04.23 pm

Here I am – another day, another blog – once again, there’s not all that much to tell you all – it’s been very quiet here… again. Auric and Dapple seem to have settled into their new Fish House extremely well, and had their first meal there last night. The first time I fed them, after we’d brought them in from their little mud puddle under the fountain outside, I don’t think they knew what goldfish food pellets were! They swam around fairly listlessly until the food scent must have permeated the water and all of a sudden, they perked up and looked … well, I suppose, amazed, and very quickly darted up and started gobbling like mad! At one stage, Auric was trying to eat, and push Dapple away with his head, all at the same time! Poor little Dapple – I don’t think he got much dinner that night! But they very quickly got into a routine – we were feeding them three times a day, but we cut that back to twice a day – breakfast and dinner – and they seemed happy enough with that. They learned to recognise me – or rather, to recognise the food that I represented – and they’d come darting over to the side, sticking their little heads up, waiting for their dinner! And then we moved them into their new FH*, and we didn’t feed them at all for 24 hours. For a while we watched them swimming slowly around, looking slightly dazed (well, there was a lot more oxygen in the water, as we had an aerator-thingy as well as the filter going!) At one point, Auric appeared to have got himself stuck, between the side of the tank and the gun-barrel shaped arm of the filter – or at least that’s where he was, and he seemed to be listless, or stuck, or both – but the mere sight of Julian’s finger entering the water in an effort to dislodge him, scant inches away from where he was “resting”, got him moving again, and as far as we know, he hasn’t been back in that location since! They were very, very cautious and timid that first night, and didn’t seem to know what they should be doing, but as I said above, they’ve settled in remarkably well, and spend some of their time playing a slow sort of “fish chasey”, or “follow the fishy leader”, where one swims around in lazy loops, with the other following about a centimeter behind, following the “leader” very closely. The rest of the time, each of them just does his (or her!) own “thing”, and having fun in their new home. Julian feeds them in the morning, while I’m treadmilling, and I feed them in the evening, while Julian’s getting our dinner ready 🙂

This morning I played WoW, and actually got Sylvänas not only up to level 98, but half way through level 99 as well, so it won’t be long now, until we need some newbies in Quel’Dorei! We discussed that this morning, actually, and we’ve come to the decision that both Coppertop and Jemima will move over from Azuremyst, bringing most of their Guild Bank with them, because the Horde Guild Bank on Quel’Dorei is so horribly empty, and their Guild Bank on Azuremyst is so full! Full of mostly junk, admittedly, but even junk sells on the Auction House (if you’re extremely lucky!) or is at least Vendorable, in WoW! With both on them over on Quel’Dorei, they’ll be able to go up that last ten levels together, and will also give us a Horde presence over there. Arisnoë was originally Horde, but we couldn’t fly in Draenor at that stage, and getting around – especially in the grotty and shitty area that Horde have to start off in – was often – quite literally – “to die for” (and which all too often, we did!) So I changed Arisnoë over to Alliance, with the somewhat vague and nebulous idea of changing her back again “later on”, but now I might not need to, with both Coppertop and Jemima coming over – and getting around in the Draenor “starting area” shouldn’t be a problem either, now that we can all fly! I’m looking forward to getting all of that underway! 🙂

I finally got my Warfarin blood test results back this morning, at around nine o’clock. I have no idea why they took so long this time – it wasn’t even as though we’d gone in really late to have the test done. either! Oh well, better late than never – and maybe they weren’t overly concerned anyway, with my Warfarin dose staying the same. My INR has hit the sweet spot – 2.5 – which is good, for a change, and they want me to have another blood test next Wednesday, so they’ve still got me on the weekly testing, which is both good – and bad. Good, because it means that I’m being closely monitored, so I’m not likely to drop dead in the next five minutes with more pulmonary embolisms, and it’s bad, because it’s a damn hassle having to go up and have vampiresnurses sticking ruddy needles in your arms every few days!

And now for the interesting and important bits!

Food stuffz: Last night for dinner we had beef sausages. We’d thought that they were either the King Island or the Three Island ones, but they were neither! We can’t remember which sort they were, but we do know that they weren’t either of the two mentioned, because these ones shrank! No, not in the wash, in the frying pan! So instead of having one sausage each, we had to have one and a half sausages each (not that I minded! They were lovely tasting sausages!) With them we had chips, “not-home-grown” green beans, and of course, our usual half a tomato. For dessert I had a Corella pear, which I really should have left to ripen a bit more, a Dark Cacao Chia Pod, and one of my very favourite youngest daughter’s home-made cookies! (yum!) Today for lunch, I had something completely different and unusual! Julian decided that he had to go off and do some shopping before lunch, as we had nothing left in the cupboard to make anything! Guess what he brought back! 🙂 I had a Baker’s Delight roll – one of the ones all studded with itty pieces of ham and cheese on the top? Well, that was cut in half, and was “buttered” with the basil-pesto hummus. It was totally delicious! I haven’t eaten anything like that for almost two years! Then there was another surprise! An absolutely fantastic Baker’s Delight “Fruit and Lemon” scone! This one, Julian did put a bit of butter on, and Oh! It was so very, very, nice, sticky, and yummy! I really enjoyed both of them, though I also felt very guilty! I asked Julian which meal would have had the highest calories, what I had today, or the BLT I usually have when we go out for lunch… and I was quite taken aback by his reply! He said that the BLT was higher in calories! If that’s the case, then I could probably afford (diet-wise) to repeat today’s lunch, maybe every two to three weeks? I do hope so – that scone was just heavenly! Tonight for dinner were having a small bowl of pasta with straight tomato sauce and a sprinkling of parmesan. For dessert, I think I’ll let my Corella pears ripen up for another day, so I’ll have some of the delicious Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding (if we have any left!) and one of Kate’s delicious home-made Mother’s Day cookies. If there’s no Rice Pudding, I shall have to have either a fruit yoghurt or another Chia Pod.

Weigh-in this morning. Was not good! See, I told you all I’d go up again (sooner or later, anyway!) I went from 63.1kg to 63.6kg – half a ruddy kilo, overnight! I reckon, and I don’t think that it’s just “wishful thinking” – that it’s largely fluid retention – let’s see what the scales say tomorrow, after my two carbs-laden meals today! (but boy, was that lunch worth it! 😉 )

And that brings me to tomorrow! Tomorrow, my very favourite eldest daughter will be coming over, and no doubt we’ll be sitting in the lounge room watching out favourite TV shows. I’ll let you know tomorrow what we got to see – I’d like to be able to catch up on some “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”, too – I haven’t seen any of those for yonks! But anyway, that’s about it from me again for this evening – stay tuned for the next exciting episode of “What Winter Did Next”! Did her weight go up even more, after she made such a little fat piggy of herself today at lunchtime, or will the ghods of E.Coli take pity on her soul and allow her to shed a few liters of fluid? What will Sylvänas be up to – will she have hit the level 100 mark yet or not? And I’m sure you’ll all want to find out how Auric, Dapple, and Flipper are getting on, too, so remember… same time, same place… and all the answers will be yours! Until tomorrow night though, do try very hard to bee good, remember that some days are simply meant for playing, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry in this mercurial autumn weather… but please – above all – don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*FH = Fish House

04.36 pm

Well, there are two pieces of news for you all this evening! 🙂 One is that a brand-new recipe, called “Tuscan Bean Soup”, has been added to the “Recipes…” menu for your delectation, and the other is that I’ve included links to Auric and Dapple in their new home! 🙂 The first piccy shows Dapple towards the top of the screen, looking a little bit bored, with Auric down lower, probably admiring his reflection in the side of the tank. The second piccy shows Dapple towards the centre of the tank, still looking a trifle bored, with Auric still admiring his reflection, but from a slightly different angle! The poor little lads are probably getting pretty hungry by now – we were told not to feed them for a day after we’d re-located them – but they’ll get their dinner tonight 🙂

