Well, almost our first weekend here in Stillwater! We’ve been here for four days, and there’s still boxes uncountable to sift through! This morning Julian taxied over to Doncaster to pick up our second car, and to do some shopping. How is it that we go to the trouble of making shopping lists, we’re going through the supermarket, armed with said list… and as we’re trundling down the bread aisle I say to him “How are we for bread, dear?” But because he’s about four paces ahead of me, and he’s tall, and I’m down low in the ruddy wheelchair, he says “What?”, so again I say “Do we need bread?”, and this time he hears me (I think!) and he replies “No, we’re right for bread… we’ve got plenty…” Then the very next day he says to me “I’m going to have to go out and get some bread – I have nothing to make my lunch with”. This seems to happen a fair bit with all sorts of things, not just bread… So anyway, he went over to Doncaster, picked up the Lexus, and came back via the supermarket at Vermont South, and I got in a couple of hours of solid Rifting, which was pretty good… We’re hoping that we might be able to Rift again this Sunday, but… I know the old saying “All work and no play makes Julian and Winter dull people”, but… perhaps we should only play until lunch time, and spend the afternoon dealing with boxes. I don’t think we’ll get much of a chance to work on the boxes tomorrow, as first the painter is coming over to see what work needs to be done, and in the afternoon, my favourite youngest daughter and her husband are coming over… Oh well, we’ll see… I wouldn’t mind having a day rocking and rollicking around either Telara, or the Tarken Glacier… (says she, wistfully!) Unfortunately though, we haven’t really done anything terribly constructive today – Julian’s back is feeling a trifle “tender”, and with the amount of boxes still left to move and unpack, neither of us wanted to jeopardise it by allowing him to do anything too strenuous, so he’s brought the car back, done a couple of loads of washing, and this afternoon we started unpacking two boxes labeled “Den stuff”. The first one contained a whole lot of my things that I’d been starting to fret about, including my photo of Gingee, my “prescription box” (a card index box with all of our various prescriptions filed alphabetically so that they’re easy to find!) a wall calendar, and a letter rack. Those items have been found homes for on my desk (which is starting to look a little crowded!) The second box we started to unpack was also mine… labeled “Den Shelf Stuff” – and so it was! So we’ve had to re-label it “Do Not Attempt To Unpack Until We Have Shelving!”, because if we hadn’t, we’d keep on picking it up, finding that it was not unpackable, and getting annoyed with it to the point that one or both of us would be happy to throw it all out. So we’ve unpacked and dealt with…. one small box, today! I looked around on the internet for bookcases and I’ve found some which look as though they’ll be ideal, from Ikea, and if they look OK when we actually set eyes on them we’ll probably buy… quite a lot of them! We’re going to need bookcases coming out of our ears (we really do have an awful lot of books!) I’ve also discovered that we really, really need a small, probably with only two-shelves, bookcase, or a very small coffee table to put on the wall side of the lounge-suite in the living room. At the moment we have one of our two side tables sitting very appropriately at the dining room end of the lounge-suite, and the second side table sitting very in-appropriately at the foot of the chaise part of the lounge-suite, because if we put it where it’s supposed to go, at the top of the lounge-suite opposite the other side table, it would make the lounge-suite w-a-y too big for the area into which it has to fit. And as the chaise part of it is where I sit, at the moment I have nowhere to put my kindle, a cup of coffee (or tea!), the television remotes, or my box of tissues – unless I can grow much more longer arms – which I can’t! So anyway, Ikea have a few possibilities there, too, so we shall have to take time off from our box unpacking to go and have a look at the bookcases and the small coffee table thingies…

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I’m starting to work out a morning routine for getting up and getting weighed – not quite a perfect routine yet, but gimme another day and it’ll be right 🙂 I think… anyway, I noticed this morning that although I’d written my weight down in my diary, I’d neglected to enter it in on my graph – because it was in another room, that’s why! Tonight I shall take both my diary and my graph book with me so that I shan’t forget tomorrow morning! Anyway, this morning I’d gone down another two points, from 76.6kg to 76.4kg – and now, here I am again, almost to the point where my weight either stops moving altogether, stays the same for days in a row… or goes back up. Somehow or other, I managed to very cleverly slide past the 77.4kg (or so) and straight down into the 76kg zone – I very much doubt that I’ll be able to repeat that little trick, so for the next few days (at the very least!) I think we should probably all totally forget about weight-loss, and start thinking more in terms of “staying the same”, or “going up!”

Flipper seems to have accepted her new reality, if not with good grace, then at least with good, solid snoozing! She hasn’t repeated her bedroom visit of the other night – either because she “forgot” that she’d slept most of the night on our bed, or because she found that it wasn’t as good as she’d thought it would be and didn’t care for a repeat visit. She seems though to have appropriated the sofa-bed in the Den here, and although she mooches around now and then, she spends most of her time either flat-out on one end of the sofa-bed, sleeping very soundly, or lying sphinx-like along the top of the back of the sofa-bed, loftily and regally surveying her new domain. We’ve brought her two cat-caves (where she usually spent more than three-quarters of her time sleeping) over from Doncaster, and although she’s poked her head into – and walked into – both of them, she’s shown no interest at all in curling up inside either of them for a nap. The heater here is very effective and efficient, so I guess she’s probably warmer here than she was in Doncaster, which was, I admit, a fairly draughty apartment… Anyway, she seems calm and happy enough, and she’s eating well…

And so life continues to muddle along as usual. On Monday, I should be getting a treadmill delivered, and I’ll be able to start doing some exercise again (mind you, walking around this place is quite good exercise, too! It’s very big!) It’s a shame I won’t have an incline that I can set, but maybe it’s just as well, too. I’ve never used a treadmill before, so it’s probably a good idea to get used to walking “on the flat” first, before starting to climb small hills… and tomorrow week we’ll be heading off to Adelaide for Julian’s mother’s funeral. I’m starting to count the days (again!) until my bathroom gets renovated – it’s really hard, trying to squeeze everything into such a small area… and that’s about all I have for you all tonight, gentle readers! Do drop in again tomorrow night to find out what the painter had to say, what sort of gardening advice we got from my favourite youngest daughter, Kate, and her husband Terry, and whether my weight has reverted to form and either gone up, or stayed the same; see if Flipper is still sleeping on the sofa-bed, or decided that our bed is much more nicer, after all! Until then, however, please try to bee good, always remember that chaos often breeds life, when order simply breeds habit, and don’t forget to drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm – but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