“Spring is sprung, the grass is riz – I wonder where the flowers is? The little birdie’s on the wing – why how absurd! Because the wing is on the bird!” – a friend of mine reminded me last night that it was time for me to change my “Winter” icon in the header to the “Spring” one (which I’d forgotten I was supposed to do! *blush*) – so here it is – “The violets of Spring, tra-la, tra-lay!” – by me! 🙂

Well, once again, it’s been a fairly productive day all around – I designed this new header, Julian unpacked more boxes, we finally heard from the mirror delivery man, and it will be delivered on Saturday! Not hung, though – Julian wants to get Clarke to hang is because (1) The mirror is very heavy, and (2) it’s going on the wall where Clarke and Paul installed that extra large sliding door, and we don’t want anyone hanging a very heavy mirror… right on top of the newly painted door! It took me most of the morning setting up the header (it’s a new [free] template, too, in case none of you noticed! 🙂 ) Sometimes I think I spend more time “setting up” than I do playing, or writing, or whatever… but, innit always the way?! Anyway – where was I? Oh, right… being productive. After I’d finished the header, silly little me thought that I’d be able to get a good few hours of Rifting in after lunch… so I did my Treadmilling, had my lunch, and logged on to Rift. Hmm… I have a new semi-favourite character  on Greybriar – was on Greybriar, I moved her this afternoon – (isn’t coffee wonderful! 🙂 ) She was one of the races that I very seldom use because, well, I just don’t like them all that much. But I’d created her ages ago, and she had a full ten Transcendent Troves (those nice experience booster potions that can be so very helpful if you want to level up in a hurry, remember?) and I really didn’t want to throw them away, so to speak – but it was her wretched “war cry” that she let out with every time her character portrait came up that was driving me mad! It sounded like a cross between a sick rooster, and a dying duck! (Not that I’ve ever heard a sick rooster or a dying duck, but I do have a very vivid imagination! 😉 ) About the only way to stop her yodeling this death-knell was to either delete her (free!) or change her race (Credits-expensive!) …so I changed her race. What’s more, I changed it to another race that I very seldom use, for exactly the same reasons as I gave above (i.e., I just don’t like them all that much) Why I did that, I have no idea – I think I was just so desperate to get away from the rooster-duck combination that I chose the first thing that came along – sort of like a drowning person clutching a straw! She’s a Mage (naturally!), and she’s a Dwarf. Her name is Dawnfyre, and she’s as pretty as all get up! For once, I’ve managed to get her hair colour exactly right, with the right highlights and all – and I’ve ended up liking her enough to want to keep her as a usable character. I didn’t want to leave her on Greybriar, because for the nonce, Greybriar is probably going to be a “Sunday Best” shard, because that’s where our two new Sunday characters are, and I couldn’t move her onto Laethys or Hailol without moving one of their denizens off, because they were both full (twelve characters is the maximum you’re allowed per shard, and I had twelve on each!) In the end, I transferred Zorsha from Hailol to Greybriar (where I only had ten characters) and then transported Dawnfyre from Greybriar to Hailol. Now, this is all well and good – I had Dawnfyre where I wanted her to be, on Hailol, which is now my primary shard – but I didn’t know/had forgotten/never set anything up (take your pick! They probably all apply!) who did what, Skill-wise. Oh, I knew that Winterthyme was a Runecrafter (Runecrafters can disassemble just about anything, to create materials needed for making runes which can in turn make your clothing more robust, your weapons more powerful, etc., etc.) and that Satai was the Guildmistress, and Hialeah was the Guild Bank keeper and Auctioneer – but as far as other proper skills were concerned, we didn’t have any! I worked out that we needed an Apothecary (to make health potions mostly, as they can get expensive and aren’t always available) an Outfitter (to make cloth and leather armour – and none of us are ever likely to need plate armour!) an Artificer (to make magical weapons, like staves and wands) and last but not least, a Weaponsmith, to make maces and shields for Julian’s Clerics 🙂 This all involved a fair amount of work, writing down what everyone could or couldn’t do, what we needed in the way of Skills, etc – and then transferring all of that into an “Easy Reference Table”, which, because I’m me, had to be prettied up and the table cells all coloured in nicely! And the next time I looked at the clock, it was twenty past four, and I hastily left all my pretty table making and started writing! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. I expect to go up again tomorrow – my body got a day ahead of itself, I think, and thought that I’d taken the last of my terribly fluid loving pills yesterday, when it was today that I took the last one! I went down four points, to 75.8kg. Yes folks, I’ve made it to what will eventually be my “goal weight” zone – 75kg! This does not mean that I’m there yet! I have to get down to 70kg first, then reassess how I look. If I think that I could pass for “not obese anymore”, I’ll stay on 70kg and try to stabilise myself between 70 and 75kg (for ever and ever, amen!) If I think that I still look a little “chunky”, I’ll attempt to whittle myself down to 65kg, and stabilise myself between that and 70kg. However I am quite chuffed, you know – to have gone from 134kg down to 75.8kg in a year and 23 days is quite a good effort, I think! …But as I said, I will probably bounce back up again tomorrow – four points is quite a lot to lose in one chunk! But at least I can say that I did get down to the 75kg zone! 🙂

Flipper has a short visit to the Vet this afternoon – to have her cartrophen injection (for her arthritis) and to have the nimble-fingered nurses there snip off about half a dozen small mats around her chin area, and under her tail area – two of the places where we’re a little reluctant to use sharp scissors, just in case we nick her skin in the process! The poor girl was most upset – probably worried that we’d leave here there again! She was most vocal on her way out of the house, and she certainly gave us both a real earful when she came home again! 🙂 She’s now sleeping off the experience in her “cat cave” on the sofa-bed in here 🙂

Tomorrow is going to be a pretty full day – I have my hairdressing appointment at 11.30am, and then we’re going off to Ikea again, this time to look for a replacement credenza, or sideboard, seeing as we cancelled the Harvey Norman order due to far too many delivery delays! Julian will have to drop me off home afterwards, and then go back and pick the flat pack(s) up, as my wheelchair will be in the back of the car (there’s no way known that I’d be able to get around a place the size of Ikea without the chair!) and there’d be no room for a credenza/sideboard flat-pack as well. I’m not very happy about it – it’s a hell of a long way to go out to – twice, but Mr. “I’ll do it myself!” doesn’t want to wait for a delivery! And that, folks, is about all I have for you tonight! 🙂 Pop back again tomorrow night though, and find out how we went at Ikea, and if my weight did go and bounce back up again or not! There’s sure to be heaps more interesting and amusing things to tell you about too, so hopefully I’ll see you all again tomorrow night. Until then, however, do bee good, don’t forget that it’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see, remember to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm – but most importantly, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Thank goodness! The painters have finished – for now, anyway – and have departed, though they’ll be back again after Clarke’s finished my bathroom. He’ll be here sometime this weekend for us to discuss what’s to be done, and when, and how (I presume!) But for now, our house is ours alone, for a change! 🙂 Julian rang Harvey Norman about the delivery of the credenza that matches our glass-topped table-desks, and ended up cancelling the order completely! Why? Well, because it was supposed to have been delivered along with the three glass-topped table-desks, but we were told that there’d been “a slight hold up in their delivery, but that it would be able to be delivered by the end of August”. It’s now September, and we haven’t heard a word from them – no phone call, no apologies, nothing. So when Julian rang them this morning and was told that there was “a slight hold up in their delivery, but that it would be able to be delivered by late to mid November”, he told them, politely, what they could do with their order and that we’d be coming in for a refund of the deposit we’d paid; that we didn’t appreciate not being kept up to date on these delivery “hold ups”, and that the credenza had been ordered in July, promised for the 21st of August, and then for the end of August, and now, not until late to mid November?! No one had bothered to tell us any of this, and if we hadn’t rung today to see what was happening with the credenza that we’d planned half the damn room around, we would probably never have been told at all! Not good enough, Harvey Norman, and no piece of furniture is worth waiting three and a half months for! We are justifiably annoyed, to say the least. So we’ll fall back on “Plan B”, which we formulated this morning after Julian told me about the credenza. We’re going back to Ikea on Friday, after I’ve finished at the hairdresser. I was very impressed with the range and quality of their furniture when we went there to look for bookcases and cupboards, and I had seen, but hadn’t paid much attention to (why would I, when I thought we already had one that was about to be delivered!) some rather nice sideboards/credenzas… so we’ll go back and have another look at them. Julian wants to have a closer look at how the cupboards we bought were constructed, anyway, so off we’ll go to the Ikea at Springvale again. Our mirror should be delivered tomorrow, but I don’t know if Julian has heard back from the delivery people or not… (Julian says “not” – his call went straight through to voice-mail, so we’re stall waiting to hear back from the guy who we think only works on Thursdays!)

