04.02

Well, here I am – starting early for a change! As it turned out, I didn’t go and get back into WoW again this morning, or this afternoon, either! No, I got stuck into still more Template viewing, sorting, and discarding! This time, with the one’s that I’ve bought since I started this blog back in August 2015. Actually, I didn’t start this blog back in August last year – I’d started it ages ago, and made about two posts in it, if that, and then just let it… drift away on the breeze… my prime excuse being “Well, why bother? *shrug* Who’d be interested in what an unknown, bored Melbourne housewife had to say about the price of fish in North Fitzroy, anyway?!” – and so the empty blog sat here, unused and unloved. Then, when I decided to lose weight last year, I thought I’d use the blog to sort-of “document” everything – not so much for other people to read, but for me to be able to keep track of my progress, as I stumbled blindly along the path to caring about what happened to me for a change. But you all know about that part of the story anyway, so I won’t bore you to death by going into it again. So, where was I? Oh yeah – having a look at the “Premium” Themes/Templates that I’ve bought since then. I bought a couple of them before I actually knew what I was doing with the blog – some of them are quite nice, and some of them, well, let’s just say that I should have known better! There is one, though, that’s a real beauty! A fantastic Theme/Template, does everything I want it to do, except one thing… No matter what I do, I can’t get it to display the ruddy header! I can get it to display a clumsy and daggy text Title and so forth, but I don’t want to use that! All the instructions and information on the Template assures me that I can make my own header – it gives me the size it has to be, and it gives me the ability to upload it to the blog file… but it just won’t display it! So, as Julian’s always telling me, I thought I’d approach the author of this very-nice-except-for-one-thing Template, and ask him/her/it how to fix this little problem! Arriving at his (or her) website, guess what?! It’s all in Spanish… or Portuguese… or Mexican – whatever, but some “Latino” language that wasn’t Italian (which I probably could have coped admirably with) Perhaps I’d better see if I can find the Word Press Forums… So today we’re making do with a nice, free Theme/Template called “Ever After”

So as I said, I never got a look-in at WoW today, but at least I’ve finally worked my way through all of my Premium Themes/Templates, as well as all of Word Press’s freebies – can I take a break from them now, please?! Oh, we heard back from Dorevitch late last night with the results of my Warfarin blood test – things are going well, my INR is about bang on target at 2.5, my rat-poison dosage is to remain the same at 4.5mg daily, and my next blood test is in a fortnight. Unfortunately, I think I’m coming down with a cold or something – yesterday and the day before I had a mild sinus headache on and off for most of the day, and today I seem to be losing my voice (oh please! stop cheering with delight! It’s bringing my sinus headache back again!) I feel so tired and lethargic that it’s a wonder I got anything done today! I feel like something that the cat’s dragged backwards through a hedge, after nibbling bits off it here and there, and all I want to do is sleep… I’ll be better tomorrow though! 🙂

I’m beginning to strongly suspect that Auric’s evening “floaties” are a type of goldfish attention seeking device – because pretty much as soon as we go over to look at him, and to discuss his buoyancy problems, or as soon as Julian starts to change over the water, he comes good and goes swimming off as though nothing was wrong! Who would ever have thought that such a dear little goldfish could be so…. devilishly devious! 😀

There’s not really all that much to tell you about today’s doin’s – I’ve been largely sitting here feeling a bit slow and not quite with it, muddling about with headers and Templates – so I suppose I might as well get on with the good bits!

Food stuff: Last night we had the first of three lots of leftover Lamb and Harissa Lasagne, and it was just as nice, if not even a little better, because all of the flavours had had more of a chance to permeate through everything, and for dessert I had another Corella pear, and a small bowl of the delightfully delicious Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding. Today we had chicken sandwiches for lunch, made with the very nice and tasty multi-grain bread with the sesame and poppy-seed crust, and with our favourite butter substitute, the basil-pesto hummus. It’s was a bit of an “oopsie” really, having chicken sandwiches for lunch, because we’re having chicken for dinner, too! It’s a new recipe wot I found through one of my many “foodie” emails, newsletters and e-zines, and it sounded not only delicious, but also seemed to be very easy to make, so I printed it out. We got the ingredients for it yesterday, and Julian prepared it all and put it in the slow cooker this afternoon. I don’t think there’s too much preparation, because there are only three main ingredients, chicken breasts, pineapple slices, and mandarin segments – and of course doing it in the slow cooker means that there’s not very much to have to clean up afterwards!  It’s called “Crock-Pot Hawaiian Chicken”, and you have it with steamed rice. I’ll let you all know what it was like, and if it was good enough, I’ll transcribe the recipe and put it on my “Recipes… page”, along with my other “classic” dishes! 🙂 As for dessert tonight, don’t look now, but I believe I’ll be having about the same as I’ve been having for the past three or four days, seeing as there’s no cake left 😦 Another Corella pear, and a small bowl of the really yummy Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding.

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t too bad, all things considered – but I was right – I did go up! I went from 64.2kg to 64.5kg – up three points, which considering what I had for lunch yesterday at the Shingle Inn, was quite reasonable, and the rest of the lunch I had yesterday will go onto my weight “punishment gain” tonight! 😉

And all of that, of course brings me up to tomorrow! I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – it is a long weekend, but I don’t think that’s going to make any difference to us. Weather permitting – and my cold and lethargy permitting – I really, really want to go to a good Nursery to get these wretched vegetables that we should have planted two weeks ago! I also want to talk to someone there about fig trees – what’s the best sort to get, and will their roots pose a problem to our concrete slab house! On the other hand, if I still feel like this tomorrow, I think I’ll just sleep – after all, I have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Sunday for our “Pandemonium in Pandaria and Questing to Level 90 Day”! And if that turns out to be the case, maybe we can go to the Nursery on Monday instead? Anyway, once again, that’s about it from sleepy little me for this afternoon! Do call in again tomorrow night, and find out what our Hawaiian Chicken was like, and if it’s nice enough to warrant a new item on my “Recipes…” page! I’ll fill you in on Auric and Dapple’s strange attention seeking behaviour (strange, in that I didn’t think goldfish were so… aware, as to want or need to seek attention!) I’m sure you’re all going to want to know which way my weight jumped, too, so if you drop by tomorrow night, you’ll have all the answers you need or want! 😉 Until then however, please keep trying to bee good, and remember that nothing is written in the stars – not these stars, nor any others – no one controls your destiny, and don’t forget to keep warm and dry in this strange Melburnian weather, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

05.05 pm

Well, I have finally finished my Word Press Theme/Template “project”! It’s taken me about four days, and I’ve – quite literally – gone through every single free Theme/Template that Word Press has to offer… and in all several hundred of them, I only found seven even worth considering. Of those seven, three of them had the sort of Sidebars that I wasn’t keen on using, so those three ended up on the “discard” pile – leaving me with a scant four Themes/Templates to play around with… so… Ladies, Gentlemen, and Small Children in the Reader’s Gallery, I have set up each of the four Themes/Templates that I deemed suitable (as well as using up four pages of the notebook wot lives on my desk with notes!) and all of “the chosen” are ready to roll! The one you’re looking at tonight is named “Suits”, and its Widgets are right down at the very bottom of the “page”, where they can’t interfere with the width of the text column – so if any of you are desirous of finding out which day of the week today is, or if you would like to re-read some of my much older posts, that’s where you’ll find the calendar, the archives, the “follow my blog” button, and various other odds and sods!

Back to the present! This morning we left early to go and have my Warfarin blood test done, and as our next stop was going to be the Bank of Melbourne at The Glen, we stopped on the way there and picked up my very favourite eldest daughter, who also had some urgent banking to do. After we’d finished our banking business, first we made our way to the Shingle Inn where we had lunch, and then we headed off to the supermarket for a few things. I’d found a very nice looking recipe for an Hawaiian-type of chicken dish in one of my daily “foodie” emails this morning, which I printed out, and we’d thought we might try it for dinner tomorrow night. The recipe called for tinned pineapple slices, tinned mandarin segments, lemon juice, and cornflour, amongst other ingredients (like chicken!) so we got everything except for the cornflour – we were quite positive that we had cornflour in the pantry – because, I mean, it’s a staple, isn’t it, and everyone has cornflour in their pantry, don’t they? 😯 and we didn’t get any chicken either, because Julian said we probably had enough in the freezer… As it turned out though, we didn’t have any cornflour in the pantry (gasp! shock! horror!), nor did we have quite enough chicken in the freezer, so Julian’s had to go out again to get the ruddy cornflour (which I’m still convinced that we have, somewhere in the pantry!) and some more chicken! So after our little supermarket preamble at The Glen, we dropped off my very favourite eldest daughter at her place, and from thence proceeded to chez nous, and a much needed cup of coffee!

