05.15 pm

Sunday – and a fun day it’s been too! Last night I changed Arisnoë’s Faction, from being a member of the Horde, to a member of the Alliance! 🙂 And despite what the “instructions” said, I was able to choose my Race, as well as keep my name without having to change any of the letters or accents – so I’m really pleased about that! 🙂 I’m a Human now, and I’m now able to move around in my Garrison without getting hopelessly lost because everything’s so grubby and messy, clumsily built, dark and dingy, and quite frankly, ugly! Alliance Garrisons are much more betterer! 🙂 I didn’t get much of a chance to play with Arisnoë today – I got her into the Guild first thing this morning, and did a quick bit of a tidy-up of her bags and bank at lunch time – the rest of the time Wynterthyme and Mouselet held the Fort – or should that be Garrison now? This morning they did their Stable Training quests, and it’s surprising just how long they take to do! We each had six quests to do – four of those were the same – we both had to kill the same mobs – so we were able to complete them together, and have those “kills” counting for both of us. For the last two though, we had different mobs to kill, and we had to go from one side of Nagrand to the other to complete those, but it also gave us plenty of opportunities to collect ore for Mouselet, and trees (lumber) for me, so it was all good. We sleep in on Sundays, so we didn’t start on these quests until after 10 am – and it took us most of the morning to get them all finished! We also did our Daily Oil quest, and another one, which we ended up doing twice, because I hadn’t picked up the quest when I should have, and Mouselet couldn’t share it with me because it was a Garrison quest. The quest was to kill this giant worm, which looks something like the huge Sand Worms from the movie “Dune”. Has anyone reading this seen “Dune”? If not, go and Google “Dune sand worm”! 🙂 Very nasty! The quest recommends using three players, as this “worm” is a level 101 Gold Elite, and as I said to Julian, “well, we are more or less three players! You, me, and Swipe!” so fully expecting to die a horrible and painful death, we decided to give it a go anyway! So of we trotted, and found our Giant Worm (called “Tremor”) and lit into him. For a level 101 Gold Elite, he wasn’t all that tough, but his worst trick was to disappear into the earth, and summoning groups of what looked like giant lobsters to fight us. These giant lobsters swarmed onto the beach wearing what looked like skirts made of rope netting, which they dropped when they died. It looked very strange… The “skirts” was “pick-up-able”, and we weren’t quite sure what they were for, at first – it turned out that they were to throw over Tremor to stop him disappearing underground, and once we had that sorted out, it wasn’t all that hard to kill him, so after we’d danced on his carcass a bit, we were about to go off and do something else, but as our bags were still full of used Mount whistles, we went back to our Garrisons, got rid of the whistles, and I picked up the “Tremor” quest – then back we went, and did it all over again! 🙂 We stopped for lunch at around one o’clock, and while Julian was making the sandwiches, I tidied Arisnoë up a bit, and sent her Followers off on their new Missions.

After lunch, because Wynterthyme and Mouselet didn’t have any really serious or interesting quests to do (as opposed to the ordinary old “Daily” type quests) we decided to continue working our way through some of the old Dungeons from earlier expansions – the main one which peaked our interest was Karazhan – a Dungeon from “Burning Crusade”, the expansion that had just been released when we first started playing WoW, all those years ago! At the time, Karazhan was considered to be probably the toughest, hardest, and most important “Raid-type” Dungeon¹ in WoW. I only went along on one Karazhan run, and only managed to complete a very small section of it – it was busy, it was hard, and it was very confusing, with so much going on all around you. I was not sorry to leave! Julian did a lot more of it than I did, and he didn’t get more than about half way through it. Some players had a regular weekly Karazhan run organised, and for those involved in them, it was a Very Big Deal! Some of the drops were certainly well worth the fighting and the dying for, too! Anyway, off we went to Karazhan – just the two of us, and Swipe. We waltzed through the place, one-shotting everything, and having a great time! It’s really so good to go through those places and be able to look around at the magnificent art work that’s gone into the construction of these areas – it’s really worth seeing – which you can’t, when you’re up to your eyeballs in bloodthirsty ghosts and monsters! The loot that we picked up – worth your character’s multiple deaths, back then – but totally useless to us now – we Vendored (well I did, I don’t know what Julian did with his!) It was too low-level for me to even think of DE-ing it back at the Garrison, and not having an Enchanter, I didn’t have anyone else who could DE it for me – so I had to Vendor it 😦 After we’d gone through Karazhan like a dose of salts, we went on to do another two Dungeons from the next expansion – “Wrath of the Lich King” – the “Halls of Stone“, and the “Halls of Lightning” – we didn’t have time to do “Ulduar“, the third in that series of Dungeons – Julian says that it’ll take about two hours to do that one, even at our level, because there’s lots of Achievements to pick up there! Ooo-er! 😮 We’ll probably do that next week… We’ve both done the two Halls before – ages and ages ago – and as we were in a fairly large group (there were about ten of us, from memory) we didn’t fare too badly – but today we were actually able to see what the place looked like! I find it amazing that Blizzard go to such efforts to make the interiors of these Dungeons so absolutely splendid and spectacular, because who has time to look around and admire the scenery when they’re fighting for survival! It’s only now that we’re such a high level that we can get into and run these Dungeons with so much ease that we can see and appreciate the work that’s gone into them. Totally fantastic! 🙂

Food stuffz: last night we had beef sausages for dinner (no, I don’t know what brand they were – sorry!) with chips, green beans, and a whole, small home-grown tomato. For dessert I had one of my Corella pears, and a slice of Julian’s Babka – fresh baked that afternoon – with a small blob of low-fat cream. Lunch today was another sandwich made with the Coles-brand multi-grain, seed encrusted bread, sandwich sliced corned silverside, low-far cheese, and shredded lettuce – all extremely nice! And tonight being Sunday night, it’s omelets for dinner, with ham, home-grown tomato, spring onion, and low-fat Halloumi cheese (Julian really does make extremely nice omelets!) And for dessert, another Corella pear, as well as a slice of cake (with a little bit of low-fat cream!)

Weigh-in this morning. Was a bit surprising, actually! I went up two points, from 63.1kg to 63.3kg… it’s gotta be the cake! Maybe I shouldn’t be having the low-fat cream with it… hmm… I might have my slice tomorrow night without it, and see if that helps (I doubt it though!)

Every morning, before breakfast, I walk for half an hour on the treadmill – that’s 2 kilometers, at 3.8 kph. This morning I didn’t. This morning was Sunday, and my back, my hips, and both my arms were really sore – I dunno – maybe it’s the cold weather – though it’s never bothered my joins before! Anyway, it’s not my arm joints that hurt, it’s my arm bones, so I don’t think it’s anything to do with the colder weather – I’m just getting old. Anyway, so this morning I decided that if I walk 2 kilometers a day from Monday to Saturday, on Sundays I deserve a bit of a break, and I’ll only do a half walk – 1 kilometer in 15 point-something minutes, at 3.8 kph, and if my weight goes up half a ton, so be it! *scowl*

So it’s the end of another week – I’m not quite sure what’s happening tomorrow, except that K., our cleaning lady will be here in the morning, and I’ll be seeing Josh in the afternoon. Julian has a bit of shopping to do, and a lot of work in the office and his Commodore 64 Room – he actually got his C-64 up and running the other day, and after finding the right cables, even got a colour display up on the monitor! I’m quite looking forward to hearing the old Commodore games music again after so many years! 🙂 And that’s about it from me for this evening! Do drop in again tomorrow night and find out how things are progressing in the Garrisons, whether my weight went up again or not (if it did, I’ll be having my cake “sans crème” from now on!) and all sorts of other bits and pieces of varying degrees of interest – but until then, please try to bee good, remember that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

¹Raid Dungeon – needing 10 to 20 players – usually more – to complete it. Definitely not for the faint-hearted!

