05.32 pm

Here I am, finally back in my chair after a visit from an old work colleague of Julian’s – it was good to see him again, although it was a shame that his equal but more artistic half wasn’t able to be here too, as she was busy teaching – and I’m afraid that I have some very sad news to share with you all…

Flipper, as you all knew, was 22 years old, with failing kidneys, high blood pressure, and very bad arthritis. For the past few months she hadn’t been doing too badly, and had been eating, if not well, then at least quite adequately, and she’d been living a reasonably happy and contented life. Over just the past three days though, she began deteriorating rapidly – what little she did eat wouldn’t stay down, and she was barely drinking at all. Her weight fell dramatically – we’d thought she was thin and scrawny before, but in a couple of days she faded to barely skin and bone, and was so weak that she could hardly stand – how she managed to get herself up onto our bed the night before last must have taken a massive toll on what little reserves she had left. It was time. Yesterday morning we called the Vet, who came here, rather than subject our poor little girl to more trauma and suffering, and Flipper finally fell asleep, as peacefully as we were able to make it for her, in Mommy and Daddy’s arms. We miss her. I’m still finding bits of the “fluff” that she shed over everything, wherever she went, and I keep expecting to hear that loud, strident “meyowl” of hers, every time I walk into the Den. No doubt she’s having a ball on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge, catching up with Bandit, Cecil, Kitley, Boo, Gingee and Artie again, after all this time – but she’s left a big empty hole down here.

Anyway, looking on the bright side of life (de-dum, de dum-de dum-de dum) Sunday’s adventures in the Broken Isles turned out not to be in the Broken Isles, but in five Dungeons we’d never done before! The first one we tried, “Heart of Fear” in Pandaria, we were unable to complete. As you know, we’re both level 110, and this Dungeon was supposedly for a 25-man Raid of level 90’s – we should have been able to handle it easily – but we didn’t. Apparently you only need to bring down one of the Elites in this section of the Dungeon, but we didn’t know that then (yes Virginia, it really does pay to “read the manual”! 😉 ) and Demelzae fired at one mob, and I fired at another mob, and before you could say “Umm…” we were totally surrounded by Elite mobs using “stun” attacks on us – and when you’re stunned, you can’t even control your Pets, let alone fight back! We died. And as we’d only managed to squeak through a previous section of this Dungeon (after dying a few times!) I wasn’t too keen on continuing, so we tucked our tails between our legs and – ahh… departed. Now that we know what we did wrong there, we might go back and give it another go next Sunday… Next we went on to do the Dungeon “Gate of the Setting Sun“, which was also in Pandaria, and in hindsight, really terribly easy for two level 110’s! From there we moved back down to the original, “Classic”, World of Warcraft  (pre-Expansions) End Dungeon – “Molten Core“! Most interesting, very easy, and a lot of fun… and then on to a Dungeon that I kept hearing about – “Grim Batol” a Dungeon (Instance) from the second Expansion, “Cataclysm” (the first Expansion after the “Classic” WoW was, of course, “Burning Crusade”) Again, a very easy and “fun” Dungeon. Lastly, we did another “Cataclysm” Dungeon, “The Stonecore“, which is situated in my most un-favourite area, Deepholm (because it always makes me feel uncomfortably claustrophobic!) And on finishing that Dungeon, we headed home to empty out our bags, stash our loot in the Bank, and repair our armor – besides, it was almost dinner time! 🙂

Food stuff on Sunday. For lunch we had a seeded sourdough sandwich, with sandwich-sliced roast beef, Cheddar/Tasty cheese, chopped lettuce, and a smearing of the Beerenberg Hot Tomato Chutney. Naturally, being Sunday, we had omelets for dinner, with diced tomato, pre-cooked diced onion and smoky bacon, and red and yellow capsicum. As usual, it was most delicious, but Julian feels he could have done better, and wants to experiment next Sunday with home-grown basil and “olive” herb – I’ll let you know how it goes next week! For dessert I had an “ordinary” green pear – probably Packham, I think, and Lemon CHOBANI yoghurt.

Weigh-in on Sunday. Wasn’t the best – I’m stacking on the fluid again 😦 I went from 68.9 kg on Saturday to 69.3 kg! Not good!

Monday. Well, you pretty much know how Monday went, as I’ve already told you. The Vet arrived here at about 12.15 pm, and as it turned out it was the Vet who specialises in geriatric cats – and who’d been looking after Flipper for a while, so it was hard for her too… When she and the nurse left, taking Flipper’s body with them for cremation, we fell apart a bit – it’s hard making that sort of decision, even when you know it’s the right thing to do. If we hadn’t, Flipper would only have been with us for another couple of days anyway, and with each day she would have been in more pain and misery. Julian eventually went out to get in some more supplies, and brought lunch back with him, as he didn’t really feel up to making sandwiches… By the time Josh arrived in the afternoon we’d picked ourselves back up again, more or less, and so the day passed…

Food stuffs Monday. As Julian brought our lunch home, it was the usual two halves of two savoury rolls – half a ham Danish each, and half a pepperoni pizza-type flat roll each, plus one of the celebrated Baker’s Delight fruit and white chocolate scones each. For dinner last night Julian tried a new recipe wot he’d found in one of our newest Cook Books – Lamb backstrap with Harissa, and orange couscous – which turned out to be extraordinarily nice! Well, we knew that Harissa went well with lamb, from our favourite Lamb and Harissa Lasagna with Feta and Oregano dinners, so it was no surprise that the lamb backstraps cooked with Harissa turned out to be delicious too, but the orange couscous was a really nice surprise! The recipe calls for two oranges, one orange is juiced, the other separated into segments – the couscous is cooked in the usual manner, but replacing some of the water you’d normally use for making couscous with half a cup of fresh orange juice, plus cumin, fresh mint leaves (home-grown!) and the orange segments, which are added just before serving. Ladies and gentlepersons, I think we’ve found another “keeper” recipe! 🙂 For dessert I had the last of my “ordinary” green pears (probably a Packham) and an Apple Le Rice.

Weigh-in Monday. Wasn’t the best, but at least a little better than Sunday! Damn fluid retention! I went from 69.3 kg on Sunday to 69.1 kg yesterday (Monday)

Today. Well, this morning Julian had an appointment with the delightful Polly the Physiotherapist, and as there was some shopping that I was determined to get, before December 1st (like ruddy Christmas Cards!) I went with him. I sat in the car and read my Kindle, while Polly folded, spindled and mutilated his shoulder – which is actually starting to feel a lot better – and then we went off to the whatever-it’s-called shopping centre on the corner of Blackburn Road and Burwood Highway. Why did we go there, when we could have gone to a much more convivial place like The Glen? I hear you all asking – well, because that particular shopping centre has a Ferguson Plarre shoppe (alright, coffee & cake/kiosk-y place!) and I wanted to get in early and put in our orders for our Christmas Cake, Christmas Pudding, and Mince Tarts, which was duly done. Then we had an early-ish lunch there because Julian had his friend coming over around 2-ish. After lunch we went to KMart where I got my non-sparkly Christmas Cards – I’ve sworn a solemn oath never to buy sparkly Christmas Cards again because the sparkly stuff gets all over everything, and is totally impossible to get off – and these ones are fairly plain and subdued (though perhaps “restrained” would be a better description? Anyway, you’ll find out, if you’re lucky enough to receive one! 😉 ) I bought a lot more than we’ll need, because Julian thinks I should hand write (read: “scribble”!) the envelopes this year. We usually print them, but Word is such a ruddy cow when it comes to printing envelopes, and every year there are loud yelling matches and lots of rude words bandied about regarding Word for Windows in particular, and Microsoft in general – and Julian just didn’t want to go through it all again. I’m not really happy about hand-writing the envelopes, not because I’m lazy, or because writing makes my hands sore or anything (though both of them are true – just not in this case, K?!) but because I’m so used to using a keyboard these days that I’ve almost lost the ability to write legibly! Once upon a time I used to have really nice, neat handwriting – but now that I’m old and keyboard-bound, occasionally I’ll get half way through writing a word (any word – it happens quite randomly!) and all of a sudden my hand seems to forget what it’s doing, or how to scribe that particular letter, and just suddenly… shoot off at all sorts of strange angles, making a thorough mess of whatever it is that I’m trying to write – and with real live handwriting, there ain’t no backspace, or “range and edit” function! So as I said, I bought twice as many cards as we’re going to need, just so as to have the spare envelopes available to replace all the wonky ones I write! Then we came home, Graham turned up, we all spent a pleasant afternoon chatting about this, that, and the other – and then I sat down to write, so now you should all be up-to-date with what’s happening around here! 🙂 Oh, just after Graham had left, and I was busy writing, there was a “ding-dong” on the front doorbell, and guess what?! It was a delivery of a beautiful box of flowers… from the Whitehorse Veterinary Hospital, saying how sad they felt that we’d lost Flipper… They’re a beautiful bunch of people up there – they do wonderful work and are so dedicated and caring… We’ve been going there for more years than I care to remember – I started going to them back when I was breeding Siamese cats, and they’ve always been absolutely marvelous! We were very touched…

And now, on to the good bits for today! 😉

Food stuffs. Today we had lunch at Ferguson Plarre – I had what they called a “Greek lamb souvlaki” (read: a rather tasteless, cold wrap with tomato, lettuce, onion, bits of lamb, and Tzatziki sauce!) which was quite nice – I’d probably have it again, at a pinch, but it would definitely have been a great deal nicer if the lamb hadn’t been so tough, or so full of gristle! I also had one of the most deee-licious caramel slices that I’ve had for a long time! I know I usually swear by the Shingle Inn caramel slices, but this one was a cut above even those! (and that’s saying something!) This caramel slice was about half the height of the Shingle Inn ones, but it was far more “intense” in flavour! The “biscuit crumb base” was more like sugar granules soaked in butter and maple syrup, the caramel part was thicker in texture, and not so “gloopy” and sticky, and the chocolate on top was more like a partly melted Mars Bar! You could taste the calories with every chew! On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “nice”, and 10 being “delicious”, I’d rate the Shingle Inn caramel slice as a 10, and the Ferguson Plarre one as a 20! I don’t think I’m going to want to see what the scales think about it tomorrow morning! For dinner tonight we had some more of the Angus Beef with Garlic and Parsley sausages, with chips, our usual half a tomato (with capers on them this time!) and steamed – frozen, this time – green beans. For dessert I had a smallish yellow peach and a smallish yellow Nectarine, and a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt.

Weigh-in this morning. I guess miracles do still happen – sort-of, anyway! This morning I went from 69.1 kg to 68.6 kg… but after that caramel slice, I’ll probably be back to 69.9 kg tomorrow!