I was going to start writing straight away, but I thought, ‘no, I’d better get all these Themes/Templates finished, because I’m not sure which ones have Sidebars, and which ones have Footer Sidebars’ – so one by one, I set them all up, made appropriate Headers for each of those that didn’t have Sidebars – which was a bit of a scramble, really, because all the Headers are different sizes, and sometimes a font that looked great on a very wide Header ended up looking a trifle “too much” on a shorter one, which meant either making a new Header from scratch, or cropping and “modifying” a wide one – and vice-versa, “growing” a short Header into a much longer one. Actually you know, I don’t know if I saved any time modifying existing Headers or not – but the point is moot now – they’re all done – and saved in situ – so I won’t – er… I shouldn’t have to set each Template up again. Hopefully, anyway!

Anyway, now that I’ve finally finished messing around with these wretched Themes/Templates, tomorrow, finally, I should be able to get back to WoW-ing! To tell the truth though, I’ve quite enjoyed my little break from WoW, and getting back into my graphics, and scribbling down Hex codes for colours all over the place – sometimes it’s nice to have a change of pace! 🙂 Anyway, now that I’ve caught you all up on my activities today, I can move on to the “good bits”! 😉

Food stuffs: Last night we had the Heston Blumenthal pork and sage sausages, which once again were very nice! With them we had chips, the absolute, very last of our home-grown beans, picked straight out of the veggie garden, and the ubiquitous half a tomato. For dessert, I had a Corella pear, and a small bowl of the Coles-brand, delicious, and very low-calorie Rice Pudding. Alas! All the cake is eaten, and we haven’t had time to make another one yet 😥 We had lunch at the Shingle Inn today, where I had my usual BLT on Sourdough bread (toast, really!), a very small chocolate-type éclair, and I swapped my equally small raspberry-type éclair for a half of Julian’s caramel slice thingy, which was delicious! I wished I’d had one of those, instead of the éclair  thingies! 😦 Tonight we’re having the first of our three lots of frozen Lamb & Harissa Lasagne leftovers for dinner, which I’m really looking forward to, and no doubt I’ll have the same old boring dessert that I’ve had for the past three nights – a Corella pear and a very small bowl of the Coles-brand, very low-calorie and yummy Rice Pudding. Or maybe I’ll have a yoghurt tonight instead, if there is any…

Weigh-in this morning. Was surprisingly good! But don’t worry, I’ll go up again tomorrow, I’m quite sure of that! Anyway, this morning I went from 64.7kg to 64.2kg, down five points! Extraordinary! Unfortunately the chocolate éclair thingy and the half of Julian’s caramel slice will put paid to my little weigh-loss slide! 😦 I hate to think what the scales are going to hit me with tomorrow!

Which again brings me to tomorrow! I know Julian has a few errands to run, and hopefully I’ll be able to get back to WoW-ing, but apart from those two things, I don’t think much is happening around here… Auric and Dapple are both well, though Auric did have a slight touch of the “floaties” again last night – I wonder why it’s always at night? Perhaps I give them too much food? I might try swapping with Julian, and feed them in the morning instead, and let Julian give them their evening meal – then if Auric starts getting the “floaties” after breakfast, but not at night, I’ll know that it’s because I’m feeding them too much – and thereafter give them a bit less! Flipper is still her grumpy old self – but I don’t blame her – I know what it’s like to have arthritis, and it’s not much fun, I can assure you! We still haven’t heard anything from Dorevitch regarding my Warfarin test this morning, so I’ll have to fill you all in on that tomorrow night – I’m not expecting much change – so go on Dorevitch, prove me wrong! 😉 And there you go – that’s about it from me for this evening, but do drop in again tomorrow night, and find out if my weight did go back up again (it will!), what I ended up doing tomorrow, whether my Warfarin dose is the same or different, and how the fin-fur kids are doing… but until tomorrow night, please try to bee good, remember that success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry in this cold, miserable weather… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

05.27 pm

Well, I finally thought I had it! A Theme/Template that I could live with, at least for a week or so! I finally managed to go through every single free Template on Word Press – I have no idea just how many there were, but I went through all of them – it’s only taken me two and ¾ days… and as I said – I thought I finally had a “keeper”… Out of several hundred free Templates, I only found seven that I thought were more-or-less what I wanted (who, me? Picky? What ever gave you a silly idea like that, eh?! 😉 ) This one – for some reason that escapes me right at this particular moment – was at the top of my meager list… I made so many headers that in the end I couldn’t remember which one was for which Template – luckily I used the same basic colours on most of them, and all I really had to do was change the dimensions – however, in the end I chose this one. It looked just right! So I finished it off, and hit the “Save and Publish” button, and guess what! All of a sudden, and without prior warning, a wretched damned Widget Sidebar sprang out of the woodwork and attached itself to my oh-so-carefully prepared Template! Arrgghh! I thought I’d weeded out all the ones with damned Sidebars! Well, apparently – and very obviously – not, because this Template is sporting one! 😡 So here’s a question for all you people out there in Reader Land – and I’m being perfectly serious about this – out of the following choices, which would you all prefer:

(a) a Sidebar on the right, with all the usual options, like Archives, a Calendar, a “follow my blog” button, and all the rest of it?

(b) a Sidebar on the left, with all the usual options, like Archives, a Calendar, a “follow my blog” button, and all the rest of it?

(c) a Sidebar as a Footer, right at the bottom of the blog posts, with all the usual options, like Archives, a Calendar, a “follow my blog” button, and all the rest of it?

(d) no Sidebar at all – you never look at them anyway!

Personally, I never look at them – I suppose I might look for a “Follow my blog” button, if I really liked it, and thought it was worth going back to. The thing is, I’ll put Widgets in if you, the Readers, really want them – otherwise I’ll just not bother with them. Unfortunately an awful lot of Templates (about 86%? especially of the older Templates) absolutely refuse to let you wriggle out of using those ruddy Widgets, and actually insert them into the CSS* of the Template! It really makes my blood boil! Why do something like that? It’s not as though the use of any of these Widgets is going to benefit the creator of a free Template/Theme in any way, shape or form – so why force people into having them when – in my opinion, anyway – they completely spoil the aesthetics of the Template, and subtract from the possible width of the text column!? Oh well… I guess it’s “back to the drawing board” for me again tomorrow!

As it turns out, we didn’t go off to have my Warfarin blood test done today, after all! We received an SMS from a very good friend of ours who lives in Melton – would we be home today because his partner is starting a new job tomorrow and he might not be able to get down to Melbourne again for a long time. I kid you not – if Steve said he was coming down to see us, I’d cancel an appointment to meet all the stars of “Game of Thrones”, or an afternoon tea with Her Majesty the Queen – or both – to be here when he arrived! 🙂 So we stayed home, and he duly arrived, and we all sat around and talked and caught up with eachother until he had to go. We’re really going to have to get off our not quite so fat backsides anymore and work out some way of catching up with eachother more often – once or twice a year doesn’t really cut it, I’m afraid! Anyway, we shall sally forth tomorrow to have my Warfarin blood test done, and then go on to either look at side tables (no, we haven’t measured, or tried re-arranging the chairs yet! What do you all think we are? Organised and efficient, or something?! 😉 ) or go and talk to a decent Nursery about water plants for the – now clean – ex-fish puddle in the front yard, and a nice large-ish fig tree for the back yard. We also have to organise all the vegetables we want to plant before it’s summer again!

