So, our belated Father’s Day luncheon has ended, and my two favourite daughters and their respective spouses have departed (actually Lee and Neale haven’t – the last I saw of them, they were walking off down the street with Julian, following a trail of ants!) Yes, it seems we have a small ant problem here – we think there’s an ant’s nest in the garage roof, and there’s a swarm of them in our letterbox, which according to Julian are coming from the base of a tree about 50 meters down the street. [begin ominous voice over] They shall be dealt with! [end ominous voice over] Lunch was a success – Nando’s chicken tenders, chips, salsa, Perinaise dipping sauce, bread rolls, and a couple of dips and spicy olives. Julian made a salad with iceberg lettuce (the only type of lettuce that Neale will eat!) cherry tomatoes, button mushrooms, celery, capsicum, and baby bocconcini. According to the Optifast web site, everything in the salad apart from the bocconcini are on the “free list”, meaning that you can eat a cup full of it because it contains next to zero calories – so I did. I had about 4 small pieces of torn off lettuce, four slivers of sliced capsicum, one small button mushroom, and two x 1 cm bits of celery (one of which has now super-glued itself into my top right bridgework!) Well, it might be on the “free list”, but I feel very guilty about eating it. I probably shouldn’t have, and if my weight does go back up again tomorrow, I’ll know why 😦 But do you know, they were the first fresh vegetables – the first fresh anything, other than the half a banana I have on my breakfast every day – that I’ve put in my mouth since August 18th last year! (prunes don’t count as “fresh” 😛 ) The chocolate mud cake that Julian got for dessert looked so delicious! I hope they’re still making them this time next year, cos I don’t think that the remains of this one will still be edible by then. It was a layer cake, with orange and poppy-seed cake on the bottom layer, what looked like milk-chocolate butter icing in the middle, with a really dark, dark chocolate cake layer on the top. The icing on the top of the cake looked to be chocolate icing, between a quarter to a half a centimeter thick , and liberally coated with cocoa powder. The sides of the cake had been rolled in slivered toasted almond flakes… (quick! Where’s a tissue? I need to wipe the drool off my keyboard!) – as I said before – I do hope they still make these cakes this time next year! 😉 We discussed our garden at length – I think we’ve decided on two beds, each about the size of our eight-seater dining room table, and standing about as high, so there won’t be too much bending involved in planting and weeding. They’ll be made of sleepers bolted together to form a rectangular box (how handy it is to have a Carpenter as a son-in-law! 🙂 ) half filled with stones, similar to the river stones currently covering the side garden beds, and then topped with garden soil and fertiliser. We’re going to need to get a few tools, too – like a spade… and a rake… a trowel – I think we already have a hose – and various other implements of garden torture – and we just happen to have the largest Bunnings store in the southern hemisphere, just down the road! 🙂 Isn’t that nice! 😉 Conversation ranged between the difficult job that Malcolm Turnbull now has ahead of him, to the follies of putting too many trees in too small an area (like putting a fig tree, a peppercorn tree, and an oak tree in a smallish garden which already has a weeping cherry planted bang-smack in the middle!) and all-in-all, a good time was had by all participants! The next celebratory luncheon will be a joint BBB (Big Birthday Bash) for Neale and my favourite youngest daughter, Kate, on a Sunday sometime around December 12th. Neale’s birthday is on December the 9th, Kate’s is on December 12th – and our wedding anniversary is on December 14th, so we’ve always tended to roll them all into the one big celebratory luncheon. We used to go out to dinner (or lunch) to either our favourite Chinese restaurant, The East Empress in Glen Waverley, or The Tender Trap in Doncaster East, another of our favourite places to eat. However, with both Lee and I out of the eating competition at the moment, it’s become kinder and easier to eat at home (besides, the East Empress is closed for renovations at the moment, but should be re-opening soon!) For minor things like Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Easter, we generally either have a “cold cuts” luncheon – a variety of cold meats, several salads, including the most delicious home-made potato salad you’ve ever tasted (which I invented!) assorted bread rolls, and some sort of dessert – usually a store-bought cake of some kind, as Julian doesn’t make cakes (yet!) or else we go for something like the Nando’s lunch we had today. Christmas is a bit more special – home roasted turkey breast with all the trimmings, ham, cranberry sauce, gravy – and of course, Christmas pudding with brandied whipped cream. Sometimes we make our really yummy Christmas ice-cream – basically good quality vanilla ice-cream, softened to room temperature, then mixed with diced Christmas cake, chopped mixed glacé fruits, and a good dose of Cointreau and brandy – then re-frozen or churned in the ice-cream machine. It really is to die for, but I’m afraid we won’t be having that again until Christmas 2016, when maybe I’ll be able to sniff it – it’s très full of calories!

Speaking of calories:

Weigh-in this morning. It took three weigh-ins this morning to get two the same, but I ended up another two points down – from 74.1kg to 73.9kg. However the scales hovered between 74.0kg and 73.9kg, and it took three goes to get 73.9kg twice, so I won’t be at all surprised if I do go up again tomorrow… and I only have ten days to the end of the month and those horrible fluid retaining pills! 😦 Anyway, here’s hoping I go down again tomorrow (though after eating that salad…. )

I’m not quite sure what’s happening tomorrow – I have a Podiatrist to find, and Julian has a Clarke to get in touch with, so we might not be able to get a full day of Rifting in, though we should be able to eke out a half day’s worth 🙂 Of course there’s still heaps of work to be done around the place – boxes to unpack, and places to find for all the things inside those boxes. As it turns out, we don’t have all the furniture (apart from bookcases!) that we need – we’re short a display case, even if we do send most of the knickknacks and ornaments off to Auction *sigh* so that’s something else we’re going to have to go looking for (and what do you want to bet that it’ll be another flat-pack!) We have been working hard though (well, he has, I haven’t, lazy sod that I am!) and we deserve a bit of a break for a day! The Podiatrist though, I really do have to get on to – my feet really need working on – they’re starting to fall to pieces on me! I’m going to ring the Podiatrist I had in Doncaster – I’m pretty sure she won’t come out as far as Vermont South, but you never know your luck in a big city – and besides – even if she can’t come out here, she might know of someone who can! There’s no harm in asking, anyway! And now that’s about it from me for tonight! It’s almost time for me to waltz off for my evening Treadmilling session, but do drop in again tomorrow night to see what’s happening around here – did we get any significant Rifting in? Did we die? More to the point, did I find myself a Podiatrist? And what happened with my weight, after the forced triple weigh-in this morning, and all the salad that I ate at lunch time?! You can be sure that there’ll be lots to tell you all, but until then, please bee good, don’t forget that experience is simply the name we give our mistakes, and always remember to keep warm, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves – but most of all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*Quote of the Day from Goodreads this morning: “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” ― George Orwell
The blurb reads: September 18, 1917: On this day, dystopian fiction novelist Aldous Huxley began teaching at Eton. One of his pupils was Eric Blair, a young writer who would grow up to write 1984 under the pen name George Orwell.

A very true quote in the sense that every generation thinks along these lines – though in my case of course, it’s perfectly true! I am more intelligent than my forebears – and it’ll probably be seen in the future that I was far wiser than people in generations to come (if we survive that long, that is!) 😉 I sometimes wonder what’s happening to the human race – a few minutes ago Julian was looking at photos of a German submarine built in 1918 – almost 100 years ago! Yes, we’ve advanced technologically, or perhaps taken a different technological path, but the engineering and construction of that submarine is absolutely phenomenal! The materials used to build and run the machine might have changed – but the method and the basic engineering principles haven’t! Take a look at education – especially in the U.S.A.! Teaching Creationism in schools, because evolution isn’t true? Because there’s no proof of evolution? Their absolute insanity about “the only thing to be able to stand against a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun”? This is from some of their politicians – their leaders! What is happening to the world? The refugees flooding into Europe because the “powers that be” are fighting over control of Syria and surrounding areas. The insanity of Fundamentalism is rising, and the logic of science and education quickly fading, as world leaders (not just in the Middle East!) adopt more and more stringent invasions of privacy,  and the curtailing of civil liberties. The propaganda of fear abounds; the media fan the flames of hatred, and the governments allow it – and sometimes even encourage it. This is just plain wrong! We have the technology, the knowledge, and the materials to build a peaceful world – all it would take would be international co-operation, an agreement to help or subsidise poorer countries, and a UN that wouldn’t hesitate to pull down, by any means necessary, any aggressive leader attempting to invade or disrupt another country, or attempting to force their will on their own people at gunpoint. The current UN is a joke, and dictators and tyrants wreck their will on their own people with bullets and gas. Most world leaders either turn a blind eye, or bleat that “sovereign rights” can’t be trampled upon, and argue and bicker about what to do with the fleeing refugees, and how little they can possibly get away with spending on the problem. Quite frankly, I’m very glad that my two daughters have not reproduced, and our line will die out with them. I don’t think I want to see, or know, what the world is going to be like in another fifty years! There was a time when I – and most of the free world – looked up to America – they were the world’s policeman and champion, they stood, like Superman, for Truth! Justice! and, of course, “The American Way”. Well, that “American Way” has become well and truly tarnished over the years, and warped into something almost unrecognizable. I no longer believe that a hero is going to come leaping out of the rubble and destruction that characterises the world today, holding aloft a blazing torch, to lead us in the right direction. If we want a better life, we have to make it for ourselves – because our leaders ain’t about to do it for us! …Think about this: what would happen if they gave a war, and nobody turned up?

