Well, we’ve been to see “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”, so what did I think of it? Hmm I’m not really sure, yet! Yes, it was a good movie – but was it a great movie; a “gee-whizz! I can’t wait to see it again!” movie? No… I don’t think so… not really. I think I was expecting better, for some reason, and one thing really bugged me! The soundtrack/music! For those of us old enough to have fallen madly in love with the first Star Wars movie, “A New Hope”, the music was so similar – and dare I say it – a lot of it seemed to have just been copied over – that that’s what you expected! You expected “A New Hope” regenerated, and of course, it wasn’t. The entire Han Solo idea just… didn’t work for me – not because Harrison Ford has aged so much (which he has!) but because people’s basic personalities don’t change – you get older, you get stiffer, and you get grumpier – but the basic “you” doesn’t change – and this older Han Solo was… what? too… timid? No, let me put that a better way – his confidence seemed lacking somehow. Seeing an older Luke, now! That was something! 🙂 Very unsettling, too! The new “youngies” – Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), and Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), were all very good – especially Finn, as the reluctant Storm Trooper-turned rebel. I would definitely go and see it again, but let’s just say I wouldn’t be breaking my neck to do so. Actually, I think I probably need to see it again – it’s said that you see what you’re expecting to see – and largely due to the soundtrack, I suppose I was more or less “expecting” a newer version of “A New Hope” (and this, by the way, is why I actually like “spoilers” – it prepares me for what I will be seeing, rather than allowing me to see what I’m expecting to see – if that makes any sense!) Next time, I’ll pay less attention to the music and the memories it evoked, and more attention to the actual movie! 🙂 Oh, at one part I grabbed hold of Julian, whispering excitedly and a bit loudly “didya see the guy at the table before? He was in “Person of Interest”! No, no – not him, that guy there *pointing at the screen* – oh, he’s gone now! *pout*” – it was Ken Leung, playing a bit part more-or-less walk-on role as Admiral Statura back in the Rebel stronghold. He played a recurring role in “Person of Interest” for a while, as a petty con-man/swindler with a real talent for hacking computers and getting himself into lots of trouble 🙂 I liked him – I reckoned that they should have made him a permanent part of the PoI team!

We went to the 1.15pm session and had lunch in the theatre – and I’m afraid I probably outdid even my Christmas Day gluttony! *grimace* I shared Julian’s large box of pop-corn, and for lunch I had mushroom risotto. And a piece of New York Cheese Cake, with cream and raspberry coulis. And a flat white, made with almost skinny milk. And three of Julian’s chips (he had the calamari, and as the chips came in a separate bowl, I felt it was safe enough for me to eat a couple… or three…) What? You don’t think that sounds terribly gluttonous? What if I told you that the mushroom risotto came in two bowls… and that I ate both of them? And that so as not to miss out on any of the delicious cheesecake or raspberry coulis (because it really was!) I scraped the plate with my finger to the point where the cinema staff probably thought that they’d given me a clean, empty plate by mistake, shrugged, and just put it away in the cupboard! Anyway, I’ll not be having much dinner tonight – and the two bowls of mushroom risotto were very small bowls – but I just thought “Bugger it! I’m here to have a good time!” – so I did! 😉 (have a good time!) Unfortunately, my stomach is now complaining that it doesn’t feel very good… (it’s probably just a lack of caffeine!)

Last night the Christmas Tree finally came down – well, it didn’t really “come down”, per se., but it was carefully lifted off the camphor-wood chest and gently lowered into a large, clean orange rubbish bag for storage in the front spare bedroom’s wardrobe until next Christmas. All the other bits and pieces of Christmas were also stowed away on the top shelf of the same wardrobe, so with the exception of a small unopened tub of lime roasted pistachios, and an opened tin of Belgian Chocolate Biscuits that someone gave us for Christmas (they’ll probably go stale before we finish them – we allow ourselves one per night as a “treat”, and it’s quite a large box!) the house has finally been completely de-Christmasfied!

This morning I played WoW (as usual) where I’m now starting to sort out setups for my Horde girls – that is, where I put what ability or spell, and in which Action Bars I put the macros to do simple things, like “wave”, and “cheer”, and “snarl” – because I like things to be neat, tidy, symmetrical, and all the same, so that if I play someone else tomorrow, I’m not going to be wildly looking around for the “heal pet” spell, or something equally as vital! Tomorrow I’ll probably go through and do all the Alliance girls – though they’re mostly already done. I must also log on to Rift – Julian says that there’s a reasonably large patch, so I’d better go and download it, and read the Patch Notes (a list of things that have been added or changed with the new patch)

I’m sorry, if the rest of this blog seems a little rushed or disjointed, I’ve just heard that David Bowie has died, and I’m a little dazed… we were the same age, and I always thought he was gorgeous and would always be around… and now he’s gone! When you think of the many times I’ve cheated death… and I’m still going – one finds oneself asking “Why?”

Food stuffz: well, I’ve told you what I had for lunch today, and I’ve told you what I’ll probably have for dinner tonight – a Ryvita crispbread with low-fat ricotta or philly light, with a bit of sliced tomato on top… my jellies have been made, so I’ll probably have one of those (one can always find room for a bit of jelly! 😉 ) and of course, my three prunes. If you’re going to see a movie at Gold Class, and intend “eating in” there, I can confidently recommend the mushroom risotto – mind you, it’s not risotto by any long stretch of the imagination – it’s more like steamed rice with a lot of shiitake mushrooms mixed in with it (though I couldn’t tell you how the mushrooms were cooked) and, with hardly enough of it to notice that it was even there, a few skinny shards of shaved parmesan had been scattered on top. But it’s easy to eat in a darkened theatre with just a fork, and it isn’t sloppy or messy! The so-called “New York Cheese-cake” was to die for – but I’d give their coffee a miss, if I were you – it wasn’t really the best, and – warning! Don’t plan on having anything for dinner afterwards, if you go to an afternoon movie session – you won’t want any! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Fairly good, all things considered – I went up one point – from 63.0kg to 63.1kg – which is really rather negligible – but it’ll probably be a horse of a completely different colour tomorrow morning! *gloom* All because I decided to let my hair down today (what little I have left of it!) and have fun! 😉 Ah well, if I’m going to be alive, I might as well enjoy it, n’est ce pas?! Well, we’ll see what tomorrow brings… I think the main calorie villain will have been that scrumptious New York Cheese-cake!

