04.38 pm

Well, here it is, Mother’s Day Eve, and I’m starting more-or-less on time! Apart from organising Wynterthyme’s Fleet and Followers this morning, completing a Fishing quest, and sending some stuff I wanted Auctioned off to Ambermyst, I’ve been pretty-much working with Akåsha, who is now almost level 14! Oh, my Warfarin results came in late last night, and they weren’t good at all! My INR was up from 2.9 to 3.7 – w-a-y too high! Ideally, it should be about 2.5 or thereabouts, and neither Julian nor I could think of any reason why it should be so high this week! Nothing in our life has changed – our daily routine hasn’t changed in any way, and our diets are the same too – I’ve not been sitting down to bowlsful of spinach, brussels sprouts, or any other type of “leafy greens”, and I’ve not eaten anything high in vitamin K (that I know of! Is there a lot of vitamin K in dates or dried figs? and even if there was, I hardly think that eating just one a night would make all that much of a difference! Surely!) The only thing that is slightly different is that – thanks to losing so much weight, my doctor has reduced the amount of blood pressure medication that I take – instead of taking 4mg a day, I now take 2mg (and depending on what my blood pressure is next week, I might even have to come off them altogether!) But that medication change was mentioned on the green form that goes off to Dorevitch along with my test-tube of blood… Anyway, they want me to have another blood test – next Wednesday! I haven’t had blood tests so close together since I came home from hospital last year with all my Warfarin prescriptions! I don’t really mind, but it’s a hassle, nonetheless. If they’d come here to do the blood test, I wouldn’t care… Oh well, let’s just hope I don’t cut myself before they get me stabilised again – we’d never get the blood out of the grouting! 😉

So, Julian has been working hard on Malinconia, who’s now just over level 91 – so we should be able to start playing the two of them – Wïnter and Malinconia – tomorrow morning! Did I mention the other day that Wynterthyme spent a whole chunk of Guild Bank money to get herself a magical potion that allows her to transform into a Dragon, and seeing as she’s the vehicle, she can give rides to other people! Mouselet has the same ability, and if I had a gold coin for every time he’s flown Wynterthyme (and most of my other alts!) around, I’d be an excessively rich Night Elf! And because Wïnter is on my second account, I can have both Wynterthyme and Wïnter online at the same time, and Wynterthyme could fly Malinconia around, and Mouselet could fly Wïnter around – at the same time! If we really needed to, that is, because now that Wynterthyme and Mouselet have their Flying Licences for Draenor, all our alts can now fly in Draenor too! I just can’t wait to get going with Wïnter and Malinconia – being able to fly around doing quests is going to make them so much easier! I have a feeling that with the two of them working together, plus being able to fly, is going to make the two of us almost unstoppable, and I think we’ll both reach level 100 a lot sooner than Wynterthyme and Mouselet did!

I spoke to my very favourite youngest daughter today – she’s really enjoying her new job, but she sounds terrible! Her husband Terry has had the flu, and from the sound of her voice, she’s just caught it from him! I don’t get sick often, and when I do get something “ordinary” (like a head cold, or the flu) I’m always better in about a day. However, when I do get “Sick” (with a capital “S”!) I get really, really sick – and it’s usually something that no-one’s ever heard of, or something really, really serious, and quite often, actually life-threatening. Like, I mean, if I’m gunna get sick, I might as well do it properly, right? Go the whole hog? Inject a little excitement and trauma into everyone’s lives… 😉 Thankfully, I don’t do it very often…

And now for the interesting bits of the day!

Food stuffz: Last night we had the King Island Beef sausages, and I think we’d forgotten how much nicer they were than all the other beef sausages – well, I know I had, anyway! They are a teeny bit larger – not a lot, though – and they’re definitely “denser” than the other ones – how to explain it? Hmm… When you stick your fork into a sausage, and start to cut it, the “sausage filling” inside the non-King Island Beef sausages was a lot “sloppier”, or more loosely packed into the sausage skins, and the sausage meat would often fall away from the skin, making a rather raggedy looking disk of cut sausage. The the “sausage filling” inside the King Island Beef ones was very firmly packed in – almost to the point that when you cut a piece of sausage off, it almost felt as though it was going to burst, from the thick sausage filling straining against the skin. This gave them an altogether different texture and “mouth feel”, and also, while still nice and “juicy”, they still seemed a little dryer than the non-King Island ones… Verdict? I most definitely like them a lot more than the non-King Island Beef sausages! With the sausages we had chips, green beans, and the ubiquitous half a tomato. For dessert, I had one yummy plump date, and a slice of the freshly made Almond-meal cake, which was superb! It doesn’t rise very high, in fact I’d say it wasn’t much more than about 2.5 cm high – and curiously, like the King Island sausages, it was very dense! (it’s been quite a while since we’ve had this yummy cake, and really, all I could remember about the Almond-meal cake was that it was absolutely to die for! (and it still is!)) It reminded me a lot of the semolina and chestnut-meal cakes that my cousin Ilda used to make sometimes when I was a little girl, only our cake doesn’t have any semolina in it and is almond flavoured rather than chestnut flavoured. I really must search for that recipe – it was made in much the same way, only it used chestnuts, and had rosemary and pine nuts in it. I think it’s the texture of the two cakes almost more than the taste that’s so fantastic… hmm… for lunch today I had a sandwich made from the Baker’s Delight sesame seed crusted, whole-meal bread (beautiful!) with roast-beef (sandwich meat) low-fat Swiss cheese, and Beerenberg Red Pepper Relish. All very tasty and delicious! For dinner tonight, we’re having a marinated roast beef, with roast pumpkin, steamed (or boiled) baby new potatoes (which we’ll have with some low-fat plain Greek yoghurt instead of butter) green beans, and… the usual half a tomato 🙂 For dessert I’ll have another slice of that scrumptious Almond-meal cake, another plump, juicy date, and a dried fig.

