Julian has just left to go and pick up Flipper, who by all accounts was the star attraction there at the Veterinary Hospital! She’s eating well, and seems quite happy, so they’re allowing her to come home – we’re not to give her any of her favourite “chewy” pussy biscuits just yet – so, sorry Flipper, but it’ll be “soft food only” for a couple of days, until your mouth is properly healed! It’s been terribly quiet around here for the past 24 hours without Flipper noisily demanding that “Daddy” drop whatever he’s doing, and go and sit with her on the couch in the Den so that he can pat her! – I think I’ll almost be glad to hear her raucous yowls for attention again 🙂 Anyway, today has been what could only be described as “quietly busy”! I only had time to sort through Wynterthyme’s Garrison “Followers”, and send them off to perform other Missions for her, before it was time to “hang the pictures! (I’d rather play WoW!)” 😉 Julian had by this time cleaned most of the frames (which look a lot better for it, too!) so we started off with “Circe Invidiosa”, which we hung on the wall opposite the Den double doors, so that all I have to do is turn my head to see her (I think it’s about my most favourite picture, ever!) “Bert’s Bath” has been hung on the wall between the exercise room (I just gotta think of a better name than that for it! ♦) and my bathroom, leaving enough room on the exercise room side of the wall for two or three smaller pictures – I did think of putting “PB in his Floral Dress” there, but it’s a very colourful and “fun” poster print, and I think it’d clash rather horribly with “Bert’s Bath”, which is a “dignified” black and white photograph. The two Michael Parks prints have been hung in Julian’s office, behind his desk – where they look pretty stunning! We haven’t hung the gi-normous “Sunset over the Torrens” yet – I think Julian intends to hang it when he gets back with Flipper – but we’ve decided to move it from the wallpapered “feature” wall in the main corridor, to the stretch of clear, white wall opposite the Office entry. The two modern “Poppy” canvases have been hung over the couch in the lounge-room, and the copy of the Japanese screen painting of the “Portuguese Merchants Arriving in Japan” has been hung centrally above the camphor-wood chest, which is to the left of the television (if you’re sitting watching television, that is!) We’ve even hung the silver-gilt mirror above the hall table with the bronzes! I was originally planning on hanging it horizontally, but the placement of its “suspension” chain meant that it would have involved a lot of fiddling around to be able to do that, and even more fiddling around afterwards, if it turned out that we didn’t like it that way after all! Anyway, we tried it out in its vertical position (the way it used to hang in our bedroom in Doncaster) and it looked fine like that, so I decided that we’d leave it that way! We always had a couple of glass and crystal, sort-of New Age type “dingle-dangle” thingies, in Glen Waverley and in Doncaster – simply because the looked pretty – so Julian got a couple of suction cup hooks which he’s attached to my big bathroom mirror, and the glass and crystal, sort-of New Age type “dingle-dangle” thingies are now hanging from those, and looking …er…. nice? However, I’m not completely convinced that that’s the right place for them… I dunno – I expected them to look a lot more… something, but I sort-of feel that they’re wasted there… So, apart from the gigantically huge “Sunset over the Torrens”, I think there are only another couple of pictures here to find places for, some of which I’ve “bookmarked” possible locations for, and some, like our family crest which is still in storage, I have absolutely no idea where to put! 