Gosh, it’s months since I had a good, refreshing rant like that! 🙂 Hope you don’t mind too much – after all, I don’t do it often 😉 It was just that looking at the photos of that submarine, I was struck by the fact that – things haven’t really changed all that much since the beginning of World War I. Julian believes in humanity, and believes that we can and will rise above these world problems and that a civilisation similar to the one often portrayed in Star Trek will come about. I’m afraid that I don’t. I happen to think that we’ve come too far along this path, that we’ve passed the tipping point, and that it’s too late to go back. Say la Vee, as the French say…

This morning Julian took the dry cleaning over to Doncaster (Yayyy! I’ll have some clean clothes to wear! 😉 ) picked up some clocks and the four wire slide-out basket stands from our wardrobe at the apartment – this house is almost totally devoid of time pieces, and I really need one in the bathroom – and in here – and once we get the bath measured properly, Julian can go out and get a piece of Masonite or whatever cut to size, and blu tack or superglue it to the rim of the bath so that I can put the slide-out basket stands on it, to give me a bit more room – I’m afraid I just can’t wait the six weeks until Clarke can start on the renovations! Julian also went and checked out our nearest Nando’s, which is up at KMart Plaza, on the corner of Blackburn Road and Burwood Highway, and not really all that far away from us – so he’ll just phone in the order tomorrow morning and someone can volunteer to go and pick it up. He did end up buying another salad spinner, and he also got a chocolate mud cake for the four of us who are eating “proper food” – Lee and I will make do with our Optifast bars 🙂 While himself was out this morning, I Rifted. I got Rubymoonshine back to Meridian – managing to die another two or three times (*sigh*) once again by thinking that a level 9 could take on a level 15! Will she ever learn?! It’s really weird – all these characters I have are all “me” – and yet each one plays differently, and has a different attitude and style of fighting – this one, for instance, seems to have a distinct lack of forethought and sense of self-preservation – so far, anyway! Most of the others would have looked before they leaped! Still, it does make the game more exciting, and less predictable! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Yep, we’re making hay while the sun shines alright! I went down half a kilo this morning, from 74.6kg to 74.1kg! This means that I’ll either sky-rocket up tomorrow morning, or stay at 74.1kg for the next three weeks! 😦 I certainly hope not, but that’s the way this idiotic body of mine seems to work, most of the time! Stay tuned! 🙂

Well, tomorrow, as you all know by now, is going to be our very belated “Father’s Day” for Julian. It should be a really good day – I don’t believe the weather’s supposed to fall apart until the mid to late afternoon, so we might even get to go and sit out at the table on the deck! That would be novel! Me? voluntarily going and sitting outside?! As the warmer weather’s approaching, I must start nagging Julian to buy a couple of those bug-zapper things. I actually do like sitting and doing things outside (as long as I’m not in the sun! I’m allergic to sun!) it’s just the insects, mosquitoes, and creepy-crawlies that I can’t abide! I don’t like nagging, and usually won’t do it, even when he begs me to because he forgets things – but in this case, for the bug-zappers, I’ll make an exception! 🙂 I’m looking forward to starting our veggie garden – it’s going to be one of those built-up ones made out of sleepers that you don’t have to break your back weeding – and I’m so looking forward to home-grown tomatoes, celery, carrots, beans, sugar peas, parsley (but not coriander! I hate coriander!) I’d like to put in a fig tree, too, but that might have to go in the front garden. And a peppercorn tree – I love peppercorn trees – they’re so romantically graceful and yet gnarly! (with all the things I want, maybe we should have moved out to a farm! 🙂 ) So once again I’ve just about come to the end of tonight’s missive – do drop in again tomorrow (though I warn you all now – tomorrow’s blog is likely to be rather late – there’s a lot going on around here tomorrow, you know! 😉 ) and see what the day brought us – how the luncheon went, if my weight did sky-rocket back up again, and whether or not we ate outdoors – and all sorts of other interesting and vaguely amusing stuff 🙂 Until then, though, please at least try to bee good, don’t forget that the human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter; remember to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and I’m almost tempted to say “to keep cool”! But most importantly, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Oh dear – I’m starting even later today – there’s no way I’m going to get this finished before dinner! Now that we’ve moved closer to my favourite eldest daughter, Julian doesn’t have to leave as early as he used to, to drop her home again – which means that we have time for more “Arrow” and more chatter before she leaves – which is good! 🙂 When Lee arrived this morning I was in the middle of getting Rubymoonshine, the last of my newbies on Greybriar, on her way to Meridian, but we went window shopping for bathrooms online instead. She likes black and white as a bathroom theme, but having spent some time in Adelaide with a bathroom that had black tiles (many years ago now) both Julian and I have promised eachother that we’ll never, ever, have black tiles in the bathroom – especially in the shower recess! We saw a lot of nice bathrooms online this morning, and a lot of – shall we say, “interesting”? bathrooms… some downright ugly bathrooms, and quite a few “really nice but the wrong colour” bathrooms. We also saw exactly what I want! Well, maybe not exactly – I really did want some purple/mauve/lilac/lavender shades in it, but I’m willing to compromise and have those colours as “contrasting accents” (towels, bottles, ornaments, whatever!) It’s exactly the shade of grey marble tiles that I want, and I really like the textured tiles in the back of the shower recess (and behind the bath, only we won’t be having a bath!) You have no idea how sick and tired I am of having to lie the shower head on the floor of the shower, and of having nowhere to put a tube of toothpaste, or a box of tissues! My new bathroom just can’t be completed quickly enough, so I’m extra pleased that I’ve found the tiles and the shades of grey that I want!

My favourite eldest daughter is really doing extremely well with her Optifast diet – she’s lost about 33 kilos, and will be catching up to me soon! 🙂 But oh dear – while we were having lunch today she was leafing through one of my magazines, looking at all the pictures of beautifully presented foods in it, mournfully exclaiming how she’s never going to be able to eat anything like that again, ever! This is not true, of course – one can eat anything one likes, after reaching one’s goal weight – the thing is though, not to eat too much of it, and not to have it too often. I told her that I’m really looking forward to having a piece of really good chocolate cake (home made, preferably!) – but I don’t really want to eat a whole piece of cake – a mouthful or two would be plenty for me – I just want to taste it again, and get the feel of the texture in my mouth! A small plate of fresh pasta every now and then – three or four oven cooked chips – a piece of fillet steak just smaller than the palm of my hand… and as a special treat 😉 a KFC Zinger… 🙂 Oh, there’s lots of things I’m looking forward to eating again once I reach my goal weight – but it won’t be all the time, and it’ll be in small amounts – I’m all too aware of the possibility of slipping back into my old, lazy, “I don’t care” ways – but I meant it when I said I was sick of being obese, I will get myself stabilised around 65kg, and believe me – I’ll still be weighing myself every day, doing my Treadmilling three times a day, and watching myself like a hawk! If I do start putting on too much weight, well I know what to do – back onto the Optifast diet until I stabilise again! Besides – if the food’s not there, I can’t eat it, can I? 🙂

But I really am a very lazy person – another day has gone by and I haven’t managed to find a Podiatrist, and I haven’t managed to locate the nearest Nando’s store for Sunday’s lunch with the kids (for a very belated Father’s Day get-together) Lee and I, of course, will have our favourite Optifast bars 🙂 (hmm… according to their map, it looks like the closest ones are at Forest Hill or Burwood East! Either Lee or Kate should be able to pick up the order on their way over…) Julian was contemplating buying a BBQ while he had the use of the van, but he ran out of time – and besides, I think it’s still a bit too cold to be sitting around outside having a BBQ!