I’m not too sure what’s happening tomorrow – well, I didn’t when I wrote that, before our somewhat sketchy dinner of Ryvita crispbreads, but I do now! My favourite eldest daughter will be over tomorrow – it’s her Birthday, so it will be extra good to see her! Crikey – it doesn’t seem like “XX” years since she was born! (those are not Roman numerals back there, so don’t go thinking she’s only “XX” years old, OK?! 😉 ) In some ways it only seems like a couple of months ago to me, but I guess that’s mothers for you – our children will always be “our babies” 🙂 Although he’s taking her out to dinner tomorrow night, her husband can’t get the day off, so she’ll just have to make do with us for the day – and while we’re slopping around on the couch watching the television, Julian will be busy making hay while the sun’s not too hot, and shifting in some boxes for us to unpack on Wednesday, when we’ll be hunkered down in here, cowering away from the heat with the air conditioning going full blast! And that, gentle readers, is about it from me for this evening! Do call back again tomorrow night, and find out what my favourite eldest daughter and I watched on television, our differing points of view on “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”,  and to find out what horrors awaited me on the scales in the morning! But until then, please remember to bee good, don’t forget that what worries you masters you, and remember to drive carefully, to keep cool – or warm – depending on our mercurial weather patterns, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, we had a very novel and interesting day in Azeroth, and considering where we were, and how long it’s been since I played a high level Beast Master Hunter character, it was quite amazing that we only died once! But I digress! We slept in far longer than we’d intended to – we didn’t wake up until about nine o’clock, which is most unusual for us! Leaping energetically out of bed (that’s a joke, Joyce!) we immediately sprang into action – I weighed myself, and went off to have my somewhat later than usual brisk 1.5 kilometer walk on the treadmill, while Julian had his shower. Then we had our breakfast, and opened our Magickal Portal into Azeroth – more commonly known as “logging into World of Warcraft”. We didn’t play with our young characters today – I was still waiting to see one of these new-fangled “Garrisons” that Blizzard have dreamt up – supposedly an equivalent to Rift’s Dimensions that I was, and am, so keen on. The thing is, not just anyone can get a Garrison – you have to be level 90, and to have completed a certain series of quests. Julian and I both had level 90 characters on the realm Quel’Dorei, which had always been our main realm all those years ago. Wynterthyme, who’s been pretty much my main character ever since I started playing WoW, is a level 90 Night Elf Beast Master Hunter whose main Pet (amongst a lot of others!) is – you guessed it – a Ghost Saber-tooth cat called “Boojums” – or just “Boo”, for short. Julian’s level 90 character was his secondary main character, called Mouselet – a huge Draenei Shaman. We often teamed up – in fact I teamed Wynterthyme up with Mouselet or Bobranda, Julian’s very first character,  more often than I soloed her! So there we were – kitting ourselves up for the day in Stormwind, the Human’s capital city in the state? province? zone? whatever! Elwynn Forest. We’d done all the pre-requisite quests, quite literally years ago, and I was feeling distinctly nervous as I eyed off all the spells, shot rotations, and abilities available to me that I hadn’t used, or even thought of, for more than four years! Would I even remember how to play Wynterthyme?! Well, long story short an’ all that, off we went, through all sorts of confusing, busy, and hectic quests – killing bands of Black Orcs and other evil dudes, finally winning through to the “ship” that would take us through to Draenor, which unfortunately I can’t tell you much about as I haven’t read up on my story arc and/or Lore, yet! (but I will! And oh boy! – you’re all going to be in for a real treat then, coz I’ll be able to tell you all about it! 😉 ) As I said at the beginning of the blog, we did die once, getting to Draenor – we were on land mounts, but we really should have been on one of our flying mounts, because we were mobbed and totally overwhelmed by a band of Black Orcs – but we got better, and off we went again! Arriving in sunny downtown Draenor, we found that it wasn’t “sunny”, in fact it was quite dark and gloomy – very pretty, but dark and gloomy! For anyone reading this who does, or has played World of Warcraft, and who hasn’t been to Draenor – but has been to Zangarmarsh and Nagrand, I can tell you that it’s a bit like a cross between sunny and cheerful Nagrand, with its green meadows and a pleasant ambience, and Zangarmarsh, with its somewhat darker aspect and lots and lots of shallow pools of water, and strange plants and mushrooms! Anyway, after a few more quests and a lot of running from pillar to post, we were finally led to an area which was to become the Garrison, which all had to be built from the ground up, and provisioned – so… more questing, to obtain a permanent source of supplies, then even more questing, to obtain suitable “staff” (Minions?) to be sent off to perform “assignments” for you – sort-of similar to the Minions in Rift, but there’s hell of a lot more work involved for you in organising these “assignments”! But it was great fun! Your Garrison has its own Flight Point, so that you (and other people) can fly back to it – and in case you’re not able to catch a flight back, you even have a Garrison Hearthstone, that magickally transports you back to your Garrison! There are vendors there, and people who can repair stuff, and all sorts of other things that aren’t even remotely available in Rift’s Dimensions! So, we had a great day (well, I did, anyway! 🙂 ) and I’m really looking forward to learning more about Garrisons, and the story arc and Lore behind this new land of Draenor – but please! Don’t let anyone tell you that Garrisons are sort-of like Dimensions in Rift, because I can assure you – they’re nothing at all like them! One thing I should perhaps mention though – being grouped with Julian (Mouselet) of course we were together, and we could each see eachother, and eachother’s little blue “map dot”, indicating on the map where the other one was. But when we got our Garrison, all that disappeared, and we were whisked off into separate, individual “instances” – both occupying the same space and the same time, but totally invisible to eachother! It was quite strange! Once we left the designated “Garrison area”, we could see eachother again, but as soon as we crossed that invisible line at the border of the Garrison – whoosh! We became invisible to eachother again!

Anyway, that was Our Day In Azeroth! 🙂 The “Grumpy Old Farts” Guild Bank on Quel’Dorei is doing very well indeed – so much so that I’m contemplating “migrating” some of it over to both the Alliance and the Horde Guilds on Azuremyst – but that’s still in the pipeline! 🙂

Food Stuffz: last night we had pan-fried chicken for dinner, with the usual chips and half a tomato, but the beans were cooked somewhat differently – we’d had beans with almonds the other night, but Julian wasn’t satisfied with them – the recipe (or methodology) is to cook the beans (steamed or boiled) drain them, and put them in a frying pan with a little bit of butter and some lemon juice. Stir them around a bit, add some toasted slivered almonds, mix, and serve. Julian thought that the mixing them around with the toasted slivered almonds didn’t really work all that well (the almonds got a little bit over-toasted, I think) so he tried them again last night with un-toasted slivered almonds, and no butter – and they seemed to work quite well. It’s actually very similar to a dish we often had when I was a little girl – beans would be cooked (typically boiled to death, in those days!) and eaten, but any left-over beans (for some strange reason there were always “left-over vegetables” – from beans, to peas, to cauliflower or pumpkin, or carrots – you name it – whatever vegetables got cooked, there’d always be enough left-overs to make another dish!) Anyway, the leftover green beans were added to a frying pan with butter and garlic, seasoned, and sizzled up for a few minutes (these days it’s called “stir-frying”, but we didn’t know that back then! 😉 ) then added to the meal as a vegetable accompaniment. So dinner last night was excellent – unfortunately Julian forgot to make my diet jellies yesterday so I had to have one of his yoghurt desserts – a low-fat apple and rhubarb one, which was very nice! There was enough of the pan-fried chicken left over to be sliced up and added to another sandwich made with the very nice wholemeal bread that we had in our lunches yesterday with the cold roast beef. Today it was the sliced left-over chicken and tomato, and I noted that there was a tiny scraping of butter on the bread too – goodness knows what the scales are going to say to me tomorrow morning! (probably something horribly rude, like “you’ve gone back up to 70 kilograms”!) Oh, and tonight we had the very last of the very more-ish Persian Spiced Lamb Pilaf for dinner – I was quite saddened to eat the last of it, though we’ll be having it again soon-ish, I hope – and I had to have another one of Julian’s apple and rhubarb yoghurt desserts again tonight too, as again, the diet jellies had been “overlooked”! 😉 But still, despite the bread, and the butter, and the low-fat yoghurt, and the rice and all that…

Weigh-in this morning. Was, all things considered, quite acceptable! I didn’t, as I expected I would, go up again – I ruddy well went down the two points that I’d gone up yesterday – from 63.2 kilograms to 63.0 kilograms! But who knows what it’ll be up to (or down to – as there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme nor reason to the fluctuations and vagaries of my weight!) tomorrow! 🙂