04.48 pm

Here I am again – later than I wanted to start, but that’s because I was busy getting Arisnoë totally lost in Frostfire Ridge. I hate it. I hate the dingy, dirty colours, I hate the smoke and the flames and the snow – I just told Julian that while I’m not going to totally abandon Arisnoë, but I won’t be playing her in Draenor any more – I’ll bring her back to Pandaria, or wherever – but her ugly Horde Garrison can look after itself, because she won’t be! I spend the majority of my time wandering around the wilderness, trying to get from Point A to Point B – usually the really l-o-n-g way round big chains of mountains; getting lost, getting bored, getting cold, and getting thoroughly frustrated and exasperated! So no more! However, Julian came up with a good idea! I can do a Faction Change! Change Arisnoë from Horde to Alliance, and live and quest in a more civilised environment! Uno momento – I’m gunna have a quick look-see how much it costs to change Factions… right… basically, it’ll cost US$30. There are some restrictions, rules, and limitations – it looks like I won’t be able to choose which Race I want to be – apparently I’ll have to become a Draenei, but that’s OK, because the two “best looking” Races in WoW are the Blood Elves (what she is now) and the Draenei (what she’ll apparently become) there’s a lot more stuff about levels, how much gold you can take with you, what happens to Guild Banks, etc., etc. – all of which is easy enough to do. So! Next time I write to you all, Arisnoë the Blood Elf, will be Arisnoë the Draenei! I hope they’ll let me keep my name! If not, I’ll just change the accent over one of the letters! 😉

So, as you can see, I’ve been playing WoW just about all day (oh come now! Do I ever do anything else?! 😉 ) This morning Mouselet and Wynterthyme went out and did all of their Stable Dailies – taking the Stable mounts out and training them, an’ all that. When you get one of these “Training your Mount” quests, you’re told what you have to kill whilst mounted on the particular creature you’re training, and you’re given a special whistle, to call it to you. These special whistles occupy a whole bag slot, and you get six of the wretched things – one for each type of mount. Well, your Backpack is only a sixteen-slot bag, so by the time you’ve collected all your individual whistles, there ain’t much room left in your bag for such things as loot, gatherables, food, and whatever else you like to carry around with you on a permanent basis, so it makes sense to go and get rid of the Mount Training quests and hand them in, before getting yourself involved in something that’s likely to need a lot of “bag space” – the whistles go back to the quest giver when you hand in the completed quest. Anyway, after Mouselet and Wynterthyme had finished their Training quests, and dealt with their Followers and their Work Orders, Julian went off to finish constructing his small chest of drawers for the Commodore 64 Room, and I went off to work on my new desktop Bookmarks Wallpaper – which is now finished, and in use! However, I’m not all that happy with it… it’s simply too “plain-jane”! It’s nice enough, but it really needs some sort of a pattern or something in the background – I’m not quite sure exactly what yet, but it does need something. In the meantime, it’ll just have to look… empty and unfinished!

Once I had that installed properly, I went back to retrieve Arisnoë from the icy cold crevasse where she’d been left last night. After a long, cold, hard slog around a huge mountain chain, I did actually manage to get to the place that I hadn’t been able to find yesterday – and I got that quest done… then I had to do another quest in that terrible tundra, and I got killed! The mob density (the number of hostile creatures that want to kill you as soon as they see you) is phenomenal! There were so many trigger-happy Orcs (where I was) and their blood-thirsty flying creatures milling around that it would have made a newly opened, full can of sardines look like a desert island! Usually, if you’re careful, and give these sorts of mobs a fairly wide berth, you can sneak around the edges of them – but these ones must have had an aggro range of about 200 kilometers or something, because they’d come racing all the way across huge empty caverns, just to attack you! Not nice!  I got killed again there, too… Finally I got through those quests, and Garrison Hearthed back home, where I was supposed to meet up with a quest giver – somewhere just outside – the Garrison. I went outside. Nothing! I went out the other Garrison gate. Nothing! I ran all around the damn Garrison! Deserted… I could see the little yellow question mark with denotes a quest turn-in – I just couldn’t find where it was! By this stage I was upset and grumpy. No, actually I wasn’t! I was distraught and almost hysterical, and tears of anger and frustration were shed. All I wanted to do was hand in this stupid quest, quit out, and settle down to write, and I’d been struggling with this wretched quest for two hours and I. Had. Had. Enough! In the end, clever Julian found this particular person – guess where? Not “outside the Garrison”, where the quest had told me to look for him, but inside the ruddy Garrison, right bang-smack in the middle of the central common area! That was when I made the decision not to play Arisnoë in Draenor again, and Julian suggested I change Faction, instead. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with the Guild Bank though… I think I’m the Guild Mistress at the moment – and while I could bring the whole Guild Bank with me, that would leave all my “junior” Horde girls without a Guild Bank, which would be a very mean thing to do (even though there isn’t much in it at the moment!) If it turns out that I am the Guild Mistress, I’ll hand it all over to one of my other Horde girls – after stripping it bare of anything that might be useful to the Alliance side of things, of course! 😉 But I’ll do all of that this evening, and let you all know what transpired tomorrow night, OK? 🙂

Food stuffz: Last night we had another of those fabulous pieces of fillet steak – the ones that are so tender that you could cut them with a tea spoon! Oh, it was just delicious! With it was had our usual half tomato (home-grown!) green beans, and chips. For dessert I had a low-fat citrus yoghurt, and one of the last two slices of Julian’s cake. I was going to make one myself this afternoon, but I didn’t want to leave Arisnoë in limbo again, so Julian has made the cake today – I will make the next one though, I promise! He says it’s the same as the one he made last time, with the cinnamon sugar in the middle of it – so I’m really looking forward to trying this one out tonight! For lunch today we had a reprise of the sandwich that we had the other day – with Coles-brand multi-grain, seed encrusted bread, sandwich-sliced cold roast beef, shredded lettuce, and sliced Halloumi cheese. Delicious! 🙂 Tonight we’re having beef sausages, green beans, chips, but this time, because our tomatoes nearly all finished, and these ones are very small (not much bigger than a large cherry tomato, really!) we’re having a whole home-grown tomato each! I shall have one of my Corella pears for dessert, as well as a slice of Julian’s new cake (maybe even with a little smidgen of low-fat cream!)

Weigh-in this morning. Well, considering the slightly oily spanakopita, and the rather over-syruped little cake slice that I had for lunch yesterday while we were out, I only went up one point! From 63.0kg to 63.1kg – so that’s not too bad, I guess! It’ll be interesting to see if I go up tomorrow though, after the beef sausages (which have virtually no fat in them, but probably lots of carbohydrates!) and a slice of Julian’s cake (with some low-fat cream 😉 ) Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to weight and see, won’t we! 🙂

And tomorrow we come once more to another Sunday! Traditionally, it’s a Mouselet and Wynterthyme Day for fossicking around Azeroth, or Draenor, but now that we’re both level 100, and each have our own separate Garrisons and Garrison quests, it’s getting quite hard to pair the quests up! Although both our Garrisons occupy the same space and time, they’re uniquely autonomous – his Garrison quests are different from mine – and of course we can’t share them – where would we hand them in? His Garrison “Scout” wouldn’t accept a quest that my Garrison “Scout” had given me – and vice-versa! The other quests, yes, we can share, but not the Garrison-specific ones. It doesn’t mean that we can’t do them both, each of us helping the other to get through the quest quickly, neatly, and efficiently. However, even though it does somewhat mess our Sunday quest scheduling up quite a lot, it’s “annoyment value” only, and we can live with it! So having said that, it’s now time for me to tell you all that it’s “that time” again, where I say “And that’s about it from me for this evening!” – so please do drop in again tomorrow night and find out how my weight reacted to more cake, and how Arisnoë’s Faction change went, whether she kept her name or had to change it. Plus, you’ll find out how we went in our general questing, and whether we died or not! 🙂 Until then though, please try to bee good, remember that life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television, and don’t forget to keep warm – or cool – depending on your preferences, to look after yourselves, and to always drive carefully… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

