Winter’s log, earthdate 201607.17

05.21 pm

Apologies for not making an appearance yesterday, but it’s a bit difficult to write when you can’t breathe properly and your nose is threatening to overflow onto the keyboard! Luckily it wasn’t a return of the blood clots in my lungs, it was (and still is!) a very bad head cold! My nose was so stuffed up I could hardly see straight, in spite of me dutifully spraying Otrivin up my nose, and swallowing those ruddy Telfast antihistamine tablets, in a vain attempt to unblock my ear… which is still stubbornly refusing to clear up! I did spray some Otrivin up my nose this morning, but I haven’t taken any of the Telfast tablets since last night – and guess what! I feel a whole lot better! (thank heavens! I was not a happy little Vegemite, yesterday!) Anyway, I’m here now! 🙂

I did a lot of work on my Blog Project yesterday morning, but by lunch time, I’d just about had it, and after lunch I pretty much just went and huddled miserably in the lounge room, trying to read… so not a lot of anything got done yesterday Today of course, being Sunday, we (a) slept in, and (b) took Xãnthe and Jemimah up another two levels to level 97! Not long to go now, and on Tuesday, the “pre-Expansion” patch will be going in! We’ll get our first ever Gnome Mages and Hunters, and lots and lots of new stuff! Blizzard, I think, must have been keeping a very close eye on how they organise “Wardrobes” in Rift, because from Tuesday on, whatever one of your characters “unlocks” in the way of clothing and/or gear, the rest of your characters will be able to access it too (just like in Rift!) with a set-up that looks extraordinarily like the one they use in Rift! (or maybe it’s just my delirium with this head cold! 😉 ) We both “pre-paid” for the Expansion, set for release on August 31st, so that we’d get the “free upgrade” to Level 100 for one character per account – which I’m going to be using on my Gnome Hunter, when I create her next week! Anyway, today we just quested as usual, going up two and a half levels. We both died once, when we were horribly overrun by Fel Demons (neither of us took into account their lethal green fire!) but we got better and soldiered on! 🙂 I’m really looking forward to next Sunday, however I think that the major part of next week will be exploring all the changes that I know are coming with the pre-Expansion patch on Tuesday! I believe some really big changes are being made to the Hunter Class, and I’m not sure that I’m looking forward to those! My very favourite eldest daughter, who’s been getting used to all the new stuff by getting herself into the Beta Testing cadre, has told us that they’re pretty radical, so I’m just a tad trepidated!

I’ve been doing a lot of work on my “Blog Project”, and I’m working on a new background tile which I’m hoping will work! If I make it too long, it’ll wrap around and spoil the left margin – if I make it too short, it’ll repeat too soon, messing up the right hand side of the screen – and of course, I have no idea how long to make it – Word Press, in their infinite wisdom, will only tell you how long to make your header, which doesn’t always span the screen, and half the time Word Press get it wrong, anyway! It’ll be a matter of trial and error, so I’m going to need people with different size screens to let me know if it doesn’t tile correctly. Back in the “good old days” when I used to make free Web Sets, I had all the major Browsers loaded onto my computer so that I could see whether the set worked with all of them, and if they didn’t work properly on all Browsers, I tweaked them and changed things until they did – far too many web “designers” thought that if their set displayed properly on Explorer, that was good enough – they reckoned that not enough people used Netscape (now Firefox) or Opera to be worth worrying about! So anyway, I’m just as committed to making sure that everyone is going to be able to see this Blog Project of mine correctly, as I was back then.

Wasn’t it cold last night! We were a little worried about our new little veggie seedlings, if there was a frost, as we have nothing with which to protect them – Julian doesn’t think “smudge pots” are allowed any more because they’re very polluting. I’m wondering if making a huge hessian “fitted sheet” type cover that could be tied onto poles above the veggie beds (like the canopy over a four-poster bed!) would be of any use… Then this morning, when we finally did manage to prise ourselves out of bed, and I went down to pull up the blind and turn on Auric and Dapple’s “little sun in a bottle”, I noticed with some dismay that there were still patches of frost on the lawn. I yelled out to Julian that there’d been a frost, so, what did he do? In his dressing gown, and in his bare feet, he goes running out onto the frosty lawn to check on the vegetables! I told him he was an idiot, and how ruddy difficult it would be for me to get into the hospital to visit him, when he ended up in a ward with double pneumonia! And you know what? He didn’t apologise, he just laughed! Men! 😡

Flipper, Auric and Dapple are all well – we’ve taken to giving Auric and Dapple a lot less to eat, but still, every evening, always around the same time – about 8.30 – they get a (much milder these days, thank heavens!) bout of the “floaties”, and we still can’t work out why! They seem to spend an awful lot of time up at the top of the tank, “nibbling” the surface of the water! I’m wondering if perhaps it’s a “habit” that they picked up when they lived outside for so long in that atrocious little mud-puddle? Do fish even develop habits, both good and bad? Still, they seem happy enough now… I’d like to see how the water condition is going at the moment, too – and I must ask Julian if the ultra violent steraliser-anti-algae whatever-it-is is still running…

And now onto the good bits 🙂

Food stuffs. Yesterday for lunch we had ham, cheese and tomato Toasties, which were delicious, and for dinner we had Heston Blumenthal sausages (either pork and sage, or pork and leek – we can’t remember which – but whichever they were, they were very nice!) with chips, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato. I had my second (and last!) “Eve” apple, and a small bowl of my absolute favourite Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding. Today for lunch we had wraps, with our favourite butter substitute, basil-pesto hummus, ham, Halloumi cheese, tomato, and yellow capsicum batons. Very delicious, and once again I managed to eat it without dropping half of it down my front, or on the floor! Amazing! 🙂 Tonight of course we had omelets, because it’s a Sunday night, and once again, it was “one of the best he’s ever made!” with tomato, cheese, green capsicum, pre-cooked onion, and pre-cooked bacon, and (obviously) eggs… 🙂 For dessert I had my second last Corella pear, and a small bowl of Coles-brand, very low-calorie, very delicious Rice Pudding.

Weigh-in yesterday morning. Wow! I should get sick more often – I seem to lose a lot more weight! 😉 Yesterday morning I went from 65.0 kg to 64.6 kg – how about that! Down four whole points! Excellent! I was quite chuffed about that, actually!

Weigh-in this morning. Was even betterer! I definitely should get sick more often! This morning I went from 64.6 kg to 64.4 kg! Down another two points! Not quite as good as going down four points, but certainly a lot much more betterer than going up two points! *sigh* Unfortunately, knowing me, I’ll probably go back up again tomorrow morning, so I’d best enjoy this small “dip” in my weight graph whilst I can! 😉

Tomorrow morning our lovely cleaning lady will be here, and Julian has his CT scan booked for 2.30 pm. Josh will be here in the afternoon, and tomorrow morning I’m going to be torn between doing what I can with the Garrisons while I still can, or getting on with my attempts to make a properly tiling background for my Blog Project! Oh dear, decisions, decisions! (I used to think that I was indecisive, but now I’m not sure if I really was or not, hmm…) Anyway, once again that’s about “it” from me for tonight, but do call in again tomorrow night and see if my weight did go back up again, whether I worked on my background or my Garrison, and whether our veggie garden survived the frost last night. Until then though, please try hard to bee good, remember that failure is the opportunity to begin again, this time more wisely, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry on these cold, frosty nights… but please, above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