Well, it’s late again, but I have a good excuse! Erm… well, it’s a pretty lame excuse, actually – when we got back from our double Big Birthday Bash this afternoon, all I wanted was a stomach pump (because I’d eaten too much and was feeling quite uncomfortable) and a nice, cosy little nap… so guess what I did?! I played WoW! Yes, I not only logged on and finished processing all my Followers and their various Missions, something that I wasn’t able to do this morning because the U.S. side of Blizzard was having massive problems – we don’t quite know what happened, apart from the fact that it was definitely a State-side problem, and possibly something to do with routing (Sorry! As you know, I’m totally non-technical – I’m simply parroting Julian, OK?!) but the latency was sometimes as long as 8 seconds, and our connection kept dropping every few minutes or so, rendering the game totally unplayable. We knew it was only the State-side servers that were affected because the Sydney-based server Nagrand was working just fine, anyway, we stuffed around on Nagrand for a while, hoping the U.S. side of things would come good again, but it didn’t! When we got back this afternoon, I decided to try it, and everything seemed to be back to normal again – so I processed Wynterthyme’s Followers and their Missions, deleted another Transport and built a second Battleship instead, and went to work on Shekinàh. Oh dear, I’d forgotten that she didn’t have enough Garrison Resources to send her Followers out on Missions, and she’s “too young” to have a Shipyard yet, so there was nothing to do there except sit around and wait for the Garrison Cache to get big enough to “harvest” – that’ll net me enough Garrison Resources to start sending my Followers out (a full Garrison Cache yields around 500 Garrison Resources, so it’s worth waiting for it to fill up, which takes about three or four days…) Then I sat and twiddled my thumbs a bit – I knew I should probably be putting my feet up and sleeping off my dinner, but I didn’t want to, so I turned to my second WoW account and decided to start off another character (I have quite a few empty character slots on my second account 😉 ) to boost to level 90 and another Garrison – why? Because I’m a bit jittery about Shekinàh choosing a different Follower from the one Wynterthyme did – he’s just a bit too good at completing Missions to want to miss out on… So I created another Draenei called Såpphíra, with the intention of getting her to level 21, and then boosting her to level 90, etc., etc., and so forth! 🙂 So despite the fact that I kept falling asleep in the middle of quests – thank heavens I was still in the baby area – I persevered until dinner time, which neither of us had because we’d had so much for lunch – so we watched the news and had a Chia Pod each, and a cup of coffee. It was a good day – the restaurant, Pescare, is in Century City Walk – sort-of next to, and behind the Novotel on Springvale Road – was a bit of a mixed bag – the food was really wonderful – the service, slightly on the lower side of “adequate”, I’m afraid – but the staff were nice, quite friendly and accommodating – just slow, and… dare I say it, not terribly well trained in hospitality and service. However, if it’s good food you’re after, and you don’t mind slow and occasionally slightly clumsy service, do go there – the food’s definitely worth it! The wine list isn’t extensive, but you can BYO wine and spirits – so we took along a bottle of Veuve Clicquot that we got in a Christmas Hamper from Julian’s sister last year – it’s been sitting in the fridge waiting for a “special occasion” – and what better “special occasion” could there be than our double Big Birthday Bash?! 🙂 My favourite youngest daughter and her husband gave Julian and me a very welcome Amazon Voucher each, and my favourite eldest daughter and her husband gave us the full set of The Dr. Blake Mysteries, which we’ve been enjoying very much since it started on ABC1 in 2013. My very favourite youngest daughter wrinkled her nose up in distaste when she heard that it starred Craig McLachlan, because she remembers him (I hope I’m not dating her by saying this! 😉 ) from the show “Neighbours”, many years ago, when she’d thoroughly disliked him, as I’m sure a lot of you did… But he’s grown up, and grown older, and he plays the part of the middle-aged Doctor extremely well – it’s a great series, which Julian and I can both thoroughly recommend!