05.00 pm

Well, here I am again – I’ve been persevering with Arisnoë since we got home from our shopping expedition, and I’m reasonably pleased with her progress… at least I’ve managed to get her over the terrible quest that I was having so much trouble with yesterday (I really must cut my nails! – they keep snagging on all the wrong keys, and I’m spending more time backspacing and correcting typos, than I am typing! *frown*) Anyway, I finally managed to finish that (muttermutter) quest, and moved on to the next one, which is proving to be just as impossible to navigate to as the last one! I hate Frost Fire Ridge! It always seems to be very dark there – it’s snowing nearly all the time, and the colours are… black…. and a dingy, dirty grey – with the occasional patches of blindingly white snow. Not good colour choices, according to my old eyes! Well, I can’t see where I’m supposed to go, anyway – and just because Julian doesn’t seem to have any problems navigating around the area, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t, either, and that I’m just being silly, or that I should go and “look it up” in the forums! I can look these quests up in the forums until I go purple in the face, but if I can’t see where I’m going in the dark and dingy colours, reading up on the quest in the forums isn’t going to help! (why is it that all young-ish men seem to like dark (read “black”) “things”, colours, and places?!) So once again, Arisnoë is camped out in the snowy wilderness, with no clue as to how to get to where she has to go, while I sit in heated comfort, writing this. Oh! I never got around to telling you all what sort of Quilen Arisnoë managed to Tame, did I! It’s not a red one, unfortunately, it’s a white one – and this is what he (or she) looks like!

We had to go off this morning to have my Warfarin blood test done, and for once, we did manage to leave fairly early this morning! We were also going to do a bit of shopping – I needed a few items for the Babka that I’m going to be making – and we also wanted to look at some lounge suites… Yes, lounge suites. The one we got when we moved is a very nice one – it’s comfortable, too – if you’re just sitting down to have afternoon tea, or something, but sitting for a couple of hours watching television is… I’m not quite sure what the right word is! It’s not that it’s un-comfortable – it’s comfortable enough, but it’s also “very firm” – almost bordering on “hard” – and the leather upholstery is very smooth, and a bit shiny, so that if you sit on the chaise part to relax and watch something on TV with your legs up, your derrière tends to slide down the seat until you’re virtually lying prone, instead of sitting in an upright position in order to see the television properly. The salesman we saw today had a valid point – when you’re going out looking for a lounge suite, of course you’re going to want to try the seating out, so you sit down on the sofa, or one of the chairs, wriggle around a bit to get really comfy, and ask yourself three short questions: “Is this comfortable? [yes] Is the colour you want available? [yes] Is the price acceptable? [yes]” – then you jump up out of the chair or sofa that you’ve sat on for fully 3 minutes, and either say “I think I’ll think about it”, or you go ahead and buy it. The guy today had us both sitting down on the lounge suite as well as the chairs, with our feet up, exactly as we’d be sitting if we were watching television, for a good quarter of an hour or so (well, I probably sat for longer than that because Julian was up and down like a Jack-in-a-Box, measuring, and so forth!) because you really need to be sitting on the chair (the salesman said) for over ten minutes, before you have a reasonably good idea of whether or not that particular lounge suite is going to be what you want. We did have three or four places to go to, and look at lounge suites, but we didn’t bother – the lounge suite that we’d sat on for fifteen minutes ticked all our boxes, and was a very good price! It’s an electronic recliner lounge suite – in other words, the sofa and chairs are all plugged in, and instead of a lever or a little push-pull round button-type thingy, you have two very small, very discrete, buttons. One to raise your legs (and lower the back of your chair, so that you can sleep in it if you have to) and one to lower your legs (and raise the back of your chair again when you wake up) Now, if you planned on having your lounge suite arranged in the middle of a room, you could possibly strike a few problems with people constantly tripping over the wiring for the recliner mechanism, but as ours will be sitting against walls where there are plenty of power points, it won’t pose a problem for us. We’ll end up with six recliners altogether – two x two-seater couches, and two arm chairs. Leather, of course (for some reason cats don’t usually seem terribly interested in clawing leather upholstery to shreds – thank goodness!) in a fairly light and somewhat subdued red wine colour – they should be ready for delivery in about 8 weeks. If anyone out there in Reader Land is interested in buying our current lounge suite at a very reasonable price, please leave me a message or a comment! Ta… 🙂

I just got the results of my Warfarin blood test back My INR has gone up a lot, to 3.2 (it’s supposed to be around 2.5!) and they’ve changed my Warfarin dosage a bit – still 5mg Monday to Saturday, but only 4mg on Sunday. Next test is on April 22nd… *sigh* In the meantime, I’d better be careful not to cut myself… I might bleed to death… (that’s not very likely though! 🙂 )

Food stuffz: Last night we had some very nice pasta with tomato sauce and a modicum of parmesan cheese for dinner, and a slice of Babka with a drizzle of low-fat cream on it for dessert – I also had one of my Corella pears, and the extremely small (almost too small to be able to peel!) “over the fence” fig that Julian procured for me a couple of days ago. Today we were out at lunch time, so we stopped at a little coffee-type shop up at the Vermont South shopping centre for lunch. Julian had a ham, cheese and tomato croissant, and I had a piece of spanakopita – unfortunately with a very over-dressed salad on the side (which, of course, I didn’t eat!) and a small, tasty, but un-named piece of cake for dessert. Both the spanakopita and the little cake thingy were very nice – the spanakopita was a little on the oily side, and the cake was a little on the “over syruped” side, but all in all, it was quite nice, for a small coffee-type shop. I’m not sure what we’re having for dinner tonight – you’ll have to wait until tomorrow night to find out what we had! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Not too bad (it’ll prolly be up tomorrow though, after the spanakopita and the over syruped cake!) I went down another three points, from 63.3kg to 63.0kg. And I remembered to take my anti-fluid tablet when I got home this afternoon, so maybe I’m not getting Alzheimer’s, after all! 🙂 As for taking my anti-fluid tablet so late last night, it didn’t keep me awake and trekking to the bathroom all night, I slept very soundly – but I wouldn’t like to risk doing that again! 😮

Which brings me to tomorrow! And you know what? I have absolutely no idea what’s happening! Julian is building a small set of drawers (from an Officeworks flat-pack) for his Commodore 64 Room, though I think that’s almost finished – and tomorrow will probably be another WoW day for me – though I would like to finish off this new bookmark Desktop Wallpaper what’s-it that I’m making – there’s not much more to do to it really, as it’s very, very, “ultra plain” – but being me, I do want to put some sort of decoration on it – somewhere! I’m still thinking about it… and that’s really about it from me again for tonight! 🙂 Do call in again tomorrow night and find out if our coffee-type shop luncheon piled a few more points onto my weight, if I managed to extricate Arisnoë from her icy emergency camp-site, and if Julian has finished his little set of drawers for his Commodore 64 Room! Until then, however, please try to bee good, remember that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep cool – or warm – depending on what you’re doing, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