Poor little Flipper has been so put out by the strange men who put sheets all over the floor and move all the furniture around that sometime in the wee small hours of the morning Julian was awakened to the “glurk, glurk” sounds of a cat about to throw up. He was able to mop it up, but the carpet now has a “ground-up kibble” coloured patch just inside the door into the Den I think (hope!) it will sponge out, but I’m starting to get that “sinking feeling” you get when you know you’re going to have to do something nastily expensive, like… change the carpets… as there are quite a few “strange marks” dotted around some of the carpeted areas (the previous owners had a little dog – hence the scrape marks on some of the window sills!) *sigh* After all the bathroom renovations have been completed, and any post-renovations painting done, I think we’ll have the carpets steam-cleaned, and see what comes out in the wash steam, before making any decisions!

Last night Julian got onto Vic Roads online and formally changed the address on his driver’s licence. He was going to do mine too, but for some unknown reason it wouldn’t accept my details, so this morning we had to ring up and do it over the phone, which did work. I’m still not sure what was wrong with the details they had in their data base for me, but anyway, ’tis done now! I shall receive a small sticker with my new address that I have to put on the back of my licence. Then I tried to renew our Ambulance subscription, which I thought I’d do online. Looking back on this morning from the distance of half a day, what happened when I did attempt to renew our subscription online was really quite hilarious, though I was absolutely furious at the time (I toned my language down because the painters were here, otherwise it might have been quite… colourful…) I had all the details I needed, including our membership number – but I couldn’t remember my password! So I requested to have my password re-set, and they were supposed to send me an email… which never arrived. In the end, Julian suggested that I use my GMail account, but I didn’t have a GMail account under my real name, did I – oh, I had the tinselfluff one, and the satai one, but none under my real name. Oh well, I’d just create one, wouldn’t I! It wouldn’t let me! I couldn’t believe that just about every possible permutation of my real name was already in use! So I tried adding “Winter” to it – after all, it’ll be added officially in the very near future anyway! Nope, all permutations with that added were already gone, too! In the end (about half an hour later!) I managed to get a name that it would let me have… right! “Enter password” came next, so I did… then “Verify password”… Every time I re-entered my new password and went on to the next part of the form, the form instantly re-wrote my password verification to something completely different, so of course I kept getting “password mismatch” error messages. I was almost screaming by this stage! (well, I was talking rather loudly, anyway! I was livid!) I have no idea how, but eventually I did manage to create that ruddy GMail account, all so that I could re-set my stupid Ambulance Victoria password! Julian finally managed to persuade me to actually ring them, which I did, and by just sitting there and not pressing any numbers on the phone, I eventually got a real live person! And after a lot of kafuffling around, we finally got to the bottom of all the trouble! They, Ambulance Victoria, and they admitted as such, had transcribed my email address incorrectly! “@digitaltapestries.com” had been entered as “@diaitaltapestries.com”! So we managed to get that cleared up and corrected, but wait! There’s more! I’d been going through all this angst in order to renew our Ambulance subscription… only… I didn’t have to renew it! Somehow or other, the last time we renewed the subscription, Julian and I must have both paid it – we’re still covered until 21st June 2017! (Winter shakes her head in wry amusement) Oh, this morning was a real doozy, believe me! And then I spent until mid-afternoon sitting in the living room reading my kindle, because the painters were in here! *sigh*

Weigh-in this morning. Only one more day left of those ghastly pills… however, I did go down another point, from 76.3kg to 76.2kg. Tomorrow, being the last day of those unspeakable pills, I’ll probably go back up again, but we’ll see… As I told you, I’m doing ten minutes on the treadmill, three times a day, but instead of walking at 1.2kmph, I’ve upped it again to 1.4kmph – it doesn’t go up in ones, it goes up in twos – which feels a little more like I’m exercising, but not that much more. I think I could probably push it up one more notch, but I’ll see how I go tomorrow. Of course, going faster means that I’m taking more actual steps, which can’t be doing me any harm, either (even if it is terribly boring!) 😉

Well, tomorrow… hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be able to get a bit of Rifting in, instead of spending the morning sending my blood pressure through the roof, trying to sort out other people’s messes! And if I’m really lucky, I might even get a bit of graphic-ing in as well! Wouldn’t that be nice! 🙂 We have our bedroom back, and the Den looks really good with a nice, clear, blank wall upon which to hang pictures! The Office is looking cosy and business-like, the trampoline seems to be earning its keep, Flipper seems to have truly settled into her new home, the mirror will hopefully be delivered tomorrow, and Clarke will be coming over this weekend to discuss my new bathroom! 🙂 And that, gentle readers, is once again about “it” from me tonight! Do drop back again tomorrow night to see if my weight did go up, as I expect it will, or down, which would be nice, though I’m not holding my breath, or if those horrible pills had a “last hurrah” and made me stay the same! And of course I’ll fill you all in on the rest of the days doings – whether the mirror arrived, if Flipper’s little “th’rup” (read: “throw-up”) stained the carpet or not (hopefully not! I don’t think I could bear the stress of having to have the carpets changed! Maybe we could put a small rug over the patch, if it is permanently stained…) Anyway, as you can see, there’ll be quite a lot of things to fill you all in on, so don’t be shy! 😉 In the meantime, please at least try to bee good, remember the best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today, don’t forget to drive carefully, to keep warm, and to look after yourselves, but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Because my favourite eldest daughter was over today, I’ve started writing later than I usually do – and I’ve also just finished my third Treadmilling for the day. Because Julian was off dropping Lee back, I decided to count how many steps I do in my ten minutes on the treadmill – I miss my Stair Walks, and I sort of feel that just mindlessly stepping along on the treadmill can’t really be called valid “exercise”, and isn’t “working” my leg muscles to the extent that the stairs did… So I counted, just to see. Well, I still don’t think it really counts as “exercising”, but I did 400 steps in 10 minutes and 10 seconds – just a little more than I was doing on my “Stairs Down”, and “Stairs Back Up Again” Stair Walks – so who knows? Maybe it is exercise, even though it doesn’t feel like it…

Well, the painters were here again today – still fiddling around in the bedroom and bedroom corridor (as opposed to the much wider hall corridor!) I must say that they’ve done a lovely job in the bedroom, both with the two new doors, and the wall that used to have great big brackets where the previous owners had attached one of their enormous televisions. The painting in the bedroom corridor isn’t really noticeable unless you have all the lights turned on – it’s too dark down there to see much without them. Tomorrow they’ll be starting in the dining room-slash-living room area, giving me a reprieve of a couple of hours before they start working in the Den. They said that they’d probably be able to finish off tomorrow, but there’s an awful lot of wall area in both rooms, so I’m just a trifle sceptical! (I wish there was a shortcut for a “smilie” denoting a raised eyebrow, that would “translate” properly into WordPress-ese”!) a ” ?) ” will have to do, I suppose… Anyway, if the painters do finish tomorrow, that’ll give me a day of (hopefully) uninterrupted Rifting (or graphicing!) before Friday, when I’m off to the hairdresser again. While my favourite eldest daughter was here we talked about her assignments and how she was going to handle them. With the one she’s managed to get an extension on (but shouldn’t really need!) she has to write one thousand words on how the texts that they’ve had to read this semester (year? I fergit…) have influenced her writing… The thing is, Lee’s in her very early forties… and she’s been writing (novels and novellas) since she was about twelve years old – and as she herself said, anything that she’s read in the past few months probably won’t have had any influence on her writing, or style of writing, whatsoever! Whatever (or whoever) has influenced her writing will have occurred many, many years ago! Still, it’s only a thousand words, and it shouldn’t be too hard for her to explain that in a thousand words, surely! 🙂 The other assignment is in the form of a video. She wants to make a short video explaining (exhorting?) young teens about the possible future dangers of sexting, without coming across as judgmental, accusing, or victimising. But even in this day and age of political correctness and neurotically extreme phobias about being seen as racist, homophobic, sexist, overly judgmental, blaming the victim – ad nauseam – it should be possible to point out the possible (and even probable!) pitfalls of sending photos of one’s genitals to another person via the internet, in a factual and straightforward manner, shouldn’t it? For a video assignment though, I guess it would have to be a person (or maybe persons?) looking earnestly at the camera and explaining the problems that they’ve had after sexting their partner. You mustn’t portray shame or guilt, or any other negative connotations – after all, they’ve done nothing to be guilty or ashamed of – but just state the facts. Anyway, it’s her assignment, and she’ll do it her way 🙂 We also watched six (6!) episodes of “Arrow” – now that we live so much closer to her Julian doesn’t have to drive her home so early and we have more time to watch whatever it is that we’re currently watching 🙂 Oh, she said she had a present for me, but she’d left it at home, but that she’d give it to Julian to bring back with him – which he did 🙂 In Adelaide on Saturday, I was quite cold and borrowed a scarf from Melissa, Julian’s sister. It was a lovely dark blue wool “Adelaide University” scarf – it was beautiful and warm, and I was quite reluctant to hand it back to Melissa when we left for the airport. Lee’s present was a black wool “Deakin University” scarf – exactly the same, only black (which I really prefer, too!) so I’m extremely pleased, and I shall be wearing it a lot, too, until the weather gets warmer! 🙂

And… it’s “that time”… again!