Weigh-in this morning. Was very disappointing! Despite all the walking I did yesterday, and all those dangerous stairs that I struggled up and dithered down, despite the fact that I did indeed remember to take my anti-fluid tablet after lunch, I went from 63.6kg up to 64.0kg! It was probably those wretched fluid retaining and loving pills that I’m on at the moment! Thank goodness, I only have another three days of them to go (and then another four for my body to adjust and start shedding the fluid again!) …I suppose I’ll probably be up again, tomorrow 😦

Ah yes… tomorrow! Our Day in Draenor! I’m looking forward to tackling that with Wïnter and Malinconia! I suspect that because I’d already made it to level 92 (possibly with assistance from Mouselet, if I have done the much dreaded (by me!) “Battle for Karabor”) we will probably be quite a bit “out of sync”, quest-wise – but that’s OK too – if neither of us have done a quest, we’ll do it together, and if one of has done a particular quest and the other hasn’t, that’s OK too – we’ll still both do it together! And as I said before – being able to fly now will make questing and leveling up a great deal quicker! As Malinconia is a Shaman, and Wïnter is a Beastmaster Hunter, we’re actually pretty much clones of Wynterthyme and a female version of Mouselet! I think it’ll be a lot of fun! 🙂 And once more, that’s really about it from me for this evening! Don’t forget to drop in again tomorrow night to find out which way my weight went – up or down (most likely up, I fear!) how Wïnter and Malinconia got on during their very first day of questing together! Did they make friends immediately? Did they take an instant dislike to eachother? Did they go up a level, or die? As well as the very important question of: is there any Almond-meal cake left! 😉 However, until tomorrow night, please do try to bee good, remember not to stop doing your best just because someone doesn’t give you credit, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry in Melbourne’s dynamic and mercurial weather… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.51 pm

You know, I was ready to start writing an hour ago – but as usual, I went to check if there were any new Templates. There was one – not really new, but I hadn’t noticed it before – or maybe I had, but decided that it wasn’t for me because the page was in three columns – anyway, I had a look at it, and you could change the number of columns – from one to four, or you could have what they call “standard layout” – which in layman’s language, it’s like this one – the one you’re looking at right now. “ohh!” thinks me “Maybe it’s usable after all!” so naturally I set about Previewing it with my blog. It didn’t look too bad! It didn’t even force you into having a sidebar for your Widgets! This was starting to look better and better – so I tried out different colours and backgrounds – just to see what they’d look like, mind you. And then I saw it! The beautiful background! The trouble was, although the Template was eminently suitable (although the text “window” wasn’t quite as wide as this one) it wasn’t a “free” Template – it would have cost me $66, and I didn’t quite like it a full $66 worth! But… the background! I just had to have the background! So with a surreptitious glance over my left shoulder, and then my right shoulder, I right-clicked on the background image and selected “save image as”, crossing my fingers that there’d be enough of it to ensure that it tiled correctly (sometimes very nasty people put up a beautiful image, but chop a bit off – just enough of it to prevent it from tiling properly! It’s like seeing a yummy picture of an ice cream, so you go and buy one, only to find that they’ve chopped the bottom of the cone off and you lose half your ice cream as it melts quickly through the hole!) So I tried the small section of background that I’d saved, and yes! It did tile properly! I switched back to my blog and again tried to start writing – but I very much wanted to see how the background looked on this Template. Well, as you can see, it looks great! (well, I think it does, anyway!) but, erm… the header didn’t quite go with it. Never mind, that was easy enough to change, and I flicked into Photoshop to add another layer to my header “base” – but… what colour to use? Using the “magic eyedropper”, I sampled just about every colour that I could see in the background, and tried them all out in the header. In all, I think I uploaded about seven or eight different versions, all with different colours, but none of them looked “quite right”, if you know what I mean, so I asked Julian. He liked this one the best – and although neither of us are really into greens that much, he was right – it did seem to go best with the background, so I’ve left it there – for the nonce, anyway. I should put a different coloured header up every three or four days, and run a competition: “Which colour header goes best with this background?” – but because I have no idea what I could use as a prize, I don’t think I’ll go ahead with it!

