04.20 pm

Here I am – sorry about yesterday, but Josh was a bit late due to finding a nail in one of his tyres, and dinner was a bit late due to a slight altercation over a recipe – and by the time we’d had dinner and what-not, it was too late for me to start writing! What do you think of this background, by the way? I’ve been absolutely itching to find a use for it ever since I found it! (it’s one of Word Press’s backgrounds) It’s so “Art Deco”, but I didn’t know how it would go with a great big solid header over it, and it was too busy and colourful to just write over – and then I thought… I could try making an invisible background! I don’t often make invisible backgrounds because – and I hate to have to admit this – but I occasionally hold my mouth the wrong way when I’m saving them, and they end up not working. This time, it did. I’m still not quite sure that it’s what I wanted, but I was starting to run out of time, so I’ve left it like this for now.

This morning I had to go up and have my blood pressure checked again – I’d been taken off one lot of blood pressure pills completely, and reduced to only a half-dosage on the other one, so this morning was more or less to see if I still had to stay on the half-dosage one, or come off that one too. Dr. B. has decided that I should keep on with the current regimen, at least for now. We were going to come home via The Glen, and have lunch there, but because Julian has a bad case of the dreaded lurgi, I decided that it’d probably be better if we just came straight home… but we didn’t do that, either! We stopped off at Vermont South Shopping Centre – ostensibly to check our PO Box there, but also because I wanted to see the very comprehensive and extensive Pet Barn that’s right next door to Aldi’s! I also wanted to see the Continental Delicatessen that’s in the Shopping Centre, which I did after lunch… Anyway, Julian was really feeling pretty rotten, and he thought that getting our lunch up there at the Shopping Centre would be easier than us coming home, whereupon he’d have to turn around and start making our lunches. He did have a point, so we looked around the Pet Barn, bought a couple of things, then we left the Pet Barn, and had our lunch at one of Vermont South’s little snack and coffee shoppes – more on that later! 😉 After we’d eaten, I sent Julian off to check the PO Box, whilst I had a look around the Continental Delicatessen, and it does look very good indeed! It looks like the sort of Continental Delicatessen that would probably stock such items as Motta Panettone, and Panforte, around Christmas time – I shall definitely be keeping my eye on them! 🙂 And after snooping around in the Delicatessen, we went back to the car and came home!

Actually, there’s not much to tell about today! I didn’t even log into WoW this morning, because although we didn’t have to leave until eleven-ish, I hate just getting into things and then having to get up and go, so I just played Solitaire, had a bit of a giggle over at Bored Panda, and that was about it! I haven’t been on WoW this afternoon, either, as I badly wanted to play around with that background what’sit, and that’s about all I’ve had time for! At the Pet Barn this morning, we bought some pretty blue sand for me to use in my bathroom incense bowl, and a packet of some sort of “kangaroo bits” – which, if you ask me, look far more like those ultra, ultra strong, Irish Moss throat lozenges, called “Fisherman’s Friend” than anything even vaguely “kangaroo-ish”! Erm… we actually bought them for Flipper, not for ourselves, even though Julian and I both know that she’ll most likely turn her nose up at them – well, she hasn’t liked any of the other “treats” we’ve bought for her in the past, so there’s really no reason to suppose that she’ll be any different about these [and if Flipper could speak “human”, this is what she’d call them – so imagine, if you will, an elderly, crotchety, and scratchy old voice, with a very broad cat brogue, saying:] “new-fangled kangaroo thingies!”