Weigh-in this morning. I think my body is “making hay while the sun shines”, or something – I went down another three points, from 74.9kg to 74.6kg! I’m still waiting for the nasty big Bounce Back to pounce, though However, I have twelve days left to lose as much weight as possible before I have to go back on those awful fluid-retaining pills again… so I’m staying on two anti-fluid pills a day (and my feet still get a bit swollen, anyway!) and I’ve upped my Treadmilling speed (yet again!) to 3kmph – and you know what? It still doesn’t feel as though I’m doing any “proper” exercise! It’s just… too easy! Isn’t exercise supposed to be hard work? Aren’t you supposed to feel tired, or out of breath, or hot and sweaty, when you finish? Cos I don’t! Am I not doing it right, or something? My toes are getting a little sore, and I’ve had to stick big band-aids around the balls of my feet, when the skin tends to split if they get too dry – but other than that *shrug* I feel about the same as I do if I walk from one room to another! Perhaps I am doing it wrong…

Anyway, because I started this so late, it’s now “that” time again! 😉

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

And finally, here I am back again! 🙂 I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – I suspect that some shopping for Sunday will be in order – Julian doesn’t know where the salad spinner is (probably still in a packing box labeled “Kitchen Stuff”, of which there are still several to go through) so a new one might need to be purchased – and just because Lee and I won’t be eating the chicken and chips and a dessert doesn’t mean that everyone else has to go without 🙂 Me? I still have a girl to bring through to Meridian, and I need to check out a few bits and pieces for various plans and projects, so I expect we’ll both be reasonably busy 🙂 I certainly hope that we haven’t got anything booked for this Monday – morning or otherwise (!) – because we’ll make it our traditional “Sunday Rift Ramble”, seeing as we haven’t had a proper one for what seems like months! And that’s pretty much it from me tonight – I’m sorry that this is coming to you all so late, but as they say in the classics, “better late than never!” 🙂 But do call in again tomorrow night to catch up on all the latest – whether Julian bought a new salad spinner or not, and what he purchased for everyone’s dessert on Sunday, whether my weight continues to go down, or whether the feared and expected Big Bounce Back has caught up with me, and lots of other interesting bits of trivia! 🙂 Until then. though, please try to bee good, always try to do the right thing – it will gratify some people and astonish the rest, and always remember to keep warm, to look after yourselves, and to drive carefully – but above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Oh dear, I’m starting this quite late tonight! We went over to Doncaster this afternoon, unfortunately forgetting to take the dry cleaning we were going to drop off on the way to the hairdresser! 😦 Anyway… this morning was fairly quiet again – Julian went off to ferry around some more boxes from storage to the shed, leaving me to…. Rift. I managed to get one more new character back to Meridian (I still have one more character to go!) stopping along the way to die four times, and pick up the three basic Skills, plus some fairly good artifacts… Now, how on earth does a level 10 Mage manage to die four times… in the ruddy baby area? Simple. One runs into a Hell Bug Foothold, and very foolishly decides to team up with another character, in order to eradicate the nasty Hell Bugs! We both died three times – dying isn’t a problem in these sorts of games – it’s easy enough to “get better”. The first time you die, you can “soul walk” – that is, your ghost hovers around at the place of your death for a couple of seconds, and then re-solidifies into you – you whistle up your pet (if you have one) and off you go – back to the fray! If you die a second (or third, or fourth) time within a few minutes, you can “purchase” a soul walk with Credits, or you can re-awaken in the nearest graveyard, where there’s usually a Healer – then you have to run all the way back to where the fighting was – and the graveyard is nearly always in the most awkward place possible for you to get back to where your battle was. Again – apart from the inconvenience (and the cost of healing!) this is not too bad… the worst part is that as soon as you “exit combat” (because you’re dead!) the mob you were fighting returns to full health! Imagine… you’re battling a great big bad Boss monster… you’re taking heavy damage, and your pet is dead – no time to whistle up another one – the big bad Boss monster is also taking heavy damage! You’re wearing him down! If you can stay alive just… a… bit… longer… you’ll have him – he’s slivered! Two more hits should do it! “That’s it!” you think, “I got him dowww…” and you die. The big bad Boss monster didn’t. Slivered though he was, you died first – and he returns to full health, because you “exited combat” when you died! And that’s what happened with the Hell Bug Foothold. We kept dying! They kept healing! I was running back to the fight after my third death thinking “I’m not sure if the two of us are enough to get them down!”, especially when I saw the other person’s little “tombstone”, indicating that he’d died too – but wait! The Hell Bug Boss was almost slivered! The other person must have died after I’d resurrected, and because we were a “group”, only one of us had to be alive to prevent the Hell Bug Boss from healing himself! And so we finally killed them all! 🙂 Yes, I died three times there – my fourth death occurred when I was happily artifact hunting in one of my favourite artifact hunting spots. I ran around the corner, and there was this great big Ogre – a “special” monster that occasionally appears in that spot. I’ve killed him so many times that without thinking, I just ran in an attacked him. He’s not even hostile – he’s a “yellow”, which means he won’t attack you if you don’t attack him. And he’s such a pushover! He’s a big pussy cat! He’s easy! …If you’re not level 10, that is. Too late, I realised that he was level 15 – not even Elite – just level 15. But I was totally no match for him – when I saw he was level 15 I thought “Uh-oh! 😦 Too late now! I’ll just have to give it my best shot!” – which I did… and so I died, for being silly and not checking on his level before attacking him! Oh well… as I said – it’s easy enough to recover from being dead… 😉

Julian got home around lunch time with some more boxes – he’d thought that two more trips should get them all back here, but I guess there were more boxes that he’d originally thought, and we were running out of room in the shed! He didn’t have time for another run this morning, the van was due back in the early afternoon, so the rest of the boxes will have to wait a bit longer. We had lunch, and I did my lunchtime Treadmilling (2.8kmph now!) after which we took off for Doncaster (leaving the dry cleaning behind, as I mentioned earlier) I had my hair done, and we did a bit of shopping. We came home via Harvey Norman, where we stopped off to pick up our deposit that we’d put on the non-materializing credenza, and we came home. Once in the garage, I jumped out to check on my little fishies (they’re fine!)

Ooops! It’s “that” time again… Sorry! 🙂

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

And here I am, back again! 🙂 Yes… I had a look at my little fishies – and they took one look at me, turned tail, and fled! 😦 then I came inside, shed my feet, and without so much as waiting for a much needed cup of coffee, jumped on the treadmill for my evening “stroll”. Twelve minutes, at 2.8kmph… I started off with the treadmill going at an extremely slow 1 kilometer an hour, and I’ve gradually increased that to my current 2.8 kilometers an hour – now I’m wondering just how much faster I can go without falling off! It’s not the walking speed that’s the problem – it’s the stopping! If I just hit the “Stop” button I almost go sailing over the front of the machine – and even when I slow it down gradually (after hitting 12 minutes, so I’m actually walking for close to 13 minutes by the time I stop it!) before I stop the machine it’s… unsettling, shall we say? because my brain is still in “I’m travelling” mode, but I’m not moving!  Anyway, then I came in here, was given that life-saving cup of coffee, and started this.

Weigh-in this morning. Will wonders never cease?! I’d gone down another four points – from 75.3kg down to 74.9kg! That’s two mornings running, with a drop of four points each, or almost a kilo in two days. Unfortunately, that seems to be quite normal for me – I’ll drop a lot of weight, very quickly, and then my weight sits there sulking in the lower part of the kilogram zone, scarcely moving more than one or two points in either direction – for days and days at a time. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, wouldn’t you… it’s been doing that since August 18th last year when I started this weight loss program… but it really rattles me, every! single! time!

Tomorrow my favourite eldest daughter is coming over, and we’ll probably watch some more episodes of “Arrow” – and I think Julian will be doing some office work. I’m not sure what’s happening on Saturday, but we’ll either use it, or Monday, as our “Sunday in Telara”, because on Sunday we’re having our somewhat belated “Father’s Day” luncheon, and both my favourite eldest and my favourite youngest daughters will be here with the respective other halves, so it should be a good day. Kate and Terry will be bringing their book of “what to plant when”, and we’ll be mapping out my long promised veggie garden, and we’ll see just how much room is left over for other things… It’s been a busy day, but we’re slowly getting the place together! We’ve got some big decisions to make about where to put big things – there’s a Grandfather clock that will be coming over from Adelaide, and a very large painting – as well as a lot of our own large paintings and mirrors – but there’s no rush 🙂 and Julian has finally taken some proper photos of Miranda – you can see them here – I think she’s gorgeous! 🙂 And I think that’s about it from me for tonight! Do drop in again tomorrow night and find out how my weight went, and whether it bounced back or not, and to find out what my favourite eldest daughter and I watched all day, as well as lots of other news and tidbits from chez nous! But until then, please bee good, remember that the art of a people is a true mirror to their minds, and 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! 🙂

*Quote of the Day from Goodreads this morning: “Don’t wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel, stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself.” ― Sara Henderson
Blurb: When her husband died in 1985, Australian pastoralist Sara Henderson (born September 15, 1936) took over managing duties at the Bull River cattle station. She was named Businesswoman of the Year for her efforts and wrote about the experience in her autobiography, “From Strength to Strength”.