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

And sim sala bim, I’m back again! 🙂 It’s after dinner, and after television, where Julian and I have just watched last season’s final episode of “Person of Interest” – talk about a cliff-hanger! There will be another, final, shortened season of the show, which my favourite eldest daughter and I were discussing, just this afternoon! We’re wondering if the character “Shaw” will have been “turned” by Samaritan, if she’ll just pretend to have been “turned” to fool Samaritan, or if she’ll be unaffected by her imprisonment by Samaritan! And… how do you kill, or destroy, such a powerful AI as Samaritan? Lee was saying that you can’t destroy or kill such a powerful entity – but Samaritan was attempting to (quite literally) kill “The Machine”, so surely it could be killed in the same way? Oh, questions, questions, questions, and no answers, yet! 🙂 It’s interesting to speculate, though… and the fact that the last season will be a very short one suggests that they (the writers and producers) have some sort of resolution to the conflict between the two machines… One thing’s for sure – having come so far with “The Machine” and its champions, one finds oneself almost hopping from foot to foot, chewing one’s nails down to the quick, and jumping up and down with impatience, waiting to see what’s going to happen! Roll on next year and the final season! 🙂

Reading back over what I’ve just written, it seems incongruous to get so het up over a – let’s face it – a pretty flimsy show with really improbable and implausible plots, where only the “goodies” can shoot straight (and nearly always in the knee-caps!) cars and trucks (vans) have armour-plated duco, and with technical holes that would make a piece of Swiss Cheese look like solid rock! But it’s good fun, and really, if something can keep you interested and on the edge of your seats for so long, it can’t be all that bad, now can it? 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Thank goodness! Only another two days of these terrible tablets! This morning, I hopped on the scales… 76.3kg Right, time for the confirmatory second weighing. Back on the scales… It dithered! It went up to 76.9kg… while I was trying to get my balance – then dropped down to 76.7… 8… 5… and finally stopped on 3 again! So I went down… one point! From 76.4kg to 76.3kg. Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll probably be back at 76.6kg or something. I do find it difficult to stand on the scales properly – my feet are badly deformed, and trying to get both feet straight (HA!) on the metal strips you’re supposed to stand on involves me going quite painfully knock-kneed, and half standing on the inside edge of one foot. It’s not easy to keep one’s balance like that! *sigh*

So anyway, the painters will be back tomorrow, I should have a couple of hours in here before Julian has to secure the computers and cover everything with sheets of plastic, whereupon I suppose I shall retire to the living room and read my kindle until everything’s back to normal in here… It might be a good idea if I get Julian to charge up my tablet tonight, too… But anyway, I’ve rambled on long enough, and said just about everything that I wanted to say – so once again I guess that’s about it from me for tonight! Call in again tomorrow night, though, and see whether or not my weight did go up (I bet it does!) and whether the painters have finished, or whether they’ll be back again on Thursday, as well as lots of other news you really won’t want to miss out on! 😉 But until then, do try to bee good, don’t forget that there is no great genius without some touch of madness, and remember to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm – but most of all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

And it’s been yet another exciting and productive day here at Stillwater! 🙂 The painters arrived at 8.30am – late! And then… suddenly remembered that they were supposed to be somewhere else this afternoon, so they left early, at 3.00pm! …Apparently they won’t be late tomorrow! (grrr! It’s so hard to get good tradespeople these days!) Anyway, I closeted myself in the Den and tidied up the Greybriar Guild Bank – Julian brought one of his characters from Laethys across with enough Platinum for a third Guild Bank Vault, while I finished tidying up the two current GBVs and then set Scheherazarde up to be the “Mistress of the GBV Overflow” (that is, things that really should be in the Guild Bank, but won’t fit!) Scheherazarde will also double up as “Auctionator”, and Daenerys, The Guild Mistress, will be the recipient of any Artifacts found on that shard, so it all looks as though it’s coming together nicely on Greybriar! 🙂 The dining room table and chairs also arrived just after lunch, and I have to say that our proper table is much more nicer than the horrible black beetle of a loan table was! Surprisingly, the chairs aren’t leather, they’re cloth-covered! Goodness knows why we decided on cloth instead of leather, though apparently we did… But it’s just as well that we didn’t have our proper table and chairs when Julian had his little… mishap with his dinner, because our “proper” chair would have been totally ruined! The chairs are covered in a light-ish sort of “oatmeal” cloth, and the tomato “oil” in the tomato lasagna would have stained the cloth beyond redemption! Which is why I can’t understand how we could have chosen cloth over leather! All too often food and drinks get spilt or dropped on dining room furniture, and it’s much more easier to clean oily marks off leather than it is from fabric (especially a light coloured fabric! You’d think that we could have at least chosen a somewhat darker colour, like maybe a nice chocolate-brown, if we really had to go for fabric!) I don’t know where our brains were that day! (I also can’t understand why we went for a creamy oatmeal type of colour! It has a lot of “yellow” in it, and everything else in the room is either dark brown, or grey! I might get Julian to look at the order form, just to check that we did get what we ordered! *Winter shakes her head* Most strange…)

Anyway, we have the dining room furniture, and it looks nice (despite the colour?) Greybriar has been nicely set up for next Sunday’s “And now for a walk in the Black Silverwood forest”, the painters have made a start on the en-suite and Walk In Wardrobe doors in the bedroom, and Julian has started assembling the first of the six glossy white bookcase-display-cupboards – although there was a fair bit of confusion and consternation with the first drawer – he wasn’t sure if he’d done it the right way up or not, because the drawer knob was on the bottom of the drawer front, not at the top, or in the middle! Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a drawer with the knob or handle on the bottom of the drawer face, but the drawer above it is the same, and that’s what the instruction sheet says to do, so maybe it is right… I just find it a little… odd… Well, we shall see what it’s like when it’s finished… All-in-all, we’ve all had quite a productive day – except for the painters, who stuffed things up a bit, but I’m sure it’ll all be alright tomorrow 🙂

Oh, I should tell you – we discovered a new low-sugar diet jelly! I have a small diet jelly for “dessert” every night, but we buy the packets of diet jelly crystals and make our own – those commercially made-up jellies are really horrible, and taste like artificial sweetener more than anything else! We usually get flavours like strawberry, port wine, raspberry, lemon, and pineapple – but it seems like the manufacturers are slowly waking up to the fact that there’s actually money to be made in the diet or low-calorie dessert production, and they’ve started adding flavours like “vanilla and berries”, and “orange blossom and tea”, and lemon and green tea”, and they’re really, really delicious! But I reckon that this new one we found is really the best of them all! It’s “raspberry and licorice”! I’m sure you’ve all seen bags of raspberry licorice in the supermarket and lolly outlets, and while I don’t mind licorice, I’ve never tried the raspberry flavoured one. When we saw it in diet jelly crystals, however, I thought we might as well give it a go. I’m so glad we did! It’s lovely! There’s not enough licorice flavour in it to actually give it a licorice taste, but it’s just enough to really enhance the raspberry flavour! 🙂 So, who needs mud cake, when you have such nice low-calorie jellies to hand? 😉

Weigh-in this morning. *sigh* My body, under the influence of those wicked pills, has decided to really make me suffer! I stayed the same again. 76.4kg again! I am not amused! I am not happy! All I can do is try to console myself that I only have another three days of the bloody things to go! I’ve upped my Treadmilling – ten minutes at 1.2kmph, three times a day, and so far it doesn’t seem to be having any appreciable effect. I don’t want to make it any longer than ten minutes – ten minutes of mindless walking is boring enough, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s possible that it might just bore the weight off me! I suppose I could try to go faster – I’m certainly considering it – and only my extremely over-active sense of self-preservation is stopping me from turning the speed dial up another notch! We’ll see what tomorrow brings…