Now, what else has been happening here today? Not all that much, really – I went off to have my Warfarin blood test this morning, but the results haven’t been SMS’d through to us yet – you’ll all probably have to wait until tomorrow night to find out if my poison dose goes up, down, or stays the same. I worked a bit on Sylvänas before we left this morning, and again after lunch – and I finally made it to level 98, which meant that I could at long last upgrade my Trading Post to level 2… yayy! 🙂 I’m curious though – am I going to have to wait to be Exalted with those three Draenor Factions to be able to upgrade the Trading Post to level 3? Wynterthyme, a Night Elf and the first of my three “Garrison Ladies” to goferit, of course, did – I’m sure you all remember me grizzling and cussing about having to go out and “Farm” the Reputation Points! However, Arisnoë didn’t have to work at her Reputation at all! She was able to just walk in and buy the Blueprint to upgrade her Trading Post – but glitches do happen, so I now have absolutely no idea whether procuring Trading Post level 3 is an “Account-Wide” privilege (meaning that once one of my characters gains the needed Faction Reputation and the right to upgrade her Trading Post to level 3, then all the characters on that account can do so too, regardless of their Faction standing) or not! I guess I’ll find out when I get to level 100, won’t I!? 😉 I also had a look to see who I could transfer over to Quel’Dorei to work on once Sylvänas reaches level 100 – and there are really only two candidates, each on different Realms (servers) – one is only level 60, so there’s a long, l-o-n-g way to go before I hit Garrison-ville – and quite honestly, I’m not sure I want to slog through all of that… the other is level 80, and would be a much more betterer prospect, except for one thing! Well, two things, really… The first thing is that she’s on Nagrand, the Oceanic server, which is handy if there are any problems with the US-based servers – it means that we have somewhere to play while we’re waiting for the US-based servers to come back online, or whatever… the second thing is that she’s generally partnered by Jemima, Julian’s level 80 character on Nagrand, and I really don’t want to break them up… So, if I’m going to transfer anyone across, it’s going to have to be Sørcha, my level 60 Horde Beastmaster Hunter I also looked at jumping a brand-new character up to level 100, but alas – I can’t justify the $66AUD that Blizzard would charge me to do so. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to get “complimentary boosts” to level 90 again when the new expansion goes live at the end of August (I think?) After all, they are introducing a new character Class – the Demon Hunter – and you can bet your sweet bippy that everyone and their grandmother’s dog will want to play one of those – except for me, that is – so we might get more boost-ability (and then of course, we might not!) but that’s August, and I expect to have Sylvänas at level 100 by the end of next weekend! (hopefully!) So it looks like it’s gunna have to be Sørcha – at least for now, anyway…

And now on to the interesting bits! 🙂

Food stuffz: last night we had Three Island fillet steak – and it was superb! So tender… juicy… flavoursome… (*drool*) With it we had mashed potatoes, the last of our very own home-grown green beans (*cry*) and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I had one of my Corella pears, and one of my special Mother’s Day cookies that my very favourite youngest daughter made for me – ohh… they’re really so very delicious! I wish I dared to eat more than one! Today for lunch I had a sandwich made with that yummy Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread – the one that has the sesame-seed crust – with basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, and Tandoori chicken sandwich chunks. Really, really delicious! Tonight we’re having more of the Three Island Beef sausages for dinner, with chips, half a tomato, and some green “not-our-home-grown” beans. For dessert I’m going to have another Corella pear, a Dark Cacao Chia Pod, and another one of my special Mother’s Day cookies.

Weigh-in this morning. Was quite… puzzling! I don’t know how I managed it… (I wish I did! I’d bottle whatever I did up and make a fortune selling it!) I went from 63.4kg to 63.1kg! Down another three points! Oh well, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth’, they say, so I’ll just say “thank-you-very-much!” to the powers that be, and count myself extremely lucky that I didn’t go up half a ton, after eating those two big lunches on Sunday and Monday!

Which finally brings me to tomorrow – Thursday, I believe it is – and what’s happening over this side of the black stump… which will be not much, as it turns out! Julian has some gardening work to do – we have to really think hard about what to plant for a winter crop – so far it seems to be mostly “leafy greens” that I’m not supposed to eat very much of – I mean, I can eat them, but I shouldn’t have them every day, or in large quantities (“leafy greens” interfere with Warfarin doses you see!) In fact, about the only sort of “leafy greens” that I can have as much as I like of, is Iceberg Lettuce! And while I don’t mind the occasional bit of Iceberg Lettuce in the odd salad every now and then, it’s certainly not something I’d want to sit down to every day! I absolutely love spinach, silver-beet, broccoli, and brussels sprouts – but I have to be very careful not to have too much of any of them, or too often. 😦 I think we can put in broad beans – I do like broad beans, and I think they come under the umbrella of “legumes”, and not “leafy greens” – I hope so, anyway! Onions and garlic should also be planted around about now, too… anyway, I’m sure we’ll find something suitable to plant in our veggie garden… Oh, and I must look up when the best time to plant a fig tree is, too… As for me tomorrow, I guess I’ll be busily leading Sylvänas along the steep and rocky path to level 100 – who knows? I might even get there tomorrow! (but I doubt it! 🙂 ) And now once again, that’s about it from me for tonight! Don’t forget to drop in again tomorrow night to find out if my weight suddenly came to its senses and went back up again, what the results of my Warfarin blood tests were, how much closer to level 100 I’ve managed to get Sylvänas, and if we’ve decided what to plant for our winter crop! Until then though – do continue to bee good, remember that the best way to gain self-confidence is to do what you are afraid to do, and don’t forget to keep warm and dry on these blustery autumn days, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

 

02.05 pm

Normally today I’d be out in the lounge room, watching episodes of the various TV shows that I and my very favourite eldest daughter like to watch – but not today, because she was over last night to have her hair cut, and she’s got uni tomorrow – so she’s coming over on Friday instead (in fact we may make the Friday visitation a permanent thing – however at time of writing, that’s still undecided) Actually, yesterday was quite a memorable day for me – my Doctor took me off my blood pressure medication altogether! Lord knows, I’ve been taking it for years – but now I’ve lost so much weight (over 70kg!) that the original dosage was actually making my blood pressure too low – so we halved it for two weeks, to see if I even needed it at all. Well, I’ve not suffered any ill effects over the last two weeks, and that half dosage I’ve been taking is so negligible that the Doctor said I might as well not be taking any (my blood pressure is almost text-book perfect now, by the way!) so we’ve decided to see how I go without any blood pressure medication for two weeks, and make a final decision then. Of course, I’m still on the beta-blocker (which regulates the speed at which one’s heart contracts to pump – or something along those lines, anyway) so as you can imagine – I’m pretty pleased! 🙂 After that we went up to The Glen to do a bit of shopping – I wanted to look around for a new jewellery box, because now that I’ve got all my good stuff back from being re-sized and professionally cleaned I had nowhere to put everything (yeah, well I did, really – I do have quite a nice mirrored jewellery box, but it’s too “lumpy” for the bathroom vanity unit – I needed something a little smaller, and more “sleek”… “elegant”…) We had lunch at The Shingle Inn there, and I found a nice jewellery box up near David Jones. We also bought a few more fish “toys” for Auric and Dapple at the Pet Shop, and I darted into Priceline to get some more makeup wipes… Anyhoo, by the time we got home, it was quite late, and I was expecting my favourite eldest daughter so I pretty much “dithered” for an hour…

Today’s been an interesting day too! 🙂 This morning Julian took poor old Flipper up to have her next anti-arthritis injection of cartrophen, and as usual, one glimpse of the cat cage and she had her usual “fit of the vapours”, and wailed most piteously! (she only does that to make us feel guilty, I’m sure! And she’s really got it down to a fine art, because it always works!) she’s supposed to have these injections about every six to seven weeks, but we almost always have to take her back to get her next dose a week or so early, as she gets terribly stiff and sore, and it’s awfully hard to see her hobbling along, and having to meow to be picked up so we can put her on the bed with us… Oh! and we lost the internet this morning too – Tel$tra were doing some sort of general maintenance in the area, so we were off-line for about an hour and a half, while they did whatever it was that they had to do. I think the big-wigs at Tel$tra must be feeling ill or something, because we actually got fair warning about the interruption to services via SMS and email! Julian read a book, while I puttered around with the new blog background, and did some work on the new header you see above you (because you don’t need to be online to use Photoshop – though you do need to be online to upload them when they’re finished! 😉 )

