12.15 pm
Coffee and pre-lunch break! 🙂 Julian and I have been playing WoW pretty much all morning – you’ve no idea how much exercise you get, running around killing monsters for fun and profit, so it must be good for you, right? 😉 We did our “Daily” quest for oil – in fact, we did two, so I now have enough oil to send a couple more of my ships off on Missions. We also scored a second Garrison Hearthstone – sort-of – this one is a Compass which takes you directly back to your Shipyard, which in turn forms part of your Garrison, so it might as well be a secondary Garrison Hearthstone. I’m just darting back again, as I have a couple of things to hand in to different Factions, which might earn me some Reputation points! 🙂 Back soon-ish…
04.45 pm
Here I am again with another snippet – once again, I’ve been hard at work om WoW, this time I’ve been busy leveling up young Wïnter! As you know, I got her to level 10 – but of course I couldn’t go and get Mangeclaw until she was level 11, because you can’t tame an animal that’s a higher level than you are… Oh, it was fun and games! 🙂 I got the quest that would take me to Loch Modan, and set out to level up mainly by Exploration (you get experience points for Exploration and Discovery) One of Julian’s characters, “Demsbank” (short for “Demelza’s Banker” – basically he was supposed to be the “Stay at home and do the banking” type character, but he got itchy feet…) managed to get up to level 20, simply by exploring the whole of Azeroth – dying countless times, collecting Flight Points, and doing a lot of “Death Running” (as explained in a much earlier blog – do you want me to explain it all again? No… I thought not! 😉 ) On the way to Loch Modan I also leveled up my Herbaling – I’d already taken my Skinning up to level 75, and I had another 20 or so Herbs to pick to get my Herbaling skills to that level – so by the time I’d completed and handed in my quest, I was just about ready to Tame Mangeclaw and boost myself up to level 90! Only a few more Herbs to pick… Finally! All ready to go! I hit the Boost button (now I have no more free Boosts left, I hope I’ve done the right thing!) and found myself, sans Pet, at the Dark Portal – no attributes to speak of, no healing potions, no back-up Pet plan – just me in my not-terribly-attractive new gear – “barefooted” so to speak! I conjured up a Flying Mount and flew back to Stormwind, where I proceeded to set myself up properly! Suitable level Healing Potion – check! Pet called – check! Re-Train and resume special attributes – check! I’m now back at the Dark Portal again, this time all set up properly…
Food stuffz so far today: Breakfast was one and a half Ferguson Plarre Hot Cross Buns each, toasted, and with a scrape of butter – totally delicious! I’d happily eat them for breakfast every morning, if I could! (well, maybe I wouldn’t – but they’re so yummy!) For lunch today I had a really delicious sandwich, made with our new favourite bread – Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread with sesame and poppy seeds all over the crust. The sandwich filling was some leftover Nandos chicken tenders, with some Iceberg lettuce leaves, and some of the basil-pesto hummus – one of the nicest sandwiches I’ve eaten this week! 😉 Then Julian and I really made pigs of ourselves! We both ate one of our Easter Eggs (they were about 9 cm long? I think?) Mine was “Hand rolled in Almond chips”, and it was really nice… I’d been wondering – should I eat the Easter Eggs as slowly as possible, one thin shard of chocolate per night, making them last as long as possible? Or should I try to get rid of them as quickly as possible, by gobbling down one whole, entire Easter Egg per day, the way I did this afternoon, so that they can’t sit there, taunting and tempting me! Oh well, I only have one more “normal” sized Easter Egg – I guess that’ll go tomorrow, if I’m lucky – and I still have the box of Lindt “Easter Selections” – bunnies, eggs, and (chocolate) carrots – then Easter will be over for another year, and we’ll go back to our normal breakfasts of Vita Brits, extra bran, half a banana, and 200 ml of skinny milk! Of course, while we’ve been having these lovely Hot Cross Buns for breakfast, the bananas that we’d normally have had on our Vita Brits have started to get a little bit “over-ripe” – so not wanting to waste them, and being in the middle of a somewhat more “festive” week, I’ve printed out three Banana Cake recipes for Julian, to see if he can master the art of cake-making! 😉
Back again soon….