Yesterday while I was paddling along on my trusty treadmill, I was thinking about the funeral… and it occurred to me that we (human beings in general) aren’t doing things properly. It’s become “tradition” to have funerals as soon as possible after a death – I suppose it must have originated when it was imperative to get bodies interred (or cremated) before they started to smell bad, but that’s not strictly necessary in this day and age (depending on where you live, of course) But that’s not the point I’m trying to make – what I’m trying to say is that we have funerals when the grief is still fresh and raw and emotions are running riot. Most of the people who read the eulogies are unable to speak audibly or coherently for the tears that choke them up, as was the case on Saturday. Afterwards people mill around and don’t know what to say to eachother – anything you can think of saying usually sounds trite, or forced… Wouldn’t it be far better just to have a brief, private burial or cremation with only close family members attending – not a formal “service”, but just a type of “laying to rest rite” of some sort. Family members could then go home to grieve in peace… and then about six months to a year later, there should be a memorial type of funeral service for the deceased – not a wake, as a lot of people have these days, but a proper, memorial “funeral service“, as we had on Saturday, where people who wanted to speak (i.e. read a eulogy) could do so, audibly, coherently, with a smile – which was completely impossible on Saturday! If the eulogies could be heard at all (and they mostly couldn’t!) it was muffled, mumbled, and choked with emotion! I think it was because it was simply too soon! Tradition be damned! My family understand that I’m to be cremated. They also know that I don’t want a funeral service – I don’t even care if anyone’s there to see my casket sink down into the crematorium below. What I want is that sometime down the track, they’ll hold some sort of “remembrance” “do”, where people can remember me as I was, the things that I accomplished – as well as those that I didn’t accomplish (and there sure have been a lot of those! 😉 ) I want it to be a fairly quiet occasion, but a happy “do you remember when she…” time, and I hereby give my permission for anyone on a diet to only drink mineral water and eat their Optifast bar! 😉 But in my opinion, funerals are always held way too soon after a death – let’s all try to start a new Tradition, get the burial out of the way privately and quietly, and leave the eulogising until a bit later… Enough about funerals…

Well, my favourite eldest daughter will be here tomorrow, and no doubt we’ll watch some more of “Arrow”, Julian will probably get on with more cupboard assembling, and the painters will hopefully get on with painting the bedroom, and move onto the next room… So once again, that’s about all from me for tonight 🙂 But call in again tomorrow night to find out if we’ve spilt anything on the dining room chairs yet 😉 whether my weight decided to move at all – in either direction – what Lee and I watched, how many cupboards Julian’s managed to finish assembling, and whether the painters have finished in the bedroom! Yup, it’ll all be here for you, tomorrow night – so don’t miss out! 😉 But until then, please bee good, remember that ability will never catch up with the demand for it, and don’t forget to drive carefully, to stay warm, and to look after yourselves… but most of all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Firstly, to all you men out there who have children – of the human and/or animal kind – Happy Father’s Day! 🙂 I hope you all got spoilt rotten today! 🙂

Well, it’s been an extremely satisfying and productive day all round, today! 🙂 We slept in a bit (until 8 o’clock, anyway!) and caught up with our sleep – you have no idea how totally exhausted we both were last night! I think what I wrote last night made sense? I hope it did, anyway – because I wasn’t able to hold onto a coherent thought for more than a minute and a half, and I kept falling asleep at the keyboard! I don’t think I can remember when I’ve been so tired before! So as I said – we slept in a bit this morning, and I’ve been working out how to fit three Treadmillings of ten minutes each, at 1.2kmph, from now on. I’ll have to do my first one before breakfast, instead of after it, the second one just after lunch, and the third one around about now-ish in the afternoon. I finished my third Treadmilling (which I extended to ten minutes) for the day about half an hour ago. We also managed to get Mandreth up to level 65, at long last – she is Julian’s main character, and is usually the one who’s sent in to help me if any of my characters get stuck somewhere in the game. And we decided what to do next! We’ve both started new characters on a reasonably neglected shard which happened to have a Guild and a Guild Bank – of sorts! There are seven shards all told, but only six playable ones as far as we’re concerned, because the seventh one, Seastone, is a PvP (Player versus Player) shard, and neither of us is even remotely interested in playing PvP! Only three of the six playable shards have Guilds and Guild Banks – two of them you’ve probably heard me mention a lot, because they’ve always been our main shards – Laethys and Hailol – the last shard with a Guild and a Guild Bank is Greybriar, and has mainly been used, by me anyway, as a place to put unwanted and unused characters whom I don’t want to delete… because I don’t want to lose their names! So we’ve created two new Guardian characters on Greybriar. Julian has a male Rogue called “Haereticus” (which means “Heretic”, apparently!) and I have a female Mage (what else!) called Azuresky – which means “blue sky” (duh!) both of whom have reached their capital city of Sanctum, and been inducted into the Guild.

And the last bit of satisfying productivity? 🙂 Julian is attacking the first of the flat-packs, and has started assembling the glossy white “end table thingy” that we got to go between the lounge-suite’s chaise and the wall, so that whoever’s sitting there can have somewhere to put a cup of coffee, or a plate, or a book, or whatever – when it’s finished I shall have to go and help him move the lounge-suite so that it can be utilised… and the ridiculous end table at the foot of the chaise can be moved to the end of the sofa-bed in here. I’m hoping that with yesterday behind us now, we’ll be able to get back to finishing off our move, unpacking and getting rid of all the boxes, both here, and those still in storage from 2007! We still have to compile a full list of furniture to be sold, or re-housed somewhere – we already have a taker for our extremely comfortable blue lounge-suite which is still over at Doncaster. I really wish we could keep it, but unfortunately there’s nowhere over here where it could go 😦 Actually, there’s an awful lot of things that have to go – Julian will have to take photos of everything for the list… I’d like to get onto that as soon as possible… but the boxes over here have to be dealt with first, as we’re going to have to bring all our books back from Doncaster in the very near future. And that means we’ll need lots of bookcases, which in turn means unpacking and dealing with all the boxes that are currently all stacked up in the Library! Talk about a vicious circle!

I’ve just come back from helping Julian move the lounge-suite and the marble-topped sideboard! The glossy white “end table thingy” is now in place, and really looks as though it was always meant to be there! The end table that used to be at the end of the chaise part of the lounge-suite is now in here, at the end of Flipper’s sofa-bed… you should have seen her eyes when we carried it in! She was just preparing to jump up onto the sofa-bed to get into her “cat-cave” when she saw us carrying the table in – her eyes nearly fell out of her head! 😀 But she’s in her “cat-cave” now, so I guess she’s not too put out about her new furniture… Unfortunately it’s going to make it terribly easy for her to get up on the spare table-desk at the other end of the sofa-bed, and I don’t think Julian wanted her to be able to do that quite so easily… Oh well, the table-desk will only be there until the matching credenza arrives – the spare table-desk will then be moved into Julian’s Commodore (the C64) room…

Weigh-in this morning. More of the same stupid weight chaos – this morning I went down two of the three points that I went up yesterday! From 76.6kg to 76.4kg – but I’m not going to take any notice of that because I’m only half way through taking these stupid pills, and anything is likely to happen weight-wise between now and September 10th! From now on, although I’ll continue to weigh myself every morning, I’m going to totally ignore anything the scales tell me between the 1st and the 10th of the month! 😛

Tomorrow morning the painters are coming in to totally disrupt our lives, and sometime in the afternoon our proper dining room table and chairs will finally be delivered – that won’t take long, but unfortunately the painters will probably be here for the rest of the week but it has to be done – we can’t leave all the hooks, power points, shelving brackets, etc., sticking out of the walls here and there – they look awful! And besides – I think we’d better use the painter’s disruptions as a rehearsal for when Clarke starts working on my bathroom! Flipper won’t be happy, but it can’t be helped… and we’ll be here to coddle and cosset her along 🙂

I noticed something yesterday while I was looking out the plane window – it was much more noticeable flying in to Adelaide than flying home in the evening – but as we were flying over the sea, I realised that when you’re at ground level, you see the waves meeting the shore as a continually repeating series of white foam, or wave crests, don’t you? But from a plane, it’s not a continually repeating series of waves; from a plane window it appears as a solid, unmoving, unchanging white line! And further out from the shore, from a plane window you can see the swells and the troughs between the waves… but… they don’t move! It’s like looking at an unchanging map, it’s only the different colour gradients that show you the difference between a swell and a trough! It’s quite fascinating! I kept trying to squint to see if I could detect any movement at all, and the only time you could detect even the slightest movement was a little closer to shore where the sun sparkled on the water – the sparkles changed, so you knew that there had to be movement, but without that, it all looked as still as a millpond, or a painting! Next time you’re in a plane and flying over the sea, have a look, and see what you think! 🙂