05.10 pm

Grr! I’m starting late again this afternoon, which means that I probably won’t get this finished before dinner! I’ve been playing WoW all day – oh, and working on a few graphics too, for a brand new Bookmarks Desktop Wallpaper – anyway, this afternoon I finally got completely fed up with not being able to use Arisnoë, because she was busy twiddling her thumbs in the middle of an empty paddock in Grizzly Hills – well, not entirely empty, really – it was full of Hunters, all hanging around and waiting for Arcturis, the Spirit Bear, to appear – for either shooting, or Taming – depending on their reasons for wanting to find him – and with that sort of competition, I felt that there was very little chance of Arisnoë ever getting to Tame him… The fact that Wynterthyme managed to get him was pretty amazing, and I was incredibly lucky – you see, we’re in Australia – most of the players on Quel’Dorei are in America. So not only is there the actual time difference – we’re seventeen hours ahead of them – there’s also a certain amount of “lag” time involved – a bit like when you see a news report, or Current Affair program on television – the news or current affair anchor will ask a reporter overseas a question, and there’s always a very noticeable “gap” or “pause” between the end of their question, and the reply from the correspondent overseas (this time is usually filled in with the overseas reporter standing there staring at the camera and nodding their head, for some reason!) So there’s a “time delay” between us and them – not a big one, but certainly enough to make a difference in game play. F’rinstance, if you’re playing WoW in Australia, and you go to pick something up (or to “Tame” something!) and someone from America is going for it too, even if you get there a split second sooner than they do, and you’re gleefully thinking “Yay! I got there first!”, you actually don’t. Thanks to that noticeable time delay, they get whatever it was that you were trying to get, first – every time! That’s why we were all so happy when Blizzard started up the server in Sydney (Nagrand) – now the tables would be reversed, and we’d get things before they did, for a change! And although we do have characters – a lot of characters – on Nagrand, we still always seem to stick with Quel’Dorei. When we first started playing WoW, we joined a Realm (server!) called Scarlet Crusade, because that’s where my favourite eldest daughter and her husband played – but we left there and migrated to Quel’Dorei because (back then) it was a smaller, less populous and much friendlier Realm (server) and we’ve pretty much been there ever since – it’s “home“! It’s also where all our best and favourite characters are, it’s got the biggest Guild Bank, and the most money. Sure, we could transfer the characters, the Guild Bank, and all the money, across to Nagrand, but unlike Rift, character transfer on World of Warcraft isn’t “Free” – and there are a lot of characters to transfer! So, we sit at “home” on Quel’Dorei, and curse and bitch at the time delay, but put up with it, the same as you put up with a squeaky floorboard in your comfy loungeroom! 🙂 So I grizzled and growled about Arisnoë not being able to get her Spirit Bear, and took her off to look for a different pet. But you all know me, I wanted something different, something unusual – something that not too many other Hunters would have… Unfortunately nearly all those sorts of “unusual” pets are either Rare or Elite, or both – and Arisnoë needed something under level 92. Once again I went and looked on Petopia, and found lots of nice pets, but… Wait a minute! That one wouldn’t be too bad! I’ll get one of those! It wasn’t a Rare, it wasn’t an Elite, and it looked – well, if perhaps not “pretty“, then certainly downright different and unusual! I wanted a red one… I talked Thuglet (Mouselet in disguise, i.e. Julian) into flying me around Pandaria to look for one, but… guess what! They’re invisible. Only Hunters can see them – sometimes – or even see their tracks! Air travel wouldn’t do me any good. Neither did running around in the wilds of Pandaria, because I got killed, while trying to follow the handy-dandy map of the Red Quilen path! Arisnoë decided to give up and just go home to her Garrison, but she really needed a Pet! Then Julian discovered that there was a Dungeon entrance close to where we were, and we thought we’d just poke our noses in and have a look-see what it was like – I mean, what could go wrong? If things started getting dire, we’d just duck out again, right? So in we wandered… and the first thing I saw was a lone Quilen, so I quickly started Taming him – while Julian started trying to kill him! “Don’t kill him! Don’t fight him! I’m Taming him!” I yelled! “What?” said Julian, still fighting my Quilen “I’m Taming him!” I explained again – but of course, fighting the Quilen had grabbed his aggro (the Quilen was now mad at Julian and wanted to bite him to death!) so Julian jumped out through the Dungeon “Portal”, and broke the aggro tie and I started Taming him. There was only one danger – to me – and that was that I was still suffering from “Rez sickness”. I told you that I died while trying to follow a path to a red Quilen, and I had run back for my body – but there were so many roving mobs milling around my poor little carcass that there was nowhere I could have reclaimed my body and resurrected myself that was even remotely safe So I returned to the Graveyard had got the Angel of Death/Spirit Healer to resurrect me – and paid for it by suffering from “Rez sickness” – 50% less health – for ten minutes. I wasn’t even half way through my Rez sickness when I started Taming my Quilen, but luckily for me, at level 92 I was still strong enough to withstand the Quilen’s attacks while I was Taming him (or her!) I’ve called him (or her) “Grog” 🙂 I then Hearthed back to my Garrison, stuffed around for a few more minutes, then quit, and started writing… rather later than I had initially planned!

Poor Julian had to go to the Dentist today, to have three fillings! Not because he had holes in his teeth, but because the Dentist wants to replace all his old, grey amalgam fillings with nice, shiny white composite resin ones. Apparently when amalgam fillings gets old they can start slowly releasing the mercury that’s in them into your system – which is not a Good Thing! He taxied there and back because I didn’t think it would be a good idea to drive back from The Pines with a mouthful of Novocaine, but he seems to have survived it all fairly well – and we’re having pasta for dinner tonight, so he won’t have to chew too hard 🙂

Must go – dinner’s almost ready… back anon…

---

09.43 pm

Back again… where was I? Oh yes, Julian going to the Dentist… He seems to be fully recovered now, which is just as well – my next Warfarin blood test is due tomorrow, so if we go early enough, we can go and do some shopping afterwards! 😀 I think we ought to head off, straight after breakfast! 😉 I’ve just noticed something annoying… the air conditioner and heater in this place are fantastic… but as I’m getting older, I find that I get colder in the cooler weather – or maybe it’s because I’ve shed so much of my insulating “blubber” – but anyway, the heater, of course, is on. Sitting at the dining room table, I’m cool, but not cold, but sitting on the couch watching television, I was shivering with cold, and most unhappy. Now I’m in the Den, with all the computers and what-have-yous, and I’m [please insert rude word here] very uncomfortably hot! The bedroom is coolish to warmish, but my side of the bed is very warm, because it’s directly under one of the air conditioning ducts. My bathroom is reasonably cool in summer, but struggles hard to stay warm in this cooler weather. I think we may need to adjust some of the air conditioning ducts… why can’t it be 24C all the ruddy time! (*disgruntled look*)

Food stuffz: last night we had pan-fried chicken breast on a bed of steamed rice, through which Julian mixed some finely chopped spring onions, which I suppose could be counted as “greens”, sort-of, and a half a store-bought Roma tomato. As I’d already had my slice of cake when Kate was over in the morning, I couldn’t have another one for dessert, so I had a Corella pear and a burnt fig yoghurt thingy. Because of Julian’s visit to the Dentist today, we had a late-ish lunch, which was a sandwich made with the extremely nice Coles-brand multi-grain, seeded crust bread, a bit of butter, and “plain-jane” sandwich chicken chunks. Quite delicious! 🙂 And for dinner tonight we had pasta with tomato sauce, and a small amount of parmesan cheese. For dessert, I had another Corella pear, the tiny “over-the-fence” fig that Julian picked for me the other day, and a slice of cake with a tiny bit of low-fat cream. I suspect we may have lunch out tomorrow, if we go shopping after my blood test, which although I love the sandwiches we’ve been having, will be a nice change.

