04.27 pm
Here I am again – what a strange, wet day it’s been! Actually, I’ve been out most of today – late last night during the course of a conversation with Julian about what we were going to be doing today, I idly said “When’s my next Warfarin test due?”, and Julian said “Good question…” and looked it up on his phone (Julian gets all the Dorevitch text messages about my Warfarin test results and when my next test is due, because although I do have a phone, for reasons of my own, it’s almost never turned on!) Then he said…. “It’s due on… [longish pause] the day before yesterday!” followed immediately with an indignant “How did we manage to miss that?!” “Probably because I forgot to write it in my calendar with a reminder!” I said… Oh well, that certainly solved the question of what we were going to do today! We had sort-of decided to go to Doncaster today, so that I could continue my long and – so-far fruitless – chase for the new MAC “Retro Matte Liquid Lipstick“* that I’ve been trying to track down! It was supposedly available at David Jones at The Glen, but they’d told me “Oh no, only the major David Jones stores have it – try Chadstone, or the city store!” Anyway, when I got home I Googled it again, and managed to find it at Myer, over at Doncaster Shoppingtown. Well, we had to go to Doncaster today anyway, to get more coffee (we do seem to go through a lot of coffee… probably because we keep on drinking it! But we needed tea, too…so…) We also needed more Flipper Food, because her “preferred” brand is a Woolworths only one – but as there’s only a Coles or an Aldi at Vermont South, the Woolworths store at The Glen had run out, and we had to get coffee and tea (and drop off some Dry Cleaning!) so… yet another reason to go traipsing all the way over to Doncaster! (again!) All we really had to decide was – where to get my blood tested! Two choices… drive to Glen Waverley, and the collection centre we’ve been going to since we moved, and then go on to Doncaster – or go straight to Doncaster Shoppingtown, and the collection centre in the Tower there, where we used to go when we lived just across the road! No contest! Naturally, we went to Glen Waverley! NO! I’m kidding! I’m kidding! 🙂 We went to Doncaster, I had my blood test done (we haven’t got the results yet though) dropped off the Dry Cleaning, and I finally pounced upon my lipstick with glee at Myer 🙂 Then we had lunch at The Shingle Inn, did our bit of shopping – the Woolworths at Doncaster didn’t have Flipper’s favourite food either, which is a bit of a worry! I hope they’re not thinking of discontinuing it! (she won’t go hungry – we have some of her second favourite food – but it’s annoying, because like me, she’s old… and set in her ways! 😉 ) and then we came home, to a most welcome cup of coffee… and about ten tons of ruddy email from that author’s list I’ve subscribed to! Ironically, when I received the first lot of emails, acknowledging my registration with a rather perfunctory “thank you for registering” note, they all – with no exceptions – said “I don’t send out many emails…”, or “I’ll only notify you when I’m offering another free book” – and now, the very next day, I’m getting anxious messages from most of them: “Did you manage to download my book alright?” and “I know I said that… [blah, blah, blah] but I couldn’t help myself, and here’s another free book for you… [blah, blah, blah]” Arrggghhh! I haven’t actually downloaded any of them yet! My “To Read” list is already as long as a century – Amazon, bless their little hearts and souls, sends me a daily (and sometimes twice daily!) list of book recommendations, and I’m such a sucker for an interesting title and synopsis that it seems I’m always clicking on a “Buy with one click” button… or stupidly clicking on a “Subscribe to This List for Free Books!”, where only some of the titles sound interesting enough for me to want to read, anyway! I’ve bookmarked all of the authors on the list, and if they promote anything that sounds really good, I’ll go fetch from Amazon or wherever! (I did try to download a couple of those “free” books, and the download procedure was so awkward and torturous that I finally decided it was more trouble than it was worth, and gave up!) And that’s all I’ve done all day! Given up my blood, walked the length and breadth of Shoppingtown, acquired a new lipstick, ate too much, read a lot of emails, got annoyed trying to download “free” ebooks from said emails, and… here I am, grizzling about it to all you nice readers out there! 😉 I haven’t even had time to check my WoW Auctions yet! Oh, yeah, and a new WoW “Patch” goes live next Tuesday, so Julian and I are expecting a lot of game down-time for a couple of days next week, while they fix all the messes that the new Patch caused! 
And now on with all the “good” bits!
