Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.28

12.15 pm

Coffee and pre-lunch break! 🙂 Julian and I have been playing WoW pretty much all morning – you’ve no idea how much exercise you get, running around killing monsters for fun and profit, so it must be good for you, right? 😉 We did our “Daily” quest for oil – in fact, we did two, so I now have enough oil to send a couple more of my ships off on Missions. We also scored a second Garrison Hearthstone – sort-of – this one is a Compass which takes you directly back to your Shipyard, which in turn forms part of your Garrison, so it might as well be a secondary Garrison Hearthstone. I’m just darting back again, as I have a couple of things to hand in to different Factions, which might earn me some Reputation points! 🙂 Back soon-ish…


 04.45 pm

Here I am again with another snippet – once again, I’ve been hard at work om WoW, this time I’ve been busy leveling up young Wïnter! As you know, I got her to level 10 – but of course I couldn’t go and get Mangeclaw until she was level 11, because you can’t tame an animal that’s a higher level than you are… Oh, it was fun and games! 🙂 I got the quest that would take me to Loch Modan, and set out to level up mainly by Exploration (you get experience points for Exploration and Discovery) One of Julian’s characters, “Demsbank” (short for “Demelza’s Banker” – basically he was supposed to be the “Stay at home and do the banking” type character, but he got itchy feet…) managed to get up to level 20, simply by exploring the whole of Azeroth – dying countless times, collecting Flight Points, and doing a lot of “Death Running” (as explained in a much earlier blog – do you want me to explain it all again? No… I thought not! 😉 ) On the way to Loch Modan I also leveled up my Herbaling – I’d already taken my Skinning up to level 75, and I had another 20 or so Herbs to pick to get my Herbaling skills to that level – so by the time I’d completed and handed in my quest, I was just about ready to Tame Mangeclaw and boost myself up to level 90! Only a few more Herbs to pick… Finally! All ready to go! I hit the Boost button (now I have no more free Boosts left, I hope I’ve done the right thing!) and found myself, sans Pet, at the Dark Portal – no attributes to speak of, no healing potions, no back-up Pet plan – just me in my not-terribly-attractive new gear – “barefooted” so to speak! I conjured up a Flying Mount and flew back to Stormwind, where I proceeded to set myself up properly! Suitable level Healing Potion – check! Pet called – check! Re-Train and resume special attributes – check! I’m now back at the Dark Portal again, this time all set up properly…

Food stuffz so far today: Breakfast was one and a half Ferguson Plarre Hot Cross Buns each, toasted, and with a scrape of butter – totally delicious! I’d happily eat them for breakfast every morning, if I could! (well, maybe I wouldn’t – but they’re so yummy!) For lunch today I had a really delicious sandwich, made with our new favourite bread – Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread with sesame and poppy seeds all over the crust. The sandwich filling was some leftover Nandos chicken tenders, with some Iceberg lettuce leaves, and some of the basil-pesto hummus – one of the nicest sandwiches I’ve eaten this week! 😉 Then Julian and I really made pigs of ourselves! We both ate one of our Easter Eggs (they were about 9 cm long? I think?) Mine was “Hand rolled in Almond chips”, and it was really nice… I’d been wondering – should I eat the Easter Eggs as slowly as possible, one thin shard of chocolate per night, making them last as long as possible? Or should I try to get rid of them as quickly as possible, by gobbling down one whole, entire Easter Egg per day, the way I did this afternoon, so that they can’t sit there, taunting and tempting me! Oh well, I only have one more “normal” sized Easter Egg – I guess that’ll go tomorrow, if I’m lucky – and I still have the box of Lindt “Easter Selections” – bunnies, eggs, and (chocolate) carrots – then Easter will be over for another year, and we’ll go back to our normal breakfasts of Vita Brits, extra bran, half a banana, and 200 ml of skinny milk! Of course, while we’ve been having these lovely Hot Cross Buns for breakfast, the bananas that we’d normally have had on our Vita Brits have started to get a little bit “over-ripe” – so not wanting to waste them, and being in the middle of a somewhat more “festive” week, I’ve printed out three Banana Cake recipes for Julian, to see if he can master the art of cake-making! 😉

Back again soon….


 10.15 pm

Food stuffz so far today (continued) [Winter reads back over what she’s written… being a glutton with an Easter Egg… nice sandwich… banana cake recipes…] I reckon that just about brings us up to dinner time! 🙂 Well, we were going to have some sort of lemon chicken thingy for dinner tonight, but we had chicken for lunch yesterday, chicken in a sandwich for lunch today, and I think Julian’s been feeling a little under the weather from all the unaccustomed rich and heavy food (not to mention the medium-sized Easter Egg, and the fairly large chocolate Bunny that he ate today!) (and I’d though that I was being gluttonous!) so we had omelets… he had a plain one (just eggs) and mine had ham, tomato, spring onion, and cheese, because I was feeling perfectly fine – probably because I have a much higher tolerance for large doses of chocolate than he does! 😉 (sometimes it pays to be a chocolaholic! 😉 ) I even had a small slice of what was left of the Flourless Chocolate Cake – unfortunately there was no cream left, so I had it with a very small drizzle of skinny milk poured over it. My Corella pears that I bought on Thursday will be/should be ripe enough to eat by tomorrow – I hope so, anyway, but unfortunately, our store-bought figs started to grow beards, so we had to throw them out, so unless we can find a few more growing over the back fence, I’ll just have to go fig-less! :/ I can’t say that I’m terribly happy about what, and how much, I’m eating at the moment, but – as I kept on saying about my Optifast diet – this isn’t forever! Easter, and all it’s tempting trappings will soon be over, and I can get back to eating “properly” (read: “sensibly”!) again.

Weigh-in this morning. Was worse than horrible! I went up over a kilo – from 62.6kg to 63.8kg – but as Julian said, a lot of it is probably fluid, because you don’t put on that much weight (by putting on fat) overnight. I’m a trifle concerned, but I’m not worried (yet!) – I’m pretty much looking at the next couple of weeks from an academic view point – of mild interest, but of no great import – because Easter is an artificial and transient time, and not a lifestyle change. I shall be very interested in seeing where my weight goes from here – probably straight up! :/

And so to tomorrow – the Lexus is being serviced tomorrow, so it’s going to be a “bitty” sort of day because Julian will be in and out, dropping off the car, and picking it up again, as well as taking my favourite eldest daughter to another appointment. The cleaning lady is coming tomorrow morning, and Josh will be over in the afternoon. I have Wïnter to get through all the hassles of the Dark Portal and into Draenor, so that she can establish her Garrison – and I have Wynterthyme to take out questing – trying to get to “Revered” with one of the Draenei Factions, before I die of old age! Shekinàh is still messing around, trying to get her Garrison working properly, but she says that she keeps getting interrupted when I decide to take Wynterthyme out instead… whilst poor old Arisnoë is still sitting around in a Grizzly Hills meadow, waiting for her Prince Arcturis, the Spirit Bear to turn up. I tell you (Winter shakes her head resignedly) it isn’t easy being a Gamer! My mother would say that it’s “unproductive” – and it’s true, it is unproductive! But so is sitting around and watching sit-coms on TV, or reading the newspaper – or what passes for “news” papers these days! And while sitting around playing games might be “unproductive”, it’s certainly a lot better and safer than a lot of other pleasures and pastimes I could name! 😉 But anyway, that’s about it from me again for tonight – don’t forget to drop in again tomorrow night to find out if Julian’s stomach has settled down, if my weight continued to spiral upwards at a rate of knots, and if I ate my second last (and medium-sized!) Easter Egg, all in one go too! Until then though, please do try to bee good, remember that in general, people are always quick to believe what they want to be true, and don’t forget to keep warm – or cool – depending on your inclination, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.27

9.40 pm

Well, here I am, very late tonight, and with a new resolution concerning my blog writing. I usually try to start writing around 4.30 pm, and it takes me until at least 6.30 pm, if not longer. On the days when I start late, I usually don’t finish writing until well after 11.30 pm. So, why do I do it? Well, it’s addressed to all of you our there in Reader Land, of course, but I also write it for myself – to put down the days doings, with all my petty little trials and tribulations, my usually minor, but occasionally major, triumphs and milestones – in a way, it helps me keep my life in perspective – and if it gives any of you enjoyment, outrage, or a good belly laugh, well, I’d count that as a bonus!

However, I can’t keep on writing the way I have been, so I’ve decided to try a new way! From now on – well, starting tomorrow, I mean – I’m going to be writing “snippets” – paragraphs – here and there during the day. I’ll try it for a week, and see how it goes – maybe I only need a week’s holiday from the solid blocks of writing I’ve been doing – we’ll see. If this new idea doesn’t work out, I’ll try something else – but no matter which way I decide to go, I’ll keep on writing every day – besides, you’d all be eaten up with curiosity and frustration, if I didn’t disclose to you the continuing saga of my weight, what we’ve decided to do about the fishpond, aquarium, and aviary, and how Wynterthyme, Shekinàh,  Arisnoë, and Wïnter are all getting on! 🙂

You’ll see the extra additions throughout the day listed like this:


10.00 pm

I’ll publish each bit as I write it, and add more throughout the day with a simple Edit, Update, and re-Publish, so that everything should still remain in context, and within the right “earthdate”.

