Well, ’tis the first day of Autumn, and how did I spend it? Huddled inside over a keyboard and mouse, playing WoW! However, I did mange to get a fair bit done – I ratcheted up Wynterthyme’s logging, skinning, and flower-picking skills, and got in a nice lot of Work Orders, which should net her some well-deserved Garrison Supplies. To get my Garrison up to level 3, I think I just have to have 5000 gold, and 5000 Garrison Supplies – there doesn’t seem to be any “lock” on it (like having to be level 100, or anything) and the 5000 gold I have… unfortunately, even after I raided the Garrison Cache, I only have about 1500 Garrison Supplies! The trouble is, to get (win) Garrison Supplies, you have to send your Followers off on Missions, and each Mission costs you between 10 and 20 Garrison Supplies! Occasionally there’ll be a Mission that gives Garrison Supplies as a reward, if the Mission is concluded successfully, but you never win enough of them to make up for the Supplies that you spent in sending your Followers off on the Mission in the first place! Mind you, you can also pick up Garrison Supplies as quest rewards, and very occasionally, you’ll get some from a monster that you’ve killed – but methinks it’s going to take me a l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g time, to amass 5000 Garrison Supplies! 
But as soon as Mouselet and Wynterthyme reach level 100, we’ll lose our experience bars altogether (as opposed to going all the way to Stormwind to turn them off!) and then the two of us can go off on our own, killing, bludgeoning, creating havoc, and Gathering (skins, flowers, lumber, fish and ore) to our heart’s content, without fear of getting too far ahead of eachother in the experience department! Then, when the new expansion goes live, if Blizzard have raised the level cap, we’ll get our experience bars back again – but that won’t be until about September, and anyway, we don’t even know if they are going to raise it! When I got sick of “Farming”*, I went off and played with Arisnoë for a bit. Unfortunately I’ve reached one of the “doldrums” sections, where leveling up slows down to a veritable snail’s pace, so I haven’t really progressed very much further towards level 90. Still, she’s doing OK – I died four times doing one quest though – I had to put on some sort of “invisibility” disguise in order to be able to sneak into the enemy camp and sabotage their explosives. Unfortunately there was a rather nasty Elite Dragon patrolling the area who could see through my “disguise”, so he managed to kill me twice, and his equally “Elite” Troopers also managed to see me – or I got too close to them – same difference though – I got killed another twice! I finished the quest in the end, but I had to pay 29 gold in repairs! I left Arisnoë about to accept a new quest with Harrison Jones, so we’ll see – if I don’t have too much work to do with Wynterthyme and her ruddy Garrison, tonight I’ll try to hop aboard Harrison’s little plane to shoot up the nasties as they try to force us down!
Julian went off to the Dentist this morning – just for a clean and a polish, mostly, and no new cavities were found – but “lucky Julian” had a nice new “dental plan” mapped out for him – the Dentist wants to replace all his old amalgam fillings, which are nearly all cracked and damaged, with composite resin – so he has three brand new appointments all booked in for April and September! 🙂 All my teeth, of course, are titanium, resin, and porcelain – so I should never have to suffer the pain of a Novocaine injection ever, ever again! He didn’t get back home until fairly late, and we had to pretty much gobble down our lunch and get ready for our accountant, so I didn’t get my second treadmillathon in today, I’m afraid – I’m sure I’ll pay the price tomorrow, though! Our accountant arrived pretty much right on time this afternoon, and so the three of us sat around the dining room table, talking about Bank Statements, dividends, what we’ve been doing in the last six months since we saw him last – all general stuff, really, then we gave him a big pile of papers to work on, and off he went! After he’d left, I went back to my graphics, and spent a bit more time looking for patterns – I’ve found quite a few – in fact, I’ve actually found a hell of a lot! Now comes the not-oh-so-exciting task of sorting the wheat from the chaff, and weeding out the ones that aren’t going to be of any use to me. This is going to take some time, but I don’t mind – it’s the sort of thing I’m good at, and while most people would find it as boring as I find “Farming” in WoW (or Rift!) I find it immensely interesting, and spend quite a bit of time mucking around with the “not so good” patterns, trying to improve them by running them through various filters, and so forth. Sometimes I succeed, but mostly I just remove them from the “pattern collection” file.
Food stuffz: last night we had “cold cuts” and a couple of store-bought salads for dinner – sliced ham, and sliced turkey, with a bit of potato salad and some quinoa tabouli salad, and then I had one of the figs which had ripened rather nicely, and an apricot for dessert. For lunch today I had a whole grain sandwich, with sliced ham, tomato, low-fat Swiss Cheese, and some quinoa tabouli salad – it was quite delicious! 🙂 Tonight we’re having steak, with either sugar-snap peas or green beans, half a tomato, and (hopefully!) some of those very nice “sea salt and cracked pepper” chips! Another of the figs has fully ripened, so I’ll have another fig, and another apricot for dessert again tonight (if both the figs are ripe enough, I might have both figs, and an apricot! 😛 )
Weigh-in this morning. Was really boring! I went from 63.1kg to 63.1kg! or in other words, I stayed the same…. *sigh* Well, at least I didn’t go up again, so I suppose that’s something – though I probably will go up again tomorrow morning because I didn’t have my second, lunchtime treadmillathon… I still haven’t been able to work out exactly what I do want my body and my weight to do – or perhaps it’s just that I like grizzling and complaining a lot! 😉 I do know what I don’t want, though! I don’t want to get fat again, like I was before – but I don’t think there’s very much chance of that happening, unless every single food outlet in the entire universe turns into a McDonalds!
So, tomorrow my favourite eldest daughter is coming over – she has to go to uni first thing in the morning, then she’ll jump on the tram that runs along Burwood Highway, and when she gets to Vermont South she’ll give us a ring and Julian will go and pick her up from there. Well, we have a few things to watch – mostly Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but that’s OK. She goes back to uni next week (and I’ve twisted something in my right shoulder, which is making typing very awkward and painful!) I’m not too sure what’s happening for the rest of the week – probably just more of the same-old, same-old. Julian reminded me this afternoon that we still haven’t had our Saint Valentine’s Day dinner yet, so we might go out for dinner on Thursday or Friday night (more calories!) – though both of us vaguely remember that something’s supposed to be happening on Friday, or that someone’s supposed to be coming over, but neither of us can remember what it is (or who it is!) – it’s also the fact that the date “March the 4th” rings a bell with both of us, for some reason… So… I dunno – I guess we’ll find out on Friday – or not, as the case may be! Anyway, that’s about it from me again this evening! 🙂 Don’t forget to drop by again tomorrow night – to find out if not doing my second treadmillathon for the day played havoc with my rising weight, if I managed to get any further with Arisnoë before my favourite eldest daughter arrived, and what we watched on the television when she did! Until then though, please try terribly hard to bee good, remember that life is like a ten speed bicycle – most of us have gears we never use – and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep cool – or warm – as the case may be – but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
*Farming = running around an area killing anything that can be skinned, picking anything that can be picked, mining anything that can be mined – etcetera – to get (a) experience, and (b) a lot of materials for Work Orders, or for sale! Personally, I find that it gets horribly boring, after about 2.5 seconds and I usually head off to do something else pretty quickly – or to play someone else. Some weird people, like Julian, seem to be able to do it for hours and hours – I can’t understand how they don’t die of boredom!
My Word! 