04.17 pm
Look at this! Will wonders ever cease?! I’m starting early today! …well… maybe not early, but – certainly “on time“, for a change! But before I get started, I just want to have a quick little grizzle to you all about subscription renewals, and the manner in which nearly all of these renewals are brought to our attention! Whether they be magazines, email notifications, online shopping venues, or blog-hosting sites – they all start clamouring and pestering at least two months before the subscription renewal is due! All of my magazine subscriptions, for both the “online” and the “print” versions of my foodie magazines, the National Geographic, all of the online services and software sites I’m subscribed to… newspapers, like The Age – all of them! About two, to two and a half months before my subscription is due for renewal, I start getting deluged with frantic and almost panicked streams of emails (and in the case of the “print” magazines, actual letters in my letterbox!) screaming at me “Your subscription is about to run out on [insert date at least a month and a half ahead]! Renew now, before it’s too late!” They even go so far as to try to tempt you with offers of a free new cookbook, or a free “extra” magazine “For the same, low “special” (just for you!) price (which “must end on Sunday night” – or something equally as unconvincing!) Honestly, it’s really starting to annoy me! I actually nearly fell for one of them today! I’d been fending off all of these panicky “Quick! Quick! Renew now!” messages for over a week now… and this morning I got an email from Word Press… my Premium subscription for this blog (I have several, you see) would be running out “soon” – so did I want to renew it now, to avoid having ads peppering my writing, as well as being able to continue using all these nice, pretty (read: “expensive”) Premium Templates?! It only took a little bit of searching to find out that my subscription doesn’t expire until November 27th – a whole ‘nother month away! I just sighed resignedly and marked the email “read” and moved it into the Word Press email folder. This afternoon, I received yet another one from Word Press. Oh Noes! My subscription was about to expire! But I could still renew it if I went to [insert link to go to for renewing my subscription] now!
The thing that threw me so that I almost fell for it this afternoon was that – under normal circumstances – none of these places actually give you the subscription expiry date – they make you go looking for it… I suppose they do that in the hopes that when you do find the date, you’re more likely to think “Oh well, it’s not due for another month, but I’m here now, so I might as well get it over with!” But this afternoon, they did put in the expiry date – November 27th – right in the middle of a paragraph of “tight” text! So all I registered – at that point in time – was a “month-word”, followed by a date – the 27th. And it was the second “announcement” from them in the one day! Could I have misread the one this morning? It’s the 27th today – so I re-read the second email. Yes, it definitely said “November 27th!” Today! Arrgghh, NO! Sudden visions swam through my mind of all of you being confronted with a churlish, undecorated and “plain jane” blog Template, not of my choosing, and with cheap ads peppered everywhere through my text! I immediately raced off to the Word Press renewal page, and I’d almost started to fill in their (rather scanty!) renewal form, when… my mind finally slowed down enough for me to catch on! This month wasn’t November, it was still October! I can tell you, I was not amused, and I closed my way out of their wretched renewal pages! Why do all these places do this sort of thing? Why do they try to convince you that you might “miss out” on something if you don’t renew your subscription a whole month early – and you know you won’t get that “extra magazine” that they always seem to promise you, because after all, it’s just all part and parcel of your yearly subscription! Grrr! 😡
So, having got that off my chest, what did I do today, while Julian was out playing Taxi Driver for my very favourite eldest daughter? Well, I didn’t watch any of my “Survivor Australia” episodes, I played WoW! 🙂 Typical, eh? I got my Draenei Marksman Hunter, Ellrevienne, up to level 20, and then had to get her all the way back from Darkshire, in the Eastern Kingdoms, to the Exodar, over in Kalimdor, so that she could learn to ride! By the time I’d done that, it was getting pretty close to “knock-off time”, so I logged off and had a bit of a fiddle around with a new font, and some of the very pretty and interesting PNG images that I got this morning. As you can see, I used the font, and one of the graphics in the header – what do you think of them? 🙂 I didn’t have very much time, but I didn’t think I did too badly in the twenty minutes or so that I had…
And now I guess it’s time to move on to the “good” bits, once again! 😉
Food stuffs. We had a fairly early lunch today because Julian had to head off straight after lunch to pick up my very favourite eldest daughter and get her to the dentist by half past one, so we had a very yummy sandwich, made from absolutely delicious “seeded” sourdough bread, with a smidge of butter, then ham, cold smoked chicken chunks, chopped lettuce, and a fairly modest smear of the totally imaginary (it must be, as I can’t find any reference to it online!) “Baxters Fig, Date & Balsamic Chutney”. It was really nice – I could very easily have eaten a second sandwich! Tonight for dinner we’re having pan-fried rump steak, chips, steamed green beans, and because Julian forgot – again! – to get tomatoes, we’ll have carrots again – maybe even our own home-grown, fully organic, curly carrots, this time! Tonight for dessert I’m going to take a punt that the Corella pears are ripe enough to eat, and have one of those, and I’ll also have an Apple Le Rice.
Weigh-in this morning. Well, I told you I’d probably go up today, especially after that (drool) delicious chocolate caramel slice (dribble) wot I had after my BLT at the Shingle Inn yesterday… So it came as no surprise to me that I went up today, from 66.4 kg yesterday, and back to “the number of the beast”, 66.6 kg this morning! Who knows what it’ll be tomorrow – knowing me, it could go either way, but I’m sort-of betting that it’ll go up again… 
I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – Julian will be up in the Office, working on our Tax, which means that I’ll probably be doing my usual “thing” and playing WoW again – or, I might actually sit down and watch as much as I can of “Survivor Australia”, as we’re starting to fill up the poor old Foxtel Set Top Box-thingy, and if I don’t watch it soon, I’ll have to erase it – as it was me who made the new “rule” about stored shows – and that is, if we don’t watch something within two weeks, we erase it – and we’re already cheating on that stipulation! Flipper did go back and eat a bit more of her dinner last night, but it’s too early for her dinner tonight – however I did remember to take her pussy biscuits away early this evening, so maybe she’ll eat her dinner tonight – or maybe, she won’t! She is a cat, after all! 😉 Auric and Dapple’s new Fish House furniture arrived today (finally!) and Julian found a rather scungy-looking aquarium shoppe this afternoon while he was out, which actually had some nice looking tank “decor” items, so he took a whole heap of photos – which I haven’t seen yet! I’m to have a look at the photos, and if I think it’s going to be worthwhile, we might paddle down there either some time tomorrow, or maybe on Saturday, to see what else we can get to make our little fishie’s lives more entertaining and amusing for them. And that’s really about “it” from me for this evening, but do drop in again tomorrow night, to see which way my weight swung, what I thought of the aquarium photos that Julian took this afternoon, and if there’s anything I think is worth getting from them, and what I did end up doing during the day. Until then though, just try to bee good, don’t forget that to do two things at once is to do neither, and remember to always drive carefully, to keep warm and dry, even if it doesn’t look like it’s going to rain, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly – please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 