I’m really looking forward to tomorrow – we’re off to see “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” at Gold Class – I’ll let you all know tomorrow what we thought of it! 🙂 You’ll also be pleased to know that we haven’t managed to kill off any of the veggies we planted (er… that Julian planted – I just watched from the decking!) and from the back window they certainly look sturdy and healthy, so that has to be a good sign! We also managed to get a couple of bug zappers so once those are hung up and plugged in, I should feel safe enough to venture outside a little more often – though I’ve noticed recently that the bugs must be getting impatient to meet me or something, because they’re starting to make themselves at home – in my bathroom! This, of course, is simply not to be tolerated! It’s my bathroom (it’s mine, all mine, I tell you! and no, I won’t share!) and I won’t have peeping bugs loitering with intent! I found one in there this afternoon, so I tied a teeny-weeny note to one of its legs telling all its friends and relations to keep out of my bathroom, “or else!”, before I flushed it down the toilet (I didn’t really, but I thought it sounded good! 😉 ) And now, I’m afraid that’s about it from me for this evening! Do call in again tomorrow night, to find out what my weight decided to do, and what we thought of the new Star Wars movie, and all the other little bits and pieces of trivia that made up our day… but until then, please endeavour to bee good, remember to live out loud, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on the weather… but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

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! 🙂

Oh dear, today has been a right old muddle, which all started yesterday when I found out that the Podiatrist was coming at 2.00pm, not 3.30 or 4.00pm, and the chances were very good that I wouldn’t be home from my hairdressing appointment at a quarter to one! Figuring that an appointment at the hairdresser’s was far more vital than a visit from the Podiatrist, I did try to ring said Podiatrist to re-schedule, but luckily for me, all I got was their answering machine, and I left them a message… Why it turned out to be lucky for me was because when I got up this morning my left foot was so [censored] painful that I could barely walk on it, at which point I decided that maybe a visit from the Podiatrist was more vital to my well-being than having my hair done – so at 9 o’clock I rang the hairdresser and re-scheduled for next Friday, at 12.30pm. Then I sat and fidgeted until I heard from the Podiatrist’s secretary, and I explained that yesterday I wasn’t sure I’d be home at 2.00pm, but now it turned out that I would be home after all, and yes, I’d be very glad to see the lovely Joanne at 2.00pm! So, finally that was all sorted out. However, I still had to have my Warfarin blood test done! It was supposed to have been done on Wednesday, so it really couldn’t be put off any longer! The thing with these Warfarin tests is that they have to be done at a Dorevitch “collection” centre, and in Doncaster, before we moved, it was just a simple matter of trotting across the road, as there was a “collection” centre in the Tower – and it was nearly always deserted! I think we’ve only had to “wait our turn” there once, in all the years we went there (and we still do go there, if my Warfarin test is due on a day that I’m going to the hairdresser!) Anyway, since we’ve moved, we’ve sampled quite a few of the collection centres in the area, and unfortunately, so far they’re all either so busy that you’d have time to write “War and Peace” while you were waiting, or the nurse (? I presume they’re nurses? I certainly hope they are, anyway!) – how can I put this politely? Er… let’s just say that they don’t speak very much English… and the nurse today (?) seemed to think that the number “seven” was the next number after “two” (so… whatever happened to three, four, five, and six, I wonder!) which didn’t exactly fill us with confidence in her medical skills!

But I’m getting a trifle ahead of myself – because my foot was so damned sore when I got up this morning, I didn’t have my usual 1.5 kilometer walk on the treadmill. I always seem to develop a fairly thick callous on that particular joint (the so-called “bunion joint” on my left foot) and quite often I somehow manage to split the skin underneath the callous, which bleeds. This makes a bruise underneath the callous, and it all gets extremely painful! Usually a band-aid is enough to cushion it, but not this morning! All of this kerfuffle upset our plans for the day to the point where just about everything ground shudderingly to a halt. We muddled through breakfast, we mooched around Azeroth for a bit, Julian went off to have his shower, and… we got a rather later start than we’d planned! Because I couldn’t walk very far, or for very long, Julian took me up for my blood test, then dropped me off at home, while he went off to do the shopping. Amongst this shopping were several prescriptions, so before we left the house I had admonished him not to forget the scripts. Next, I see him walking down the hall carrying a zipped-up orange insulated carry-bag. I presumed that he’d put the scripts in the bag, so as not to lose them. I had my blood test, and he drove me home again. I took of my hurty shoes, and proceeded down to the kitchen to make myself a much-needed cup of coffee. And what was the first thing I laid eyes on as I walked into the kitchen? The bundle of scripts, all neatly packed away in a zip-lock bag so that they wouldn’t get separated! I called Julian on his mobile: “Sweetheart,” I said “You’ve left something behind!” “What!”, said Julian, somewhat testily “The bloody scripts!” I snapped back, equally as testily. He came back for them, and off he went again. It was already late, and I was a-feared that he wouldn’t be back before the Podiatrist arrived at 2.00pm, but he got here with about ten minutes to spare – neither of us had had any lunch, I might add, and there wasn’t time to have any before Joanne arrived – so we had a very late lunch! And guess what we’re having for dinner tonight?! Roast Beef! (one can only laugh! We seemed to bounce from one misadventure to the next! 🙂 )

So you can see why I said at the beginning of this blog that today had been a right old muddle! 🙂

I asked Joanne about my foot – she said it was quite bruised under the callous, but should be alright to walk on – she’s carved off most of the callous with a scalpel, which means that the worst of the pressure is now off the bruise – so I will get back on the treadmill tomorrow, but I’ll make sure that I’ve cushioned it with a few of those large “fabric” band-aids.

Food stuffz: last night we had a reprise of the Persian Spiced Lamb Pilaf, which was, as I suspected it would be, even better than it had been the night before since all the spices had had a chance to blend and permeate everything properly. There’s even another meal of it left! (it’s an extremely economical meal!) which we’ve frozen for “ron” (later on) So that’s one meal with very delicious mashed potatoes, and two meals with rice, so far this week, and we’re having roast beef for dinner tonight, probably with roast potatoes and possibly roast pumpkin, with some sort of green vegetable – and I wouldn’t be overly surprised if there was half a tomato on the plate too! We had a very late lunch – I had two Ryvita crispbreads with Philly light, sliced ham-off-the-bone, low-fat cheddar cheese, and sliced tomato… and still I go on to…

…Weigh-in this morning. Losing weight! After all those carbohydrates this week, I get on the scales this morning to find… I’ve gone down another five points! From 63.5kg to 63.0kg! I am aghast! Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I could sink so low! Er… I meant never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I could lose so much weight! First, I modestly thought “I’ll try to get down to 70 kilograms” Then I got more ambitious and thought “I wonder if I can get down to 65 kilograms?! Wouldn’t that be something!” So I did – I got down to 65 kilograms, where I ended my Optifast diet… and the weight just seemed to keep on shedding! I got down into the 64 kilogram zone, and shot right back up again after Christmas, and I thought my little day-dream was well and truly over. But all that excess weight just came off again, and now I’m down to 63.0 kilograms? It just doesn’t seem real! Maybe I am dreaming, and I’ll wake up tomorrow, still slopping around at 134.7 kilograms, and this will have been just a lovely dream…but I sure as hell hope not! 🙂

I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – hopefully we’ll be able to get back to unpacking the boxes in the Library, because I’d really like to get that room cleared out and ready for whatever sort of bookcases we decide to put in there. We have so very many books! Even if we quite literally (or do I actually mean figuratively?) line the entire room with bookcases – above the two windows, under the two windows – floor to ceiling bookcases on all the walls – I still doubt that we’d have room for all of our books – in fact, I know we won’t! I’m thinking that we have three “spare” bedrooms – one has been designated the “Commodore 64 Room”, but there’s no reason why it can’t have as much bookcase coverage as possible! Then there’s my treadmill room – once again, we could completely line it with bookcases! And the third (or perhaps it should be considered “the first”, as it’s up at the front of the house!) bedroom – it will be the actual “spare room”, with a proper bed in it, in case anyone ever has to stay the night. I’d like to see that room pretty much lined with bookcases too! (anyone would think we liked books, or something! 😉 ) Then we just might have enough room for all of our books! However, first – and most importantly – we have to get all of the boxes unpacked – because we have absolutely no idea of how much room we’re going to need for everything until that’s done – and I’m not just talking about books here!