10.15 pm
Food stuffz so far today (continued) [Winter reads back over what she’s written… being a glutton with an Easter Egg… nice sandwich… banana cake recipes…] I reckon that just about brings us up to dinner time! 🙂 Well, we were going to have some sort of lemon chicken thingy for dinner tonight, but we had chicken for lunch yesterday, chicken in a sandwich for lunch today, and I think Julian’s been feeling a little under the weather from all the unaccustomed rich and heavy food (not to mention the medium-sized Easter Egg, and the fairly large chocolate Bunny that he ate today!) (and I’d though that I was being gluttonous!) so we had omelets… he had a plain one (just eggs) and mine had ham, tomato, spring onion, and cheese, because I was feeling perfectly fine – probably because I have a much higher tolerance for large doses of chocolate than he does! 😉 (sometimes it pays to be a chocolaholic! 😉 ) I even had a small slice of what was left of the Flourless Chocolate Cake – unfortunately there was no cream left, so I had it with a very small drizzle of skinny milk poured over it. My Corella pears that I bought on Thursday will be/should be ripe enough to eat by tomorrow – I hope so, anyway, but unfortunately, our store-bought figs started to grow beards, so we had to throw them out, so unless we can find a few more growing over the back fence, I’ll just have to go fig-less! 
I can’t say that I’m terribly happy about what, and how much, I’m eating at the moment, but – as I kept on saying about my Optifast diet – this isn’t forever! Easter, and all it’s tempting trappings will soon be over, and I can get back to eating “properly” (read: “sensibly”!) again.
Weigh-in this morning. Was worse than horrible! I went up over a kilo – from 62.6kg to 63.8kg – but as Julian said, a lot of it is probably fluid, because you don’t put on that much weight (by putting on fat) overnight. I’m a trifle concerned, but I’m not worried (yet!) – I’m pretty much looking at the next couple of weeks from an academic view point – of mild interest, but of no great import – because Easter is an artificial and transient time, and not a lifestyle change. I shall be very interested in seeing where my weight goes from here – probably straight up!
And so to tomorrow – the Lexus is being serviced tomorrow, so it’s going to be a “bitty” sort of day because Julian will be in and out, dropping off the car, and picking it up again, as well as taking my favourite eldest daughter to another appointment. The cleaning lady is coming tomorrow morning, and Josh will be over in the afternoon. I have Wïnter to get through all the hassles of the Dark Portal and into Draenor, so that she can establish her Garrison – and I have Wynterthyme to take out questing – trying to get to “Revered” with one of the Draenei Factions, before I die of old age! Shekinàh is still messing around, trying to get her Garrison working properly, but she says that she keeps getting interrupted when I decide to take Wynterthyme out instead… whilst poor old Arisnoë is still sitting around in a Grizzly Hills meadow, waiting for her Prince Arcturis, the Spirit Bear to turn up. I tell you (Winter shakes her head resignedly) it isn’t easy being a Gamer! My mother would say that it’s “unproductive” – and it’s true, it is unproductive! But so is sitting around and watching sit-coms on TV, or reading the newspaper – or what passes for “news” papers these days! And while sitting around playing games might be “unproductive”, it’s certainly a lot better and safer than a lot of other pleasures and pastimes I could name! 😉 But anyway, that’s about it from me again for tonight – don’t forget to drop in again tomorrow night to find out if Julian’s stomach has settled down, if my weight continued to spiral upwards at a rate of knots, and if I ate my second last (and medium-sized!) Easter Egg, all in one go too! Until then though, please do try to bee good, remember that in general, people are always quick to believe what they want to be true, and don’t forget to keep warm – or cool – depending on your inclination, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 