And once again, I’ve come full circle and I’m (almost) up to tomorrow! I’m not quite sure what’s happening – Julian thinks that the root canal filling he had done some time ago has fallen out, or something, and wants to see if he can get it looked at tomorrow, and by rights, I should start my laborious job of attempting to write these Christmas Cards and their envelopes – though goodness knows why we bother any more – we always send out more than we get back (shut up, Winter Grinch!) and apart from that, I’ll probably fiddle with graphics, play WoW, or read… Exciting stuff, huh? 😉 Auric and Dapple are still hopefully circling, shark-like, whenever I go near the tank, thinking that maybe I’ll forget that I’ve already fed them and give them a bit more – but y’know, that’s really about “it” from me for this evening – do drop in again tomorrow night to find out what we did do, whether Julian’s root canal had fallen out, and what my silly scales had to say about that magnificent caramel slice that I had today… but until then, please do try to bee good, don’t forget that the heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on how you’re feeling at the time, but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.35 pm

Phew! It’s been a reasonably hectic day for me today, despite the fact that all I did was sit here and struggle to get “Scarlet Crusade”, the WoW Realm I’m currently “visiting” set up and organised properly. I had eleven characters on Scarlet Crusade – I now have seven left, after I decided that I’d probably never play some of them again – no particular reason, I just thought “…..nah!“, collected all their worldly goods, and consigned them to history. So I now have five Alliance Hunters, and (so far) two Horde Hunters. A while ago, when Julian decided to go back and play on Scarlet Crusade I handed over the Guild Mastership of the Alliance-run Guild, the “Quel’Dorei Irregulars”, to his character, Callidae (which now that I’m back there myself is just a trifle frustrating) I still had my Horde Guild though, “death by chocolate” – er… with only the Guild Mistress, Mietta, in it! But I did have another Horde there as well – a level 60 Beastmaster Hunter called Sørcha, and she had all the money – I just didn’t have any way of getting her into the Guild, because both the Invitor and the Invitee have to be online for the Invitation and the Acceptance to be exchanged – which can be a bit hard, when both of them are you, and it becomes an”Oh, Joooliannn!” situation! Julian created a character called Gaerak, whom I invited into the Guild. He joined, I bumped his Guild status up, then I logged off as Mietta and immediately logged back on again as Sørcha – whom Gaerak invited into the Guild! Now I had three people in the Guild! Back to Guildmistress Mietta again, and as she was only level 20, and Sørcha was level 60 – with lots of money – I promoted her to Guildmistress instead, and spent pretty much the rest of the day sorting out the Guild Bank and finding the icons I wanted to use for the Guild Bank Vaults! You know, you’d think, that in all the many, many years that WoW’s been around, that some bright young spark, somewhere, would have worked out a way, or written an app or an Add-On, to sift through and sort out the – quite literally – thousands of icons that are available in the game! We mainly use them for Macros – short-cuts for specific actions, or sets of commands to be carried out with a single keystroke instead of half a dozen, and they’re also used as “labels” for things like Bank Vaults. Well, good-old Sørcha was rich enough to buy, not just one, but three Guild Bank Tabs, or Vaults, and as I was pretending to be Sørcha, I had to set everything up! Which meant looking for icons. I hate looking for icons! There are so bloody many of them (pardon the French!) and they’re not in any sort of order whatsoever… each icon is approximately 1 real-time centimeter square, they’re highly coloured, and they’re set in a sort-of-a “table” of 10 icons per line, by about a hundred gazillion lines long. Oh, and you can’t search for them by item type, name or colour! I only had three icons to get, and I knew which icons I wanted to use – it was just a matter of finding the damn things! The first one was easy enough to locate, but the second one was a doozy! I needed an icon of a covered picnic basket, but if your concentration slips for even a split second, it’s all too easy to miss the one you want… I went through the entire lot three times before I found my covered picnic basket – and you know what? You can’t even save it out, or bookmark it for future use! If I want to use it again, which I undoubtedly will, I’ll have to go through the whole wretched rigamarole again! So, I ask again, with tears in my voice! Why hasn’t some bright young spark, or enterprising and ambitious programmer, written some sort of Add-On or App for sorting through these damn icons! And even more to the point, why hasn’t Blizzard factored in a way of filtering the ruddy things? Or do they think that players will have “more fun” doing it the hard and tedious way?! Grr!

So, yup – that’s what I’ve been doing all day! On the bright side though, I think I finally have Scarlet Crusade all sorted out and ready to roll! (Now to do all the other Realms that I have characters on! 😉 ) Flipper did eat a bit of dinner last night – or should I perhaps say that she licked a bit of dinner off the top of the dish! We’ve found that it helps if we leave one of her very favourite “special” pussy biscuits sticking out of the top of her dinner – just enough so that she can’t lick it off and leave the rest, but has to have at least one or two bites of her dinner to get the pussy biscuit out. Sneaky, eh?! 😉 She actually woke up and came into the bedroom with us last night – after we’d turned the light out and had almost got to sleep, naturally! The night before she didn’t come in to us until we were getting up in the morning (and she got all offended because she wanted to snuggle in and get patted, and we were getting up and leaving the bedroom! Naughty Bad Mummy and Daddy!) but we think she must be getting at least a bit of her Loxicom when she licks at her dinner, because she seems to be moving around a bit more than she usually doesn’t… Hopefully she’ll do the same again tonight… I fed Auric and Dapple a lot earlier last night, and guess what! Auric didn’t get the “floaties”! I fed them again tonight at about 5 o’clock – about an hour ago – so we’ll see how Auric goes tonight! Unfortunately, the greedy little pig-fish grabbed all the little pellets as soon as they hit the water! Poor little Dapple didn’t get a look in – Auric darted in and just went “gulp! (*burp*)” and got them all except one, before they even had a chance to start drifting down! I was busy telling Dapple to go up and grab the last one, but Auric spotted it first, and Dapple was still saying “What?? where!” as Auric shark-glided in and grabbed it. When I feed them, the pellets don’t float on the surface for long, they usually sink down to the bottom, while the two fish swim lazily around, either catching them as they drift downwards, or hoovering them up from the gravel during the next half hour or so – but now that we’re feeding them a bit less, I guess Auric doesn’t want to miss out on even one pellet, so he’s being extra enthusiastic and swimming about a lot faster, and grabbing them all! I hope little Dapple doesn’t starve….

Anyway, that’s caught you all up on our day today, so I shall get on with the “good” bit, shall I? 😉

Food bits. Last night for dinner we had chicken breast, sliced horizontally and pan-fried with a little good olive oil and herbs, served on a bed of steamed rice with finely chopped spring onion, and a little Soy Sauce. For dessert I had one of my Corella pears, and my dark cherry CHOBANI yoghurt. Today for lunch we had the last of Julian’s sourdough bread (which was starting to get a little bit stale) as a ham, cheese, capers, and tomato Toastie – very, very delicious! 🙂 Tonight we’re having a very “plain-Jane” dinner – lightly pan-fried steak. with chips, our usual half a tomato, and probably steamed green beans, and for dessert I’ll have a smallish yellow peach, a smallish yellow nectarine, and a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt.

Weigh-in this morning. Was pretty much the same – still in its wretched “margin of error”! I went from 69.0 kg yesterday to 68.9 kg this morning. Wow! Look! I went down one whole point! Where’s the champagne! (*rolls eyes*)

And that pretty much brings me around to tomorrow again, when for once I do happen to know what’s happening! 🙂 Because it’s Sunday, and Julian and I will be WoW-ing again! We talked about what we’d be doing tomorrow – I suggested doing one “Dungeon We Always Wanted to Do But Never Got a Round Tuit” before lunch, and after lunch moving on to our two newbies, Imaan (me) and Krankhaft (Julian) – or, we might decide to do Imaan and Krankhaft first, and the Dungeon after lunch – or we might decide to do something completely different! However, whatever we do end up doing will definitely be WoW-related – but you’ll all just have to wait – probably until Tuesday night – to find out what we did, as I don’t often have time to write on Sunday, or Monday nights! Oh, and another thing I’ll be doing tomorrow, now that Julian has remembered to buy some string, is to re-cabbage my foot – this time with leaves from our very own home-grown, organic, and very splendid-looking Cannonball cabbage! I shall, of course, be taking suitable before and after photos (if I remember!) so you’ll have the results of that to look forward to on Tuesday, too! 🙂 And that’s really about “it” from me for this evening! Do call in again on Tuesday night (or maybe before, depending on time constraints!) to find out what my ridiculous weight did, how Flipper, Auric and Dapple are, and what we ended up doing on Sunday (and possibly Monday too) but until then, please try to bee extra good, remember that knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes… and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on your mood… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.29 pm

Well, today’s been very quiet! Julian went over to Doncaster for two very important reasons – firstly, because I was starting to run low on my new favourite Nespresso “Variations Limited Edition” flavour, which they bring out every year just before Christmas – this year their “theme” (for whatever reason!) is “Well known and loved Austrian Desserts”, featuring coffee pod flavours based on Sachertorte, Apfelstrudel, and Linzer Torte! My this year’s favourite is the “Linzer Torte” one – it has a “cherry liquor” flavour and is quite delicious! (though it’s not a patch on my last year’s favourite – an “Amaretto” flavoured coffee, which was truly to die for… because I absolutely love anything with an almond flavour!) The other reason to go over to Doncaster was that the Dry Cleaning basket was overflowing all over the bedroom floor – and besides, we felt it was probably time for our next contribution to the “Daisy Dry Cleaning Christmas Fund” –  I reckon they must be just about due for their next family Mercedes by now!? 😉 While Julian was out, I played WoW mostly – getting my new Night Elf Mage “Equipoise” up to level 13, and starting to sort out my other characters there on Scarlet Crusade. You know, the last time I played on that Realm was so long ago that my Hunters all have ammo in their backpacks! That was so long ago that you can’t even Vendor it – you just have to throw it out and destroy it! The other things is that being Hunters, they’re all geared up in Leather – Hunters haven’t worn Leather in years! They wear Mail armor now, so I’m going to have to find the gold to re-outfit them all! (Winter sighs, and rolls her eyes in mock despair!) The rest of the time, I spent reading the “paper” (The Age online) which is now mostly just click-bait – but occasionally some of their articles are either stupid enough – and very occasionally serious enough – to prompt me to send in a comment (or on very rare occasions, two, or three) on the subject. This morning happened to be one of those occasions – so if you’re interested, you can find my two comments underneath the first comment, at the bottom of the linked article.

Then Julian got home, and we had lunch… I also did a bit of research and drew up a chart of what vegetables we could plant in December, as in spite of the plethora of tomato plants that Julian planted the other day, there’s still a fair amount of room left in our veggie beds for other things, like… capsicum, and cucumbers! We want to try growing “apple cucumbers”, as they seem to have completely gone out of fashion! They used to be all over the place – in greengrocers and supermarkets everywhere… now if you go in and say you’re looking for apple cucumbers, people just look at you blankly – apparently we’re ultra old fashioned (or maybe we’re just too old to understand the issue!) Anyway, I want to see if we can get some apple cucumber seeds, rather than seedlings (which we’d prefer!) so that we can grow our own. We also want to put in more green beans – last year’s green beans did extraordinarily well, and we want to try putting in a different type of carrot – our last lot of carrots weren’t too bad, and they were certainly edible – but I think they were those little Dutch carrots that only grow about an inch or so long… Anyway, yeah, carrots, some more rhubarb – only one of our crowns survived – radish would be nice – I like radishes, “Mustard Greens” (whatever they are, but they sound cool!) Leek, and Broccoli.

So that’s pretty much been my day today – we didn’t see our friends today, which is fairly understandable, as they’ve had a shocking time lately with the loss of one of their children – so we basically… bludged, this afternoon! 🙂 Auric had yet another fit of the floaties last night, which is a bit concerning, so we’re trying a different tack! Julian usually feeds them their breakfast around ten o’clock in the morning, and I usually feed them anywhere between 06.30 pm and 08.00 pm, depending on how late I’m running before dinner. Tonight I got Julian to give them their dinner early, at about 05.30 pm… because it doesn’t seem to matter what time I feed them at night, it’s always around 8 o’clock that Auric starts “floating” (something seems to go wrong with his swim bladder, and if he stops swimming for any reason, be bobs straight up to the surface like a little (big!) orange cork, where he seems to have trouble swimming down again!) I want to see whether changing their dinner time changes the time he starts getting the floaties. If he starts floating around about the same time – 8 pm-ish – then it’s obviously not his dinner, and we have to try to think of other possible causes – but if he starts floating about an hour to an hour and a half earlier, then it must be his dinner, and he’ll need to go on a strict diet – though how we do that without putting poor little Dapple on a diet too, I don’t know! (well, actually I do know how to do that – but it’s a real hassle, and an enormous headache to organise and implement, and I just don’t want to go down that path!) Flipper probably ate more last night in one sitting than she has for some time! I think we might try the same tactic tonight, if possible – but it relies on her being awake and cooperative – which doesn’t seem to happen all that much any more – as her kidneys deteriorate, she gets less and less lucid, and more and more demanding of human company and petting. The main things is that she seems to be happy and contented – as long as she’s asleep with us close by, or when one of us is with her and making a fuss of her. All we can really do is just take things one day at a time…

And now on to all the “good” bits! 🙂

Food stuffs. Last night we had a lovely small piece of porterhouse steak, pan-fried in a small amount of olive oil, with chips, our usual half a tomato, and a steamed medley of home-grown cauliflower florets, home-grown broad beans, and store-bought green beans – an extremely interesting and tasty mixture! For dessert I had a smallish yellow peach, a smallish yellow Nectarine, and an Apple Le Rice – all very delicious! For lunch today we had another sandwich made with Julian’s sourdough bread – with a teeny bit of butter, sandwich-sliced chicken, Cheddar/Tasty cheese, chopped iceberg lettuce, and a smidgen of the “imaginary” Baxters “Fire Roasted Tomato & Smoky Chipotle Relish” (I tried Googling it again tonight, and sure as eggs are eggs and apples are apples, there was still nothing online about it! There was, however, a link back to my blog! I am arrived! Looking for a link to Baxters relish, Google had a link back to my blog! Now, how exciting is that! 😉 ) The sandwich was absolutely scrumptious! For dinner tonight we’re having chicken breast, pan-fried with a few herbs, on a bed of plain steamed rice with finely chopped spring onions. For dessert, I’ll have one of my Corella pears, and a dark cherry CHOBANI yoghurt.

