What a busy day! Once again, we slept in – just a bit – then the usual morning events took place, and I went for my walk… This time I did make it to 2.51km, in 44.43 minutes! I came back into the Den, feeling very pleased with myself – and was told that we’d have to be getting up earlier from now on, because my walk now takes almost three-quarters of an hour, and that perhaps I should consider the fact that I might be doing too much exercise? Wot, me?! Too much exercise?! Surely he was jesting! 😮 I hate, loath and despise exercise! I might have changed my name (erm… not really changed it, just added to it!) but I most certainly haven’t changed my sport and exercise hating personality! *sigh* I thought that five kilometers was what I should be aiming for – it’s what he once told me that he walked (mind you, he walks a lot much more faster than my decrepit and doddering little 3.4kmph!) Only now he tells me that he only walks about three kilometers on his morning walks! I dunno – I just want to stay fit and healthy, and I really have no idea how far or how fast, or how often I should be doing it! Believe me, if I had my druthers I wouldn’t be doing it at all! So, either I get up at six thirty, and walk my first 2.51km in the morning (it’s also supposed to wake up and speed up my metabolism for the rest of the day!) and then go and do it all over again after lunch, or get up at the usual time, and shorten it a fair bit! Whichever way I do it though, it really does eat an enormous slab of pecan pie out of my day… with whipped cream on it! (and a cherry on top, just for good measure!) Anyway, straight after breakfast Julian went off to do a stock-take on what we’d bought at the Nursery yesterday, so that we could work out what we still needed to get – f’rinstance, we realised that we seemed to have a lot of herbs… but maybe not enough actual vegetables? And we were going to need stakes, with which to prop up the tomatoes, and that we’d meant to get beens beans yesterday, but hadn’t, and also that we’d need some sort of trellis for said beans! We took off and went to Officeworks first, where I found an “it’ll do!” Diary (it’s not exactly what I was after, but it’ll do…) and Julian got some printer cartridges, and I got… a few other things that I thought might be nice… We bought a new keyboard that hopefully doesn’t have a “power saving mode”, in which if the keyboard remains unused for more than about ten seconds (well, sometimes it feels like only ten seconds!) your keyboard “saves power” by “going to sleep” (what a good little keyboard! NOT! grr!) Then when you decide that you do want to write something, and you start to type –  you suddenly discover that the first three or four words of your sentence are missing! The keyboard had become bored waiting for you to make up your mind whether you were going to type something or not, and had gone to sleep! You see, after you’ve not used your keyboard for a short while (and believe me, it is a “short” while!) when you get back to typing again, you’re supposed to tap a key once or twice – to wake it up – and then start typing! For heaven’s sake! This is 2016! We live in the “now” these days, not sometime in a nebulous future few minutes! It appears to have something to do with Blue Tooth – apparently any hardware associated with Blue Tooth has this idiotic “power saving” mode built into it – so from now on, I’m going to be reading all the fine print to do with computer hardware, and if I see the words “Blue Tooth” in it, I’ll look for something else that doesn’t! Oh, and I also bought a new mouse, as I’m not completely happy with the one that I’m currently using – with this mouse – which doesn’t have “power saving”, thank goodness! – occasionally (it’s actually quite often in fact!) when you’re using the mouse wheel to scroll up or down, the wheel turns, just as it’s supposed to, but the cursor doesn’t move at all, and it takes a few “robust” (and often a bit annoyed) pulls on the wheel to get the cursor moving again. I have no idea why it does this, but it really is exasperating sometimes!