And now we can move on to all the good bits! 🙂

Food stuffs: last night Julian made another of those Lamb and Harissa Lasagne thingies for dinner – and oh, it was sooo nice! I know it sounds as though there’s an awful lot of Harissa in it – and Harissa is well known for its spiciness – but it isn’t! Even my very favourite eldest daughter, who’s not too keen on spicy foods, said that it was just enough to give it a bit of a “kick” – and the “white sauce” made with ricotta, feta cheese, and skinny milk, is just to die for! Stick them all together in a baking dish with lasagne sheets, and you have a dish fit for an Emperor! What’s more, Julian chilled the leftovers, carved it up into individual serves, bagged and vacuum-sealed each serve, and put them all in the freezer for ‘ron – so we have enough vacuum packed plastic bags of left-over Lamb and Harissa Lasagne to give us at least another three meals of it! For dessert I had a Corella pear and a small bowl of the delightful Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding. Today for lunch we all had wraps, with sandwich sliced roast beef, semi-dried tomatoes, roughly chopped home-grown spring onions, Halloumi cheese, and the usual butter substitute of basil-pesto hummus. Dinner tonight will be more of the Heston Blumenthal very delicious pork and sage sausages, with chips (I think) and the very, very last of our home-grown green beans, and our usual half a tomato. Dessert is most likely going to be a reprise of last night’s – a Corella pear and a small bowl of the delicious Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding.

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t too bad, considering! I went from 64.6kg to 64.7kg – I only went up one point, so that was very good! But knowing me, I’ll probably go up another half a kilo tomorrow morning – I mean I devoutly hope that I don’t, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt since last August, when I started out on my Optifast journey, it’s that this body of mine will do exactly whatever it feels like doing, whenever it feels like doing it, and there’s not a single, solitary thing that I, or anyone else, can do about it! 😛

And once again that brings me to tomorrow – when we will go off to have my Warfarin blood test done, and do a bit of shopping, here and there along the way, and with a great deal of luck, I might even get to log into World of Warcraft again, to at least check my ruddy Auctions! (not that I think I’ve sold anything though! 😉 ) Julian gave himself a bit of a break this evening by swapping out Auric and Dapple’s water this afternoon instead – both the little finnies seem well and energetic, and hopefully Auric won’t have another attack of the “floaties”, even a mild one! Flipper is getting more and more vague every day, but she’s quite happy in her own little foggy world, as long as she gets to snuggle up between us on the bed every night, and gets plenty of Daddy Pats during the day – and that, dear Readers, is once again about “it” from me for this evening! Please give some thought to the Sidebar conundrum, and let me know what you all want, and do drop in again tomorrow night to see how my weight went, if I have the results of the Warfarin blood test back, and what they were, and whether I managed to get any WoW-ing in during the day! Until tomorrow evening though, please continue to bee good, remember that the two most powerful warriors in life are patience and time, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep warm and dry in all this wintry weather, and to look after yourselves – but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*CSS = a “Cascading Style Sheet” – which is a type of program that defines the elements within the Template, and how they work, or interact with the user.

06.07

Well, this will either have to be cut short, to be finished tomorrow, or split in half, and finished after dinner (which I really hate doing!) Yes, I’m still experimenting through all the ruddy Templates – what do you think of this one? If I hadn’t been so ruddy-well annoyed with Word Press for causing all this wretched Template shuffling, I might have remembered that it’d probably be a good idea to write down the names of the Templates that I did like, and which did work properly! Oh well, at least I can remember what the last two looked like – I think! So later on I’ll go and find out what they were called, so that I can keep a record of them… just in case, like! *sigh*

As I think I told you all last night, my very favourite eldest daughter came over today (is this font too small for you all, by the way? Please let me know if it is – I don’t want you getting eyestrain from trying to read writing that’s too small!) We ended up watching two episodes of “Orphan Black”, which is such a good show! It’s getting a trifle scary again though – I can’t wait to see what happens next week! After that it was lunch time, and the three of us sat and watched two episodes of “Person of Interest”. I’m not sure how the writers and producers of the show are going to tie up all the loose ends, because this is to be its last season, and it’s a short season, too! I have a feeling that our “good” Machine is going to see that it’s going to end up with a “fight to the death” between herself and the evil Machine, “Samaritan” – and that our “good” Machine will nobly sacrifice herself in order to bring Samaritan down, and the world will be left with no super-intelligent Machine to either help us poor, weak humans – or to enslave us, as Samaritan wanted to do. As far as I can see, it’s the only way out for a “happy” ending, anyway. My very favourite eldest daughter though, is of a different mind! She thinks that the only way to sensibly end the series is to kill of one of the major characters, though how that’s going to end things, goodness knows! If they kill off Finch, the guy who built our “good” Machine, “she” (our good Machine) will become distraught at losing her friend, mentor, and in a way, “father” – she won’t, however, wreak vengeance on Samaritan, because Finch taught her that that was not the right way – killing, whether another human being or another AI machine, was wrong and to be avoided at all costs – and Samaritan, who is totally ruthless and just plain evil, will have won… and the human race will end up enslaved. To kill off any other major character would be a great shame, and fans of the show will all howl in outrage, but it really won’t do anything much to prevent Samaritan’s final victory! So, I think there’s only another two or three episodes to go. I do know that I’ll be very, very cross, if they end up killing off John, Root, Shaw or Fusco – because what possible effect could that have? If it drove Finch to try to teach the Machine to become a killer, after teaching it to “find a better way” from the moment it became self-aware – sorry, I just don’t think it would work. So – I guess we’ll just have to start biting our nails down to the quick, and wait and see what happens – but we’ll find out in the next couple of weeks, won’t we! 😉

After lunch and “Person of Interest”, we watched a couple of “The Flash”/”Arrow” crossovers – in which Oliver Queen, AKA Arrow, and Barry Allen, AKA The Flash, work together to thwart two nasty would-be villains (“would-be” villains, because they’re not terribly good or successful at being evil and wicked! 😀 ) and then it was time for my very favourite eldest daughter to go home, and I came in here for yet another attempt at finding the “perfect” Theme/Template! And if you don’t particularly like this one, don’t worry, there’s a few more for me to work my way through yet – like maybe about another 300 or so… 😉

The fishies.. as I said last night, after Julian had tested the water in the Fish House in the mid-afternoon, and declared it a bit better than it had been two nights ago, Auric had a mild return of his “floaties” for a short while… so once again Julian swapped out another 30% of the water for a fresh lot, and almost within minutes Auric was back to his usual self again… Hmm… it almost makes me wonder if it’s some sort goldfish attention-seeking behaviour! Well, whether it was or not, it worked! 🙂 I think that perhaps them-thar goldfishies be smarter than the average minnow! 😉

And now on to the good bits!

Food stuffs: Last night for dinner we had some extremely nice chicken breasts pan-fried with pepper, and a little of the lemon-infused olive oil, served on steamed rice which had been mixed with some finely chopped home-grown spring onions – a most tasty and delicious meal! For dessert I had another of my Corella pears, a small bowl of the Coles-brand, very low-calorie, yummy Rice Pudding, and the very last slice of cake 😥 We’ll have to make another one soon! Well, I told you all last night that whilst I’d sworn off Baker’s Delight fruit and white chocolate scones for ever and ever, I’d also had my fingers very firmly crossed behind my back – so guess what I had for lunch today! Yes… a reprise of the “naughty” lunch I had the other day! But on the other hand, I didn’t have my slice of cake tonight (because there wasn’t any!) so I think that in this particular case, we could just call the scone a “slice of cake”, and say that I’d had it at lunch time instead of after dinner. Yeah… That works for me – how about all of you, hmm? (*winning smile*) Tonight for dinner Julian made the Lamb & Harissa Lasagne with Feta and Oregano again – and although it’s a bit of a fiddle to make, it really is most delicious and well worth the effort, believe me! You’ll find the recipe up on my “Recipes…” page, if you feel like trying it out. And for dessert I had another of my Corella pears, and a small bowl of the Coles-brand, very low-calorie, yummy Rice Pudding… and that was it for dinner tonight, as I’d already had my slice of cake scone at lunch time! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Was much more betterer! I went from 5.0kg to 64.6kg – down four points! Don’t ask me why – I’ve totally given up trying to work out why my weight fluctuates so much, and the reason behind some of the more puzzling up-surges and sudden drops in my weight that my body seems to take such a thorough delight in inflicting on me! Who knows what lies in store – it’s adventure for me, tomorrow morning! 🙂