As for today, Easter Sunday, here’s a brief re-cap! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. I thought the fluid was finally on the move! (and just as well too, after everything I ate today!) and today I went from 63.2kg to 62.6kg – down 6 points! Don’t worry though, I’ll be back up a couple of kilos tomorrow! And you know what? It’ll have been worth it! 🙂

As the day progressed, food-wise! We started off with one and a half Hot Cross Buns, toasted, with a scraping of butter, for breakfast. Those Ferguson Plarre HCB’s really are the best I’ve ever tasted, and that’s not just me “waxing lyrical” about them! They really are fantastic! Lunch. Julian made a really great salad – Iceberg lettuce, red and yellow capsicum, mixed cherry tomatoes cut in half, spring onions, Kalamata olives, european cucumber, celery, and cubes of Fetta cheese. I like my salad “naked”, but although there was dressing for it if anyone wanted any, no-one did, and we all enjoyed the salad “au naturel” (we should have those salads more often – it was really very nice…) There were fresh bread rolls with butter, Nandos chicken tenders, Nandos chips, both hot and mild peri-peri sauces, plus some Perinaise (peri-peri mayonnaise) to dunk the chicken tenders and chips in. There was a bottle of Chandon for before lunch, and a bottle of red wine that everyone had with lunch – I was the odd one out, I had a half glass of white wine (I like red wine, but it doesn’t like my stomach! :/ ) Dessert was the extremely delicious and “chewy-like-a-brownie” Flourless Chocolate Cake, with runny low-fat cream (Julian’s only concession to us “dieters” – Lee, Kate, and myself!) which was followed by coffee, and some of Kate’s home-made, simply scrumptious, “Confetti Cookies” (I think that’s what they’re called!) They’re supposed to have “pastel” M&M’s sprinkled on top of them, but as they’re not available here, she used ordinary M&M’s – and those Cookies were “Baby Bears”¹ (“just right!” ) We’d bought a box of Cadbury’s Roses Chocolates, as “after lunch chocolates”, and… they’re all gone! I think all that’s left of our luncheon today is one-third of the Flourless Chocolate Cake, which Julian and I shall polish off for dessert over the next three or four days – but truly, it was a wonderful feast, and I don’t regret one crumb of it all! 🙂

You know, Julian and I realised this morning that this is the first Easter in as long as we’ve been together – 30 years – that we haven’t had a Colomba² – an Italian Easter cake – for Easter Sunday! To tell the truth, they’re usually all over the place before Easter – in Supermarkets and Delicatessens – I haven’t seen any this year! No wonder we “forgot”!

And that’s about it from me for tonight – Drop in again tomorrow night and see how my “write as I go” plan is working out, and if I need to reach for the Optifast again after my gluttonous lunch today! However I’m afraid you don’t get out of my nightly little “bon mot” that easily! 😉 So, until tomorrow night, do try very hard to bee good, remember that if you can’t amaze people with your intelligence, confuse them with your wisdom, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on how you feel at the time… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

¹“Baby Bears” – because of what Goldilocks said when she sat on Baby Bear’s chair (and broke it!), ate Baby Bear’s porridge (and scraped the bowl) and fell asleep in Baby Bear’s bed – because they were all “just right” for her! Hench the term “baby bear” means “just right!” K?

²“Columba” is “Dove” in Italian – the cakes are sort-of like a Panettone, only without the fruit in it, they’re covered in a thick-ish coating of meringue and big fat sugar crystals, and are baked roughly in the shape of a flying dove.

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.26

So, what’s been happening today, apart from me trying not to burst out singing “When the Easter Bunny comes hop-hop-hopping along…” and nonchalantly pretending not to care two hoots, but secretly longing for tomorrow morning, to see if Mr. E. Rabbit Esq. has left anything sort-of a bit chocolaty for me… “I think that’s him, a-coming now! (anxiety bedewed her brow)”¹ You know, for a serious chocolaholic like myself, Easter Sunday – or as it is often referred to these days – “The Official Chocolate Eating Day”, is a day to anticipate and salivate for, all year – and of course last “TOCED”, I was in the throes of my Optifasting regimen! I just had to ignore the chocolate that surrounded me, threatening to overwhelm me, whenever I went into a shopping complex, and I’d grit my teeth, muttering my favourite dietary mantra: “This isn’t forever, next year I can participate too!” And this year, I can! 🙂 Yayyy! 🙂

This morning we did leave fairly early – Julian and I both had our “walkies”, and then we had our delicious Hot Cross Bun breakfast, and pretty much went off to do our shopping! Ferguson Plarre and the Supermarket first, then Bunny’s, where I got two small hand-basin sized “sink-strainers”, which… don’t work. After all that effort to get them, they’re just as bad as the pushmi-pullyu plugs! The pushmi-pullyu plugs are screwed into the plug hole, and due to a “design fault” (the whole pushmi-pullyu plug is a “design fault”, if you ask me!) the screw part causes an air-lock in the waste pipe, preventing the water from draining out of the basin… so if you’ve left the tap running while you’ve turned your back for even a few seconds, the fairly shallow basin very quickly over-fills… and you find yourself mopping up the ensuing flood! And as for the little “sink-strainers”, Julian says that the water going through the strainer part gets held back by surface tension, because the little holes are too small. We did find that unscrewing the pushmi-pullyu plugs almost to the point where you could lift them out, did help a bit – with cold water, anyway – though I’ve found, from bitter experience, that hot, or even warm water, makes the screw part of the mechanism swell – just enough to narrow the pipe even more, and make the air-lock it causes even harder to get rid of! The person who invented those pushmi-pullyu plugs should be tarred and feathered! (*grrr*)

I did get a fair amount of WoW-ing in this morning before we left – enough to get Wynterthyme’s Followers sent off on new Missions, anyway -and when we got home I got onto my second account and started leveling up Wïnter, my new character, who’s just reached level 10 (all in one day, too! 🙂 ) On the advice from my favourite eldest daughter, I’m going to level her up to 60 in the two Professions she’s chosen – Skinning and Herbaling – she’s already past 60 in her Skinning, and is quite quickly getting up there with her Herbaling. Once she gets to 60 in Herbaling, I’m going to boost her to level 90, to see how she goes with a Garrison to look after! 🙂

When we went shopping this morning, first of all we went up to “Burwood East One”. That, I learnt today, is the name of the large Coles/K-Mart complex on the corner of Burwood Highway and Blackburn Road. While Julian drove around looking for somewhere to park, I went and had a look to see if Ferguson Plarre had anything not too wicked that we could have as dessert for our Easter Luncheon tomorrow – all their stuff is excellent, so it was a tough choice! In the end I bought a very nice looking “Flourless Chocolate Cake”, and if it’s anything like their little, bite-size flourless chocolate cakes, it’ll be exactly what’s needed to finish off a lovely family lunch! There was also an equally delicious-looking “Chocolate Truffle Cake”, which I eyed off at first, but I decided against it for various reasons… one being that it was probably a bit too rich, after a big lunch. We’d decided to make our own salad, rather than a store-made one – Nandos do make a very nice Greek Salad, but we wanted to use low-fat fetta cheese, and we also had a lot of the salad ingredients at home anyway. So after getting everything we wanted from the Supermarket, including a box of “after dinner chocolates” (well, it is “The Official Chocolate Eating Day”, after all! 😉 ) Julian went to Nandos to order the chicken and chips for tomorrow, and we headed off for Bunny’s and Officeworks. Well, I did find my little basin strainers at Bunny’s, but as I said earlier, they were a big disappointment! I also got another non-slip shower mat, Julian got two hose-reels and some wood putty, and we finally got our kumquat tree tub! It’s a nice big, rectangular, off-white, fiber glass tub, with an embossed border vertically down one side. I hope our little kumquat tree likes it! I also saw exactly the sort of fish pond “mould” (I dunno – should that be “mold”? I looked it up in the dictionary, and it used both spellings in the same context, which just made me think that it was as confused as both Julian and I were! I always get “mold” and “mould” confused – sorry!) Anyway, I saw a black plastic in-ground pond shape “thingy” which would be ideal outside, under a spreading chestnut fig tree! It had ledges to plant pond plants and a deeper part to plant water lilies, and I reckon it’d look right purdy! 😉 Oh, I saw, and I bought (because we can’t find the other half of the one my favourite eldest daughter and her spouse gave me!) a very nice little desk-top fountain, which I’ll get Julian to set up on my desk later on. Then we went to Officeworks, where I got some more magazine holders, as all the ones I had are already full… And then we came home and had lunch! 🙂

Food stuffz: last night we had a very nice boneless lamb roast, with roast potatoes, roast pumpkin, half a tomato, and snow peas. All very delicious – the lamb was so tender it almost fell apart! For dessert I had some of the yummy Coles brand very low-calorie Rice Pudding – and I’d better start eating my figs and my Corella Pears soon, before they go off!  While we were out this morning, we stopped at Ferguson Plarre for a cup of coffee (whenever I’m out, and wherever we end up having coffee, I always have a long black, with a small jug of skinny milk) and I tried one of their “new” lemon tarts, which was just as good as the rest of their fare, so today for lunch I had two Ryvita crispbreads, with low-fat ricotta cheese, and some chopped up left-over lamb roast from last night – extremely delicious! 🙂 Tonight we’re having – not the King Island Beef sausages this time, a new one – Cleaver’s Beef Sausages, which I reckon were on a par with the King Island ones! If you see them in the Supermarket, you really should try them! We had all the usual suspects with the new sausages – chips, half a tomato, and “something green”. I’m not sure what I’ll end up having for dessert – possibly one of my pears, if they’ve ripened up enough, and definitely one of my figs… We still have a few breakfast’s worth of Hot Cross Buns – I’ll be very sad when we eat the last of them – they’re really beautiful!

