04.39 pm

I’m back – sorry for my somewhat longer than usual absence, but both of us have been a bit shook up by Flipper’s passing on Monday, plus a sore hip and stiff muscles from too much exercising (me) and a molar extraction (Julian – the tooth that he had a root canal in not so long ago split in half and had to be removed!) …so it’s been a fairly quiet and unhappy time for us here Christmas is galloping towards us at a rate of knots, and although we have got everything more-or-less sorted out, I feel as though we’ve barely started organising for it (panic, panic, panic!) I wrote out all the Christmas Cards this afternoon, and now it’s Julian’s turn at them – sticking on all the addresses that we ended up printing on sticky-backed paper! I wasn’t kidding when I said that I’ve grown so accustomed to using a keyboard that my handwriting has – quite literally – “gone to hell in a handbasket”! If you’re lucky enough to get one of our Christmas Cards, you’ll see what I mean by my atrocious scribbling, in an attempt to pass on our “Best Christmas Wishes” to the lucky recipient(s)… Still, they’re all done now – or my part in “The Great Christmas Card Production Line” is – now it’s up to himself! 😉 We’ve ordered the Christmas cake, the Christmas Pudding, and three dozen mince pies from Ferguson Plarre, to be picked up on December 15th (the day after our Wedding Anniversary) We’ve made a reasonably good start on amassing the necessary Stocking Fillers, and two of the main Christmas presents have been either ordered or accounted for… so I don’t know why I’m starting to feel panicked about it – I just am… I even have a few ideas of what to get Julian, and to that end, my very favourite eldest daughter and I are going shopping next Friday, which will be the…. (Winter starts counting on her fingers, because her toes are under the table-desk where she can’t see them, let alone reach them) the 9th… Good, because if I can’t find what I want then, I’ll have to try again, on my own, the following week… Unfortunately we still have no idea what to get for my very favourite youngest daughter, or her husband Terry! It seems that every time I ask her, somehow or other the subject gets turned around, and by the time I think “Wait! She still hasn’t told me what they want for Christmas!”, it’s too late, and she’s either gone home, or hung up the phone to go and feed the rabbits! Arrgghhh! I shall call her again tonight and wring it out of her! We also don’t know if my very favourite eldest daughter and her husband will be here for Christmas Dinner or not! They were here last Christmas, so by rights they should be going over to his parents this year – but… who knows?

You know, every year, without fail, I say “Right! We’re not doing Christmas this year! It’s just not worth the hassle!” – and every year, without fail, we jump through all the same old hoops, get totally frazzled, and go through all the rigmarole that is Christmas! Sometimes I feel a bit like “Tevye” in “Fiddler on the Roof”, singing the opening number “Tradition“, with all that “tradition” implies in our lives…

Enough about Christmas! What else has been going on around here then… umm… not much, really! I’ve alternated between poking around with two new WoW characters on my Tinselfluff account (as opposed to my primary Wynterthyme account!) and halfheartedly fiddling around with graphics and fonts for different Headers, which I abandoned because I really wasn’t interested in them.

My very favourite eldest daughter was over yesterday, so we spent the day slopping around the loungeroom watching “Legends of Tomorrow”, “The Flash” and “Arrow”, and I really think that sitting for most of the day with my feet up helped me – remember I said in my opening that I had a sore hip and stiff muscles from exercising too much? Well, I’ve been religiously doing the exercises that Polly set me, but being the weird, topsy-turvy person that I am, instead of the exercises getting easier as my muscles got stronger and more used to doing them, they got sorer and more stiff! That is actually par for the course for me – that happens every time I start exercising, even if I’ve been doing them for months – but I always optimistically expect that this time it’ll work! This time my muscles will strengthen and stop feeling as though a steam-roller has just run over them… So I did my exercises, and waited patiently until my muscles strengthened up and stopped aching… and instead, not only did the backs of my thighs feel as though someone had cut all the tendons there, and my ankles feel as though maybe they were broken or something – my ruddy left hip started aching and making horrible grating noises and I could only hobble around slowly – I tell you, this week’s been totally miserable! I haven’t been able to do my walking, either, so that’s been another set-back! However, sitting with my feet up all day yesterday helped a lot – by yesterday evening I was walking freely for the first time in days, and without the pain in my hip, so maybe all I needed was a day with my feet up! My muscles still ache a fair bit – especially the back of my thighs – but hopefully that’ll loosen up too in the next couple of days, because I really need to get back to my walking! I have to “limber up” for all the walking that my favourite eldest daughter and I are going to be doing next Friday! 😉 I can’t decide whether to go to The Glen, or Doncaster… I’m more familiar with Doncaster, and I think it has more “variety” there – I’d actually like to go to Chadstone! It’s terribly big, but I reckon I could get around Chadstone OK, if I took it fairly slowly… you know, it’s been over a year since I used my wheelchair?!

Look, I know you’re all going to be terribly disappointed, but tonight I’m not going to go back over all the “good” bits of the past three days, and what we had to eat an’ all – I’ll just go back to last night this time, as three days worth is too much to try to remember! 😉

Food stuffs. Last night for dinner we had a semi-reprise of the lamb backstraps with harissa that we had the other night, only we didn’t have the orange and cumin couscous this time, we had plain rice, steamed with an infusion of home-grown olive herb – which was very unusual, and extremely nice! Once again, the lamb backstrap was tender and delicious – I don’t know whether we’ve just been lucky with the backstraps that we’ve had lately, or whether marinating it in harissa “tenderises” it in some way, but you could have cut it with a spoon! For dessert I had a Corella pear and an Apple Le Rice. Julian had been out doing the “Big Saturday Shop” up at the Blackburn Road/Burwood Highway Shops and brought some Ferguson Plarre goodies home for lunch today – so we had half a sausage roll and half a Tiddly Oggie each, plus half an orange and white chocolate muffin, and Julian had a Vanilla Slice, and I had a Zesty Lemon Tart – it was all scrumptious! 🙂 Tonight for dinner we’re having Coles-bought “Farm Foods Beef, Caramelised Onion and Pepper Sausages” – we haven’t had those before, so I’ll let you know what they were like tomorrow night. With those, we’ll be having chips, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato, and for dessert I’ll have an “ordinary” green pear (most likely Packham, I think) and another Apple Le Rice, as Julian forgot to get more CHOBANI or Vaalia yoghurts today!

Weigh-in this morning. Was a bit better than it’s been for a couple of days! I went from 69.0 kg yesterday to 68.6 kg this morning… but don’t worry, it’ll be back up again tomorrow!

And that brings me back to tomorrow again, and it’s a Sunday! So…. guess what we’ll be doing tomorrow! 😀 As Julian puts it, we’ll be saving the world… one Dungeon at a time!” 😆 So there’ll be plenty to tell you all next time I make an appearance – hopefully tomorrow! But for the moment, that’s really about “it” from me for this evening – as I said, it’s been a very quiet and somber week, with a lot of the “bounce” having gone out of our steps… but do drop in again tomorrow night (maybe!) to see how our “Dungeoneering” went, what my weight went back up to, and whether Auric has stopped being a greedy little pig-fish and let poor hungry little Dapple get a crust or two for a change! Until then though, please remember to bee good – it’s so close to Christmas that you don’t want to get on “you-know-who’s” Naughty List – remember that man may have discovered fire, but women discovered how to play with it, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on the circumstances… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