So, what did we do today… well, not much, really, because I had to go off this morning to get my Warfarin blood test done – and seeing that we’ve now had my name and our address changed  with Medicare, we had to try to explain all of that to the nice Vampire nurse who took my blood, who just happened to be very deaf. I’ll see if there’s some way I can get my green forms changed online, and sent out to me (they send you out a bunch of forms with all your medical particulars pre-printed on them, to give to the nurse whenever you have a Warfarin Blood Test) I’m a bit surprised, really – we went in fairly early this morning, and we haven’t had the SMS about my dosage yet, even though it’s now 5.38 pm! Oh well – it’s not all that urgent – yet! After that, we went off to Ringwood to change my name, and our address, on the Electoral roll thingy (we went to Ringwood because it was the only one listed on their website for our area!) Well! To enter the building, there’s either a flight of steps with no hand-rail on either side*, or an enormously l-o-n-g wheelchair ramp. I opted for the stairs, but I was most displeased! I’m old, and in shoes I’m ultra slow (I detest shoes!) and without a rail I was even slower than usual, as well very nervous. But I got up them, and we went in. The Electoral Roll office was… (drum-roll, please!) up two flights of ruddy stairs! Ah, but wait! There was a lift! (elevator, to Americans) What a shame it wasn’t working! (I was more than just a little “put-out” by this stage!) So, guess what! I struggled up the two [censored] flights of stairs which, thank heavens, did at least have hand-rails! We got up to the top, to find the place was in darkness – no, they weren’t closed, the lights were just out – someone in the office there muttered something about a Board Meeting or something, though what that would have to do with the lights being out was not made clear! So I changed my name on the Electoral Roll, and we changed our address from Doncaster to Vermont South – then we groped our way back to the stairs where I nervously inched my way back down, despite the comfort of the hand-rail, only half wishing that I could fall and break something, so that I could sue them! And then we came home. After lunch I worked at getting Akåsha all set up and ready to go questing for fame, fortune, and lots of fun – she’s now level 8! Julian made the almond and Ricotta cake, as featured in yesterday’s recipes, and cleaned out one of the drains, and I washed my hair, came back in here, had a bit of a pink fit at the time (it was a lot later than I’d thought it was!) and decided that perhaps I should start writing, but got sidetracked about the background and header colours – and that was, essentially, “My Day!”

Having rambled on a bit too long on mere trivia, I can now get on to the exciting and good bits, like…

Food stuffz: Last night we had pan-fried chicken on a bed of steamed rice, flavoured with finely chopped spring onions and a bit of soy sauce – no half a tomato though. For dessert I had my last Corella pear (I’ll get Julian to get me some more tomorrow!) a small tub of low-fat fruit yoghurt, and a large, juicy, sweet, delicious date (I was going to have a dried fig, but I’ll have that tonight instead – or maybe as well as, seeing that there are no pears left!) Lunch today was a very delicious and yummy wrap, with basil-pesto hummus, red capsicum batons, baby cucumbers, ham, and low-fat Halloumi cheese. Very yummy to eat – very messy to handle! 🙂 Tonight we’re having King Island Beef sausages – hopefully they’ll be a bit better than the marvelous shrinking beef sausages that we’ve been having lately! With them we’ll be having chips, green beans, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I’ll have a nice big healthy slice of the almond-Ricotta cake, with a fig and a date chaser.

Weigh-in this morning. Still no rhyme nor reason for it, and definitely within the margin of error, I went from 63.5kg to 63.6kg – up one point. Oh well, I’ll probably go up another half a kilo tomorrow – as I’m still on those nasty little white pills! Although walking up and down those stairs today will probably send me sky-rocketing up, or plummeting downwards – weight-wise, that is! 😉

And so on to tomorrow – the beginning of the weekend! Naturally, being us, we’re postponing Mother’s Day for a week – our family Mother’s Day will occur on Sunday, May 15th. Why? I don’t really know! However it does give us the distinct advantage of going out somewhere for a special meal, and not have to “book early to avoid the rush”, or put up with a limited “special Mother’s Day” menu. I must remember to call my favourite youngest daughter to (a) find out how her new job is going, and (b) to tell her that Mother’s Day will be held on Sunday, May 15th! And really, once again, that’s about it from me this evening! What did you all think of my recipes? Have you tried out any of them yet? Do call in again tomorrow night and find out if my Warfarin results were good, bad, or indifferent, what my weight decided to do – or not do, and how young Akåsha is faring! But until then, please continue to bee good, remember that Tetris teaches you that when you try to fit in, you’ll disappear, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep warm and dry now that the weather’s getting colder and wetter, and to always look after yourselves – but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*I look on this as a safety hazard! Just because you’re not old and doddery, or in a wheelchair, doesn’t mean that people don’t need the safety of a hand-rail, especially if it’s been raining and the steps are wet and slippery! I intend writing about it, in the strongest possible terms, to the local Council!

04.32 pm

Yup, here I am again – I feel as though I’ve been writing for the past three or four hours! Well, I haven’t, but I have been diligently head down, tail up, writing, writing, writing… If you go and have a look at the Recipe page, you’ll find three recipes there for you all – there’ll be more later on, as my enthusiasm for the project waxes and wanes – so look here for news and I’ll let you all know when the next “installment” gets published! 🙂 Enjoy!