Weigh-in this morning. Well, from the look of my fingers and feet, I think the fluid might be starting to “retreat”, though from what my scales are telling me, you’d never guess it! At least I didn’t go up again today (I will on Monday though! 😦 ) I went from 63.2kg to 63.2kg… so I stayed the same, despite all the extra walking and exercise I’ve done over the last couple of days! :/ Well, it’s better than going up again, I suppose…

Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day – the kids will be over between noon and 12.30 (unless they’re running late!) and the chicken is to be picked up around 12.45 (I think!) so from about noon onwards, I’m going to be so busy, trying to eat all of my Easter Eggs before the…. ! What am I saying! No! I mean I’ll be so busy enjoying having both of my favourite daughters together for a change! I wasn’t thinking about eating Easter Eggs at all! Hot Cross Buns, maybe, but certainly not Easter Eggs! 😉 (psst! Wanna buy a bridge? Real cheap!… only one owner…) 🙂 I don’t think I’m going to get much of a look-in at WoW – oh, I’ll prolly be able to organise my Followers and my Fleet, if I’m lucky, but I’m really looking forward to tomorrow, whatever the scales tell me in the morning! Anyway, once again, that’s about it from me for tonight! Do call in again tomorrow though, and find out how our day went, and whether Mr. E. Rabbit Esq. paid us a visit in the wee small hours of the morning (I hope he doesn’t make a noise and upset Flipper, who’s now taken to sleeping on our bed every night! You know, I don’t really mind her sleeping on the bed, it’s the lumps of long tangled fur that she leaves behind that bug me!) However until tomorrow night, please bee good, and leave a carrot out for you-know-who! 😉 remember to always do the right thing – it will gratify some people and astonish the rest. Don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather, and to always drive carefully… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

¹From: “King John’s Christmas” – with apologies to A. A. Milne!

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.25

Well, I’m not as early as I would have liked, but I’m still early-ish, sort-of. I’d started a new character a couple of days ago, when I couldn’t get on to Quel’Dorei (it was when Blizzard were having all sorts of nasty problems – remember? and Julian and I had to use the Sydney-based server, Nagrand…) I’d created her with the sole purpose of snapping her up to level 90, etc., etc., but thank goodness I didn’t, because of course, the whatever-it-was that was wrong with Blizzard has (apparently) been sorted out, and now that everything’s tickety-boo again, I don’t really need that character on Nagrand (I really must remember to go and delete her, as all characters count in the number of characters you’re allowed per account!) So anyway, I wanted a Human Hunter to boost up to level 90, mainly to see what a Human looked like in a Human Garrison – yeah, stupid, I know – a character is a character, and a Garrison is a Garrison, full stop. The Horde Garrison isn’t as… pretty, neat, or clean as the Alliance Garrison, and the buildings have different “name labels”. The Horde Garrison is located in a much more unpleasant area, too, but other than that, they’re pretty much the same… I also think that the Horde quests to establish your Garrison are quite a lot harder to complete, but then it seems to be a “World of Warcraft Cultural Thing” from the very beginning, a lot like Starfleet versus the Klingons. The Horde (read: Klingons) have always been portrayed as being the “baddies”, or villains of Azeroth (and now, it seems, Draenor too) a somewhat grubby, coarse, unkempt, undisciplined and uncivilised “mob” – lord knows, their Fearrrless Leaders don’t even seem to be capable of intelligible speech! Apart from their great stone and metal fortresses, their homes seem to be roughly slapped together from odd bits and pieces of wood, with a tattered hide stretched over the top as a “roof”! If you play a Horde character, even a sophisticated Blood Elf, you’ll find that the quests are either harder to complete, or more complicated than the Alliance equivalent. *shrug* I dunno – I just feel that the Horde really do get the rough end of the stick… So, I made this Human character the other day, got her into the Guild, set her up with bags, and gold and a decent weapon – and started her up in the Baby Area. I did everything right. I learnt Skinning and Herbaling as Professions, got her past the starting area, and up to level 6, before I realised… I’d started her on the wrong ruddy account! I’d already used up my Wynterthyme account “Bonus Boost to 90”, on Shekinàh! Shoot! I was not a happy little Vegemite when I realised what I’d done… *sigh* What could I do, but pass all her worldly possessions on to another new character – this time on my second account – and start all over again! And that’s why I didn’t start as early as I’d intended! 🙂

Anyway, we slept in a bit this morning, but still managed to get a lot of WoW-ing in before lunchtime. I helped Julian bring down an extremely tough Silver Elite that had given him a lot of grief yesterday, and he helped me to complete a quest I was on (Mouselet had already completed it) Shekinàh is still proceeding slowly, still trying to get to level 96 so that she can upgrade some of her Garrison Buildings, and Wynterthyme doesn’t seem to be getting any nearer to her goal of “Exalted” with the ruddy Council of Exarchs than she was three months ago! I dunno – my Reputation bar, set up to show my progress towards “Exalted” with the Council of Exarchs, just isn’t moving! 😦 I don’t really know what else I can do! I’ve already done all the quests that I can find that are supposed to further your Reputation with that Faction – I’ve read in some of the Forums that you just have to work your way through all the zones, and that you’ll pick up the Reputation you need that way – but that’s what I’ve been doing for the last week – and as I said – that Reputation bar hasn’t moved even a micro-millimeter!

I’ve been giving quite a lot of think-time to Julian’s suggestion of getting an indoor aquarium – where we’d put it, what sort of fish would we have – goldfish? tropical? marine? I’d love to have a marine aquarium! The marine fishes seem to be much prettier, and much more colourful than their tropical cousins! I first saw a marine aquarium about a million years ago, in a Chinese restaurant – amongst all the fishes they had in their absolutely beautiful display, there were two shy little fish that spent most of their time hiding under the artfully placed rocks and coral on the aquarium floor, they were only about 8cm long, and they absolutely enthralled and fascinated me! They were paisley! I kid you not, paisley! Their colours were so vibrant and brilliant – I kept getting up from the table to go and look at them! Marine fishes are expensive to get, and very expensive to maintain – you have to have all sorts of fancy heaters, and lights, and filters, so if we did end up getting an aquarium, we might have to settle for goldfish or tropical… As for where to put it – well, Julian suggested the wall between the outside deck and the “Library” door, and it would look pretty good there – it’d balance out the big glass display cabinet on the other side of the doorway very nicely! But I’d still like a backyard fish pond, or at least a pool of some sort – because as I said to Julian, regarding the indoor aquarium “Yes, but you can’t have a fountain in an indoor aquarium!”, to which he had to agree… so at the moment, both ideas are floating around in my think tank!

Food stuffz: last night we had those weird little filo pastry “parcels” – they were supposed to be lamb (well, Julian bought them as “lamb” parcels, anyway!) but they actually turned out to be chicken! “Flakes” of chicken (which in all honesty were too small to be called “chunks”, and too big to be called “chicken mince”) in way too much fake-creamy white sauce, all wrapped up in rather nice filo pasty – in fact, the filo pastry was about the best part of the little parcels! I don’t think we’ll be getting them again… We had them with chips, half a tomato, a small, steamed, button squash, and green beans. For dessert we had one of the Ferguson Plarre Hot Cross Buns each – slightly warmed in the microwave, and with a scrape of butter (Note: you really have to be very careful warming yeast-containing items in a microwave – if you warm them up too much they turn rubbery, and if you let them cool down too much after you’ve warned them, they go stale! Microwave yeast-containing items at your own risk!) They were the very best Hot Cross Buns I think I’ve ever eaten! They were to die for! I’d give them a score of 22.5 out of 10! For lunch today I had a ham, low-fat Halloumi cheese, and tomato, on Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread – it was a lovely sandwich, and I was particularly impressed with the bread – it had a lovely “crunch” to the crust, which had been liberally sprinkled with sesame and poppy seeds. I think we might get that bread again! Tonight we’re having roast lamb, roast potatoes, roast pumpkin, and snow peas – and of course, we’ll be having another Ferguson Plarre Hot Cross Bun for dessert! I’ll let you know what the roast was like tomorrow night! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Was not good at all! I went up another two points, from 63.0kg to 63.2kg! All I can think of is that I’ve had a very low-grade viral infection – I was just so thirsty yesterday, and as I said – I hardly ever get “thirsty”! Yes, I like my coffee, and my tea, but I drink them because I like them, not because I’m “thirsty”. Usually when I get some sort of low-grade virus, all I want to do is drink orange or mandarin juice, and I get terribly thirsty – well, that’s what I felt like yesterday, only of course we didn’t have any orange or mandarin juice, so I just had to drink water – and that extra cup of tea late last night – so I suppose it’s no great surprise that my fingers and feet have been getting swollen, and that my weight’s been going up. Or, on the other hand, it is Easter, and I have been having one Hot Cross Bun with a scraping of butter for dessert, for the last three nights! Maybe it’s the Hot Cross Buns and the butter! Then of course there’s Sunday, and Easter Eggs! I don’t think I even want to think about that in relation to my weight! :/ So the words: “And this, too, shall pass…”¹ is a damn fine saying to think about instead! 🙂