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t pleasant – but I’m getting used it that… Despite my exercises an’ all, my feet still look like balloons – with tiny little balloon toes – and ya’know, it’d probably look kinda cute, too… if I was a cartoon! *sigh* This morning I went from 68.6 kg yesterday morning, to 69.0 kg. That’s up three points! Why?! I’m not happy…

And that brings me around to tomorrow again! Saturday… as usual, I have no idea what’s happening – Julian, as always, has places to go, people to see, things to do – and I, on the other hand, have WoW to play, graphics to graph, and jigsaw puzzles to do… (wow! hold me down!) but at this particular point in time, I’m forced to admit that… that’s about “it” from me for this evening! Do call in again tomorrow night though, to see how much more my weight went up, whether Auric had another bout of the “floaties” this evening, and if I’ve got any further with Equipoise 🙂 But, until then, try very hard to bee good, don’t forget – nothing endures but personal qualities, and remember to look after yourselves, to keep warm, or cool, depending on your personal preferences, and to always drive carefully… but most importantly, please -remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.15 pm

I meant to be a bit earlier this evening, however, I wanted to get the short skit wot I rote for you all written down before I forgot it. But I should start at the beginning, shouldn’t I! Yesterday I played WoW in the morning, and started work on the new Header you see at the top of the page. I didn’t get terribly far with it yesterday because all of those little “squiggly” bits around the edge had to be added one at a time, and lined up so that they were all even – and I’m afraid that I didn’t work terribly hard because I was feeling too sore and sorry for myself, and besides, I wanted to get the cabbage leaves on my foot, to see if they’d work a miracle and ease the swelling in my feet… Anyway, I’d done all my exercises and my treadmilling, and I was quite stiff and sore, so I went and got the cabbage out of the fridge. I had to wait about a bit because Julian had commandeered the kitchen to make a loaf of sourdough bread, and it had just gone into the oven – but the kitchen smelt delicious, so I didn’t mind all that much. I finally got to the cabbage, removing four or five leaves, and cutting out most of the main “vein” down the centre of each leaf, which was so thick and hard that I was having trouble “rolling” them flat with the rolling-pin. Then, armed with my Kindle, the cabbage leaves, and with Julian in tow to tie the leaves on for me, I repaired to the lounge room and my Recliner chair… We couldn’t find any string, so Julian had to make do with a bit of left-over athletic strapping tape to bind the leaves onto my foot… which sort-of worked, but came undone about half-way through the experiment. We took some photos of the sourdough loaf when it came out of the oven – and it was absolutely fabulous! How’s this for a home-made Sourdough bread loaf! (hint: it tastes even betterer than it looks! 😉 )

I should have taken a “before” photo, I should have made sure that I had a bigger, green cabbage, and I should have made sure we had string (but I’m positive that we do have some… somewhere! Never mind, it’s now on our Shopping List!) Anyway, we taped the red cabbage leaves on as best we could (which wasn’t very!) and as all the articles that I’d read said to leave the cabbage leaves in place for about 30 minutes – I sat and read my Kindle for half an hour, and then I removed the leaves, which were miraculously still wrapped around my foot – but only because I sat extremely still, and didn’t move so much as an eyelash! I’m quite sure that if I’d so much as twitched my nose, or blinked, they would have fallen off! This morning though, a friend told me that the cabbage leaves should stay on for two to three hours, and that most people tie their cabbage leaves on before they go to bed! Well, I knew that that would be a bridge too far for Julian – he’s happy enough to tie cabbage leaves around my foot and let me sit around reading my Kindle with my feet up, just to please me, but I know he’d never countenance cabbage leaves in bed! Actually, the idea of cabbage leaves in bed brought somewhat mangled images of leaves, fig leaves and cabbage leaves, to mind – hence this short skit I wrote:

* * *
Scene: A shady glade in the Garden of Eden. Eve is lying back comfortably on a pile of leaves, with her feet propped up on a Lion with huge fangs. A small, woolly lamb is nuzzling up to the Lion, who is licking it fondly, and drooling… Eve is delicately filing her fingernails on what appears to be a piece of cuttlefish bone, and humming to herself. Her right foot is wrapped tightly in cabbage leaves, which have been tied on with a piece of twisted yarn, which seems to have been made from shed animal fur…

Adam enters, stage right. He’s hot and sweaty from working with the animals they’ve been put in charge of. “I’m sorry dear, I couldn’t get you any fig leaves (Adam blushes hotly) I’m… I’m afraid I used them all…. Sorry, love!”

As Adam speaks, a troop of animals enter, single file – they’re all wearing fig leaves draped strategically over… certain parts of their anatomy.

Eve looks up from her nails “Oh, that’s OK hon – I found these cabbage? leaves instead! Snake told me about them – and there was something about apples, too, I think… I can’t quite remember, now… but these kibbidge? cobbage? no! cabbage leaves are really very comfortable and cool! You should try some – they’re growing over in the garden bed by the south wall, right next to that great big apple tree….”

[ghod] hears this conversation, takes a look down at the two humans in confusion, and does a bit of a double-take when he sees the animals that Adam has draped with fig leaves. In exasperated annoyance, he turns to Snake, who is lounging about on a soft cushion next to the coffee table holding the petit fours, and exclaims accusingly “Just exactly what did you tell that young lady!”

Snake looks innocent, and says “Oh… ummm… [Snake clears his throat in embarrassment, and continues, in what he hopes is an innocent voice] …I just said that apples go really well with cabbage, if you let them stew together for a bit…” [Snake looks off towards stage left] “Well! For goodness sake! Would you look at that!” [ghod turns and looks off towards stage left too, the humans forgotten for the moment, and Snake heaves a huge sigh of relief…]
* * *

Julian’s been working outside most of today, and I’m happy to be able to tell you that all our tomatoes are now planted! And while he was working out there, preparing to (finally!) put in the tomatoes, he found… a lovely big Cannonball cabbage! Apparently we’d planted one, way back when we put in all the other things, like the cauliflower, and the rhubarb, which were also harvested today (and tomorrow we have to buy a small can of diet lemonade, so that we can stew our rhubarb 🙂 )

And that’s been pretty much our last two days! Today I created a new Night Elf Mage called “Equipoise” on the very first Realm we played on, Scarlet Crusade, because Julian’s been playing on there and he says it’s very deserted, and I also finished the new Header, which I think has an almost “Medieval” or “Renaissance” look to it! Dapple’s been a very good little boy, behaving himself properly as all good little goldfish should – but naughty Auric is still having mild bouts of “floaties” in the evenings, although I keep feeding them less and less each night… and we’re both very worried about Flipper. She’s still not eating more than a mouthful or two a night, though she does like her pussy biscuits… so I suppose that having those is a lot better than not having anything… she tried to eat me last night! We bought her some special kibble “treats” a while ago – they’re supposedly one of those fancy-schmantzy “Nature” kibbles, and she loves them! Unfortunately they’re not at all good for her kidneys, so we never give her more than one or two at a time, about once a week, if that! However, we now feel that there’s not much point in being so sparing with them any more, so we give her a couple every night. She loves them so much that she even recognises the sound of the bag that they’re in, and she gets all quivery with anticipation when she hears it 🙂 So, last night I got her out two of her special treats, and gave one to Julian, which he fed her, and she got so anxious to eat it that she couldn’t see where it was, and when I gave her mine, on the flat of my palm, she missed the treat, and found my finger instead! I suppose my finger must have smelt the same as the treat, and that’s what she went chomp on! Yeoooowww! She didn’t quite break the skin, but she came very close to it! She’s tremendously weak though – walking is an effort, and she’s fallen over a couple of times, jumping off the bed… we’ve tried putting make-shift ramps up for her, but she’ll go miles out of her way to avoid the ramp – silly old girl! I fear she has an attitude of “Where ah’m-a-goin’, I don’t need no ramps!” I must try to get some Loxicom (her arthritis medication) into her tonight..

And now it’s about time that I moved on to all the “good” bits!

Food stuffs. Last night we had one of those “Coles Finest” products – Australian Angus Beef sausages, with Garlic and Parsley: “Gourmet sausages made with Australian Angus Beef and Onion, Lightly seasoned – Gluten Free” – which turned out to be very nice! With them we had chips, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato, and also a little bit of Sriracha, cos we’d never had it before and we wanted to see what it was like. It’s quite “hot” (as in “spicy” hot) but as long as you don’t try drinking it straight from the bottle, it’s good 🙂 For dessert I had one of my “ordinary” green pears (either Bartlett or Packham, but probably Packham… I dunno!) and a Lemon CHOBANI yoghurt (which was really yummy!) Today for lunch we had a “Julian’s Sourdough Bread” sandwich, with just a teeny bit of butter, and chicken peri-peri chunks, and it was just sooo nice! Nothing beats home-made bread, honestly! As with the first “white” loaf that he made, the texture of this loaf was just about perfect too, and although the crust wasn’t quite as crunchy as the first loaf he made, it had a nice “bite”, a very good “mouth” feel,  and enough “crunch” to make it a very delicious sandwich! Tonight we’re having some (once again, “Coles Finest”!) pan-fried Australian Angus Beef Porterhouse “100 day grain fed in Victoria 21 day aged” steak, with which we might have our only surviving baby cauliflower, possibly the last of our home-grown and fully organic broad beans, maybe some chips, and undoubtedly, our usual half a tomato! And for dessert I’ll be having a smallish yellow peach, and a smallish yellow Nectarine (which I’ve just taken out of the crisper drawer, so as to bring them up to “room temperature” before dinner) and an Apple Le Rice.

Weigh-in yesterday morning. Not too bad, I suppose – I stayed the same as Tuesday, at 68.5 kg…
Weigh-in this morning. Back to the good-old “margin of error” business again! I went from 68.5 kg yesterday, to 68.6 kg today. Tomorrow I’ll probably be back to something like 69.999 kg!