And now, it’s that time again… sorry…

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

And, Hey! Presto! Here I am, back again! 🙂 Oh, I forgot to tell you – I got the results of my Warfarin blood test back on Friday night – my INR has gone up to 2.4, which is very good, and they’ve left my rat poison dose the same as last time, which is a big relief! 🙂 My favourite eldest daughter will be over on Tuesday, though she has two uni assignments due this week (she managed to get an extension on one, but she hopes to have it done on time, anyway) and I think Julian will be pretty busy assembling flat-packs – he said he had no problems bolting together the one he did today, but it was less than a quarter the size of the other ones! Oh well, I think I had better get the packets of band-aids ready! 😉 While all the painting and furniture delivering is going on tomorrow, I think it might be best if I just cower in here playing Rift, or working on some new graphics… and with that, I hate to have to tell you all that that’s about it from me for tonight – but do drop in again tomorrow, to find out all the latest, like what the new dining room table and chairs actually look like, or whether or not the painters have made a big mess, and what surprises my weight had in store for me in the morning! There’ll be lots of other things as well – I’ve got lots of time to think about all sorts of things while my legs are mindlessly churning away on the treadmill, and I was considering funerals and their timing this morning – I thought I’d share some of my observations with you, but that’ll have to wait until tomorrow now as it’s getting late, and this is already way too long! 🙂 So until tomorrow night, please bee good, remember that every exit is an entry to somewhere else, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm, and to drive carefully – but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, here we are, back from Adelaide… The plane actually made excellent time on the return leg – we actually landed a full 25 (twenty-five!) minutes ahead of schedule, thanks to some helpful tail winds and a somewhat over-zealous pilot 🙂 But I’m getting ahead of myself! 🙂 We had our alarm set for 6.10am and it was still a mad scramble to be ready on time to pick up my favourite eldest daughter and her husband on our way to the airport. Then we got lost on the way there! It’s been literally years since Julian went to the airport via the South Eastern Carpark, and “routes have changed, Barbie!” (to borrow from an ancient computer game!) We ended up going all the way over the Westgate Bridge, and then all the way back again over the Westgate Bridge – but we managed to get to the airport before the plane took off without us 🙂 We rendezvoused with my favourite youngest daughter and her husband at the airport and had a good flight over to Adelaide. Julian and I flew Business Class, while they went “cattle”… Do you know, it has to be (Winter starts counting on her fingers…) oh… a good “XX” years? (yes, double figures – but if I tell you exactly how many years it’s been, you’ll work out how old I am, and I can’t have that! 😉 ) so… it’s been “XX” years since I’ve been able to sit in any sort of aeroplane seat, and not only not need an extension for the seat belt, but to actually have at least 8 inches of excess seat belt left over! It was fantastic! And I would even have fitted fairly comfortably into a “cattle class” seat, too! 🙂 I guess all this losing weight business does have its advantages! Arriving in Adelaide, we caught a taxi to the house – this time we took Kate and Terry – Lee and Neale hired a car for the day. There were quite a number of people already there, so we mingled and made polite small-talk and had a cup of coffee while we waited for the cars to take us to the church arrived. (As promised, what we all wore! 😉 ) I wore the black slacks I bought yesterday, and the new red top – I must have looked alright because several people remarked on how “elegant” I looked (I don’t think that anyone, ever, has referred to me as being “elegant“! S’truth! What’s the world coming to, if I can look “elegant”! 🙂 ) Lee wore black jeans, a black shirt, and a gorgeous brown and gold paisley tie, and Neale wore black pants, a black shirt, and a charcoal coloured tie. Kate wore a black top, and a very lovely full black skirt with palm-of-your-hand sized white leaves on it, and Terry looked very smart in charcoal/dark grey, with a nicely contrasting sky-blue tie. Julian wore his brown slacks, with a matching sport’s coat, a light-grey/off-blue shirt, and a soft mauve tie.

The funeral was a funeral. Enough said.

Afterwards there was pink champagne, tea and/or coffee in the hall behind the church – it was extremely well catered, too, with wafer-thin cucumber sandwiches, as well as mixed sandwiches. Beautifully crafted “petit fours” (read: teeny little cakes of different shapes, all beautifully and fancifully decorated!) and some absolutely darling little apple and cheddar quiches – none of which I could eat of course, but everyone who did said that they were quite delicious! 😦 And as they didn’t have any skinny milk (or equivalent) I was left with a choice of black coffee, or black tea. I opted for the black coffee, as it was quite decent plunger coffee 🙂

We only just got back to the airport in the nick of time! Because I was using one of the airport’s wheelchairs, the cabin crew on-loaded us first (and off-loaded us last!) so by the time we’d arrived at security, they were paging us at the gate! But, security had to be appeased, so we gritted our teeth and smiled tightly at them as they patted me down and used a mirror on a stick to search for bombs planted underneath the wheelchair! Then we almost galloped down the ramp to the door of the plane… and then we flew home! 🙂

Back in Melbourne, I was absolutely kicking myself (or I would have been if I hadn’t been sitting in an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie airport wheelchair freezing to death!) for not thinking this morning as we were leaving… that by the time we got back to Melbourne, at night… in the dark… it was going to be as cold as hell is hot! My favourite eldest daughter and her husband, and I… sat in the freezing cold with our teeth chattering while Julian went and fetched the car from the car park! I would have killed for a cup of hot coffee, or a scarf… or a thick jumper… Anyway, we didn’t die of hypothermia because Julian arrived with the car, and we drove home, dropping Lee and Neale off on our way 🙂

After we staggered inside (we were both totally exhausted!) our first priority was coffee! Then Julian fed Flipper, and then he made my soup… He’d already eaten on the plane, to save cooking time when we got home – wasn’t that clever of him! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Was! Not! Good! Nononononono! It was very bad! I went up three points! Up! Three whole points! That’s only two points off half a kilo! If I wasn’t depressed about it before I wrote about it, I’m depressed now! 😦 Only another five days on these wretched pills…

So there it is – a very short blog tonight because I keep on drifting off to sleep, and I still have to do my Minions! 🙂 Tomorrow, we’ll probably spend the day getting Mandreth up to level 65, and on Monday, the painters start pulling out nails, screws and brackets from the walls, plastering up the resulting holes and sanding them back before doing the painting proper, which should take a couple of days. And of course, Julian has to start assembling all those Ikea flat-packs! Whatever happens, do call back again tomorrow night to see how things are progressing on the weight front, the Rift front, and the unpacking of the boxes front! Until then though, please try to bee good, don’t forget that even if you fall on your face, you’re still moving forward, and always remember to keep warm, to look after yourselves, and to drive carefully – but most importantly, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Oh dear, I’m starting really late tonight! My hairdressing appointment was at 3.00 this afternoon, so by the time I’d had my Warfarin blood test done, finished at the hairdresser’s, and we’d gone up to My Size at The Pines to get me a smaller pair of slacks (and a pair of jeans, which are too long and will have to be shortened, and two tops) plus a small amount of supermarket shopping, arrived home, and done my second Treadmilling for the day – it’s now a quarter to six! Still, I have a cup of coffee, and everything’s good! 🙂 We got a call from the Ikea delivery people at about a quarter to ten last night, to tell us that all our bits and pieces would be delivered sometime between 1.00pm and 7.00pm today! Say, whaaat?! We’d told them – several times, in fact – that if the items were delivered after 2.00pm there wouldn’t be anyone here to receive them, as we had to go out! Well, it was too late to call them back last night, so Julian rang first thing this morning. As a result, the bits and pieces arrived well before lunch today, thank heavens, and all those great big flat-packs are sitting on the floor  in the Office!