And so to tomorrow! 🙂 Well, I believe that we have an early visit to Bunny’s, to find a suitable large tub for our little kumquat tree – I was going to look for a fish-net there, but we already got one of those from the Pet Shop yesterday, so the only other thing that I have to ferret around for at Bunny’s is a bathroom plug-hole strainer of some sort! I really hope they have one… I reckon I could probably make one myself, if I had the right tools (and I really only have a very vague idea as to what I’d need!) I’d need a flat metal ring – a large-ish flat metal washer would do – and some mosquito proof fly-wire. Tin snips, or whatever they’re called, for cutting out a neat circle of fly-wire, and something with which to affix the fly-wire across the circle inside the metal washer! Viola, as the French say – one bathroom plug-hole strainer! Sort-of, anyway… And once more, that’s about it from me for this evening! Do drop in again tomorrow night to find if my weight is trying to go back to normal, or if it’s still insisting on going up! And how was our roast lamb? What about Wynterthyme, Shekinàh, Arisnoë, and this new girl, Wïnter? Never fear! All your questions will be answered tomorrow night! 🙂 Until then though, please do try to bee good – remember that the Easter Bunny will be here the day after tomorrow! 😉 Remember that there is no great genius without some touch of madness, and don’t forget to stay cool – or warm, depending on your preferences, to always drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

¹This is not actually a quote from the Bible…

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.24

Yay!! An early start, for a change! 🙂 Well, today we had intended to go out early this morning, to do our pre-Easter shopping – but once again, life sort-of got in the way a bit. As it usually does… My favourite eldest daughter had forgotten that she needed to get a new script from the doctor, and as the doctor is quite a long way from their place, she needed a lift… and could we provide one for her, please? So instead of heading out to do our shopping early, we stayed home and took Wynterthyme and Mouselet off to do their 600 barrels of oil worth of Daily questing. We had to go to a different place today – very dangerous! There were “pools” (puddles? lakes?) of toxic green goo down in the bottom of what could only be called “craters”, which made you sick if you walked in it, or fell in it. This toxic green goo was what’s called (by me, anyway!) a “buff-debuff”! That is, if you go in it, you get what’s called a “Buff” – you do an extra 30% damage to whatever you’re fighting, which is good! Unfortunately, it also gives you a “DeBuff” (or perhaps “anti-buff” is a better description) in that you also receive 30% extra damage from whatever hits you, which, of course, isn’t fair! What’s more, these debuffs, or anti-buffs, “stick” to you! Once you get ten of them on you, you die! Horribly! (well, perhaps not horribly, but you do die, and that’s not considered to be good, by most players…) Wynterthyme managed to fall into the goo a few times, and because her jumping isn’t exactly “Olympic standard”, she also managed to accidentally jump into the goo a few times whilst trying to get out of one of the craters! In the end, she had 9 stacks of “debuff” on her – one more, and she would have been dead! Luckily we finished the quest shortly after that, so Wynterthyme was saved from a fate worse than….er… well, she didn’t die from it! But at least we both collected our 600 barrels of oil quest reward – and then it was time for Julian to go and play taxi for my favourite eldest daughter! So while I didn’t manage to accomplish anything much in WoW today, at least we got our rather lucrative Daily done! 🙂

After dropping my favourite eldest daughter back at her place, Julian rang me to say he was on his way home, and to get my shoes on and wait out the front for him, which I did (I can be very dutiful on occasion… mainly just to confuse people! 😉 ) and off we went to Knox City, where we had lunch. After that, we went upstairs to Howard’s Storage World, where I looked for – and found – a very nice little white “tidy” with a swing-lid! It’s quite swish, actually – a sort-of “lucent white”, with a clear perspex swing-lid – it fits very nicely under my vanity unit, and is almost exactly what I was after! They also had those little kitchen sink strainer insets, but they were the wrong sort, with a flexible rubber, “dangle down into the drainpipe” strainer, which was far too big. They said to try Bunny’s for smaller, bathroom ones, which we were going to do on our way home… then we looked around for the usual, ubiquitous Easter Egg and Easter Card kiosks, which always seemed to abound in shopping complexes around Easter time, and would you believe, we couldn’t find one anywhere! Where have they all gone? Sold out before Easter? I can’t believe that! They’re usually around for weeks afterwards, flogging their cut price, left-over chocolate eggs for… err…. for next Easter, perhaps? Anyway, we didn’t quite walk the length and breadth of the entire Knox City complex, but we did walk most of the length and breadth of it, both upstairs and downstairs, and didn’t see any sign of anything “Easter-ish” at all! Most peculiar, mamma! In the end we went to Sweet As to look for our Easter Eggs (mainly because we happened to be standing right outside it when we stopped looking around for the missing Easter Egg and Easter Card kiosks) so at least we have “token” Eggs for the kids! 🙂 We then made our way to the Pet Shop. which is outside, just around the corner from Adairs. We were looking for some fine sand for an incense bowl, which we found, so I’m looking forward to burning some nice incense later on, and I found my fish-net thingy, at long last! It’s not quite as big as I would have liked, and its handle isn’t terribly long, but it should do the trick! 🙂 I also asked the nice young lady behind the counter if there was any reasonably easy way to get rid of excess algae in ponds, fully expecting her to say apologetically that no, there wasn’t… but she didn’t! She said that first we should put up a bit of a sun-screen, otherwise it’ll just grow again, and secondly, there was some “bottled gunk” (she did tell us what it was, but I fergit what she said!) that we had to put in the water, every day for (however long she told us, which I also fergit!) and then once a week after that, to stop it from re-growing. We didn’t get any of this bottled gunk today though, because unless we have a half-way decent water filter system installed, we’d have to siphon the dead algae out – which for some obscure reason, Julian didn’t fancy doing! 😉 (yes, I do know how a siphon works, and I also know that if you’re not careful, you’re liable to get a mouthful of something that you’d really rather not have a mouthful of! Like dead algae…) But at least I have my net, now! 🙂 Well, we were going to be going to Bunny’s on the way home, but by this time my back had almost completely given out and I was in considerable pain, so we decided to leave Bunny’s for Saturday morning and just come straight home so that I could take some Panadol – and we forgot that we needed to get some more toilet paper! Oh well, I think we have enough to last us until Saturday…

Food stuffz: last night we had the rest of the left-over Chicken Provencale, which was a nice as – if not better than – it was the first time we had it! We had it on a bed of steamed rice, rather than with vegetables, and quite frankly, it was much better, served like that! I didn’t have a fig last night, I just had one of the Doncaster Hot Cross Buns – heated up in the microwave a bit this time, and with a scraping of butter on it – and again, it was very nice! Today we each had a Hot Cross Bun – toasted, and with a scrape of butter – for breakfast, and we had lunch at The Shingle Inn up at Knox City, where I had a BLT on Sourdough Bread (they make really nice BLT’s there – they’re not smothered in mayo, and they don’t drip mayo and/or salad dressing all over you when you pick them up to eat them “a la sandwich”) For dessert I had a flattish type of Brownie, which had runny chocolate sauce just underneath the icing – delicious! 🙂 Tonight we’re having lamb wrapped up in little filo pastry “packets” (no, I don’t know what they’re called, and neither does Julian) with our usual chips, half a tomato, and green beans. I’ll probably have another store-bought fig for dessert, unless the one that was hanging over our back fence is ripe enough to eat, and we’ll probably have another of our Doncaster Hot Cross Buns…

Weigh-in this morning. Was a disaster! Oh, I know it’s nearly all fluid – both my feet and my fingers were very swollen last night – and were still a bit puffy this morning! Apparently my body thinks that the weather is going to get very humid! (Oh please! I hope not!) But still, I was quite horrified this morning to find that I’d gone back up from 62.2kg to 63.0kg! Eight points! And I didn’t even eat or drink anything unusual all day! However, I was – and still am – terribly thirsty – and I virtually never get thirsty! I even had a second cup of tea last night, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever done before! Oh well, we’ll see how much more I go up tomorrow, after the BLT on Sourdough Bread, and the Brownie! Not good, with National Chocolate Eating Day around the corner on Sunday! 😦

Anyway, tomorrow is Good Friday, and we’re having Roast Lamb for dinner, with baked potatoes, baked pumpkin, green beans, and our ever-present half a tomato 😛 Hopefully we’ll get a fair bit of WoW-ing in too, because we certainly won’t get a chance to play on Sunday, or even Saturday, because we’ll be busy shopping and doing “other” things! I think we might have to make Monday our Sunday again… Oh, don’t forget! You Must Not Wash Anything On Good Friday! If you do, you’ll wash whoever’s clothes you washed, out of the house (some people say “out of your lives, permanently!”) so… just to be on the safe side, don’t wash anything, OK?! So, after all of that, that’s about it from me for tonight! Do remember to drop by again tomorrow night, and find out just what my stupid body thinks it’s doing, weight-wise, and whether or not we got any WoW-ing in. There’ll be lots of interesting news, and lots of amusing trivia for you all anyway, so don’t miss out! 🙂 Until then though, do try to bee good, remember that the bad news is time flies, but the good news is you’re the pilot, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on what you’re doing at the time… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.23