I liked that quote of the day – I often stride off down the tunnel to get the light going 🙂 Not often, admittedly, but often enough 😉 Anyway, today’s been fairly quiet – Julian took off almost straight after breakfast, to drop the car off to have its headlight fixed, and to pick up the van (one tonne, I think) so that he could deliver rubbish, cardboard, and packing materials to the Waste Refuse Station, and pick up boxes from storage for us to unpack and make a bit more rubbish, cardboard, and packing materials for the Waste Refuse Station (he’s so thoughtful and generous like that! 😉 ) Well, “They” say that while the cat’s away, the mice, or in this case, mouse, will play – and play I did! I Rifted for most of the morning, and managed to accomplish quite a lot on Greybriar, set-up wise. It’s all organised now, and ready for some serious questing and gaming, to try to make us some money. In the past, we’ve brought in one or two high level characters from “richer” shards (high level, because they can carry more money) but this time I don’t want to temporarily “import” characters, I want us to do it ourselves, by gathering, processing, and auctioning herbs, wood, and minerals. We have a 3 Vault Guild Bank, and we have Artisans to process what we gather, and to make things that we can auction off. Anyway, the least we can do is give it a try! Oh, did I tell you that I’d changed the name of the Guild? It’s now “Rift-Raff” 🙂

So far Julian has made three (? or is it four? I fergit!) trips to a from the Waste Refuse Station and the self-storage place in Mitcham – he’s off on another trip at the moment, to do some much-needed shopping and to pick up yet more boxes. Most of the boxes he’s put in the shed for unpacking later, but two of them he’s left out because apparently they contain some of my bathroom things… hmm… I’m not sure that this is such a good idea at the moment! It might be better to wait until my bathroom has been renovated first – because at the moment I don’t have any room for the things I’ve already got, let alone the things in those two boxes! Well, if they won’t fit into the bathroom, I may just have to “spill over” into my Treadmill room! There’s a built-in wardrobe in there, and back in Doncaster we have four wire mesh sets of slide-out drawer thingies in our old wardrobe – we’ll just have to bring them over here sooner than we’d planned (they’ll eventually be put in the Walk In Wardrobe) and put them in the wardrobe in the Treadmill room! Or… we can do what I first suggested, and have a piece of reasonably sturdy Masonite cut roughly to measure and just…. drop it over the wretched bath! I don’t give a damn what it looks like, I just need a place to put things on! Especially after I unpack those two boxes that Julian brought home with him on his last trip to the storage place! However, going from the way that a lot of these boxes seem to have been labelled, it’s far more likely that there’ll be kitchen stuff in them, or linen, or bedroom things! Actually, you know, I quite like unpacking boxes, especially when you’re not sure what’s really inside them – it’s a bit like Christmas time, and unwrapping presents! You have a fair idea of what’s inside, but quite often it turns out to be a complete surprise! 🙂

Tomorrow afternoon I have an appointment at the hairdresser, but the morning should be pretty much a clone of today’s. Julian has the van until about one thirty? so he’ll want to get as much done as possible, which means I’ll probably be able to get some more Rifting in… though I am starting to get a bit bored with my current desktop bookmark wallpapery-thing – so it’s probably about time I made a new one. This one is in shades of mint green and silver – I think I might try the mauve/lilac shades next (seeing as I don’t think I’ll be able to get those colours for my bathroom!) I’ve decided to go with large, square, very pale grey “marbled” tiles, which will go on both the floor and the walls, and should make the room/space look bigger – they’ll be off-set with tiny, square amethyst/deep blue mosaic tiles (little strips of mosaic tiles, no wider than the length of your thumb, around things like the long inbuilt ledge in the shower, maybe around the mirror (undecided about that at the moment!)) The tiles will come up the walls to the height of the window, and it all should look quite nice… Depending on the mosaic tiles, and what sorts of colours are available … Anyway, as soon as we do go tile shopping, I’ll try to post some images up to show you what I mean. And speaking of images, Julian took some photos of Miranda, our resident lamp-holding mermaid, to put up for you – but he took them at night, in very poor light, with his phone, and all you can really see is a dark “blob”! Damn the boxes, before he goes out tomorrow I’m going to get him to open the blinds in here, get his proper camera, and take some decent photos of her! I’ve been dying to show you all what she looks like, but there’s no way I’m going to put up the ones he’s taken so far, where she’s just a dark shape!

Weigh-in this morning. Suspicion and conspiracy theories are swimming around inside my head… this morning, I went down four (4) points, from 75.7kg to 75.3kg! Go figure! I’m now walking for 12 minutes at between 2.4 and 2.6kmph, three times a day, and I think I’m starting to develop a blister underneath the big toe on my right foot – but that’s OK – s’easy enough just to bung a band-aid over it and keep on walking! I don’t expect my weight to stay at 75.3kg, I fully expect it to bounce right back up again, because it really does like to tease me – but at least it moved! It’s only when it just hovers sullenly around the one point, only going down a smidge, and then back up again, over and over, for [*censored*] days on end, that I start getting upset…

Well, Julian is back, and I have a cup of coffee – he says he has about another two trips top make to get the rest of the boxes out – and then all we have to do is… unpack them! I’m expecting an awful lot of breakages amongst the old boxes (the ones packed up in 2007) The packers we used back then weren’t very good, and there were some really heartwrenching breakages amongst the boxes that did get unpacked when we first moved into the Doncaster apartment. It had been a real “horror” year for us – starting with my mother’s death at around half past four on New Year’s morning, then Julian’s father, not that long afterwards. We both got double pneumonia – I got it twice, and then I developed the first of my two bouts of multiple blood clots in both lungs (the second, and hopefully the last now that I’m permanently on Warfarin, was last year!). No, 2007 was definitely not a good year for us, so we weren’t really up for the move – in hindsight, we probably should have waited a few months… but, we’re still here …and still unpacking! 😀 So… once again, that’s about all from me for tonight – it’s almost time for my last Treadmilling for the day – I shall attempt it all at 2.6kmph, but I’ll bung a band-aid on my toe first – I have to walk around tomorrow, so I really don’t want a blister under my toe! Do call in again tomorrow night – find out if my stupid weight did bounce right back up again – or only half way right back up! Find out if there were a lot of breakages in the boxes, and whether they were heartbreaking or not, and have a look to see if Julian has taken some decent photos of Miranda! I’d take them myself, except that I’m a totally hopeless photographer (I don’t take after my famous late favourite cousin at all! Painting? Yes… Drawing? yes… Digital art? yes… Photography? Forget it, Freddie! ) Anyway, I hope to see you all again tomorrow night… until then, though, do try to contain yourselves and bee good, always remember that intolerance betrays a lack of faith in one’s cause, and don’t forget to keep warm at night, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Unfortunately my favourite eldest daughter didn’t come over today – she’s behind with an assignment that’s due in on Thursday so she thought that she’d better stay home and try to get it done, but could she come on Friday instead? So instead of spending the day amicably watching “Arrow”, I found myself ringing up the hairdresser and re-scheduling my appointment for 3.00pm on Thursday instead of 11.00am on Friday. Anyway, we ended up having quite a busy morning here – after breakfast and a cup of coffee, of course 🙂 Julian has now finished constructing the four cupboards for the Den, and they’re nicely in place – this afternoon he’s been finishing off the last two cupboards (they’re all the same sort of Ikea flat-packs) that are to go in the back hall – he’s just called out to me that they’re finally finished and he’s putting them in place – next to the built-in cupboard that houses the in-house vacuum cleaner (and which doesn’t leave much room for anything else, hence the two extra cupboards!)  I don’t think that the shoe rack wot we bought for the back hall will fit next to the two new cupboards, but it will go very nicely in our Walk In Wardrobe, so what you lose on the roundabouts you win on the swings (or however the saying goes!) Our shoes will simply go into one of the compartments or drawers in the new cupboards instead of onto the shoe rack. Anyway, seeing as Lee wasn’t coming over after all, we spent the morning unpacking the pile of boxes which had been stored in a corner of the Den – most of it was labeled “Den”, so that’s where the boxes were put.  There was some “Den” stuff in them, but you know what most of it was? Cables! A family of giant’s spaghetti bowls full of cables! A whole knitting Guild’s tangled balls of wool cables! The entire Addams Family home’s spiderwebs of cables! This morning was a real “Cables Coming Out Of Our Ears” morning ! I knew we had a lot of cables, but I never knew we had quite so many! What’s worse is that Julian already has an extremely large box of cables that he’s been using to set up the computer network – and this morning we trebled what’s in that box! I think what happens is that cables always get tangled. It doesn’t matter how you store them, they always come undone and get tangled. It’s known as “The First Law of Cables: Attempt To Get Tangled!” – then, when you go to get a particular cable, you can’t find it because it has cunningly disguised itself as “just another tangled cable”, so you end up going out and buying a new one… and before you know it, you have thousands of the wretched things, all nicely tangled up together in a real “Medusa’s Hairdo on a Bad Hair Day”, of twisted, tangled cables… Well, that’s my theory, anyway – and I’m sticking to it! So anyway, all of the flat-packs are now assembled, and all of the furniture for this place is in – there’s a few very minor pieces of “attachments” to be done – like the Gargoyle front door knocker, plus the little brass cats key holder has to be put on the wall near the front door, and a “No Junk Mail” plate to be attached to the letterbox…. So, really, all that’s left now is Tha Great Unpacking Of The Boxes! There are still boxes, and boxes, and boxes left to unpack, both here and in storage, and trillions of pictures to hang (and books to bring over, once we get rid of enough of the boxes to be able to measure up properly for bookcases!) We haven’t organised for the sale of the rest of our furniture, either, but at least we can see a very faint light at the end of the tunnel! (let’s just hope it’s not an oncoming train!)

