As I have the Podiatrist coming around about 4.30 this afternoon, I thought I’d (a) get a really early start, and see how much I could get done in just under an hour, and (b) make a slightly more “sober” and sophisticated header for this Template, using the font I saw this morning that I just had to have – so I resisted for all of three seconds, and then I bought it! (it’s called “Brunette“, and you can get it from My Fonts for $29) So let’s see now… the latest on the Flipper front! She’s just come back from her post-op checkup – they’re very pleased with her progress, and don’t need to see her for another two weeks. I’m afraid she looks very “moth-eaten” at the moment – they were going to remove a lot of her lumps of matted fur while she was still under the anesthetic on Tuesday, but they forgot! Anyway, they removed them today – and while she’ll be a lot more comfortable with them removed (the tangled and matted hair pulls on the skin and can get quite painful) she does look as though she’s been picked up and chewed a bit by a very large dog, and then spat out again – she looks very bedraggled and unkempt! She also had to undergo the indignity of having her temperature taken, so she’s giving us dirty looks and not speaking to us at the moment – but you can bet your sweet bippy that the second Julian gets up and goes and sits on the couch, she’ll be up there like a shot, demanding “Daddy Pats”!
We hung another couple of pictures this morning – we managed to get the gi-normous one, the gargantuan “Sunset on the Torrens” up, but it took the two of us to wrestle it into a semi-safe position from which to hoist it onto the wall! From memory, it weighs 18 kilos! It doesn’t look too bad where it is, but if nothing else is ever done to it, the frame really needs to be professionally cleaned and restored – it’s in a very parlous state! We also managed to put up “PB In His Floral Dress” – he’s looking very pleased with himself, sitting on the wall to my left, next to the window 🙂 Oh, and we’ve found a fairly nice clock to put on the wall in the kitchen, right above the pantry doors, so now if I’m sitting in the lounge-room reading, it won’t matter if I’ve forgotten to put on my watch! 🙂 But apart from those few things, today’s been very quiet – Julian’s been busy doing “Office-y” things, and I’ve been busy leveling up Calypsõ, who’s now level 20 and riding a big cat! Now I just have to get her up to level 21, and I can go out and Tame one of the Ghost Saber-tooth cats from the Ruins of Mathystra 🙂 Once I’ve got her up to that stage, I might give her a bit of a rest for a while and play one of the two new Horde girls I created a while back! They’re both Hunters, one’s a Troll, and the other is a Forsaken (Undead) and amazingly enough, they’re both quite good looking, even though it’s extremely hard to make either of those two races look “pretty”. They’re only level 1 though, so I might still change my mind and re-create them as something else… 😉
Food stuffz: well, the gorgeous-looking home-grown tomato that we had with our dinner last night, was just as good as it looked! 🙂 Very juicy, lovely flavour – there was only one thing that I could say I wasn’t too keen on, and that was the size and width of its “core” – where the tomato “stem” enters the fruit – it was very large, thick, and tough, but I think that’s probably because it was an “Heirloom” tomato, which quite often turn out to be a little “misshapen”, and of course, no respectable home-grown tomato is ever as uniform or as symmetrical as their store-bought cousins! I wonder how many tomatoes we can expect to get from our three tomato bushes/vines? Each one is a different “breed” (breed? is that the right term to use for a fruit or vegetable? Maybe a better term would be “species”?) Yeah, each one is a different “species” (that sounds better! It’s just as well that I don’t write for The Age! I wouldn’t have bothered to try to clear that up if I did! 😛 ) so I wonder how many tomatoes we’ll get, total?! We had the King Island Beef sausages with our half tomato, along with chips, and sugar-snap peas – all delicious! Once again, I had one of my diet jellies, and Julian had one of his low-fat yoghurts… For lunch today, we both had cold corned silverside sandwiches – my sandwich also had some of the new low-calorie Bulla “Real Dairy” sweet chilli spreadable cheese, which according to Julian – whose eyesight is still good enough to be able to read the fine print on the back of the tubs – contains less calories than the equivalent amount of Philly Light! It’s quite nice – maybe a bit bland? but it definitely had a good, chilli “bite”! You wouldn’t want too much of it though – just a light spreading/smear across the bread is enough 🙂 Verdict? The sandwich was delicious! Tonight we’re having chicken – I’m not sure how it’s being cooked, and we’ll no doubt be having chips, sugar-snap peas, and half a tomato (probably of the store-bought variety this time though) I’ll be having another of my diet jellies, and Julian will no doubt be having one of his extremely nice low-fat yoghurts…
Weigh-in this morning. Well, not surprisingly after my stint with the chocolate cake yesterday, I did go up – but only two points – from 63.3kg to 63.5kg. I think I’m finally starting to shed some of the fluid I’ve been guarding so jealously, but not enough – my feet were both very noticeably swollen this morning – and that’s as soon as I woke up, after a good night’s sleep with my feet up! However, I did get both my 1.5 kilometer walks in today, so who knows? Maybe that will help… Actually, I’m more concerned about my feet being swollen first thing in the morning, than I am about a few points of weight here or there, and if my feet are still swollen by Monday, I might have to take them to the Doctor (though why I should take them to the Doctor I have no idea – it’s not as though they can actually do anything about them!)
