Here I am again – almost exhausted, even though I haven’t really done anything much. We got up at the usual time (7.30am) but I really wish that we’d got up a bit earlier. I hate having to rush, and I had to be at the Hairdresser by 9.45am… so I rushed. Julian seems to think that simply keeping me informed of the time is somehow going to automagically make me do things quicker – but alas, it doesn’t work that way! It has always, and will always, take me “x” minutes to finish in the bathroom – and no amount of telling me “we leave in eight minutes” is going to change that! I keep trying to explain to him that If we’re leaving in eight minutes, but it’s going to take me more than eight minutes to finish in the bathroom, then we’re going to be late – it’s as simple as that! Now, you’d think that after 29 years he would have learned this! The only way around this “time management” problem is… to allow more time – perhaps by getting up a little earlier? Anyway, I rushed, and I hate rushing. It makes me grumpy and recalcitrant! I didn’t get a chance to finish my cup of tea, which makes me really bad tempered, and I had to bolt my breakfast, which makes me even more bad tempered and snarly to boot, so if I wasn’t a very pleasant passenger in the car, well, it wasn’t my fault, OK?! After I’d finished at the Hairdresser we went off to have my Warfarin blood test done – the results of which have just come in. I’m to stay on the same dosage (3mg) my INR has crept up to 2.0, which is really excellent, and my next test is on July 24th, so that’s all good! 🙂 We called in at Inglot, my favourite cosmetic store, on the way home, and I got two new eyeshadows – I’m always concerned that I’m going to end up looking like “mutton dressed up as lamb” – well, I am old, you know, and while I do like the smoky greys a lot (love them, in fact!) I’m starting to think that just maybe they’re a bit too “heavy” for someone my age – so this time I got something a teeny-weeny bit lighter… I’ll try them out tomorrow, after I’ve cleaned my eyeshadow brushes… (*woebegone look at screen* I don’t have any coffee left! 😦 ) By the time we got home, I was freezing, and we were both frazzled and suffering from a lack of caffeine. I couldn’t come straight upstairs as I normally do, I had to wait until himself had collected all the bits of shopping and the dry cleaning, so I froze a bit more… I didn’t have my keys with me because last night when I went for my Stair Walk (Julian was off supervising the Removalists) I couldn’t find the spare set of keys that I normally use when I go on my Stair Walk, and which usually live in a little dish by the front door, right next to my Door Propping Open Book and my leather gauntlets (to protect my hand from the vastly over-textured wall!) The cabinet that they’d always been on had been emptied, the contents packed, and the cabinet whisked off to storage – I did search around a bit, but at that stage everything was in so much of a mess that I thought “bugger it! I’ll just take my own keys!”, which I did. But when I got back, I forgot to put my keys back in my handbag, didn’t I! (I have since returned them to their normal home!) So we got home this morning, we straggled upstairs, and collapsed into our computer chairs (there weren’t any other chairs left to sit on!) with some much-needed coffee. It seemed that no sooner had we started to relax than the door buzzer went. It was Sharron and her side-kick (whose name escapes me at this particular point) with the new furniture. I’m quite at a loss as to exactly what they were trying to do – we were told that the place was going to be “modernised”, made to look a bit more like a Display Home, etc., etc. As usual, I secreted myself down here in the Den and left them to it. At one stage Julian came down and I said “How’s it looking?” He hesitated for a second… “Well,” he said “it’s not the sort of house that I’d want to live in….” which I thought sounded a bit ominous… but I saw what he meant when they’d finished, and I came timidly out to see what I had left to live in until August 24th or 25th. Modern? They’ve put smart, very nicely upholstered furniture that would have looked good in a Dowager Duchess’s living room. There’s a nice square glass-topped table and matching chairs out on the balcony (complete with potted plant in the middle of the table, which will have to be removed except for Open For Inspection days, because if there’s even a breath of wind, it’ll blow off!) The lounge room looks, if anything, more crowded! There’s a cream coloured two-seater sofa, and two horribly uncomfortable looking, “horseshoe” arm chairs – the sort you see in some of the more “up-market” hotel lounges, in a matching cream-ish fabric. There are scatter cushions from here to eternity, and the top of the entertainment unit is carpeted with little “knickknacks”; the two side tables are only a little less sparsely