Winter’s log, earthdate 201601.09

So, what do you think? 🙂 A New Year, a new theme, with a new header! This header is sort-of temporary – I tried to knock something up pretty quickly, but I’ll try to do better tomorrow… er, no – we’ll be WoW-ing tomorrow – better make that Monday! Ackshally, Monday’s out too, as we’re going to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens – oh well, some time next week then? 😉 Today we got stuck right back into the Library – which may not be the Library, after all! It’s a rather narrow room, and as I was looking around, trying to envision bookcases on every wall, it suddenly occurred to me that this would narrow the room even further, and it would become, in effect, like a very narrow walk-in wardrobe – walk in, swivel head around looking for a book, find book, then back out of the room, because there probably won’t be enough room to turn around! Alright, I am exaggerating just a teeny bit, but it won’t be far off that – there certainly wouldn’t be room to put a comfy chair and a small side table, if you wanted to go in there for a bit of peace and quiet in which to read your latest literary find! So as I was saying, I was looking around and thinking about how much space the bookcases were going to take up – and I had to mentally admit that Clarke had been right. He’d suggested knocking the wall down between the front (spare) bedroom and the Treadmill room, and making one big room out of them. That could work – there would then be room for all our books, and the treadmill, and even a chair or two! The room that we’ve been busily unpacking boxes in, the Library, could become the permanent, proper “spare room”, for overnight campers – a sofa-bed, a comfy chair, a chest of drawers – a couple of smaller bookcases – it would be ideal for that, actually… The thing is, Julian got a bit cross with Clarke and said he wouldn’t use him again because he took so long over my bathroom – whereas I’m glad they did do it slowly – it really is a work of art (even though he’s going to have to get Paul to come back and attach a strip of silicone under my shower door – we can’t keep on jamming rolled up towels against the door to stop water getting all over the floor for ever!) However, whether we use Clark or not, and whether we decide to do something as drastic as knocking down a wall (it’s not so much the knocking down of a wall, it’s all the hassle, having people in and out of your house all the time, it’s the mess, the dust, and the inconvenience involved in such a project!) we do have to come to some sort of decision about where all the books are going to go! One thing is as sure and certain as my name is Winter, though – and that is that whatever we decide to do about housing the books, it won’t be done before the books come home to roost in February! They’ll just have to languish in boxes (Winter rolls her eyes – more bloody boxes!) until something’s arranged for them. Anyway, we did finally get through all the boxes in the “Library”! I found quite a few of the “missing” Den items (things that had been in the Den in Doncaster, and which I hadn’t been able to find over here) but unfortunately not my nice little stag statue, made of some sort of clear “stuff” (perspex? resin? I dunno what he’s made of, I just know that it’s clear, and it’s not plastic, or glass!) I hope we find him soon – I rather miss him…  All that’s left in the “Library” now are some aluminium suitcases of CDs and old tapes, a large perspex stand to hold our rather enormous (hmm… gigantic? gargantuan? incredibly large? would probably be more accurate terms for it!) Special Edition Atlas that used to live in the hallway at Doncaster, and a few odd books and magazines – plus Flipper’s water bowl and litter boxes… (and a lot of grot and scruff on the floor!)

Playing WoW last night, in desperation, I fled back to Nagrand – the realm I’ve been playing on, Azuremyst, a US realm which at the moment is so heavily populated as to almost make the game unplayable! Wherever you go, whatever quests you have, you have to “stand in line” to do whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing – because other players have got there first and killed absolutely everything that moves (and I’m not kidding! I keep running past dead squirrels, dead deer, dead rabbits – innocent little level 1 critters that play no part in any gaming “needs” whatsoever!) picked all the herbs, mined all the ore – killed animals mostly used for skinning and not bothered to loot them, rendering them un-skinable for anyone else! All you can do is stand there twiddling your thumbs and wait until things start to re-spawn – which – depending on the area and the mobs involved – can take quite a long time! And Blizzard have this new-fangled “bonus” to drag the kids in – if you have a high level character who has “Heirloom” items, a newly rolled character can wear those items and use them to get a personal “chauffeur” to whizz them around from quest to quest – a “Clayton’s Mount”, if you like (a mount that carries you around as a passenger when you’re too young to be able to use a mount!) while the rest of us plebs have to jog-trot all over the place and from quest to quest! No wonder they get there first and wreck things for everyone else! Yeah, yeah – I know – “how dare they play the game when I want to play it! (loud foot stamp)” – yaknow, I wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn if they want to play or not – let ’em!  If they had to hoof it around like the rest of us – at least we’d have a fighting chance of getting to the quest area first! It really annoys me, and it’s not just one or two of them tearing around the country side – which is why I escaped to Nagrand (the realm that’s apparently based in Sydney) last night – which was only slightly better – but the game was unplayable on Azuremyst. I hope all those little Yankees go back to school soon! (grrr!)

Food stuffz: The roast beef we had last night was delicious! And we had roast potatoes, roast pumpkin, and green beans with toasted almonds, too! 🙂 Very, very nice! Today for lunch we had some of the cold roast beef – not on Ryvita crispbread – they really don’t lend themselves all that well to roast beef – Julian had some very nice sliced wholemeal bread from Baker’s Delight at the Vermont South shopping centre, and he made a sandwich with the roast beef and low-fat cheese (I don’t think there was even any butter in the sandwich, but I may be wrong!) and that was really yummy too! 🙂 Tonight I think we’re having chicken – I’ll let you know tomorrow!

Weigh-in this morning. Was a bit more “back-to-normal” than the last couple of days! I went back up two points – from 63.0kg to 63.2kg – and I’m back to walking on the treadmill. I hurt my foot a bit this morning, but I solved that problem by adding an extra band-aid for my lunchtime walk – two walks, of 1.5 kilometes each (actually 1.52 kilometers – about 26 minutes) so I’m still getting in my three kilometers, only in slightly easier “chunks” – I think that’s how I hurt my foot in the first place – I think that three days of a full three kilometers in one go wore the skin around my callous out! Anyway, all back to more-or-less normal now (I hope!) I wonder what my weight will decide to do tomorrow!

Yes, and tomorrow! No doubt Julian and I will be waltzing around Azeroth, killing things and trying to get to quests before the hoi polio in their little chauffeur-driven vehicles! I can’t remember where we’re up to, but it should be a good day in the Ghostlands (oh, that’s right! I think we’ve got Knucklerot and Luzran coming up! Two really nasty Elites who can just about kill you with a glare!) Anyway, that’s for tomorrow – but I think that’s about it from me for this evening! 🙂 Don’t forget to drop in again tomorrow night to find out how we went with Knucklerot and Luzran, and if we died or not – as well as whether we’ve come to any decisions regarding the Library, and whether my weight is still behaving itself – I have been eating a bit more than usual lately! Hmmm.. I’d better stop while I’m still ahead, I think! 😉 So… until tomorrow night, do try to bee good, remember that the only disability in life is a bad attitude, 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! 🙂