Weigh-in this morning. Was a lot much more betterer! 😉  I went up to 63.9kg yesterday because I stupidly forgot to take my second anti-fluid tablet when Kate was over on Tuesday, but today I went down to 63.3kg – down 6 points (over half a kilo!) Innit amazing what a difference one teeny little pill can make! Ackshally, I’m a little bit anxious this evening – I hope I’m not starting to get Alzheimer’s! I forgot to take the ruddy thing again today! Mind you, I was a trifle distracted with Julian off at the Dentist an’ all – I’ve just taken it now though, even if it does keep me awake tonight – I just don’t want to balloon up to 63.9kg again tomorrow!

So there we are – in a minute I’ll go back and rescue Arisnoë and Grog – I left them in a very unsafe crater trying to get to a place that should have been a “given” Flight Point, but wasn’t. I’m not terribly good at reading half drawn maps, and I get lost easily in mazes of twisty little passages that all look just the same… and then I shall go see if Mouselet and Wynterthyme can get their evening Oil Dailies done – so that’s about it from me for this evening – do drop in again tomorrow night and find out if I got any sleep tonight, and what happened with my weight, how Arisnoë is getting along with her new Pet, and how my blood test went. Until then though, please bee very good, don’t forget that logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on your preferences… but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.35 pm

Well, here I am again – if not “bright and early”, then at least early enough that I stand a fair chance of getting finished before dinner (if we have a reasonably late-ish dinner? 😉 ) Anyway, it’s been quite an interesting day – as I mentioned yesterday, my very favourite youngest daughter was coming over, after she’d dropped her husband Terry off at work. Kate is at the moment a “lady of leisure”, having been made “Redundant” on Monday. She’s been with the company for two years – one day off two years, actually… Apart from the fact that it’s a bitter blow to them – they’ve been pretty much relying on her salary to keep going, as Terry’s not very well at the moment – she’s now going to have to look for a new job – not all that easy in today’s job market! However, for all that, I’m actually very relieved that she’s no longer a part of that company – I felt that they were, well, shonky and dishonest, and I’m so glad that she’s not a part of it any more! She worked for Jenny Craig for 15 years – she started off as a client, joined the company as a Consultant, and worked her way up through Centre Management, to Trainer, to Head Office, writing manuals for the Trainers! Then when Nestlé’s bought out Jenny Craig and tried to change things to “Truth, Justice, and The American Way”, things sort-of fell apart a little for the Australian side of Jenny Craig, as we tend to approach things somewhat differently from Americans… (thank heavens!) They decided to rely very heavily on Tablets for communication and training, and after fifteen years, Nestlé’s threw all Kate’s experience out the window, and made her redundant. So am I allowed to feel just a little smug about the fact that Jenny Craig hasn’t really been doing all that well since Nestlé’s took them over, and decided that the American system was far superior to the Australian one (simply because it was American, no doubt!) Kate still has friends that work there, so she hears a lot of gossip “on the grapevine” about how things are going at the moment, and the news isn’t very good, so I don’t think she’ll be approaching them for a job… One of her friends who works there has been made redundant, and then a couple of months later, re-hired… then a few months after that, made redundant a second time, and then re-hired again… she says she doesn’t really feel “secure” in her job any more… hmm… I wonder why?! Anyway, Kate’s out of work, and looking for a job, which means that until she does, hopefully we might get to see a bit more of her! (clouds, silver linings, an’ all that! 😉 ) The first thing she’s got to do before even starting to look for work, is bring her CV up to date, and then we can all cross our fingers, toes, eyes, and legs for her!

Still, we spent a pleasant morning chattering, drinking coffee, and having a piece of the Babka that Julian made yesterday – there’s not much of it left, now 😦  She’s also car-less at the moment – someone ran into the back of her car, damaging it quite badly, so it’s now off at the Insurance company, being pulled to pieces to see whether or not it’s possible to repair it, and more importantly, whether or not it’s even worth repairing – so for the foreseeable future, she’s driving Terry’s car, and dropping him off and picking him up from work. Those poor kids have had a terrible run of bad luck lately…

This morning before Kate arrived, I took Wynterthyme off to do her “Stable Dailies”. Apparently there’s an Achievement that you can get with gives you… er… extra something, I think, and perhaps a new Title or something. First you have to catch and Tame six different mounts – which I’ve done. Then you have to Train your mounts, by going out and killing Big Scary Mobs while you’re riding them – and lastly, you have to kill five different Big Scary Mobs, while mounted on each of your six mounts – twice! In other words, while riding each of your six mounts, you have to kill each of the five Big Scary Mobs – twice! (“Oh!”, says Winter sarcastically “I can’t wait!”) Anyway, everything’s going relatively well in Draenor – and elsewhere in Azeroth – except that poor old Arisnoë is not having any luck whatsoever in finding Arcturis (the Spirit Bear) in Grizzly Hills (not that Arisnoë spends a lot of time looking for him, mind you!)

This evening I might spend a bit of time looking through back issues of magazines online, trying to find the Almond Cake recipe that was so nice… I know we have it somewhere – it might even be with the sheaf of recipe print-outs that I’ve seen in the Pantry Cupboard recently (I’ll get Julian to have a look next time he goes out to the kitchen!) otherwise I’ll just have to make my Babka! Though he might have to do a bit of shopping before I do… I intend to stir finely grated orange zest into the mixture, and put spoonfuls of marmalade in the middle of the cake… or I could use “dribbles” of mixed, dried fruit! (or sultanas! I know Mum often used to put a small handful of sultanas into the mixture – they were great!) Anyway, we’ll see 🙂

Food stuffz: last night we had Lee and Neale over for dinner, and we had some wonderfully tender, very tasty, slow-cooked Corned Silverside, with mashed potatoes, green beans, and half a store-bought Roma tomato (Neale didn’t get his half tomato – he doesn’t like tomato!) And you know what? There was still enough of the Corned Silverside left over for our sandwiches at lunchtime today! That’s what I mean about Corned Silverside being excellent “value for money”! For dessert, we all had a slice of Julian’s latest culinary creation, the Babka, with a small amount of thickened, low-fat cream poured over it. Our sandwiches at lunchtime were made with the Coles-brand multi-grain, seeded-crust bread, lightly buttered, with some of the left-over sliced Corned Silverside and a little tomato sauce, though I’m not sure if Julian had tomato sauce, or mustard! Tonight we’re having pan-fried chicken breast, with steamed rice and finely chopped spring onions. As I’ve already had my slice of Babka today, I’ll just have either my over-the-fence fig, if it’s ripe enough, or one of my new batch of Corella pears (again, if they’re ripe enough!) and possibly one of the Dark Cacao Chia Pods…

Weigh-in this morning. I’m really cross with myself! I usually take two anti-fluid pills per day – one in the morning, and the second one around lunch time. Yesterday, because Lee and I were in the lounge room watching episodes of “Arrow”, I forgot to come in here and take my second anti-fluid pill! I didn’t realise I hadn’t taken it until around about 11.30 pm, when of course it was too late to take it, or I’d have been up and down all night, like a Jack-in-a-Box! So I wasn’t looking forward to clambering up onto the scales this morning! Mashed potatoes, made with butter and milk! (well, only a little butter, and it was the A2 low-fat milk, but still…) and the Babka, with a bit of cream… but the most damning of all was me forgetting to take my second anti-fluid pill yesterday at lunchtime! (I must have been awash with excess fluid – well, that’s my excuse, anyway) so of course, I did go up again, didn’t I! I went from 63.5kg to 63.9kg – up four points! 😦 Well, I made a particular point of taking my second anti-fluid pill this afternoon, though my stomach was gurgling well before lunchtime – so much so that Kate made rude comments about it! 🙂 So, let that be a lesson to me, to never forget to take my lunchtime anti-fluid pill, ever again! (Oh! The shame of it all!) 😉