So, what did I do this morning? Not much, really – I played WoW, ran around getting Wynterthyme’s  Fishing Daily done, and sending her Fleet and her Followers off to collect lots and lots of nice saleable “stuffs” for her – and then I went and deleted a few characters, just so that I could create two new ones, Akåsha, a Draenei Hunter, and Påndora, a Night Elf Hunter – why, I have no idea, except that it seemed like the right thing to do at the time! 🙂 Julian and I have decided to go with two different characters – both on Quel’Dorei rather than elsewhere, and Alliance, rather than Horde, so that we can take advantage of the Guild Bank (which now boasts 64 thousand gold, and the odd bits of loose change in silver and copper!) So, instead of Coppertop and Jemima on Azuremyst, we’re now going to be working with Wïnter (guess who! 😉 ) and Malinconia (Julian) Wïnter is on my second account, and Julian brought Malinconia over from the PvP Realm, Azshara, last night. Malinconia still has a few levels to go to catch up with Wïnter, but as soon as she does, we’ll be galloping off into the sunset, looking forward to setting up our own Garrisons. Now, I know you’re not going to believe me, but all of that took me the better part of the day! (thank ghod for coffee!) and now that I’ve created my two newbies, I’ll play with them for a day or two while Malinconia (level 87) catches up to Wïnter (level 92) though knowing Julian, it’ll probably only take him half an hour! This is the sort of thing we do all the time – we have two characters that play mostly with eachother, like Wynterthyme and Mouselet, and when we get them up to the top level, with not much more to do except Farm, and run the occasional Dungeon or two, we pretty much “retire” them, and chose another two of our highest level characters (like Coppertop and Jemima, or Wïnter and Malinconia) and work with them until they get to “retirement age” – rinse and repeat as necessary! Of course, in between the times when we’re playing together, we both play our other lower level characters – building them up until they’re ready to take over from our current “Dynamic Duo”.

Just scooting back to this recipe business for a moment, I found what looked like a really yummy recipe for something called “Southwestern-Spiced Port Tenderloin“. I found it in one of my daily newsletters from “the kitchn” – they usually have interesting articles and recipes – and I always like the sound of “make it once, eat all week” recipes… but I fell into my usual trap. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before – but I have absolutely not the vaguest idea about just how big things actually are (although there are usually a few clues and hints – which I almost always manage to miss!) Take this recipe, f’rinstance. It calls for 2, to 2.5 pounds (not kilos, pounds!) of pork “tenderloin”. Firstly, neither of us are familiar with the term “tenderloin” – we don’t use it much here in Australia, we tend to use the British terms, like “fillet”, instead of “tenderloin”, and “scone” instead of “biscuit” – but Americans have to be different, don’t they! This afternoon Julian actually rang me from the supermarket to ask me what a tenderloin was – I said I didn’t know! We both thought it might be something to do with a pork fillet – only bigger, more like a lamb backstrap in size. Well, we were both right, and we were both wrong. I should have twigged when I saw the photo with the cooked pork sitting on a chopping board, next to some beans. Look at the pork, Winter! Now look at the beans… now look at the pork again… the pork, when actually looked at in relation to the beans, isn’t very big, after all! In fact, it actually is a pork fillet! duh! So, can you imagine how much it’s a-gonna cost you, to buy 2 to 2.5 “pounds” (why can’t the Americans go metric, like the rest of the ruddy world! *annoyed look at screen*) or about 1.1 kilos worth, in metric? Quite a lot, actually! This recipe had better be extra good – however no matter how good it is, or how many meals $t provides, I don’t th$nk we’ll be mak$ng it terribly often$ Anyway, I’ll let you know what it’s like when we have it – either tomorrow, or Saturday, I suspect – I don’t want all that $$pork$$ going to waste! Hmm… I think it might be worthwhile starting to write up a “Glossary of American terms, and what they really mean in English”, just so that we don’t get caught like this again!

And now to the interesting bits:

Food stuffz: Last night we had our second last meal of the extremely tasty Lamb & Harissa Lasagne with Feta and Oregano – would you believe, we still have one more meal of that left? It’s really yummy – that’ll prolly be the next recipe I’ll be putting on the Recipe page – a bit like this, the newest will go at the top… and I’ll always warn you at the top of my nightly ramblings if there’s anything new in the way of recipes posted… Where was I? Oh yes, dinner last night… Lamb and Harissa… yummy… and for dessert I had a Corella pear (oh dear, I only have one left! I should have put them on the shopping list!) one really yummy big, plump, sweet date, and a small tub of low-fat fruit yoghurt (there was no more Rice Pudding left, and again, I forgot to put them on the list 😦 ) Today for lunch I had a ham, cheese and tomato toasted sandwich, with the very nice Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread – quite delicious, after I’d let it cool down enough so that I didn’t burn my mouth on the boiling cheese! 😉 Tonight we’re having pan-fried chicken breasts, on rice, with finely chopped spring onions in it (I’m not sure if they’re our spring onions or not!) and hopefully, a half a tomato. For dessert, I’ll probably have my last Corella pear, another low-fat fruit yoghurt, and a dried fig.

Weigh-in this morning. Was good, which really surprised me! I tell you, there ain’t no rhyme nor reason, only some swings and roundabouts, with my weight! I went from 63.8kg to 63.5kg this morning – down three points! While I’m on those terrible little fluid adoring and fluid retaining pills! I’m not complaining, mind you, I’m just totally mystified!