Then we decided to move Auric and Dapple into their new Fish House! I was quite worried about them – we’d set up their new abode yesterday, with plants, a nice big rock, gravel – well, you all saw the photo! Ackshally, it looks a bit different now – there are more plants, another aerator (the black one’s just a filter) and lights – it’s all very pretty! I must get Julian to take some more photos – now that Auric and Dapple are in the tank, too! 🙂 So while I sat and cowered in a corner, wringing my hands with worry for my little fishies, one by one, Julian scooped them up into the net, and carried them the five paces across the room to their now home! I can tell you, those little fishies were not well pleased with the exercise! Dapple adapted more quickly than Auric, who sort-of swam listlessly around the very top of the tank, with his top fin poking out of the water most of the time. Since then, Julian’s made a few adjustments to the filter stream, so that there’s not as much turbulence in the water – and they do seem to be a lot more relaxed now (I think you were right, Josh – there was too much movement in the water for them to be able to relax – but they can now, though 🙂 ) Of course, I’m jumping up to go and look in on them every ten or fifteen minutes – fond mother that I am – the trouble is, they know me now, and every time they see me coming towards them, they rush over to the top of the front of the tank – probably expecting me to feed them – but we’ve been told (by the guy in the aquarium) that we shouldn’t feed them until tomorrow night…

So it’s been an exciting couple of days for us all! I have my next Warfarin blood test tomorrow morning and this time I’ll be able to march in bearing my (totally unheard of before last Wednesday!) “Referral”, and with my correct green forms – which arrived yesterday! 🙂 but apart from that, I have no idea yet as to what’s happening tomorrow!

And now to the important and interesting bits…

Food stuffz: yesterday for lunch at The Shingle Inn I had my usual BLT on sourdough bread, which, as usual, was very nice. They must have a new kitchen hand or something, because I noticed that this time the BLT wasn’t drowning in mayo! The bit of salad on the side had dressing on it, too Oh well… Julian had a Caesar Salad (I think?) and for “dessert”, he’d ordered some sort of Vanilla slice thingy for himself, and two small Eclair thingies for me! I was more than a little taken aback that I had two of them (well, they were fairly small, and his was gi-normous!) but he reckoned that (a) they were quite small, and (b) neither of them would have been particularly high in calories. Needless to say, I ate one and a half of them – and he ate the remaining half. He had a cappuccino, and I had a long black with a small jug of skinny milk. Last night we had pan-fried chicken breast, with chips, home-grown green beans, and half a tomato, and for dessert I had one of my Corella pears, and one of my Mother’s Day cookies that Kate made for me.

Today I had a most delicious wrap for lunch, with that yummy basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, red capsicum batons, Halloumi cheese, and ham (“and a bit of pepper”, Julian says!) He wrapped them up slightly differently today, and for once, I was able to eat the whole thing without wearing half of it! Much more betterer! 🙂 I think he should wrap them like that all the time! Tonight I believe we’re having steak – possibly King Island, or maybe it’s the Three Island variety – but I know it’ll be extra nice! We’ll probably be having it with chips, but I’d much rather have mashed potato for a change, with – possibly our last for the season *cry* – meal with our very own home-grown green beans – and of course, the ubiquitous half a tomato! I’ll most likely reprise my dessert of last night, with a Corella pear, and one of my special, Mother’s Day cookies (ohhh… they are so very, very delicious!)

Weigh-in yesterday morning. Well, despite feeling quite apprehensive, after my Mother’s Day luncheon on Sunday, I was very pleasantly surprised when I clambered up onto the scales yesterday morning! For the third day in a row, I weighed in at 63.8kg – I’d managed – miraculously somehow, to stay the same! I was chuffed, and I was also fully expecting to go up the next day – today! After all, it was quite a big lunch on Sunday, with lots of carbs, and lots of fats…

Weigh-in today… so imagine my complete and utter astonishment this morning when I slowly and reluctantly stepped up onto the “Podium of Judgement” – and found that I’d gone down four points! After that big lunch on Sunday, and my BLT and two Éclairs (well, alright, one and a half Éclairs!) yesterday – not to mention the Mother’s Day cookies – and I went from 63.8kg to 63.4kg! I’m not complaining! I’m not complaining! I’m just stunned, is all! I wish I could pull that stunt more often! 🙂 However, I’m sure to go up tomorrow!

And that brings me to tomorrow – and as I said earlier – apart from my Warfarin blood test, I have no idea what’s happening! I’ll probably WoW a bit – I’m still trying to get Sylvänas up to level 98 – I fear I wasted a lot of time this morning taking her fishing, but tomorrow it’s all systems go – the game will be afoot – though I don’t know what I’m going to do when I do get her to level 100! Julian said to transfer one of my higher level characters across to Quel’Dorei and take them up to level 100 – hmm… tempting idea – I’ll have to think on it…  And that, gentle readers, is about it from me for this evening! Please feel free to call in again tomorrow night to find out what’s been going on chez nous – find out what my weight’s up to (or down to, though I strongly doubt that it’ll be down!) what level Sylvänas is up to, and all the latest on my Warfarin levels… Until then though, please try really hard to bee good, remember that when you’re saving for old age, be sure to put away a few pleasant thoughts – and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm and dry in Melbourne’s weird weather… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

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! 🙂

03.15 pm

If any of you came looking earlier this morning to see if I’d updated last night’s meager effort, and found… nothing… it was because I was attempting to force my brain through an old-fashioned mangle, trying to work out what the hell Word Press was talking about! Parents… children… have as many as you like… and not a single, solitary word about exactly how to actually create them in the first place! Arrggghhh! I was also playing WoW – but we won’t mention that yet! 😉 However! If you look up at the menu, and mouse-over the word “Recipes…” – ta-daaaa! You should see a drop-down sub-menu of actual recipes! (*Winter hops up and down anxiously*) Did I do it right? Can you see it? Is it working? It works for me… It took me ages to work out how to do it – no thanks at all to Word Press, well, except for maybe just a teeny little bit – in the menu functions section, of all places! I’d made “Recipes” a “parent”, and created a new page, with just a title (Test 1a – how imaginative is that!) and written “will this work?” in the body of the page – called it a “Child” (of Recipes) and saved it. Yup, it was there – but it wasn’t showing up the way it was supposed to, as a sort-of a sub-menu of “Recipes…” Then I thought “maybe there has to be more than one?!” (which I realised at the time was quite idiotic, because what if you only wanted the one item in the sub-menu?) But being me, I tried it anyway. Again, being a very imaginative person, I called this one Test 1b, made sure it was labelled as another child of Recipes, and wrote something equally as inane in the body of the text. Again. No show. Back to the menu section! I just couldn’t work it out! They were in the list of pages for menu inclusion… (<– there’s a hint, there, but I didn’t see it – I can be miserably slow sometimes! *Winter shakes her head in despair*) they were even indented under the “Recipes” parent-page as children… so why weren’t they showing up?! I looked at the list of pages for inclusion in the menu… they were there! I looked at the menu opposite the list. They weren’t there… It was around about then that the penny finally dropped! (gee, that rabbit hole goes w-a-y deep!) They probably weren’t there… because I hadn’t told the menu to include them! say, duh! *sigh* I went and told the menu to include “Test 1a”, went and looked… nothing there. After a bit of hair pulling, I realised that the “Save Menu” button was a long way down the screen – where sensible, sane people like me would be bound to scroll casually down past anything even vaguely relevant to menus and notice it – only I didn’t. So, I did it all over again, saving it this time *rolls eyes*  and… finally! It worked! I had a little sub-menu under “Recipes”! Not daring to believe that I’d finally got it right, I tried it with the “Test 1b” sub-menu thingy. Miracle of miracles, it worked too! So then I began the laborious job of cutting and pasting from my originally transcribed recipes to their brand new homes – and now it’s all done. It makes things a lot easier for all of you out there in Reader Land, too, you know! If you decide you might like to try making any of the recipes I put up, all you have to do is print that particular page out and you’re all set! 🙂 Enjoy! 🙂

