05.33 pm
My goodness! I’m starting quite late tonight – that’s because I’ve been busy finishing off my new desktop bookmarks wallpaper thingy – I really wasn’t happy with the last one – and besides, it didn’t really go with the new window blind that I got this morning 😉 It’s quite dark – as in a fairly dark charcoal – with a very smart “ox-blood” type of red (it has a fair bit of brown in it) for the trim – so I’ve done a sort-of reverse. I did try for the charcoal background, but that made the screen terribly dark and gloomy – so I’ve reversed it and made the background the smart “ox-blood”, and used the charcoal (which actually looks black) as the “trim” – with accents of gold on my “Winter” symbol, up near the top next to the text frame, and white on a small snowflake down near the lower right-hand corner. It does look quite smart – but who knows when I’ll decide to change it again – probably the next time I download and use a new window blind, I guess… 🙂 Well, look at it this way – while I’m happily messing around with new desktop bookmarks wallpapery thingies, I’m not fiddling around changing the blog templates and headers, am I! 😉
I spent most of the day playing WoW – only breaking off to work on my graphics when my right shoulder and arm got too sore to keep playing. I’m beginning to think that the arms on my chair might be just a wee bit too high, which tilts my posture to the left (which is probably why all my tops keep sliding off my almost non-existent shoulders on the left hand side! It’s extremely most annoyment!) however, I managed to get Arisnoë to within four bubbles of level 95 – and she’d pretty much only just turned level 94 yesterday at close of play – so that’s not too bad going for a day, I suppose. While I was out hacking away at monsters and demons and such, Julian was out doing some shopping for our disgusting grot and algae puddle, laughingly called a “fish pond”. We now have a pump, to get the water out of the puddle, and we have a small glass aquarium, in which to place our two little fishies while we clean up their home (it also has a glass lid, so that Flipper can’t get in and have a bath with said fishies!) This will all be happening tomorrow (I think!) but we may yet keep the fishies in their small holding tank for a while longer. We’ll clean out the grot and algae puddle, and put in some water plants and some snails, so that it will look nice, and keep reasonably clean, but not put these fishies back in there – we thought we’d get going with planting our fig tree, and installing a somewhat larger and deeper, proper fish pond, with some pretty water plants and a small waterfall-slash-fountain in it, where it will get plenty of shade from the fig tree and the shed on summer afternoons (we don’t want boiled fish!) and then put our little fishies in there, and get them a few new friends to play with. Those lucky little fishies! I’m starting to feel quite jealous! I wouldn’t mind frolicking around in a nice clean little pond, with pretty plants, and a waterfall or fountain to play in! According to the gentleman in the Aquarium place that Julian went to, we’re to fill the little holding tank half full of tap water, let it sit for a bit (Julian did tell me how long the man said to let it stand for, but that was half an hour ago, I was concentrating on my graphics, and I’ve forgotten what he said! Sorry!) and after it had sat there for “X” hours (or minutes!) to fill the rest up with their disgustingly filthy, grotty and algae filled pond water, and then we can catch our fishies and transfer them to the holding tank, where we’re not to feed them for about three days, as they’ll be stressed out from their enforced resettlement – and I guess with slightly different and cleaner water, they may get upset tummies, too!
Ah yes! Tummies, and what’s good for them, and what’s not so good for them! Remember that cake I made yesterday, with the sultanas and apple bits in it? It was absolutely delicious! I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but it’s been a very long time since I made even a packet cake, let alone one from scratch! But, it seems that I haven’t lost my touch – next time I’ll make the citrus variation, and if that turns out alright, I might even try my hand at a Devil’s Foodcake recipe! It’s one that my mother made every Saturday, for years and years and years, when I was growing up. Friends would always come over on Saturday night to play Poker, or Solo, and it was always to our place because they were all bachelors, and I guess they liked getting a good meal when they arrived, and a luscious chocolate cake for supper! Anyway, Mum would make this cake, and one of my favourite things to do on a Sunday morning, while my parents were still asleep, was to get out of bed, creep into the kitchen, cut myself a healthy size chunk of cake, pour some cream over it, then scuttle back to bed with my cake and a teaspoon, where I’d cuddle into the blankets and devour my filched prize with glee! Ahh… nostalgia! 🙂 It’s a fairly easy cake to make, in that most of it is created in the blender (or Vitamizer) then you simply add the blender mixture to the flour, and bake it – in two tins because it’s a two-layer cake. The icing, or frosting, is a little harder – Mum used to make it with Copha, I think, and it can get a bit tricky – I always found that the Betty Crocker ready-made chocolate frosting tasted exactly the same as Mum’s icing, and all you had to do was scrape it out of the tub and apply it to the cake! Much more easier! 🙂 It’s also nice just to eat it straight from the tub, but I’d never do that now (well, maybe just a teeny taste then, just for old time’s sake! 😉 ) But getting back to the cake I made yesterday, the sultanas and apple bits all went where they were supposed to – that is, they didn’t all just sink down to the bottom of the cake – though next time I’d use three or four mini-packets of the dried fruit – I thought it could have done with a bit more in it, and the texture was right, and it tasted… just like it should! 🙂
09.32 pm
Food stuffz: last night for dinner we had another one of those delicious steaks – the ones you could cut with a spoon – with our green beans, from our own veggie garden, and which were very, very nice – half a store-bought tomato, and chips. Naturally for dessert I had a piece of my cake, and a low-fat strawberry yoghurt. We had sandwiches for lunch today, made with the Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread, with sliced sandwich silverside, low-fat Halloumi cheese, and some tomato and chili relish – very delicious – and tonight for dinner we had pan-fried chicken breast on a bed of steamed rice which had our very own home-grown, finely chopped, spring onions in it. Julian also got some more Corella pears today, so for dessert I had another piece of my cake, and one of my pears, so I feel very well-fed! 🙂
Weigh-in this morning. Was a bit of a shocker! I must admit, I’d grown so used to bobbing around the 63.2kg – 63.3kg mark that I was a trifle taken aback this morning to see that I’d shot up four points! From 63.2kg to 63.6kg! And I didn’t even have any cream on my cake! S’not fair! If I’d known I was going to go up like that, I would have at least put some cream on my cake, and be damned to the consequences! Unfortunately, those damned consequences must have known what I had planned, and got their crumb in the door first! *pout* I didn’t have any cream on my cake tonight, either… because the cream had gone past its “use by” date *cry* Oh well, let’s see what my weight does tomorrow… 
And then there’s tomorrow – Saturday – with all its fishy connotations… It’ll be fun to see the little fishies swimming around on top of the dining room sideboard – which is about the only place they can go, apart from the hall table, which is really a bit too dark – the little fishies would think we’d moved to Alaska, and the land of the midnight sun! And Sunday, I believe that Mouselet and Wynterthyme have a hot date planned in Ulduar! Now that I’ve finished my new desktop bookmarks wallpaper thingy, I’ll be able to concentrate on Arisnoë’s very gradual level advancement, though I’m sure that Mouselet and Wynterthyme will also get a good run with their Reputation and Riding quests! And once again folks, that’s about it from me again for tonight! Don’t forget to look in again tomorrow night to find out if there’s any cake left, what my weight is up to (or, hopefully, down to!) and whether Arisnoë has reached level 95.5, with only a few more bubbles to the longed for level 96! Until then though, Gentle Readers, please do your very best to bee good, don’t forget that if you don’t raise your eyes you will think that you are the highest point, and remember to always drive carefully, to keep cool – or warm – depending on the weather, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please! Remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 