Which once again brings me to tomorrow! In the morning I have another Warfarin blood test, and if we start out early enough, and if we do a little bit of research tonight, and if the weather permits (hmm… lots of “if’s” there!) we might go looking for side tables for our new lounge suite – the teeny-tiny, or perhaps I should say “minuscule”, table I’m currently using is barely big enough for a box of tissues, and only one of our two TV remote controls! Actually, before we go table shopping, I think we need to measure the available space, and maybe try rearranging the chairs and couches… so maybe we won’t go table shopping until Thursday or Friday… Oh well, I don’t mind – it’ll give me all the more time to try out some more Themes/Templates! 😉 And I fear that once again it’s time for me to tell you all – “that’s about it from me for this evening!” – and so it is! But never fear – I’ll be back again tomorrow night with more tall tales and true from this side of the Black Stump! So do call in again tomorrow night, to find out if my weight went back up again (highly likely! er… sorry about the unintentional pun!) how Auric and Dapple are getting on, whether I have yet another Template up or not, and whether we did get to go table shopping after all… but until then, please at least try to bee good, remember that “forever” is composed of “nows”, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry, especially in this wild and woolly weather we’ve been having… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

09.59 pm

Well, I’m here, at long last… I’ve spent all day – apart from a couple of hours while Josh was here and while we had dinner – all day, stuffing around with different free Themes/Templates – does this one do what I want? Yes? No? Move on to the next one… and then the next, and the next. I didn’t even log onto WoW to check my Auctions! (well, it might not sound like a big deal to all of you, but it’s a fairly big deal to me…) Some of the free Themes/Templates were good enough for me to waste spend time creating a series of different Headers for them, but ultimately 99¾% of those free Themes/Templates were discarded as not being quite good enough… The one you’re looking at tonight is, I suppose, about the 40th one I tried? I’m thinking that I must have used it before, as it already had the Header in place – I simply changed the colours around it a bit – and at this stage, I don’t know whether I really like it, or if I just got tired of spending the whole day moving from Template to Template. We’ll see how it goes, for a day or two, anyway, as I’ll not be able to do any more Template fiddling for a couple of days. My very favourite eldest daughter is coming over tomorrow, and on Wednesday morning I have another Warfarin blood test…

In the meantime, let me catch you all up on my last couple of days! 🙂

Yesterday – Sunday. Well, Xãnthe and Jemimah spent a rather hectic day in Pandaria, after having finished off their last half a level to finally ding level 85. It’s quite amazing, the difference between the Alliance and Horde quests! I don’t suppose it’s something that very many people stop to think about – I know I don’t, usually – but as I was writing that, about the Alliance and Horde quests being so very different – it suddenly struck me that it would have taken quite a bit of working out and planning! OK, you have “a” country, populated with various “citizens” and monsters, and you have two factions – each made up of about four different races – both vying for control or dominance in that country. They compete, but neither ever really “wins” – the struggle is pretty much eternal, I suppose, because neither side is “bad”, or “evil”, they’re just… different. However. They “compete” with eachother by completing quests to get or find something, or to kill “x” number of a particular type of monster, or in some cases, to run off with the other Faction’s flag! But here’s the part that had me so – I suppose startled, when I stopped to think about it – and that’s that each set of quests for a particular area have to be (a) finely tuned to experience levels, (b) geared to a particular Faction’s beliefs and orientation and (c) complement eachother in complexity and difficulty. In all probability, I don’t suppose very many gamers stop to think about the work that goes into a game like World of Warcraft, or Rift, or any of the massive, interactive multi-player games – sure, people notice the graphics, and the music/soundtrack – which are in themselves extraordinarily superb – but the amount of effort and thought that goes into working out the game-play itself – let alone the programming involved – I’m not too sure that many people stop to think about it, really… I dunno – maybe they do, maybe it was just me that took so long to suddenly think about it – I can be amazingly dense sometimes…

Anyway, back to Xãnthe and Jemimah! They got to Pandaria, and have started to settle in there – I think we died once – before we got to Pandaria – because we thought we’d try for a five-person Dungeon in The Caverns of Time – well, it wasn’t really a “Dungeon”, it was more of an “Scenario” (er… mini Dungeon?) We thought that we might be able to manage it, but, umm… nah! We got deaded in very short order, and decided to run back in, collect our bodies, and then turn around and run away – very fast! Which we did! And then we went to Pandaria! We went up almost two levels, to level 86, so we only have four more levels before we can go of to Draenor! I’m really looking forward to next Sunday – we should make it to level 88 next week, and with a bit of luck – and maybe a few evening sessions in between – we should get to Draenor – and our Garrisons – the week after! 🙂 And then we’ll only have about a month and a bit before “Legion”, the next expansion, is released, and according to my very favourite eldest daughter, Garrisons will be a thing of the past, and won’t matter any more! 😦 *sigh* Oh well, I guess that’s just life in the ever-hectic world of WoW! 😕

And as I’ve already told you what I did today, I suppose I should get on with the “good bits” now…

Food stuff: last night, being Sunday night, was omelet night. As usual, it was one of the best omelets that Julian’s ever made – it had tomato, shallots, Halloumi cheese, pickled mushrooms, bacon, and sort of little baby red capsicums, called “Vine Sweet Minicaps™”, as well as the usual seasonings and herbs – and it was really delicious! For dessert I had a Corella pear, a small bowl of Coles-brand, very low-calorie, exceedingly yummy, Rice Pudding, and a slice of cake. For lunch today I had a very nice sandwich, made from that nice whole-grain bread which has the lovely sesame seed and poppy-seed crust, with garlic and herb sandwich chicken chunks and my favourite butter substitute, the basil-pesto hummus. Dinner tonight was pan-fried chicken breast on steamed rice that had been mixed with finely chopped home-grown spring onions, and dessert was a reprise of last night’s – unfortunately, that slice of cake tonight was the last one 😥 until one of us makes another one!

Weigh-in yesterday morning. Was not good! I seem to be going through another “upswing”, for reasons known only to my wretched body – why it’s punishing me, I have no idea! I went from 64.4kg to 64.8kg! Maybe it was the yummy fruit and white chocolate scone, but if it was, I don’t care! The scone was worth the small weight gain! 😛

Weigh-in this morning. Was even worse! I take it all back! I take it all back! I was only kidding! I’ll never, ever eat another fruit and white chocolate scone again, I swear! (said with my fingers firmly crossed behind my back, of course! Wot, me?! Never eat another fruit and white chocolate scone again, ever? Not going to happen! 😉 ) Oh dear… I’m afraid my gluttony will be my downfall! I went from 64.8kg to 😥 65.0kg! Oh well, back to the treadmill! Not that I ever left it mind you….

Which brings me to tomorrow, when my very favourite eldest daughter will be over, and we can catch up on all our favourite TV shows – “Orphan Black”, “The 100”, “Person of Interest”, “Arrow”, and “The Flash”! It’ll be good to see her and catch up on all her doin’s – last week she had a lot of uni assignments and stuff to get done, so she didn’t come over, and I just had to sit around and twiddle my thumbs and play WoW instead 😉 Oh, I forgot to tell you all – Julian tested the water in the Fish House this afternoon, and the Ammonia content is a little down on what it was two days ago, which is very good news! Auric and Dapple seem to have been doing very well for the past couple of days, but tonight Auric was showing a bit of his old “floaties” problem again, which is a bit concerning – we thought that he’d got over it, especially with 30% of the water getting changed out regularly. They do seem to have one strange – “habit”, it almost seems to be – I’m not sure if it’s a “goldfishy” sort of thing that all goldfish do, or whether it’s a “thing” they picked up when they lived in that dreadful little mud puddle outside – it just strikes me (says she who knows absolutely nothing about goldfish in general!) as “not natural”. They both swim up to the surface and swim smartly along, with their mouths up on the surface, seemingly “eating” the surface of the water! If they only did it after they’d been fed, I’d be inclined to think that they were still finding a few teeny flakes of food still floating around – but it seems to be every few minutes or so, all day! They get fed twice a day, the water is very well oxygenated, 30% of the water is changed out every two days, and their water is tested every two days, the results of which are good, apart from the Ammonia content being a bit on the high side – so why do they do that? Did they get into the habit of swimming up and gulping air when they lived in their little fishy hovel outside? They also seem to like swimming up, gulping air, then swimming down and blowing out the bubbles! They do that for up to five or so minutes at a time, and it seems to be a bit of a game with them – so, unless someone out there in Reader Land can tell us whether it’s “normal” goldfish behaviour or not, or give us some advice, all we can do is watch, test and change the water, and do our best… Anyway, that’s about it again from me for tonight, but do drop in again tomorrow night – if only to see if I’ve stuck up yet another Template or not 😉 as well as to see how much my weight went up again, what my favourite eldest daughter and I watched on TV, and how Auric, Dapple and Flipper are getting on. Until then however, please try to bee good, remember that courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen… and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm and dry in this terrible weather we’ve been having… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