Food stuffz: last night we had pan-fried pork fillet, with snow peas, half a home-grown tomato (which was absolutely wonderful!) and chips – I blotted my copybook (again!) by having some more of the totally scrumptious Coles brand very low-calorie Rice Pudding and a store-bought fig for dessert… And now I suppose you’re all hanging out for what I had to eat at Pescare today! Well, let’s see… we got there, sat down, and were given a couple of bottles of iced water… Seeing that we were out, and that it was a special, social occasion, I had a cocktail – a “Tequila Sangria 15” – which sounds good, but was basically just your common or garden variety fruit punch, with a Tequila base! Lots of bits of fruit in it – pineapple, raspberries, strawberries, and little chunks of lemon, which I ate, because I thought it was orange. I only ate one… For my Starter, I had “Saffron Arancinis” – three little crumbed rice balls, about the size of a squash ball? with a teeny cube of goat cheese in the middle of the ball – each one sitting on a teeny dollop of olive paste, with a small pile of (“undressed”, thankfully!) arugula on the plate next to them. For Mains, I had the Lamb Rump, which was about seven or eight nice sized little nuggets of very lean roast (or it might have been grilled – it’s hard to say!) lamb, served on grilled vegetables (mostly pumpkin, carrots, zucchini, broccoli… and eggplant chunks, which I didn’t eat because I don’t like eggplant!) quinoa and hummus dip. Both those dishes were extremely good, well presented, very delicious – and apart from the olive paste under the arancinis and the hummus under the lamb – pretty low-calorie! The glasses that the staff provided for our champagne were very small, for champagne flutes! Just a little bigger than your average sherry or martini glass – it makes sense – you don’t drink as much, and the bottle goes a lot further if there are a lot of people there. Neale (Lee’s husband) was driving, so he only had one of the small glasses, as did Kate, who was also a “designated driver” – so the rest of us polished off the rest of the bottle between us – I suppose that even with two glasses of champagne, I had less than I would have had if I’d had one normal sized champagne glass. Ah, yes… but then there was dessert, wasn’t there! And that’s where I met my Waterloo, in the form of a Mars Bar Chocolate Cake! It came with no cream, but with a very small scoop (too small, really!) of the most delicious chocolate ice cream I think I’ve ever eaten! I don’t know why it was called a “Mars Bar” cake – I couldn’t see anything “Mars-bar-ish” about it – but my goodness, it was so terribly yummy! I’m a real sucker for chocolate cake of any sort, especially when it has that lovely, thick, sticky, gooey dark chocolate frosting all over it.. I shall probably dream of it tonight… 
(Now do you all understand why I didn’t want any dinner tonight? 🙂 The only reason I had the Chia Pod tonight was because it was cool, slightly and weirdly crunchy, and slipped down like jelly)
Weigh-in this morning. Thank heavens for small mercies! And I do, unfortunately, mean “small” mercies! I went down one point – from 62.7kg to 62.6kg. I’m not sure how much I’ll have gone up tomorrow, but all things considered, the only really “naughty” things I had today was the alcohol – the Tequila Sangria 15 (which I don’t think really contained very much alcohol!) the champagne… and the lucious Mars Bar cake – so maybe it won’t be too bad, when I get on the scales in the morning (says Winter, clutching at straws like a drowning rat on a sinking ship!) 😉 I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow night!
And so to tomorrow – I may not even want breakfast, you know – I still feel full! Anyway, hopefully Blizzard will still be up and running smoothly tomorrow and I’ll be able to get a few quests done! But apart from that, and that Josh will be over in the afternoon so my hair will look nice again, I think tomorrow is mostly free! Anyway, ’tis late, and I’ve blathered on long enough, so once again – that’s about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Do drop in again tomorrow to see what sort of punishment the Mars Bar cake wreaked on my poor long-suffering body, weight-wise; if Shekinàh has been able to get any Followers out on Missions yet, and what other adventures or misadventures I’ve had during the day – but until then, please at least try to bee good, remember that intelligence is the ability to adapt to change, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 