04.45 pm
And a very Happy New Year to all of you out there! Luckily for all of us, the Christmas and New Year Gazetted Public Holidays are finally over – for the next twelve months, anyway – and we can get back to our usual normal, boring, hum-drum daily sloggings – even if certain well-known establishments (wot should know better!) are trying to foist the next Gazetted Public Holidays (Easter!) onto us a great deal earlier than is either religiously or commercially acceptable (yes, I’m looking at you, Woolworths (Hot Cross Buns) and Target (Easter Eggs) !) Yesterday at Doncaster Shoppingtown (getting coffee and dropping off Dry Cleaning) Julian and I did see Coles selling fruit buns, and although they looked exactly like your average Hot Cross Buns, they didn’t have the customary “Easter X” marked on them, and they were being discretely marketed as “Fruit Buns” – which is totally acceptable! (Dang! We should have bought some! We ate the last of our Panettone for breakfast this morning! 😦 …back to cereal and fruit tomorrow… 
)
So this afternoon, I looked at the time, and headed back to the Den to start writing this… Guess what I found! Someone was kindly keeping my seat warm for me… or was he?! “S’my chair, Mummy!”, he declared, with narrowed eyes (see fig. 2)
and he wasn’t going to move off my chair for love nor pussy biscuits… actually, that’s a lie – Salai (“Sal” for short) would travel to Timbuktu and back on a unicycle with a flat tyre for a small bowl of pussy biscuits! When I tried to pick him up to put him on the couch he just made himself go all limp and floppy, nearly turning himself into a pretzel in the process – however, he is currently sulking on the couch, I have my chair back, and you’re all getting a blog! 😉
So, what exactly have we been up to, over this Holiday period? Well, doing “nothing much” has been keeping us both extra busy, Sal experienced his first ever thunderstorm last Thursday, which made him a little nervous, but he was a big brave boy and tried hard to emulate Mummy and Daddy’s air of nonchalance, so-much-so, in fact, that on New Year’s Eve he hardly even noticed the odd “pop, pop, pop” of local fireworks going off in the distance! We were very proud of him! 🙂 Ah – Sal has stopped sulking on the couch and is now very deliberately turning his back on Mummy, and clambering determinedly onto Daddy’s lap, where he’s settling in for a nice long cuddle, still with his back towards me! What else have we been up to… we played WoW on Sunday – running Dungeons with Winterthyme and Demelzae in the morning, and furthering the adventures of Imaan and Krankhaft – both level 26 now – as they moved from the final quests in Silverpine Forest to the opening quests in the Hillsbrad Foothills. We went up about four or five levels, too, which isn’t bad considering that we only started playing them after lunch, after running Winterthyme and Demelzae through the set of three Dungeons (comprising the Tempest Keep “set”), in Netherstorm that morning! We’re expecting “new and interesting things” in WoW after the scheduled Maintenance tonight, as we both received cryptic emails from Blizzard stating that “Strange things are afoot in the world of Azeroth as denizens of Sanctuary (← note the name “Sanctuary” in the original email!) cross over into an unfamiliar world” – sounds quite intriguing! I can’t wait to find out what’s going on – though it’s probably going to be something quite tame – we think it has something to do with Blizzard celebrating the fact that it was twenty years ago that Diablo was released. The blurb reads: “As we approach the original game’s release anniversary on December 31, Blizzard Entertainment is thrilled to commemorate twenty years of Diablo. We’re ready to celebrate our passion for the world of Sanctuary (← and note the name “Sanctuary” in the blurb!) and the brave heroes who inhabit it!” Diabo, Diablo II, and Diablo III were really fantastic games – I didn’t actually “play” any of the Diablo games – I wasn’t fast enough – but I did create characters to act as mules to carry extra loot and stuff around – and I also watched avidly, yelling out helpful phrases, such as “look out behind you!”, and “quick! Take a pot now, or you’re dead!” Re. the use of the word “Sanctuary” in both the email and the blurb – are they planning to cross some of the NPC characters from Diablo, like maybe Deckard Cain, over into Azeroth?! That would be a real hoot! 😆 Hopefully we’ll find out tomorrow morning… when I have Josh coming over, and then we’re off to see “Rogue One” tomorrow afternoon! (*sigh* it never rains but it pours!)
We’re still wondering if we shouldn’t pick my little Brown Bengal kitten up a little earlier than planned… we’re just a little edgy that he’s so un-socialaised and unused to people, and the sooner we start “people-taming” him, the better! On the other hand, I don’t want to hurt Sal – he’s really Julian’s kitten, but he seems very fond of me – how is he going to react when I start spending a lot of time and energy on a new kitten? I don’t want him to feel abandoned or unloved – because I do love him – he’s so very sweet and gentle and loving – there’s so much of Arty, our beautiful, happy and loving Russian Blue, in him, and I couldn’t bear to see him unhappy. I’m really confused… because whether or not we do go ahead and get this Brown Bengal, we will be getting a second kitten – we don’t want to be a “one cat family” (arrgghh! Sal is “play-fighting” my bare feet under the desk!) though we had to be with Flipper – she was far too old and infirm to accept another, younger cat! We’re supposed to be picking up the Brown Bengal on the 16th – but I think we might bring him home a week early – he’ll be eleven weeks old – and after just experiencing the second attack on my feet in twenty minutes by you-know-who, I’m thinking that a kitten playmate would be a much more betterer alternative to my ankles and toes!
