare, and no doubt there’ll be lots of other things for me to brighten your evening with! So until this time tomorrow night, bee good, drive carefully, and… stay safe! ciao, all! 🙂

*VLCD = Very Low Calorie Diet

Well, there it was, the first day of Autumn, and for Melbourne, the weather was, for once pleasant, cool, but not cold, warm, but not hot. There was no sign of rain, the sun shone, the birds sang (I think – we didn’t hear them – we were indoors) and the world was truly a wonderful place, as long as you lived in a nice safe city, far away from war and strife. And where were we? As I said before… huddled indoors over a hot screen and keyboard, merrily running around an imaginary land, killing imaginary monsters and gaining imaginary money for completing rather peculiar and largely senseless quests for imaginary people. When you put it like that, it makes us sound as though we’re ready for the – I was about to say “loony bin”, but then I realised that that term is probably considered extremely politically incorrect these days, so instead I’ll say… “ready for assisted living in a controlled environment”. After all, why use two simple words which say it all in a nutshell, when five will do instead? We all know what I mean, don’t we? 🙂

Yes, today was our day in beautiful downtown Telara, questing away in the Moonshade Highlands, home to Dwarven ghosts, bloodthirsty rams, and thieving Boglings. Add to the mix a lot of unhappy, zombie-like humanoids, mechanical metal giants, black wraiths, homicidal fairies, and antagonistic Guardians, and what have you got? A great game which keeps us occupied for hours and hours every day – well, it keeps me occupied for hours and hours every day, Julian doesn’t play nearly as much as I do – he spends most of his week sitting in the office, dealing with such mundane things as the banking, Body Corporate affairs, and keeping the household running. As we ran along, gathering strange items for our quests – things like shaking leaves, broken power cells, Bogling “essence” (whatever that it – all I know is that when we collected it, the Bogling it was being extracted from “disappeared“!) and things like that. We happened to run past a Rift, and we said “Shall we?” and we did. It just goes to prove the old adage “look before you leap”! If we’d looked, we would have seen that it wasn’t just your average, run of the mill Rift, it was a Nightmare Tide Rift. And what we didn’t work out until it was too late, was that we should have targeted the giant waving tentacles first! Oh well, we’ll know next time – that is if there is a next time! Personally, I don’t want to face another one of those until I’m level 65 or higher! I died. It wasn’t fair! Once we realised that we had to target the tentacles, and had almost finished closing down the Rift, I just… keeled over and died! I have no idea why, either. Oh, and guess what! It’s Carnival time in Telara at the moment, and dotted around the countryside are colourful little dragon shaped gas balloon piñatas, full of glass beads and occasionally, other goodies. Everyone rushes madly around “killing” these piñatas, and grabbing as many glass beads as they can. Why? Well, because you can exchange those glass beads at the World Event stall in the Rift Shop for all sorts of interesting things, from Venice-style face masks to costumes, to special mounts. All good fun – I think we managed to knock down about four piñatas, before we realised that we were being sidetracked and went back to our (very serious, you know!) questing. We went up two levels today – we’re now sitting at level 40, which is only 25 levels off the top of the ladder…  One of the sections we quested through today used to be a most dreaded area – the mobs are numerous, and used to be really, really tough. The quests are yellow (remember what I said a short while ago about the level of quests corresponding to the colour of the quest?) and should have been hard enough to have at least made us raise a sweat, but we were cutting through them like a hot knife through butter! No, it’s not that our playing has improved that much, and it’s not because we’re both Mages – even separating and soloing mobs was no problem – it’s a bit of a worry, actually… there simply wasn’t any challenge in it (apart from that Nightmare Tidal Rift, which should have been a “Raid” Rift (requiring twenty players or more), but there was only the two of us… I think we were pretty good to have lasted as long as we did, and that I only died once!) We’ve already decided that when we get to level 45 we’re not going to bother with any more quests in this section of the world, we’ll pack up and go straight to Ember Isle (Ember Isle used to be about as far as you could go, when the game was capped at level 50, so it’s not for babies!) And you know what? I reckon that even Ember Isle is going to be too easy for us… C’mon Trion Games! We want a little bit of a challenge put back into Rift!

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I know it was before I took that wretched fluid hugging pill this morning, but I went down to 101.4kg! Now, if I can do that tomorrow as well (I won’t, but if I did) it’d probably be within my reach to get into the 100kg zone by my Birthday! Wouldn’t that be great?! However… my 10 “doom and gloom” days have started – from here on in I shall probably either stay the same, or go up, as I slowly start to accumulate fluid 😦 I’m still considering an extra Stair Walk before lunch (well, it makes sense – before breakfast, before dinner, so why not before lunch – three meals, three Stair Walks – it just sounds right!) I think I’ve almost talked myself into it! 🙂

So tune in again this time tomorrow – there’ll be lots to tell you – my favourite eldest daughter will be over, my hair will look decent, and who knows? I might even have re-done my nails! (I didn’t get a chance to do them today – by the time we stopped playing, it was time for “walkies”, and if I’d done them after that, they wouldn’t have been dry by dinner time!) and I do so want to see what the gold (with the silver shimmer) looks like on my nails… I doubt that I’ll get much of a chance to do any Rifting, so you won’t have to put up with me telling you all about that – you will, however, have to put up with me telling you – or sobbing on your (collective) shoulders – about what my weight did, or didn’t do – whether it went up, or stayed the same (I’m betting on it going up – it was such a big drop this morning – there’s sure to be some re-bound!), and also how Lee and I spent the afternoon… So until this time tomorrow, bee good, sleep tight tonight, and please… stay safe! ciao, all! 🙂