April 25th, 2016 – ANZAC Day – “Lest we forget…” (good one, channel 7! 😦 )
Only one more bubble to go! One more bubble to “Exalted” with Hand of the Prophet! I can hardly believe it! This time tomorrow, I might have my level three Trading Post! (Winter hums softly to herself: “One more bubble to ding… so shut up and grind (grind, grind, grind…)”) This morning Mouselet and Wynterthyme finished off the awful quest that they began last night – supposedly rescuing Arakkoa prisoners from Skettis. If this daily comes up again, I don’t think I’ll take it – it’s just too fraught! There are as many mobs as there are grains of sand on the beach – and as tightly packed – they’re lightning fast, and some of them attack in groups of five or more. They’re easy enough to kill – there’s no problem about getting them down, it’s just that there are so damn many of them! What you’re supposed to do is kill anything that has a red name plate over its head, and collect four keys from them. Then, you’re supposed to click on a very small round leg-iron ball at the end of a chain on four Arakkoa prisoners, who then join you in romping around a very small, already overcrowded and confusing area, freeing more “prisoners” – who also join you! Then you have to escort them across the compound to an NPC waiting outside, to complete the quest – all while fighting off the easy to kill, but frustratingly numerous mobs! The other fly in that quest’s ointment is the time you turn up to do it. The server, or realm, Quel’Dorei, is on the US West Coast, and because of the time difference between their PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) and our EST (on weekends and holidays especially!) it means that our evenings are usually their peak periods, and the place was not only crawling with hostile mobs, it was also overrun by other players! The keys that the mobs drop are not prolific – even the scrolls lying on the ground that we had to pick up this morning were as scarce as hen’s teeth – and it was often a matter of shooting at a whole lot of mobs that you really couldn’t handle in one foul swoop, but simply to “tag” them (so that no-one else could shoot it before you did!) We got ourselves into trouble quite often doing that – and don’t worry – all the other players were doing the same thing! The whole thing was a real nightmare! Picking up the scrolls this morning wasn’t too pleasant, either – same scenario, different objective – we did get through it, but there were a few very frayed tempers before we finished 
We worked on Dailies until lunchtime, when Julian went off to do a bit of real work, and muddled around a bit more with Wynterthyme, and completed another Fishing daily – I was going to go off and work with Arisnoë for a bit, but decided to start transcribing the Lamb and Harissa Lasagne recipe instead… but all that happened was that I got furiously fed up with Word, because it wouldn’t let me make “neat” fractions! You can get the ½, ¼, and ¾ ones, but you can’t make a 2/3, or 1/5, or any other fraction – and you can’t in Word Press, either! (*very annoyed look at screen*) I tried everything I could… you can sort-of kludge them by using Word’s Equations function, but they don’t line up properly with the other characters on your page, and they look clumsy and “not quite right”… so I went searching for a font that would give me all the fraction permutations I was after. Naaaah! Apparently no such animal – or font – exists! By this stage I was seething, hating and detesting Word from the bottom of my soul! Surely I can’t be – in fact I refuse point-blank to believe that I am the only person alive who wants to insert a “2/3 of a cup” that will match up with the “½ a cup” above it in the Ingredients list?! It shouldn’t be so hard! In this so-called enlightened and supposedly “educated” age, the “information” age, a program like Microsoft Word, that’s used all over the known world, should be able to create any fraction you can think of, just like that! (Winter snaps her fingers) I know that the world has largely turned decimal, but believe it or not, Microsoft, people do – every now and then – still use those archaic little anomalies called “fractions” – admittedly, not terribly often these days, but often enough to warrant inclusion in your oh-so-superior document creator, Word! So after a great deal of wasted time – wasted trying to find ways and means, or even a work-around, for inserting fractions into a recipe – I flung my hands up in the air in disgust, and downloaded LibreOffice Writer – which, by the way, is Free – and I’ll give that a go. It’s still not at all easy, putting in a fraction, it’s really only a modicum better than Microsoft’s stupid program – and it does take a bit of getting used to the way it looks (i.e. very “klunky” and “kludgy”) but… we’ll see how it goes… And that’s really about all I’ve had time to do today – so, on to the “important bits”, eh? 🙂
Food stuffz: Because last night was Sunday night, we had omelets for dinner – vegetarian ones this time, as we’d run out of ham and bacon, and I really didn’t think that cold roast sandwich beef would go all that well in an omelet… It had store-bought tomato in it, Halloumi cheese, home-grown spring onions, home-grown capsicum in it, and it was quite delicious! For dessert I had a slice of my cake, and a small bowl of the Coles-brand, very low-calorie, and extremely delicious Rice Pudding. Tonight we’re having chicken sausages, with mashed potatoes, half a store-bought tomato, and… home-grown green beans! Julian managed to eke another small bowl full of them this afternoon! For dessert, silly me forgot to ask Julian to get me some more Corella pears when he went shopping this afternoon, so I’ll just have to rough it with a last slice of my cake, and either a low-fat fruit yoghurt, or some more of the extra delicious Coles-brand Rice Pudding. Ah well, my very favourite eldest daughter will be over tomorrow – maybe Julian can pick me up some more pears then… (Winter thinks: “hmm… we have some peach slices in natural juice in the fridge now, thanks to my nagging – maybe I can have a few of those – with my Rice Pudding! Yeah! That’d go down a treat, I reckon!” 😉 )
Weigh-in this morning. Yet another surprise awaited me when I stepped onto the scales this morning! I went from 63.2kg… to 63.4kg! I went up two points! (down one point, up two – down two points, up one – bounce, bounce, bounce!) It’s almost as good as playing Snakes and Ladders, except without the rolling the dice, to see how far you move! No rhyme nor reason – just the luck of the snake scales, in this game of weight and see!
Which brings me to tomorrow, and the arrival of my very favourite eldest daughter! We should have some more of “The 100” to watch, plus at least one episode of “Supergirl”, and one of “Orphan Black”, as well as “Arrow” and “Flash”, so we should be kept well occupied in the loungeroom tomorrow! 🙂 The fishies, Auric and Dapple, are doing very well so far, and really, neither Julian nor I have the heart to put them back into the outside pool when it’s finally clean enough and ready, after all they’ve been through. The small pond out the front will get some plants, and some water snails to help keep it clean, and the larger pond that will be going in the back yard will get a fountain of sorts – possibly a waterfall one – some plants, and probably a few fish as well – if we do put fish in it we’ll put some sort of discrete netting over it so that the birds won’t be able to get at them – but Auric and Dapple will remain indoors with us – we’ll get them a nicer, bigger tank, with gravel in the bottom, some sort of rocks or whatever, so that they can play “hidey”, and some nice little plants. Anyway, that’s about it from me again tonight – don’t forget to call in again tomorrow night to find out what Lee and I watched, what tricks my weight played on me in the morning, and how Wynterthyme is going with her “Exalted” Reputation! 🙂 Until then, however, please try to bee good, remember not to strive to be a success, but rather strive to be of value, and don’t forget to keep warm – or cool – depending on whether you’re going to be indoors or outside, to look after yourselves, and to always drive carefully… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 