06.31 pm

OK, just very briefly, to fill you all in – I discussed running a website instead of a hosted blog like this one with Julian, and while it would be possible – I could even run Word Press from our file server – the security handling would be horrendous – so – I’m getting the last laugh on Word Press anyway – from now on, I simply won’t look at anything except free Themes/Templates! So there, Word Press! 😛

It’s late, so I’m afraid you’ll all have to wait until tomorrow night for a full run-down on today’s doin’s – Xãnthe and Jemimah went up two levels, and are happily running around Pandaria, the fur-fin kids are well and thriving, and my weight went up (a bit! 😳 it must have been that utterly delicious lunch we indulged in – perhaps the fruit and white chocolate scones were not the wisest of choices, but they sure were yummy! 😉 )

I’ll be back again tomorrow night to fill you all in on our Sunday!

ciao for niao –

moi! 😉

04.44 pm

Well, here we go – another day, another bout of feeling totally pissed off with Word Press! Why am I pissed off with them this time?! I’ll tell you why! I just bought this ruddy Theme/Template – whatever they’re calling it this week, and guess what? It doesn’t work! AGAIN! STILL! Do you see that sweet little “Read More” bar underneath these first couple of lines? I’ve turned the bloody things off! Several times! But they’re still there! They have the option of whether I want to “display the full text, or summaries”? “Full text, please sir!”, says me – and what does Word Press give me? Summaries! If I’d known that they couldn’t be turned off, I wouldn’t have bought this [heavily censored!] Theme/Template-thingy! I detest those “continue reading?” prompts! I’ve always gone out of my way to avoid using Themes and Templates that have them, and if I’m surfing the net and come across one, I choof off and go and read something else instead! Yes, I’m that bigoted and stubborn! Please excuse the harsh language before, but really, this is just too much! I’d take my custom elsewhere, but there isn’t an “elsewhere” to take it to! I suppose, at a pinch, I could just put up another website, and write in that, and have a little drop-down form-thingy if anyone ever wants to comment on what I’ve written, or leave me a message… Do I really need a sophisticated word processor-type of set-up, in order to write a blog – which is essentially just an essay, anyway – isn’t it? Once I got the website set up the way I wanted it, it’d be easy just to copy the page lay-out every day, and just upload the new section when I’d finished writing… I’ll talk to Julian about it, because I really am totally and completely done with Word Press – they’ve ripped their last bloody dollars from me under false and/or misleading instructions and information, and I just feel as though I’ve run out of viable options! I have officially had it with them!

So… what other, more interesting and exciting things happened here today! Not all that much, really! Julian didn’t go for his walk this morning because it was raining, and I only did one kilometer today, instead of the 1.5 kilometers I’ve been doing lately (blisters again – remember?) What’s more, for some unknown reason, neither of us is feeling all that crash hot – I hope we’re not coming down with something! We’re lethargic, morose, totally lacking in energy… and now I’m extremely angry as well! I mean, there’s really no fun getting exceedingly angry, but not having enough energy to enjoy it! 👿 Anyway, Julian didn’t go for his walk, and I only did a short one – then we sort-of moped around the place until Julian psyched himself up enough to go off and do a bit of shopping. I played a bit of WoW, but didn’t really achieve anything much. I’m starting to do yet another of my “clean-ups” of Quel’Dorei, and I had a lot of Alts (alternate characters) that needed to be sorted out. We both use an Add-on called “Altoholic”, which allows us to see what our other (alternate) characters have – both on them, and in their banks, as it saves us from having to log one character off, so that we can go and have a look at another character, log them out, and go back to our original character. So.. this Add-on also keeps tabs on whatever mail a character has, and I’d been getting weird messages from Altoholic saying that someone’s mail was overdue for pickup and was about to be deleted. I was pretty sure that there was no such mail, but you all know the old saying – better to be safe than sorry – so that meant that I had to go through each and every character that I had on Quel’Dorei, including those on my secondary account. Altoholic also seemed to be listing quite a few more characters than I actually had – some of them being characters that I remembered having deleted or moving to different Realms, years ago! All I could do was go through and make a list of them all, one by one, get them to check their mailboxes and pick up any mail that was waiting in them, and then go back to Altoholic, and delete any character that wasn’t on my lists! It turns out that I have eleven characters on one account, and nine of the other, and now that Altoholic’s been stripped of its extraneous characters, I’m not getting that silly mail message any more! Not yet, anyway! 😉

I don’t know that I really should have thought of putting my blog on a web site, and just doing it myself – I mean, how hard can it be?! (I can hear Julian groaning in the background from two rooms away! 😀 ) Because of course now I’m thinking of all sorts of different ways I could do it, and different lay-outs and all – and I could use any and all the graphics that I wanted to! I could have different coloured backgrounds for different menu items, too! (Winter is getting visibly excited at the thought of being in charge of her own blog site rather than wriggle futilely under the thumb of Word Pres!) However, it’s getting late, and I’ve asked Julian to help me set up the Foxtel Ap on my Galaxy Tablet to see if it behaves any better than the online Foxtel TV guide, so I’ll go and get on with the “good bits”, shall I? 🙂

So! “And now for all the good bits!”

Food stuffz: Last night for dinner we had the most delicious little piece of fillet steak that ever came from a cow (or a steer)! It was a piece of steak to swoon for, honestly! With it we had mashed potatoes, steamed green beans (Julian wanted to have peas, but unbeknownst to him, we’d already eaten them so there weren’t any peas and we had to revert to our “default” of steamed green beans!) and half a Kumato. For dessert, once again I had one of my Corella pears, which was followed by a slice of the cake that Julian had made the other day. Today when Julian went off to do the shopping, I put in a request for a rather “naughty” lunch! We don’t have it often enough for it to be really naughty, and anyway, it’s good to indulge yourselves every now and again – especially when you’re feeling a tad poorly! So for lunch today we had half a mushroom and cheese topped roll and half an “Italian” topped roll each, with one of those absolutely wonderfully delicious Baker’s Delight fruit and white chocolate scones (also each!) Tonight we’re having some Heston Blumenthal pork and sage sausages – I’ll let you all know what they’re like tomorrow night – with chips, broccoli (for a change!) and our usual half a tomato – which Julian is just having to go off and get, because he forgot to get any when he was up at the shops earlier! And I suspect that dessert will be a repeat of last night’s – a Corella pear, and a slice of cake! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Was as dreary as we both felt! I went from 64.4kg to 64.4kg – I stayed the same! However, as I keep saying, it’s a lot better than going up! I wonder if it’s got anything to do with the weather? Julian’s been having the same problems with his weight, too – either with it going up, or just staying the same! Hmm… interesting!