This afternoon, while Julian was finishing off the last two cupboards, I Rifted. I sat there and looked at all the characters on Greybriar, thinking… I had too many Guardians, and not a balancing number of Defiants… so I moved one of the Guardians off to another shard (again!) and created a new Defiant (a Mage, of course) Her name is Kehsha, and I’ll get Julian to invite her into the Guild tonight when we do our Minions. And, apart from my Treadmilling, that’s all I’ve done today! The stuff in the “Den” boxes this morning that was mine has already been sorted through and put away in my brand new cupboards – I think Julian threw out about thirty of those cables, mostly because they were too old, or too slow, or both, to be used on today’s computers and other associated hardware – the rest will be stored in a box in one of the new cupboards in the back hall. They’ve all been very carefully sorted into audio/visual cables, Ethernet cables, USB cables, “retro” cables (C64 cables, etc.), and power cables. At the moment, they’re all neatly coiled up and sealed individually into zip-lock bags – but you can bet your sweet bippy that in six month’s time, if Julian goes to look for a particular cable, it’ll be all tangled up in a maze of twisty little cables, which all look the same! *rolls eyes*

Weigh-in this morning. I don’t think I want to talk about it! (*pouts and sulks*) It was horrible! And not fair, either! After all the work I’ve put in, all the chips and pasta I’ve gone without, my body rewards me with what?! Staying the ruddy same, that’s what! 😦 *sigh* I’m still sitting at 75.7kg! I really feel like crying – I honestly don’t know what to do next! I’m just not going down any more – it’s been over a fortnight! WHY! I’m walking a lot more and a lot faster on the treadmill, I spend more and more time walking around and doing things generally, my diet is still exactly the same… Nothing has changed – except that I’m not losing weight any more! I’m starting to get frantic! There’s not much more I can do – certainly nothing that springs readily to mind, anyway! 😦

Speaking of Treadmilling – “walking for 12!…“

There! The last of the day’s Treadmills! I did the first 9 minutes at 2.2kmph, and the last three at 2.4kmph, so I’m getting faster… not that it seems to be doing me much good! Scratch that, I know that it’s doing me good, it’s just that it doesn’t seem to be doing my weight (loss) any good! 😦

I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – Julian has the Lexus booked in to get the headlight fixed – it wasn’t working properly, so he booked it in, then it was working properly, so he cancelled the booking, and now it’s not working properly again, so he’s taking it in tomorrow morning. After he’s dropped the car off, he’s hiring a van for a day and a half so that he can cart all the waste paper and packaging off to the… (thinks!) Waste Refuge… Refuse Station, I think it’s called, then he’s going off to load up as many boxes from storage as he can, and bring them back here for me to unpack (wot fun!) so I’ll probably just be rattling around here like a pea in a pod or something. I suppose I could force myself to Rift a little bit… or maybe think of a new design for the blog header… or a new desktop bookmark wallpaper thingy… or I could just walk on the treadmill all day – it’s such fun! (and soooo boring!) 😉 I could also unpack some more boxes, but I’m too short to be able to reach the top shelves of the display cupboard, so perhaps I’d better wait until himself is around before I do that… Oh, the locksmith came today to finish changing all our locks over. We’ve thrown away all the old keys which no longer work, and the same key now opens the front door, the laundry door, the back door onto the decking, and the back hall door into the garage – so that’s now all done, too! (though just between you and me and the gatepost, I much preferred the “swipe card” system we used in Doncaster – just a flat plastic disk waved in front of the reader – no keys to mislay, or to make your pockets sag! Brilliant!) And that, gentle readers, is about it from me for today – again! Do drop in again tomorrow night though, so you can find out just how much weight I didn’t lose again – or how much my weight actually went up – whichever turns out to be applicable! I’m sure you’ll all want to know what I did all day – whether I Rifted or not, or whether I worked on some graphical project 🙂 however, you’ll all just have to wait until tomorrow night, won’t you! 😉 So until then, try to bee good, always bear in mind that Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished, and remember to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm – but most importantly, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, ladies and gentlepeople, nothing happened this morning – no one came, and we received no irate phone calls demanding to know where we were, or why we hadn’t turned up…. or whatever. Julian and I are seriously starting to think that it must have been a shared delusion, because we both distinctly remember the phone call, the discussion, and the fact that we had agreed, along with the mysterious caller, that whatever it was would be “Monday morning”… meaning this Monday morning – only it didn’t… wasn’t… *sigh* Now I guess we’ll never know who it was, and what it was about. I hate things like that – it’s like reading a terrific book, and it’s such a good book that you can hardly bear to put it down… and then you find that the last chapter is missing, and the book’s out of print so you can’t buy another copy! I hate not knowing!

So this morning, before we knew that “the last chapter was missing”, Julian busied himself in his office with “Administrative-ie” tasks, and I busied myself with setting up “Skilled” people on Greybriar – people to make potions, outfits and bags, weapons… you know, I told you all about it a couple of days ago! S’all done now – now all I have to do is train them up, once we get enough money in the Guild Bank to buy them all the materials they’re going to need! Luckily I checked all the characters before I doubled up on Skills – er… sorry, that was a lie! I actually checked all the characters after I’d realised I’d made two Apothecaries by mistake… “Lucky”, because having to go and check them all out, I found that I already had a totally max’d out (Savant level – 450/450, the highest you can go in a Skill level!) Weaponsmith! As I hardly ever used Greybriar (until now) I can only surmise that I must have transferred her there from another shard – so because I already have a max’d out Weaponsmith (she’s only level 25, too!) I no longer need to create and level one up! Just think of the platinum I’ve saved! 🙂 (cupboard number 3 of 4 is currently being maneuvered into the Den!) So that’s what the two of us did this morning… We had two phone calls today (apart from ones pertaining to Julian’s “Administrative-ie” work) one was from our cleaning lady… and the other was from one of the denizens of The Ridge, our erstwhile apartment building in Doncaster… with the worst possible news! 😦 They all want… to give us a send off “do”! a “Bon Voyagey” party! a “let’s all bring a plate of something and a bottle of booze to the foyer and have a Goodbye Party for Julian and Carla!” NO! No-no-no-no-no! Do! Not! Want! I dread things like that…  smiling and being polite to people you barely know, when you’d rather be anywhere but there! (Oh lord! I hope none of them read this blog!) It’s not that they’re not very nice people – they are – they’re a really nice group of people – but I don’t really know them, and I’m just not a party animal! Gimme a dark, dank cave, a computer, and a comfy chair, and I’m happy – stick me under bright lights with lots of happy company, and I just want to go home! 😦

Anyway, we now have three of the four cupboards destined for the Den in here – and a great pile of boxes full of “Den” stuff (or at least that’s what’s written on most of them!) where the fourth cupboard is supposed to go, so I suppose that means that we have to start unpacking boxes so that cupboard number four doesn’t have to live out there in the hallway. There are still another two cupboards to be built, too, and Julian is all but exhausted… he’s going to make himself ill if he doesn’t slow down soon… I’m not sure when we’re going to go out to look at tiles and caesarstone – my favourite eldest daughter will be over tomorrow, and Julian plans on hiring a van on Wednesday to take rubbish down to the tip – sorry, “Waste Recycling Depot”, down the road, and bringing boxes back from storage to be stored in our shed here – where they’ll be close and handy, easier to get to, and more likely to finally get unpacked and dealt with than they were in the hired storage bin over in Mitcham! Some of them have been there since 2007, but it’s either been too hot, too cold, or we’ve been too caught up with other things to go and sort them all out. Julian brought some of them back to the apartment for unpacking, but it was too exhausting and time consuming for him to manhandle the heavy boxes into the car, out of the car, into the lift, out of the lift, and into the apartment on the fifth floor. The irony of it all is, most of the things still in the boxes will be sent off to auction! Or thrown away – the packers we had back then took their job very, very seriously! They packed everything! They even carefully and tenderly wrapped up an overflowing ashtray, full of cigarette ash and butts, in layers and layers of paper – how’s that for serious “attention to detail”, hmm?! (or maybe they were trying to tell me something? 😉 ) But going back to the subject of looking at tiles and caesarstone – I’ve been doing a lot of looking online – and I have come to the conclusion that either tile colour fashions and pattern trends have changed very drastically since I went looking for tiles when we were re-decorating Doncaster, or that none of the tiling outlets are showing their full range online. You know why? Because they’re almost all in shades of brown! tan! light brown/dark cream! grey (lots of shades of grey! hundreds of shades of grey!) a few black tiles, and even (gasp, shock, horror!) white! But blues? lavenders? lilacs? even (heaven help me!) pinks? They have a very few (and not all tile places have them, either!) garish Pantone blues, greens, and other really harsh colours that I wouldn’t have in my home if they were presented to me on a solid gold platter! I think (hope!) that they’re supposed to be used as “highlight” tiles here and there – I certainly can’t imagine a whole wall full of them! As for patterned tiles – back in 2007 they had some really beautiful “trim” tiles – narrow, decorative tiles generally used to break up a monotonous monochrome wall or floor – today, they’re the pattern equivalent of Pantone! Horrible stuff that I wouldn’t contemplate giving away to my worst enemy! Even I’m not that cruel! So I think we’re just going to have to bite the bullet and go to the tile places and just walk around – they must have something that isn’t brown, brown, or brown, surely! The caesarstone places were only slightly better – they actually had something other than brown! Unfortunately it resembled dirty concrete with large lumps of stone in it. We shall go looking!