Food stuffs. Last night we had the beef-turned-into-chicken stew thingy that I’d told Julian to try. It didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped, but it did open up all sorts of avenues and ideas to try to “make it so”. Apparently I’d managed to confuse Julian when I said to add a tin of crushed tomatoes to it, because there was already vegetable stock in there and the added tomatoes made the stew a bit runny – what I’d meant for him to do was to add the tin of tomatoes – but to adjust the amount of stock in the recipe to compensate! Next time I’ll try be a little more explicit – or maybe a lot more explicit… in fact, it might be best if I just re-write the recipe… He also left the stew glubbing on the stove for a few minutes, and unfortunately it “caught” a bit on the bottom, so there were a few “burnt” bits in it (Warfarin results have just come in – INR 2.3, dosage 2.5 mg, which is the same as last time – next test on November 18th) back to the stew… we had it on a bed of plain, steamed rice – and despite the fact that it didn’t turn out the way I was hoping it would – and was expecting it to, and despite the fact that is was a bit runny, it still tasted delicious, and I hope there’s a lot left over and waiting, packaged up in the freezer, for a few more meals! For dessert I had one of my new peaches, which could have been a bit riper than it wasn’t (it was actually very nice, if a wee bit “crunchy”) and a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt. Today we had lunch at the Shingle Inn over at Doncaster, where I had my “usual” – a BLT on sourdough bread, a yummy, gooey, slurpy caramel slice, and a long black with a side jug of skinny milk – I shudder to think what the scales are going to tell me tomorrow morning! Tonight we’re having Gourmet Chicken with Mushroom Sausages, by the same people who make the excellent Tuscan Pork sausages we had the other night. With the sausages we’ll be having our usual chips, steamed green beans, and half a tomato. For dessert I might try one of the white Nectarines that Julian got yesterday (I doubt that they can be any less ripe than the peach last night was, and it was fine!) and a Cherry CHOBANI yoghurt.
Weigh-in this morning. Was depressing and distressing, and I’m quite unsure as to how to proceed at the moment – the doctor doesn’t seem to have any ideas as to why my weight’s been going up, though she’s ordered some more blood tests (which have to be done “fasting”, so I didn’t have them done this morning with my Warfarin blood test) surely it can’t all be due to the fact that I’m not treadmilling at the moment – though that’s probably part of it, I suppose… and I do know that a lot of it is fluid retention – this morning when I got up my feet were already looking like balloons 😦 Apart from not treadmilling because I don’t want to aggravate my ankle any more than I have to – I’m not doing, or eating, anything that I haven’t been eating, or doing since I went on Maintenance, just over a year ago – but now, all of a sudden, within the last month, my weight has been steadily going up! And what’s even worse is that on the first of November I have to go back on those horrible, wretched little fluid-loving pills again, for ten days! (*resentfully*) As if I’m not carrying enough excess fluid at the moment anyway! This morning, I went from 66.6 kg – the number of the beast – to a truly disgraceful 67.0 kg. Not. Good! 😥
I put Flipper’s pussy biscuits away as soon as we got home this afternoon, but she hasn’t eaten her dinner yet this evening – she’s still asleep in the bedroom – warming up my side of the bed, for a change – Auric and Dapple are fine though – they’re funny little fishies! When I went in this morning to pull up the blind and turn on their “little suns in bottles” (a strip of led’s inside the aquarium hood) they were both awake and swimming around (they’re usually still asleep!) I said “good morning” to them, as I pulled up the blind, and told them how cute they were, etc., etc… Then I told them to close their eyes, because I was going to turn on their lights (yeah, yeah, I know they (a) can’t hear me, (b) wouldn’t be able to understand me even if they could hear me, and (c) aren’t capable of closing their eyes, anyway!) And then I turned on their aquarium lights… well, as I said, they’re usually still down at the bottom of the tank, “sleeping” when I come in in the morning, and when I turn on their lights, they just sort of wriggle away to another part of the bottom of the tank, and keep on “sleeping” for a few minutes, slowly waking up and moving around – but this morning they were already awake, and swimming around the top half of the tank – probably hoping to get an early breakfast or something, when I turned on their lights… Well! They both jumped in fright, darted around a bit, and immediately swam down to the bottom of the tank, to where I usually see them sleeping first thing in the mornings, and where they seemed to be “pretending” to be asleep, almost as though they felt guilty at having been “caught” swimming happily around looking for breakfast, when I’d expected to find them still fast asleep! As I said – funny little fishies – because after the usual amount of time they usually take to wake up once I’ve turned their lights on, they “woke up” and started swimming around again, as though nothing unusual had happened! And that’s really about “it” from me for this evening! As usual, I have absolutely no idea what’s happening tomorrow, so you’ll all just have to call in again to see what we’ve been up to – what my weight has gone up to, whether Flipper ever got around to eating her dinner, and whether I’ve got Shamena up another couple of levels or not. Until tomorrow night though, do try hard to bee good, remember (and you know I’ve said this before!) stressed spelled backwards is desserts, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep warm and dry, especially during this nasty little cold, wet, spell, and to look after yourselves… but above all… please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
*Retro Matte Liquid Lipstick – the colour shown in the link, “Back In Vogue”, is actually the colour that I ended up buying!
My Word! 