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! 🙂