populated (but then, they have containers of flowers on them…) and there’s a ginormous vase of flowers in the middle of the coffee table (which will have to be moved, if we want to watch anything on television!) The dining room chairs she’s provided do look very nice, as do the flowers in the middle of the dining room table (all of the flowers are fake, by the way, but you’d never know it, even by feeling them! Somehow or other they’ve been made so that they actually feel real!) However, both the charismatic Carmen and the superlative Sharron kept going on about how one of the display cabinets in the hall had to go, because it would make the room seem bigger? Well, the display case, which sat flat against the wall and didn’t take up much room, has gone… and in its place they’ve put another one of those “horseshoe” armchairs, at an angle, poking into the hall, right where the passage down to the bathroom and Den is! It’s smothered in scatter cushions, too… The bed looks silly, quite frankly – they’ve placed a narrow, ruffled, or ruched “runner” about six inches up from the bottom edge of the bed, and again – thousands of pillows! Ditto with the small(ish) bed they’ve put in the spare room. Sharron said to take lots of pictures (so that we’ll know how to put things back if we have to disturb anything!) which we haven’t done yet, but will do, as soon as we get a chance – and I’ll make them available for you all to see. As Julian said – it’s not the sort of house we’d want to live in for very long, but… we’ll just have to put up with it for the duration 
Weigh-in this morning. Not happy. I stayed the same – 84.3kg again. Thank heavens that today was the last day of those wretched pills! Now all I have to do is wait until they work their evil way out of my system! Only 11 more days until I see Dr. Y…..
So we’re almost at the end of the “set-up for the sale” ordeal! Tomorrow, the cleaners come. They have orders to scour (and I do mean “scour”!) the place, from top to bottom, including power-hosing the balcony! Cupboard doors, light switches, skirting boards, doors – the works! They were going to bring in a special machine for cleaning grouting, but it would have been far too expensive, so they’re not going to do that – but the rest will be properly cleaned! Sunday is our day in The Plane of Water… The other night, Julian wanted to try an experiment with my Mage “Silversong”, and his Cleric, “Mandreth”, instead of the Mage that Silversong usually plays with on Sundays. I’m not quite sure why – we have teamed up a Mage (me) and a Cleric (him) many times before – in fact, that’s the combination we’ve usually played with – mainly because the Mage provided the dps (damage per second), and the Cleric provided the healing to keep the Mage alive. But anyway, we gave it a go, and if we got nothing else from the experiment, Silversong did find a much more betterer “shot rotation” than she’d been using (“shot rotation” – the order and sequences in which you use your weapons) and she can now bring down mobs in less than half the time it had taken her before! 🙂 On Monday, the photographers are coming to take their extremely clever photos (which make all the rooms look twice the size they really are!) for the advertising campaign. The last day of the “ordeal” will be Tuesday, when the painter comes in to do any last minute little “touch-ups” that might be needed. Then, we should be able to heave a sigh, keep a stiff upper lip, and “endure” the two days a week of the “Open For Inspections”, until either the 19th August (Auction day), or until someone makes a fantastic offer that’s too good to refuse – whichever comes first! 🙂 Only forty days to go… The day after the Auction (if it goes to Auction!) is settlement date for our new place – which is a Thursday – and we should be moving in around about the 25th, the following Tuesday. So… roll on August! 🙂 Flipper seems to have taken a liking to one of the horribly uncomfortable “horseshoe” chairs, and has claimed it for her own – until she changes her mind, anyway, so she seems to have accepted the new layout reasonably well – but I’d still prefer that she not be living in paint fumes next Tuesday – she has boarded overnight at the Vets before, without undue histrionics… But anyway, that’s about it from me again for tonight – but do call back again tomorrow – by then I should have pictures of the “new-look apartment” for you all to gawk at and exclaim over – hopefully I’ll have better news about my weight, but I doubt it – it’s probably too soon for any real downward progress. But, as usual, I’m sure there’ll be lots to tell you, so make sure you don’t miss out! 😉 However, until then, please remember to bee good, don’t forget to always be kinder than you feel, and remember to keep warm, to look after yourselves, and to drive carefully, but above all… remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 