At the moment Julian is out in the back yard – probably getting himself drenched, as he attempts to use a fly-wire screen he bought from Bunny’s to rinse off the gravel for the bottom of the new Fish House. It has to have all the dirt and grot rinsed, or washed, off it before it goes in the new tank, otherwise the water will get very grubby and cloudy, and I’d really like to present Auric and Dapple with a nice, sparkling clear tank. The stand and the lid are all nicely varnished – that’s what he was doing yesterday when he wasn’t inside watching “Person of Interest”, and I must say the stand looks a lot better now! Once the gravel is all washed, it can go in the tank, and we can start putting in the water, which has to sit for at least a couple of days… and then we can move Auric and Dapple! I do hope they like their new home! Wow! Julian just had me out in the lounge room, supervising and advising on the artificial plant placement in the tank! It really looks good, too, now that the rock is also in the middle, and it’s filled with water! He’s putting in the pump/aerator or whatever-it’s-called at the moment – we’re going to have to get a new power-point put in next week because there isn’t an outlet for it in the lounge room at the moment, so it’s plugged into an extension cord from the Library! Flipper came out when she heard “funny noises” coming from the lounge room (Julian filling the tank with the hose!) and she simply sat and stared goggle-eyed at us! 🙂 I’m quite sure she thinks we’ve gone stark, staring, bonkers! 🙂 So it’s nearly all ready for our dear little fishies! 🙂

WoW this morning. I worked with Sylvänas, after I’d done Wynterthyme and Arisnoë’s morning “chores”, and I’ve got her up a level – from level 94 to level 95, which isn’t bad going for half a day! I’ll play again after I finish this, hopefully, as I doubt if we’ll have much time to do anything much with Wïnter and Malinconia tomorrow! We’re off to an Indian restaurant called Elephant Corridor in Glen Waverley for our combined belated Mother’s Day luncheon, and belated Terry’s Birthday luncheon – my favourite eldest daughter and her equal but more technical half have been there, but Julian and I, Kate and Terry, and Terry’s youngest daughter (whom we hope will be joining us!) haven’t. We’re told that it’s very nice, and that you can ask for your meal to be as spicy, or as mild/un-spicy as you want, which I would appreciate, as I’m not as much into highly spiced food as I used to be (yeah… I got old!) I’ll let you all know tomorrow night what it was like! 🙂

And now on to the interesting bits!

Food stuffz: Last night for dinner we had lamb backstrap, pan-seared in lemon infused olive oil, and freshly ground black pepper, and served on a bed of steamed rice with finely chopped home-grown spring onion, which was absolutely delicious! For dessert I had one of my Corella pears, a low-fat fruit yoghurt, and a small bowl of the Coles-brand, very low-calorie, extremely delicious, Rice Pudding. For lunch today, just to be different, I had a wrap, with sandwich chicken chunks, yellow pepper batons, low-fat Halloumi cheese, and basil-pesto hummus. Really yummy to eat, really messy to handle! I wish they’d invent edible elastic bands, then you could hold your wrap together without losing half of it every time you took a bite! I’ve no idea what we’re having for dinner tonight, and Julian’s outside again, so I can’t even ask him (ackshally, I’d be asking for a cup of coffee, if he were around!) He’s now around, and I’ve asked him both things – for dinner tonight we’re having not another lot of the Three Islands Beef fillet, but the Three Islands Beef sausages! It’ll be very interesting indeed to compare them to the King Island Beef sausages, seeing that so far, they’ve managed to trump all the other beef sausages we’ve had! I’m assuming that we’ll be having them with chips, some more of our home-grown green beans, and a half a tomato. I’ll probably have another of my Corella pears for dessert, as well as another low-fat fruit yoghurt, and something else wot I haven’t decided upon yet! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Was quite good for a change, surprisingly! Just as well, too, because I know it’s going to go up after tomorrow’s celebratory luncheon! However, today was good – for once! I went from 64.2kg to 63.8kg – down four points. I intend to enjoy it while I can, because I’ll probably be up hovering around the 65kg mark on Monday morning! I guess all we can do is weight and sea…

And so to tomorrow… I’ll give you all a full report and critique on the restaurant tomorrow night (hmm – I wonder if I could get a job as a food critic – write up new restaurants and venues – think of all the free meals! I wonder if you’re allowed to bring your family and friends along to help you make up your mind about the food… 😉 ) Anyway, so I doubt if either Julian or I will want any dinner tomorrow night – which will probably be a Good Thing – but I also doubt if we’ll get much WoW-ing in either – as before we go out, we’ll probably be too busy, and after we get home, if I know anything about us at all, we’ll just want to go and sleep the dinner off! Julian has just come in from putting the last two coats of varnish on the Fish House Lid, and that will be ready to go on later this evening. And if you’re really good, I’ll even get Julian to take some photos of it so that you can all see what it looks like in situ! And once again, that’s about it from me for this evening! Don’t forget to drop in again tomorrow night – feedback on the new way of presenting the recipes isn’t mandatory, but would be appreciated – find out what we thought of Elephant Corridor, see how my weight is going (or not going, whatever the case might be!), and whether we did get any WoW-ing in. But until then, please endeavour to bee good, don’t forget that the strongest people aren’t always the people who win, but the people who don’t give up when they lose, and remember to look after yourselves, to keep warm and dry, no matter what the weather’s like outside, and to always, always drive carefully, but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

05.50 pm

Oh my goodness! It’s Friday 13th! No wonder I haven’t been able to make much sense of a tutorial site I’ve been trying to read! I’d heard (or read somewhere) that I could attach “sub-pages” to particular pages (in the blog) F’rinstance, I want to change the “Recipes” page to become what’s called a “parent” page, and to be simply an index-type page, with sub-pages, called “children”, coming from/linked from that first Index-type page – if you can follow what I mean. Well, I found the Word Press “how-to” site without too many problems, but as I said – I read it, very carefully, three times, and while I understood perfectly what they were talking about, they didn’t really give me any clear instructions as to how to actually create these ruddy “children” pages, so not only will the “Recipes” page have to remain as it is a while longer, but I’m also starting to write much later than I wanted to, which means that tonight’s blog will either have to be painfully short, or be finished after dinner, when I really don’t want to be writing anything! Or, I can Publish whatever I get finished by dinner time, and complete the rest tomorrow – which I’d really rather not do… and all because it’s Friday the 13th! If I’d realised it was Friday the 13th this morning, I probably would have stayed in bed! But I didn’t, and I did get up and do my treadmilling…

My most favourite eldest daughter came over today – I asked her about the “parent” and “children” type pages because she’s used Word Press and other blog hosts a lot, and I sort-of thought that she’d know – but she didn’t, so we went into the lounge room and watched “The 100”, which is really getting dark, and “Orphan Black” which seems to get more and more convoluted with every episode – but gee, it’s good! 🙂 Then it was lunch time and Julian joined us on the couch to watch two episodes of “Person of Interest” while we ate our sandwiches. It’s the beginning of the very short (only 13 episodes!) final Season, and “The Machine” (the good AI!) has been kept in a series of memory cards in a specially constructed suitcase, to keep her from being destroyed by Samaritan, the wicked, bad, and thoroughly evil AI who’s attempting to take over the world, and is (probably!) planning on getting rid of us puny and totally nonsensical and unintelligent (compared to itself!) humans altogether! Oooh! Bad things are happening! Bad! Bad! 😯 We did have another episode, er -I think, but Julian had to get back to varnishing the Fish House, and because he’s watching “Person of Interest” with us, we’ll save it up ’till next week, so that he doesn’t miss any of it. Then we watched an episode of “Arrow”, and an episode of “Flash” – and then it was time for Julian to drop Lee back to her place, and I came in here to start – well, to try to start – learning how to nest pages in Word Press… only I didn’t really understand how to set it up initially – they kept blathering on about “templates” and “default templates”, and I’m absolutely positive-certain that they weren’t talking about the Templates that I use to make the blog “pretty”! Oh well…

Julian is starting to cook the dinner – so as much as I don’t want to, I shall post this before dinner, and finish it off tomorrow morning while Julian’s out doing the shopping!