Tomorrow Julian is off to the Dentist – not just for a check-up this time, but to have three fillings done – his Dentist wants to replace all his old amalgam fillings with nice, new, hygienic and non-toxic “white” resin ones, so I think that’ll put paid to use going out shopping afterwards, as he’ll be pretty doped up with Novocaine (I’m not even very happy about him driving at all, actually – if he’s too doped up with Novocaine to go shopping, he’s really too doped up with Novocaine to drive! I think he should taxi there and back! But Julian will be Julian, and you can’t tell him…) Anyway, I’m not too distraught – it gives me the whole day to stuff around looking for the Almond Cake recipe, working on a new bookmark desktop wallpaper, trying to up Wynterthyme’s Reputation with one of the Draenor Factions, so that I can upgrade my Trading Post to level 3, and making him copious cups of coffee. And that, Gentle Readers, is once again about it from me for this evening! 🙂 Do drop in again tomorrow night though, to find out how Julian got on at the Dentist, what Wynterthyme’s been up to all day, whether or not I found the Almond Cake recipe, if I’ve finished my new bookmarks desktop wallpaper, and how many cups of coffee I ended up making for the Novocained Julian! 😉 But until then, please try terribly hard to bee good, remember that if you smile at someone, they might smile back, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather, and to always drive carefully… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

09.27 am

OK, I have to write really, really fast this morning, as I’m not going to get much of a chance later on. Julian has gone to deliver my favourite eldest daughter to yet another appointment, and will then be bringing her back here for the day – then instead of dropping her back home this evening, her husband Neale is joining us all here for dinner tonight, so writing time is going to be meager, at best! (but I’ll try to fit everything in for you all, you lucky people, you! 😉 )

What happened yesterday. Erm… Julian and I sort-of got stuck into doing a lot of itty-bitty quests together, which unfortunately chewed up most of the day – but we did get through a lot, and only died once! My fault as usual – at one point, we were so hard pressed that in sheer desperation, I fired off an AOE (“Area Of Effect” shot – it targets multiple, but largely random, mobs, which has the unfortunate side effect of pulling in a lot more mobs who would otherwise have ignored the fight – and you!) and… we died. Oh well, death in WoW is largely fleeting – you do get better! 🙂 Then it was afternoon, Josh came over and I had my hair done, and then it was dinner time. Because there was nothing much to watch on TV, we decided to watch one of our last remaining episodes of “Foyle’s War” (which has been a truly excellent series!) which would have finished early enough for me to write my blog last night. I say “which would have”, because then the phone started ringing! All in all, we took three calls, none of which were the sort that only took a minute or two. So by the time Foyle’s War finished, it was pretty late – as you could see from the time stamp on last night’s brief sentence! Oh well… As I said – I’m gunna have to write fast this morning, and hope that my favourite eldest daughter is kept waiting the customary half hour or so, by the inestimable Dr. B.! 😉

Oh, remember I was talking about fish ponds and aquariums? And especially marine aquariums? There’s a certain type of marine fish that I’ve always coveted – they’re gorgeous, and I call them “Paisley Fish”, because to me they look as though their skin (scales?) are made from a beautiful paisley pattern. That’s not their real name, of course, that’s just what I like to call them. Their real name is “Mandarin Dragonet“, or, if you want to appear more learned, “Synchiropus splendidus”. I found them by Googling “marine fish paisley”, would you believe, which led me to this – and viola, as the French say, there they were! They come in a lot more colours than the ones in the linked pictures – the ones I saw and fell in love with – so many years ago in the decorative display marine aquarium at a Chinese Restaurant – were a creamy colour, with a brilliant jade and gold “paisley” pattern all over them – they were so beautiful, like little, living, jewelled brooches! And by the way, might I just mention here that I totally hate, loathe, and detest, Pinterest? I have absolutely no interest in signing up with that horrible site, but every time I go looking for “images”, or “photos”, that revolting place always comes up with the best examples of what I’m looking for (see above!) which I can never see properly because they keep sticking their [please insert foul word of your choice in here!] “sign-up” screed, on a black background, right in front of me, which gets bigger if you try to scroll down, and there seems to be no way to remove it, other than signing up with them – which I do not want to do! What do they think I’m going to do? Steal their ruddy images? The most I’d do (because I hate them so much) is put in a ruddy link to them (which I’ve done here, curse me for a fool!)

Anyway, Julian and my favourite eldest daughter have arrived – I’ll finish this late-ish tonight (I hope!)

---

10.24 pm

Right, here I am again – and I might even get this finished before midnight, for a change! 😉  Well, Lee and I had a good day – we watched one episode of “The 100” – the only one we had, and then we watched multiple episodes of “Arrow” for the rest of the day – aww! Oliver’s mother got killed Julian went off and did a bit more shopping for dinner tonight, because Lee and Neale were staying for dinner. I knew there wasn’t very much Banana Cake left, so I persuaded Julian to make a different sort of cake for dessert, as we had no more “over-ripe” bananas (in fact the old song “yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today!” sprang to mind this morning! We had to have a naked (as in a totally banana-less) breakfast this morning! It was terrible! 😉 ) I tried to find a copy of a delicious Almond cake that he made last year, which was absolutely super delicious, and made with mostly almond meal, but alas – I have no idea where I put it – it’s probably somewhere in either the “AAA-All 2015 Folders” directory, or in the “AAA-All 2014 Folders” one – and on further thought, it’s probably in the 2014 one, because we moved here in mid 2015, and I seem to recall that the weather was warm when he did make it, and that it was “later on” in the year, so it must have been 2014… or maybe even 2013… Who cares! It was a wonderful cake, and I’ll move heaven and earth to either find the copy, or find it on the ‘Net somewhere (in fact I think I actually found it in a magazine – so I’ll also look through all my back-copies of all my “Foodie” magazines! See, Julian?! I told you there was a good reason for keeping all those old magazines! 😉 ) In the end, I went back to an old, old recipe that came out of the Ark – my mother got it from a Polish friend of hers, and she got it from her mother, etc., etc. – you know the way it goes! 🙂 It’s a non-yeast recipe for a Babka, and it’s been adapted many times over the years. In the contemporary version, you put everything except the flour into a Vitamizer (they’re known as Food Processors these days) whizz everything up, pour it into the flour, stir well, pour it into a ring tin, and bake for about 35 minutes. There are lots of variations that we used to use, from sprinkling Nescafe crystals in the middle of it, to adding orange zest to the mixture, and dobbing teaspoons of marmalade in the middle. You can find my family recipe for it here. So, that’s what Julian made! At my insistence, he made a cinnamon sugar mixture, which we sprinkled into the middle of the mixture (pour half the mixture into the tin, shake it even, sprinkle whatever you’re using, making sure you don’t get any on the side of the tin, then pour in the rest of the mixture – it works, trust me!) So, speaking of cakes an’ all, I suppose I should hurry up and get onto…

Food stuffz! Last night we had pan-fried chicken breast on a bed of steamed rice with finely chopped spring onions, and half a home-grown tomato for dinner, and for dessert I had a small bowl of the yummy Coles-brand, very low-calorie, Rice Pudding, and a small slice of Banana Cake. For lunch today, I had a Coles-brand (again!) whole-grain, seed crusted bread, with sandwich-sliced roast beef, sliced home-grown tomato, shredded lettuce, and Halloumi cheese, and it was scrumptious! Dinner tonight was slow-cooked Corned Silverside, mashed potatoes, green beans, and half a store-bought Roma tomato, and everyone declared the Corned Silverside extremely good! For dessert, we all had a slice of the Cinnamon-sugared Babka, with a small amount of thickened light cream. It was so very nice – and exactly as I remembered it – I’m making it next time! 🙂