Well, as they say in the classics, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”! There was I, thinking that I’d be able to get a nice early start this evening, and what happens? My favourite eldest daughter called in one her way home from uni – so I’m starting after dinner (and television) again. And yes, I have changed the blog Template and header – yet again! I couldn’t find a colour that didn’t look too “twee”, so I just made everything… white. I did make something in a rather pretty shade of lilac, but it was a bit too bright – I’ll see if I can tone it down with a bit of grey, and if I think it’s suitable, I may re-do this again tomorrow, because it’s got the widest text column that I’ve been able to find, so far! So… what’s been happening today – let’s see… I played WoW this morning, and took Wynterthyme on a Daily run with Mouselet, to get some drums of oil for my Fleet – a “Daily” quest is one with a fixed quest reward (usually gold or goods) that can be done once every day – they’re very handy for getting items that you always seem to need a lot of, like…. money, or in this case, oil for our ships! Mouselet and Wynterthyme have resolved to do this Daily quest together, every day – we both need all the barrels of oil that we can lay our hands on! We actually had quite a good run today – we scored a very welcome 600 barrels of oil each – and while each of us is capable of doing this Daily solo, it’s a lot quicker and easier with the two of us doing it! 🙂 Then I woke up Shekinàh, and took her out to Gorgrond to finish up a couple of quests she’d started the other day, and that went quite well too – but I’m frustrated at how slowly she’s leveling up! Leveling up solo at lower levels isn’t too bad – you do move up the ladder fairly quickly – but I’m afraid I’m spoilt – I’m so used to leveling up higher level characters as a team with Julian – and when you’re in a group, not only does each character share a percentage of the other’s experience points (I think it’s called a Group Bonus, or something) the game fairly races along because you get through the longer quest chains a lot faster! Shekinàh’s doing it all on her own, and with the exception of that “Vorka” quest, she’s handling it quite well – it’s just that it’s painfully s-l-o-w! Oh well, at least she scored another Follower today – now all she needs to do is get enough Garrison Resources to be able to send all her Followers out to do Missions for her! Unfortunately, I think both Wynterthyme and Shekinàh are going to have to take a break tomorrow, as I’m finally going to be able to do my shopping!

You know – Julian read my blog last night and didn’t pick up on it, but apparently somewhere along the line we got our wires crossed or something… He’d told me that Clarke was coming over today – and I’ll swear on a stack of anyone’s “Holy Literature”, that’s what he said. Today he tells me that it wasn’t Clarke who was coming over, it was the Cabinetmaker, about the drawers in my bathroom – and I wouldn’t mind betting that he’d probably be happy to swear on a stack of anyone’s “Holy Literature”, that’s what he said! So, the Cabinetmaker duly arrived, with my properly made double drawer (thank goodness! I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever get it back!) of course, it’s minus it’s little “built-in” waste basket that the original drawer had – the bin from that disappeared with Paul when he took the drawer off to the Cabinetmaker to be re-built, after he’d re-hung the shower door a cuppla weeks ago – and every time I’ve been in the bathroom since the Cabinetmaker left, I’ve looked at that drawer and wondered if I really need to have a small waste bin tucked away in there, when I so desperately need every square mico-millimeter of room in there for tall bottles and stuff… so I’m slowly coming to the decision that there’s plenty of room underneath the vanity unit for a small, discrete, white bin in which to put used makeup wipes and band-aid wrappers (all right then, chewing gum wrappers!) So when we go shopping tomorrow morning, I’ll go to Howard’s Storage World up at Knox City and see what they’ve got in the way of small, white tidy bins! 🙂 Oh, the drawers that were so stiff and weren’t closing properly? The Cabinetmaker didn’t have a clue as to why they weren’t working properly – they should have been – and in the end it was Julian who diagnosed the problem – he removed the “soft-closing” mechanism (it’s supposed to make the drawer close gently on its own) and the drawers worked perfectly (though they didn’t close on their own when not fully closed manually) In the end, the three of us decided that – we all hated self-closing drawers, that they weren’t at all helpful to people who had them installed, and what’s more, didn’t always work properly! We left the self-closing bits in the long drawers though, because they worked reasonably well – and Julian can always remove them if I decide I can’t stand them any longer! 🙂 Talking about things that don’t work properly in bathrooms, do any of you out there have those ghastly push-down plugs in your hand basins? You don’t use a loose plug to fill the basin, you push this little knob down instead – then when you want to let the water out, you push the little knob down again, and it pops back up, allowing the water to drain out. I hate them! I detest them! I loath them with a passion! I can’t stand them! I wish they’d never been invented! I think they’re just a wicked plot by the Government to force us to use less water, like those wretched flow restricters that they make you put into showers! (we don’t have one in ours, we took it out! I refuse to be dribbled on by the shower when I’m trying to rinse shampoo out of my hair!) Anyway, I’m trying to find out if there are bathroom basin “drain insets”, like you can get for kitchen sinks – they’re like little flat strainers, that stop small pieces of vegetable waste going down the plug hole, because you want to save them for the compost bin. You see, those horrible little “pushmi-pullyu” plugs can screw out, and you can throw them in your nice, white waste-bin and forget that they ever existed – but that leaves a yawning great hole in the bottom of your hand basin, and heaven help you if happen to drop an earring, or a diamond ring down it – it’ll be a major job requiring a $Plumber to extract it from the U-Bend – so if anyone knows where I can get one of those little sink-strainer thingies, I’d be ever so grateful if you could drop me a comment about where I can get one! Ta! 🙂

Food stuffz: last night we had a very delicious piece of steak, with half a tomato, chips, and broccoli and cauliflower florets – a really lovely meal – and for dessert, I had one of the store-bought figs, and one of the Doncaster Hot Cross Buns, just cut in half, with a bit of butter scraped on it. Lovely! 🙂 Lunch today was a wholemeal sandwich, with ham, low-fat cheese, and tomato, and while he was out picking up the Ferguson Plarre Hot Cross Buns, Julian also picked up a couple of little, almost muffin-sized orange cakes, which we had for a lunch dessert! I almost never have a lunch dessert, unless I’m out, so it was a real treat! 🙂 For dinner tonight we had the leftover Chicken Provencale, which Julian had frozen the other night – if anything, it was even better the second time around! That recipe is a definite keeper! 🙂 We had another of the Doncaster Hot Cross Buns for dessert tonight – this time slightly warmed up in the microwave – cut in half, and with a scraping of butter. Next time, I’d like to try them toasted… especially as they’ll prolly be a little bit stale by tomorrow…

Weigh-in this morning. Astounded me! I was sure I’d have gone up again – especially with the Hot Cross Bun for dessert! But I hadn’t. I’d gone down seven points, from 62.9kg to 62.2kg! There’s just no rhyme nor reason to it, is there! I’ve given up trying to work out what makes it tick – all I can do is keep an eye on it, and record it for posterity – then despair if it goes up too far, and worry if it goes down too low… As I think I said in an earlier blog – my weight graph looks like an old, broken toothed saw! :/ Well, today I had a sandwich (carbs!) a little cake (more carbs… and fat!) and a Hot Cross Bun (even more carbs, and even more fat!) let’s see what my scales say tomorrow! I can’t guess – can you? 😉

And so to a nice, long shopping trip! Here’s hoping I can get everything I want, from a fish-net scoop thingy for the mud-puddle, to a nice little white bathroom tidy-bin, as well as Easter Eggs for the children, and whatever else takes my fancy… (I’m also in the market for a nice turtle-neck jumper!) But that’s about it from me again for this evening – Drop in again tomorrow night to see what sort of surprise the scales had for me in the morning, and whether I managed to get anything at all done in WoW. I’ll fill you in on our shopping adventures, and if I managed to get my fish-net thingy – I think I might try the pet shop at Knox for that though, before we go to Bunny’s for the kumquat tub, as I also want to get a small bag of fine sand – not for an aquarium – or a fish pond – but for an incense bowl! Anyway until then, please try to bee good, remember that humans, not places, make memories, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to keep cool – or warm – depending on the weather, and to look after yourselves… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.22

Well, hooray and hallelujah! With a bit of luck, this’ll be the last night that I have to start late – until this time next week! My favourite eldest daughter was over today, but until she arrived I caught up with Wynterthyme, Shekinàh, and yes, even Arisnoë, who was still sitting forlornly in Grizzly Hills, waiting for her Prince Charming Spirit Bear to appear! For some reason, everything seems to be going terribly slowly, WoW-wise – I just don’t seem to be making any headway at all… whenever I say to myself “Yes, today I’ll…” and plan a course of action for Shekinàh, or decide to take Wynterthyme out for a quest-run in Gorgrond, or the Tanaan Jungle, or Nagrand – I either get caught up in organising my Followers and their Missions, or “servicing” Work Orders for my various Building enterprises – and I simply – run out of time – before I have to start my writing for the day! bleech! Never mind, I should be able to get a decent run at things tomorrow morning, at least until after lunch. The great Clarke is supposed to be gracing our doorstep sometime tomorrow afternoon – but (and please don’t take this the wrong way, Clarke, if you happen to be reading my blog tonight) I’ll believe it when I see it – and I’m certainly not going to be holding my breath – even though Julian said that he’d rung him to confirm his presence tomorrow – he’s let us down too many times lately! Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to play WoW tonight, even if I didn’t have to write this – all the WoW servers are coming down for maintenance tonight, and will be offline for several hours! (let’s hope that this lot of maintenance fixes some of the horribly annoying little “bugs” that have been driving me to distraction lately!) Oh well, at least I can rest easy about the fact that even if Arisnoë can’t get her bear tonight, at least no-one else can, either! 😉 Wynterthyme now has eight ships in her Fleet – 2 Transports, 2 Destroyers, 2 Battleships, and 2 Submarines – but she’s run out of oil and can’t send them out on Missions! It never rains but it pours, eh?! I really need to get Wynterthyme out to do some questing, and to glean some more timber and skins while she’s trying to earn Reputation points for the Council of Exarchs – but Farming for anything – Reputation or Reagents – is almost as boring as walking on the treadmill every morning, and I’m afraid I don’t handle it with very good grace :/