And that brings me to tomorrow! Sunday! Our WoW-ing day, with Xãnthe and Jemimah! I wonder how much further we’ll get? We only have one more level to ding before we can go to Pandaria (where hopefully Xãnthe will be able to Tame herself a Quilen for a Pet!) I do hope we feel a bit more alert and “with it” than we don’t today! Honestly, all I really want to do is sleep! Anyway, we have a lot on our plate, what with finally getting out from under the Word Press thumb(screws!), coming to grips with the Foxtel Ap, and a full day of riding around slaying monsters and demons in our dash to Pandaria! Last night Julian swapped out about 30% the water in Auric and Dapple’s Fish House, for which I’m sure they were extremely grateful, and – cross fingers and touch wood – we haven’t seen any more signs of the “floaties” that they’d been suffering from! Flipper is still her same old grizzly self (hark! is that a Flipper squawk I hear coming from the kitchen?! Why, yes! I think it is!) I think she’s looking for either her Daddy, or her dinner – as usual! 🙂 And once again, that’s about it from me for tonight! Do drop in again tomorrow night, to hear all the latest in the ongoing Word Press saga, and whether it’s even going to be possible to move all of this (Winter waves her arms around expansively, as if to encompass the entire blog, from go to whoa) to a personal website! Then there’s the business with my weight – probably not helped at all by the ever-so-slightly “naughty” lunch we had today – but c’mon! We only have a lunch like that about every three to four months or so – sometimes even longer, so I don’t think it can be too awful of us! And of course, I’ll fill you all in on how Xãnthe and Jemimah fared in their attempt to get themselves to Pandaria. But until then, please try to bee good, don’t forget to laugh loudly, laugh often, and most importantly, laugh at yourself, and remember to look after yourselves, to keep warm and dry in this very wintry weather, and to always drive carefully… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.56 pm

Well, here I am – a little later than I had planned on, but I was a bit busy, trying out the new lounge suite that was delivered this afternoon! So, what can I tell you about it? Conventionally it would be called “burgundy”, but I think that’s wrong… if you think of a glass of burgundy wine, it’s got a lot of blue, or purple in it. Personally, I’d call the new lounge suite colour “Ox Blood”, as it has rather more brown in it than a true burgundy. Anyway, no matter what colour you call it, it’s leather, and looks very well in our lounge room! The rug under the coffee table could have been made with that particular lounge suite in mind 🙂 There are two x 2-seater couches, and 2 arm chairs – they’re all recliners, too, but they’re electronic, not manual! Instead of having knobs or levers to pop your feet out and up, you have two discreet little buttons on the side of the chair – very suave and sophisticated! 😎 I reckon I’d much rather be sitting out in the lounge room, reading my kindle with my feet up, right now! But, I’ll have years and years to sit out in the lounge room, reading with my feet up (well, I hope I do, anyway!) but only a few hours this evening to write tonight’s episode of “Ther Blog”!  So – guess what I chose to do! 😉 Go out and read with my feet up, of course, but then I felt guilty, and came back in here instead!

The old lounge suite has been separated into its two sections – one half going into the library, the other half going into the treadmillery – at least for now. The end table and occasional table that we’d used at each end of the old lounge suite won’t fit in the lounge room any more, so we’re having to improvise with a couple of very wonky and fragile cherry-wood nested tables in between one of the two-seater couches and one of the arm chairs, until we get some smaller tables on which to put things like tissues, television remote controls, and our cups of coffee. As we were sitting there, idly wondering where we could put what, I looked at the coffee table sitting in the middle of the room and was suddenly perplexed as to why anyone bought coffee tables these days! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very nice coffee table, and I like it a lot – I certainly don’t want to get rid of it, and the room needs something in that big, empty “middle-of-the room” space – but – a big coffee table? If you put it close enough to any other lounge room furniture to be able to use it as its name suggests, and that is to put cups of coffee on while you’re relaxing in a chair, or on the couch, you wouldn’t be able to sit comfortably because said coffee table would bang you on the shins every time you tried to move! I can more-or-less see the use of coffee tables back in the ’50’s and ’60’s, when people weren’t so wrapped up in the current plague of social media addiction, and had far more time – and reason – to entertain, with afternoon teas, soirées, cocktail parties, and the like, and when a really stylish coffee table would have been not only an asset, but a status symbol as well! But these days, why do we still have coffee tables? Though mind you, I have no idea what else we could put in the big, empty “middle-of-the room” space instead! er… ahh… which is probably why we cling so tightly to our beloved coffee tables? Because we don’t know what else to fill that empty space up with? (*rolls eyes*)

So, what else has been happening here today… This morning I played WoW, where Phoenìx has now reached level 47, and has left both the Western and the Eastern Plaguelands behind, and gone to quest in the Badlands, which is supposedly for levels 44 to 48, and I’m afraid I’m finding it just a bit too easy… I may have to move on again sooner than I’d thought – maybe to Felwood, Tanaris, or Searing Gorge, which are supposedly for levels 45 to 51, but which I suspect I’ll also find to be a bit on the “too easy” side for me – which I guess is a side effect of using the Heirloom pieces… two of which have already been upgraded to grant me the nice experience bonus until level 100, but the other two will need to be upgraded fairly soon, as they’ll only be useful until I reach level 60.

I’m not sure what’s happening tomorrow – I think we have a fair bit of general “tidying up” to do after today’s big furniture “re-arrangement”, and I’d like to get my new towels washed and dried, so that I can start to use them – but other than that, I don’t think we have anything planned… I guess we could, weather and morale permitting, head off looking for nice little tables to put between the new chairs in the lounge room, but I think I’d rather give the brand new blister on my left big toe a chance to settle in and start hurting seriously 😐 Quite frankly, I think a small amount of time should be put into settling the new furniture into its new home by actually sitting in it, and maybe reading for an hour or two – just to get it used to us, if you know what I mean! 😉

Anyway, it’s time to move on to the good bits:

Food stuffz. Last night we had pasta with a plain tomato sauce, and a small amount of grated parmesan cheese, and for dessert I had one of my Corella pears, and a slice of cake – very delicious! 🙂 Today for lunch I had a turkey sandwich, made with the extremely nice Coles-brand sesame seed and poppy-seed crusted bread, basil-pesto hummus instead of butter, and rather nice turkey “sandwich chunks” – very plain, but very delicious! Tonight we’re having pan-fried steak, mashed potatoes, steamed green beans, and our usual half a tomato, and I’ll most likely have another Corella pear, and another slice of cake! 🙂 All good…

Weigh-in this morning. Well, my weight is still within that “margin of error” place – I went from 64.5kg to 64.4kg – or down one point. Big Deal, as they say in the classics! Still, it’s better than going up! I guess it’s just as well that I did do all that walking and standing around yesterday – who knows? If I hadn’t, I’d probably have gone up!

Which brings me to the tomorrow bit, where I don’t really know what’s happening! But you can bet your sweet bippy that whatever we do, it will definitely involve some sort of WoW-ing on my behalf, and some fairly serious sitting and reading – with my feet up – in (on?) the new lounge suite! Flipper is being her usual annoying self, poor old girl – but we love her all the same! And I’m very pleased to say that Auric and Dapple are behaving themselves quite well. Julian didn’t change out their water last night – he was just too tired – but it will be changed out again tonight. The poor little fishies got quite scared when the new furniture came in this afternoon, and they went and hid behind the fake plants in the far right hand side of their Fish House! They learn very quickly, too! They know when they’re going to get fed, and they come flocking (can fish “flock”, or is that only sheep?) to their food hole (there’s a corner cut out of the sheet of glass that covers the tank, so that they can’t accidentally jump out – and they do jump a lot – we quite often hear the “splash” when they do – it’s quite loud!) Today, Julian was fiddling around with one of their filters, and one of them – he didn’t see which one it was, but I suspect Dapple, as he’s the cheeky one – came up and started nibbling his hand! Julian said that it tickled 🙂 Anyway, once again, that’s about it from me for this evening! Please call in again tomorrow night to see what the latest is with my silly weight, what Phoenìx has been getting up to, how the new lounge suite is going, and all the latest on the fur-fins! Until then though, please do try to bee good, don’t forget that logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere, and remember to always drive carefully, to keep warm and dry in this rapidly changeable weather, and to look after yourselves… but most of all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.55 pm