Wynterthyme has done as much with her Garrison as she possibly can before the “Legion” expansion which will be released at the end of August this year – I must remember to ask my very favourite eldest daughter (she was a tester for the Alpha, and is now testing out the Beta) if there are any changes coming to the Garrisons with the expansion – she’s already told me that there are heaps of changes coming to the Beastmaster Hunter – most of which, she says, I will not like!

Dinner’s ready – catch you all tomorrow! 🙂

04.42 pm

Well, I’m early again – I probably won’t be tomorrow, because my most favourite eldest daughter will be over… But that’s tomorrow – today’s today, and here I am! I suppose you’re all wondering, “did she, or didn’t she!?” Well, she did! That is, Arisnoë did! She got to level 100, at long last, and has made major upgrades to her Garrison! The path down to the Shipyard has been automatically added, though I haven’t had any breadcrumb quests or hints to go and build it yet, but no doubt I’ll get one sooner or later. I’ve added one large building, one medium-sized building, and one small building, vis. Stables, an Inn, and a Salvage Yard. Now, with Wynterthyme, the Stables were installed without me adding them – I have no idea what will happen now (though I’ve already been given the first Daily to go and tame a wild Talbuk – a riding animal that looks like a cross between an antelope and a mountain goat!) The Menagerie has been “automagically” added to my Garrison Buildings, though once again – it’ll never be used and is really a waste of time and space! I added the Inn for only one reason! Every night when I log off, I leave my girls(s) standing and looking just a little bit lost. In “the good old days”, when Stormwind city seemed to be every Alliance member’s “Home Away from Home”, nearly all of the people I played with would run upstairs at the Inn, jump onto a bed, and enter “/sleep”, and lo an behold, our character would promptly lie down on the bed,  and go to sleep – and we’d log off. Sometimes a character’s head would sink so far into the pillow that they ended up looking “headless”! (and each Race had a different way of lying down to sleep too, which made it a lot of fun!) It was probably a rather inane thing to do, but it just sort-of finished off the day’s doin’s – we’d gone out to “work”, we’d come home, and now we were going to get a good night’s sleep! So… I built the Inn, solely so that before I logged off for the night, I could run whoever I was playing into the Inn, up the stairs, and take a giant leap up onto the bed, where I could type in “/sleep”, and watch my tired little character lie down gratefully, curl up, and go happily to sleep in a nice, warm, comfy bed… 🙂 (C’mon, c’mon, where’s the chorus of “Awwww” from all of you, eh?! 😉 )

I have two more girls waiting for me to get them to level 100 – Wïnter, of course, but I really only play her with Julian and Malinconia, and the other one is Sylvänas. Once I get Sylvänas up to level 100, I may (I haven’t really decided yet!) decide to pay for an instant upgrade to level 100 for Akåsha – who’s only level 13 at the moment, and somehow the thought of slogging slowly through 87 levels isn’t really filling me with a sense of eager delight – in fact it was only last night that I was playing with Akåsha, and grizzling to Julian: “You know, I really hate having to jog everywhere until I’m level 20 and can ride! *pout*” And then, of course, you have to wait until you’re level 40 to fly! Leveling up is sooo much more easier when you can fly!

Anyway, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing all day! Last night I went through Word Press, looking for new Templates (there weren’t any!) and suddenly getting the bright idea of choosing different colour combinations, to see what sort of pretty backgrounds those colours would come up with – the ones I liked, I promptly saved. The one you’re looking at now is one of those – do you like it? I managed to get quite a lot of them actually, so I’ll probably cycle through some of them whilst waiting for Word Press to come up with some new Templates.

And now on to the important bits…

Food stuffz: Last night we had the new recipe from the e-zine The Kitchn, “Southwestern-Spiced Pork Tenderloin” – and yes, it was quite “spiced”, thank-you-very-much! It was actually a little bit too hot for me to just eat on its own, but combined with tomato and plain Greek yoghurt, it was very nice! I’m looking forward to having some in a sandwich, with the basil-pesto hummus, or maybe with either ricotta, or Philly Light. The pork itself was delicious – so tender and juicy! Anyway, we were going to have that with mashed potatoes (only someone forgot the potatoes, didn’t they, so we had it with chips instead! 😉 ) home-grown green beans, and our usual half a tomato – we also added a dollop or two of plain, low-fat Greek-style yoghurt, and we enjoyed the meal a lot. For dessert, I ate the last piece of the Almond-meal cake for dessert, and a small tub of fruit yoghurt – I thought I’d give the Corella pears another 24 hours to ripen, so they should be edible tonight. For lunch today I had a sandwich of sandwich turkey chunks, basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, and made with the delicious Baker’s Delight sesame-coated whole-meal bread. Most delicious! In fact I reckon I’d be quite happy to have that for lunch every day! (well, if truth be told, I’d probably get a bit tired of it by the end of the week, but it is ultra tasty, nonetheless!) Tonight we’re having pan-fried chicken breast on steamed rice, no doubt with finely chopped spring onions (maybe even ours!) some other sort of greens (maybe more of our beans? I’m guessing here, you know!) and, of course, the usual half a tomato. For dessert, I’ll have one of my Corella pears, and maybe another small tub of low-fat fruit yoghurt. At the moment I’m experimenting with the way the Recipe page is set up and laid out, but once I get things the way I want them, I will put up the recipe for the Southwestern-Spiced Pork Tenderloin – it is really very nice – and if you don’t like things too spicy, I think it would be easy enough tone it down a little bit, and not have it quite so “hot” – and it makes so much! Honestly, the blurb with the recipe said there was enough for a few meals out of it – but it’s no wonder that Americans are so big, if they go through all of that in “a few meals” (mind you, it does depend on how many you’re feeding each time – we’re only feeding two people who don’t eat all that much anyway!)

Weigh-in this morning. I’m feeling a little happier, but I still have a ways to go before I feel “secure” again. I went from 64.6kg to 64.4kg – down another 2 points… but let’s just weight and sea what tomorrow brings! I’m still very jittery… (I shall have to have “words” with Dr. Y. about those wretched pills next March! I was not even vaguely amused by what they did to me!)

And so on to tomorrow, when my very favourite eldest daughter will be coming over, and I’m going to be quizzing her on how to set up my “Recipes…” page, as well as watching lots of things on television – “Orphan Black”, “Person of Interest”, “Arrow”, “Flash”, and I want to know what happened to “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”! (which I note with interest is on late-night TV on Channel 7! I would much prefer, however, to be able to watch it without having to fast forward through all the “Free to Air” commercial breaks!) Anyway, once again that’s about it from me for this evening (see? a lot shorter tonight! 😉 ) However, do drop in again tomorrow night to find out what we watched, what my weight did, and whether Julian has put the first coat of clear varnish on the Fish House! 😉 But until then, please try to bee good, don’t forget that the quickest way to do many things is to do one thing at a time, and remember to take care of yourselves, to keep warm and dry, and to always drive carefully… but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*As promised: the recipe for “Lamb & Harissa Lasagne with Feta and Oregano” is now available on the Recipes page! Enjoy!