I suppose you’ve all probably noticed that the blog Template has changed  yet again – expect it to do so fairly regularly for a cuppla days, while I pretty much go through all of the Free Templates, searching for one that I really, really like… the trouble is that most of them don’t allow a wide enough column for the text – in fact, most of them simply present you with a narrow little strip down the centre of the page for text, or jam a narrow column over on one half of the screen, leaving the whole of the other half for their silly “Widgets” (the Calendar, Archives, Follow button, and Admin stuff) which would be much more better positioned at the bottom of the page, or hidden in a slide-out panel! I have found a couple of Templates that give you a reasonably sized central text column, but so far, those don’t give you the option of making a personalized header!  Anyway, I’m sure I’ll find something – sooner or later! 😉

While my favourite eldest daughter and I were lolling around watching recorded TV series, Julian went off to do a bit of shopping. I wanted him to go to Ferguson Plarre to get some Hot Cross Buns to “try out” before Friday, so I’d added “Hot Cross Buns – one dozen!” to the shopping list. Unfortunately, when he got to Ferguson Plarre they’d sold out! A bus load of little old ladies from a Retirement Village had been in and bought the lot – but they’ll have more tomorrow morning! So Julian has ordered two dozen of them, to be picked up tomorrow morning! He then went over to Doncaster, because last time he was over there he forgot to get more Nespresso Pods, and we were running dangerously low – and heaven forbid that we should run out of coffee on the Easter Long Weekend! We were also starting to run low on tea, so he went to T2 as well, and picked up a most curious “special” tea! Baxter’s Buns, which we’re sampling, even as I type! It’s a loose, flavoured black tea, which you can have with milk in it, and it’s really very, very nice! They also make a Caramel Brownie “special” tea, which Julian didn’t get, unfortunately, so I can’t tell you what it’s like – but it sure sounds scrumptious! 🙂 (psst! Specially for the chocoholics amongst you! They have several Chocolate Teas, too!) Anyway, I just finished my cup of Baxter’s Buns tea, and it was really very nice – if you’re into flavoured black teas, do get some – it’s only 50 cents more than T2’s other flavoured black teas, so do get some to enjoy over the Easter break! There was a fair amount of “throw-out” in the bottom of the cup, even though Julian used a tea strainer when pouring it, but forewarned is forearmed, so you shouldn’t cop a mouthful 🙂

Apropos of the Ferguson Plarre Hot Cross Buns – because he was unable to get any there this afternoon, and having ordered some for tomorrow, he tried again at Baker’s Delight over at Doncaster (upstairs, just down from Woolworths) but… a woman ahead of him at the counter bought the last ones! Not to be thwarted, he tried again at a bread shop (which he can’t remember the name of!) downstairs, and brought home a dozen quite nice looking Hot Cross Buns, which we sampled for dessert tonight. We had one each, cold out of the bag – we didn’t warm them in the oven or the microwave, and we didn’t toast them – just cut them in half and added a small scraping of butter – because you simply can’t eat Hot Cross Buns without butter – and I have to admit, they weren’t bad at all! They had a decent amount of fruit, and more importantly, spices, in them, for a change (it’s a mistake all the supermarkets make with their Hot Cross Buns – not enough spices! They’re almost white inside! They should be a sort of a dark ecru colour with spices inside!) I thought they were perhaps a trifle heavy – maybe a bit “doughy”? but that was probably because we didn’t warm them up in any way… I’m looking forward to sampling the Fergus Plarre ones tomorrow night! 🙂

Food stuffz: we had chicken sausages for dinner last night, with mashed potato (made with low-fat Greek yoghurt instead of milk and butter!) snow peas, and half a tomato, and I had the last of the store-bought figs, and a small dish of the delicious Coles brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding for dessert. Today for lunch I had a wholemeal sandwich, with basil-pesto hummus and sweet chili sandwich chicken chunks, and for dinner tonight we had a wonderful little piece of steak – once again cooked to perfection – with chips, half a store-bought tomato, and some steamed mixed broccoli and cauliflower florets. For dessert I had one of a new lot of store-bought figs, and one of the Hot Cross Buns that Julian got over at Doncaster this afternoon, split in half and with a scraping of butter on each half.

Weigh-in this morning. Wasn’t too bad – I went up another point, from 62.8kg to 62.9kg… I was going to say that hopefully that would be the last of the “going up!” bit until after Sunday – and while that would be very nice, I don’t think it’s going to happen – not while I’m “testing” Hot Cross Buns, anyway! So, it’s a toss-up! Continue testing Hot Cross Buns and allow my weight to slowly creep up a bit, or deny the Hot Cross Buns, and have Ryvita crispbreads with low-fat ricotta and tomato for lunch, and maybe start drifting downwards again… but it’s Easter – last Easter I was Optifasting, and nothing but Optifast bars and soups passed my lips – and I said to my family, as I watched them all eating chocolates and Hot Cross Buns, and hoping fervently that I would have hit maintenance before Christmas, “This isn’t forever! Next year, I’m going to enjoy Easter!” Well, it’s now “next year”, and I’m going to enjoy Easter! 😛

And so to tomorrow – hopefully it’ll be a fairly quiet day and I’ll be able to get a decent bit of WoW-ing in – but who knows… I haven’t been out to do any of the shopping that I’ve been wanting to do yet, and I’m starting to get a bit antsy! I have “things to get” before Sunday, and I’m very quickly running out of time! I know Julian is planning some sort of shopping “Raid” on Saturday, and although I’ve lost over 71 kilos, and I’m doing quite well at getting around shopping centres under my own steam, without the wheelchair, I’m not as quick on my feet as I was thirty years ago, and quite frankly, I don’t want to get caught out! I’m hoping against hope that we can do some shopping on Thursday… And with that plaintive plea, that’s once again about it from me for this evening! Do call in again tomorrow night to see how much the Hot Cross Bun affected my weight, if I’ve managed to get any further with Wynterthyme and Shekinàh, and whether or not Clarke turned up, this time – or if there’ll be another excuse (I’m actually betting on the latter! Prove me wrong, Clarke!) Until then, however, do see if you can bee good, remember not to just go through life, but to grow through life, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep cool – or warm – depending on the weather, and to always drive carefully… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.21

Reprise last night’s statement about being late again… and I’ll probably be late again tomorrow night too, if my favourite eldest daughter comes over – but… what’s an hour or two here or there –  or even now and then, hmm? 🙂 So… my day, with all its adventures – and quite a few misadventures, too! Of course, I played WoW – Wynterthyme is busily building her very first Submarine – unfortunately it meant getting rid of one of her Destroyers, but she has a fair way to go before she gets her Shipyard upgrade – at the moment she can only have six ships – she’ll have to work out which ones to keep, and which ones to “decommission” (which basically means destroying them – because when she can have more ships she’ll have to create new ones – she won’t be able to “recommission” them 😦 ) So this time around, she’ll end up with two Transports, two Destroyers, and two Submarines – and may the Horde have mercy on her small Fleet! At the moment she has two Transports, three Destroyers, and one Submarine – I’ll work on evening everything out for her tomorrow morning! Then I went over to work on Shekinàh… I hope she never finds out just how close she came to getting deleted today! :/ Honestly, I very nearly did… I was struggling through a long quest chain, and I’d finally got myself to the last scenario – I had to kill a certain “Commander Vorka” – and I just kept dying! Over, and over, and over – I lost count at twenty! The wretched thing about dying in this game is that the mob you’re fighting is restored to complete full health when you die! If you’re in the sort of situation I was this morning, where you’re resurrected exactly where you fell – which is usually quite close to where your enemy is – you come back with low health. Now, there are three ways to get your health back. 1. You can just wait. Eventually your health will regenerate. 2. You can take a Healing Potion – unless you took one just before you died, because Healing Potions have quite a long cool-down period! I’m not quite sure how long it is, but it’s certainly long enough for your enemy – who’s back at full health – to notice that you’re back and to begin attacking you – which usually means that you die again – rather quickly – then just rinse and repeat! Then there’s option 3. You can sit down and eat something, if you’re far enough away from your enemy to be out of combat, because you can’t sit down and have a nice healing sandwich when your life is in danger – and of course, in the situation I was in this morning, I wasn’t far enough away. So I just kept on… dying. I never even had enough time to call back my Pet, who’d got bored when I died, and wandered off somewhere! I just wasn’t fast enough – heck, half the time I couldn’t even find where my ruddy cursor was, amid all the special battle effects! So eventually I got totally fed up with the whole stupid situation – you apparently can call your Garrison Guard to assist you – but they got killed quicker than I did! In the end, after dying more than 20 times (I wonder if that’s some sort of Blizzard record?!) I logged out with the intention of deleting Shekinàh – because if I couldn’t play her, there was no point in having her! Luckily Julian came to my rescue as he always does, and he managed to get Commander Vorka down for me (he’s much better coordinated than I am, and unlike me, he always knows where his cursor is!) So Shekinàh lives to fight again another day… for now, anyway. I find it very annoying that Blizzard are so inconsistent – about ninety-nine and three fifths of the mobs have been nerfed almost out of existence, but some of the End Bosses, like Vorka, are simply too hard – according to the Forums, most people had difficulties finishing off this particular quest chain – some even said that they couldn’t finish it – so maybe I’m not such an abysmal player, after all?! I know that I’ve complained in the past about the lack of challenges in WoW and Rift, and it’s true! Most of the main quests and bonus quests are too easy! But just because I like a bit of a challenge, doesn’t mean that I want the quests to be nigh on impossible to complete without help!