Goodness, I’m totally exhausted! We left home around a quarter to 12 this morning – yes, we did go out shopping – and we’ve only been home long enough this afternoon to drain a much-needed cup of coffee dry! We went to The Glen – it’s the closest shopping centre that has a David Jones, and a Lincraft – where I was hoping to find towels… well, I didn’t find my towels at Lincraft, but I did find lots of other interesting things there! However, I digress! Let me go back to the beginning… We got to The Glen around lunch time, so the first place we went to was the good ol’ Shingle Inn, which seems to have become almost our “default” favourite place to have lunch when we’re out shopping. Before we left home this morning, I’d made quite a comprehensive list as to what I was after today, so as soon as we’d finished our lunch, off we trotted. The first place we went to was Lincraft, where unfortunately they didn’t have anything suitable in the way of towels – I wanted something that would tone in with my almost all white bathroom, rather plain-ish (as in not stripey or patterned) not “thick and fluffy”, and definitely something that didn’t have wide fabric “inserts” between sections of toweling, because no matter how carefully you wash them, they always shrink, making the towel go all wonky and crooked! So, we didn’t have any luck there, but I saw lots and lots of things that did interest me! I really wish I could still knit, because they have some absolutely gorgeous wool available these days! 😐 They also have tons and tons of the most intriguing and interesting looking crafting materials, too, which I’d love to “have a go at”, but have no idea as to how to go about it, and once again, I’m let down by the arthritis in my hands – alas, an artist who works with real or digital paints I am, but I’ve never been terribly good at constructing three dimensional items from raw materials! What we did get there at Lincraft, however, was from their crafting section! I’ve been after some sort of a receptacle to attach to my treadmill, for tissues and things – there’s nothing worse than trundling along at 4 kph, and your nose starts to run! So I’ve been sort-of looking for some sort of “basket-y” thing that I could dangle over the handle bars of the treadmill, and I found the very thing! It’s a “basket-y” thing, made out of a sort of tough cardboard – I think you’re supposed to paint it, or decorate it, and maybe turn it into some sort of decoupage flower arrangement, or something – but I think I’ll just leave it as it is (for now, anyway) and dangle it over the treadmill’s handles, and see how it goes. I was quite pleased with that purchase, actually! 🙂

Next we went on to Target to look for towels – and if anything, they had less than Lincraft did! Next! (trundle, trundle, trundle) There was a Bed, Bath and Table place just across from Target, so we went in there… They had lots of towels, and other nice “House-y” sorts of things, but I still couldn’t find anything that I thought was really suitable – but then I saw some rather nice towels on a “Sale” table, and after some discussion and excellent help from a very nice sales lady, I got the towels and matching hand towels that I wanted – what’s more, while she was organising the towels, I spotted a stand of scented candles, soaps, and liquid hand soap! Now, I’m a real sucker for those sorts of things, and I got to sniffing this one, and that one… because my lovely red Christmas-y Frankincense and Allspice scented one that I have in the bathroom is on the verge of running out (well, I’ve been using it since Christmas morning – it was a stocking-filler! 🙂 ) so I’ve been on the lookout for a nice smelling replacement liquid hand soap, and this one seemed to fit the bill – so I got that, too! 🙂

Then we went on to David Jones, to look for some jumpers for Julian, and some brown waterproof mascara for me. I’d done some research on the mascara, but evidently not enough! There is no Yves Saint Laurent section at The Glen’s David Jones, and the Cover Girl brown waterproof mascara is apparently only available in the US, or online! So I tripped the light fantastic and hobbled around (I was beginning to flag a little by this time!) asking the very nice cosmetic peoples – who were a damn sight more helpful than the ones at the Doncaster David Jones ever were, I can tell you! Eventually a nice young lady told me that Clinique made a brown (black-brown, actually – but what the heck – it wasn’t black black!) and she actually took me over to the Clinique stand, introduced me to the nice lady who was working there and who found the right one for me, then nice young lady #1 took the sale, as she was the one who told me about it, etcetera. So I now have a nice black-brown waterproof mascara, at long last! Let’s hope it does what it’s supposed to do! Yanno, 99 and ¾% of all mascara seems to be black! “Extreme” Black! “Ultra” Black! “Blackest” Black! “Very” Black! there’s even a (can you believe it!) “Leather” Black! Why?! I mean, I know that the majority of men and women who buy mascara are the young and fabulous, dahrling! but we (ahem!) “more mature” females also like to look our absolutely fabulous best too! And can you imagine a woman of my mature years wearing those heavy, black Goth mascaras? We’d look ridiculous – or should I say even more ridiculous that we already do! “Mutton dressed up as lamb” is one thing, but “mutton dressed up as Goth lamb”?! I shudder to think!

Then we moved on to the Men’s section, and the nice, woolly, warm jumpers for Julian. The nice warm jumper that I gave him years ago and that he likes so much was a David Jones jumper with a “Vee” neck – well, they still have the same sort of jumpers – warm and woolly – but they didn’t have any with “Vee” necks – only the round crew necks, and they didn’t have the “cream-of-tomato-soup” red ones, either… but he’s got a nice, new charcoal one, and a nice, new dark blue one, as well as a nice, new zipper-fronted woolen jacket with pockets, for when he goes on his morning walks! He picked up a nice pair of black woolen gloves at the little cap and scarf kiosk just outside David Jones, too!

Then we came downstairs again, and went first to the Reject Shop to buy some more incense, and then on to Aussie Disposals, where we got a pair of bamboo socks each… then we limped back to the car and went to the local Vet’s to get some more of Flipper’s favourite pussy biscuits (kibble!) which she was almost out of, then we made a quick trip to Bunny’s to get some more “black sand” for a second incense bowl for my bathroom, and finally back to Vermont South Shopping Centre, to pick up some prescriptions, get some pasta sauce for dinner tonight, and check the PO Box… after which we gratefully came home! I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to write anything tonight – I was totally exhausted! However, a cup of coffee refreshed me enough to start writing, and now a second cup of coffee is giving me the incentive to keep going! 😉

And that was our shopping day today! So now on to the good bits!

Food stuffz: Last night for dinner we had Three Island Beef sausages, with chips, half a Kumato, and steamed green beans, and for dessert I had one of my new Corella pears, which were actually ripe enough to eat, which I “washed down” with a slice of the cake that Julian had just made! It was scrumptious! 🙂 Today for lunch I had my usual Shingle Inn lunch of a BLT on Sourdough Bread, a long black with a little jug of skinny milk, and one and a half tiny éclairs (Julian always eats half of one of them!) Tonight for dinner we’re having a small bowl of pasta each, because Julian is too knackered to stand there cooking meat and vegetables (and I don’t blame him either, because he’s also been shifting one half of the lounge suite out into the treadmillery, in preparation for the arrival of our new lounge suite tomorrow!) We’ll have the pasta with plain old tomato sauce, and a little sprinkle of grated parmesan, and for dessert I’ll probably have the same as last night – one of my Corella pears, and a slice of cake! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Was not good! I’m see-sawing again, up and down, up and down… I went from 64.2kg to 64.5kg (it must have been that slice of cake I had last night! 😉 ) up three points! (*doom* 😦 *gloom*) Oh well, hopefully all the walking I did today will help a bit… 😮

 08.44 pm

Here I am again – back from dinner – and only one television show tonight, because there’s nothing terribly comfortable to sit on at the moment! Where was I? Oh yes, my weight 😦 Oh well, as I said before – let’s hope that all the walking I did today will make a difference tomorrow morning when I get on the scales! I haven’t even logged into WoW once today – I’m hoping to get a bit of a look-in after I finish this though – even if I only get to check my Auctions! Julian got a phone call this evening from the furniture people – they said – very helpfully – that the new lounge suite will be delivered “sometime between 2 and 5 pm”, so I sort-of expect that the truck will pull up outside at about 04.58 pm! 😕 And once again, gentle readers, that’s about it from me for this evening! You’ve been given a fairly accurate blow-by-blow description of our day today, and I think I’ve caught all of you up on whatever you needed to be caught up on, so it only remains for me now to admonish you all to drop in again tomorrow night, to find out “What KatyWinter Did Next”, whether or not all my walking today had any effect on my weight overnight, if the new lounge suite got delivered on time, and what it’s like and if it’s as comfortable as it was in the shop when we bought it… but until then, please try to bee good, remember that the difference in winning and losing is most often… not quitting, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm and dry on these cold and frosty winter days… but most of all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