05.38 pm

Well, what an… interesting? day it’s been! 🙂 For some unknown reason, both Julian and I woke up this morning with a very distinct feeling that we really didn’t want to do our morning walks… but we did them anyway. Julian goes on a bit of a nature hike around the area – taking different routes and covering about three kilometers each day. While he’s out having fun in the clean (HA!) fresh (giggle) air, I mindlessly perform two kilometers of leg churning on the treadmill, and from what I can gather, at around the same sort of speed, too. He usually gets back before I finish though – not by much – I usually only have about another quarter of a kilometer to go when he gets back. Not so this morning! I’d barely cleared one kilometer before I got the familiar “Honey! I’m home!” as he comes through the front door. “What happened?” I asked him “did you get rained on?!” he replied “No, why? It’s not very pleasant out, but it didn’t rain” I told him that I thought he was back a bit early, because I’d only just finished my first kilometer – he said no, it was just his usual walk, and we left it at that… I eventually finished my second kilometer and left the treadmillery, in desperate need of a cup of tea – my mouth had got so dry! Talking about our morning walkings over said cup of tea, he admitted that it was all he could do to drag himself out of the house this morning, while I told him that this morning’s walk was one of the hardest, and definitely the worst I’d had to do since I first started walking up and down the stairs in Doncaster! Neither of us knows why we felt so… gosh, I don’t even know the right word for it! (quick! someone hand Winter a Thesaurus!) well, I don’t know about Julian, but it wasn’t that I felt tired, or ill, or resentful that I had to do it – my arthritis wasn’t playing up – and yes, it was before breakfast – but we always do our walks before breakfast, so it wasn’t low blood sugar or whatever. Anyway, as I said – I have no idea why this morning’s walk was so damn difficult! I warmed up three times quicker than I normally do – I usually get a bit heated at the 1.5 kilometer mark – this morning I didn’t even get to half a kilometer before my knees started shaking and I didn’t feel good. It’s possible, I suppose, that it could be a touch of sinusitis – I did wake up with a dreadfully stuffy nose, which cleared after I’d been upright for a short while, which usually indicates sinus trouble – but I know what that feels like, and this morning didn’t! Oh well, we both finished our walks, and – once again, I don’t know about Julian, but I felt fine again once I was sitting down. So, we had breakfast, and got ready to go and have my Warfarin blood test done. Last time we were at the Doctor’s, I noticed that there was a Dorevitch sign in the window – so I looked them up to see if it was a collection centre or just a pathology lab, and it was a collection centre, so I decided to go and have my blood test done there – and at the same time make an appointment to have my blood pressure measured again next Monday (the Doctor halved the amount of my blood pressure medication, and wanted to test it again in two weeks – I told you all about it at the time! 😉 ) Both Dorevitch and the Doctor are in the same building – Doctor is downstairs, Dorevitch is on the first floor… so I walked up the stairs (again!) only this time there was a very comfortable and reassuring stair-rail to hang onto. Now, this time last year we were still in Doncaster, and three times a day I’d walk the stairs – from the fifth floor up to the sixth floor, then down to the basement car-park, and back up to the fifth floor – and at that time, I could only manage to do one stair at a time (read: I was as slow as a lame chook!) Since we’ve been here in Vermont South, there are no stairs – the house is perfectly flat – so we hired a treadmill. It’s one of those ones that you can crank up the angle of the belt so that you end up walking uphill, at an angle. I have this one on setting “10”, which is as high as this one goes, and I stroll along at a comfortable 4 kilometers an hour. Normally, that’s fine – this morning, it wasn’t. However! All those stairs in Doncaster, and all this treadmilling here must have done me some good, because I can now actually walk up and down stairs more or less normally! Yeah, I was slow – but 99.9% of that is because I’m wearing shoes (did I ever mention to you all that I really hate and detest shoes? I did? Oh… well anyway, I still hate and detest shoes…) show me those stairs bare-footed, and I’d be up and down them like the Flash! Arriving at the blood-letting place, it was almost deserted, and I was taken straight in (I didn’t even have a chance to take out and start reading my Kindle!) As I told you about a week ago, we went and had our Medicare cards updated – my name, and our address – so this morning I handed the Vampire nice nurse who takes the blood my green form for the blood test – and would you believe, it was the wrong one! In amongst the pile of green forms that Dorevitch had sent me was one (there may be more! I haven’t looked yet!) that was apparently for an Asian gentleman (I think! It may have been for a woman!) This was… very, very unusual, to say the least! Never mind, nice nurse who takes the blood had a spare one, and so we started giving her all the particulars – including my name change, because the old green forms had my old name on it. Nice nurse who takes the blood couldn’t seem to get her head around the fact that it was my first name – my Christian name – that had changed, and not my surname – my last name! It took us about five minutes for us to explain this to her – I even wrote it down for her! In the end, she got it right, and she also got my blood. Then she asked about a referral! We both looked at her blankly “What referral” we chorused in amazement. So it now appears that for the two and a half years that I’ve been having Warfarin blood tests done, with never a word or a query from anyone, that I shouldn’t have been! The Government, bless their tiny malevolent hearts, has decreed that unless you have a (something or other – I’ve forgotten!) sort of referral from your doctor, you only get (get this! This is truly amazing!) six (6) months of Warfarin blood tests, or six (6) Warfarin blood tests – whichever comes first! After that, you pay $80 per test! This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a vital blood test that could mean your death – quite literally – if you didn’t have it because you were an old age pensioner who couldn’t afford it this week! And I thought that the American system, the way the Republicans think it should be run, was iniquitous! Well, I had my blood test, we picked up our jaws from the floor where they’d fallen in astonishment, and we toddled off to pick up Auric and Dapple’s new house. This business with the Warfarin tests though, has now brought to light another enigma for me to solve, in light of the forthcoming Federal Election! I cannot, and will not, vote for a Government who makes those sorts of laws. On the other hand, I cannot, and will not, vote Labour, under any circumstances. There’s no way I’d ever vote for the Greens – so who’s left? I don’t believe in not voting, or handing in a donkey vote – I want my say in how things are run, even if I don’t get what I voted for. At the moment, all I can say is – I sure hope that the Sex Party is fielding a candidate in our electorate! They seem to be the only ones left with their heads screwed on the right way, and not just “screwed”, like the rest of Australia’s so-called “leaders”!

So we picked up the new Fish House and brought it home. It’s very nice, and I’m sure Auric and Dapple (and their new friends, as soon as they arrive) will be very happy living there. We’ve put it in the lounge room where we wanted it to be, and I’ve voted to live with it there for 24 hours, and see what we think we should do then… Why? Because it’s made from raw, untreated pine. It could, of course, exist quite happily just as it is – but it looks a bit… odd. Anyway, we also got some nice gravel, some fake plants, because the guy at the aquarium said that goldfish would eat real plants, and poo lots because of it, and the tank would get a lot dirtier a lot quicker – so we got fake ones. We also bought a nice medium sized rock, that I hope Auric, Dapple and their little fishy friends will use for playing games around, hiding in, and having “Secret Fish Business” meetings behind. We got home to find a new packet of green Dorevitch forms – with, of course, my old name on them – heavens we only informed them of the name change this morning, and I’m quite sure that Dorevitch, as good as they are, aren’t quite that quick!

After a quick lunch, Julian took off again to go to the bank, and to see if our parcel of tea had arrived from Tea Leaves. He also went over to Doncaster to drop off some more Dry Cleaning, and while he was over there, Hildan Jewellers sent him an SMS to say that our jewellery was ready! Remember a while back how I was complaining that all my rings were falling off? Well, I went through all my stuff – some of the earrings are true heirlooms passed on from my grandmother’s family in Italy – anything that needed re-sizing (just about every ring I had needed to be re-sized!)(er… and I have a lot!) cleaned, re-strung – whatever – and packed it all off to Hildan’s. They’re really lovely people – they have a small suite up in the Doncaster Tower, and we’ve been going there for years – whenever we had to have anything done, repair-wise or re-sizing… so Julian arrived home with all my finery – a lot of which I’m wearing again now! 🙂

I didn’t have time to do anything with WoW this morning, apart from catch Wynterthyme and Wïnter’s Fleet and Followers, before we headed off to the blood-letting (the nice nurse who takes the blood thought that “Winter” was a very “exotic” name! Oh, la la! Je suis très exotique! 😉 ) However, this afternoon, while Julian was off doing all his “shopping bits”, I played around with Arisnoë, who’s now wearing some upgraded Heirloom armor to see if I can level her up a little more quickly – well, it sure seems to be working! 🙂 She hit level 99 just before I stopped playing to start writing this – and then of course, Julian got home and I got my nose stuck into the jewellery bag, and, well, I was a little later starting this than I’d planned…

So as I said – it’s been an… interesting day! 🙂

And now from the sublime to the ridiculous!

