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! 🙂