Last day of the month… 😦 Tomorrow I start on those awful fluid-retaining pills – but more of that later. I must, however, tell you about a fantastic little gadget we got the other day. Flipper always has a little bowl of pussy biscuits (tooth cleaning kibble) in here for her to munch on when she feels a bit peckish – which is quite often – and she really leaves a big mess of kibble debris and crumbs on the carpet! We already have a bit of a problem with ants in the letterbox and in the garage that we’re trying to eradicate, and I didn’t want to wake up one morning to find that they’d discovered Flippers crumbs, and moved in! Now, it messed up the carpet a bit – lots of little crumbs, not really worth getting out the vacuum cleaner for – so I said to Julian that what we needed was one of those old-fashioned carpet sweepers, and I wondered if they still made them. The answer is, they do, and when Julian went out to get a few supplies he ducked into Bunny’s and bought something called a Vax Duplex – a glorified, motorised carpet sweeper – apparently enough people still use an old-fashioned carpet sweeper often enough that they’ve modernised them and powered them up! Well, he brought it home and put it on its charger, and I pretty much put it out of my mind. This morning he assembled the second steel storage shelves in the spare front bedroom, then we had lunch, after which he got ready and went off to his dental appointment, and I went for my lunchtime “stroll” on the treadmill. Approximately thirteen minutes later, I wandered into the spare front bedroom to inspect the second set of shelving, and spotted the new carpet sweeper. “Oh!” thinks me, “I wonder what it’s like!” – well, for starters, it’s as light as the proverbial feather, and remarkably easy to use! It doesn’t turn quite as well as it might on our carpet, which has a very strong nap texture – rugs and mats “walk” really well on it – but even so, it’s not too hard for me to manage, even though I have virtually no arm muscles. It’s much noisier that a normal carpet sweeper, after all, it’s half vacuum cleaner, but it works really, really well. Normally, cat fur is terrible to have to try to clean up – it sticks to things the same way velcro does – but this little machine handled it better than your average vacuum cleaner! Bunny’s had it on special, and he got it for $59.00 – it’s normally more than twice that price, so if you think it sounds like “you”, get it while the price is still low – it’s well worth it! And guess what! No more crumbs around Flipper’s bowl of pussy biscuits! 🙂
This morning I hopped back into Rift and went to continue working on my cottage by the lake – I put the lid on – sorry, roof on, and added an outside staircase to get to it. I have yet to put up the safety railing around the perimeter, but I have planted two trees – one is a beautiful cherry tree in full blossom, the other is a huge weeping willow – right on the shores of the lake 🙂 In time more trees will be added, and I think I’m going to be able to push a sail boat into the lake for visual effect. I haven’t taken any screenies yet – it’s still too raw and unfinished. My main problem is in finding where I’ve put things over the years – I have Dimension items coming out of my ears, and as it all has to be stored somewhere, I’ve slowly been appropriating – or perhaps commandeering would be a better term – the larger Dimensions of my other characters, labeling them as “A – All Plants and Flowers”, and “A – All Kitchen Items”, etc., the letter “A” serving to bump them up to the top of the list when I sort them alphabetically. Unfortunately, due to time and natural attrition, the contents of these very neatly labeled Dimensions have become more of a “dog’s breakfast” than an ordered and orderly collection of usable Dimension goods. In other words, they’re all so mixed up now that I don’t know where anything is anymore! So I have two choices… Stop building, and spend an awful lot of time re-collecting and re-sorting everything and trying to make some sort of sense from all the hodgepodge… or… continue to waste tons of time and effort running blindly from Dimension to Dimension, and from shard to shard, looking (in vain, so far!) for where I’ve stashed all the ruddy lights! I had literally hundreds of the wretched things – now, the most I can find are two! Anyway, tomorrow I have to have my next Warfarin blood test – the last one was… not encouraging, shall we say – so they upped my dose (again!) and told me to come back in a week! A week! I haven’t had weekly blood tests done since I was in hospital last year! 😦 I also have an appointment at the hairdresser in the afternoon, so somehow I don’t think I’ll be doing very much of anything – unpacking or Dimensioning, and of course on Friday, I’m off to try out the treadmill with the adjustable incline!
Weigh-in this morning. Same old, same old… totally typical for this end of the kilogram zone and the end of the month – I went from 73.3kg to 73.3kg – I stayed the same! Not! Happy! Jan! Julian won’t let me go any faster than 3.2kmph, so I’ve upped the number of steps I take – yes, I do count them – it gives me something to do while I’m mindlessly putting one foot in front of the other. I used to do 12 minutes, which usually took 600 and a few steps. I now do a full 700 steps and it generally takes a bit longer than 13 and a half minutes at 3.2kmph. Yes, I could walk for longer – I’m not tired or footsore or anything when I finish – I could quite happily extend it to twenty-five minutes, three times a day! Unfortunately though, I’m bone-lazy, and at the moment I’m neither willing, nor desperate enough, to sacrifice more than the measly 13+ minutes to the endless leg churning. But I am hoping that the adjustable incline will make me work just a little bit harder, and hopefully produce better results, weight-wise. Tomorrow I start on those horrid tablets again – and I’m rapidly beginning to see my hopes of getting to my goal weight of 65kg by Christmas (so that I can have some Christmas Dinner this year) vanishing into the distance, like a mirage…. 
I don’t know about Julian, but I’m looking forward to this Sunday – we won’t be Rifting, or if we do it’ll only be for a couple of hours – because my favourite youngest daughter and her husband are supposed to be coming over to start work on our veggie garden! (I’ve managed to give myself a blister under my right big toe – it’s sore! 😦 ) The weather’s supposed to be good, too, and if everyone’s going to be trooping off to Bunny’s, then I’m going to go too – they have lots of things there that I’m quite sure I could learn to be unable to live without! (and if all else fails, Officeworks is right across the road! 😉 ) No, seriously, I am after some potted palm type thingies for the back decking, and we need to start thinking about a couple of bug zappers, too! I have big plans for our back garden and my participation in its maintenance this coming summer (as long as it’s not over 26C! I’m extremely allergic to heat!) *sigh* There’s so many things I want to do, and I’m getting old enough to start hoping I’m not going to run out of time before I do them all! And on that somewhat whimsical note, I shall bid you all a good evening, because that’s about all I have for you again tonight! 🙂 Do drop in again tomorrow night though – to find out about the Warfarin test, and what the results were this time, and what my weight decided to do – or not do, as the case may be, and lots of other things besides – there’s always something new and/or different going on around here, and the only way to find out about it is by reading my somewhat convoluted writings! 😉 Until tomorrow night then, please continue to bee good, and remember – never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate; don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm, and to drive carefully – but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 