My Warfarin blood test results have just come in! Hallelujah, and all that jazz! My INR has gone up to 3.0! (it’s supposed to be high, remember, and that’s about as high as I’d want it to go!) I stay on the same dosage, and my next test is on January 15th.

So anyway, the above ramble about bookcases is our current project, which means unpacking boxes – hopefully tomorrow, though we’ll be off on our usual Azeroth or Telara romp on Sunday! And really, that’s about it from me again this evening! Stay tuned for more fun and adventures chez nous! Have I really just been dreaming? Will I wake up tomorrow to find myself still at 134.7 kg? (ghod! I hope not!) Did we unpack boxes? How was the roast beef? All this and more, will be revealed to you all tomorrow night! Until then, however, please try to bee good, don’t forget that discipline is your friend, not your enemy, and always remember to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on the weather… but above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Goodness, what a busy day! 🙂 This morning I decided to re-activate my second World of Warcraft account – I wanted to see who was still there, and what level they were, so I could figure out what to do with them all… Well, it turns out that there aren’t as many of them as I thought there would have been – which is good, because it means all the more new characters that I can create! 😉 There are a few “Oldies but Goodies” there, which at this stage I’ll leave strictly alone, and there were a few “newbies” (below level 10) one of whom I… “permanently de-activated” – and then promptly created another character in her place! The only thing wrong with running two accounts is if you’re on account #2, but you need to use account #1 for something (like getting the Guild Mistress (on account #1) to bump up the Guild position of a character on account #2) it means that you have to exit the game, re-log in on account #1, and do whatever it is that you have to do. Then you have to exit the game (again!) and re-log back in to your second account… Very messy and time-consuming – but even harebrained me can’t really think of any other way of doing it… Anyway, we shall see what transpires…

This morning I did the first half of my daily 3 tread-kilometers – I was going to do my walks as two lots of 30 minutes – supposedly making a total of 3 kilometers – but I finished 1.53km in only 27.something minutes, so I decided to call that “good enough!” I finished off the second half of my walking regimen before lunch… I was going to do it after lunch, but as usual, life has this weird habit of getting in the way of all the things that you’d “planned” to do! Flipper threw up. She’d been asleep in her “cave”, but woke up, poked her head out of the cave, and looking quite distressed, began to make that most dreaded of sounds! That awful wailing, groaning, distressed “yodel”that a cat makes, just before they throw up… and of course, that was exactly what she then did. I’d already alerted Julian, who rushed in with something that she could be sick on instead of the couch or the carpet – then when she seemed to be feeling a bit better, we thought that we could clean up, and everything would go back to normal. Except Flipper still felt quite ill, and ran and hid under my desk – she was quite upset too, poor old girl, and in her distress decided to “relieve herself” under my desk – missing live cables and power points by mere millimeters! (just as well too, as the scent of roast cat and singed fur would definitely not have enhanced the ambience of the room! 😦 )

By this time we were running very, very late for lunch – we’d spent the morning unpacking boxes in the Library (where we managed to empty out, sort, and dispose of, two ceiling-high stacks of boxes!) We stopped for lunch after that, but by the time Julian had dealt with the stacks of folded paper, the sliced-up cardboard from the more “unsalvageable” of the boxes, and flattened out all the boxes that we could sell back to the storage company, it was after two o’clock. He was just about to say “Right, now I can get the lunch!”, when Flipper threw that little wobbly! That was about when I decided to do my 30 minute second walk before lunch, just in case “lunch” turned into “dinner”! (again, it was more like 26.something minutes, but it’s the length of the walk that matters, isn’t it, not the duration?)

After lunch I was determined that I was going to get some WoW-ing in today, so then I spent the next hour and a half, jumping in and out of accounts like a jack-in-a-box! I think I eventually got everything sorted out and ready to go with the two accounts, but it took a lot of switching backwards and forwards, from this account, to the other account, and then back again! Oh well, the proof of the pudding, and all that! 🙂 Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll get much of a chance to do anything tomorrow – but I’ll tell you all about that later! 😉

Food stuffs: as I said last night, the Persian Spiced Lamb Pilaf was delicious – so much so that we’re reprising it tonight! I’m curious to see if it does indeed taste better the next day, when all the different herbs and spices have had a chance to work their way right through the dish! For lunch today I had another two Ryvita crispbreads with low-fat cottage cheese, sliced sandwich ham, and sliced tomatoes on top. Very messy (tomato always falls off open-type sandwiches!) but also very nice 🙂 I’m not sure how tomorrow will pan out, food or event-wise, because a rather a large-sized fly has been found in the Ointment Jar labeled “Tomorrow”! It’s Friday, so I have my weekly hairdressing appointment booked, for 12.45pm (or a quarter to one in the afternoon, if you prefer!) I also have a Podiatrist visit happening tomorrow too, which I didn’t think would be a problem – however that Podiatrist’s visit has turned into a rather large fly, and it’s landed bang-smack in the Ointment Jar of our postprandial activities! The Podiatrist usually comes here anywhere between three o’clock and four thirty in the afternoon. Tomorrow however, she’s coming at 2 o’clock! As well as the hairdressing appointment, I have a Warfarin blood test to have done, and I need to do a bit of shopping – I doubt we’ll be back in time for this “early” visit! If she’d been arriving at her usual time, it would have been do-able, but… Anyway, I didn’t realise that she was going to be so early – it was only a calendar pop-up reminder that alerted me to this fact, so thank you, eM Client! 🙂 I did try to ring them – it was just past a quarter-past four, but apparently they close early on Thursdays, because I just got an answering machine I left my name and number, but if I haven’t heard anything by tomorrow morning, I’ll try ringing them again… I don’t want to cancel the hairdresser (my hair’s a mess!) but I reckon that my feet could possibly go another week or so before my toenails get long enough to start decapitating mice, if I walk too close to them! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Was quite extraordinary! I was thinking that I’d been at the same weight – 64.1kg – for two days in a row – if I was running true to form, I’d probably go up two or three points today, so that’s what I was expecting. They say that you see what you’re expecting to see, and I hopped on the scales and saw a “sixty” number, followed by a “.5”, so immediately jumped to the conclusion that I had, indeed, gone up several points. “Oh well,” I thought “there I go – back up agai…. hang on! That’s not 64.something! That’s…. that’s… 63.5kg!” I tell you, my eyes nearly fell out of my head! I weighed myself again though, just to be sure, and… yep! 63.5kg! I’d gone down six points! From 64.1kg to 63.5kg! Despite the mashed potato the night before last, and the rice last night (and of course, I’ll be having rice again tonight!) This is getting a bit like an exciting TV show – I can’t wait to see what happens in the next “episode”! 😀 Talk about “clif-hanger endings”! 😉 What will I be tomorrow? (place yer’re bets, ladies and gentlepersons, place yer’re bets! All done? Rien ne va plus! 😉 )