Weigh-in this morning. Well, it was another big disappointment! I went up one point – from the breathtaking depths of 75.6kg, to the dizzying heights of 75.7kg! Oh, the shame of it all! I think it’s just the warmer weather, but my feet have been swelling alarmingly over the past two days – I’m wondering if I should go back onto the two anti-fluid tablets for a bit longer… I’m still doing my twelve minutes, three times a day, on the treadmill, but I have upped the speed – yet again – to 2kmph, with no problems…  I asked Julian about “ordering in” a treadmill that has an adjustable incline, but he doesn’t seem to think that it’d make much difference – what do you all reckon? Would it? Anyway, we’ll see what transpires tomorrow when I brave the scales again…

Well, I mentioned before that my favourite eldest daughter will be over tomorrow, which’ll be good – I don’t think we have to go out anywhere so we can probably spend most of the day watching “Arrow”, or anything else worth watching… Oh, one amusing thing happened today on my Treadmilling exercise – my sock came off! Since I’ve been upping the speed, the soles of my feet have been getting steadily “warmer” – the faster I walk, the warmer they get, and I remember the delivery man telling us to be careful because some people can overdo things a bit and burn their feet. So as my feet have been getting warmer while walking, I’ve taken to wearing socks – the same ones that I used to wear on the stairs at Doncaster because the concrete was so damn cold! Unfortunately these socks are fairly firm around the top, so that they won’t keep falling down, presumably, so I never pull them very far up because they always make an itchy indent in my ankle. Anyway, I’m walking along doing my lunchtime walk-a-thon, when I noticed a small lump under my right foot. The more I walked, the bigger the lump grew, and then my sock simply… “walked” itself right off my foot! I wasn’t going to stop the treadmill just to accommodate a sock, so I just kept on walking! Anyway, I shall pull them up a little higher tonight! 🙂 And that’s about it from me again for tonight! Do call back again tomorrow night – find out what Lee and I watched on television, whether I’ve managed to locate a tile place online that has something other than *** brown tiles, if I’ve been forced back onto two anti-fluid pills, and if my weight went down, or up, or stayed the same (I’m actually starting to get a bit annoyed about it – I don’t know what to do next to get it going again!) However, until tomorrow night, please bee good, realise that with the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere, and remember to drive carefully, to start thinking about keeping cool instead of warm, and to look after yourselves – but above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Oh boy, what a busy and mixed up day! 🙂 Julian thought we’d be able to do a fair bit of Rifting before Clarke arrived, so after my nice long amble on the treadmill, we started out with our two new characters, and got hopelessly lost and confused because we’d both forgotten where we were up to! We managed to get ourselves back on track, and as usually happens when we start playing on a Sunday, Invasions, rifts, and nasty Boss characters were in full swing. Being the big, bold, adventurers that we are (!!) we decided to have a go and try to knock some of these beasties out… which we did very successfully – at first… but then, being the rash, foolhardy, impetuous characters that we also are, we got stuck into a whole horde of Hell Bugs and their Boss. Elites, all of them! And… we hadn’t noticed. I think I noticed first, and I said… “Oh! he’s an Elite!” and then I said “Never mind, he’s only a level 8 Elite – we can take him!” (we were level 10, you see) And then we died. Several times, in fact. They were all Elites, and the Big Bad Boss Hell Bug was a real doozy! We didn’t even manage to scratch him! He turned around and glanced in our general direction, and we fell over dead! Well, maybe not exactly like that, but he went through us like a hot knife through room-temperature butter! So anyway, we got better, and by the time we came back from the Healer it was all over bar the celebrating

Clarke got here around about noon, and we sat in the Den here and made small talk for a couple of minutes, then retired to the bathroom to start planning things out. So, what’s going to happen: The wall between the toilet and the bathroom is going to be knocked out. That’s the wall in front of you when you’re… reaching for the toilet paper. The wall between the shower and the toilet will be a glass panel and form the top end (?) of the shower. OK, think of the shower as being a nice, long rectangle. At one end of the rectangle will be a bench seat (for me to sit on) If I sit on the bench and look left, I’ll be looking into the bathroom. If I turn and look right, I’m going to be looking at the shower hose rail. If I look straight ahead, I’m going to be looking at the toilet – does that make it more comprehensible? 🙂 The bath is going (thank goodness!) which will give me enough room in which to turn around without bruising myself on something. The vanity unit will run almost the full length of the room, with a cupboard at each end, then a set of drawers on either side of a “makeup bench” where I can sit and do my hair without banging my knees on cupboards or drawers – so basically it’ll go cupboard, drawers, seating, drawers. cupboard. Towel rail. The window will be raised slightly to the height of the vanity unit, and be converted into a glass brick wall or panel – let’s face it, all I see outside the window is a very mundane path and the side fence – so the glass bricks will give me light in the room, and privacy – just in case I’m in the shower and someone decides to take a shortcut to the front garden without coming through the house. And… I get to choose the colours, the tiles, the bench tops… lights… What’dya reckon? 🙂 A full size crystal chandelier? 😉 I’m a bit overwhelmed – I don’t have to stick to the basic colour scheme of the house (dark browns, greys, and off-white) I can have any colours I want. I was thinking blue and white tones – not stark white, but maybe more into the hogsbristle (a creamy white) range… but then Julian went and spoilt that image for me by casually mentioning that he didn’t really like blue in bathrooms so now I’m thinking more into the lavender-lilac colours, IF I can find the right tiles and tile trim – and you can bet your sweet bippy that they’re not going to be easy to find! Thanks to a very good friend who sent me the url of a place that has a lot of colour schemes, I’m starting to get a few ideas sorted out in my mind 🙂 Now it just remains to go tile searching, and caesarstone hunting – paint shouldn’t be a problem – you can get paint places to blend just about any colour you can imagine if you can tell them the Hex number (I think! They should be able to, anyway!) It’s the tiles that I’m a bit iffy about…

Now, when Clarke was doing a bit of “pre move” work over here and got the job cancellation that we immediately snapped up, he said he’d be able to start in “about six weeks” – today we asked him how soon he could start… and he said “Oh… about six weeks?” Aaarrrggghhh! I though that he’d meant six weeks from when he told us about the cancellation – now he tells us six weeks from now? Of course, he could be factoring in the time to organise the vanity unit, tiles, paint, all the other little bits and pieces – tilers, etc., etc. into that six-week period, so if I’m extra lucky and manage to find the tiles an’ all quickly, maybe he can start sooner! Oh, I do hope so…. Anyway, at least he’s said he’ll come over this week and put in a new, “temporary” (read: cheap!) shower hose rail so that I don’t have to keep putting the damned thing on the floor of the shower all the [*censored*] time! It’s…. more than annoying, I promise you!

So that was the “Clarke” visit… and we have a lot of homework to do! After he left, we had a cup of coffee and lunch – then Julian went off to get a bit of shopping and I did my Treadmilling. Do you think it matters how you stand while you’re walking on a treadmill, or is it simply a matter of moving your legs? My legs work very evenly – it’s easy to get a good rhythm going on a treadmill – it’s just like clockwork – but I don’t stand up straight all the time (well, I can’t stand up straight anyway!) I tend to lean on this arm, or that elbow, or lean over, or back (but mostly I just lean over) or just change posture in general as my arms get cramped, or my hand starts to get uncomfortable – whatever… But mostly what I want to know is – does the way I stand while walking on the treadmill adversely affect the amount of benefit I get from all this walking, or not?!