And that just about brings me back to tomorrow! I’m not sure what’s happening – probably more of the same as today! I’m pretty sure we’re not going anywhere, and there’s a small possibility that we may be having some old friends over for a visit, but I haven’t heard anything from them and I don’t think Julian has either, so it’s probably going to be a matter of “weight and sea”. Anyway, I think that’s probably about “it” from me for this evening – please feel free to drop in tomorrow night and see if we had visitors, if my weight went up yet again, whether I’ve done any more work with Equipoise, and how Auric, Dapple, and little Flipper are going. Until then though, do try hard to bee good – it’s getting closer to “that” time of the year again, you know, and you don’t want Father Christmas writing your name down in the “Naughty” column, do you! Remember that true freedom is not overcoming what you think stands in your way, it is understanding that what is in your way is part of the way, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep warm – or cool – whichever seems most appropriate to you – and to look after yourselves… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.36 pm

Well, I’m only two days late (I have been later, you know! 😉 ) but that’s pretty much par for the course on weekends, what with Sunday’s getting eaten up by WoW, and Monday’s getting eaten up – well, Monday evenings getting eaten up – with having my hair done! 🙂 Anyway, it’s been a very busy couple of days for us! We didn’t get all our tomatoes planted yesterday, as it was too hot… and today, not only have we been out for most of the day, but it’s too wet! Anyone would think that “The People Upstairs” (Winter glances up towards the ceiling, domain of the Charismatic Ceiling Cat and the Great Galactic Kitten – amongst other more mundane deities!) don’t want us to have any nice, delicious, home-grown and fully organic tomatoes this year!

But let me start at the beginning, Sunday. Wynterthyme and Demelzae have come to a sort of an impasse in WoW, now that they’ve fulfilled all the “basic” requirements and achievements for level 110 – in fact, they seem to have found themselves with no sensible quest chains left to complete! Sure, there are plenty of “dailies” – repetitive quests that one churns through day after day (supposedly) in order to build up Money (gold) and “Reputation” with different Factions, and there are plenty of “Profession” quests, in order to earn more Herbing, Skinning and Mining “recipes”, none of which Wynterthyme and Demelzae have any inclination of ever implementing – so… what are a couple of hardy and adventurous Hunters to do? For the last two weeks, as I think I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve been going back and doing some of the early, and very early Dungeons, that we hadn’t done at the time, because it would have meant doing something that Wynterthyme and Demelzae simply do not do – and that is that they do not, and will not, play, or work in a PUG (Pick Up Group) ever! Of course, at level 110 you can simply waltz on in, kill all the Elite mobs and Bosses with one shot, and complete the Dungeon with plenty of time to wander around, looking at the fabulous artwork and admiring the gorgeous graphic decoration. However, there are only so many Dungeons that we really want to do – f’rinstance, on Sunday the two of us went off to do what is classified as a 25 player Dungeon, or Instance, “The Icecrown Citadel“, and the “End Boss Battle” of the “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion! We walked in, killed the 16 Bosses with one shot – we took it in turns 🙂 “This one’s yours – I did the last one!”, “Oh, right-o, thanks! [bang – Boss falls over dead, still going on about all the terrible things he was going to do to us] Next!” and so it went on. At the end sequence, there are supposed to be four “waves” of combat, and Julian very carefully read up on what we were supposed to do – just in case… Unfortunately, we never experienced these four “waves”, because we got Arthas, the Big, Bad, Lich King himself, down to 1% health in the first couple of seconds! He still went through his enormously long spiel, about what he was going to do to us, and all our decedents, but we missed out on all the fighting that we were supposed to have been doing! Not that we minded that much, but still… Anyway, now we’ve crossed that Dungeon off our “Dungeons We Always Wanted To Do” list – but there are only so many Dungeons that we do want to try – what are we supposed to do with the rest of our time? Well, I suppose we could go and start off two new Intrepid Adventurers to carry our Guild Banner? 😉 Which is what we did. This time Julian has rolled a female Blood Elf Mage, called “Krankhaft” (which is German for “morbid”, or “diseased”!) (*rolls eyes*!) and I’ve rolled a female Blood Elf Warlock, called “Imaan”, which I don’t think means anything; I just liked the sound of it. We rolled Horde characters because we wanted to use the Undead starting area for a change, as we haven’t done much in that area, and they’re both now sitting at level 7. The “semi-plan” is to work through one of the Dungeons on our “Dungeons We Always Wanted To Do” list every Sunday morning, then, after lunch, pick up with our two newbies – at least until we run out of Dungeons, or get bored with that “semi-plan” – whichever comes first! 😉

Sunday food stuffs. For lunch on Sunday we had a yummy Toasty, made with the last of Julian’s home-made bread, ham, tomato, and Cheddar/Tasty cheese. Delicious! Of course, dinner on Sunday was omelets, with pre-fried real (I very nearly typed “real live bacon” there!) er… really real bacon (that sounds better!) lovely, almost melted Cheddar/Tasty cheese, diced tomato, and pre-fried diced onion and red capsicum – which made for an exceptionally nice omelet (as usual! 🙂 ) For dessert I had a fairly wrinkly and slightly over-ripe white nectarine, an also slightly over-ripe yellow peach, and a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt.

Weigh-in on Sunday morning. Was not good, but definitely more betterer than Saturday’s weigh-in! On Saturday I weighed in at 69.2 kg, and on Sunday I weighed in at 69.0 kg – so I went down two points.

Yesterday – Monday. I had my very favourite eldest daughter over yesterday instead of today, as she had a Dentist appointment this morning. The cleaning lady was here yesterday too, so we got a slightly later start to our television watching than we normally do, because it’s a little difficult to hear what the “baddies” are threatening the “goodies” with, when the vacuum cleaner is snarling along in the background! We watched one episode of “Supergirl”, and a few episodes “Legends of Tomorrow”, “The Flash”, and “Arrow”, which took us up to almost 5 o’clock, and just as Julian was walking out the Garage door with Lee, to drive her home, Josh arrived at the front door! Then all too soon it was dinner time, so I didn’t get a chance to start writing – but never mind, I can assure you that you’re not going to miss out on anything interesting or exciting! 😉

Monday food stuffs. Lunch time was a “brought home” lunch – I had my usual half of two savoury rolls, and one of my very favourite Baker’s Delight fruit and white chocolate scones. Julian and my very favourite eldest daughter had Sushi (also, Julian polished off the other halves of my savoury rolls! 😦 and I’d been hoping to be able to have them “later on”!) For dinner last night we had a beautiful little pork fillet, cut into bite-size pieces, and pan-fried with some lemon-infused olive oil and home-grown and fully organic rosemary, served on a bed of plain steamed rice with finely chopped spring onions. For dessert I had one of my Corella pears – it’s really strange! They didn’t look very ripe when we bought them, so I left them in the bowl to ripen up a bit… that was nearly a week ago, and they still felt very firm, but I decided to try one last night… It was sort-of ripe, but only just! It was very “crispy-crunchy” and didn’t have all that much flavour, but I’m just wondering why it didn’t seem to have ripened up very much in around about a week! If you leave anything else out in the fruit bowl for even just a day and a half, it practically turns to mush! Oh well, I still have a couple of those Corella pears left – I’ll try the next one on Thursday night (if I remember!) and see if it’s any riper than the one I had last night wasn’t! With the pear I had an Apple Le Rice.

Weigh-in on Monday morning. A bit better, but still plenty of room for improvement! I went down a little bit more… from 69.0 kg on Sunday, to 68. 8 kg on Monday – down another two points…

Today. Well, today’s been quite busy – I had an appointment to see Polly the Physiotherapist at 11.30 this morning, and that went quite well – she didn’t stick another chopstick into my foot this time, but she “massaged” it very thoroughly indeed! (I never knew that Physiotherapists had such hard, strong thumbs!) I reckon I’ll have bruises tomorrow! Still, she did manage to get a lot of the fluid out, and again, a lot more movement and flexibility into my foot! After Polly finished with me, Julian hopped up on the bench, as he also had an appointment to see her about his shoulder, which has been really painful for about a month. So Polly wriggled his shoulder around, bending it this way and that, and saying helpful things like: “Does this hurt if I do this?”, while Julian is almost screaming in agony! In the end, she told him his shoulder was stiffening up due to poor posture – and getting a trifle older. She’s given him some exercises to do, and strapped his shoulder into place, and he has another appointment with her next Tuesday morning. In the meantime, I’m to make sure he does his exercises every two hours! Julian was a bit taken aback by that “Every two hours! That seems a lot!”, he said. Polly replied “I’ve been a Physiotherapist long enough to know that if I tell someone to do their exercises four times a day, they’ll do it maybe twice, so if I tell you every two hours, you might get them done about three times a day, if we’re both lucky!” to which I replied “You shouldn’t have told him that! Now he knows your tricks, and I’ll be lucky if I can nag him into doing them twice a day!” – anyway, we’ll see how it goes – I think we’re both going to be feeling a little bit sore and sorry for ourselves tomorrow, as she also stretched my right leg until it yelled in protest! We left the Physiotherapist and went up to Vermont South to have some lunch before heading off to see Dr. B. at 1.30 pm to get the results of all those “fasting” blood tests I had done last week. We had planned on going to The Glen and having lunch there, after we’d finished at the Doctor’s, but as Dr. B. usually keeps us waiting for ages and ages and ever, it probably would have been more like afternoon tea or supper than lunch – and we didn’t really have time to have a proper lunch before we went to see her… so Vermont South it was, for a quick-ish cup of coffee, a slice of slightly warmed-up spanakopita, and a chocolate caramel slice, which we ate relatively speedily, and off we took again. Guess what! This time we didn’t have to wait! I’d hardly read two sentences in my kindle before I was called in! (*fume!* and it was just getting to the good bits, too! 😉 )

We’re having pasta for dinner tonight, and Julian tells me that it’s ready! I’ll come back later to edit and finish this!

09.36 pm

So it’s now later… let me read back a bit to see where I got up to….

Ah yes, the appointment to see Dr. B., who didn’t keep us waiting this time – probably because I’d just got to an interesting part in my book! *sigh* And once again, as I’d predicted, all my blood test results were not only “normal”, they were extra good “normal” – so there were no overt reasons for my swollen feet, and no answers or suggestions as to where to go next, or what to do about them! Grr! I tell you, if I’m going to get sick, or have anything go wrong with me, it’s never anything simple, like sinusitis, or myopia – oh no! I have to get something different, something slightly drastic, like a very serious bout of diphtheria as a child, after I’d been inoculated against it, or the multiple blood clots in both lungs, that I’ve had twice in half a dozen years, or these mysteriously and painfully swollen feet, for no apparent reason! (I had my badly infected tonsils out twice, too, once as a six year old, and once as a teenager!) Oh well, Dr. B. suggested that I could see a “lymphologist“, with a view to have him/her/it do exactly what Polly did this morning – massage the fluid out of my feet – but it wouldn’t be a “cure” – it’d have to be an ongoing thing, and I really don’t think I can be bothered. I guess I’m just going to have to stretch my shoes to breaking point on the days when they’re at their worst and I have to go out!

We came home in a steady, cold drizzle, so once more, the tomatoes didn’t get planted – hopefully tomorrow will be a little kinder to our tomato growing aspirations! I was going to try getting the cabbage leaves prepared for my foot tonight – I can’t remember if I told you all about that, but it’s an old folk remedy, a bit like the “gold ring for sore eyes” remedy (which actually does work, by the way!) You take chilled cabbage leaves (from the fridge!) and roll them out with a rolling-pin to make them more pliable, then you tie them around the swollen foot and go and sit with your cabbage-wrapped foot elevated for about 30 minutes – it’s supposed to work wonders. I told Polly about it this morning, and she said that it probably works because cabbage absorbs a lot of water (though I don’t quite understand how the fluid inside your skin gets into the cabbage leaf wrapped around the outside of your foot!) However, we have a red cabbage, which Polly said might stain my foot a bit, but Josh has kindly offered to get us a green one, so I’ll get the string and the rolling-pin out and give it a try tomorrow night, so that I don’t end up with one red foot!