Food stuffz: well, last night we didn’t have any dinner – we just had a Chia Pod each – mine was the plain vanilla one, which does however, have the slightest hint of chocolate flavour about it. Today for lunch I had a lovely, delicious wrap, with basil-pesto hummus, ham, tomato, sliced red pepper batons, and Halloumi cheese – very messy to eat, but also very delicious! 🙂 And for dinner tonight, we had a different type of chicken sausages, with mashed potatoes – this time with Greek yoghurt instead of milk and butter – half a tomato (not one of ours tonight :/ ) and snow peas. A very, very nice dinner! And for dessert I had the last of the store-bought figs, and some more of that delicious Coles brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding… so I’m expecting my weight to go up a bit more, tomorrow morning!

Weigh-in this morning. Surprised me! I expected to go up quite a lot, after all that chocolate cake yesterday, but I only went up two points! From 62.6kg to 62.8kg – totally amazing! However, I’ll probably go up a fair bit more tomorrow morning, after that yummy wrap for lunch today (I wouldn’t mind having those wraps for lunch every day, and dinner as well! I really like them, even if they are quite messy to eat!) and the heavenly Rice Pudding for dessert tonight (not to mention the chicken sausage and the mashed potato, even if it was made with low-fat Greek yoghurt!) Still, we’ll just have to weight and sea what transpires when I get on the scales in the morning! (I’ll probably have gone up to around 69.9kg or something! :/ )

So, apart from the sickening debacle with Commander Vorka this morning, the rest of my time in Draenor passed without any other unpleasant incidents, and I was quite pleased with Shekinàh’s overall progress. Josh was over today and my hair looks really nice again, thank goodness. And this week I have an agenda! We will be going to Bunnys to get both a large tub for the kumquat tree to live in, and a fish-pond scoop-net-thing with which to remove the dead leaves and scruff from the mud puddle around the water feature by the front door! We’re also going to be going up to the shopping complex on the corner of Burwood Highway and Blackburn Road to get some Hot Cross Buns from Ferguson Plarre (well, I mean we have to test them before Friday, don’t we, to make sure that they’re going to be suitable for the Easter long weekend! 😉 ) We still have to get Easter Eggs, too… *sigh* So much shopping to do… so few places to store everything I want to get… 😉 Tomorrow my favourite eldest daughter will be over again, though I’m not sure what we have left to watch! I’ve actually been thinking about Netflix, and wondering just what series they have to offer – Julian says you can’t go and see what they’ve got until you sign up for it, which is ridiculous! What if you sign up, and then find that they don’t have anything that interests you! And are all the series they do show littered with ads, like the Foxtel ones? (The never-ending “ad show”, infrequently interrupted with a few seconds worth of the Shannara Chronicles on the SyFy channel springs to mind!) because if so, I’m not interested! Still, that’s a discussion for another time, because that’s really about it from me for this evening! 🙂 Don’t forget to call back tomorrow night to find out how much my weight had gone up by tomorrow morning when I clambered onto the scales – and what I said about it – and whether or not Shekinàh has got enough Garrison Resources with which to send her growing band of Followers off on Missions, or not. However until tomorrow night, please do try to bee good, and don’t forget – no one is remembered for being normal!Remember to keep warm – or cool – depending on your preferences, to look after yourselves, and to always drive carefully – but above all, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.20

Well, it’s late again, but I have a good excuse! Erm… well, it’s a pretty lame excuse, actually – when we got back from our double Big Birthday Bash this afternoon, all I wanted was a stomach pump (because I’d eaten too much and was feeling quite uncomfortable) and a nice, cosy little nap… so guess what I did?! I played WoW! Yes, I not only logged on and finished processing all my Followers and their various Missions, something that I wasn’t able to do this morning because the U.S. side of Blizzard was having massive problems – we don’t quite know what happened, apart from the fact that it was definitely a State-side problem, and possibly something to do with routing (Sorry! As you know, I’m totally non-technical – I’m simply parroting Julian, OK?!) but the latency was sometimes as long as 8 seconds, and our connection kept dropping every few minutes or so, rendering the game totally unplayable. We knew it was only the State-side servers that were affected because the Sydney-based server Nagrand was working just fine, anyway, we stuffed around on Nagrand for a while, hoping the U.S. side of things would come good again, but it didn’t! When we got back this afternoon, I decided to try it, and everything seemed to be back to normal again – so I processed Wynterthyme’s Followers and their Missions, deleted another Transport and built a second Battleship instead, and went to work on Shekinàh. Oh dear, I’d forgotten that she didn’t have enough Garrison Resources to send her Followers out on Missions, and she’s “too young” to have a Shipyard yet, so there was nothing to do there except sit around and wait for the Garrison Cache to get big enough to “harvest” – that’ll net me enough Garrison Resources to start sending my Followers out (a full Garrison Cache yields around 500 Garrison Resources, so it’s worth waiting for it to fill up, which takes about three or four days…) Then I sat and twiddled my thumbs a bit – I knew I should probably be putting my feet up and sleeping off my dinner, but I didn’t want to, so I turned to my second WoW account and decided to start off another character (I have quite a few empty character slots on my second account 😉 ) to boost to level 90 and another Garrison – why? Because I’m a bit jittery about Shekinàh choosing a different Follower from the one Wynterthyme did – he’s just a bit too good at completing Missions to want to miss out on… So I created another Draenei called Såpphíra, with the intention of getting her to level 21, and then boosting her to level 90, etc., etc., and so forth! 🙂 So despite the fact that I kept falling asleep in the middle of quests – thank heavens I was still in the baby area – I persevered until dinner time, which neither of us had because we’d had so much for lunch – so we watched the news and had a Chia Pod each, and a cup of coffee. It was a good day – the restaurant, Pescare, is in Century City Walk – sort-of next to, and behind the Novotel on Springvale Road – was a bit of a mixed bag – the food was really wonderful – the service, slightly on the lower side of “adequate”, I’m afraid – but the staff were nice, quite friendly and accommodating – just slow, and… dare I say it, not terribly well trained in hospitality and service. However, if it’s good food you’re after, and you don’t mind slow and occasionally slightly clumsy service, do go there – the food’s definitely worth it! The wine list isn’t extensive, but you can BYO wine and spirits – so we took along a bottle of Veuve Clicquot that we got in a Christmas Hamper from Julian’s sister last year – it’s been sitting in the fridge waiting for a “special occasion” – and what better “special occasion” could there be than our double Big Birthday Bash?! 🙂 My favourite youngest daughter and her husband gave Julian and me a very welcome Amazon Voucher each, and my favourite eldest daughter and her husband gave us the full set of The Dr. Blake Mysteries, which we’ve been enjoying very much since it started on ABC1 in 2013. My very favourite youngest daughter wrinkled her nose up in distaste when she heard that it starred Craig McLachlan, because she remembers him (I hope I’m not dating her by saying this! 😉 ) from the show “Neighbours”, many years ago, when she’d thoroughly disliked him, as I’m sure a lot of you did… But he’s grown up, and grown older, and he plays the part of the middle-aged Doctor extremely well – it’s a great series, which Julian and I can both thoroughly recommend!

Food stuffz: last night we had pan-fried pork fillet, with snow peas, half a home-grown tomato (which was absolutely wonderful!) and chips – I blotted my copybook (again!) by having some more of the totally scrumptious Coles brand very low-calorie Rice Pudding and a store-bought fig for dessert… And now I suppose you’re all hanging out for what I had to eat at Pescare today! Well, let’s see… we got there, sat down, and were given a couple of bottles of iced water… Seeing that we were out, and that it was a special, social occasion, I had a cocktail – a “Tequila Sangria 15” – which sounds good, but was basically just your common or garden variety fruit punch, with a Tequila base! Lots of bits of fruit in it – pineapple, raspberries, strawberries, and little chunks of lemon, which I ate, because I thought it was orange. I only ate one… For my Starter, I had “Saffron Arancinis” – three little crumbed rice balls, about the size of a squash ball? with a teeny cube of goat cheese in the middle of the ball – each one sitting on a teeny dollop of olive paste, with a small pile of (“undressed”, thankfully!) arugula on the plate next to them. For Mains, I had the Lamb Rump, which was about seven or eight nice sized little nuggets of very lean roast (or it might have been grilled – it’s hard to say!) lamb, served on grilled vegetables (mostly pumpkin, carrots, zucchini, broccoli… and eggplant chunks, which I didn’t eat because I don’t like eggplant!) quinoa and hummus dip. Both those dishes were extremely good, well presented, very delicious – and apart from the olive paste under the arancinis and the hummus under the lamb – pretty low-calorie! The glasses that the staff provided for our champagne were very small, for champagne flutes! Just a little bigger than your average sherry or martini glass – it makes sense – you don’t drink as much, and the bottle goes a lot further if there are a lot of people there. Neale (Lee’s husband) was driving, so he only had one of the small glasses, as did Kate, who was also a “designated driver” – so the rest of us polished off the rest of the bottle between us – I suppose that even with two glasses of champagne, I had less than I would have had if I’d had one normal sized champagne glass. Ah, yes… but then there was dessert, wasn’t there! And that’s where I met my Waterloo, in the form of a Mars Bar Chocolate Cake! It came with no cream, but with a very small scoop (too small, really!) of the most delicious chocolate ice cream I think I’ve ever eaten! I don’t know why it was called a “Mars Bar” cake – I couldn’t see anything “Mars-bar-ish” about it – but my goodness, it was so terribly yummy! I’m a real sucker for chocolate cake of any sort, especially when it has that lovely, thick, sticky, gooey dark chocolate frosting all over it.. I shall probably dream of it tonight… :/ (Now do you all understand why I didn’t want any dinner tonight? 🙂 The only reason I had the Chia Pod  tonight was because it was cool, slightly and weirdly crunchy, and slipped down like jelly)