So you now know what’s happening – or not happening, as the case may be – tomorrow, and you know what we’ve been up to today! The veggie garden is miraculously still looking nice and healthy, and the herbs seem to have decided that the back deck feels like home, and not some horrible concentration camp – now all I have to do is get some indoor plants that Flipper isn’t going to decide to eat (as she has with every other plant that we’ve brought into the house, including real-live coriander (also known as cilantro – shudder – I can’t stand the stuff!) and plastic palms!) I think that an African Violet would look nice, either on my desk here, or in my bathroom… hmm… well, it’s worth thinking about! 😉 And so once again, gentle readers, that’s about it from me for this evening! Please feel free to drop in again tomorrow evening, to see how our day fared – did I manage to fit the hairdresser and the Podiatrist in? Or which one did I end up cancelling? Did my weight stay down, or bounce right back up again? (I bet it was the mashed potato, if it did go back up!) Well, you can find out all the answers to these weighty questions this time tomorrow night, right here! 🙂 Until tomorrow evening then, do please try to bee good, remember that a bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses, and don’t forget to drive carefully, to keep cool – or warm – depending on your preferences, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Oh gosh! Another very late start! My favourite eldest daughter was over today, and I was planning on starting to write this after she’d left – but my favourite youngest daughter rang up just before Lee and Julian took off, and seeing I don’t get many chances to talk to Kate, I sat and chatted to her instead. By the time we finished talking, dinner was almost ready – so – tonight I decided to leave the writing bits until after dinner (and television!) and now, here I am – finally! I’m afraid I didn’t do much of anything this morning – I sat here twiddling my thumbs, waiting for Julian and my favourite eldest daughter to arrive – he’d taken her off for an appointment, and I guess the specialist she was going to see must have over-booked or something, because I was on the verge of calling in a search-party, as it was nearly lunch time when they rang to say they were on their way! They finally arrived, and we spoke a lot about WoW, and the fact that Blizzard had created so many realms (servers) that most of them were severely underpopulated – in fact, I’d never even heard of most of them! Anyway, they had all these practically deserted realms – so they decided to double – and in some cases, triple or even quadruple – them up with some of the more popular (and therefore more densely populated!) realms. I was curious to see which realms had been paired up – with a view of getting a free transfer across if I thought it would be worth it. The thing with those less populous realms is that of supply and demand – the less people (characters) on the realm, the less harvesting and manufacturing will be done, with less materials and crafted goods available on the Auction House, the higher the prices, which leads to fewer goods being sold. This creates a vicious circle which ultimately brings the economy of the realm tumbling. As more and more people lose “money” on a realm, they either get bored and drop out of the game, transfer their characters to a more viable and wealthy realm, or simply desert their characters on the poorer realm, and create new ones on one of the more populated and more wealthy realms. Having satisfied myself that none of the other “merged” realms sounded any better than the ones we’re currently on, I was about to log out of the World of Warcraft website when I remembered about “The Armory“! I’d been meaning to go and look it up for ages, but kept on forgetting – so with my daughter’s help I went and reacquainted myself with this very handy utility! The Armory is a fascinating place – and even though it’s been more than four years since I played World of Warcraft, all of my old characters are still listed and searchable! Amazing! I believe there are aps for it where you can access the entire Armory from a phone or tablet, too! I’ll investigate further tomorrow! 🙂

Anyway, we then retired to the lounge-room where we had lunch and watched episodes of “Supergirl”, and “The Librarians” – both great shows! On Monday, Julian and I are going to see “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”, which we’re really looking forward to! We’ll be seeing it at the Glen Waverley Gold Class cinema, where this time I’ll actually be able to eat and drink something (the last time we went to Gold Class I was on my diet and I had to sit there and eat an Optifast bar for lunch!) My favourite eldest daughter and her husband liked it so much that they’ve already seen it twice, and she’s currently reading the novelisation of it! I didn’t even know that there was a novelisation of the movie! I hastily logged onto Amazon and bought the kindle version, which I will read after I’ve seen the movie, and once I’ve finished the book I’m currently reading, Imhotep, by Jerry Dubs (not a bad book – there are another three of them in the series – this is the first – and I’ll  read the rest of them, after I’ve read the “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” book! 😉 ) Where was I? Oh yeah – going to see Star Wars next Monday, and me not knowing that someone had written a novelisation of it. I used to read all the Star Wars books that I could, back in the day – it’s a shame to find that none of them are “canon” any more (or so I’m told, by a reliable source! 😉 )

After Lee had left, as I said earlier, I had a nice chat with my favourite youngest daughter 🙂 She got sunburnt last week, which surprised her – she said it was about 10.30 am and she’d only been sitting out in the sun for about fifteen minutes, but apparently she got burnt badly enough to blister and is now happily peeling away! Terry’s mother, who’s so ill, has been sent home from hospital as there’s nothing more that they can do for her. She can’t go back to the nursing home? Hospice? Whatever! The place where she was before she went into hospital, because she’s not well enough and they’re simply not equipped to look after her. She’s moved in with Terry’s brother and his partner for the duration, which is closer to Kate and Terry, and where she’ll get the attention that she needs.

Food stuffz: tonight we had that Persian Lamb Pilaf that I was telling you all about – the one with half a ton of cinnamon in it! Well, it was delicious! You could sense, rather than taste, the cinnamon in it, but it wasn’t overpowering or too much spice – it was very tasty, served with a generous dollop of plain Greek yoghurt, and a little squeeze of lemon juice over the top! I’m very glad to say that there’s at least another two meals of it left (it’s a big recipe!) and I have the feeling that like a lot of rice dishes and stews, it’ll be even nicer tomorrow, either hot or cold, when all the flavours have had a chance to work their way through it properly! For lunch I had another two Ryvita crispbreads with the last of the quinoa tabouli salad and some sandwich ham and tomato slices – no low-fat cottage cheese or ricotta this time.

Weigh-in this morning. I was quietly pleased (amazed, astonished, and nonplussed, but pleased, nonetheless!) as I went from 64.1kg to 64.1kg – that is, I stayed the same! I’m still debating about the walking issue though – I must have misread the time it took me to walk the 3 kilometers that first time, because it took me 53 minutes this morning too, not 43 – oh well, once the logic was pointed out to me: I walk at 3.4 kilometers an hour, so obviously it’s going to take me an hour – or 60 minutes – to walk 3.4 kilometers! So 53 – not 43 – minutes is just under an hour, and 3 kilometers is just under 3.4 kilometers – QED! (maths was never – and still isn’t – my strong point!) However, I still don’t want to break up my day, and do my three kilometers in two sessions – although half an hour isn’t all that long, really… Just enough to stuff up my day 😦 On the other hand, I don’t really want to be mindlessly churning away on the treadmill for almost an hour every morning! A whole hour is a lot to walk in one go, and I’m starting to get blisters on my feet again! (you can all see where this is going, can’t you! I’m busily talking myself into doing two half hour sessions instead of doing a full one hour! Gimme time, I’ll get there – eventually! 😉 ) I wonder if the rice tonight (i.e. carbohydrate!) will make any difference tomorrow or the next day… Oh, and I learnt an important lesson today! Never take an anti-fluid tablet with a hot drink! The hot drink instantly dissolves the tablet in your mouth before you can swallow it, and they taste utterly horrible! 😦