And that’s about as far as I’ve got tonight! No! Wait! Look up at the address bar! I’ve got a new domain, courtesy of Word Press! They’ve had these new domains in the pipeline for a while now, and they’ve only just become available. As a proud “Premium” subscriber, I get one free! “My Word!” can now be reached at winterthyme.blog – innat très cool! 🙂 I’m going to add it to all my emails! 🙂 Flipper still isn’t eating much – a mouthful here or there, and a few pussy biscuits, but she’s not much more than skin, fur, and bones now, poor old girl – but she’s happy, sleeps most of the time when she’s not demanding pats and cuddles – which she always gets – and at first I wasn’t sure, but I’m pretty certain that she comes into the Den, then sits just behind the open door, waiting… then as soon as someone crosses the threshold, she gives out a really loud, harsh “Meeeyah!” at you – it always makes me jump, it’s so sudden and loud, and I’ve come to realise that she does this deliberately, because if you take too long to come into the room, she goes and gets into her “cat cave” and goes to sleep, but if you’re pretty much right behind her, she’s always there waiting to let loose with this raucous “Meeeyah!” – I think she thinks it’s funny, to see us jump a mile because we’re not expecting it! 🙂 Auric and Dapple are both well, though Auric had a slight touch of the floaties again tonight. I think I’m going to have to put him on a diet… Now, as I’ve caught you all up on the past three days, I can now get on to tonight’s “good” bits! 😉

Food stuffs. Today for lunch, up at one of the coffee shoppes at Vermont South, I had a small “square” of spanakopita, “lightly warmed up” (read: lukewarm! Not really the best health safety-wise!) with what appeared to be a hastily slopped on forkful or two of limp salad, which I never eat anyway because I don’t like dressing on my salads. I also had a rather nice chocolate caramel slice – almost the same as the ones I always have when we go to a Shingle Inn coffee shoppe! Nice “crumb” base, at least an inch and a bit (at  least 3 centimeters) of thick, sticky, creamy, gooey caramel, and almost a quarter of an inch (not quite half a centimeter, but close enough to it!) of chocolate on top! And of course I had my usual “long black with a small jug of skinny-milk on the side” Tonight for dinner we had a small bowl of pasta with tomato sauce, with freshly grated parmesan cheese. For dessert I had a smallish yellow peach and a smallish yellow Nectarine – I’ve put them in the fridge, wrapped up in a clean tea towel, to see if I can get them to last longer before they over ripen and become inedible. The main trick is going to be removing them from the fridge in time for them to reach room temperature by dinner time – you lose a lot of the flavour if they’re too cold when you eat them… and I had a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt after the fruit…

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t too bad, for a change! I went from 68.8 kg yesterday to 68.5 kg today – down another three points! Never mind – I bet I’ll be up again tomorrow morning!

And that brings be up to tomorrow! I really have no idea what’s happening – tomato planting, hopefully, if it’s not too wet! And cabbage tying in the evening! 🙂 Apart from that, I’ll probably be back to my usual haunts – WoW and messing about with graphics – but whatever happens tomorrow, you’re all going to have to wait until this time tomorrow night to find out, aren’t you! 😉 Do drop in again though, and find out how my weight went, whether we got our tomatoes planted, and if I cabbaged my foot! Until then, do try very hard to bee good, don’t forget that the single most important key to success is to be a good listener, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, especially in this drizzly weather, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on your preferences… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.58 pm

Here I am – I’m sorry I went MIA yesterday, but I really wasn’t feeling all that crash hot – I think I might have been exercising a bit too hard or something, because everything from my collar bones to my toes ached! I hope I’m not coming down with something…

Anyway, I’m a lot better today, except that my feet are so swollen that I didn’t know if I’d be able to get my shoes on (we went tomato seedling shopping this afternoon! 🙂 ) Actually yanno, I should probably wear my shoes a lot more often! [##°Winter’s evil thought processes start grinding away°##] Hmm… Struggling to get my swollen feet into my shoes is more than likely to weaken them (the shoes that is, not the feet!) and if I do it often enough… the shoes might even break! 😮 Oh dear – quelle dommage! Whatever would I do then, they’re the only shoes I have left! [##°snicker°##] No…. maybe I shouldn’t do that – it’s not the shoes’ fault that they’re hideously clumpy and ugly, not to mention horribly uncomfortable – poor little (big! 😦 ) shoes… Anyway, whatever… I didn’t do much of anything yesterday except slump around feeling miserable and sore and lethargic – I didn’t do my treadmilling because my legs were too sore, and this morning when I was doing my leg exercises I thought “That’s probably why my legs were so sore yesterday! This is hurting!” – all my leg muscles were protesting loudly, but I finished all of the exercises anyway. Again, I didn’t do my treadmilling this afternoon – I swapped it over for walking around a horribly sunny Nursery, looking at tomato plants (and surreptitiously looking around at baby fruit trees, and herbs, and different types of vegetable planters! They have some really interesting plants there at the Pinewood Nursery!) We got some Gypsum, as we’re supposed to put some in the soil before we add the tomato plants, and some fertiliser, and (the following are all different types of tomatoes!) 9 x Grosse Lisse seedlings, 7 x Black Russian seedlings, 2 x Tomato Boss seedlings, and 2 x Italian Heritage seedlings – it’s enough to fill one of our two vegetable beds, and if this lot do as well as the ones we planted last year did we should get plenty of nice tomatoes out of them! Last year we only had three tomato plants in total – one Grosse Lisse, one Black Russian, and I can’t remember what the third one was, but it was one of the “Heritage” variety which didn’t look very pretty (they were all rather odd shapes) but they sure tasted delicious! We liked the Black Russians the best – they’re the almost chocolate brown skinned ones, very similar to the “Kumato” tomatoes that you can occasionally get in supermarkets at somewhat exorbitant prices (and while Kumatoes are very nice, they don’t taste even a quarter as nice as our home-grown Black Russians did! 🙂 ) We haven’t planted them yet – at the moment they’re sitting “out the back”, getting the vibes and “feel” for their new home-to-be. We’ve given them a good watering, and Julian will probably plant them on Monday, if it doesn’t get too hot.

Flipper is getting very weak – but she did eat about 1/3 of her dinner last night, and managed to keep it down, so that was good – with a bit of luck she might eat a bit more tonight, too! She’s happy though, in her own muddle-headed way, and that’s about all we can do for her – make sure she knows that she’s well-loved, is happy, and has her favourite food and plenty of fresh water, for whenever she actually remembers to eat and drink. Auric and Dapple are still their usual funny little selves – always so eager for their food that they begin circling, shark-like, whenever they think you might be going to feed them! Greedy little sods! I gave them even less at dinner time last night, because Dapple’s alright, but Auric has a problem with his swim-bladder if he eats too much (and he’s so greedy! I’ve seen him actually grab the food just as Dapple was about to swallow it! I kid you not! Auric is a right little monster!) They’ve both grown so much since we brought them inside – it’s hard to remember them as the lethargic little fish that used to live in the squalid little mud puddle (which is now nice and clean!) outside!

I did a bit of work on the Header this afternoon after I got back from Tomato Seedling Shopping – what do you think of it? Not as Christmas-y as the last one was, with the deer, but it’s nice enough until I make something different, or better, or different and better… But that’s really about all I’ve done lately – I’m having a bit of a tough time acclimatising myself to the hotter weather! You know what I said about “swings and roundabouts” the other day? Well, losing more than half one’s body weight is the “gain” from the swings… but the not being able to wear short sleeves ever, ever again is the “loss” from the roundabouts! It’s hot, but I have to wear long sleeves now because the loose, excess skin on my arms from losing so much weight looks… umm… Ugly? Revolting? Sickening? Yup, all of those… so long sleeves are the go. But my legs, from the knees down, are fine… my face, unfortunately, now looks ten years older – but hey! I’m no spring chicken, after all! So… swings and roundabouts! I just wish I’d known how easy it was going to be to lose that much weight – I’d have done it years ago when my skin was young enough and elastic enough to have more-or-less snapped back into place! Alas, I didn’t…

Now, having filled you all in on the happenings around here, I can now get on to all the “good” bits!

Food stuffs. Yesterday for lunch we had a very nice sandwich made with the scrumptious bread that Julian had made, sandwich-sliced turkey, Cheddar/Tasty cheese, and some hot tomato chutney – and a Baker’s Delight fruit and white chocolate scone! Well you see, Julian went out to do some Banking. He rang me when he was on his way home to see if there was anything I wanted him to pick up on the way, and as it was nearly lunch time, I said to him “Why don’t you bring lunch home?” – and then I said “No! Don’t! I want a sandwich, made with your bread!” to which he laughed 🙂 I put the phone down and thought… !!! A few seconds later I rang him back and said “but that doesn’t mean I can’t have one of those fruit scones, does it!” – so I had my sandwich of Julian-made bread, and also a fruit and white chocolate scone as well! 😉 …and it was all totally scrumlicious! For dinner we had some very nice pan-fried lamb backstrap, with chips, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato – for dessert I had another smallish yellow peach and a smallish yellow nectarine (in this sort of weather you have to eat them fast, or they get over-ripe and mushy!) and an Apple Le Rice. Today for lunch we had another sandwich made with “Julian bread” (it’s nearly all gone now! 😦 ) with ham, Cheddar/Tasty cheese, and tomato, and for dinner tonight we’re having some gently pan-fried Richmond Valley Veal Porterhouse, with steamed butternut pumpkin, steamed peas, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I plan on having either one of my Corella pears, or the last of my – whatever-it-is – “ordinary” pears! Unless the peaches and nectarines need to be eaten first again! With that I’ll have a raspberry CHOBANI yoghurt.

Weigh-in yesterday morning. Wasn’t good. Damn this weather, and damn my stupid fluid retention problem! Hopefully this time the blood tests I had during the week will have something intelligent to tell us for a change, instead of the perennial “nothing wrong, everything normal” results I usually get – because very obviously, everything isn’t “normal”, or I wouldn’t have these swollen, elephantine feet! Anyway, same old, same old… on Thursday I went from 68.7 kg to 68.9 kg… and on Friday, yesterday, I went from 68.9 kg to 69.1 kg… 😦

Weigh-in today. Although it was supposedly within the stupid “margin of error” thingy, was even worser! I went from 69.1 kg to 69.2 kg – ghod knows what it’ll be tomorrow morning! Probably 150 kg! Mind you, there have been a lot of tummy gurgles going on today – which means that fluid is moving around (or so they say!) This could be either a good sign, or a bad sign – depending on exactly where the fluid is going! Knowing me though, it’s probably a bad sign…

My dinner is yelling at me – gotta go – back soon to correct typos and finish off! 😉

09.38 pm

Back again… Well, I can now divulge that Flipper finally woke up around 20 past eight this evening and came out to the living room, meowing for Daddy, dinner, pats, and/or pussy biscuits – in no particular order – so the television was duly paused, and her dinner was prepared. She followed Daddy into her dining room and headed straight for her dinner… which she didn’t eat. She came out and came over to sit on the couch to get patted and made a fuss of, then wandered off again. When we came back in here, to the Den, she headed straight for where her pussy biscuits usually are, so I gave them back to her, rather than hope that she’d go back to her dinner. Better that she eat her pussy biscuits and not get all her medication, than not eat anything at all! She stood there looking at them for a few minutes, and then just wandered off – probably back to the bedroom again. I had my last whatever-it-is – “ordinary” pear for dessert tonight, though on feeling the stoned fruit, I probably should have had the last non-squishy nectarine. I doubt that it’ll last until tomorrow night, and I’m wondering if we shouldn’t be keeping stoned fruit, like peaches and nectarines, in the crisper drawer of the fridge from now on… And that’s pretty much been the sum total of our Saturday, so that’s really about “it” from me this evening, once again! 🙂 Do drop in again tomorrow night to see what’s going on around these parts, like how much more my weight has gone up, despite the fact that my stomach has been gurgling all day, or how many times we died in the Broken Isles, because tomorrow’s our “traditional” day for Wynterthyme and Demelzae to give the nasty mobs hell in WoW, as well as all the other interesting, novel, new and exciting things that we’ve been up to since this evening! But until then, please try awfully hard to bee good, remember – don’t be yourself – be someone a little nicer 😉 and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on the weather… but above all… please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

05.01 pm

Not quite so early this afternoon – Julian and I have been having a bit of fun taking Wynterthyme and Demelzae through some of the low-level Dungeons in WoW! As I think I’ve told all of you previously, Julian and I don’t “do” Dungeons – because unless you belong to a large-ish Guild, and you can rely on your fellow Guildies to run the Dungeon with you, you have to join a Pick Up Group, or “PUG”, as they’re commonly called. A “PUG” consists of a bunch of complete strangers, and like all groups of complete strangers, some are nice, some are loud, rude, and overbearing, and some are just simply “Not Nice”. Julian and I, being the fairly anti-social people that we are, “do not play well with other children”. We tend to play “our” way – going through a Dungeon or Instance carefully, killing everything that needs to be killed, taking our time, skinning all the skinables, and observing the intricacies and details of the usually superb art-work that’s gone into the Dungeon design. PUGs, on the other hand, want to get through the Dungeon as quickly as possible, running on before the rest of the party (in other words, us!) is ready to move on; they’re hair-trigger quick to pounce on, and put the boots into the unfortunate group member who accidentally clicks on “Need” instead of “Greed” when rolling virtual dice to see who gets a dropped item (you’re only supposed to click “Need” if it’s something that you can, and will use! The rest of the time you’re supposed to click “Greed”, indicating that you’re going to be selling it on the Auction House and are only interested in what you can get for it) and they bicker loudly and incessantly about who should have got which items.