04.14 pm

Here I am, nice and early for a change – and with not very much to tell you all! We didn’t go out shopping today, either, because we got a late night SMS from our Lawnmowing/Gardening-type person, wanting to know if he should turn up today or not because – let’s face it – it’s not exactly “growing” season, is it! Anyway, he hadn’t been here for a couple of weeks, so we thought that maybe he should do a little bit of a general “tidy-up” around the garden. We thought that we could go out after he’d finished, as he generally comes around lunch time – but what with one thing and another, plus the fact that I absolutely hate to feel rushed when I’m shopping – good heavens! What if I missed out on a really nice handbag, or a nice jumper, or a fantastic bargain, or something, just because I didn’t have time to stop and look! 😦 I’d be most put out! 😡 In other words, I decided that it would be much more betterer if we went tomorrow morning, right after breakfast, when we could take our time walking around, and relax, and not have to miss out on anything because we were rushed! I do have a vague sort-of plan floating around in my scatter-brain – Julian needs one or two new jumpers – everything he’s got at the moment is about two to three sizes too big for him! I need to get some new bath towels – with very few exceptions, all of ours are hand-me-downs from my mother – and a couple of them even date back to her mother! So I want to get some new towels – ideally, I’d like to get Turki$h towels – they’re so nice and soft – and thin! I don’t really like big, thick towels – they’re too big and bulky for my increasingly arthritic-y hands – but the really good Turki$h towels are a little on the expensive side, though you can be lucky sometimes and find them on an “On Sale” table (see what I meant about rushing, and possibly missing out on a fantastic bargain?!) I need to get a proper waterproof mascara – the one that the girl sold be in the Channel shoppe (a) isn’t really brown, it’s a “black/brown”, and (b) it’s not ruddy waterproof at all! It smudges and runs just as much as the other Channel mascara I have does! I tried Googling “brown waterproof mascara” this morning, and it was quite depressing – I was given just about anything and everything to do with black waterproof mascara, but the word “brown” seemed to have skipped their attention, somehow. Oh well, I think it means that I’m going to be doing a lot of foot-slogging from booth to booth, and from little shoppe to little shoppe – the trouble with the big stores like Myer and David Jones is that in a stupid and wasted effort to cut costs and save money, they’ve put off a lot of their staff, and – especially around in their makeup department – only kept about three or four girls on (most of whom appear to be at lunch, or on their break, when you need or want assistance!) to service all of the different little cosmetic booths (kiosks? stalls? shoppes?) The result of this, of course, is that none of them are really familiar with any particular product – they do have a vague idea of who has what and how to use it, but they don’t know how much it is, or even which drawer they’re kept in – so unless you know exactly what to ask for – including the product number – they’re really not much help at all! From my extensive research this morning 😉 I believe that Cover Girl might have a brown waterproof mascara (though it might be only in the US that they have it – none of the sites were terribly clear on that, even though I do append “au” or “australia” to the search field) and I think (hope!) that Yves Saint Laurent has one too – so at least I have a starting point! Talking about Google, remember I was telling you yesterday how I ended up using Google Docs to write up my list of vegetables to plant, and to transcribe that recipe? Well, they have their own fonts that you can choose for your document – and there’s a hell of a lot of them too – including some very nice ones, which being the fontaholic that I am, I immediately decided that I simply had to have! So I went looking for them, thinking that they’d either have been made “exclusively” for Google Docs, or readily available, but prohibitively expensive… imagine, then, my utter delight to find out that not only were they readily available, but free, too! 😎 One is called Architect’s Daughter, and the other one, which is a “family” of three fonts – Delius, Delius Unicase, and Delius Swash Caps – I rather think I’m going to be using them a lot in recipes and lists! 🙂

So we stayed home and I got Phoenìx up to level 43 and a half, I finished off the Western Plaguelands and moved on to the Eastern Plaguelands, which as I was saying yesterday, are equally as horrid and nasty as the Western ones – but I seem to be handling everything that they’ve been throwing at me – and I only died once, which was my own fault because I hadn’t read the quest properly, and I really didn’t have any idea as to what I was supposed to be doing – so as a consequence, I got overwhelmed by vicious, blood-thirsty skeletons, and died! 😐 Hopefully I’ll get time to play a bit more later on – I’d like to get Phoenìx up to level 44 tonight, because I probably won’t get much of a chance to play tomorrow, but I guess we’ll see… Actually I’m just a trifle cheesed-off with WoW at the moment – it must be school holidays or something over in the US, because there are so many people running around that the whole game is bordering on the unplayable! At one point, I had to run through a long tunnel, killing monsters as I went, and collecting some sort of green goo from the dead monsters. Now normally, re-spawns are reasonably quick – especially if the game detects a lot of players in the same area – but today there were so many small groups doing that particular quest that the re-spawns simply couldn’t keep up! It ended up with all those two or three person groups, roughly lining up and running through the tunnel – trying to get a shot in and “tag” the monsters ahead of us first, before anyone else could – then we’d have to stand and fight the monster we’d tagged, while everyone else ran on ahead of you, getting their shots in first – etcetera, etcetera! That particular quest should have taken me about three minutes to do – if not less… (I’ve done it fairly often before with other characters!) today it took me over half an hour, I kid you not, and I was not pleased! 👿

Julian went up to check the mail in the PO Box this afternoon, and to do a bit of grocery shopping – the two turtle-neck T-shirts I ordered the other day had arrived, so I’ll have something to wear tomorrow when we do go shopping, and when he got home, he made a cake! 😀 wasn’t that thoughtful of him! I’m so looking forward to having a slice tonight!

And so on to the good bits! 😉

Food stuffz: Last night we had the lamb leg steaks for dinner – pan-fried in a small amount of onion-infused olive oil and home-grown rosemary leaves, and served on a bed of steamed rice with finely chopped home-grown spring onions and some diced store-bought yellow capsicum mixed through it. It was very delicious! Hopefully we’ll have it a little bit more often! For dessert I had my last Corella pear, and a small tub of low-fat passionfruit yoghurt. For lunch today we had wraps, with the delicious basil-pesto hummus, cold, sliced sandwich roast beef, Halloumi cheese, and red capsicum batons – a little messy to eat, but yummy, all the same! Tonight we’re having the Three Island beef sausages, with chips, green beans, and our usual half a tomato, and for dessert, I’ll have one of the new Corella pears that Julian got this afternoon – if they’re ripe enough – and a slice of cake (*drool*) and if the pears aren’t ripe enough, I’ll have a small bowl of the delicious Coles-brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding, and the piece of cake! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Was a bit weird! The scales haven’t done this for a long time! I hopped on the scales – 64.2kg, the same as yesterday. Then, as I always do, I hopped off the scales, then hopped back on them again – just to make sure, you know? They “said” (read: “showed me” – they’re not talking scales!) 64.0kg! I did a bit of a double-take, hopped off, and hopped back on again, for the third time. 64.2kg OK, and one more time for luck – 64.2kg. So, my weight decided to tease me a bit this morning, but I actually stayed the same as yesterday, which is better than going up, I suppose! 🙂

And that brings me to tomorrow, when hopefully we really will go shopping. Jumper for Julian. Towels for me. That “Army-disposal-type store” for socks for both of us! Julian keeps his toe nails nice and short, but he goes through socks like nobody’s business! Just about every night he has holes in the ends of his socks, and we can’t work out why! So I thought we might try the extra-thick hiking and camping socks that they used to sell there – and I could do with some new socks like those for my treadmilling every morning! I think my walking socks are wearing a bit thin, as I’m starting to get blisters again! So, we need jumpers, towels, socks, brown waterproof mascara… and I’m quite sure that I’ll be able to think of a few other things between now and then – but for the nonce, that’s about it from me for this evening! 🙂 However, do call in again tomorrow night, to find out what my weight’s doing this time, whether we got everything on our shopping list, where Phoenìx is up to, and how Flipper, Auric and Dapple are getting along! Until then though, do try to bee good, remember that what we have to learn to do, we learn by doing, and don’t forget to keep warm and dry in this cold winter weather, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but please, above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