And so to tomorrow! I believe we’ll be un-boxing tomorrow – while I’m itching to get through all the boxes, at the same time I’m feeling a teeny bit resentful that I won’t get any WoW-ing in – the logical part of me is calmly saying “there’ll be plenty of time for that when the boxes are emptied!”, and the selfish, mean and petty part of me is whining “Yeah, but Lee was over today and I didn’t get a chance to do anything!” *sigh* Honestly, what do you do with such a whinging little brat! And once again, that’s about it from me for this evening 🙂 Drop in again tomorrow night though (I promise not to be so late!) and find out if the carbohydrate intake rice had any effect on my weight, how many boxes we managed to unpack, and whether or not I did my walkies in one, or two sessions! 😉 But until then, do try to bee good, remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on the weather… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Another fairly quiet day – and I’m still debating which way to go with my treadmilling! This morning a wrong number on Julian’s mobile woke us up a quarter of an hour before the alarm was due to go off, so we got up anyway, as what’s the point of trying to go back to sleep when you have to get up in another (by then!) ten minutes! The night before, after much discussion, we (jointly) agreed that 3 kilometers should be the goal per day, and that if I could do it in one foul swoop, then I wouldn’t have to split my day in half by doing another walk either before or after lunch. That decision was arrived at after I’d somehow managed to walk three kilometers in 45 minutes! This morning, I did do the three kilometers – Julian went off for his walk outside, and I went off to do mine on the treadmill – both of us reckoning on about a 45 minute walk. Julian returned, presumably after 45 minutes – but I was still going! I had about another three-quarters of a kilometer still to go… By the time I finished, it had taken me 55 minutes, not 45! I guess I must have misread the timer display yesterday or something, because I didn’t do anything differently today, like walking any faster, or any slower, and I hit the “slow down” button as soon as the “distance traveled” display cranked over to “3 kilometers”. Although it’s only ten minutes longer, it’s just a bit too long, when you consider that when I finish walking I have to go and brush my teeth, wash my glasses, and get dressed (yes folks, Winter treadmills in her underwear!) adding about another 15 minutes to the amount of time before we can have breakfast and start our day. So even if we get up at 7.00 am rather than 7.30 am (which we don’t want to do, being the lazy sods that we are!) it still means that we don’t get started in the morning until after 8.30 – because we don’t just wake up, jump out of bed, and start walking! So if walking three kilometers takes too long, that means I’m going to have to split it up – which I do not want to do! Having done my walking this morning, you have no idea how nice it was, not to have to eat my lunch with one eye on the time, because I had to hurry of and do my second “walkies”! Unless I misread the timer a second time, walking for thirty minutes gives me 1.70 kilometers (or was it 1.07 kilometers? I can’t remember now! I think it was 1.70 kilometers…) so I suppose I could do two thirty minute walks – but as I said, I don’t want to do that! And besides, if I did misread the distance, and it was only 1.07 kilometers, then two thirty minute walks isn’t going to be enough, because that will only produce 2.14 kilometers. Why do I get the eerie feeling that I’m walking, and talking, in circles here! So, I’m back at square one! If anyone out there in Reader-Land has any polite suggestions, I’m all ears! (er… I suppose I really should have written “I’m all eyes”! 😉 )

So, after my marathon walk this morning, and because my favourite eldest daughter will be over here tomorrow, and not today, I settled in for a bit of serious WoWing! I did end up re-rolling Medüsa – and changing her name as well – because “Medüsa” didn’t really seem an appropriate name for a Human. Yes, a Human – I tried out the Dwarf Hunter, and it was just “wrong”, Gnomes, as I said last night, can’t be Hunters, I definitely didn’t want another Night Elf Hunter, and I won’t play a Worgen or a Pandaren – so Human it had to be – and her name is Tethys. So after I’d re-rolled “Medüsa” into “Tethys”, I went and took Akåsha out for a spin. I don’t mind the Human starting area (they’re all far too easy, anyway!) It wasn’t long before I got her to level 11 (in the “good old days”, before all the quests were made ridiculously easy, I thought I was pretty damn good if I could get to level 10 and Tame myself a Pet in a day!) Now, of course, Hunters start out with a Pet, and everyone automatically gets the three most important Flight Points of their starting area! 😀 I can just hear myself! (*cough* in my very best Glaswegian accent) “When I was a gel, we had to get all our own Flight Points! OH yes! And we had to make the run from Ironforge to Menethal Harbour being chased – and killed! – by the Black Orcs, for nearly the whole way!” Ah, nostalgia! 🙂 But honestly, it was a lot more fun when you had to really work to survive!

So, as I was saying, I got to level 11 very quickly, and had a quest to go to Loch Modan – a fair way north of Ironforge, the Dwarven capital – to deliver a package. Being a Human, my “default” Pet was a wolf, and I couldn’t wait to get to level 10 to get rid of it! He, she, or it, was forever sitting down to scratch – it even made me feel itchy, just watching it! So there I was, level 11 and now able to Tame a Pet of my own choosing, in Loch Modan. I remembered that years ago I’d go up into the hills where there was a level 11 Tamable white Bear “Silver Special”, called (of all things!) “Mangeclaw”! Apparently he still exists, but they’ve moved him from where one used to be able to find him – so I went off looking for him – Bears make excellent Hunter Pets, but… although I went to the correct co-ordinates for where he’s now supposed to be, I couldn’t find him. However one thing that all this exploring did do for me was to bump my level up – I was now over level 12, but not quite level 13. Dishu (the spotted orange cat that I often try to Tame) is level 13, so I figured that by the time I got to the Northern Barrens and found her, the chances were extremely good that I’d be level 13 too, and so would be able to Tame Dishu. Long story short, I did, and I did. Mission accomplished, so I Hearthed back to Stormwind, dusted down, and Quit out of WoW for the rest of the afternoon.

Food thingz: I had another really tasty lunch today – 2 Ryvita crispbreads with low-fat cottage cheese, some quinoa tabouli salad, with some sliced, left-over herbed chicken on one, and some sliced sandwich ham on the other. Yummy! 🙂 Tonight we’re having pork – what sort, I’m not sure, and I don’t know how Julian plans to cook it, but I do know that it will be delicious! 🙂 When he went out to do a bit of shopping today, he got all the ingredients to make the Persian-Style Lamb Pilaf recipe which I found in the “Delicious” magazine. It sounds very nice, though it does call for an enormous amount of cinnamon! I’ll let you all know what it was like after dinner tomorrow night! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Was quite astonishing! I went down another two points! From 64.3kg to 64.1kg! I’m not complaining! I’m not complaining! 🙂 I’m just… mystified! I do so hope that I can continue to stay down around this weight – though we had an uncomfortable and hideous “wake-up” call this afternoon! Julian, as I’d said earlier, had gone out to do a bit of shopping. He rang me with a query about the recipe for tomorrow night, and we sorted that out, and then… he rang me from the supermarket again less than ten minutes later – he sounded as though he was in shock, and in a weak and quavering voice he said: “They’ve… got… Hot Cross Buns out!” I told him, as gently as I could, that all supermarkets would be putting their chocolate eggs, their Easter promotional items… and the Hot Cross Buns out from now on until after Easter, when they would start putting out the Christmas cakes, and the Christmas promotional items. Indeed, it’s very sad, but equally very true, that even the most sacred and solemn religious events have been hi-jacked for the sole purpose of making money from the masses of “believers”! If the big corporations think that they might be able to con a bit more money out of the credulous public, then they’ll do so, with all the Good Will and Best Wishes that they can bestow! So, peoples, buy your Hot Cross Buns now, and put them in your freezer for Easter! Heaven forbid that the shops might sell out of them early, and you had to miss out! (I wish there was a “smiley” for rolling one’s eyes!)

