Yes, yet another new theme! What do you all think of it? I’ve set the basic colours – predominantly a soft grey, and the highlights and links should be a nice, rich sort-of “royal purple” (or maybe Cadbury’s chocolate classic wrapper!) Sorry, I haven’t made a header for it yet, but I wanted to get onto this before it got too late yet again – I’ll make a proper header for it either later tonight, or some time tomorrow… Today I mostly worked on my desktop wallpapery-thingie – I’d already made it, but I just felt that it was lacking a little “something” – it looked too “bare“, if you know what I mean. I was sitting there last night, staring at it, and feeling very unsatisfied with it, wondering what I could do to improve it, and I suddenly remembered that I could add a layer of colour underneath sections of the floral outline I’d used, and which might just give it a little more “oomph!” Well, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t work! Usually when it does work, it looks fantastic, so I thought “nothing ventured, nothing gained!” and gave it a go – at 12.15am, mind you! 🙂 so I did a quick layer copy to preserve the original (just in case my idea didn’t work) selected the parts I wanted to “colour in”, created a new layer and applied the “paint” and style underneath the original outline! Eureka! (or something) it did work! Stunningly! Amazingly, in fact! Wow! But it was very late (or very early, depending on your perspective) so I left it for ron, and went to bed. This morning, after breakfast, I played a bit of Rift – I’m trying to get Blyce, who’s currently sitting on level 18, up to level 30, when I’ll switch back to Blackrose and drag her up to level 30 too – then, back to Blyce to take him on to level 50, then Blackrose, ditto – I’m sure you all get the picture 🙂 As for the Guilds and Guild banks for every shard (except Seastone) I have to wait until Julian has the time to temporarily transfer one of his characters across from Laethys to the shard we’re working on, carrying enough platinum with him (or her) for the transaction to be completed. I can’t transfer anyone across with the platinum, because all my character spots are full! 
So yet another downside to being an alt-o-holic! However, I didn’t play for very long – when I logged on it was late evening on the shard, which very quickly became night time, and I just couldn’t see a thing! I decided to just log off, and come back in a few hours when hopefully it would be daylight again. Actually, I have very poor night vision in “real life”, despite having eaten all my carrots and bread crusts – hang on, bread crusts are supposed to make your hair curly though, aren’t they? (*hmph!*) Just goes to show how unreliable all those “old wive’s” tales are, doesn’t it! My hair is straighter than ruddy straight! Not a wave or a curl anywhere, despite all the crusts I ate as a child! And as for carrots helping you to see in the dark… I’d like to meet the person who came up with that particular little white lie! 😉 But carrots are good for you (lots of vitamin A, or something) so fibbing to a recalcitrant child in order to keep them healthy? Well, I guess that very occasionally, the ends might justify the means… So before it got a little too hard to see my sword in front of my nose, I logged out and started working on my graphics again, and added the colour underneath the original floral outlines, which as I said before, worked very well indeed! Then I changed the font… the one I’d been using was “nice enough”, but not to my standards, so I changed it for something a little more “stand out-ish”, and that worked out well, too… That left the background that I’d made for the first version of this desktop wallpapery-thingie. It’s a sort-of soft grey (like this theme!) but faintly marbled in an off-white… nice, but boring! I went looking for snowflake brushes (brushes that draw little (or big) snowflake thingies when you click on your image) I already have heaps and heaps of snowflake brushes, but I can never remember where they are, and as it’s almost impossible to search for something on your own hard drive unless you know exactly what it’s called, it’s a lot easier just to go and download them all again (swearing black and blue that this time you’re going to remember where you’re putting them! You never do, though, do you? *shrug*) Anyway, so I downloaded four sets of snowflake brushes and started trying them out to see how they looked – in the end I finished up with about thirty different little snowflakes dotted (very artistically, naturally! 😉 ) all over the screen. They looked kinda pretty, so I shall leave them as they are – until I decide to make a new desktop wallpapery-thingie.
Weigh-in this morning. Maybe it was all the fresh air that I breathed in while sitting on the outside deck yesterday, or all the mineral water I drank, or the visit to the shoemaker, or Steve’s visit, or a combination of all of them, but I went down three points! I went from 67.1kg down to 66.8kg! I suppose I’ll probably go up again tomorrow, but at least I made it into the 66kg zone! 🙂 If only I could stay in it until I go down a bit more! Only one point eight kilos to Maintenance! (Winter bounces excitedly up and down in her chair, which comes perilously close to tipping off the piece of board that stops her chair wheels from getting stuck in the carpet!)
Well, Paul left early this afternoon to go and pick up my bathroom window (frame) which is now ready, and he brought over one of the lilac glass bricks which will be “scatter-gunned” amongst the plain, clear glass bricks. The lilac glass brick is exactly how I imagined it would look, and exactly what I wanted! Clarke says that as I have some multi-coloured mosaic tiles as a highlight at the back of the shower alcoves, I could have some of those other colours replicated in the glass bricks, if I wanted to – but I want the window to be the clear glass, with about five lilac ones, and nothing else, so I said thank you, but clear and lilac will be fine! 🙂 My slightly wider than normal sliding door was also ready, and was being picked up today, and Clarke said he thinks he’s found suitable taps for me (I can be very picky sometimes!) So everything’s looking rosy – or perhaps I should say “looking lilac-y” – with my bathroom! 🙂 Paul also concreted the shower base this morning, so I don’t think it’ll be long before the tiling starts! Julian thinks that they may try to do the window tomorrow – Paul says it usually doesn’t take more than a day to put in a glass brick window, and if it does, they do have the means to secure the house so that no creepy-crawlies – of the two, four, or six-legged variety – can invade, and slaughter us in our beds 🙂 You know, as much as I’m hanging out for my wonderful new bathroom, I think poor Julian is just about dying to get his bathroom back again! 🙂 Never mind dear, not too much longer now…. (I hope! 🙂 )
Tomorrow I have a hairdressing appointment at a quarter to one, but as Julian went out to do the shopping today (we ran out of tea!), and Flipper needed some more of her blood pressure medication, I think we’ll probably be coming straight back after that, so hopefully I’ll be able to have a few daylight hours on the shards in which to advance Blyce on his quest for level 30! I’m most anxious to know if they’re going to be doing the window tomorrow, and how soon the tiling will be able to be started, but I realise that there’s no point in saying “I can’t wait until…” – because what else am I going to do, hmm?! Julian will be working on the seemingly never-ending process of notifying people, places, and institutions of not only my name change, but our address change as well, and that’s about as much about tomorrow as I can tell you at the moment – so I guess that brings me to the point where I say: “And that’s about it from me for tonight!” So, that’s about it from me for tonight, but drop in again tomorrow night to find out if I have a beautiful, new, clear and lilac glass brick window, and if there’s been any indication of when the tilers will be starting! You’ll also hear how much my weight went up again – or down – or if it frustratingly stayed the same! There’ll be lots of things to tell you all about tomorrow, so don’t miss out on all the latest! 🙂 Until then, though – you know the drill – bee good, it’s almost “that” time of the year again! Don’t forget that to admit you were wrong is to declare you are wiser now than you were before, and remember always to drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather… but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 