Weigh-in yesterday and this morning. Well, it seems like all my tummy gurgles are paying off! 🙂 Though mind you, after mashed potato and cake tonight, I’ll probably go up again *sigh* but I guess that’s just par for the course! Yesterday (Monday) morning I went from 64.0kg to 63.7kg – down three points… and this morning (Tuesday) I went from 63.7kg to 63.5kg – down another two points, which is all good, and I’m both very pleased, and very relieved to be going down again! No doubt I’ll go up a bit tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll be too distraught – I’m pretty sure it’ll go down again – eventually! 😉

And that pretty much sums up my two days! We were going shopping tomorrow, but it seems like my very favourite youngest daughter will be coming over for a visit, so the shopping might have to wait until Thursday or Friday. On the WoW side of things, Wynterthyme now has six quests to do for the Stables, which I’ll attempt to get done before Kate arrives – I mean, how long can it take, to kill three large, scary monsters, whilst sitting on a terrified mount?! 😉 Actually, they’re called “Training your mount” quests… And that’s about where everything’s up to at the moment, so once more it’s time to tell you all that that’s about it from me for tonight! Do drop in again tomorrow night – I’m hoping to be able to start writing early enough to do it all in one coherent block, rather than in this somewhat disjointed and rambling fashion, so that you can find out all about what Wynterthyme’s been up to, if there’s still any Babka left, and how my mercurial weight’s going. Until then however, please make an attempt to bee good, remember that many of life’s failures are people who didn’t realize how close they were to success when they gave up, and don’t forget to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

11.42 pm

Oh dear, this is starting to become a bit of a habit, isn’t it! The time simply ran away from me today, and now, as you can see from the time stamp above, it’s getting rather late – I’ll have to fill you all in on the day’s doings tomorrow… *sigh*

05.27 pm

Well, I’m finally here again! Thank you all for being so patient with me! I have no idea what was wrong with me yesterday, it just seemed as though all my words had dried up – and for once in my life, I honestly had nothing to say! The only other time I’ve been at such a loss for words was when my two very favourite daughters were very young – about 5 and 6 years old… and I got laryngitis! A pin dropping onto thick, shag-pile carpet made so much noise that you couldn’t hear me speaking – it was that bad! The kids, of course, thought it was all terribly funny!  I sure they thought that all their Christmases had come at once! Mummy couldn’t yell at them, or tell them not to do something that they jolly-well knew they weren’t allowed to do! I didn’t think it wasn’t funny at all! Oh, I could write things down to try to get them to do things, but although Lee could read – sort-of (because she was six, and took after me – a bookworm!) Kate was only just learning to read simple books – so there was no point in me writing down “Please ring Aunty Shiela and tell her I’ve got laryngitis, and can she come over, please?” because most of those words were outside of Lee’s – at that stage – fairly limited vocabulary! So, for this exercise, you should all consider yourselves to be very young children, and that Mummy had very bad mental laryngitis last night and couldn’t write anything – but she’s all better now, so you can all stop being naughty! 😉

Yesterday I mostly played WoW, this time concentrating on getting Wynterthyme organised, and running her Garrison properly. The addition of the Stables really keeps you running – every day there are at least five or more “quests” to go out and tame more animals, or to train them to behave appropriately when you’re in combat (like digging in their heels and standing firm while you’re attacking and being attacked, instead of running away in a panic – in training horses, it’s commonly called “bomb-proofing”) Some of the taming quests have been damned hard! You have to target and “tag” the required animal, which attaches a thick “rope” to your quarry, which then runs all over the place for up to forty-five seconds (but I can tell you, it sure seems like a lot longer when you’re doing it!) up hill, and down dale! Leaping over chasms, dodging around trees, or swimming off through a school of extremely hostile electric eels! If you can’t keep up, and the “rope” stretches too far, it “breaks”, and you have to start all over again!

Today, instead of doing our usual questing around Draenor, we did something completely different, and so totally civilised, I don’t know why we haven’t done them before! (I suppose probably because we haven’t been level 100 – and pretty much immortal – before!) Anyway, remember how I said ages and ages ago that Julian and I didn’t “do” Dungeons, Instances, or Raids, because you had to do them with a fairly large group of other players, which we didn’t like doing? Well, today Julian thought that we’d try some of the “Cataclysm” Dungeons (“Cataclysm” was the name of the expansion before last, and those Dungeons are for player levels 82 to 85) I was a little bit dubious – I know we tried to run a couple of Dungeons not that long ago, and the mobs just wiped the floor with us – but we went and tried them, anyway… I mean, what was the worst that could happen to us? Sure, we might die – but we’d get better again! 😉 So off we flew into the Cataclysm sunset, so to speak. I think we ended up doing them all! It was so easy! So “civilised”! We even had time to stop and look around, and admire the scenery! You can’t do that when you’re running a same-level Dungeon – you’re too busy just trying to stay alive! We were practically one-shotting everything, even the Big Bad Bosses! It was quite funny, actually – we’d get to the Boss fight, and the Boss would start to go into his (or her) Big Threatening Speech, about how Azeroth was Doomed, and we were going to be squashed like insects, or some such – and one of us (we took it in turns) would take a pot-shot at the Big Bad Boss, and he’d keel over, stone dead, still giving his Big Threatening Speech, as I happily started skinning¹ him (or her)! And so we waltzed through the Cataclysm Dungeons – maybe next week we could do some of the others – I’m not sure if we could handle the Pandarian ones, but we are level 100 now, after all, and… what’s the worst that can happen to us?! 😉

We’ll try to get our Dailies done tonight – I let my oil barrels stockpile up until I had over 3000 of them – I only started sending ships off on Missions again yesterday – and would you believe, I’m running low on oil again?!

And now on to the really important business of the blog 😉

Yesterday’s and today’s salient points:

Food stuffz: from what I can remember, anyway. Friday night we had a beautiful little piece of filet steak, with chips, beans, and half a home-grown tomato (which was yummy!) For dessert, I had the last of my Corella pears (we must get some more tomorrow!) and the very last (and also extremely small!) piece of the Flourless Chocolate Cake 😦 Last night – Saturday – we had chicken sausages for dinner, again with chips, green beans, and half a home-grown tomato (an Heirloom one this time – which are just as nice as the Black Russian ones!) For dessert I had no more fruit left, so I had to content myself with a small piece of Julian’s Banana Cake. For lunch today I had two Ryvita crispbreads, spread with some of my favourite basil-pesto hummus, with cucumber and red pepper batons, sandwich ham, and low-fat Jarlsberg Cheese piled on top of them – terribly awkward and messy to eat, but tasted brilliant! And tonight, being Sunday night, we’ll be having an omelet (yum!) probably with ham, spring onions, tomato, capsicum, and low-fat Halloumi cheese, which I’m looking forward to! I’ll most likely have another small slice of the Banana Cake for dessert, with one of the Dark Cacao Chia Pods (which look a bit odd, and I still think they have a really weird texture and “mouth feel” –  but they really taste nice! 😉 )

Weigh-in yesterday, and today. Is starting to improve a bit. My feet are still puffy, which I’m not at all happy about… However! So on Friday, I was 64.4kg… Yesterday (Saturday) I went down two points, from 64.4kg to 64.2kg. This morning, I went down another two points, from 64.2kg to 64.0kg, so hopefully I’m starting to get back to “normal”, now that I’m not eating chocolate and Hot Cross Buns with a little scrape of butter every day! It should be obvious, shouldn’t it, that if you eat chocolate, heavy desserts, and other such things, every day, that you’re going to put on weight – so why can’t so many people see this, and plan accordingly – Eat your chocolate, by all means – I need a dose of chocolate every now and then (or chocolate flavoured Chia Pods, anyway) but don’t eat (real) chocolate every day! Ditto cakes, and ditto anything that your common sense tells you you’re going to regret! So hopefully tomorrow I’ll be down a little more again – though of course, knowing my body, I’m just as likely to go up again! (*rolls eyes*)