At My Size, I bought a pair of slacks, the next size down from the ones I’m currently wearing, and they look a lot better, too! The jeans… well, I ummed and errr’d about them for a bit – I haven’t worn jeans since… 1986? mainly because I got too big (read: “fat”) to find any that fitted me, and that I didn’t look… “not good” in! *blush* You know, it’s funny… I’ve lost over 56kg, but I still feel diffident about… sitting on flimsy looking chairs or benches… wearing things like jeans… even using the treadmill – all silly things, that intellectually I know will be alright, but that I’ve developed such a phobia about that it’s really hard for me to make myself sit on a bench or small seat, to wear things like jeans, or even to hop on a treadmill that I know is rated to 100kg, and that I’m well under that! Anyway, I got the jeans – they’re a size larger than the slacks, and although I could get into the smaller ones (just!), they weren’t comfortable and certainly didn’t look nice! Next week I’ll take them up to The Glen and have them shortened, and we’ll see how we go with them. One of the tops I got is the same as a black one I was thinking of wearing tomorrow, but I’ll wear the new one instead, even though it’s red… The other top I got is a rather pretty “junior navy” hoodie, which will hopefully keep my stupid right ear warm without messing up my hair too much! Oh, and on the buying side of things, I think I’ve finally found a lipstick that I can wear that doesn’t dry my lips out to the point where I’m constantly chewing dried and cracked skin off! If anyone else out there reading this suffers from dry lips, try Estée Lauder’s “Pure Color Envy Liquid Lip Potion”! It’s not cheap, but it’s certainly good for keeping your lips moist! (and what’s more, it doesn’t smear off on whatever you’re eating with or drinking from!) 🙂

While waiting for the Ikea stuff to arrive this morning I caught up with Rift and with the help of an experience enhancing potion got Satai up to level 46. Julian has suggested that I start taking some of them up to level 65 on my own, and calling for help with some of the harder “end of zone Boss fights” (which I’d been planning to do anyway, but somehow life and moving from Doncaster to here got a bit in the way…) I’ve pretty much been able to solo up to level 60, and I’ve even managed to solo some of the more awkward Rift closing end sequences – but I’d like to see if I can actually manage to get to level 65 on my own (I usually try until I’ve died about two or three times before I yell for Julian to come and save me 🙂 ) Anyway, I’ll see how I go next week…

Oh, I’ve remembered what’s happening next Monday! 🙂 Our proper dining room table and chairs are arriving! They hadn’t been ready when we moved (they should have been ready, and in fact were promised for August 21st – which is why they gave us the “loan” table and chairs we’re currently using!) but they’ll be arriving next Monday! It’s been so long that I can only vaguely remember what the table looks like, and I have no idea about the style or colour of the chairs, except that I think they’re leather! These loan ones are leather, and just as well! 🙂 Last night I sat down at the table and started eating (?) my soup, while Julian got his dinner (a big bowlful of re-heated tomato lasagna) and a big glass of mineral water, before joining me at the table. All of a sudden there was a loud crash, the chinkle of breaking crockery, and mineral water all over the table! While attempting to put everything on the table, he’d accidentally knocked the bowl against the back of one of the chairs – he lost his grip on it, and it fell to the floor, causing the very loud crash, accompanied by the unmistakable chinkle of breaking crockery! And of course, whilst fumbling with the bowl, he also spilt the full glass of mineral water all over the table – narrowly missing my soup bowl! So we ended up having a somewhat later than planned dinner, while he gathered up the pieces of broken bowl and its contents, mopped the floor, and re-heated himself some more of the leftover tomato lasagna… Such fun…. not! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. I hate these new pills! I shall tell Dr. Y. that I’d rather go back to the old ones – even though I hated them with a passion, too – next time I see him (which won’t be until November 😦 ) Oh well. My stupid weight didn’t do anything this morning – it’s still scowling at me from 76.3kg, the same as it was yesterday. Hopefully there’ll be some movement (in a downward direction!) at the station tomorrow morning! We’ll see…

And now, of course, it’s that time again… 🙂

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

Well, here I am, back again! I’ve just been finding out about our schedule for tomorrow… We’re picking up my favourite eldest daughter and her husband at 7.45am and heading off to the airport. My favourite youngest daughter and her husband will meet us there… It’s wheels up at 10.05am, and the funeral is at 2.00pm. There’ll be tea, coffee, drinkies, and a few munchies in the courtyard outside the church afterwards… and then it’s wheels up again at 5.05pm (Adelaide time) and we arrive back in Melbourne at 6.55pm (Melbourne time) My favourite youngest daughter and her husband will make their own way home, we’ll drop off Lee and Neale, and get home somewhere around 8 o’clock, feed Flipper, and then ourselves. So you can expect the blog to be extra, extra late tomorrow night! Oh, and I’ve been told that I don’t have to do my Treadmilling tomorrow as I’ll be doing a lot of standing up and walking around during the course of the day anyway. Speaking of Treadmilling, I didn’t have time to do a third one today, but I did up my speed from 1km per hour to 1.2km per hour, and I did 8 minutes worth instead of just 7… Tomorrow, of course, I won’t be able to Treadmill, but on Sunday I plan on doing 3 lots of 8 minutes at 1.2km per hour, and hopefully be able to build up from there. My hair looks good – hopefully I won’t sleep on it awkwardly and mess it up too much, so that it’ll still look as good tomorrow! And that’s about all I have for you again tonight – there’ll be lots to tell you tomorrow night, so do drop in again to read all about it – though I’m quite sure that none of you want a blow-by-blow description of the funeral (well, I hope you don’t, anyway, coz you won’t get one!) you will, however, probably be regaled with tales of the flight, what we wore, what other people were wearing, what there was to eat, and what Flipper had to say to us when we did get home (I’ll “XXX” out all the rude bits for you because when Flipper gets upset she often uses some rather… shall we say colourful? language!) and other such amusing and anecdotal trivialities (like my weight!) So until very late tomorrow night, please try to bee good, remember that if you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree! But 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, we finally got to go to Ikea this morning! We went to their Springvale store – it’s a big, big place out there! There’s not just Ikea, there’s Howards Storage, Nick Scali furniture, Harvey Norman, and so many other “Home Ware” places out there that I can’t remember what else! It’s completely mind-boggling! Julian took a different route to the one he usually takes out that way, and we got lost, so we had to pull over and program Brünhilda (the name we’ve given our satnav) to take us there! I never realised it was so big – and it has underground parking so I needn’t have worried that it might have been raining! (I learned a lot today! 😉 ) Anyway, we eventually got there, and then we had to get a map with which to find our way around! Yes, Ikea has little maps available in lots of handy and strategically placed “map trees” – but basically, you just follow the arrows painted on the floor, and sooner or later (usually later!) you’ll arrive at what you came to look at and/or buy. I suppose there’s good strategy in laying out their store like that – they have SO. BLOODY. MUCH. STUFF. that most people are bound to do a fair amount of impulse buying, both on their way to, and from, the original object(s) of their visit to Ikea. F’rinstance, we bought a small shower “squeegee” thingy and a nice, big front door mat on our way to, and back from, the lounge room storage furniture (read: bookcases, cupboards, and display cabinets!) I have no idea why, but I was under the impression that we were going to be looking for bookcases – the sort you put a lot of books in (on?… in!) and as a side issue, cupboards and shelves for the Den here, mainly for “display” purposes. You see, I have an awful lot of little knickknacks that people have given me over the years, and they’ve always lived somewhere on or around my desk – but we have nowhere to put them here… er… we didn’t have anywhere to put them here – now, we do! 🙂 These cupboard-shelves are quite schmick! They’re made from the same glossy white-painted wood as our table-desks (so they’ll fit right in!) When we looked at them, they had four of them bolted together to make one unit, but you can buy as many or as few of the units as you want, and either bolt them together, or stand them singly. You can also assemble them in any order you choose – the ones we saw had two columns of drawers at the bottom, followed by two shelves running the full width of the unit above the drawers, then two little cupboards, side by side, and finally there was a repeat of the two shelves below the cupboards. Together, the four units bolted together were exactly the right size to fit into our space here in the Den! (how lucky can you be, eh?! 😉 ) We were so taken by these snazzy little units that we bought an extra two of them – Julian’s been looking for some sort of a cupboard to put in the back hall, next to the shoe rack, so that he can keep some of his tools in the house, rather than out in the garage! The two units will mean that the shoe rack no longer fits there, but that’s OK, we can definitely use the shoe rack in the Walk In Wardrobe, and when we come in, we can put our shoes in one of the new unit’s cupboards! So we got two birds with one stone, so to speak 🙂 The other item we got today was a narrow-ish “occasional table” (I think that’s what they’re called!) It’s to go next to the chaise of the new lounge-suite, which is against a wall, and anyone sitting there has absolutely nowhere to put a cup of tea or coffee, or a plate, or a box of tissues, or whatever! We could have put one of our two side tables there, but that would have pushed the lounge-suite out too far into the rest of the room and there wouldn’t have been enough room for us to put our sideboard. So at the moment, that second side table is sitting sullenly at the foot of the chaise, which is totally useless to anyone sitting there (and where it also looks vaguely ridiculous) That side table will be coming into the Den here, next to Flipper’s sofa-bed, and will house a lamp, Flipper’s bowl of Pussy Biscuits, and Julian’s cup of tea or coffee if he’s sitting on the sofa-bed patting Flipper. But back to the little table we bought this morning… it, too, is made from that glossy white-painted wood, the same as the new cupboard units and our table-desks (no, we weren’t deliberately trying to match everything, we were just lucky!) The table is very “plain” (no ornamentation of any kind) stands just under desk height, and has one shelf right under its top. It should be exactly what we need. All of this stuff we bought today except, for the front door mat and the shower squeegee which we brought home ourselves, are being delivered tomorrow – before 2 o’clock, or so we’ve been told, and it had better be! (*glare!*) I have a hairdressing appointment over at Doncaster at three o’clock, and I’m also supposed to be having my next Warfarin blood test! I really hope they come early – I’d like to sneak into My Size and get another pair of slacks to wear on Saturday Something in a size “Extra Small” – these ones I’m wearing are “Small”, and they do fit me, after a fashion… (the elastic around the waist isn’t too loose, but the rest of the slacks is (are?) far too big!) I guess I’ll just have to wait and see… (*sigh*)