Food stuffz: last night we had the very last of the frozen leftover Lamb & Harissa Lasagne with Feta and Oregano – and you know? We both agreed that the longer it had remained in the freezer, the nicer it was! All the flavours get a proper change to permeate through all the layers… and for dessert, I had a small bowl of Coles-brand, very low-calorie, Rice Pudding with some fruit on top. Lunch today was – yes, another sandwich! 🙂 Made with the Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread with the sesame-seeded crust, Julian used the basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, and I had the last of the cold marinated roast beef – pretty much the same as yesterday’s sandwich, except with the hummus instead of the pumpkin and potato! Tonight for dinner we’re trying out a new recipe from an e-zine called “the kitchn“. The recipe is called “Southwestern-Spiced Pork Tenderloin” – I’ll let you know how it goes, and if it’s any good, I’ll post the recipe for you all! 🙂 For dessert, I now have Corella pears again – if they’re ripe enough I might have one of those – if not, I’ll have a reprise of last night’s Coles-brand, very low-calorie, Rice Pudding with some fruit on top.

Weigh-in this morning. Was a little more mollifying. I went from 65.1kg to 64.6kg. I’m not going to say anything, lest I mozz myself! (Winter looks around furtively – holding one finger against her lips she says “Shhhhh!”)

Well, there you have it! That’s how my day has played out – so far, anyway – we haven’t heard back from Dorevitch about my Warfarin blood test yet… I’ll keep you all posted! And once again, that’s about it from me again (“dinner’s in 10!”, calls Julian from the kitchen! Arrgghhh! This is too long!) – will finish my last words later – back soon-ish! 😉

09.08 pm

Here I am again – where was I? Oh yes, I’m very sorry this evening’s missive is really more of a missile – but news to hand: Warfarin blood tests are in: INR is back to 2.6 – about where it should be, for a change! I stay on the same dosage of 4mg daily, except for Sundays, when I take 5mg.  And now, that really is it from me for this evening! Tune in again tomorrow night for a much shorter essay on “What Made My Day Today”, whether Arisnoë has finally cracked level 100 yet, and what my stupid weight decided to do to amuse everyone this time! (sorry – I’ve just finished watching Shaun Micallef’s “Mad as Hell”!) In the meantime, please do try to bee good, remember that success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep dry and warm, especially if it looks like rain… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.42 pm

Well, I’d thought that my very favourite eldest daughter was going to have been over today, but she wasn’t feeling all that crash hot so she’s taken a Rain Check until Friday – so I had the day to slop around in Draenor for a bit! This morning it seemed to take me for-evah to work through all of Wynterthyme’s “chores” – collecting the proceeds from all the Missions that both her Fleet and her Followers had been on, and then organising said Fleet and Followers, and sending them out again on new Missions, to be collected and collated this evening. Then she had her Fishing Daily to complete, so I raced off and did that – I dunno, by the time I’d finished with Wynterthyme in Draenor, it was nearly lunch time in Vermont South, Victoria, and I was only able to get in a relatively short time in with Arisnoë! After lunch, Julian and I managed to get about an hour and a half in with Wïnter and Malinconia, but it was a time very well spent, as we managed to get through a couple of fairly simple quest chains, before Julian had to head off to do much more mundane jobs, like copying our inherited tapes, CDs, and LPs to the file server, mainly as a way of preserving them for posterity, but also to make it easier to find and play them if we feel like it. We copy quite a few to little USBkeys, to take in the car with us, too! Talking about music, isn’t it really weird, how a piece of music that you haven’t heard for (quite literally, sometimes!) years, and with no recognition or memory “trigger” to start you thinking about that particular tune, will suddenly invade your mind and – almost with a sigh of satisfaction – embed itself into your brain, where it will remain, blissfully humming its way through every single thing you do, until it almost drives you to distraction! Where did it come from? What triggered its recall? Why here? Why now? – f’rinstance, Julian was telling me this morning that he had a very old Doris Day song going through his head, apparently called (I looked it up just before!) “Perhaps… Perhaps… Perhaps” – now, Julian’s far too young to have been terribly familiar with Doris Day songs, and there’s absolutely nothing going on in our lives at the moment that involves any sort of speculation or indecision! So… what made it suddenly pop into his mind? Where did it come from? It’s weird… and I also, before he told me about the Doris Day song running through his mind, suffered a similar visitation! It was a song by George Michael, called “Praying for Time” – and I don’t even like George Michael all that much (wonderful voice, but not a nice man!) let alone that particular song (I find it slightly maudlin and a bit “preachy”) so… why did it suddenly pop into my mind? My mind was miles away, thinking about where to go for my belated Mother’s Day luncheon next Sunday, and would I, or would I not, cave in and get Arisnoë into some Heirloom gear – it gives a slight “boost” to earning experience points (which helps you level up a bit faster!) and poor old Arisnoë is crawling along (more like staggering along!) at the moment, as slowly as an ancient and arthritic snail – Arisnoë doesn’t have the luxury of leveling up with a partner – she’s doing it all on her lonesome – except when she can’t, which is usually heralded with a doleful wail of: “Joooo-lien! I can’t (whatever it is that I can’t do)” – so I have no earthly idea where that song came from, or why it chose that particular moment to infiltrate my usually heavily guarded mind! 😉 I don’t really mind when a song sneaks unbidden into your mind, and decides to stay for a while – I’d just like to know how and why it happens!

And now on to more interesting things! 🙂

Food stuffz: As I told you all, last night we had a piece of delicious “Three Island Steak”, which came from Flinder’s Island, and it was really seriously good! With it we had chips, green beans, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I had a small slice of cake, a single dried fig, and one nice, juicy date. For lunch today I had a sandwich – made from the very tasty Baker’s Delight sesame-crusted whole-meal loaf, with mashed roast pumpkin instead of butter on one side of the sandwich, and mashed, cold boiled potato instead of butter on the other, with some of the leftover roast beef that we had the other night in the middle! Absolutely scrumptious! That marinated “chunk” of roast beef was fantastic – extremely good value for money, and almost without a skerrick of fat on it (though you do need a little bit of fat on meat, just to give it some flavour!) I mentioned to Julian that we should have it more often, and he agreed with me – so hopefully we’ll be having it again, soon-ish! 😉 Tonight we’re having the last of the “Lamb & Harissa Lasagne with Feta and Oregano” – that particular recipe – which says it feeds eight – has fed us for four meals! The first night, when Julian first cooked it, and then from the freezer to the oven for three subsequent meals! Naturally Julian had divided the leftovers up into individual single-serve portions, as we didn’t want to be freezing and re-heating it too many times! Tomorrow, I will get the rest of that recipe written up properly, and it should be waiting for you all in the Recipe section of my blog! And for dessert tonight – there is enough Almond-meal cake left for tonight, but I’m not sure that I should have it – even though I do like it so very much… I will, however, be having a small bowl of the Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding, with some sort of sugar-free fruit on it.

Weigh-in this morning. Was horrible and very humiliating. I went from 64.9kg to 65.1kg. I am in despair. I just don’t know what to do! I took my last [heavily censored] fluid loving and retaining pill this morning – thank heavens – but it’ll take at least three or four days for me to work their evil out of my body – and who knows how much higher my weight will go in the meantime! I may, really, have to go back onto the Optifast diet for a month or so… 😦 All my hard work and perseverance – stripped completely away in ten bloody days! No. I am not a Happy Little Vegemite! I can say “I did it once, I can do it again!” – but then in three months time, it’ll go down the same path! What is it they say? “Practice makes perfect – but nobody’s perfect, so what’s the point of practicing?!”