Weigh-in this morning. Maybe the extra two minutes and the extra speed on the treadmill are starting to pay off! 🙂 I went down two whole points today, from 75.8kg to 75.6kg! Let’s just hope that it’s “permanent”, and that I won’t slide back up again tomorrow! We can only hope… and walk… and get up and down a lot because everything always seems to be in the wrong room! That’s at least four times since I started writing this that I’ve had to get up to go and look at something, or check on something, or get something – I’ve been up and down like a ruddy Jack-in-a-Box today! Still, I suppose every little bit of exercise helps? 😉

Well, tomorrow is “The Day” when we’ll find out what it was that was supposed to be happening, or who we were supposed to be seeing, and why…. If no-one comes around, or rings, by lunch time, perhaps we can go out and start looking at tiles! W-a-y back in 2007 when we were re-decorating Mum’s apartment for us to move into, I went looking at tiles online, and we only went out to look at them once I found some that I thought might be nice… I’ll prolly do the same again. You know, come to think of it, I don’t recall ever seeing any lavender or lilac coloured tiles that didn’t look like sugar candy! *shudder* I definitely do not want anything too bright, or too “sweet”, or too “grandma’s lace-ish”. If I do go for the lavender or lilac shades, it’s going to have to be very muted – more like just the barest hint of lavender/lilac – just enough to give a suggestion of lilac… Pink is definitely not “me” – red is way too harsh for a bathroom – blue’s out, because Julian doesn’t like it (which is a shame, because I think I could do something with blue tones…) Greens are another no-no (I don’t like it in bathrooms) Yellow isn’t “me” either, and orange is way too “loud”! Which leaves me with the browns and mushroom colours… which I was hoping to get away from! Of course, I could go for a total “white-out”, with only highlight tiles for relief… but I’d really rather not! So, tomorrow my work begins! All comments and suggestions gratefully accepted! 🙂 And that, gentle readers is once more about it from me for tonight! Pop back in again tomorrow night to see how my homework is progressing, and whether my weight continues on its downward journey or if it’s gone back up again… (or worse! stayed the same!) And of course, the burning, sixty-four thousand dollar question – what happened in the morning! Did anyone turn up or not? Who was it? What was it about? …or was that mysterious phone call simply a shared delusion between Julian and myself?! All will be made clear tomorrow night! Until then, though, do try to bee good, remember to respond intelligently, even to unintelligent treatment, and don’t forget to drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm – but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

So it seems as though I’m starting a bit earlier today – Julian is busy building up the six flat-packs of cupboards – he’s made all six frames, now he’s building up the drawers and the cupboard doors. Hopefully they’ll all be finished and in place by this evening! As I suspected, Clarke didn’t come over today to help hang the mirror and/or discuss bathrooms with us – it seems that his kids have some sort of sporting activities on Saturdays, to which he’s obliged to attend. Well, I used to go riding on Saturday mornings when I was growing up, but my parents just took me there, and picked me up afterwards… However. So that means that our Sunday is going to be a little bit hacked into tiny little pieces, jumped on, set afire, and the resulting ashes scattered to the four winds – but it’s really a matter of priorities, isn’t it – Rift? or my bathroom? At the moment, my bathroom wins, hands down! I haven’t mentioned this before, but in the shower, the shower head has to sit on the floor as the rail it’s supposed to sit in…? on…? (Winter throws her hands up in the air in frustration at not knowing the correct technical term for the “thing”!) in the little thingy wot holds the shower hose and head – is broken, or loose, or something, and if you’re in the shower and try to put the shower head back in its cradle (there, is that better? I invented a term for the “thing” – “cradle”!) it just flops over, points any way it feels like, and sprays water everywhere except where it should! I have to lay it, very carefully, down on the floor, and try not to accidentally nudge it with one of my enormous feet while I have shampoo in my eyes! There is, quite literally, nowhere to put anything! I’ve had to resort to getting Julian to cover up one of the two hand basins with a chopping board, so that I at least have somewhere to put my comb! So as I said, when it comes to getting our priorities right, my bathroom wins over everything! Last night, after Julian had finished constructing the “replacement credenza”, of course we had to get the glass-topped table-desk out of the Den and into Julian’s C64 Room, and I was volunteered to help. I’m not very strong… and I was a bit trepidated (alright, a lot trepidated!) Naturally, we removed the glass top and put it in a safe place – against the wall that we were likely to bump into on our way out with the table, if we weren’t extra careful… which we were. After a great deal of huffing and puffing, and quite a few anxious moments, we managed to get it onto the trolley and  into the nice, wide, hall corridor – the fun started when we had to get it around a newly painted doorway, and into the much more narrower – and also newly painted – bedroom corridor. We took it off the trolley, and roughly squished a couple of old towels under the table – Julian pulled on the towels, and I pushed the table, and we got it down to the C64 Room’s doorway. Then it was a matter of wiggling it, about a centimeter at a time, this way and that, through the (newly painted!) door jamb, without scratching the woodwork, or damaging the table legs… and then we had to turn it up the right way again, without damaging the table legs! Anyway, the nice, big, wide, glass-topped table-desk, is now ensconced in Julian’s C64 Room, and the “replacement credenza” is sitting against the wall behind me, with all its hardware (printer, file server, router, etc., etc.) lined up neatly on top of it. Apart from needing a damn good vacuuming, the Den is starting to look really good! Against the wall behind me there’s a side table with a very ordinary standard “reading lamp” behind it. Flipper’s sofa-bed sits next to the side table… and between the sofa-bed and the “replacement credenza” is “Miranda”, the utterly gorgeous silver and bronze (not real silver and bronze!) Art Deco standard lamp (I called her “Miranda”, after a book about a mermaid that I used to read as a child – I’ve spent ten minutes looking, but I can’t find any references for it. It must have been a good book though, because I distinctly remember borrowing it from the Library to re-read at least three times between the ages of six and nine…) unfortunately there are no photos of Miranda just yet, Julian’s been a tad busy today 😉 And just the other side of Miranda there’s the “replacement credenza” with its cherry-red bins, which means that the file shredder has been left sitting right in front of the window (it’ll have to be moved – it’s in the way there…) There’s almost a full wall of window directly to my left, and on this wall, where I’m sitting, there’ll be one of the cabinets that Julian’s been so busily constructing today, between the window and my glass-topped table-desk. To my immediate right (there’s just an empty space there at the moment) will be another two of those cabinets, and a fourth cabinet will sit against the wall between Julian’s desk and the door wall.  These cabinets will be used for display, for books, and for storage. There are another two cabinets (we bought six!) but they’ll be used as storage in the “back hall” (which leads into the garage) I’m just looking around behind me and musing to myself that a nice rug might look good in front of the sofa-bed… hmmm…

This morning I did a bit more “tweaking” to the blog header… the colour pink was needed in the “Spring” icon, so I took some colour samples from a gorgeous photo of cherry blossoms, and created several sets of Photoshop “styles” – the resulting header version is just one of four… I left a bit of a “glow” around this one, just to see how it would look… (Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy! I just looked at my word count! eek! “999” so I’ve quickly written a few more words – just in case! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I “threw away” that point that I’d accidentally picked up yesterday by mistake 😉 so now I’m back down to 75.8kg I’ve stepped up my Treadmilling, too, from 10 minutes to 12 minutes – which is about how long it took me to do one of my Stair Walks – and I’ve upped the speed again too – from 1.6kmph to 1.8kmph. Any faster than that and I think I’d be jogging, and I am not going to do that because I have far too much respect for my arthriticky old ankles! (i.e. I’d probably break one or both of them if I tried jogging, or running!) Anyway, I counted my steps at that speed, and I must admit I was a trifle surprised! Each time I go off and do my Treadmilling, I’m doing over 600 paces (which works out at about 900+ paces per day) and I can assure you all that I was never able to do any part of my Stair Walks at 1.8kmph, not even on my way down! But you know what? I still feel as though I’m not putting any effort into it; that I’m not working or exercising hard enough. I don’t puff or feel tired, either while I’m walking, or when I stop – I feel as though I could easily do twice the amount of time at that speed (but then I’d probably die of boredom!) So… why do I feel as though I’m not really doing any good, that I almost feel as though I was still sitting at my desk?! I’ll remind Julian to see if he can book a treadmill with an adjustable incline for me for next month – this is too easy… Maybe “climbing hills” will make me work a little harder…