So anyway, that was my day – full of WoW, and a few somewhat jaded and cynical musings on the “true commercial value” of Christmas and Easter… and really, that’s about it from me for this evening! 🙂 Do call in again tomorrow evening, and find out what my favourite eldest daughter and I watched during her visit, and whether or not my weight has been mean to me and shot up like Jack’s Beanstalk, all the way into the clouds and the giant’s castle! 😉 Until tomorrow night though, please bee good, remember that in life, you always get what you ask for – but it rarely comes in the package you think it’s supposed to come in… and don’t forget to stay warm – or cool – depending on Melbourne’s fickle weather, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves…  but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

It’s been quite a quiet day today – I went for my walk this morning, but only did 30 minutes – I was intending to do another fifteen minutes after lunch, but I changed my mind at the last minute, like at about 10.30 am 😉 I’m still trying to map out a good program that’s not going to chew my day to pieces, and isn’t going to annoy Julian because I spend too much time on the treadmill every morning. Thirty minutes just isn’t going to cut it – 30 minutes of walking = 1.70km, which isn’t enough actual walking, though it’s ample enough time spent on it (in my opinion, anyway) I’m just really sick of having to say “Oh, well I’d better not start doing that now, because I have to go and do my walk, in three-quarter’s of an hour! And on Sundays, when we’re playing Rift or World of Warcraft, we lose so much ruddy time with my running off to do my walking, which always seems to add over an hour to our lunch break, by the time I “sock-up” and get going… No, we’re going to have to come up with a better plan… Maybe if I get up three-quarter’s of an hour early, and get my walk over before our usual getting up time, and weigh myself after my walk, instead of before it – if I could get a good 45 minute walk in early enough so as not to disrupt the day’s doin’s, I could live with that (at a pinch, though I’d probably grizzle a lot in the winter months… hmm!) I’ll talk to Julian about it later…

Well, our cleaning lady came today – and I must say I’m a trifle surprised! She usually runs around emptying out all the waste-paper baskets – to the point that sometimes I get annoyed because now and then she’ll empty out things that I don’t want to be emptied out, because they’re not waste-paper bins! But today, she hasn’t emptied even one of them! All of our waste paper baskets are chockers! Oh well, I just went out to have a look at the deck – at least that’s clean, with all the spiderwebs and general grot, swept or dusted off the doors, wood and wire balustrades, and windows (or all of them that I could see without actually going outside to look!) All we need to do now to set ourselves up for some fun BBQs are a couple of bug zappers. Julian said that he looked for them at Bunny’s, but they didn’t have anything – well, they might have sold out, the week before Christmas, because after all, it was the start of the Traditional Holiday Celebrational Week or something, because just before, when I went looking for Bug Zappers online, the first place that came up was Bunny’s, and they had about half a dozen different types available. Actually, when you’re looking for something specific like worms, or bug zappers, I really think you have to go and ask someone! F’rexample, yesterday we couldn’t find where they kept the worms, until we asked – because they seem to have a completely different way of categorizing things to us! Anyway, I’ve sent Julian the link, and once we get our bug zappers we should be able to have some very nice “al fresco” lunches, whilst sitting out in the comforting, bug-free shade, the cooler fan turning lazy circles above our heads, as we watch our veggies growing (even as we’re eating them in our salads! 😉 ) and our pigeons … doing whatever it is that pigeons do, on a warm, lazy summer’s day! 🙂

Anyway, I spent most of the day playing WoW – Winterwight is now level 33, and having a well-earned rest in the somewhat seedy Inn at Hammerfell, the main quest hub for the Arathi Highlands. I also created two new characters – Alliance ones, this time! The Alliance Guild is called “The Way of the Smiling Cat”, and although it has a few members, most of them are not only all me, but they’re characters on my second account, which I haven’t re-activated yet! Though it would be nice to know just how much gold they have between them! “The Way of the Smiling Cat” is a very poor Guild, you see! We need all the money we can possibly lay our chubby little fists on! 🙂 The two girls are called Akåsha and Medüsa (thanks to Blizzard for letting us use “funny letters”! 😉 ) Akåsha is a Human, but Medüsa is a Draenei, so I might have to end up re-rolling her… the Draenei story-line peters right out once you’ve completed all the Azuremyst Isle quests – it’s a really dead-end quest chain! You can go over to Darkshore and continue questing with the Night Elves, but you miss out on a lot of quests and story-line because it’s all wrapped up in Night Elf lore and beliefs – but you’re not a Night Elf, so you miss out on some of the side-quests. I experimented with Medüsa today – as soon as she was set up I took her off to Teldrassil, to the Night Elf starting area. I was able to get three of the starting quests – there are about fifteen all told – but because I wasn’t a Night Elf, I wouldn’t even have known that any more quests existed! So I’ll either have to run her all the way back to Azuremyst Isle, do those quests, and come to a full stop when I finish them – or “re-roll” her as a different Alliance Race, and about all that’s on offer in that department are the Night Elves – and I already have enough Night Elves. There are the Dwarves – but I’m not at all keen on Blizzard’s visual interpretation of a Dwarf – Gnomes are out, because Gnomes can’t be Hunters (I have no idea why – go and ask Blizzard! 😉 ) and that leaves the Worgen and Pandarans – which I won’t play, not even if you pay me to – they’re the two most stupidly “cartoonish” Races in World of Warcraft, and really… Thanks, but no thanks! The only other Alliance Race is… Human! I really don’t like the way that Blizzard have portrayed Humans, either – although Akåsha is a Human! So, Akåsha might have a little sister by this time tomorrow – maybe! Trust me – you’ll all be the first to know (after I’ve told Julian, and got him to invite me into the Guild again! 😉 )

Food issues: So far today, so good! There was a bit of the herbed and pan-fried chicken left over from last night, so I had 2 Ryvita crispbreads for lunch, with the low-fat cottage cheese, some of the very nice quinoa tabouli salad, some sliced cold herbed chicken, and some nicely seasoned sliced tomato on top. Lovely! 🙂 Tonight we’re having King Island beef sausages – presumably with chips, beans, and the usual cold half a tomato…

Weigh-in this morning. Yes, I definitely think that my body is trying to tell me something! I went down another two points this morning, from 64.5kg to 64.3kg! Let’s see how it goes tomorrow, after I failed to do my usual amount of walking today! I wonder if it’ll make much of a difference? Julian seems to think not – but I’ll let the “proof of the pudding” be in the weigh-in tomorrow! 🙂 I feel guilty about not walking as much as I should have…. but it takes so long, and it’s so boring! 😦

I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – I don’t know if we’re seeing my favourite eldest daughter or not this week, or which day we’ll be seeing her if we are (I suppose I could always just pick up the phone and ring her) I haven’t been out to have a look at my veggie gardens yet so I can’t give you any sort of an update tonight, but here are some photos of the herbs for you – in order of appearance, the little bay tree, the pot of basil, the rosemary bush, and the “mixed herbs” – parsley, sage, thyme, and chives down each side…

So after dinner, I did pick up the phone and call my favourite eldest daughter – we’re seeing her on Wednesday, so I still don’t know what’s happening tomorrow! Those King Island beef sausages we had for dinner tonight were really, really good! And what’s more, they actually tasted like beef! I think we’ll have those again, thank you Chef Julian! 🙂 Not too often, mind you – I don’t think they’re terribly “slimming” food – but they were very nice. Now, here’s a harebrained idea to have instead of the perennial chips – how about making “Potatoes Anna” – I’m sure it can be made with skinny milk – I might look up some low-calorie recipes tomorrow, because it’d make a nice change from the usual – and now that I’m eating again, we should also try to re-find that low-calorie recipe for rice pudding wot I found a while back! And that, gentle readers, is about all I have for you this evening! Do drop in again tomorrow night to find out all the latest about how our herbs and all the little baby vegetables are faring, whether my weight is still behaving itself or not, and whatever else we’ve been up to! However until then, please try to bee good, don’t forget that most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine, and remember to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on what the weather’s doing at the time…but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