And so we move on to tomorrow. I’m not really sure what’s happening tomorrow, except for the fact that I have my next Warfarin blood test (I think I’ve decided that I really don’t like people sticking needles in my arm, after all!) Still, I guess it’s gotta be done I suppose I’ll probably spend most of the day on WoW, starting out my two newbies, but apart from that? Who knows? Anyway, once more that’s about it from me for tonight – please drop in again tomorrow night to find out what my weight did (I bet it’ll be up again!) if I still have any blood left, and how Malinconia is going towards catching up with Wïnter (she only has five levels to go!) as well as telling you all about any other adventures we got up to! In the meantime, do try to bee as good as possible, don’t forget that he who spends time regretting the past loses the present, and risks the future, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to make sure you stay warm and dry because “winter is coming”* – but most of all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*Don’t be silly! I’m already here! Oh… you mean the other, more seasonal winter! *sheepish grin*

04.13 pm

I did think, very briefly, of playing WoW for half an hour or so before settling down to write, but then I thought – “no… if I get started now I might actually finish before dinner for a change!” and seeing that I really hate having to start writing again after dinner (and television) well, here I am! 🙂

Not all that much happened today – I played WoW this morning, and took Arisnoë out for a run fly – originally to do some straight-out questing, but as I had a Fishing “task” to complete in the Spires of Arak, I thought I’d do that first. But I didn’t, because I got totally distracted by the sight of all the treasure chests marked on the map for Spires of Arak, and I went after those, instead! (do any of you out there in Reader Land get the vague sort of impression that I really didn’t feel like questing this morning? 😉 ) So while Julian went outside to give the mostly clean puddle underneath the Water Feature another scrub and polish, I went zooming around the countryside collecting lots and lots of treasure! Nothing that I could actually use, mind you, but certainly worth collecting, if only for their monetary value! Oh, and before that, I took myself back to Stormwind and the Auction House, to find some spiffier armor for myself – what I’d been running around in looked really daggy! Well, I think I’ve worked out why nearly all the low-level gear is so damned expensive! Blizzard, bless their tiny, wizened little hearts, have decided that, like Rift, you can chance the way you appear to other’s eyes, whilst still wearing your excellent, but daggy-looking armor. However, unlike Rift, where all you need to do is a quick “Superman-like” gear change, in your nearest, unmarked “Out of Order” phone booth, oh my goodness me, no! Blizzard makes you go to a special shop and “Transmogrify” your daggy-looking gear… into something “more trendy”, and which you’ve just procured from the Auction House – at enormous expense! The Transmogrification itself isn’t “free”, either – it too costs you gold! Now, I reckon that people picking up nice looking gear, either through “drops”, or quest rewards or whatever – have a go at selling it on the Auction House, for unbelievably exorbitant prices. Some silly bunny (like me, f’rinstance!) will usually come along and pay what you’re asking, simply because they want to look “pretty”! And if they don’t sell it? Not a problem, because while it’s sitting on the Auction House for a 48 hour period, it’s all time that it’s not taking up room in your personal Bank vault! If you’re lucky, you make a mint – if you’re unlucky? You get free banking space! In fact, you just can’t lose – it’s a win-win situation for the seller! So, I bought some new gear for Arisnoë, for about 1.5 thousand gold (not out of the Guild Bank, either!) so that she’ll look good out on the Battle field. Then I went of to do some questing, decided to do my Fishing task first instead, but got distracted by the treasure chests marked on my map…

And by the time I’d done all of that, it was lunch time! After lunch, I went and brushed my teeth, put on some makeup, and put my shoes on – we were finally going Fish House shopping! Then Julian found a discrepancy in one of our Bank Statements, which necessitated a phone call to the Bank – where we were put on hold because “our call was important to them”. Ten or so minutes later Julian was put through to a nice person who took down all the details, which resulted in Julian’s card being cancelled, and a new one ordered for him – luckily, mine was OK, so we’ll probably be working off mine until his new card arrives. We were finally able to scramble into the car and go off to look at Fish Houses! There was a really, really nice one, on its own stand too, and with a very nice “hood” thing over the top of it where you’d put your tank lighting and so forth. Unfortunately, it was a little on the “super-large” size, at 3 feet long (about 92cm) about a foot and a half wide (about 43cm) and maybe 2 feet deep (about 61cm) …I think! however we all know how dreadful my maths is, don’t we! Anyway, we figured we’d have to buy an awful lot of new fishes to put in with Auric and Dapple, in order to make a tank that size look “lived in”. There was another tank that was only 2 feet long, (about 61cm) but that one seemed just a wee bit too small… in the end we opted for an in-between size of 2.5 feet long (about 74cm) with all the same sorts of dimensions regarding the width and depth (I’m sorry, but dreadfully lazy me simply can’t be bothered looking them all up and writing them all down – again!) It too has its own stand to sit on, and hood, for the lighting – unfortunately they didn’t have any in stock – the guy’ll have to get one in for us – and it should be ready for collection by next week. Then we’ll need gravel, plants, rocks, more fish, including a freshwater catfish (they’re only little!) to help keep the bottom of the tank clean. I wonder what Auric and Dapple will think of their new abode, and the new playmates we’ll be getting for them (we’ll be moving them in first and letting them settle in properly, before going off and buying more goldfish for them to play with!)

