04.29 pm

The last day of autumn! who’d a thunk it! This year seems to have absolutely raced by – or is it just that I’m getting older? 😯 Remember when you were a kid, and it always seemed like centuries between one Christmas and the next, or one Birthday and the next – time always seemed to flow much more slowly then – we figured we had all the time in the world, to do whatever it was that we wanted to do… and then we grew up, and we got jobs, and we had deadlines to meet, friends to go out with (well, other people did, anyway) and we all had so much to do that we didn’t quite know how we were going to get through it all… and somehow or other we got so preoccupied with “other thingz” that we didn’t notice the time slipping by us, until it was gone, and we suddenly found ourselves middle-aged. By then some of us had children, so we didn’t have the time to worry about such trivialities as time starting to speed up a bit, and haven’t you booked the baby sitter yet? what do you want for dinner tonight? the cat’s just fur-balled on the new rug! quick! quick! little Joan (or John) is going to be late for football practice (or ballet class) …until the morning that we woke up and realised that the children were grown up, married, and had children of their own, and we thought “when did we get so old?!”, and “why does time seem to absolutely fly past these days!” Believe me, all you young ones out there – the old saying that “youth is wasted on the young!” is true, so enjoy it while you still have it! 😛

Well, I bin a busy girl today!This morning I played WoW (well, and what else would I have been doing then, hmm? 😉 ) messing about with Phoenìx in the Western Plaguelands! Thanks to the Heirloom things I’m wearing I only got about five quests done before I hit level 40, so I hightailed it back to Ironforge, where I went back to Riding School to learn how to Ride faster (I’ve Hearthed myself in Ironforge, the Dwarven capital, as being the closest city to the Plaguelands that has a Bank and an Auction House!) After I finished learning to Ride faster, got rid of all my junk, and repaired my armor a bit, I went back to the Western Plaguelands… and you know what? The first quest I picked up told me that I was being sent to the next area, the Eastern Plaguelands, which if anything, are even a bit nastier than the Western Plaguelands! So, for Phoenìx, the next stop is level 60, and Flying, at long last! 😎 I wonder where Phoenìx will be by then! 🙂

We got a phone call this afternoon from the furniture people to say that our new electronic recliner lounge suite will be delivered on Friday. We were going to sell the one that’s currently in the lounge room, but we’ve changed our minds – or we think we have, anyway – because if it’ll fit in the Library, we’ll put it in there instead, as we’re going to need somewhere to sit when we go in there to read – so why spend money on something new, when we’ve already got something that’s almost new? (we got it just before we moved in here last August) Anyway, I’m really looking forward to Friday, and having a comfortable place to relax, where I’m not going to slide down the chair until I’m almost prone, whenever I put my feet up! When that phone call came through, I was busy looking for a Microsoft Office look-alike – that is, something that I can use instead of that [censored] piece of [censored] <- please insert derogatory terms of your choice in the [censored] areas provided! I’m so sick and tired of its stupid Auto-correcting, and even sicker to death of its insistence on turning a new line into a bulleted list, if I happen to want to start the line with a numeral, or a dash, which I quite often do! I’ve been grizzling about Office, or Word, for years! It’s so un-intuitive, user-hostile, awkward to navigate around, and with the “Help” files the way they are, you could almost call them “obstructions”! I did try a new program last year (or was it the year before? I fergit!) and at first it looked very promising… and then it went and trampled all over Thunderbird, which was my Mail Client at the time. It not only trampled all over Thunderbird, but it also completely destroyed it! Obliterated it completely! All my email, going back years… gone! Julian managed to get most of it back from one of our latest backups, but there’s still quite a chunk missing that’s gone for good – some of you may remember me ranting, raving and screaming blue murder about it in one of my blogs written around that time (no, sorry – I can’t remember how long ago it was, or which blog it was that contains my incendiary tirade!) Two things happened after that – I ditched the Word look-alike, consigned every and all emails from that company to the Trash folder, and I also got rid of Thunderbird, as I no longer trusted it. I still get regular news updates from the software company that wrote that evil, e-mail obliterating program, and although they’re regularly dumped into my Trash Folder, I still glance at them to see what they have to say for themselves, this time… Well they’ve just released a new version of this Word-look-alike… and it seems that I can’t have been the only one to complain long and loudly about what their earlier one did to my email – because this new version of theirs was written and developed… in conjunction with Thunderbird! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry! I desperately need a word processor program – I have an almost pathological hatred of Microsoft Office, and Word – and I can’t find anything else. I’ve tried LibreOffice – I know Julian uses and likes it – but I’m sorry to say that I find it almost as bad as Word. I wrote out the list of Vegetables that we’re intending to plant before spring creeps up and smacks us on the backside, and I also transcribed that recipe for a new sort of Shepherd’s Pie – and you know what I used? I used Google Docs! It wasn’t bad, considering! The only thing I really don’t like, is that fact that you don’t save the document to your own hard drive, in fact you don’t even really “save” it at all – it’s stored in “The Cloud”! And, being the cynical Old Fart that I am, I don’t trust “them” (whoever “them” is in this case!) to keep my precious documents safe, and away from prying eyes and grasping keyboards! Fair enough, in this case it was only a recipe that I copied from a popular magazine, so I’m not too distressed at the thought of it “vanishing”, or turning up on someone else’s hard drive – but there’s no way known that I’d trust an important personal document – one that could possibly be used for identity theft, perhaps – to “The Cloud” – or any Cloud run by anyone, anywhere, for that matter! The point that I’m slowly meandering around to (in my usual and long-winded fashion!) is – should I give this software company another chance? Forewarned is forearmed, so I’d make certain-sure that all my email was safely backed up “off-site” somewhere, before having another look at their Word look-alike program… What would you all do, hmm? 😐