As Julian and I avoid PUGs like the plague, we’ve run very few Dungeons – but as we’re both level 110 now, we’re having great fun going back and doing all the old Dungeons that we never got to do! The two of us can go in, “one-shotting” all the Elite mobs, and having a good look around at everything! Of course all of the loot that we pick up is useless to us at level 110 – but some of it makes good “Transmogrification” costumes, which is a bit of a fun bonus to us now, but back when we were at the level where we should have been doing those Dungeons, well, maybe we’d have been bickering loudly and incessantly about who should have got which items, too! 😯

So as I said, Julian and I have been having a bit of fun in the Dungeons this afternoon, but for most of the morning I played around with some re-discovered online jig-saw puzzles, and Julian made the most scrumptious looking loaf of bread, by hand! It’s not a sourdough loaf this time – he hasn’t made bread since 2014, before I started on my diet – and he wanted to “get his hand in again” by practicing on a plain, white loaf – and by the looks of it, I think he did pretty well, don’t you?! He made this loaf completely by hand – but back when he was making bread every week, he used the bread making machine – and when he makes the sourdough loaf next time, he might use the machine again, but I just can’t wait to have a taste of this one – it looks magnificent! (the house smells pretty magnificent, too! I love the smell of freshly baked bread!)

And that’s been pretty much our day – I did my treadmilling again today, plus all my other exercises – not that I think they’re doing me terribly much good, as they’re all really simple and easy! Flipper still isn’t eating properly, and is really only interested in her pussy biscuits – when she’s awake – which isn’t all that often… I gave Auric and Dapple a little bit less dinner last night, and although Auric showed a slight tendency to “float”, it wasn’t bad enough to really worry about, so I’ll give them a bit less again tonight, and see how they go. So, having filled  all of you in on all the salient points, I shall now proceed to get onto all the “good” bits! 🙂

Food stuffs. Last night for dinner we had some very, very delicious succulent and tender pork steaks, pan-fried in a teeny bit of olive oil with some of our home-grown rosemary, with mashed potatoes, steamed home-grown and organic broad beans, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I didn’t have one of my Corella pears – I thought I’d give them another day because the last of my yellow peaches and nectarines looked and felt as though they were about “on the turn”, so I thought I’d better eat them toot sweet, which I did, with an Apple Le Rice. For lunch today we had another ham and cheese Toastie, which as usual, was lovely! (and much less messy to eat than a wrap! 😉 ) Tonight we’re having the last of this lot of left-overs from the Lamb and Harissa Lasagne with Feta and Oregano that Julian made last week – so he’s going to have to make another one soon! We’re having the left-overs tonight because it’s really too hot to stove-cook anything, and we can just heat the Lasagna up in the microwave…

Julian has just brought in a lightly buttered slice of his freshly baked loaf – and it’s fantastic! The crust is, well, “crusty”, not too thick, and has a nice bit of “crunch” to it. The bread itself is perfectly cooked, not doughy or soggy, with a lovely, even texture, and it tastes soooo much better than ordinary “commercial” white bread, which – let’s face it – is really more like bland, tasteless, polystyrene! I’m really looking forward to lunch tomorrow! 🙂

Is anyone reading this blog old enough to remember family mealtimes – especially dinner at night – where everyone would be sitting around the kitchen table, talking, or Dad would be reading the newspaper, and Mum would be dishing up the family dinner… and there’d always be a fresh loaf of bread on the table, with a serrated bread knife – no pre-sliced bread in those days – sitting next to it on the breadboard, and there’d be a nice pat of butter, usually sitting on an “odd” saucer next to the salt and pepper in the middle of the table? My family didn’t always have bread out on the table – though we always had bread and butter on the table when we had company – my mother’s parents always (always!) had bread and butter there, even at lunch time, and when we went to a friend’s place for dinner, there was always bread and butter… Do people still do that? We don’t visit friends for dinner much, and vice-versa – usually we all just pile off to a restaurant!

I’m digressing again! Yes, we’re having left-over Lasagna for dinner tonight, as it’s really far too hot to stove-cook anything – and for dessert, tonight I’ll try one of the green pears that Julian brought home yesterday – I think they’re Williams, but they might be Packhams – anyway, I’ll try one of them tonight, along with a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt.

Weigh-in this morning. Oh well, I suppose one could say that it’s still within that magical Fae realm, “margin of error”! I went from 68.4 kg yesterday and the day before, to 68.7 kg this morning… so… who knows what it might – or might not be – tomorrow? I suppose we shall all just have to weight and sea…

And that brings me around to tomorrow again – it always happens, doesn’t it? Tomorrow is always “just around the corner”, with who knows what sorts of surprises waiting for you! 🙂 So, now… I think I’ve filled you all in on just about everything that’s transpired today, and told you all about what might – or might not – be happening tomorrow – which isn’t a lot, really, because at this stage of the evening even I don’t know what’s happening tomorrow! But drop by again tomorrow night, and you’re sure to find out whether my weight went up, down, or stayed boringly the same, whether or not Flipper ate her dinner this evening, and if Auric’s nasty little bouts of the “floaties” has dissipated! 😉 As a bonus extra, you’ll also find out how we amused ourselves, and if we ran any more Dungeons in WoW (wow!) But until then, do try extra hard to bee good, don’t forget  – do or do not, there is no try, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm, depending on your personal preferences… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

03.52 pm

Well, well, well! Will wonders never cease? 🙂 Here it is, dab-bang-smack in the middle of November, and here I am, starting early for a change, and what’s more – starting in on my Christmas-y type decorations! Well, Headers, anyway! I bought a new “Vector Christmas graphics” file this morning, called, of all things, “Fa-la-la”, and I bought it because of the really cute deer that you can see in the Header, and of course, I simply had to have it! For well under $20 I got about 15 to 20 images – including snowflakes, the deer 😎 , Christmas Tree baubles, stars, fancy ribbons, string (!), lots of other little bits and pieces, and about a dozen seamless patterns, which I have yet to have a close look at, but will probably use a lot, even if I do have to re-colour them to achieve the effects I want – so I reckon it was a bargain at half the price! They’re all “vector” images which means that they arrive absolutely gi-normous, but re-size perfectly to any size you want, with no loss of clarity or detail! Whoever invented them deserves to win the Nobel Prize for Graphics! (and if there isn’t one, well, there ruddy-well should be!) I’m afraid I’ve mostly frittered away my day, doing a little bit of “this”, a little bit of “that”, and quite a lot of “not much at all” – but I’ll blame the unseasonably warm weather for that, plus the fact that this morning was a really mad scramble! It was quite literally leap out of bed (actually it was more like a slothful stagger!) race (hobble) to the bathroom, race (limp) back to the scales, throw on (struggle into) some clothes, and into the car! I was having that “fasting” blood test done this morning, along with my “eat anything you want as long as it doesn’t contain Vitamin K (like nice, healthy, ‘leafy greens’!)” Warfarin blood test. However going without tea or coffee first thing in the morning is…. really Not Nice, or conducive to becoming Happy Little Vegemites – and I wanted to get the two blood tests over and done with as quickly as possible, so that we could get home to have our “fix”! After that, we more-or-less muddled along, until my very favourite eldest daughter rang – her computer wouldn’t boot! “This looks like a job for SUPER-Julian!” we cried, so Julian hastily put a pair of underpants on over his trousers, and after we’d both had a cup of coffee, he sprang into his automotive chariot (his cape was still at the Dry Cleaners, so he couldn’t fly!) and went over to see what he could do. Naturally he was able to get it going again, but it’s not a very happy little computer so she’ll probably have to bring it with her when she comes over next week.

I just received another of those annoying and tiresome letters (snail-mail, not e-mail) this time from Taste.com Magazine – telling me that I have just one issue left in my Subscription, and that I’d better renew it now, or I’d (heaven forbid!) miss out! Now, ordinarily one would think that this was very nice of them, to send me such a thoughtful reminder – and here’s the “BUT” that you again knew was coming! BUT! After allowing two of them to run out – because they were sending me double copies – one to our old Doncaster address, which was being re-directed to here, and the other one was being sent to our Vermont South PO Box, as well as to the house address! I’ve tried to correct this “abnormality” online – but all that seems to do is make things worse! I thought that I’d sorted out the other magazines, but I’m now starting to get double copies of “Women’s Weekly Food” and “Delicious” – and now “Taste” seems to think that my recently renewed subscription is about to run out! I think I know why it’s happening though. Most of them are handled through a crowd called “Magsonline”, where I have an account. There’s another crowd called “Magshop”, to which I also have an account, and which handles some of the other magazines that I get. I’m beginning to suspect that they work in concert, and that my accounts, which both have the same mailing address (because I think it has to be the same as what’s on my Credit Card?) Anyway, the only way I can see of straightening the whole mess out is to cancel my accounts with Magsonline and Magshop, allow the magazine deliveries to “peter out”, and then, when nothing has arrived at either address for a total of two months, start again from scratch, and from now on, totally ignoring any and all “panicked” letters begging me to renew my subscription, now! Before it’s too late! Grr! Anyway, I’m just sick of the begging letters, and I’m heartily sick of double deliveries!

Flipper went back and ate about maybe a tenth of her dinner? She’s getting so thin now… She does eat her pussy biscuits, though she’s not getting the medication that she should – I’m going to have to search for that syringe… Auric was suffering a rather bad case of the “floats” last night – as soon as he actively stopped swimming, his little body would just bob up to the surface, and he appeared to be having a bit of a struggle getting back down to the middle of the tank again. This morning though, he was fine! Sitting on the bottom, hovering mid-tank –  no problemo! So thanks for scaring us last night, you naughty boy! 😡

So that’s what we’ve been up to today – I still haven’t got my Warfarin results back (I would have thought we’d have heard by now! We were very early this morning at the collection centre!) Stop Press! Warfarin results have just come in – everything’s pretty much the same as last time, though I would have liked my INR to be a little higher than 2.2 (down from 2.3 last month – the thumb-nail rule for INR is that it should be low – around 1 – for normal people, and people like me who suffer from blood clots should be around 2.5!) My Warfarin dosage is to stay the same, and my next test is due on December 14th, a date we can’t forget because it’s our Wedding Anniversary! 🙂 I have an appointment to see Dr. B on Tuesday at 1.20 pm to get the results of my “fasting” blood test – and hopefully we’ll be able to work out some way of dealing with my fluid retention and swollen feet! Oh, I did do my treadmilling this afternoon, and was quite surprised! My right foot, although still quite swollen, really did have a lot more movement in it than it did before Polly poked the chopstick into it! I’ve also been persuaded to try an alternative approach! Cabbage! Google “Cabbage” and “swollen feet”, and you can see for yourselves. Anyway, I’m game to give it a go – because the worst it can do is not work, right? I got Julian to bring me home a cabbage this evening, only it’s a red cabbage, not a green one, and I think you’re supposed to use a green one – but maybe it’ll work anyway?