Julian’s off to Adelaide for the day tomorrow – he’s meeting up with his sister for a last clear-up around the house, so I’ll be rattling around this place like a dried pea in an empty metal tea caddy – I’ll probably alternate between reading, playing World of Warcraft, and just generally doing what I’m so damn good at doing – wasting time! 😉 Sunday is Saint Valentine’s Day, and no doubt Julian and I will be busy questing, and hoping to pick up some worthwhile rewards, loot, and exotic goods for our Garrisons! 🙂 You may all be wondering why I put in a somewhat oblique comment about not writing for The Age, well, I’ll tell you! I’d just finished reading two articles, by two different journalists, and I swear, at one point I thought I’d traveled back in time to when I first started frequenting Bulletin Boards (the forerunners to forums on the Internet, right?!) There was a guy on Melbourne P.I.E. who wrote quite a lot of messages, and really, sometimes you had to read the messages two or three times, in order to be able to work out what he was talking about… because he never used punctuation, or capital letters. Well, one of the articles that I read in The Age this afternoon was like that! Four lines, and not a single punctuation mark! Remarkable… and the other article was probably worse, because the grammar was excruciating, and there was no attempt whatsoever to get words, spelling, or tenses into context! I tend to blame spell checkers, and cost-cutting practices – spelling checkers, because they don’t understand grammar, and they’ll judge a word spelt correctly, even if it’s the wrong tense, or in the wrong context – and cost-cutting practices because the Editor responsible for getting the paper ready won’t hire proof readers because it costs too much! I’m bitterly disappointed in The Age – once upon a time it was an esteemed and respectable publication – a Broadsheet reporting the “news”, as opposed to a Tabloid, which “reported” the gossip and the scandals – but I guess there’s no money in news these days – people only seem to want to read badly written and shockingly edited articles about who’s sleeping with what, or who’s likely to get the Republican Nomination for the next US election! I really don’t know which “news publication” I should look to now, if I feel like catching up with the rest of the world, and the really saddest part about it is – that no-one, not the Australian public, nor any other “public” for that matter, really care anymore – everyone’s too wrapped up in their own little smart-phone, social-media cocoons, or fighting to stay alive in war-torn countries – so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that no-one notices the bad grammar, or the shitful spelling, of journalists who should be sacked for the appalling work they hand in as being “fit for publication”! OK, end of rant! 🙂 Sorry about that, but I was just so… completely taken aback – aghast, even – at the sub-sub-substandard of those two articles tonight* that I just couldn’t keep quiet about them! My English, and my spelling ain’t all that crash hot, but I’m not a trained journalist working for a newspaper (of sorts, I suppose!) and at least I make an effort to get things right, and if I don’t know the name of something, or how to spell something, I look it up – and then I re-read and edit my writing at least twice, to make sure I haven’t mixed up my tenses, or put things out of context – and if I do make mistakes, it’s usually deliberately intentional (otherwise Julian points them out to me and I correct them as quickly as possible!) Anyway, that’s about it from me for tonight – apologies again for the rant – however do call in again tomorrow night – no more rants, I promise – just a fun read of all the news, chez nous (and all the mischief I got up to while Julian was in Adelaide! 😉 ) Until then though, please at least try to bee good, and remember, if you really want to do something, you’ll find a way – and if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse… however, don’t forget to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather… but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
*no, I’m not going to put in a link to them – I’m too fed up with The Age to want to link anything to them!
My Word! 