After our excursion to the Aquarium, we came straight home, and had a much needed cup of coffee! 🙂 Then I had that little “conversation” with myself about playing WoW, or settling down to write – and that’s really the contents of my day, so to speak! Now I’ll get stuck into the interesting bits…

Food stuffz. Last night we had beef sausages for dinner, with mashed potatoes, steamed green beans, and our almost “de rigueur” half a tomato. I’m starting to wonder though, whether the beef sausages we’ve been getting are gradually shrinking or something, as they seem to be getting smaller? Maybe it’s just my imagination… For dessert I had one dried fig, a small tub of low-fat passionfruit yoghurt, and the last slice of Julian’s latest cake. Oh! Good news! I did manage to locate the recipe for the really lovely, yummy almond-meal cake that I was raving on about a little while back – I’m going to put all the ingredients down on our Shopping List for tomorrow, so that Julian can make that, instead of the ultra-simple and easy to make Babka, for a change! 🙂 Today for lunch I had a really delicious sandwich made with the Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread with the sesame seed crust, basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, and sandwich turkey “chunks” – it was really the most delicious sandwich! For dinner tonight, we’re having the second-last (I think!) meal of our left-over Lamb & Harissa Lasagne with Feta and Oregano, and for dessert, I’ll be having one of my Corella pears, some of the delicious Coles-brand, very low-calorie, Rice Pudding, and one juicy date (if there are any left – if there aren’t, I’ll have another dried fig instead!)

Weigh-in this morning. No rhyme nor reason, honestly, I’ve given up trying to figure out how it works, and what to expect every morning! I went from 64.1kg down to 63.8kg, which was good – especially as I’m on those wretched pills at the moment – but it’ll most likely be up again tomorrow morning *shrug* just as long as I don’t go up as high as 65kg, because then I would have to go back on the Optifast!

And there you have it – the sum total of my day – well, this far, anyway! 🙂 There’s still time for anything to happen, before midnight tonight! 😉 Julian and I have decided to work with some of our “extraneous” characters on another Realm, now that everyone can fly in Draenor, and Wynterthyme and Mouselet have pretty much done as much as they can do, apart from Dailies and Dungeons, before the expansion in a couple of months – so we’ve gone back to another Realm, Azuremyst, and two Horde characters that we got up to level 80 (which was the level cap when we left them) Coppertop (me) and Jemima (Julian) We spent most of last night catching them up and setting everything out properly – crikey, it must have been sooo long ago that we last played them – Coppertop, who’s a Beastmaster Hunter, didn’t even have a bow or a gun! All she had was a Polearm! Yes! way back then, Hunter’s usually fought with melee weapons! All fixed up now though – I bought her a new gun on the Auction House last night! 🙂 Of course, the Guild Bank over on Azuremyst isn’t all that wonderful, and at level 80, we still have a long way to go before we get to Draenor – but, we’ll see how we go – it’s early days yet! 🙂 And that, Gentle Readers, is about “it” from me for this evening! 🙂 Do call in again tomorrow night to catch up on all the latest news, trivia, and fun from this neck of the woods! Until then though, do try really, really hard to bee good, remember, there are two primary choices in life – to accept conditions as they exist, or to accept the responsibility for changing them, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep dry and warm, in this typically changeable Melbourne weather… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

05.59 pm

OK, yes, I am a bit late this evening, but that’s because my very favourite eldest daughter’s been over today, and as she was leaving I was starting to work on the colours and the header for this particular blog Template – it’s an older one that I bought some time ago, and because it’s been one of the better ones I thought I’d give it another go. It’s got a fairly wide text column, though not as wide as I’d like – unfortunately, I can’t tell what the font or header sizes are like until I actually publish what I’ve written! I can look at yesterday’s blog, and that looks alright, but I changed fonts for this one, so who know what it’ll look like when I’ve finished! I might still need to do a bit of tweaking with things like fonts, headers, and so forth. Anyway – here’s the latest “burnt offering”, so to speak – I’ve been trying to capture more “Autumnal” colours – not terribly successfully, I fear, because oranges and reds can be a little bit… “harsh”, when there’s a lot of it on the page – so I’ve settled for a more toned-down “Indian Summer” effect – has it worked? (Winter looks anxiously at the screen)

While my favourite eldest daughter was over, naturally we retired fairly rapidly to the lounge room to watch our favourite shows – as I think I said last night – there was no “Supergirl”, because the last episode of that which we watched last week was a right doozy of a cliff-hanger, being the season finale, but we had one episode of “The 100”, where things are not going at all well for our young (and not quite so young) heroes and heroines – I can’t wait until next week to see what happens next! We also had one episode of “Orphan Black”, which is also starting to get very dark and “edgy” – and we’re only into the first couple of episodes of the new season! One shudders to think what they’ll be doing, and/or using, for the “de rigueur” end of the season cliff-hanger! After that, we watched alternating episodes of “Arrow”, and “Flash”, which are both getting quite tortuous, and which involved quite a bit of nail-biting by the two of us, plus the holding up of pillows in front of our eyes because we couldn’t bear to watch all the mayhem and strife – well actually, I think it was only me that was hiding behind pillows, and my cupped hands, whilst peeking out to see what was happening, and then ducking back to the safety of the pillows or hands again, when things got a bit too hectic! (I’m a very devout coward – my favourite eldest daughter is a lot much more braver than I am! 😉 ) That took us to about 05.20 pm, Lee started putting on her shoes again in preparation for her journey home, and I came in here and started looking for semi-decent “Autumnal” type colours – and so, here I am!