And now on to the “good” bits! 😉

Food stuffs. last night for dinner we had the Beak & Sons “The Godfather” Pork and Beef sausages, with steamed and mashed Butternut pumpkin, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I had a smallish yellow peach, and a smallish yellow nectarine, with a Blueberry CHOBANI yoghurt. For lunch today we found that we’d run out of bread! Julian had thought that there was another loaf of bread in the freezer, but there wasn’t… so we had a wrap for lunch, which was just as nice – if not nicer, because it was a change from the usual! In the wrap there was our favourite butter substitute, the basil-pesto hummus, Halloumi cheese, cold, sandwich-sliced roast beef, green capsicum batons, and some of the Beerenberg Hot Tomato Chutney – wraps are usually pretty messy to eat (things tend to fall out of the “other end” all the time!) but for once I only managed to drop one tiny piece of cheese as I was eating it, and it fell onto the plate, anyway! 🙂 Tonight we’re having some lovely looking pork steaks, delicately pan-fried with a little bit of home-grown, organic rosemary. With them we’re having steamed green beans, mashed potatoes, and once again, our usual half tomato. For dessert I’ll try one of my Corella pears, though I’m still a little bit dubious about their ripeness, and an Apple Le Rice.

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t too bad, considering… I went from 68.4 kg…. to 68.4 kg! Er… I stayed the same, which is really a lot better than going back up again! (that’s happening tomorrow!) So I shall just take it one day at a time, and see what the results of my “fasting” blood test this morning reveal…. which will probably be nothing new, but one has to jump through all the hoops first, doesn’t one!

And that pretty much brings me around to tomorrow again! Julian wants to look into our tomato planting a bit more – and this time we really should start a journal, or a log, of what we plant, how it turns out, and whether or not it’s worth-while repeating the exercise – because we can’t really remember which types of tomatoes we planted last year! All I can recall is that one was called “Black Russian”, and another one was called “Heirloom” – but I have no idea what the third sort was – perhaps it was “Big Red”? I can’t remember! I’ll probably fiddle around with graphics, and play a bit of WoW, and that’s about as much as I can tell you all! So, I’m afraid that that’s about “it” from me for this evening again! Do call in again tomorrow night to find out what my weight did (it’ll probably got up tomorrow!) and what the two of us got up to during the day. Until then though, you’ll all just have to try very hard to bee good, remember that it’s not enough to be nice in life, you’ve got to have nerve, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep warm – or cool, depending on your preferences, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please – don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.49 pm

Here I am, finally! Yes, I know I’ve been slack – and I really should have started writing this today a lot earlier than I haven’t, and I’m sorry for that, because it means I’m probably going to have to finish it after dinner and television tonight, as I now have three days worth of adventures and excitement to catch you all up on! 😉 So… to re-cap (so to speak)

Sunday was our Traditional “Breaking Heads in the Broken Isles” – and of course, we did just that – only managing to die oh… about half a dozen times? One thing we did do though was change the appearance of our second Pet, Hati! Julian/Demelzae changed his/her Pet into a second Spirit Bear, so s/he now has two of these trotting dutifully by his/her side – I shall attempt to get a screenshot of them together later on… Wynterthyme (me) first changed her Hati into a second spirit cat, and she looked very spiffy and intimidating, strutting around town with the two of them flanking her protectively! However, out in the wilds, fighting for her life (and very often losing it!) they were hard to see and tended to “blend into the scenery” too much… so I changed them. I’d been under the impression that once you’d changed Hati’s appearance, that was it – you couldn’t pull a second change, so you had to be careful which Pet you chose to copy… I was wro… wrrr… in error! Apparently, as long as you hang onto your “Essence Changer”, you can swap Hati’s appearance over again, as many times as you like! And not only that, but if you do happen to inadvertently lose it, you can get another one – simply by asking the original quest giver’s offsider! So I asked myself “What’s the most striking looking Pet that you can tame? Hmm… Difficult choice! Some of them certainly look extremely striking, but either I didn’t find them visually “appealing”, like Gorillas, or some of the two-headed dogs – or that would be too hard to find and Tame if I didn’t already have one to “copy”! Personally, I’ve always liked tigers – and there are two “Special” tigers that I could have gone after – a Saber Tiger called Shango in the Sholazar Basin, or an “ordinary toothed” Tiger called Sin’Dall in Northern Stranglethorn. Because Wynterthyme is level 110 – compared to which the two tigers were pretty wussy little things – I went after both of them, because being “Specials” it was quite possible that I’d have trouble finding them both. I went after Shango first, and found him within seconds of reaching the area that he patrolled, and of course, being level 110, I had him eating out of my hand before you could say “Sholazar Basin”! Hmm… his teeth did look awfully long! What if they got tangled up in the undergrowth in the Broken Isles? Worse! What if he, and the Shango-looking Hati both got their long teeth tangled up in the undergrowth in the Broken Isles! At the same time! That could spell certain death for Wynterthyme! I put Shango in the Stables, and went looking for Sin’Dall, who had ordinary “tiger-length” teeth. Once again, I found Sin’Dall straight away (aren’t maps that give x – y coordinates great! 😉 ) It was all too easy! I zapped back to Dalaran with a gentle and amenable Sin’Dall by my side to make my decision… the “normal length” tiger teeth won out, and this is how Wynterthyme gets around now! We went out to do a bit of Herb Questing that I had to do (please don’t ask! It did not got well, and I had to call in Demelzae to give me a hand to get the damned thing finished!)

Sunday food stuff. For lunch we had a really scrumptious seeded sourdough sandwich, with pepper-rolled sandwich-sliced pork and some of our favourite basil-pesto hummus, and as usual for Sunday nights (which is “Omelet Night” in Winter-speak) we had a really delicious omelet – even though there was no bacon! We’d spoken about the bacon on a couple of shopping trips last week, and Julian had said that we did have bacon – only we didn’t, so we had to have sizzled-up smoked ham as a bacon substitute – which really turned out not to taste too different (because, well, they’re both pork, I guess!) There was also the usual pre-fried diced onion, diced green capsicum, tomato, and Cheddar/Tasty cheese, just barely melted…. For dessert I had a brown Nashi pear, and a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt.

Weigh-in on Sunday. Wasn’t nice! Words were said at the Physiotherapist this morning, about the effect those damned little pills have on me – but more on that later! I went from 69.3 kg on Saturday to 69.6 kg on Sunday. I can’t begin to tell you all how horribly disheartening it is – your intellect is telling you “don’t panic, it’s only fluid – it’ll go once those bloody pills leave your system!”, but when you’re standing there looking down at the readout on the scales, your emotions burst into tears as your brain screams “You lazy pig! You’re getting fat again!” at you! Not good!

On Monday, my very favourite eldest daughter came over. We’d taken a “rain check” for Tuesday, the day she usually comes over, because I had my next appointment at the Physio – and she wasn’t going to be free for the rest of the week because it’s her and her husband’s Wedding Anniversary, and they were going up to Sydney, by train, to celebrate! So as usual when she’s over, we retired to the loungeroom early to watch episodes of “Arrow”, and “Legends of Tomorrow”. We usually alternate episodes of “Arrow”, “The Flash”, and “Legends of Tomorrow”, but for some reason which I didn’t quite catch, because she was muttering, we had to watch three episodes of “Legends of Tomorrow” back-to-back, and so we never got to see any of “The Flash”, except when Barry made a brief, cameo appearance at a funeral, in “Arrow”. We had a good day, probably because we didn’t get into a really “in-depth” discussion of the US Election – if we had, the discussion would probably have ended in blows and tears The only reason I had hoped that Hilary Clinton would win was primarily because I totally detest the man who is Donald Trump. I think he’s a churlish boor, with a totally abominable attitude towards women, and non-Christians of any ilk. I don’t think he’s anti-Semitic like his newly appointed Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon – and I don’t think he’s as homophobic as his Vice President-to-be, Mike Pence – or at least I hope to goodness he’s not – but then, who can tell with Donald Trump?! He says one thing one day, and the opposite the next… *shrug* maybe he doesn’t even know himself? (now, there’s a frightening thought – someone who’s going to be President of the USA, and who doesn’t even know what he thinks or believes in?!) I’m not even sure that Trump will be all that powerful, in the long run – I think the people he’s appointed so far, plus his Vice President, Mike Pence (especially Mike Pence!) will be the ones to watch out for! Apart from all of that, in some obscure small way, I’m almost relieved that Hilary didn’t win. Sacrilege? 🙂 Maybe not… I’m sure everyone reading this is all too familiar with the problem we have here in Australia with our two main political parties… They’re the same! Neither of them has any real vision for the future, or in which direction Australia should be guided – so it doesn’t really matter who’s in power – nothing really changes – we just get more of the same… nothingness! And so it would have been with Hilary in charge. Just more of the same, with very little – if anything – being done to redress the problems of the jobless and the once reasonably prosperous middle classes. No, something had to give there – I’m just terribly disappointed that it had to be Trump – but there was no-one else. I don’t even think Bernie Sanders would have been able to change very much – especially with Congress and the House so firmly ensnared by the Republicans. Anyway, enough of politics! I’m writing a blog, not a manifesto!

So on Monday we idled around and watched television, and as my very favourite daughter walked out the garage door on her way home, Josh walked in through the front door 🙂 Once again, by the time we finished with my hair and chattering, it was little bit too late for me to do any writing, because it was dinner time! 🙂

Food stuffs Monday. For lunch on Monday we had really yummy ham, cheese and tomato sourdough Toasties, and they were totally delicious! For dinner we had pan-fried marinated chicken breasts (marinated in Dijon mustard and mayonnaise) on a bed of plain steamed rice mixed with finely chopped spring onions. For dessert I had a smallish yellow peach and a smallish yellow nectarine, followed by an Apple Le Rice.

Weigh-in Monday morning. Was pretty much the same as Sunday 😦 I went from 69.6 kg to 69.5 kg – within the magical, mystical “margin of error” – I hoped for better things this morning…

And here we are, Tuesday! 🙂 I bet you never thought I’d get here, did you! 😉 Well, this morning I had my second visit to see Polly, the Physiotherapist. She was quite pleased with my exercise progress, but growled at me because I didn’t do my treadmilling on Sunday (because my feet were so swollen, all I wanted to do was go into the loungeroom at put them up! Walking was difficult and painful!) and I didn’t do my treadmilling yesterday because my very favourite eldest daughter was over… and to tell the truth, I didn’t do my treadmilling today, either, because for some reason I was totally exhausted and just simply… fell asleep! Oh well, I will get back to it tomorrow! Polly’s given me another exercise to do – another one I can do in bed in the morning – and she gave my foot a bit of a massage to try to press out some of the fluid. It’s a bit of a vicious circle – the tendon is inflamed because of the pressure of the fluid around it – and the more inflamed it gets, the more fluid accumulates! I may have to go onto stronger anti-fluid tablets when I’m taking those horrible little pills – but that’s something for Dr B and Dr. Y to decide. So anyway, there’s Polly standing there talking to us while she’s trying to squish some of the fluid out of my foot, when she says “I’m going to use an acupuncture needle now – you’ll probably get quite a bruise there, because of the Warfarin…” I nearly leapt off the table in terror! I hate needles, and I really didn’t appreciate having one sprung on me like that! So, she’s talking soothingly to me, asking me if I’d ever done any sewing, and what sort of needles I’d used, etc., and then she goes on to say (while keeping a very firm grip on my foot, so that I couldn’t flee in panic) still in what I’m sure she thought were soothing tones (and my mind is busy yelling “no! no! no! don’t do it! no, no!) “Well, this needle is a lot smaller than the ones you would have used sewing” – and with that, she jabbed the ruddy needle into my foot! Arrgghhh! It hurt! I yelled “Owwww!” – er, quite loudly, I’m afraid (well, it did hurt! a lot! Did I ever tell you all that I was a devour coward, and that I have an extremely low threshold of pain? No? Well, I am, and I do! And I was quite annoyed about it!)

