Winter’s log, earthdate 201505.15

Beware the ides of May! I went for my Warfarin blood test today – my INR (International Normalised Ratio – naturally, with a drug like Warfarin it has to have an international dosage standard!) has dropped – quite a bit! If one is prone to developing blood clots (like me), one’s reading should be on the high side – last month mine was sitting on 2.0 – not as high as we would have liked, but just high enough. This morning it was 1.7! So, once again, they’ve upped my Warfarin dose *sigh* however, as long as it keeps me out of hospital, I don’t really care how much rat poison I have to swallow! 🙂 After the blood test, I remembered that we hadn’t bought Terry, my favourite youngest daughter’s husband, a Birthday present yet – and they were going to be over on Sunday! (just as well I remembered while we were in the shopping centre, eh?!) He wanted a nice warm jumper to wear to work, on these lovely, cool, crisp, autumn mornings – so we went around to a few of the menswear shoppes, where we certainly saw some very lovely jumpers – at not very lovely prices! It’s a work jumper for goodness sake – who’s going to pay $200 for a jumper to wear to work… fair enough if you’re a CEO or in some sort of managerial position… or even a well-groomed receptionist with her eye on the boss – but when you’re a carpenter, working in all sorts of conditions? I rather think not… Anyway, we eventually found him a nice, warm jumper, at a much more reasonable price – guess where! David Jones, because they were having a 20% off sale! I even got myself another jumper! 🙂 (I only have two nice warm jumpers – I used to have a third one, that I’d borrowed from Julian, but he borrowed it back again, and now I don’t have it any more 😦 ) Now, all we have to do is wrap the present… find a nice card, and we’re all set for Sunday (apart from something nice for everyone – except my favourite eldest daughter and myself – to eat! Julian will prolly pick up some sort of cake tomorrow…I hope he remembers!) Then we raced for the car, before I decided to buy anything else (we were walking through the handbag section of DJ’s at the time 😉 ) and we made our way over to Acuity, to pick up Julian’s reading glasses, to deliver my old red glasses to have their lenses updated, and to return my new computer glasses. It’s a pity people don’t pay attention – those new computer glasses are really excellent – I can see the screen much more betterer than I’ve been able to for years. Unfortunately, I can’t see the keyboard, so the glasses have had to go back to have the lenses corrected, so that hopefully, I’ll be able to see the keyboard as well as I can see the screen! Fingers crossed! 😉 By this time our tongues were almost hanging out for a cup of coffee, so we came home and had some of that wonderfully stimulating beverage which revived me enough to set off on my lunchtime Stair Walk. When I got back, I could hear voices coming from the Den. Our lovely cleaning lady had arrived! ( 😉 I’ll have to be careful what I say about certain things from now on 😉 as one of her daughters has requested the address of this blog, which she wants to read – and I don’t want to bore her! 😉 (*waves* “Hi, Bahar!” 🙂 )) So, the three of us chatted for a bit, then E. went off to do her cleaning, Julian and I had our lunch, and then settled in for an hour or so of Rifting together in Dusken – we won’t get much Rifting in on Sunday, as the kids will be over for a now traditionally late Birthday and Mother’s Day celebratory afternoon tea 🙂 According to himself, we’re going to try to get a bit more Rifting in tonight, after dinner, but it’s Friday night, and there’s a “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” on ABC1 to watch! (and if we’re really lucky, another episode of “Elementary”, before it!)

Weigh-in this morning. I went down another two points, to 91.4kg. I know I’ll bounce back tomorrow… I always do…

Oh, I got myself into a right stew this morning – we were trying to get ready to leave and I had a few minutes up my sleeve, so I thought I’d quickly (HA!) take care of a magazine renewal, as well as subscribe to another magazine that I often buy at the supermarket, but which was being offered very cheaply as a subscription. I started off with the new one. Somewhere along the line I managed to click on the wretched thing twice, and do you think I could get rid of that stupid second subscription? Not on your [*censored*] life! The damn thing kept wanting to charge me for two subscriptions, instead of just the one! And all the time, Julian’s waffling on in the background, trying to offer helpful advice, which just wasn’t making any sense to me! (at the time – you have to understand, I was in a hurry, something that should have been quick and simple wasn’t, I was rapidly losing what little cool I’d had, and Julian was offering helpful advice I couldn’t understand? So I yelled at him!) Anyway, when we got home, we sorted all the magazine stuff out – as it turned out that there was a “click on this to delete that product” type of link, but it was printed in very fine, very light brown italic, which blended wonderfully into the rest of the page, and like an army camouflage unit, was almost invisible to the rushed, frustrated, and unfamiliar eye. I nearly made the stupid magsonline people go without their new subscription, just for messing me around this morning when I was in a hurry! *annoyed sniff*

So, what’s happening tomorrow? I have absolutely no idea! I’ll probably do a bit of this and that – Rifting… graphic-ing… speaking of which, what do you think of the new header and background? The border around the header took a while to set up – I have a font which does fancy frames, but of course, if I’d wanted to make the frame big enough to fit around the entire header panel, it would have been gi-normous and un-workable! So I did a small one. Chopped out one side, stuck it on a new layer, and repeated it, all around the header. It took a while, because everything else had to be turned off – I was working on a transparent background, magnifying it all as high as I could go, and making sure everything lined up. That part was easy enough, but then came the matter of getting it all to fit inside the header background. If you look closely at the top right hand corner of the “frame”, you’ll see that it’s about a pixel out. Couldn’t be helped – if I’d added that extra pixel, it would have looked really “off”! However, like my kanji autumn symbol, I’ve saved that frame (without the style colour) for posterity, so that I’ll be able to use it again, somewhere else, and in a different colour – if I want (or need) to. So, as you can see, there’s always something going on around here – why not drop around again tomorrow night, and find out all the latest news and tidbits from this side of the black stump? 🙂 All the latest news and information from chez nous – always guaranteed to educate, amuse, entertain, amaze, enlighten, mystify, bore, and/or to lull you all to sleep! 🙂 I shall look forward to seeing you all here again tomorrow night, but until then, bee good, remember that a nice cup of hot cocoa will help you sleep, and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