Which once again brings us around to another Monday! I’m not quite sure what’s happening in the morning – no doubt I’ll be WoW-ing again (do I ever do anything else?) and hopefully, this time, getting back to Wïnter and maybe Shekinàh as well – as soon as I finish off the two Stables quests I still have (and then there’ll probably be another five to do!) however, I have caught up on most of Wynterthyme’s ordinary quests for the moment, so… cross your fingers that I’ll be putting young Wïnter through her paces tomorrow! 🙂 And, I’m afraid, that’s about it from me for tonight! Apologies again for last night, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes! Do call in again tomorrow night to find out just what I did get up to, whether my weight is still behaving itself or not, and if I’ve managed to find another cake recipe for Julian to make – because there’s not much Banana Cake left! Until tomorrow night though, please do try to bee good, don’t forget that we have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

¹skinning… only where applicable! No humanoids were skun… skinned? in the running of these Dungeons!

11.20 pm

Sorry everyone – I just haven’t been able to write anything at all today – expect a double-dose tomorrow, and forgive your ultra lazy and not feeling all that crash-hot Blog Writer! 🙂

Ta… catchyas all on the flipside! 😉

10.22 pm

Well, here I am, finally… I didn’t get a chance to ‘jot thingz down’ today because my very favourite eldest daughter came over – a little earlier than usual, so we filled the day with chatter and watching our favourite TV series. I did have time to put Wynterthyme through her daily chores before Lee arrived, which included my Daily Stable Capture quest. This time I had to go out into the wilds of Frost Fire Ridge – Horde territory – to capture and Tame a Young Icehoof! I didn’t even have a Flight Point for the area, and I certainly wasn’t about to go galloping through various Horde towns and villages to try to get there under my own steam! Luckily the Stable Masters seem to have an arrangement with my Flight Master, to fly me out to these impossible-to-get-to places – but not fly me home again! I had to Garrison Hearth! Still, an’ all, I have that Flight Point now, just in case I ever want to go back there again… though goodness knows why I’d want to! It’s Horde territory! Extremely hostile to us Alliance folk! And it’s covered in ice and snow, it’s freezing cold, and has lots and lots of really big (as well as small but deadly!) nasty monsters lurking behind every boulder and stunted bush! *shudder* No… I can’t really see me going back there voluntarily, in the near – or even the far distant – future..

So when Lee arrived, we distracted Julian with our bright, chirpy conversation so much that twice in a row, he managed to copy and delete a whole long string of files that he was supposed to keep! (mind you, I wouldn’t have thought that our frothy and frivolous conversation was interesting enough for Julian to do that… or maybe we were being a little bit wittier than I thought… 😉 ) so under a somewhat frosty masculine glare, we two girls hastily repaired to the lounge room and the television, where we watched… two (I think) episodes of “Agent Carter”, two episodes of “Supergirl”, including a “Supergirl/The Flash” crossover one, featuring the theory and possibility of multiple universes (quite a fascinating subject on its own!) which I thought was very well done – and a couple of episodes of “Arrow”, where things are starting to look pretty grim, for our young hero! After Julian had dropped Lee home, we just had time to log onto WoW to do our “Daily” Oil Barrel quest… because we had a movie to watch after dinner! 🙂

While my very favourite eldest daughter and I were watching our shows, Julian went over to Doncaster, to drop off some Dry Cleaning, replenish our coffee store, and a few other bits and pieces – and he brought me home a present! 🙂 Season 5 of “Game of Thrones”! I can’t wait to start watching it! (Winter bounces up and down in her computer chair, which starts making strange sounds, so she stops bouncing, just in case it breaks) But wait! There’s more! He brought home a movie that we’d missed, when it was on in the Cinemas! “The Martian“, starring Matt Damon, and (in places) Sean Bean (from “Game of Thrones”) and that’s what we watched after dinner (which is why this is so late!) It was a good movie – it ticked all my boxes – no-one died, no-one got laid, there was no excessive or gratuitous swearing, and it had a happy ending! – totally unlike 99¾ % of American movies these days! I totally enjoyed it! 🙂

So, on to the important bits of tonight’s ramble…

Food stuffz: last night we had lamb back straps for dinner, with half a tomato, green beans, and rice with finely chopped spring onions in it – I love lamb backstraps – they’re really good value for money – no fat, no bone (so no waste!), and they’re lovely and tender and juicy! And for dessert I had my second last Corella pear, and a very small piece of the Flourless Chocolate Cake, because there wasn’t that much of it left! Today for lunch I had another sandwich using the very nice Coles-brand multi-grain, seed-crusted bread, with basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, ham, low-fat Jarlsberg cheese, and home-grown tomato! Using the basil-pesto hummus instead of butter is a really good idea – it tastes delicious, gives a “plain-jane” sandwich a bit of texture, and isn’t as fattening! We also splurged, and had a small slice of Julian’s Banana Cake so that Lee could see what it was like. For dinner tonight we had a really delicious little piece of fillet steak – absolutely the tenderest piece of steak imaginable – you could have cut it with a spoon! Tonight we had chips, green beans and half a home-grown tomato – another of the “Black Russian” variety that we’d had the other night. They are really nice – lots of nice, firm, juicy “flesh”, with not too many “seeds in tomato jelly” in the middle of the fruit. If you have a veggie garden with tomatoes growing in them, but aren’t growing any of the Black Russians, do try them – you certainly won’t regret it! For dessert, I had my last little Corella pear, and the very last, tiny little slice of the Flourless Chocolate Cake – Julian had another piece of his Banana Cake. So, for us, Easter is now Officially Over, and I can go back to eating “normally” again! (or what passes for “normally” around here! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning. Was slightly encouraging… My feet looked like balloons again last night, but my stomach has been making quite a few gurgles, so hopefully that’s a good sign. I went from 64.5kg to 64.4kg – down one point… as I said, encouraging… and hopefully, a good sign… Now that all the tempting chocolaty things have gone (and won’t be returning until at least next Christmas!) I should start to lose a bit of weight – unless, of course, my body decides that “Well, I’ve tried 64 kilograms, and I’ve tried 63 and 62 kilograms, but I really feel much more comfortable at 64 kilograms, so I think I’ll just stay around this weight!” – because, you know – I don’t feel that I really have much say in the matter any more! My body, with no rhyme nor reason for what it does, or doesn’t do, does exactly what it wants to do – and I just get dragged along for the ride! Hopefully, it’ll decide that it really liked 62.5 kilograms best, after all, and head on back down there… I guess we’ll just have to weight and see…

And so to tomorrow – I have absolutely no idea what’s happening tomorrow, so you’ll all just have to drop in again tomorrow night to see what we did do! I know we’ll be WoW-ing on Sunday, but tomorrow? I dunno! Anyway, that’s about it from me again for tonight, but as I said before – drop in again tomorrow night and be surprised! Well, you’ll either be surprised by what we did, or you’ll all give a snort, a roll of the eyes, and with a sharp nod you’ll all mutter under your collective breaths “Typical!”, or “We might have known you’d do something like that!” But until then, please do try to bee good, don’t forget that all things are difficult before they are easy, and remember to keep warm – or cool – depending on your mood, to look after yourselves, and to always drive carefully… but please, above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