I fear that dinner’s ready – I shall continue this later…

09.30 pm

Right… back to the saga! 🙂 You know, I’m reasonably used to having needles stuck in me, with all my regular Warfarin tests, and when you come to think about it, a needle used for taking a blood test is a lot bigger (thicker, chunkier, whatever, because it has to be wide enough for the blood to go through!) than a (supposedly) thin little whisker of an acupuncture needle – and I know I put on a bit of a song and dance routine when I go for my Warfarin tests, but it’s more in fun than anything else – but that ruddy acupuncture needle hurt about 350% more than the blood test needles! It felt about as thick as a ruddy chopstick, and about as blunt as one, too! (actually, I was quite shocked! I’d always heard, read, and/or been told, that acupuncture needles were so fine that you hardly felt them at all, so having a blunt chopstick suddenly stabbed into my foot was… shall we say, a bit of an “unpleasant surprise”?) Now, having grizzled on about the horrible acupuncture needle for as long as I felt I needed to, to salve my wounded sensibilities, you know – I can finally add the “BUT!” that you all knew would be following, didn’t you! 🙂 As Polly removed the offending chopstick, and twiddled my foot a bit more, she noticed that all of a sudden, the fluid was moving out of my foot a lot faster and easier, and as she stood there, twiddling my foot every which-way, even I could tell that it had a lot more movement in it, and a lot less pain – so I suppose one could almost mangle a metaphor and say that what you lose on the swings of pain, you gain on the roundabouts of movement and comfort? Anyway, I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about, and have been there, and done something similar in the past (or are sure to in the future! 😉 ) You might also be interested to know that the acupuncture needle didn’t leave a bruise, after all – and even the much bigger needle used in the blood tests usually doesn’t leave a bruise – but if I bump any part of my anatomy against something like a desk leg, a cupboard, or a door knob, I get the biggest bruises, as though someone had manhandled me! Go figure!

So we got back from the Physio around lunchtime, and I spent a bit of time after lunch “wasting time” (I’m very good at that because I practice diligently, every day!) and then I went and put my feet up for an hour (why waste all of Polly’s excellent massaging!) had a cup of coffee – and started writing!

Food stuffs Today. We checked the PO Box on the way home from the Physio, which happens to be right next to the very excellent Barker’s Delight up at Vermont South, and as it was almost lunchtime, we got our lunch there. As usual, I had half a savoury “pizza”-type roll, and half a savoury Danish, and one of my very favourite fruit and white chocolate scones. Yummy! 🙂 For dinner tonight we had a Beak & Sons “The Godfather” Classic Pork & Beef Sausages, with steamed and mashed Butternut pumpkin instead of potatoes, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I had another smallish yellow peach, and another smallish yellow Nectarine, as the Corella pears that Julian got the other day still aren’t ripe enough to eat, and a Blueberry CHOBANI yoghurt.

Weigh-in this morning. This might give you all just a small glimpse of exactly what those unmentionable little pills do to me! As usual, it always takes about four days after taking the last one… Yesterday I weighed in at 69.5 kg… This morning, I weighed in at 68.4 kg. A whole kilo, those bloody little pills made me gain! Do you wonder why I hate them with a passion?! I’ll probably go back up a bit – a bit more than a kilo is a lot to shed overnight – the stupid thing about this whole drama is that I haven’t done anything right, or wrong, or even slightly differently – you’ve read my blogs – we have pretty much the same things to eat all the time – we don’t go out, we don’t drink or smoke – how can those damnable little pills cause so much angst?! (yes, I do know the answer! “only because I let them”, right? Well, surprise, surprise! I’m human, and I can’t help it!)

We noticed tonight that (a) as usual, Flipper hardly touched her dinner. Hopefully she’ll drift back to it throughout the evening! and (b) Auric is a very naughty boy! He had another bout of “Floaties” this evening! Maybe I gave them too much dinner, but I thought that the pellets I gave them this evening were pretty much the same as I always do – hopefully turning their lights out and letting them go to sleep will settle him – I guess there’s not much we can do though! I’ll try to feed them a little less, tomorrow night! And that’s about “it” from me for this evening (“at long [censored] last!” I hear you all chorusing! 😉 ) As for tomorrow, I’ll have my “fasting” blood test, as well as my Warfarin blood test, and probably get the results of the “fasting” test early next week. Apart from that, I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow! I guess you’ll all just have to wait until tomorrow night to find out what we did, or didn’t do! 🙂 Do call in again tomorrow night to hear all the latest news and gossip, as well as how much my stupid weight went up (or, hopefully, down!) but until then, do try to bee good, don’t forget that success is a journey, not a destination, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry – or cool and dry – depending on the weather… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.42 pm

Well, I’m a bit late today, but that’s alright, because there’s not really all that much to tell you all! I’ve been really lazy today – I didn’t even log into WoW to see how Ellrevienne was faring – though I did go in and rescue her from her precarious position out in the wilds of the Eastern Plaguelands last night! She’s finished off that entire quest chain and is now resting comfortably at the Inn  in Light’s Hope Chapel! No, today I simply “mucked around” – doing a bit of this, playing a bit of solitaire, experimenting with fonts and backgrounds – the background that you’re currently looking at isn’t the one I made earlier today and experimented with… I decided that I didn’t really like it after all, and scrapped it – which meant that I had to either construct a new background toot sweet, or just go for the plain, flat colour, sans pattern or texture, that I went for next. I didn’t like that look either, so… by this time I was starting to sweat! It was almost four o’clock, and I hadn’t devised a workable background! I’ve used another background I rather liked – I’ve used it before, when it was blue… but a blue background wouldn’t go with the green Header – so I re-coloured it, and at the moment I think it looks quite acceptable – though I’m just as likely to decide otherwise in an hour or two! 😉

I also played around with fonts a bit – the one you’re currently seeing in the Header isn’t one of my new ones, it’s actually a much older one that I like a lot, but it’s a “shaded” font and doesn’t work all that well with the styles I use… but I accidentally discovered a hack for that little problem the other day, when I was playing around with one of my newest fonts – which also happened to be “hollow”! I wished that it was a solid font, as I’d be able to use some really spiffy styles on it, but styles lose all their “oomph” on thin lines – which was how this font had been designed. I thought of just “colouring in” the blank bits… and after a small amount of “trial and error” (three attempts/tests, actually) I managed to create a secondary, solid layer of colour underneath my font – I made the solid layer one colour, and the outline of the font above it in a contrasting colour and style, and as the saying goes, “Bob’s yer Uncle”! So anyway, I’d worked out a work-around for the hollow font, and it worked very well, too! In this case, however, I was using a shaded, or textured, font, which I wanted to hide – so I simply added the “solid” layer above the text, hiding the unwanted shading. I’m quite pleased with the effect, actually! I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing something like that ages ago!

While I was pottering away with fonts and stuff, Julian was busy doing “proper” things, like doing a bit more work in the garden to get the veggie bed ready for our tomato planting – hopefully sometime next week… Oh, and he cleaned out our two hard-working “bug catchers” that we have hanging under the ceiling of our rather large outdoor deck, because I’m totally allergic to mosquito bites! After that, he came inside and cleaned out Auric and Dapple’s condominium. Don’t ever fool yourselves that goldfish are “low maintenance” pets! Their tank needs to have 30% of its water “swapped out” every week – that means siphoning out 1/3 of the water and replacing it with fresh, clean water. The glass gets totally cleaned once a week, and Julian does a quick “vacuum” of the gravel once a week too, with a more thorough gravel vacuum, as well as a general plant and decor “de-algae-fying”, every second week. They got the “full” treatment today, so the tank’s looking all sparkly and kleeeen – not that Auric and Dapple are at all impressed! They hate having their peaceful routine interrupted by strange, pale tentacled “things” descending into their home, uprooting rocks and trees, before putting them all back in the wrong places! Tsk! What’s a little fishie to do? (why, cower down in one corner of the tank and wait for the horrible ordeal to be over, of course! That’s what a little fishie’s to do! 😉 ) There are two filters in the tank, and he changes each of the filters on alternate weeks. The water needs regular testing – at least once a week – to monitor the amount of nitrites, nitrates and ammonia in the water, as well as testing its ph balance, and adjustments are made as needed (Julian does this once a week, and keeps a log of the results) So it’s not just a matter of standing there and saying “Awwww! Look at the pretty little fishies!”, and feeding them – there’s also a fair amount of work involved! I generally try to help by keeping out of Julian’s way while he’s doing all of this work…

And that’s about all that happened today – so I shall now get on with the “good” bits! 🙂

Food stuffs. Last night for dinner we had our home-made hamburgers, made with real ham! I mean real pork, not beef! Julian was making them when I wandered into the kitchen at one point, and he said that the hamburgers just didn’t “feel” right when he was making them, and he wondered what he might have done wrong, or left out – so we went through all the ingredients, and he’d forgotten the breadcrumbs! Luckily it wasn’t too late to add them, because he’d gone and bought breadcrumbs specifically for the hamburgers! We had the hamburgers pan-fried, with organic (but not home-grown!) plain boiled potatoes, fully organic and home-grown broad beans, and our usual half a tomato. For dessert I had one of my Corella pears, and a Vaalia Lemon Creme yoghurt. There were a couple of (cooked!) hamburgers left over, so we had those for our lunch today – in a most delicious seeded sourdough sandwich, with a bit of our favourite butter substitute, basil-pesto hummus! 🙂 Tonight we’re having a fairly plain, ordinary dinner, with pan-fried steak, chips, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato, and for dessert I’ll have a couple of my yellow Nectarines, if they’re not too soft and squishy, and an Apple Le Rice.

Weigh-in this morning. Was pretty horrific! Bear in mind though that I’m still working those horror pills out of my system – that generally takes about a week and a bit, with a sudden peak between the second and fourth days. Today was the second day – and boy, did I peak! I think I managed to keep a fairly calm face, but every time this happens, I die a little inside. Thank goodness I only have one more lot to take – in another three months, before I see Dr. Y. again, because I can’t keep doing this – I simply can’t! I’d rather go through all the hassles and the very real dangers (for someone on Warfarin, and a long history of clotting) of surgery, if it’ll keep me off these wretched pills! Anyway, I went from 68.6 kg yesterday… to 69.3 kg today… I know it’s only fluid – my feet certainly do look like balloons – but it’s just so depressing… and uncomfortable, as far as walking is concerned… (yes, I did do my treadmilling again today – and all the other exercises that Polly has set for me!) I’d better get off my backside and have that fasting blood test done – not that any of us, including Dr. B, are expecting any different results from the last time I had the tests done… (*gloom*)

And here we are, almost up to tomorrow again! It’ll be fun to get back into WoW with Wynterthyme and Demelzae, and to change Hati’s appearance! I still haven’t decided how I want her to look – but I have a feeling that even if I did decide tonight, it’d still be a split-second decision tomorrow morning, anyway! 🙂 Flipper was a good girl last night, and despite still having access to her pussy biscuits well into the afternoon, she made quite a job of eating her dinner last night! Maybe she overheard me talking to Julian about using the s-y-r-i-n-g-e to get her medication into her! 😉 Anyway, once again, that’s about “it” from me for this evening! Do call in again tomorrow night, to see how my stupid weight went, and what we finally decided to change our respective Hati’s into! 🙂 Until then though, remember that you are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream, and don’t forget to keep warm (or cool) and dry, no matter what the weather’s like, to look after yourselves, and to always drive carefully… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