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! 🙂

Well, a New Year, a New Header – isn’t that the way things go? 🙂 We’ve been relatively busy today – I played WoW in the morning, and I had to get Julian to bring in Jemima, his high level Tauren, to help me again – I was level 27, and had a 3-person group quest to do… Well, I’ve always considered that a Hunter with a Pet was about the equivalent of two people, and the quest was a level 25 quest, so I thought I’d give it a go, and see how I went. Well, I didn’t. I got clobbered! There were four (? it might have been five, but I can’t remember now – this morning was a long time ago! 😉 ) mobs that I had to take down – all level 25 Elites (i.e. extra tuff!) The first one killed me, so I came running back for my body and thought “Duh! I should have rezzed my Pet!” because re-calling, or resurrecting a Pet doesn’t take the “forever” time that it does in Rift – it’s pretty much instantaneous, so if your Pet does fall in battle, you don’t have to spend a lot of time calling them back from the dead! However, like all spells, you do have to concentrate – and anything that interrupts your concentration – like getting bashed over the head by a narky elemental – disrupts your train of thought and you have to start over – by which time said narky level 25 Elite elemental has usually killed you! So sometimes it’s better to let your Pet have a brief rest from the fighting (while he’s dead) and rez him later, like when you run your ghostly form back from the Graveyard to collect your own body! Anyway, on my third attempt, I did manage to bring the #1 Elite down! So far, so good! And there was even a repair type person standing just outside the back wall of Durnholde Keep, so I was able to keep my armor reasonably intact! 🙂 Anyway, after bumping off the first elemental, I had a go at #2 – nah – this one was far too tough for me, mainly because he had a really strong interruption spell – and it was at this stage that Julian offered, and I accepted, some help from Jemima. Once Jemima arrived and we made ourselves a Group, we managed to knock the rest of them over in very short order… or more truthfully, Jemima went around, going “bang! bang! bang!”, with her gun, and the rest of the elementals all fell over dead – and I just trotted around, picking up any loot that they might have dropped! 🙂

After that we had an early lunch, and set out on our rounds – first to Doncaster, to pick up the Dry Cleaning. The guy in the Dry Cleaners had told Julian that everything would be ready by Friday (last Friday, that is!) which was a Public Holiday. Julian pointed that out to him, to which he replied that he knew it was a Public Holiday but that our stuff would be ready then and that they’d be open, anyway. Which, as it turned out, they weren’t. Julian had rung ahead, the guy answered the phone, yes they were open, and yes, all of our stuff was ready for collection. So poor old Julian went all the way over to Doncaster to pick up the Dry Cleaning – but lo and behold, they were closed! So we went over again this afternoon, and they were open! But! (don’t you just hate those intrusive “but’s”?!) Our Dry Cleaning wasn’t ready, after all! Well, the guy was very apologetic about it – as well he should have been – so partly because Julian was pretty angry by then, and partly because the guy who owns the Dry Cleaning shop was standing around just observing what was happening, he’s offered to drop the Dry Cleaning off here this afternoon! In fact, I think it’s just arrived! 🙂 Yup, we now have some clean clothes to wear! Good! 🙂 I went looking for a replacement 2016 Diary, at both QBD and the Newsagents there at Doncaster. QBD normally has a whole big “bin” full of new Diaries, right next to the main entry point – but there were none there today! So I went in and asked, and was directed to a pitifully small box of rather unprepossessing 2016 Diaries – so I went up to the Newsagents, next to Coles. They usually had whole stands of Diaries – but today they only had a couple of dozen very ordinary Diaries. What I want is a pretty, hard-cover, spiral bound Diary, that has at least 3 days to a page. Julian is going to take me to Officeworks tomorrow – hopefully they’ll have some! 🙂 I use the Diary for nothing more exciting than to write down my weight every morning after I’ve weighed myself, and also to keep tabs on my daily Warfarin doses and when my next blood test is due! Wow! I’d better keep that under lock and key, hadn’t I! Who knows what might ensue if my scandalous little Diary fell into the wrong hands! 😉

From Doncaster we went on to a very good Nursery in Pinewood (we think it’s Pinewood, anyway – it’s on Blackburn Road opposite the Pinewood Shopping Center, close to the Freeway entrance) where we practically went berserk, buying up big pots (one for the little Bay tree, one for the kumquat bush, and another for a smallish rosemary plant) plus a few smaller blue-glazed pots for various herbs… We bought three different kinds of tomato plants, some baby leeks (well, seedlings, actually) spring onions, a lovely big pot of basil, some “snap peas”, and some (ordinary green) beans. We got chives, parsley, thyme, and I can’t remember what else! Julian’s put them out in sheltered spots around the house and given them a good drink of water, in preparation for their planting tomorrow, after I’ve been to Officeworks for my Diary (and who knows what else! 😉 ) and Julian’s been across to Bunny’s to buy worms! The nice check-out girls at the Nursery told us that Bunny’s sell boxes of worms, because we’ll need to add some to our special soil mixture for our veggies to be nice and healthy! You know, it doesn’t sound like we got very many actual vegetables to plant! We’ll have to do a stock-take before we head out tomorrow, and maybe buy a few more at Bunny’s…

Food thingz: for lunch today I had two Ryvita crispbreads with low-fat cottage cheese, a slice of low-fat cheddar type cheese on each crispbread, some sandwich ham, and a bit of the quinoa tabouli salad, and really, they were just as nice as the home-made wraps! (lets just hope that they contained a few less calories!) Last night we had the pan-fried chicken, which I’ve already told you was scrumptious, and tonight we’re having lamb backstrap – probably also pan-fried, with all the usuals – however what’s on the menu for tomorrow, I have no idea! We did buy a big tub of the quinoa tabouli salad while we were at Coles this afternoon, so I guess that some of that will figure in all of the food preparations tomorrow! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Looking better today! I lost (went down) almost a whole kilo! Overnight! 😮 From 65.8kg to 64.9kg! Probably just fluid, but it just goes to show what happens when I forget to take my second anti-fluid pill for two days in a row! My feet swell up like balloons, and I retain fluid like a camel! (hmm! I always thought that my back was bent over the way it is because of my arthritis – but maybe it’s not arthritis – maybe I’m evolving into a camel! 😉 ) Anyway, I was very pleased with the drop in my weight this morning – hopefully it’ll keep on going down a bit further, and I’ll continue to stay off the delicious but maybe fattening home-made wraps!

Tomorrow being Sunday, Julian and I should be galloping around Azeroth, righting wrongs, doing good deeds, and generally making nuisances of ourselves within the “nasty mob” communities – however, I think we’re going to be pretty busy, buying worms and Diaries, and putting a lot of seedlings root-first into the oh-so-carefully prepared veggie beds, and baby trees and bushes into the as-yet-to-be-filled with nourishing soil, large pots! So tomorrow night, you can all expect to be bored silly, listening to me filling you all in on our planting trials, tribulations, and experiences! 🙂 However for tonight, that’s about it from me! 🙂 Don’t forget to drop in again this time tomorrow to find out how our day went – whether it was filled with planting and growing vegetables, or whether it was filled with murder, mayhem and Boss Fights on Azeroth! Also on the “menu” for tomorrow night is which way my weight decided to go – up? or down? Anyway, you’ll find all of those things – and more – right here, tomorrow night! But until then, please try to bee good, remember that you teach people how to treat you, by what you will allow – and don’t forget to keep warm – or cool – depending on what our wonderful Melbourne weather dishes up for us, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves – but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