Well-l-l… do you want the good news first, or the bad news? 🙂 The good news is that Julian and I picked up our new glasses today – he still has one more pair to come – and I don’t know about his, but mine are much more betterer! 🙂 I can actually see the screen without squinting! (squinting causes wrinkles, don’t you know! So we don’t want to be squinting, do we?! 😉 ) Unfortunately, now I have to squint to see the keyboard! (Ahem! the previous statement about squinting causing wrinkles has never been proven beyond reasonable doubt, thank heavens!) The bad news is that I tried out a paneled background and header, and they looked really good! Until I tried them out on the blog. Once again, Word Press’s strange way of rendering graphics has reared its ugly head. For some completely unknown reason, the header part of the equation gets shrunk to about 3/4 of its original (“what you see is what you should expect to get”) size… while the background portion of the graphic – the second of the two pieces – both cut from the same original graphic – and each having exactly the same dimensions as the other… gets magically enlarged (magnified?) to the same proportions that the header was shrunk! How?! Why?! It’s stupid! It doesn’t make sense! The theme obviously didn’t do it with the current background and header, if it had, you’d see “join” lines where the header sits above the top of the background. The background doesn’t tile all the way to the top of the page – it ends – comes to a full stop – just below the bottom edge of the header! The background underneath this header is just plain “pink”, which I can only suppose the system chose after “sampling” the header pattern colours and coming up with a “reasonable match” (which it still managed to get wrong anyway – it’s far too dark!) So it looks like there will be no paneled backgrounds – at least with this theme – some themes seem to behave differently just because they feel like it! I’d move this blog away from Word Press, but apparently it’s the best of a bad bunch 
I saw some sort of article somewhere – or it might even have been a piece of spam in my email – I can’t remember now – all I can remember is looking at it and thinking “Oh!? Maybe there are “third-party” Word Press themes available?! I wonder how you install them… I must…” – and then I forgot about it because something else grabbed my attention… Say la Vee, as the French say! So, perhaps I will go hunting for “third-party” Word Press blog themes, now that I’ve finished all the mind numbingly boring Rift re-setting ups.
Anyway, graphics and Word Press aside, we went off early this morning to pick up our glasses (minus one pair of Julian’s because they weren’t ready yet) and from there we went on to The Pines shopping centre, because there’s an Autograph and a My Size there. I’d seen a rather nice cardigan/jacket in my bit of My Size email this morning, and I was desirous of having a quick squint at it before declaring it (as I should have!) “too expensive” for what it was. Autograph had their “40% off everything” sale on, and of course, since I was going to My Size first, I left my nice $50.00 gift voucher wot they’d given me for being such a good customer…. at home, on my desk. So, just to prove to them what a good little customer I really was, I bought the (rather too expensive, I’m afraid) cardigan/jacket. It’s a size “Small”, and if anything, it’s really a teeny bit too big for me – even though I was wearing a fairly bulky jumper this morning – but it’s warm, and snug, and has a nice collar that I can turn up to keep my stupid right ear warm (no, that wasn’t the main reason I bought it – though I’ll admit it did float through my mind while I was trying to think of reasons not to buy it… 🙂 ) Have any of you ever been to The Pines? It’s quite a nice shopping centre – and has just about everything you could want – Woolworths, Coles… an Aldi (all quite large ones, too!) there’s a well-appointed Chemist shop (which also sells Optifast products) a Pet Shop that seems to sell mainly dog beds, gift shops, hairdressers, The Bank of Melbourne, Priceline… a reasonably sized food hall, lots of half way decent looking food stalls… and pigeons, well, one pigeon, anyway, strutting around and pecking at crumbs scattered around one of the food stalls – he certainly looked well fed and happy – then he fluttered off somewhere else. It’s odd, seeing a largish bird like a pigeon in the food hall – sparrows, yeah, I’d expect to see them in a fairly well closed shopping centre (but I didn’t) – they’re little, and I suspect that if the health authorities did a spot check on all the supermarkets in Melbourne they’d find whole colonies of sparrows inhabiting most of them – but pigeons? I’ve never seen birds that big hanging around in closed off food halls in the middle of a shopping centre… Oh, I also bought a pair of full fingered gloves from one of the little kiosk thingies there – I usually wear one of my fingerless gloves when I’m doing my Stair Walk because the over-textured and razor sharp rendering on the wall of the stair well absolutely slices my hand to ribbons! Not to mention chipping off all my nails, one by one – even the ones on the hand that’s nowhere near the wall! That’s how lethal those walls are! So I tried them out when I got home – they worked very well – what a shame the gloves will probably get ruined – they’re a lovely shade of purple… 🙂 Anyway, after lunch I did a bit of Rifting, then I got onto those graphics, wot I’ve already told you about 🙂
Weigh-in this morning. Was a big relief! Yesterday I went up two points, to 92.4kg. This morning I came down three points, to 92.1kg 🙂 Perhaps the Big Bounce Back figured it had the wrong address, after all, when I didn’t scream and cry, rend my clothes, shave off my eyebrows, and scatter dirt and ashes though my hair… Now let’s wait and see what happens tomorrow morning – my last morning on those wretched tablets! Maybe then I’ll be able to shed a bit more fluid… (but it’ll take a couple of days for my body to wake up to the fact that it doesn’t have to hoard fluids anymore, like they were going out of style or something!)
So tonight we’ve got another ABC1 night – another in the new Father Brown series, about a bumbling priest who solves murder mysteries (Father Brown is played by the actor who played Ron Weasley’s father in the Harry Potter movies – I fergit ‘is name, but!) followed by part two of another “detective”-type show, DCI Banks. It’s quite good – worth a watch, if you’ve nothing better to do (Hmm… coming in half way through a two-parter might be a bit confusing – you could catch up with iView, though 😉 ) So that’ll be largely our night! Tomorrow, of course, is Sunday, and once again, we’ll be happily sashaying around Dusken. I remember the first time we ended up in Dusken – I was scared… it was too hard… it was an ugly place! (and everyone knows how I always go for “pretty”! 🙂 ) No, I didn’t like it at all! This time around though, I think I’m almost blasé about it… even the “Pus Swamp” doesn’t fill me with dread, simply by the sound of its name! (shudder!) So you can be sure there’ll be lots to tell you about all our adventures in Dusken – maybe we’ll die multiple times – maybe we’ll go up several levels – maybe we won’t die, or even go up a level! But we will have fun! 🙂 I’ll be able to give a much better report on our new glasses, after our eyes get accustomed to the new prescriptions in the lenses, and weight-wise I’ll tell you whether I went up, or down… or whether I stayed frustratingly the same! So tune in again tomorrow, for a night of fun, frivolity and… other interesting stuff! 😉 Until then, bee good, keep warm tonight, and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 