04.48 pm

So, our first day (for a long time, anyway!) playing with Xãnthe and Jemimah – in fact, I don’t think we’ve played with them since we left WoW for Rift! Anyway, it was good to get back in the saddle again, and a bit of an eye-opener too, of slogging it out at the more “junior” levels than we’ve been used to, for quite a long time! Our levels are actually a little bit high for the quests we’re doing at the moment, and mobs are more or less falling over dead as soon as we brandish our weapons at them – except once, when we inadvertently got ourselves accepting a Dungeon quest – but we thought we’d give it a go – see how we went… well, we didn’t. We were both level 80… the mobs in the Dungeon were level 82 Gold Elites – so we died fairly quickly, and just as soon as we were able to retrieve our bodies, we beat a hasty retreat and scampered for the Dungeon Portal! We thought we’d give it a go “later on”, when we’re “older”… IF we remember it… (so here’s hoping that we suffer a nice little bout of amnesia between now and then, eh?! 😉 ) Still, I didn’t think we did too badly – we went up two and a half levels each, which was very pleasing, and seeing that we’re both wearing Heirloom gear (which gives us an experience boost of 20%) we’re pretty much running neck and neck for a change, and leveling up within minutes of eachother. There’s still a lot of clearing out of the Guild Bank to do, which is going to take a l-o-n-g time – I’ve actually created a Banker, too, so that we can just mail all the loot and gold to her, instead of having to travel back to town all the time. But that’s all work for another day! Today we decided that we’d do Mount Hyjal, rather than Vashj’ir (which is underwater, and we all know how much I hate fighting underwater, don’t we!) or Deepholm (which is claustrophobically under a huge mountain of rock!) Mount Hyjal is a rather pretty mountainous area – except for the burnt and still burning bits – with big tall trees, lots of flowers, Grecian-type ruins, with lots of broken columns, cute little bunnies and squirrels, and Dryads, who prance around saying silly things, like “Ahhh! The great outdoors!” – hopefully, by the time we finish Mount Hyjal, we’ll be able to go straight to Pandaria, which is what Arisnoë did when she was leveling up to go to Draenor. Despite the quests being pretty easy, we did die, numerous times each, and not just in that somewhat unplanned Dungeon excursion! Hopefully by next Sunday I’ll have my Blood Elf Banker, Liaselena, all ready to assume the duties of a Private Bank Manager, and the Guild Bank all de-cluttered, the useless junk sold off, and everything still in it sorted out and filed correctly! 🙂

As well as all of that Guild Bank sorting and organising tomorrow, I also have the delightful task of sifting through all my Foodie magazines, looking for a recipe that I think I saw a few weeks ago (!!) for some sort of Cottage or Shepherd’s pie – or something along those lines, anyway – that featured leeks, because our home-grown leeks are getting to the stage where they’re almost big enough to harvest and incorporate into an appropriate recipe. I’ve already been through one of the magazines, and I’ve found two or three interesting sounding recipes which I think we should try – especially now that winter is coming – but nothing that has leeks, so I’ll keep on looking *sigh* Only another seven or eight magazines to go… the car’s due to go off for its annual service tomorrow morning, and our cleaning lady will be here – I must look into getting either a steamer (clothes steamer thingy) or an iron and ironing board – or both – because K., the cleaning lady, has said she’ll do the ironing for us, and I reckon that even taking into account the initial outlay for the iron, ironing board, and (possibly!) steamer, that we’d save an awful lot on Dry Cleaning bills! I think Julian’s going to get some sort of water testing-kit for the aquarium tomorrow, too, so that we can make sure the water is just right for little Auric and Dapple… and I should really read up a bit on goldfish behaviour, and what’s considered normal, and what’s not! Last night I was getting quite concerned because Auric, who’s the bigger of the two, seemed to be spending a lot of time just sitting up near the surface of the water, not doing anything in particular, just moving his fins and tail a bit every now and then – but just sort-of…. hanging there (“right side up” though – I mean he wasn’t turning “belly up” or anything drastic like that!) Dapple was swimming about as usual, and sometimes when he came close to Auric, Auric would swim off after him, quite normally, but then he’d go back to the surface again – so I don’t know if this is “normal” behaviour for goldfish or not! Perhaps he was sleeping? Do goldfish sleep? Or maybe that’s the sort of thing that goldfish like to do sometimes, and I’m just being my normal neurotic self! I dunno…

And now for the good bits!