And so, now on to the “good” bits! 😉

Food stuff: Yesterday for lunch we had wraps, with ham, home-grown capsicum, Halloumi cheese, the last of the pickled mushrooms, and our very favourite butter substitute, basil-pesto hummus. I do wish there was a way of wrapping up wraps so that they weren’t quite so messy to eat – however, it was really delicious! For our late-ish dinner last night, we had what was erroneously called a chicken and leek “bake”, and this, it turned out, was the subject of the slight altercation between Julian and I. He’d wanted me to find him some recipes containing leeks, as we have quite a lot of leeks ready to be harvested in our veggie garden. I found him about six or seven, and printed them out for his perusal. Well, he went through them all, and chose this “Chicken and Leek Bake”, which on the surface, sounded easy enough, and which looked very nice – he even went as far as writing down all the ingredients, so that he could go off and get anything that we didn’t have in the pantry. Just before he was going to start cooking, he actually read the recipe, and decided that it wasn’t what it said it was! A “bake”! The only time the oven was even indicated was to put this concoction under the griller, to brown it on top! The kilo of chicken was supposed to be cut into cubes, cooked in a frying pan, along with the sliced leeks, on the stove for five minutes (we both looked more than a little askance at this – five minutes? To cook – or even just lightly brown – a whole kilo of chicken?? Plus four leeks?? Can you really set your stove top to fry things at 1 million °C?!) Then you were supposed to use another stove-top utensil – a saucepan this time, and make some white sauce, so which you added half of the grated cheese the recipe called for. I said “let me read the recipe” – I read it, and it was quite wrong in its instructions, and I told Julian exactly how it needed to be cooked, and why. No, he didn’t want to do that, and it wasn’t a “bake”, it was a lot of hard work. So – we had a few words – and then Josh arrived, and while he was doing my hair, Julian made the Chicken and Leek “Bake” anyway – and it was actually very, very nice! Yes, it’s a bit messy and “utensil-heavy” in its construction; you do have to cook the chicken quite a bit longer than the recipe says, you do need to use more than just four leeks, especially home-grown ones, as they tend to be smaller, and you do need to make more white sauce (or to be more technically correct, “cheese sauce”!) than the recipe specifies, and it’s definitely not a “bake”, per se. However, you could certainly make this a day ahead, keeping it (covered, of course) in the fridge for dinner the next night, then pop it in the oven, and yes, bake it, in order to heat it through, and to brown the top nicely – bugger the use of the specified griller, it doesn’t need one! The oven will brown the top very nicely, thank-you-very-much! If we do make this again, I’ll re-write the recipe (“next time – my way!”) the way it should have been written in the first place, and I’ll add more leeks and more white (cheese) sauce to it. We had it with steamed rice, and it really was lovely! For dessert, I had my usual – one of my Corella pears, and a small bowl of the scrumptious Coles-brand, very low-calorie, Rice Pudding. Today for lunch I had a very nice little square of (supposedly) “home-made” spanakopita, with a rather limp and a little oily-looking side salad (which, as usual, I didn’t eat! I much prefer my salads naked!) The spanakopita was nice enough that it may very well have actually been “home-made”! 🙂 I also had a very nice little slice of some sort of “Jaffa” cake – it was orange cake on the bottom – complete with small pieces of orange rind – and a layer of chocolate cake on top – which had very much appreciated tiny chunks of dark chocolate in it – and there was a very nice butter-cream frosting on top. The whole thing was quite small, really – about 2.5″ (6.3cm) long, about 1″ (2.5cm) wide, and about 3″ (7.6cm) high (it sounds an awful lot bigger when you say it in centimeters! I think I much prefer inches…) Tonight we’re having steak for dinner, with chips, our usual half a tomato, and probably some steamed green beans. For dessert, I’ll have my usual Corella pear, and a small bowl of the really yummy Coles-brand, very low-calorie, Rice Pudding!

Weigh-in yesterday morning. What was I saying the other day about my weight fluctuations not being “boring”? Well, yesterday they were! I went from 64.5kg to 64.5kg! I stayed the same! *sigh* as soon as I say something about my weight, my body has to go and make a liar out of me! Sorry about that one, chief(s)! I suppose you could call that weigh-in as being “within the margin of error”, n’est ce pas? 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Well, still within that “margin of error”, but at least there was a small bit of movement at the station – I went from 6.5kg to 64.4kg – down one point! Never mind though – it’ll definitely be up again tomorrow! Oh well… at least it’s starting to get “non-boring” again 🙂

Julian changed out another 30% of the water in the Fish House again last night! The Ammonia count had been nicely on the way down, but last night it was back up again, and Auric was back to his old trick of floating up and sitting looking harassed on the surface… I told him to stop it immediately, but as usual, he took absolutely no notice of me! Hopefully tonight will be a bit better! I do worry about that little fish… Tomorrow my very favourite eldest daughter will be over, which will be good fun – and although I won’t get a chance to do anything with Phoenìx, we’ll be able to catch up on some of our favourite shows, which quite frankly, is much more enjoyable! 😉 And that’s pretty much “it” from me again for tonight! Feel free to drop in again tomorrow night, and find out what malicious tricks my body decided to play on me, weight-wise, and what my very favourite eldest daughter and I watched on television – whether Auric had another attack of the floaties last night, and whether Flipper deigned to consume any of her new “kangaroo bits” treats! Until then though, do try hard to bee good, do remember that “stressed” spelled backwards is “desserts”, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry in this very changeable weather… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