*smirk* Well, at least I’ve managed to get rid of those two horrible and unsightly black lines running through the middle of the header! 😉 What do you think of this layout and set-up? I thought that as Chinese New Year is almost upon us I’d go for a slightly more “oriental” look and theme. The kanji symbol is “Summer”, and I thought that it turned out quite nicely – what a shame that summer officially ends at the end of the month! I’ll have to dig out my Autumn kanji symbol then (I know I’ve got one – somewhere – I just can’t remember where I put it! The same with this Summer one – I have got one, but I couldn’t find it, so I had to go hunting for one to download! *tsk!* Honestly! The things I have to go through for this blog! 😉 ) Anyway, I think this Template and style look quite good – they’ll do for the moment, anyway!

So, this morning! Well, we didn’t get as early a start as I’d planned, but we trundled off at around eleven-ish, and went down to a Dorevitch Collection Centre on Ferntree Gully Road in Wheelers Hill – a rather strange place, I thought, as one wasn’t requested to “Take a number and sit down”! It’s in a Medical Clinic, so you go in and trundle down a fairly narrow and somewhat gloomy corridor to the “Pathology” area, where you just sit down and wait. There were hardly any people in there, and we didn’t have to wait long (so I think we might go there again next time!) The woman (nurse, I think!) taking my blood had a somewhat strange sort of “English” accent – Julian thought she sounded as though she was having trouble with an upper dental plate or something – and after asking the usual questions (date of birth, address, etc., etc.) she proceeded to take my blood… She was damn good! I didn’t even feel the needle go in! So off we went again – to Knox City, where Julian thought he knew where the JB HiFi shop was, only it wasn’t – it was a Hardly Normal Harvey Norman, so we went in there to get his Birthday Present! 🙂 I gave him a new Samsung Galaxy S2 Tablet, to replace the old one he’d had for four years, and which was slowly dying – and Flipper gave him a Nutri-Bullet, which we have yet to examine and try out. I think Flipper thinks that Daddy might be able to make her a pussy-biscuit thick-shake after she’s had her tooth (or perhaps teeth, plural!) removed next week, if her mouth is too sore to eat them whole. I suppose he could, you know, if it came to that – but I hope he doesn’t! Those pussy-biscuits smell totally revolting! (sometimes I’m very glad that I’m not a cat!) and if he made a thick-shake out of them the poor old Nutri-Bullet would never get rid of the smell of them – *bleeech!* Then we went and had lunch – and no, I’m not going to tell you what I ate, except to say that one item had a lovely filling of spinach and fetta cheese, but had far too much gluggy pastry around it (but the chips with it were delicious! 😉  and the salad that I asked for “without dressing, please” was wearing a ball gown!) and the other item involved a great deal of caramel filling, chocolate cream, and very thick, sticky chocolate frosting! I’ll also add that neither Julian nor I will be having any dinner tonight – just a nice cup of coffee, as we sit and watch the newly returned “Dr. Blake Mysteries” on ABC1 tonight! After lunch, we waddled upstairs to Katies where I bought my 3/4 length sleeved Tee-shirts – they’d only come in yesterday, and they only had four of them in my size… so I took all of them! They were on sort-of “special” – they were (from memory!) $35 each, but if you bought two of them you got them for $15 each – that is, a bit better that half price – which is why I decided to take all four of them. They’re exactly what I was after – the sleeves come down to just below my elbows, and hide a multitude of tattered curtains! They also came in white, and a sort-of chartreuse colour, but as those colours look awful on me (white makes me look sick, and my skin is too olive to wear chartreuse – it just makes me look jaundiced!) so I only took the black ones 🙂 (which were the ones I wanted, anyway!) Then we did a bit of supermarket shopping, and came home!

I was planning on having an hour’s play on World of Warcraft when we got home, but as usual, I checked to see if Word Press had any new Templates first, and I saw this one. It’s not new by any means – it’s quite old, actually, and I have used it before, but I decided to have a fiddle… which turned into making a new header, and looking for summer kanji symbols, and before I knew it, it was time to start writing, and… here I am! 🙂

Food stuffz: well, you pretty much know what we had for dinner last night at the East Empress Bistro, coz I told you all last night – and right now I don’t really feel like talking about food (I’m sure you all understand and sympathise!) – ditto with lunch today – suffice to say that we both ate far too much, and we shall both rue our gluttony, and face our weight punishment stoically, if not philosophically, with the understanding that what goes up can also come down (and believe me, it will!) However, I did get in my morning 1.5 kilometer treadmill-a-thon, and at Knox I walked briskly the length and breadth of the centre, twice, so that’s gotta count for something, doesn’t it? I sure hope so, anyway!

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting – I went from 62.5kg to 63.2kg – seven points – a lot of which will be fluid, because of those wretched little pills I’m taking at the moment… However… my weight tomorrow morning will not be a pretty sight! 😦 (but ohh… that thick, sticky, chocolate frosting was dee–vine… and I refuse to regret eating it!) Still, no more heavy eatings now until my Birthday in March, or our Saint Valentine’s Day Dinner, which we never have on Saint Valentine’s Day anyway! Why go with the mob, and have to put up with a “special” and much restricted dinner menu, with lots of people sitting and milling around you, usually spoiling what would otherwise be a nice, romantic dinner for two! No, we always have our Saint Valentine’s Day Dinner a week, or even two weeks, afterwards! Anyway, hopefully we’ll have shed all this excess weight by then – so we can “start all over again…”

Tomorrow, we hope to be hanging pictures – we have a couple from Adelaide to hang – one is gi-normous, “Sunset Over the Torrens”, I think it’s called – it’ll have to go somewhere in the hall, or on one of the walls near the Den (I don’t think it’ll go in the Den though – it’s too “formal”!) and another is a print that I’ve always adored – by John William Waterhouse – and I have no idea where we’re going to put her, except that it’s got to be somewhere where I’ll see her every day! Then there are a few from our old place – “Bert’s Bath”, and the only possible place for that is in the bathroom (or maybe on the wall just outside? dunno…) and “PB* in His Floral Dress” (ya just gotta see that one to understand it! 😉 ) our family crest, as designed and embroidered by my Nonna when she was a young woman, and many, many (far too many!) more… I might post up some pictures of some of the best ones, once we get them sorted out and work out exactly where they’re all going to go! So, all of that should keep us fairly busy, and out of mischief! 😉 And now it’s that time again – time for me to say well, that’s about it from me for this evening! Please drop in again tomorrow night – I’m sure you’ll all be agog to find out how much more my weight has gone up (a lot, probably!) and how many pictures, in total, we managed to get hung on the walls, and where we ended up putting the great big, gi-normous “Sunset Over the Torrens” – if we even managed to get that one up – I think it might need more than just Julian and I to get it on the wall – it is very big! Anyway, until tomorrow evening, please remember to bee as good as possible, don’t forget that plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it… and do remember to drive carefully, to keep cool – or warm – depending on what it’s like outside, and to always look after yourselves…but above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao all! 🙂

*PB – PB is a cat – it stands for “Pussy Bxxxxx” (the “B” stands for Mum and Dad’s surname – and of course my maiden name, because he was originally my cat!) because we had a cat who was known by that name (“Pussy” + “family surname”)