And now for the good bits! 😉

Food stuffz: last night we had a beautiful little piece of fillet steak, which we bought from Woolworth’s (Winter starts singing, quite a lot off-key: “Woolworth’s, the fresh food people…” only of course, they’re not really, are they!) I have to confess that the quality of the meat from Woolworth’s is not nearly as good as the quality of meat from their big bad rivals, Coles – but it was still lovely steak! Pan fried, with chips, steamed green beans, and half a store-bought tomato. For dessert, I had one big, delicious date, one of my Corella pears, and a slice of Julian’s cake. For lunch today I had a very yummy wrap, with the delicious basil-pesto hummus, sliced sandwich ham, Halloumi cheese, and batons of crisp and crunchy cucumbers and fresh red capsicum – a very excellent luncheon! Tonight for dinner we’re having beef sausages, with mashed potatoes, some sort of green vegetable (probably green beans?) and the almost always present half a tomato. For dessert tonight I think I’ll have a dried fig, a slice of cake, and a low-fat fruit yoghurt.

Weigh-in this morning. *sigh* It looks like I’m back on the swings and roundabouts, or maybe I should just call it “The Good Old Yo-Yo Trail”! Because I went back up again this morning, didn’t I – from 63.8kg yesterday morning, to 64.2kg this morning! Mind you, that’s most likely the fluid-retaining pills starting to kick in – so I refuse to worry too much about any weight gains for the next 10 days, plus one week – until I’ve finished this course of the horrible, weight-gaining pills, and been off them for about a week. Then, if I stay up too much, I’ll start to worry!

Almost time for dinner – I’ll finish this off later this evening! 🙂

09.33 pm

Here I am, back again! Well, having told you all about the “interesting” bits, I suppose I can spend a few lines to tell you all how absolutely thrilling it is for not only Wynterthyme to be able to fly in Draenor now, but also her junior siblings, Arisnoë and Sylvänas, because one of the rewards for doing all the hard work of completing quests and gaining Reputation, is that all your other alts, regardless of what they’ve done (or not done) or the Reputation they have, or don’t have, with anyone, will also be able to fly in Draenor, gratis! 🙂 So this morning I took Arisnoë off to do a few quests, and it’s sooo much more easier to get to places, and get in to pick up treasures, by “bird-back”! 🙂 I’m looking forward to having more time to get her up to level 98 (she dinged 97 this morning! 🙂 ) however, tomorrow I believe we’re going to look at fish tanks – the little tank that Auric and Dapple are currently in was only ever supposed to be a temporary holding tank while we fixed up their mud puddle – but now that we’ve decided not to put them back outside, they’ll have to have a “proper” Fish House inside. I’ll let you all know how the “Fish House-hunting” goes tomorrow night! And now, it’s the time of night where I usually turn around and say “and that’s about it from me for this evening!” – so – that’s about it from me for this evening! 😉 Do call in again tomorrow night to find out if my weight is still going up (oh, I hope not – but I’ll be quite resigned to it if it does – bloody pills! 😦 ) whether Arisnoë has reached level 98, now that she can get into places that she never could before, and if Auric and Dapple have a new Fish House to live in, once we get it all set up for them. In the meantime, do try to bee good, remember that it’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown, it’s part of being alive, something that we all share – and don’t forget to keep warm and dry in this wild and wet Melbourne weather, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves – but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

06.45 pm

OK, well, here I go – a quarter of an hour before the news and dinner! Talk about cutting it fine! We’ve been out most of today – we didn’t actually get to go looking at fish tanks and fishes today – because the doctor’s appointment was at 12.50 pm, it sort of cut the day right in half, so we contented ourselves with going to Doncaster (of all places!) because we had to get coffee, and pick up the Dry Cleaning (damn Daisy for only having two establishments! One in [censored] Port Melbourne, and one in Doncaster!)(and damn Nespresso for not having an outlet at The Glen, too!) so anyway, we went over to Doncaster and had lunch at The Shingle Inn – I’m rather partial to their BLT’s on Sourdough Bread, and their little cakes (which used to be called “Slimming Biscuits” when I was a teenager – because they’re not! (slimming)) are simply delicious… their coffee isn’t bad, either… I had to stop off at David Jones to get some waterproof mascara, and we needed to get some more Flipper Food from Woolworth’s, so we were there quite a while.

And I have some really good news for you all! 🙂 Tonight – in Draenor – I fly! Yes, I have less than half a bubble to go to get my “Revered” Reputation with my last Faction – The Order of the Awakened – and then I too, shall be able to soar through the skies of Draenor! I’m quite chuffed, actually! 🙂

11.33 pm

I can fly! 🙂 I can fly! 🙂 Izz wunnerfull! 🙂 Yanno, this might make Farming fun! Julian says you can go around harvesting trees without landing and getting off your (whatever you’re flying on at the time! At the moment I’m riding a lovely Golden Cloud Serpent I got in Pandaria! 🙂 )

