Well, better late than never, as they say in the classics! Sorry this is so late, but by the time we got back from Doncaster I j-u-s-t had time to squeeze in my evening tilt at the treadmill before dinner! As you know, my hairdressing appointment was at 3 o’clock, and, well, hair colouring takes a l-o-n-g time, plus there’s the washing and the blow drying, and all that, so as I said, I only just had time to do my treadmilling before dinner. Then we watched yesterday’s pre-recorded episode of Channel 2’s Agatha Christie-based show, “Partners in Crime“, starring Little Britain’s David Walliams, and Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine – quite a good show 🙂 Not side-splittingly funny, but with enough awkward “bumbling” by our two protagonists to keep you happily amused 🙂 We also watched last Wednesday’s “Gruen” show, and then I came in here…. What??!! Oh, you want to know how my hair turned out! 🙂 Very nicely, thank you, but… more on that later!

This morning being Saturday, the day before Sunday, we did our sleeping in, so as not to take up too much of our Rifting time tomorrow (last Sunday we got such a late start at Rift that we’d determined that from then on, we would do our sleeping in on a Saturday, rather than the Sunday – for the reasons mentioned above!) Actually, I was woken up at around 5.30am by the thunder-storm! Did anyone else get woken by it? One of the girls at Oscar Oscar said it woke her, too – what a shame we’re no longer living in our old apartment in Doncaster! We had the most fantastic view of the city, and some of the sunsets and thunderstorms during our time there were most spectacular! In fact, we’d often turn off all the lights and open the curtains, and just sit on the couch watching the lightning! We also got to see all the Moomba and New Years fireworks for free, too – now we’ll just have to watch it all on the television instead (*sigh*) The things one gives up for a veggie garden! 😉 Anyway, after being so rudely awoken by the thunder-storm, I drifted off to sleep again but had weird dreams about a friend and his wife coming to stay with us in Doncaster, so I was quite happy to be woken at 8.30 for my morning mole-hill climbing. You know what? I tilted the treadmill incline up another notch the other day (it’s now sitting on setting seven of ten) and lengthened the time of my walk from 15 minutes (about 800 steps) to 17.something minutes (about 950 steps) – but still only at 3.2kmph, and still only three times a day – finally my top thigh muscles are actually starting to feel it (that is, they’re starting to get sore!) so the increase in incline and extra length of time must be doing some good, after all! 🙂 But getting back to this morning… I didn’t get to do much in Rift today – I did get rid of the last of my “Bind on Equip” junk on my three main shards, and started “neatening up” some of the shards that as yet have no Guild or Guild Bank – I’m starting to think that I’d like all the shards to have Guilds, so I’m going to have to “import” (read: temporarily transfer) characters carrying “bribe money” across – once upon a time, people would sign your Guild Charter because they wanted to belong to a Guild – it didn’t matter what Guild, just a Guild – these days you have to bribe Guild-less newbies to sign your Guild Charter (you need nine signatures on your Charter to form a Guild!) and by telling them that they don’t have to actually stay in the Guild, but just stay there until it’s formed! (some naughty people take the bribe money and then skip before the Guild is created! Very poor form! (*shakes head sadly*)) Then, if they don’t leave once you have your Guild, you can kick them out if you want your Guild to remain “private” 🙂 As you can imagine – all of this can be quite time consuming and expensive, so at this stage I’m only thinking that I’d like to set up a Guild on each shard… Back to reality: I did my lunchtime treadmilling early, and we had an early lunch in order to get over to Doncaster by three o’clock – we nearly didn’t make it on time, either, because Julian decided to take Springvale Road because it was more direct than the Tollway – this would have worked out well, but for the fact that there were holdups due to roadworks on Springvale Road – so the Tollway probably would have been faster, but we did manage to make it on time… As usual I had a nice relaxing time at the hairdresser, and I have to say that Elliott did a fantastic job on my hair colour! The blue foils didn’t turn out quite as blue as we would have liked, but actually, I think I like it better the way it did turn out! My hair is now a very dark, vibrant red, and what should have been blue streaks have in fact turned out to be a sort-of translucent lavender, giving the red a shimmer of almost opalescent mauve all over it – it’s very pretty, and I love it! 🙂 Thanks Elliott, you did a fantastic job! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. You’ll never guess what happened! I went down four points! Yes, I went from 69.2kg to 68.8kg! fantastic! I’m going to have to start a new graph page for that, because although I was almost at the bottom of the page yesterday, there was still room for another two kilo drops, but not four of them! 🙂 Ah, yes, BUT! (well, you did all realise that there had to be a “but” in there, didn’t you?!) Because I knew I was going to be so long at the hairdresser, I didn’t take my second anti-fluid tablet at lunchtime. Julian said “That’s alright, take it when you get home!”, and that’s what I would have done, but we got home so late I thought that if I took it then, I’d probably be up and down all night – so I didn’t take it. Well, you all know what that means – I’ll retain excess fluid, which will push my weight back up again tomorrow morning 😦 Plus the fact that I start those horrible fluid-loving and retaining pills again tomorrow – s’not fair! 😦 Perhaps being up and down all night would have been worth it, but… sleep versus weight? Nah… I think I’d rather sleep… maybe… too late now, anyway! The die is cast… the pill was not taken… But whatever happens tomorrow morning, I’ll know… that for one, brief, shining moment, I got under 69kg! 🙂

And so to tomorrow! Alas, no sleeping in for us – we did that today! It does mean that we should get a good run at Rift, though 🙂 I really should have looked up the little blurb that I saw a couple of weeks ago about Acts 1 & 2 of “Into the Wilds” – I’m sure it said that for those of us who’d finished the first part, we could get into the second part by…. and that’s the part that I can’t remember and should have looked up! (I’ll do that after I finish this!) Of course we have our two new Primalists to play with, but it’s a long hard slog from level 14 to level 65! 🙂 Whatever we do though will be fun, and as I said, getting a slightly earlier start will give us more time. I’m looking forward to Monday, too – we spoke to my favourite youngest daughter this morning, and because the place where she works is only going to have a skeleton staff there on Monday, they’ve given her the day off, so she’ll be coming over with her husband Terry when he comes over to take us shopping for sleepers and veggie-garden “stuffz” 🙂  I don’t get to see as much of Kate as I’d like, because she works… so every opportunity that she gets to come over is very welcome! 🙂 Anyway, it’s late, I still have Minions to de-brief, and besides, that’s about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Drop in again tomorrow night though, and find out if my weight did sky-rocket back up again, how our day in Telara (or The Wilds!) went, whether if we died or not, and if we did die, how many times, and what was it that killed us? I’m sure there’ll be heaps more to tell you all, too – so until tomorrow night, please bee good, remember – it’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know that counts, and don’t forget to keep cool – or warm, depending on the weather, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but most of all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