Weigh-in this morning. I really hate these wretched pills I have to take – even taking two anti-fluid pills instead of one isn’t making much of a difference – not only weight-wise, but my feet swell up like balloons, especially if I’ve been wearing shoes! 😦 However, I did go down one point today – from 76.4kg to 76.3kg. I did do my second Treadmilling last night, and I will tonight, too – but I think I might increase it to three times as day, and also try to set the speed just a teeny bit faster… I keep catching up to the treadmill! And again this morning, it was my arms that suffered most – they keep on cramping up on me 😦 I do try to relax them as much as possible, but they just don’t seem to like resting in the only places that I can put them without changing all the settings on the machine! Anyway, I shall persevere – walking for seven minutes is boring, but if it gets me fitter and thinner, I’ll set up my computer in front of the treadmill and walk all day! (no, not really 🙂 that was a joke, Joyce! And strangely enough, I quite enjoy it!)

I’m really quite trepidated about the arrival of all this furniture! It’s all flat-pack stuff, and Julian, bless his little heart and soul, wants to assemble it all himself! On his own! I think he’s being silly. Those units are not small – they’re actually quite tall, too (taller than him, anyway) Once a unit has been assembled, how is he going to stand it upright – without damaging it – on his own?! How is he going to move each unit into place, so that he can bolt them together, on his own? I told him, I think I’ll go out for the day – I couldn’t bear to watch (or listen to the temper tantrums when something doesn’t go right, or he cuts himself, as he invariably does!) I could catch a taxi over to my favourite eldest daughter’s place, and visit her for a change – I just don’t want to be here when he’s assembling everything! The trouble is, it’ll take him about a week to get them all done – there are six large cupboard units, and one “occasional table”. Actually, I don’t even want to think about it – I’m going to change the subject! Friday is going to be plenty busy – I just hope I get a chance to have my Warfarin blood test done! Life should be able to get back to normal again on Monday (something’s supposed to be happening on Monday, but once again, I can’t remember what it was/is! This “old-timer’s disease is a real nuisance!) Oh, and I forgot to tell you! (not that you should have needed to be told – you probably all noticed it when you started to read the blog, yes? 😉 ) I made a new header this morning – I didn’t have time to get stuck into Rift, so I had a fiddle around with the header – what do you all think? 🙂 Anyway, that’s about it from me again tonight – but there’ll be lots more tomorrow night, and lots of news and interesting tidbits for you all to catch up on! Find out if the flat-packs did arrive on time, and if I had enough time to not only have my blood test done, and go to the hairdresser, but if I was also able to get myself a new pair of slacks for Saturday! And, of course, you’ll want to know how my weight’s going… so stay tuned! Until then, however, do continue to bee good, remember that the true secret of getting ahead is getting started; 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: “Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!” ― C.J. Cherryh, The Chanur Series, et al.
Blurb: The acclaimed speculative fiction writer was actually born Carolyn Janice Cherry, but her editor felt like the last name sounded too much like a romance writer. The fix? Adding a silent “h”!

For once there was an interesting – well, perhaps more amusing than interesting, quote on the Goodreads Quote of the Day email that I received this morning, so I decided it was worth re-posting here – I hope you all like it too! 🙂

Well, we were – really, really were – going to head off to Ikea this morning to look at these bookcases that we need so much… but by the time we were both breakfasted and ready to leave, uhh.. the weather had started to turn nasty, so we didn’t go. And of course, by the time it was too late to go all that way, the weather had cleared right up! Typical Melbourne weather! 😦 Never mind, hopefully we’ll be able to go tomorrow! This morning I woke up with such a sore back that I did something I haven’t had to do for months and months! I had to take some Panadol on top of all my other anti-inflammatories and pain killers! My back’s been getting quite sore lately, and I’ve been wondering what could be causing it – apart from moving from Doncaster to here, nothing’s really changed – we’re using the same mattress, and doing the same sorts of things that we’ve always done, apart from walking up and down a lot of stairs every day… the only other thing that’s changed is the lounge-suite. It’s a little “firmer” to sit on than our old blue one – well, alright, it’s a lot firmer – downright hard, one could almost say – and if it is the lounge-suite, well, there’s nothing we can do about it except sit on it a lot, because sitting on it a lot will soften it down after a while, and it’s a lovely, comfortable couch, too! But I think I might do away with the leather cushion that came with it that I’ve been using – it does tend to make me slide down a lot – so much so that often I end up lying almost flat, with my head cricked up at an awkward angle so that I can see the television screen properly. I might also try swapping places with Julian, and see if sitting on the cantilevered seats helps my back (the cushion parts of the ordinary seats all pull out, so that you can put your feet up quite comfortably without having to resort to using the chaise) So we’ll see what happens – otherwise, as I said, we’re just going to have to sit on it a lot, until it softens down! 🙂 Well, I had my first treadmill “go” this morning after breakfast – I’ll have my evening stroll tonight after I finish writing this… Julian found a timer so that I could time myself (seven minutes per walk until I get used to it, remember? 🙂 ) but I found that the treadmill itself has a timer, so I walked using that this morning. Walking on the treadmill, it turns out, is very easy, and surprisingly, it wasn’t my back that got sore – or my feet, it was my arms! It has a handle on each side that you’re supposed to hang onto, and that was fine, for the first couple of minutes, but then my arms started to feel cramped, so I “walked” my hands up along the handles and onto the top part of the frame, where I found I could lean on the top of the treadmill quite comfortably… for a few minutes, and then my arms started to get cramped again! In the end I found that I was wriggling my arms between the handle grips and the top of the frame almost constantly, but that’s OK, it worked… There’s one position that I feel my arms would be the most comfortable in, but I can’t use it! It’s at a point just past the handle grips, but before the handles start turning into the frame – and the reason I can’t use it is because the right hand handle has a speed controller right in that particular spot! If I tried leaning on it I’d probably end up turning up the speed to full throttle! 12 kilometers and hour! There’s no way known I could walk at that speed, even for the short amount of time that it would take me to turn it down, or stop the machine! So unfortunately, leaning on that nice, comfortable looking position is a definite “no-no!” Walking at one kilometer per hour is going to very quickly become too slow – even this morning, I occasionally found my feet walking over the top/front part of the treadmill, and I had to make myself slow down so as not to get too far ahead of the moving belt – however, I’ll give it another couple of days before I speed things up a bit…

Weigh-in this morning. Honestly, this is really getting very tired! Up… down… Up… down… ad nauseam! This morning I went down the two ruddy points I’d gone up yesterday and the day before, taking me back to 76.4kg again! *sigh* I wonder when I’ll manage to get below 76kg! However, last night in the bathroom I realised that I could see my reflection in the window, and I was actually quite horrified! There was me thinking that I was looking quite a bit thinner, that I’ve lost a third of my body weight, and blah, blah, blah – but looking at my reflection, I looked almost as thick and chunky around the wait, hips, bottom and thighs as I did before I started losing weight! I honestly do think I’m going to have to go down to 65kg – that’s half of my body weight before I started this project. Maybe that’ll be enough! Yes, I do know that a lot of it is excess skin, and yes, a fair amount of it will eventually be removed – but it’s still dispiriting to feel pleased with yourself, and then be rudely awaken to the fact that you don’t really look all that good, after all!