Speaking of blood-letting “attacks”, I went to have my Warfarin Blood Test this morning, and the results are in. My INR has come down from it’s very high 3.5 (it’s a wonder I didn’t hemorrhage!) to a much safer 2.7 (2.5 is the ideal for me!) and my dosage is to remain the same. Next test is due on January 24th.
Auric and Dapple are well, and continuing to grow bigger and bigger – I believe that goldfish will grow to an appropriate size for their “home”, be it pond or fish tank – so they’ve still got a ways to go yet! 🙂 Sal noticed them for the first time a day or so again, and is quite fascinated! When I go to feed Auric and Dapple, he comes with me and stands up with his front paws on the glass, watching them get their dinner. Luckily we got a Fish House with a nice, solid, wooden top, so neither Sal – nor his brother-to-be – will be able to jump in and catch our pretty little fishies!
My weight. I’m continuing to weigh myself every morning, and I’m reasonably happy to report that at this stage it appears to be “holding steady” between 70.9 kg and 71.6 kg – unfortunately, at the end of this month I go back onto those despicable little pills which will see me go up at least a kilo plus before I see Dr. Y. again in March! Still, depending on his verdict, the plan is to go back onto Optifast again for a month or two until I get everything back to the way I’d like it to be – around 65 kg!
I’m eating “normally” at the moment – and enjoying the Christmas/New Year break – most of the “excess” stuff, like Mince Pies, Christmas Cake, Panettone, etc. are all eaten up now (actually, there is still a bit of Christmas Cake left – I must remind Julian that we’d better get it eaten too!)
Dinner is ready – back later to finish off! 🙂
09.51 pm
It’s later, and I’m back 🙂
OK, and now to the nitty-gritty! Firstly:
Food stuffs. I’m not going to try to remember what I’ve eaten since last Saturday, because “sufficient unto the day”, etc., etc. So… today for lunch we had simple ham and cheese sourdough Toasties – and quite delicious they were, too! For dinner we had Beef, Pepper & Barossa Valley Shiraz sausages, with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots*, and “continental flat beans“, and for dessert I had a very nice, crisp, crunchy, and juicy brown Nashi pear, and a Lemon CHOBANI yoghurt.
Weigh-ins went thusly:
Friday, December 30th: 71.4 kg
Saturday December 31st: 71.6 kg
Sunday January 01st: 71.8 kg
Monday January 02nd: 71.2 kg
Tuesday January 03rd: 71.4 kg
All pretty much within that fabled “margin of error”, considering how often we’ve had lunch out, munched on a mince-pie (only one!) every night whilst watching television, and that I’ve also had a glass of orange juice almost every day, and upped my fruit intake a bit (well, alright, a lot then! A lot for me, anyway) So as I said – although I’m watching my weight and being reasonably careful with what I eat, I’m also going to live happily and enjoy myself – within reason – and I’m expecting to get back onto Optifast after the last Birthday luncheon “do” for this end of the year, in March. I also plan on getting back onto the treadmill by the end of the week – on the flat, this time, and a lot slower – so that if possible, I can get away with doing it in bare feet!
There are lots of things in the pipeline at the moment – getting our second kitten, finding a pair of shoes that I can bear to even look at, let alone wear, sorting out, and doing something with our Library – and lots more that I can’t remember now, as I’m being hopelessly distracted by a small lilac Burmese who’s decided that the whole world is his toy – including my feet!
Tomorrow, as I think I said earlier, Josh will be over in the morning, and then we’re off to Gold Class to see “Rogue One” – so it’ll be another busy day again – but at the moment, I reckon that’s about “it” from me for this evening! I should be on-track to be back again tomorrow night, so call in again and see what we thought of the movie, how much my weight went up, and whether or not Sal has worked out how to get into the Fish Tank yet! Until then though, do try to bee good, for goodness sake, don’t forget that true change takes place in the imagination, and remember to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – as the whim takes you… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
*(gasp! shock! horror!) We didn’t have any tomatoes! Entirely our fault, as we went to an extremely nice sort-of Fruit & Vegetable “market” on High Street Road in Wantirna South, which our friend Josh had recommended to us. Signposted by a giant watermelon slice, it’s called “Bushy Park“, and it’s really well worth a visit, especially if you’re after fresh fruit and vegetables! There are three of these Fruit and Vegetable “markets” along that particular stretch of road, and goodness knows, we’d driven past them about a million or so times (only a very slight exaggeration there!) because I’d thought that they were just “little farms”, selling their own produce! How wrong I was! They had just about every type of fruit and vegetable there in well laid-out aisles and bins, as well as a massive cool-room with not only fruit and vegetables, but mushrooms of every type and variety! They also sell things like lentils, dried beans, poppy seeds, flowers… and in an adjacent building, they have their own cafe! Well, we bought lots of vegetables, some brown Nashi pears, a very nice looking mango, spring onions, capsicums, lettuce – I fergit what else – and we looked at all the beautiful, luscious, varieties of tomatoes, unwilling and unable to decide which ones to get, to the point where we totally forgot to go back and get some! So, we had carrots tonight instead, and we’ll get some of those lovely looking tomatoes tomorrow! 🙂
My Word! 