Winter’s log, earthdate 201506.17

Are these colours too bright? I can change it back again if it is… let me know! Well, once again I’m starting late again – Julian left to take my favourite eldest daughter home about ten minutes ago, so I walked them to the lift and then continued on for my evening Stair Walk. It’s been a good but fairly quiet day, and Lee’s told me to put the April Photos online ASAP, so (fanfare, please!)… here they are! 🙂 I’ll also post them on the “As Seen On…” page when I’ve finished here. As I said yesterday, Julian looks good in all of them, and for once in a photo-shoot, I even look vaguely human for a change! When I looked at the bottom left hand one, I thought “Good grief! I almost look like my mother!” – I think it’s more the facial expression though, rather than the actual physical features – or maybe more like a “nostalgic memory” of my mother… I dunno… but out of my photos, that’s my favourite – I feel I’m showing too many teeth in the others…

Anyway, I sorted out my Minions this morning, then started experimenting with some Art Deco Fonts and Brushes wot I’d downloaded. What you see on the header are two of them – I let Lee chose which font to use, seeing as she’d suggested the theme in the first place (and she got her $20 for her pains! 🙂 ) I was still experimenting with things when she arrived this morning, so I let her choose the font, then I showed her what happens with the size of graphical elements on this template. Again, I had to pull down the size of the text a couple of notches so that it didn’t look like something that even Mr Magoo would have been able to see! I’m pondering how to get a pattern incorporated into the header without it looking stupidly out of proportion… I think the answer lies in making the pattern as small and as fiddly as possible – maybe by shrinking the image itself – that might work! I’ll try that later. I like to use patterns because they sort-of break up the colour a bit, and make it less intense (though I think that’s what Lee had in mind when she suggested an Art Deco theme – the colours they (mostly) used were very intense!) Once I had this online and looking reasonable, we retired to the lounge room, and I left Lee to read while I did my midday Stair Walk. When I got back we watched several episodes of “The 100” – now I think there’s only one more episode before the end of the season! “Bother!” said Pooh, when he saw Piglet watching the second last episode… We also watched an episode of “Orphan Black”, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen an episode of that particular show where so many people died gruesomely and violently, some shot, some with their throats cut, and one was tortured to death by being whipped with the plug end of an electrical power cord! “who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (with apologies to Lady Macbeth and Shakespeare*) All in all, it was a “bloody” good afternoon, and I’m looking forward to more of the same next week – not that I’m a violent sort of person, mind you! 😉

Julian is back from dropping my favourite eldest daughter back home, and he’s heard back from the Valuer we sent out to Vermont South this morning – according to them, we should have our report in the morning (I’m getting sooo nervous!) We have our Auction Strategy Meeting with Carmen in the morning, then we have another house in Doncaster East to go and look at in the afternoon, and, if we do end up going, Vermont South in the evening. Then I only have to live through Friday… Ahhh… himself has just brought me an cup of coffee… I think I need it! Sometimes I find myself wishing that I still smoked… and then I think: “Nah! I’d lose my implants, if I did!”, and I think I’d rather have my implants, than be calm in the face of Auction fever! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I don’t know if it was the extra “floor” of stairs that I climbed up and down so gingerly yesterday, or whether they were simply coincidental, but I went down another two points – from 87.1kg to 86.9kg (two points is OK! Three or more are not!) I have until July 21st to get down as far as I can. That’s (approximately) 30 days from next Saturday. I was losing about a kilo a week – that “week” has stretched a bit, so let’s say I can lose about a kilo every ten days. I should be able to shed another three kilos by July 21st, with should bring me down to about 84kg (but hopefully a bit less!) My end goal weight is 75kg, but I want to get down to 70, so that when I start my “maintenance” diet, I’ll have five kilos to “play with” while I adjust to the new regimen. So if I can get down to 84kg (or less) I’ll have less than 10 kilos to my goal weight. But if I can get down to, say, 80kg by August 18th, that will mean that I’ll have lost 54 kilos in 12 months! Oh, I nearly forgot! I got Julian to measure my height this morning – just for fun, I want to look up my supposed ideal weight according to my BMI. I used to be quite tall – 5’7″ in bare feet. I’m now…. not even five foot one! I’m just a titch over five feet now! My spine has mangled and compacted more than half a foot, with scoliosis and osteoarthritis! The moral of the story? Don’t get old and arthriticky! 😦

Anyway, t’is nearly time for dinner and the news again, so I’ll save this here and return to ramble on at you all a bit later on 🙂

 +————————–+ * Dinner & Television Break * +————————–+

Here I am, back again 🙂 I just did a quick BMI weight calculation thingy – according to that, even when I get down to 70kg, I’ll still be bordering on obese, let alone what I’d be at a whopping great 75kg! At 5’0″ (154cm) it tells me that I should weigh 45kg to be a normal, “healthy” weight. I dunno… somehow I don’t think I’d ever want to get down to 45kg, and if I did, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be a so-called “healthy” weight! So much for the science of the “ideal”, eh?!

We’re going to have a pretty busy day tomorrow, so I don’t expect I’ll get much Rifting or graphic-ing in – but busy or not, it’ll be very interesting. I’m not really sure if our visit to see Carmen tomorrow isn’t going to be a big waste of time – it largely depends on whether we can get her to stick to the subject – she has a great fondness for the sound of her own voice, and does seem to get easily sidetracked listening to it 😉 We’ll see… and of course we’re both very curious as to what the Valuer’s report on Vermont South has to tell us, too! Hopefully it won’t say something like: “This is an amazing property, worth close to 2.5mil, so forget it, Freddie!” The house we’re going to look at seems quite nice – it has a nice floor plan, and of course, the photos of the rooms look great – but then Realty photographers have special lenses and know all the tricks in the book to make rooms look larger than they actually are. When we first looked at photos of the house we went to see yesterday, one of the first things we noticed was that there was a guitar on a stand in the lounge room, but we had to look twice before we realised that it was a guitar – I’d thought it was a weird modern sculpture of a guitar, it had been so distorted and elongated by the lens and angle of the photograph! Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow night 🙂

And that’s about all I have for you tonight – but rest assured there’ll be lots more to tell you all tomorrow night. Do drop in again to find out what Carmen had to say, what the house in Doncaster East was like, what the Valuer had to say for his twopence worth, and whether we ended up going to a twilight viewing of our Great White Hope in Vermont South or not. Then of course there’ll be all the incidental news, like what happened at my morning weigh-in, whether or not I got any Rifting in, as well as lots of other little bits of trivia. But for now I shall once more exhort you all to bee good, remember to act with a determination not to be turned aside by thoughts of the past and fears of the future, don’t forget to take care of yourselves, drive carefully, and keep warm, but most importantly… remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*Hands up any of you who knew that Macbeth and Duncan were indeed real, historical Kings of Scotland? Read about them here…