Anyway, on to all the good bits! 😉

Food stuffz: Last night we had a beautiful little piece of fillet steak – absolutely delicious, and sooo tender I could have eaten it with a teaspoon! With it we had green beans, chips, and half a Kumato. For dessert I had my second last Corella pear (and yes, I have added them to today’s shopping list!) and a small bowl of the totally yummy Coles-brand, very low-calorie, delicious Rice Pudding – this time with no canned-peach slices in-a-jar (I wonder if we have any left for tonight? If not, I’m going to have to add them to the list, too!) Lunch today was a slightly different sort of sandwich! We had the same lovely sesame and poppy-seed whole-grain bread as we usually do, but today we had Pastrami in our sandwiches for a change – I absolutely love Pastrami! With basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, and some Halloumi cheese – all absolutely delicious! Tonight we’re having something else different! Julian couldn’t get hold of any lamb backstraps, so he got some lamb leg steaks instead. I haven’t had those for yonks, but from memory, they’re very nice, so I’m looking forward to dinner tonight 🙂 For dessert I’ll probably have my last Corella pear – until Julian does the shopping again, anyway – and tonight I might have a small tub of low-fat fruit yoghurt instead of the Rice Pudding – but I haven’t decided yet! 😛

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t too bad, I guess – I went from 64.3kg to 64.2kg – down one point (there’s that ruddy “margin of error” thingy again!) so I’m not going to hatchet my chicks before I can count ’em, and say that my weight is starting to behave itself, at long last, because it probably isn’t, and my weight’ll be up by about 5 points again tomorrow! 😐

And that brings me finally to tomorrow – we didn’t go and do any shopping today, so we might do that tomorrow – depending on the weather, and “Conditions may apply” to that particular possibility! 🙂 So it’s quite likely that tomorrow will be another version of today – with me WoW-ing in the morning, and struggling to find some sort of decent word program to use for recipe transcriptions in the afternoon, as I stall have a lot left to copy out! Auric and Dapple seemed much better and more relaxed last night after Julian changed their water over – so it’s looking as though this is going to become part of our evening ritual, at least until the good bacteria kick in and start growing! And that sort of brings me to the point where I tell you all: “and that’s about it from me for tonight” – so – that’s about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Do drop in again tomorrow night, to find out if we went shopping or not, what my weight’s doing, how much further along Phoenìx has got to level 60, and if all the fur-fins are well and happy. Until then though, please bee good, don’t forget that sometimes problems don’t require a solution to solve them; instead they require maturity to outgrow them, and remember to always drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm and dry is this freezing weather… but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