Then we went on to Bunny’s, where we got a few more vegetable-type plants, some stakes, twine, a box of 1000 worms (which are still in their box!) and I can’t remember what else – then we came home, and had lunch. After lunch we both went outside – I sat on the deck, and Julian went out to plant our two veggie gardens! In the right hand box (if you’re looking towards the fence) are three different tomato types (staked and tied up) leeks, capsicum, and French Beans (with “wigwam” type climbing sticks) The veggie bed on the left has spring onions, sugar snap peas, and the rest of the capsicum that didn’t fit in the right hand veggie bed. Of the bushes and “shrub” type items, the small bay tree has been planted in a large concrete pot to the left of the lemon tree, and the kumquat bush is awaiting a new pot in which to live, because we decided that the pot originally planned for the kumquat would be much better suited to the little rosemary bush. The herbs we have: there’s a beautiful, rather large round pot of basil in a lapis-lazuli blue pot on the decking near the back door, and a rather large, round terracotta pot, with parsley (at the back) sage (in the middle) and thyme (in the front) and chives planted down both sides. The big round herb pot is sitting in another “easy-to-get-at” corner of the deck. And that was the extent of our gardening this afternoon! I suppose we sort of went a bit overboard with the number of seedlings that we put in today, but with our dismal gardening record (we even managed to kill two out of three bougainvilleas just by planting them, once!) we thought that “overkill” (pardon the pun!) was better than ending up with no vegetables to speak of!

Oh, we also bought some snail pellets – snails can climb (crawl? slime their way up?) the outside of raised garden beds (well, if they can get into letter boxes, they can get into raised garden beds, right?) but while I was sitting on the deck watching Julian plant everything, I idly picked up the packet of snail pellets, only to read the words “Do Not Use On Food Crops!” printed in large, red letters, on every side of the box. I wonder if we still have the receipt, and if Bunny’s will exchange it for one that we can safely use on “food crops”! 😉

All in all, today was such a full day that I haven’t even had the time to log into WoW – not even once!

Food-wise: another yummy lunch (I thought it could have done with a bit of salt and pepper though) two Ryvita crispbreads, with low-fat cottage cheese, some of that nice quinoa tabouli salad, and sliced up roast beef sandwich meat – very nice indeed! 🙂 Dinner tonight was herbed pan-fried chicken, with beans, steamed rice this time, rather than chips, and the ever-present half a tomato. I love rice, and tonight was the first time I’ve had rice since the middle of August, 2014! I’ve really missed it! Now, I don’t know if any of you remember me saying that I’ve taken to chewing chewing-gum, which I absolutely hate and detest (and it makes my jaws ache something chronic!) but I have it because when I’m walking on the treadmill, my mouth gets drier than the middle of the Sahara Desert, which makes it extremely difficult for me to count my steps (please, don’t ask!) but now I’ve found a sugarless equivalent of ye olde boiled lollies, and while they do contain some calories, if I limit them to two or three a day, it shouldn’t matter too much. I tried them out on my morning walk this morning, and one sugarless lolly lasts for 1.5km! And it doesn’t make my jaws ache! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I was quite sure that I would have gone back up a bit this morning, but much to my surprise, I seem to have floated gently down to what I’m now starting to think of as my “normal” weight – I went down another four points, from 64.9kg to 64.5kg! It seems to be where my body wants to be at, because every time I do go up by over-indulging, as soon as I stop the “bad behaviour”, I just seem to come back down to around the 64.something mark – and if that’s the case, I shall do everything I can to make it happy by letting it stay where it seems to want to! 🙂

Tomorrow our cleaning lady will be here, and one of us will have the happy duty of telling her that she’s going to have an extra “room” to clean! The deck! When I went out there this afternoon, it was in a really disgusting state – spider webs between the door frames and the glass, grot and leaves and – yes, even feathers! on the floor (and we don’t even have our two pigeons yet!)(but I doubt that these were pigeon feathers – they were too small and fluffy!) Webs and other debris strung along the wire and wood balustrade… not to mention the lovely table and chairs we bought for the deck! So… I want it to be cleaned regularly with the rest of the house – if I’m going to be spending more time outside, anyway! And with those firm words, I think that’s about it from me again this evening! 🙂 There’ll be lots more news tomorrow night though – whether the vegetables and herbs have survived their first night in their new home, if the cleaning lady balked at the idea of cleaning an outside area or not, and whether my weight is going to make a liar out of me by sky-rocketing back up to dizzying heights! 🙂 Until then though, please continue to bee good, remember that a bend in the road is not the end of the road… unless you fail to make the turn, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather, and to drive carefully – but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