Of course, there’s still a lot of art-work to go through, and we’re simply not going to have the wall space available to hang all of them – especially considering that we still have to have several acres worth of bookcases to find room – and wall space – for! No photos have been taken as yet – I’ll get Julian to take some when he gets home, and I’ll post the appropriate links as soon as I get them! 🙂
Food stuffz: last night for dinner we had cold cuts – there was turkey, pastrami (I thought at first it was corned silverside, but it was too spicy and peppery for silverside, so I’m betting that it was pastrami, which I love!) ham, and a type of salami, with a spoonful of (commercial) potato salad, and a spoonful of (equally commercial) quinoa tabouli salad, and half an ordinary tomato, and I had one of my diet jellies for dessert. For lunch today I had two Ryvita crispbreads, spread with Philly Light, with some of the left over turkey from the cold cuts last night, and some sliced tomato. Fruit-wise today I had one small apricot, and one small nectarine – and although it was next to impossible to extract the stone from the nectarine, it was quite delicious! 🙂 Tonight we’re having slow-cooked corned silverside, mashed potato, sugar-snap peas, and half a tomato, which I’m very much looking forward to – especially as there’ll be a nice lot of cold meat left over for wraps, or Ryvita, or even a (gasp! shock! horror!) sandwich! 😮
Weigh-in this morning. Was a trifle disappointing – when you consider the amount of standing around (which is really cruel to my back!) I’ve been doing, and the walking about (which isn’t), and my three treadmillometers per day (in two 1.5 kilometer lots though), as well as cutting out the wraps and the yoghurt – I would have thought that I’d have gone down a little bit more… but I stayed the same as yesterday (so at least I didn’t go up!) and went from 63.2kg to 63.2kg – mind you, I took my last horrible pill this morning, so hopefully things will go better for the next two months, until I have to start taking them again! But looking at my weight graph, for approximately the last two months, the highest I’ve gone is 64kg (on January 28th) and the lowest I’ve gone is 62.3kg (on February 03rd) the rest of the time I’ve just been see-sawing up and down between those two weights! So, I guess that as long as I stay somewhere between those two weights, I can pretty much say “Mission accomplished!” – I’ve lost the weight, and I seem (so far, anyway) to be staying pretty stable between 63kg and 64kg – which in no way means that I can relax my game! I can’t ever afford to relax my game again – yes, I can “splurge” from time to time, because too much denial just leads to resentment, and that’s when you fail, and go back to where you came from – and I ain’t never doin’ that again, no-way, no-how! I’m still getting the My Size and Autograph emails, and this morning I thought that perhaps I should remove myself from their mailing list, because I really hate seeing the pretty, smiling faces of the models, in those dumpy, horrible-looking clothes that I once thought were so nice – and I thought, “No! I need those emails! I need to have those images thrust in my face to remind me of what I was, and what I could very easily become again, if I’m not careful!” So it’s now my new goal – to stay as much as humanly possible between 63kg and 64kg! (and I suppose, having now said those words, tomorrow when I get on the scales, my wretched body will have sent my weight skyrocketing up to 64.8kg or something! Simply for the fun of seeing me crying and humbled! 😦 )
Tomorrow we have a few errands to run, and on the way home from those I want to stop off at the Storage place to see if we can pick up the family crest, and whatever other pictures we can find – I also need to get to a $2 Shop for a specific type of box, and maybe some drawer dividers (although Howards Storage World is probably my best bet in that department!) We’ll see, anyway… then when we get home, I suppose it’ll be back to walking and standing around again as we hang up some more pictures, so maybe Friday I’ll be able to get a bit of WoW-ing in! 😉 I also have to talk to Clarke about building our aviary – I’ve been looking at a few aviary plans and designs, and Josh has also given me some good ideas to incorporate into the final product – now all I have to do is draw it so that Clarke will have some idea of what I want! Yanno, I’m an artist, but for the life of me, I can’t draw a cube with proper perspective! Gimme a flower, or a face, or a geometric design of some sort, and I can reproduce it faithfully! Ask me to imagine, and then draw or paint, a face, or a flower, or to create a repeating pattern that “tiles” properly, and I’ll do a perfect job! But! Put a vase in front of me, or a building, and say “draw that!”, and it’ll come out looking like a very bad piece of abstract modern art! I’m simply not a designer, or an engineer, and I have absolutely no idea of metric measurements or distances. *sigh* Still, I’ll do my best… Anyway, that’s finally about it from me for this evening – I’m afraid you’re all going to have to wait for tomorrow to see where we’ve put our art work, as Julian’s had to go out again – he’s just remembered that he’s run out of his cereal, and he has nothing for breakfast tomorrow! But do call in again tomorrow, to see what we’ve been up to – and to see how Flipper’s getting on, now that she’s back home again – though until then, do try to bee extra good, don’t forget that science is organized knowledge, and that wisdom is organized life… and do remember to drive carefully, to keep cool – or warm – depending on your preferences, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
♦the “Marathon Room”? the “D.D.”? (short for “Dull Dungeon”) the Mill Room?
My Word! 