And so to tomorrow. Tomorrow, I have another Warfarin blood test! Let’s hope it’s a bit better than the last one wasn’t – I could really do with a bit of good news, concerning this [heavily censored again] body of mine! Oh well – I’ll probably do some more Arisnoë-ing, and get my Heirloom gear organised – it’s “Account-wide”, so all my characters have access to it – and although it’s only suitable up to level 90 at the moment, you can buy (for an exorbitant price!) “upgrades” for it – so I’ll see how she goes with that – well, I guess it’ll either work, or it won’t! It certainly helped Malinconia catch up to Wïnter, who had somehow managed to get nearly half a level ahead of her. Here’s hoping, anyway! 🙂 And that, gentle readers, is about it from me again for this evening!Don’t forget to drop in again tomorrow night to see if the Heirloom armor is working for Arisnoë, and if my weight is starting to subside at all, or if it’s still on the way up (as I expect it will be for another couple of days – my feet still look like balloons!) I’ll make sure I have that recipe up for you all, too – so stay tuned! 🙂 In the meantime, please try ultra hard to bee good, remember that a pessimist complains about the wind; an optimist expects it to change; but realist adjusts the sails… and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep warm and dry in this horrible weather that we’re having, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly – please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

06.08 pm

Well, here I am finally – only a day late! As you’ve all probably guessed, I got a bit caught up in Draenor, with Wïnter and Malinconia last night! We had a really good day – and finished off a lot of the smaller quests in Shadowmoon Valley, both of us scrambling up a couple of levels from level 92 to level 95, with neither of us dying! Pretty good, I thought, for our first foray into Draenor as a team! We actually played a little more this afternoon, too, but Julian had some shopping to do, and I had Josh coming over to do my hair, so we only got about an hour and a half in today. I think we might have a small problem though – we had to decide whether to put an Artillery Tower or an Arcane Sanctum at Fort Wrynn, and without paying much attention to what we were doing, we each chose one. Now, the general advice when choosing what really boils down to a “Profession” based option, is that if you’re going to be playing long-term with someone, as Julian and I do, you should always choose the same option, because the Artillery Tower and the Arcane Sanctum both have different quest chains linked to them, and it’s ever so much more easier, if you and your co-player are both on the same quests. You don’t have to be, of course – it just makes life easier. F’rinstance, yesterday we were up in Gorgrond at Highpass, and we had to make a choice of building either a Lumber Yard, or a Sparring Arena – which we did discuss – briefly, and because neither of us is very much into ye olde “Gladiatorial Combat” type scenarios, we both decided to build the Lumber Yard – easy-peasy! And of course, we both got the same sets of quests attached to the option we’d chosen. We should a thunk today, but we didn’t. I chose the Arcane Sanctum, because I’m sorta into all that kinda ookey-spookey stuff, and Julian chose the Artillery Tower, because he’s sorta into engineering and “how things work” type of stuff! We were both sent off in completely different directions to acquire the necessaries for our two choices and naturally Malinconia came along to give Wïnter a helping hand, as Wïnter did when we came to do Malinconia’s – but we were both “flying blind”! I had no idea what his quest entailed, or what we were supposed to accomplish – all I could do was try to kill anything that seemed to be making a threatening move towards either of us – and Malinconia had the same problem while we were doing Wïnter’s set of quests! I think we’ve finished off those two quest chains – if so, then as long as we’re careful not to get too far ahead of eachother, from now on we should be on all the same quests. I’m not sure if there are any more “Outposts” that we have to establish, but if so, I, for one, shall endeavour to be mindful of trying to keep our individual choices parallel from now on! 🙂

Ooops! Dinner time – back soon-ish…

09.35 pm

Back again… so, this afternoon Julian and I took Wïnter and Malinconia out to stretch their legs a bit, but this morning, after I’d completed Wynterthyme’s “chores” with her Fleet and her Followers, I took poor neglected Arisnoë out, to do a bit of questing – and I’m very pleased to say that she has at long last reached level 98 – for which she picked up one new, “Passive” ability (meaning that you don’t physically call on the ability, it’s just added to your list of… well, “attributes”, I suppose you’d call them…) Unfortunately, she still has another two levels to go before she can start making any improvements or upgrades to her Garrison 😦 though she has been given a book to take to Stormshield in Ashran, which I think will allow her to buy level 3 “Blueprints” for Garrison Buildings – or at least that’s what I hope it is!

So anyway, that’s how I’ve been occupying myself for the past two days – so now I suppose I’d better get on with the “interesting bits”! 🙂

Food stuffz: Last night being Sunday night, we had omelets for dinner – a reprise of the last week’s fried Halloumi cheese bits and bacon, to which the rest of the omelet mixture of eggs, onion, red pepper, and a family top-secret mixture of herbs and spices, was added. Very delicious! For dessert I had a slice of Almond-meal cake, one dried fig, and one date. Today for lunch I had a really lovely sandwich made with the Baker’s Delight sesame-crusted whole-meal loaf, with basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, and turkey “sandwich chunks” – honestly, I don’t think there’s a better combination for a sandwich that that, anywhere in the universe! It’s almost worth the price I’d have to pay if I had a second one! Tonight for dinner we had fillet steak… not our customary King Island steak, but “Three Island Steak”, which actually comes from Flinder’s Island – and I was most curious to know how it would compare with our usual King Island fare… Well, I can tell you truthfully, it was every bit as good as, if not better than, the King Island steak – so guys and gals, if you’re browsing through the supermarket one afternoon, wondering what to get for dinner, and you see either the King Island brand or the Three Island brand, don’t hesitate, get one of each and compare it yourselves! Your mouth and your stomach will think that you’ve died and gone to heaven, it’s that good! For dessert tonight I had exactly what I had last night – a slice of cake (and hopefully there’ll be enough of it left for a slice tomorrow night as well!) one dried fig, and one date *burp* 😉

Weigh-in yesterday morning. Was not good. Not good at all! Thank heavens I only have tomorrow morning left of these horrible, dreadful, awful little fluid-loving and retaining pills! I went from 64.0kg to… 64.7kg! I was devastated! I’m not doing anything differently! I’m eating the same things, I’m drinking the same things, I’m doing all the same things! So… Why! See?! no rhyme nor reason! My feet have been hideously swollen in the evenings – but they’re quite often like that, and even the [censored] doctors don’t know why (unless they’re just not telling me because they don’t want to upset me or something) And you know what? If I thought that was bad – seven points overnight, for no apparent reason –

Weigh-in this morning. All I can say is that yesterday was damn good, in comparison! I think I have reached crisis point, and I don’t think that even Julian knows how sick I feel about it all! If I go up again tomorrow, I’m going to have to go back on the Optifast diet for a while. No, I’m not exaggerating or being melodramatic. This morning I went from 64.7kg… to 64.9kh – one lousy little point off “Maintenance” weight! And I don’t know why! I mean, if I’d been going out every day and indulging and making a pig of myself, well, I’d only have myself to blame and I wouldn’t expect anything else… But I haven’t! Lord knows, Julian’s with me all the time, he sees what I eat and what I don’t eat – and I’m honestly not in denial – I’m eating exactly the way I have been since last September, or whenever it was that I hit Maintenance, except for a couple of days over Christmas, and a week over Easter. I’m not happy.

And so to tomorrow. I think I’m almost too scared to get on the scales tomorrow – because I just know that for the first time in over seven months I’m going to be over 65kg again *cry* About the only good thing about tomorrow is that my very favourite eldest daughter will be coming over… I’m not sure what we’ve got to watch at the moment, except for the first two episodes of the final, very short season of “Person of Interest”, in which I sincerely hope that all the loose ends and bits of straggly string that have been left lying around will finally get knotted, tied, and neatly trimmed! It’s been an excellent series, but I can’t see how they can end it without a lot of angst and recriminations, unless they do a George R R Martin, and kill  off everyone you ever liked in the show, which is just about everyone 😦 And that, believe it or not, is about it from me for tonight – I do try to get my blog written before dinner every night, because I utterly hate having to come and sit down and write after dinner and watching – whatever we watched on television (tonight we watched Midsomer Murders, wot we recorded last night) and sometimes I’m a little (alright then, a lot!) late, and sometimes it doesn’t get written until the next day (or night) so apologies in advance for the next time it happens! Do feel free to drop in again tomorrow night to see how much my weight went over 65kg, what my favourite daughter and I watched on television, and how our “girls” are getting along in Draenor! Until then though, please try to bee good, remember that everyone smiles in the same language, and don’t forget to take care of yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry in this blustery late autumn weather… but above all, please – don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