Food stuffz: Last night for dinner we had those very interesting sounding pork sausages, with Kakadu Plum and Lemon Aspen in them, and I can tell you very honestly and truthfully… they were really delicious! More, please! They didn’t taste “lemony”, or “plummy” but they did taste quite “different” – and as I said earlier, very delicious – from your normal, every-day, run of the mill, pork, beef, lamb, or even chicken sausages! We will be getting them again, and I think we’ll be looking to see what other products, if any, that this particular brand – “Outback Spirit™ Provenance” – puts out. They have a “Gluten Free” label on them, and if you want to try them for yourselves, go to Coles, because there’s another little sticker on them too, which says “Only at Coles”. With the sausages we had chips, steamed store-bought green beans, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I had a small bowl of the Coles-brand, very low-calorie, extremely yummy, Rice Pudding, and one of my few remaining special Mother’s Day cookies. Today for lunch we had a “clone” of yesterday’s cold Corned Silverside sandwich with the Beerenberg Tomato and Cracked Pepper Relish, in the Baker’s Delight seed crusted whole-meal bread – and tonight, being Sunday night, it’s our omelet night, which I’m greatly looking forward to! 🙂 For dessert, I’ll try another of my Corella pears – hopefully by now they’ll be ripe enough to taste of something except “crunch and tasteless”, and of course, I’ll have another one of my rapidly dwindling supply of special Mother’s Day cookies.

Weigh-in this morning. Was not good again! But it’s really strange! Julian’s weight is shooting up too – half a kilo in 24 hours – and neither of us is doing anything different, eating anything that we don’t normally eat, or doing anything that we don’t normally do! Anyway, this morning I went from 64.3kg to 64.5kg – up another two points… is it because our bodies are feeling the colder weather and starting to lay in a bit more “insulation” for the winter? Yeah, I know – I’m clutching at straws, trying to find a “logical” reason for why we’re starting to put on weight, when we’re not really doing anything different! Well, we’ll just have to weight and sea what happens tomorrow and the next day, I guess

And of course, that takes me full circle to tomorrow – only I’ve already told you what’s happening tomorrow – more or less – Josh will be here in the afternoon, but most of tomorrow will probably be spent with me in a Foodie magazine, or stuck in the Guild Bank, up to my eyebrows in “stuff” that has to be sorted into “Vendor”, “Auction”, or “Keep” piles… Having just come back in from watching an episode of Game of Thrones (season 5 on DVD) I’m very much afraid that we may lose little Auric. He’s having enormous difficulty in swimming down – he tries to – nearly flips himself over in his attempts to get further down in the tank – but he just keeps bobbing back up again, like a little cork. I thought it might just have been me being neurotic, but we both think it’s a little more than me being silly. Anyway, time will tell, I suppose… mind you, they were living in that dreadful little puddle when we bought the place last year, and we have no idea how old they were, or what their health was like, or how much they were damaged by being in that water… however, we have turned off their “bubble making machine” – supposedly an aerator – and they both seem a bit happier without it. I have been noticing for a while that they kept going up and biting (?) the bubbles on the surface of the water all the time – maybe they were trying to eat them, and they got a bad dose of wind? Anyway, that’s pretty much it from me for this evening – do call in again tomorrow night to find out if our weight is starting to behave or not, whether I found a recipe featuring leek, if I managed to get the Guild Bank sorted out or not, and if little Auric survived his “floaties”… but until then, please bee good, remember that if your life goes along too easily, you learn nothing – and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry – unless you’re a fish… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