Tomorrow, Clarke will be over around about lunch time – hopefully we’ll be able to get him to help Julian hang the mirror – but if not, we have to pin him down to a definite start date for my bathroom, and I’m going to have to choose tiles, vanity units, fittings, towel rails… Julian was saying the other day about knocking the wall down between the toilet and my bathroom, because heaven knows why, the toilet is in a separate little teeny room. The thing is, I pointed out to him (because he’s always pointing it out to me!) that the house is built on a concrete slab, and while it’s not impossible to move the plumbing around, it is difficult, expensive, awkward, and fraught with disasters just waiting to happen! Believe me, I’d love to expand the space, move the shower, and re-arrange things so that I had something similar to what I had in Doncaster – but there’s a ruddy great window along one wall, which precludes positioning the shower there (well, it could be, I suppose – there’s no “view” per se, so nothing really to “lose” there – and those glass bricks could possibly be used as the “outside” shower wall, and still provide privacy and light… I think…? Clarke??!!) Anyway, that’s up for discussion tomorrow – I’ll let you all know what transpires! 🙂 But that’s about it from me again for tonight – do drop in again and find out if my extra walking is helping my body in the shedding of a few more kilos, as well as what Clarke had to say about bathrooms in general, and glass-walled showers in particular (hmmm if the shower could be put where the bath is… then the toilet wall could get knocked down and I’d have a much more bigger bathroom…) Yeah, “and visions of sugarplums danced in her head!” 🙂 But there’ll be lots of stuff to tell you all about – like whether or not we managed to kill off our little fishies – we added some more water to their “pond” today – it was starting to dry out a bit – but all the muck from the bottom got stirred up… 😦 On a brighter note – we should have photos of Miranda and the Den ready for viewing tomorrow, so until then, please bee good, don’t forget that you can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do, and remember to keep warm, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Another very busy day! We’ve just got back from Ikea – well, when I say “just got back”, I mean we got back, I raced off to do my lunchtime Treadmilling a little later than usual, and we had a well-deserved cup of coffee – and now I’ve started writing. Never a dull moment in this household, I tell you! This morning we left a little earlier than usual to go over to Doncaster – my hairdressing appointment wasn’t until 11.30, but I wanted to dart into David Jones to get a price on an Estée Lauder product that I was thinking of getting, after comparing the prices of similar products from Jurlique and L’Occitane en Provence – I ended up getting the one from L’Occitane – they do make an excellent product (but then they all do!) they use only natural ingredients (as does Jurlique) and it was about eight dollars cheaper! 🙂 I’ll let you know if it’s as good as the Estée Lauder that I was using, until it ran out! We still had enough time to head off to Woolworths to get some more Flipper Food (Coles don’t sell it!) and a big bottle of el-cheapo moisturiser for my feet – they got so dry that I’ve managed to split the skin on one of my feet again! If I don’t oil them religiously I end up with feet so dry that they split – and who has time to oil their feet when they’re moving, and everything is packed away, and you can’t find anything! 😦 I was lamenting the fact today that when I was younger, I had a very oily skin and I used to absolutely hate it! Then, when I was in my “middle years”, I blessed it… and now? Now my skin seems to have used up all its natural oils and has become really dry, and I really wish that I had oily skin again… Talk about a vicious cycle! 🙂 When I finished with the hairdresser, we took off for Springvale, and Ikea… We got half way down Blackburn Road when we remembered that we hadn’t picked up the dry cleaning… so we turned around and went back to Doncaster! The only reason we remembered the dry cleaning when we did was because we were racking our brains trying to remember what was supposed to be happening on Monday morning, and we were going through things, item by item, which made us remember the dry cleaning… but Julian had taken a call on his mobile – yesterday, in here, in front of me, and now neither of us can remember who was on the phone, or what it was about – but Julian said to this caller “Probably Monday would be alright – just a minute, I’ll ask the wife!”, turned to me and said “How about Monday? morning?” and I, thinking quickly, remembered that Monday was free, said “Yeah, OK, Monday – Monday morning!” (all the while thinking to myself ‘well, there go my plans for Monday!’) So Julian told this (at time of writing, still unknown!) person “Yes, Monday morning will be fine!” We both remember that conversation, but neither of us can remember who it was, or what it was about! If it happens to be any of you reading this, please enlighten us, or we’re just going to have to wait and see who turns up on Monday morning! (…or we get a very annoyed phone call saying “Where were you?!”) *shrug* I dunno…

So we picked up the dry cleaning and again headed off to Ikea. We got there around lunch time, so we went into their very nice looking restaurant where Julian had some sort of salmon salad thingy and a wedge of chocolate and butterscotch meringue pie and a cappuccino, and I had a cappuccino Optifast bar which I’d brought with me, and a cup of black coffee (because they didn’t have any skinny milk!) Then we went “replacement credenza” shopping. We ended up buying a white (glossy, but not as glossy as the table-desks) eight “compartment” (hole? cavity?) bookcase-type “contraption”, that you could put cupboard doors on, or drawers in or square basket thingies in – I don’t really know what to call it, really – it’s not a sideboard or credenza by any long stretch of the imagination, nor is it a bookcase per se., but it’ll do the job! 🙂 Ikea had some “demo” examples set up with drawers, cupboard doors, plastic (perspex?) bins, and woven rattan bins. All the square “holes” are the same size, as are the cupboard doors, both types of bins, and the drawers, so you can mix and match to your heart’s content. We’ve opted for four bins in a row on the top – white, red, red, white (or whatever!) another two bins on the bottom row, and two drawers in the two middle “holes”. The printer and various other pieces of hardware will sit on top of this “whatever-it’s-called”, while various pieces of “junk” will be hidden in the bins. The third table-desk that’s currently in here will become the desk in Julian’s Commodore (read: C64) room. Julian started bolting the “credenza replacement” (for want of a proper term!) together just after he’d finished his coffee, and guess what! It’s already bolted together and sitting in here, waiting for him to finish the four small drawers, and for the table-desk to have its legs removed so that it will fit through the doors on its way to the C64 room! So that was our rather busy day! (well, he’s been busy, I haven’t, really… )

It’s almost time for me to go and do my evening Treadmilling – I’m still doing only ten minutes, but I’ve now upped the speed to 1.6kmph, which I think is a slightly more “respectably energetic” pace – but it’s still as boring as all get out! 😦 Honestly, what do people think about/do with their minds, whilst exercising on a Treadmill! I’ve tried counting my steps, and that works for about one hundred and fifty steps, but either I get interrupted and lose my place, or I get so bored that I forget where I’m up to! And my arms get all cramped – I have to keep moving them around… Oh well, I guess the treadmill is better than leaving me to my own devices – without something like the stairs at Doncaster, or the treadmill here, to exercise their “siren” call on me, I’d just sit on my rapidly expanding backside all day… which brings me to…

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I was expecting it, but it was a disappointment, none the less. I went up one point, from 75.8kg to 75.9kg – hopefully I won’t go up again tomorrow! I’ll cry, if I do 😦 That’s why I rushed off to do my Treadmilling as soon as I got home this afternoon, instead of flopping down and demanding a cup of coffee first, and why I’ll be buzzing off as soon as I finish this to do my third Treadmilling for the day! Cross your fingers for me, please! 🙂

Last night, when I was making the green header for the blog, I had great difficulty finding blossom, or even flower brushes or shapes to use – it’s very frustrating sometimes –  whether it’s a piece of equipment, a tool, a piece of clothing – or whatever – I know what I want, but either have great difficulty in describing it, or else people just look at me blankly, as if to say “why on earth would you want that!” So I thought “if I can’t download the sort of blossom or flower brush that I want… I can make my own! I’ll draw what I want on a plain piece of paper, get Julian to scan it for me, and I should (key word that, “should“!) be able to use it “as is”, or to turn it into a brush that I can re-size easily” – so that’s what I’m going to do from now on, if I can’t download what I want! Usually if I want a specific shape, I’ll just work on it in the graphic, “on the fly”, as they say – but it’s not quite so easy to make smooth round shapes – they usually end up all rough and “jaggie”, which is why drawing something on paper first should result in rounder and smoother lines… I’ll let you all know how it turns out… 🙂 (Julian has just finished the drawers! 🙂 )

Tomorrow morning our mirror is arriving, and something else with it, too! Remember I was telling you about that absolutely beautiful Art Deco silver mermaid standard lamp? Julian bought it as well! So she’s coming “home” tomorrow, too! We’ll take some photos of her and put them up for you all – either tomorrow night, or Sunday night! I’m not sure when Clarke will be coming over (hopefully, not Sunday!) and I have absolutely no idea what’s happening, or who’s coming over, on Monday morning! So that’s about all from me for tonight! But don’t worry – there’ll be more for you all tomorrow night, what with the arrival of the mirror and the mermaid (Hey! That sounds like a cool title for a book, or a song! “The Mirror and the Mermaid”!) and whether my weight will continue to go up (expect tears and lamentations!) or decide to go back down again – whether Clarke turned up and helped Julian hang the mirror, or if he’s going to disrupt our Rifting on Sunday! But no matter what, there’s always something interesting happening around here! 🙂 Until then, though, do continue to bee good, remember to be gentle to all and stern with yourself; don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm, and to drive carefully, but most of all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