Anyway, hopefully tomorrow we’ll be off to Ikea – because not only do we need bookcases for books, but we also need a narrow sort of side table to go between the chaise part of the lounge-suite and the wall – something that you can put a cup of coffee on, or a book, or the remote controls for the television… It can’t be too wide though, because as big as this house is, it’s not quite “palatial”, and we don’t want it to look “cluttered”… About the depth of a bookcase would be ideal… 😉 And, Ikea sell bookcase “extenders”, both horizontal and vertical ones. If we got one of the vertical ones and turned its bookcase side to the wall, it would be just the right size and shape to look like a narrow side table next to the lounge-suite! I do think that perhaps Julian had better get busy with the tape measure between now and tomorrow morning, measuring up for how much room we do have available for bookcases! 🙂 Friday I have my visit to the hairdresser… I don’t quite know what Flipper’s up to – I think she’s hungry… so Julian is going to feed her early tonight, seeing as she’s almost shouting at him to feed her. He’s trying to “train” her to go to the Library for her food, and you all know how well “training” a cat to do anything works! It only works when and if the cat wants to do it – subject to change without notice! 🙂 Well, it seems to have worked – this time, anyway – she walked into the Library of her own volition, and is munching away. Tomorrow will probably be an entirely different story! 🙂 And now once again that’s about all I have for you this evening! 🙂 Stay tuned though, because there’ll be lots to tell you all tomorrow night – like, did we really get to Ikea, or did we pike out again? Were there any suitable bookcases, or bookcase “extenders”? And if there were, did we get any? Will my weight have continued to go down, or will it have gone up, yet again? How is my Treadmilling going? And lots of other stuff besides! Anyway, until tomorrow night, please continue to bee good, remember that only you can change your life. No one can do it for you… and don’t forget to keep warm, to drive carefully, and to take care of yourselves… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Ooo-er! I’m starting to write really late this evening! My favourite eldest daughter has been over – Julian is just running her home at the moment – but we’ve had a good day all round. Lee had an appointment at the hairdresser over at Doncaster Shoppingtown this morning for a hair cut – and although she says that Neale, her husband, will hate it, I think it looks good! It’s very, very short, but it suits her. We also did a bit of shopping over there, and we collected our Dry Cleaning (but I’m really annoyed with myself! I meant to remind Julian that we should take the Dry Cleaning basket which is rapidly filling up again, but I [mumble] forgot! ) Oh well, at least I’ll have something clean to wear on Saturday! This afternoon we watched about four episodes of “Arrow“, of which we’d only seen the pilot before we moved. It’s quite a good show, but as usual I was struck by the lack of communication between characters – back when I still used to watch soaps, like “Days of Our Lives”, and “The Bold and the Beautiful”, I used to think that if the characters would only talk to eachother about whatever was bugging them, instead of bottling everything up or deciding to take matters (like revenge!) into their own hands… then there probably wouldn’t have been a story-line, I guess! “Darling, I have to confess to you! Ten years ago I slept with your brother, and Sonny-Jim isn’t really your son! *sob* and Now he’s married to Mary-Sue, who’s really his half-niece, and she’s pregnant! *sob*” (Ahhh! But little do they suspect that Sonny-Jim isn’t the real father of the unborn baby at all! 😉 ) See? Where would the story-line be? “Darling” would leave “the confession-maker”, the truth would be out, and “Mary-Sue” would also ‘fess up to her small indiscretion – and that would be the end of it all! No more episodes full of angst, revenge, jealousy, and remorse – and we bored housewives would have had to go and read a book instead! (hopefully not a Mills & Boon!) So maybe there is a point in not talking to your friends and loved-ones, though quite frankly I prefer to clear the air and get things out in the open, and resolved, one way or the other!

It’s quite exciting – my treadmill arrived this morning at about a quarter past nine and has been installed in the middle bedroom of the “bedroom wing” of the house 🙂 I had a bit of a go on it, and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to read my kindle whilst doing my walking on it – I’m going to have to watch where I put my feet fairly carefully, because unfortunately my feet don’t point straight ahead like normal feet, but poke out at about a 45° angle (thanks to deformities caused by my arthritis – a legacy of eleven years of classical ballet!) and if I’m not careful I end up with either one or both feet only half on the treadmill “belt”, with the “overhang” resting on the plastic side strip – not an ideal situation! Still, it goes pretty slowly – it’s currently set to one kilometer per hour, but I’ll probably speed that up as I get more used to it… Julian thinks I should start out doing two lots of seven-minute walks a day, and gradually building it up. I start tomorrow morning, so I’ll let you all know how it goes!

The locksmith came today to see where we wanted the locks changed, and what sort of locks we wanted them replaced with – and surprise, surprise! They didn’t have the sort we needed and/or wanted in stock! They’ll have to order them in and it’ll take about a week to get them! Ridiculous! In the meantime, I suppose we’ll just have to sit on the porch with our rifle resting on our knees, waiting for the bad dudes to come and rustle our cattle try to break in… I suppose in this case, a deadlock isn’t always a deadlock…

Tomorrow I’ll start my walking exercise, and if the weather is anything like it was today, we might make the trek over to Springvale to have a look at Ikea’s bookcases and (I think!) cable tidies (the area behind our nice, white, glass-topped table-desks looks like a spaghetti monster’s nest!) and of course, there are all the boxes still left to unpack… however, it’s “that” time again! 🙂 S’cuse me!

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

Here I am, back again! 🙂 You know, we got spoilt, over in the apartment, with lovely tiled floors… the ceiling lights in the apartment below us kept all our floors nice and warm, and moving the computer chairs was akin to playing ice-hockey! Here, the floors are all tiled – except in the so-called “living areas”! The Office, the bedrooms, the Den here, and the Library, are all carpeted. Maneuvering the computer chairs around the desks was harder than trying to push Mt. Everest over onto its side with your bare hands! So we got three of those heavy plastic (?) mats that people put down to protect their carpets from the wear and tear of rolling chairs… but if anything, they made the problem worse. I “sploshed” at least half a cup of tea onto myself and the desk the other day (some of which got under the inlaid glass top and was a real pain to clean up!) just trying to push the chair back so that I could get up out of my chair! So we removed the matting… moving the chairs was only slightly easier, so in the end, Julian went off to Bunnings (which is just down the road!) and got some sheets of masonite (I think!) which fit quite nicely under the desks and you know what? The chairs now move as easily as they did on the tiles back in Doncaster! 🙂 Apparently these aren’t the right sort of wooden sheets though, and they’ll eventually warp and bow, but they’ll do for now, and at least I can get up and sit down without losing half my tea to my lap, and under the glass top of my table-desk! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. You know, I think my treadmill came just in the nick of time! Not only did I start on my next dose of horrible fluid retaining pills (for which I’m doubling my daily dose of anti-fluid retaining pills) this morning, but I went up a point too, from 76.5kg to 76.6kg! 😦 To say that I’m not a “happy little Vegemite” would be the understatement of the millennium! So, tomorrow morning I’m hopping on that there treadmill – and I don’t think it’ll be long before I double my seven minutes, and increase the speed I walk at – just a little bit! 🙂 I really wish I’d been able to get the treadmill with the adjustable incline, but I’ll start off with this one, and try to “book” one of the adjustable ones for next month!

As I think I said earlier – I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow or Thursday – apart from my walking exercises and unpacking more boxes – if the weather’s OK we’ll probably go off to Springvale and Ikea, but if it’s pouring with rain, we might just sit all cosy at home and work on unpacking boxes. I need to find my “bathroom” box – it has a new tube of herbal toothpaste in it. I packed it, thinking that I had plenty of toothpaste to last me until we moved – and I suppose I do, really, but it’s starting to get a lot harder to squeeze the tube to get a sensible amount of toothpaste out of it, and I’d feel a lot more confident if I knew I had the new tube waiting in the cupboard! While we were at Doncaster this morning, Julian went to the Shaver Shop and got me some new “sensitive” toothbrush heads, and also went across to the apartment and unscrewed our little brass gargoyle-head door knocker and the little brass pussy-cat tails key rack. We’ll need to get another brass “striker” plate for the door knocker to hit against, and then once that’s up and functional I think I’ll feel as though I’m really home! 🙂 And that, I think, is about all I have for you tonight! Call in again tomorrow night though, and find out if my weight went up yet again, because I really don’t expect the treadmill to make any difference to my weight for at least two or three days (if not longer!) and also whether we went off to get bookcases or not – but whatever we do tomorrow, you can read all about it here, tomorrow night! 🙂 But until then, please try to bee good, don’t forget that when a cat chooses to be friendly, it’s a big deal, because a cat is picky! and always remember to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm – but most importantly, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