Winter’s log, earthdate 201605.15

04.06 pm

Just a short note tonight – primarily because we haven’t done anything much today except go out to lunch, and secondly because – as I expected I would – all I really want to do is lie down and have a nap! 🙂 However, seeing as you’ve all been exceedingly good, here’s a link to a photo of our new “FFH” – “Fish Fun House“, to the uninitiated! 🙂 Please bear in mind that the photo was taken quite late at night under interior lights, and on a somewhat awkward angle – and that cluster of what looks like little black dots towards the top right hand side of the tank are not in actual fact dots, debris, or marks on the wall at all – they’re actually air bubbles from the black filter that you can see attached to the back of the tank. It’s not bad, as far as an air oxygenator’s concerned, however before Auric and Dapple move in, we’ll  change it for an “air-stone” – one the ones that looks like a lump of stone, sitting on the bottom of the tank and blowing a stream of little bubbles up through the water. For some reason, fish seem to like swimming through them – I dunno – maybe it tickles them, or something!

You know – I’d really just about kill for a glass of mandarin juice – or even orange juice -right about now! 😦

What else… I did manage to get through Sylvänas’s Follower sorting and organising this morning, and her Fishing Daily – but that was about it! Being Sunday, we slept in, and as we had to leave at noon, I didn’t have much time to do anything constructive at all! Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up a bit tomorrow, but as we’ll be out in the morning, and I have Josh and my favourite eldest daughter coming over in the afternoon, I very much doubt that I’ll get much further… and of course, said favourite eldest daughter will be over again on Tuesday, so it’s likely to be Wednesday before I can get back to any sort of serious leveling up work. Not that I mind, as the company is much more betterer than running around cutting the heads off nasty monsters! 🙂 Oh, and today being “our” Mother’s Day, I can tell you that this morning Julian surprised me with – not breakfast in bed, but a lovely burnt orange, rust and gold Pashmina, which is gorgeous, and I wore it to lunch today, where my very favourite eldest daughter and her husband gave me a lovely card and an Amazon Gift Voucher, and my very favourite youngest daughter and her husband also gave me a beautiful card – and canister of cookies! 🙂

And now for the interesting bits…

Food stuffz: Last night we had the new “Three Islands” Beef sausages, with chips, home-grown green beans, and half a tomato. The sausages were very nice! About on a par with their cousins, the King Island Beef sausages, flavour and texture-wise – however, I thought that their skins were maybe a little on the tough side – or maybe my knife was blunt (which is highly doubtful!) In a nutshell, I’d be quite happy to have them (as well as the King Island ones) again, tough skins or not! For dessert I had one of my Corella pears, and a small bowl of the very delicious, Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding. Today for lunch: my favourite eldest daughter and I shared a dish of Keema Naan (Naan filled with spicy lamb mince & coriander, baked in Tandoor) It sounds a lot more than it actually is though, because the bread is very flat, and the so-called “filled with” is more like “we took a photo of the lamb and coriander and put the photo in because otherwise the bread would have been too thick!” – but it was very nice, nonetheless. For mains, I had the Chicken Khorma (Tender chicken cooked in light creamy sauce with cashew nuts) and I suppose it’s just as well that I asked for it to be “mild”, because if that was their idea of a “mild” amount of spiciness, I hate to think what their “hot” version would have been like! – but it, too, was very nice (if a little too spicy for me) I had some rice and Naan with that, too – you have to have something to mop up all the sauce with, after all! Then for dessert, I had their Wattalapan (Sri Lankan Custard pudding with palm candy and nuts) It was nice. I can’t tell you what the flavour was like because it was… sweet… different… and I really don’t know how to describe it! It tasted a bit as though it had rice in it, but it was more texture than flavour that made me think that. It also seemed to have a lot of “watery” liquid in it – much the same way as crème caramel has the caramel liquid surrounding it – but it was nice. It arrived with a softball-sized “ball” of spun palm sugar sitting on top of it – I did pick at a bit of that, just to see what it was like, but it was so very, very fine that (a) it was very hard to eat without getting tiny splinters and shards of it all over yourself, and (b) it was pretty tasteless, anyway! I had a short black (coffee) with dessert, and that was lunch! I can also tell you what I’ll be having for dinner tonight! Nothing! Well, maybe a cup of tea – with one cookie! My very favourite youngest daughter Kate made me a jar of cookies for Mother’s Day (don’t forget that this Sunday was our Mother’s Day!) She’d asked me what I wanted for Mother’s Day a while ago, and I’d told her – “from you sweetheart, a jar of your cookies is what I’d really like!” – so that what she gave me today – a very nice canister of double choc and cherry cookies, and I intend to have one for dinner tonight, no matter how full I still am from lunch!

Weigh-in this morning. Was a lot better than it’s going to be tomorrow morning, I can tell you! This morning I went from 63.8kg to 63.8kg – in other words, I stayed the same. However, seeing that on weekends I only walk one kilometer instead of my usual two kilometers, and in light of the big enormous lunch I had today, I’m expecting to have reversed the losses of last week, and be up in the high 64kg area again But, you know what? I don’t regret today in the slightest – sure, one has to live, but most importantly, one has to enjoy life – and personally, I don’t believe that one’s life can be enjoyed on bread and water alone… what’s more, if there’s no enjoyment to life, there’s not much point in staying around. Just my tuppence-worth, anyway…

And so to tomorrow. In the morning, I have an appointment at the Doctor to have my blood pressure checked after two weeks on the lower blood pressure medication – I have a feeling she’s going to tell me to stay on it, as I’ve been feeling quite well, apart from the usual old arthriticky aches and pains… The trouble is, she’s a very good Doctor, and is very popular – the only times we get to see her on time are if we have a weekend appointment! We can usually count on a 30 minute wait when we go during the week – which is where I picked up the habit of never leaving home without my Kindle! One just never knows when one is going to have to sit around and twiddle one’s thumbs! So with an 11.30am appointment, I don’t expect to get back home until around 1.30pm, because this time, Julian’s having his Chickenpox-Shingles vaccination too – I’m still thinking about whether or not I’ll have one… I probably won’t! Every single time, through my whole life, when I’ve had a vaccination of any sort, I’ve always caught what it was I’d just been vaccinated against – quite badly, too! er… except for Smallpox and Cholera, which we all had to have when we went to Italy! (I was five years old at the time) But everything else – Diphtheria, Whooping Cough – you name it, I was vaccinated against it… and then I got all of them! Scarlet Fever, when I was an infant… Diphtheria, which very nearly killed me, and Whooping Cough, when I was four… I’ve had Mumps twice (had my tonsils out twice, too!) Chickenpox, Measles, German Measles – I think the only childhood disease I didn’t get was Croup, and that’s not a disease anyway – it’s a condition! So… I think you can see my reluctance to tempt fate again with the Chickenpox-Shingles vaccination – what if I haven’t grown out of my childhood predilection for catching the very things that I’ve just been “immunised” against! And once again – that’s about it from me for tonight – yes, I know it was supposed to be a short one – but you all know me by now – why use only five words, if I can use twenty instead? 😉 But do call in again tomorrow night to find out what my weight did, what Kate’s cookies were like, what the Doctor said about my blood pressure medication, and how the rest of our day went. Until then however, please bee good, remember that a positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to have made it worth the effort 😉 and don’t forget to keep warm and dry in Melbourne’s erratic weather, to look after yourselves, and to always drive carefully – but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