But enough of my euphoria! I know you wanna know everything about yesterday and stuff – right? Well yesterday, Sunday, we spent most of our time in Draenor getting geared and psyched up to go Reputation Farming once the Dailies had re-set (they re-set every night at about 9 – 9.30 pm) and after lunch, we did (most of) Ahn’Qiraj – I think we died once, but neither of us can remember how or why (Julian thinks it was because we fell from somewhere very high – though that’s something we usually saved for Draenor, before we could fly!) We’ll have to go back there next Sunday because we haven’t finished getting all the bits and pieces we had to get – stone idols, and the like! By the time we finished that, it was right on dinner time, and then of course, after dinner, I was fretting to get back to earning my Reputation – which I finally achieved tonight! Yayyy! 🙂

I told Dr. B. about my sore arm today – she seemed to think that it might be Polymyalgia – which I hope to goodness it’s not! Not that there’s much that can be done about it, anyway, except for pain killers – wot I’m already taking for my arthritis – and a much more general “put up with it and shut up about it” – and that doesn’t sound like me at all! 😉 (if I didn’t have something to complain about, I’d be really upset and miserable, so I’d probably complain about that instead! *saccharine smile*) The long and short of it is that if it’s not better in a fortnight, she’s sending me off for blood tests! I hope it’s better by then… I’m allergic to blood tests – and anyway, I need all my blood – just in case! 😉

Food stuffz: yesterday for lunch I had a lovely roast beef and relish sandwich, made with the extremely nice Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread with the sesame seeded crust, and of course, last night being Sunday night, we had omelets for dinner. We had bacon and chopped fried onion in it this time, as well as the usual Halloumi cheese, chopped tomato, and chopped green capsicum – and Julian made them slightly differently – instead of chopping the bacon and Halloumi into the usual little bits, he left most of it in bigger pieces for a change, and fried the cheese, onion, and bacon first, before adding the rest of the egg-y “mixture” – the resulting omelet was extremely nice, and I hope he employs that method again next Sunday night! For dessert I had a piece of cake, a beautiful big, fat (alright, “plump”!) almost juicy, date, and one of my Corella pears. Today for lunch I had my usual Shingle Inn BLT on Sourdough, and a delicious little cakey afterwards, with a long black coffee and a small jug of skinny milk. Extremely nice lunch, that! 🙂 For dinner I had a lovely little piece of fillet steak, with chips, green beans, and the usual half a store-bought tomato. For dessert, I had a slice of cake, another date, which was delicious, and one of my Corella pears.

Weigh-in yesterday morning. Was not pleasant! I went up – from 64.0kg to 64.2kg! I was most put out, because I hadn’t even started to take those ‘orrible little fluid-retaining pills yet! (I actually took my first one about half an hour later, after I’d finished my morning treadmilling!) I was seriously starting to think “Optifast” again! It’s really rather creepy and nasty, the way my weight plays these sorts of mean tricks on poor little me, because…

Weigh-in this morning. Was a completely different story! This morning I went from 64.2kg to 63.8kg – go figure, coz I certainly can’t! I really do believe that my wretched body enjoys teasing and tormenting me, like that! 😦 Talk about a yo-yo for a body!

And so to tomorrow – my very favourite eldest daughter will be over, and we’ll probably watch – not “Supergirl” – I think the last one we watched was the season final – or was that “The 100”? I fergit! However there should be another “Orphan Black” (it really is a great show!) and of course there’s always “Arrow”, and “Flash”, both of which are starting to get quite exciting. I’m hoping to be able to go and have a look at fish tanks on Wednesday, and possibly something on which to put the fish tank, and to find out a bit more about introducing new fishes to Auric and Dapple (both of whom were quite hungry this evening as I wasn’t here to feed them at lunch time, poor little babies!) They’re doing much better now that they’re out of that hideously filthy mud puddle under the water feature – which is now looking very clean and healthy, except that I noticed it had a whole lot of dead leaves floating in it this afternoon – methinks we’ll have to use the net to fish them out before they start rotting in there again… Anyway, that’s about it from me for this evening – ’tis now 12.36 am, and I think Julian is getting a little impatient for me to finish up. Do drop in again tomorrow night – there’s really heaps more to tell you, but once again I’ve run out of time – but you’ll be able to catch up on all of it tomorrow night 🙂 In the meantime, please try to bee good, don’t forget to learn from yesterday, live for today, and hope for tomorrow – the important thing is not to stop questioning, and remember to look after yourselves, to keep warm and dry in this changeable weather, and to always drive carefully – but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

06.00 pm

Hi all – this is just a brief note to tell you that tonight’s blog will be late… very late… in fact, it might not even get written until tomorrow morning! But never fear – all about the day’s doin’s you shall hear about in due course 🙂 You may notice that I’ve added “Recipes” to the menu – however, there’s nothing there – yet! And as I’ll compiling some of my very bestest recipes in there for all to grab, I shall (when the time comes!) issue to you all, the same challenge that I give to Julian! “Here’s your weekly challenge! Make this!” – and then I give him the recipe. Sometimes he makes it, sometimes he doesn’t – and sometimes it just takes him a long time to find where he’s put his round tuit. All the recipes are tried and tested – do let me know how you go with them (in fact it might be nice if you invited us over to try it, don’t you think?!) 😉

Anyway, I’m off – catchyas all on the flip side! 🙂 Bee good, don’t be naughty, and I’ll catch up with all the news later on!