Weigh-in this morning. Thank heavens for small mercies! And I do, unfortunately, mean “small” mercies! I went down one point – from 62.7kg to 62.6kg. I’m not sure how much I’ll have gone up tomorrow, but all things considered, the only really “naughty” things I had today was the alcohol – the Tequila Sangria 15 (which I don’t think really contained very much alcohol!) the champagne… and the lucious Mars Bar cake – so maybe it won’t be too bad, when I get on the scales in the morning (says Winter, clutching at straws like a drowning rat on a sinking ship!) 😉 I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow night!

And so to tomorrow – I may not even want breakfast, you know – I still feel full! Anyway, hopefully Blizzard will still be up and running smoothly tomorrow and I’ll be able to get a few quests done! But apart from that, and that Josh will be over in the afternoon so my hair will look nice again, I think tomorrow is mostly free! Anyway, ’tis late, and I’ve blathered on long enough, so once again – that’s about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Do drop in again tomorrow to see what sort of punishment the Mars Bar cake wreaked on my poor long-suffering body, weight-wise; if Shekinàh has been able to get any Followers out on Missions yet, and what other adventures or misadventures I’ve had during the day – but until then, please at least try to bee good, remember that intelligence is the ability to adapt to change, and don’t forget to always drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Winter’s log, earthdate 201603.19

Well, I’m late again tonight because we swapped days… that is, because we’re going to be out for a lot of tomorrow (Sunday) Julian and I decided to call today “Sunday”, and have our usual Sunday romp in Draenor. We did quite a lot of questing, and I thought we did rather well – neither of us died, and we got through a lot of our “backlog” of unfinished quests. Julian, of course, already has his “Level 3” Trading Post – unfortunately, I wasn’t as lucky as he was, and I can’t “buy” my upgrade until I can get “Exalted” with one of the Draenor Factions, so I’m having to farm my Reputation with the “Council of Exarchs”. As I’ve already reached “Revered” status with them, and only “Friendly”, or “Neutral” with all the other Factions, it shouldn’t take me as long to go up that last level – or at least, that’s the theory! You can make the Reputation bar for your chosen Faction visible (the Reputation bar works the same way as your experience bar) so that you can see how well you’re progressing to your next level with them – and judging from my Reputation bar today, it should only take me, oh… about three and a half years to reach “Exalted”? In other words, most of the quests that we finished off today were done specifically to gain Reputation with the Council of Exarchs – and my Reputation bar hardly moved more than a bubble and a half! Very disappointing! I did drop in on Arisnoë this afternoon – just to say “Hi!” and to let her know that she hadn’t been totally forgotten, in my mad scramble to get Wynterthyme’s Reputation with the CoE to Exalted, and to get Shekinàh up to her next Garrison upgrade, at around level 98 (or maybe 96 – as I said – I fergit which it is, now!) Strangely enough, Shekinàh has found herself in the same predicament that Wynterthyme was – she hasn’t got enough ruddy Garrison Resources to be able to send Followers out on Missions to earn Garrison Resources! Still, as she does more quests and gets more Followers, it’ll get easier – or at least, it has for Wynterthyme – though she’s now having problems with her Fleet! This time she doesn’t have enough barrels of oil to be able to send the ships out on naval Missions! And I do every quest, and take every Follower Mission, that will net me oil! I dunno… I did a quest today that should by rights allow me to build Battleships – but I’m going to have to disable one of my existing ships to do so, because my Fleet already has the maximum number of ships available, until my next Shipyard upgrade (in about three and a half years? 😉 ) Wynterthyme earned herself another Follower today – one level higher than my lowest level Follower, but when I tried to send her out on a Mission, I was politely told that I’d have to “disable” one of my Followers, because I already had the maximum number that I was allowed! Sheesh! So I “disabled” the lowest level Follower – at least for now – and I’ll see how this new Follower goes… if she’s not up to scratch, I’ll disable her and hopefully be able to bring the first Follower back again! Getting back to Arisnoë this afternoon, I wasn’t at all surprised to find her standing in the Grizzly Hills meadow, with two other level 100 Hunters! One had even set up a nice cosy little campfire to make her wait for Arcturis a little more pleasant! The other Hunter had his current Pet with him – a Diseased Bear from the Plaguelands, from the look of it! I sat there for a bit, then decided that I was being silly, and logged out again – I think that probably the only time it’s going to be worthwhile trying to find and Tame Arcturis will be late at night – from 11.00pm onwards – that seems to be about one’s best bet of getting the place to oneself… Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to do anything much tomorrow – we’re all going off to have Julian’s and my Big Birthday Bash, and I don’t think I’ll have enough time to do much more than just check on Wynterthyme’s and Shekinàh’s Followers before we leave – and I’m quite sure that after a big lunch, I’m not going to be feeling much like taking a couple of Hunters out questing! So any more work on my Reputation with the CoE is going to have to wait until Monday or Tuesday! :/

Food stuffz: last night of course, we had the very yummy Chicken Provencal, with steamed broccoli florettes, and steamed rice with finely chopped spring onions (a small aside to Julian – I know it’s mixing metaphors an’ all that, but I reckon a bit of sliced water chestnut would have gone well in that rice too – I think fancy chefs call it an “East-West Fusion”, or something – Chicken Provencal with Asian Style rice! 😉 ) And for dessert, I had one store-bought fig, and some of that delicious Coles brand very low-calorie Rice Pudding. Today for lunch I had a wholemeal sandwich with some of the basil-pesto hummus, ham, Halloumi cheese, and home-grown tomato – very, very nice! Dinner tonight was pan-fried pork fillet, with snow peas, chips, and a half a home-grown tomato, and dessert was a reprise of last night’s dessert – another of the store-bought figs, which was lovely, and some more of that wonderful Coles brand, very low-calorie Rice Pudding.

Weigh-in this morning. Was horrible, but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, after all the carbs I ate yesterday! I went up five points today – from 62.2kg to 62.7kg – which I was slightly pleasantly surprised by – I’d expected to go up a lot more! Never mind, that’ll happen on Monday morning, after tomorrow’s lunch, I’m quite sure of that! Then I’ll have just under a week to drop back down again, so that I can safely eat a Hot Cross Bun (or two, or three) and a small-ish Easter Egg on Easter Sunday… (*Winter is mortified*) uhhh… I forgot to add Easter Sunday lunch into the weigh-in equation! :/ We normally get Nandos Chicken Tenders and chips and a couple of salads and Perinaise sauce, and a dessert of some sort, for Easter Sunday Lunch – plus a chocolate or two after dinner… *sigh* Oh well, I have to live, and I have to enjoy living, or there’s no point in it – so I’ll eat what I want over Easter – yes, I’ll be careful, but I’m not going to make myself either miserable, or resentful – so let the chips fall on the floor where they will – if I have to, I’ll go back to Optifast for a month afterwards – but I’m damn-well going to enjoy Easter this year! 😛

I don’t know whether you all noticed or not, but I decided to go back to an older Template that I’ve used before (it’s one of the Free ones) just for a bit of a change – Why? Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I found the last one slightly …awkward, reading only the right hand side of the screen – I kept feeling as though I wanted to move my chair over so that the text would be in front of me, and not over on one side. Anyway, I’ll see how this one goes, at least for a few days… So… I’m looking forward to tomorrow – we don’t really go out very often – it’s also going to be quite a change because we’re going to somewhere other than The East Empress Bistro, or the Tender Trap! We have been to this place before – many years ago – it was quite good then, and I don’t know why we haven’t been back before – but it’s still there, so it must still be quite good, in theory, anyway! 😉 I’ll write up a full report for you all tomorrow night, and you can then either go there yourselves, if the report is good, or steer clear of it, if the report is less than glowing! 🙂 Anyway, there it is – that’s about it from me for this evening! Please drop in again tomorrow night to read my report on our luncheon venue, and to see how much my weight continued to climb in the morning (and how much more I’m expecting it to climb on Monday!) I’ll let you know if Wynterthyme and Shekinàh have progressed any further in their personal questing, and you’ll find out all about the adventures we’ve had during the day. Until then though, do please try to bee very good, remember that breakdowns can create breakthroughs, and that things fall apart so things can fall together, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep warm – or cool – depending on how you feel… but most importantly, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