Eighteen days to go…

Well, as usual we spent a very pleasant day on the Tarken Glacier – it would have been even more pleasant if it hadn’t been snowing so heavily, though! Needless to say, we didn’t reach level 65 – in fact, I only made it half way (51%) and poor Julian didn’t even get quite that far! I tells ya, it’s a s-l-o-w goin’ when you get into the sixties! I only have one more point to go in my Foraging skills, though, to become a full “Savant” at skill-level 450 (and that’s as high as you can go, in all of the Skill departments – 450!) and about fifteen levels left to get in Butchering Skills (that’s the skinning and the processing of the skins, not meat production, as one might have thought!) You can only have three “Skills” – the basic ones being “Foraging”, “Mining” and “Butchering” – they’re the three “Gathering” skills, then there are other “manufacturing” skills, but I won’t go into them here. You can buy extra skill slots for Credits, but as I already have all the artisans who can make anything that Guild members might need or want, I didn’t bother buying any extra for Sylversong. When Julian and I play together, we usually choose to level up only two skills out of a possible three… Why? So we don’t waste too much time figuring out whose turn it is to harvest whatever. This time I took Foraging and Butchering, and he took Mining and Butchering – so all plants are mine to harvest, and all minerals are his to harvest. The Butchering we take in turns, each of us going up ten levels and then handing the skinning over to the other person. A little clumsy, but it works 🙂 And that’s why my Butchering skills are so far behind my Foraging skills! 😛 Anyway, as I said in the beginning, we both had a fun day – it’s a lot harder at this level, not because the mobs are so much harder to kill – they’re not – even the Elites were pretty easy – no, it’s the mob density! At one stage we were running around in the snow and the blizzards, visibility almost 0%. We had to find dead Researchers and give them a “proper burial” (i.e. right click on a sparkly skeleton, and hey presto! He’s decently interred!) These “sparkly skeletons” were very few and far between, and we had a very wide area in which to search for them – but the mobs were like flies on a pile of umm… rotten meat? making it: mob density (number of nasties attacking you) close to 87%, quest objective (the “sparkly skeletons”) about 5%! And of course, fighting in those snow storms and white-outs, you got turned around a lot, and all you seemed to be doing was fighting, fighting, and more fighting – with only the occasional “burial”… and all the time we’re killing this, and slaughtering that, our poor little experience bars were barely moving! Quite frankly, I don’t think we’ll even make level 65 next Sunday, but I don’t care – it’s fun playing!  🙂

my-Julian got an SMS from Julian-the-Agent the other night – the Vendors wanted to know if we wanted to buy the desk and bookcase in the front study (my-Julian’s office-to-be) We did think about it – we do have a lot more rooms to furnish than we do here – but in the end we decided that we didn’t really need it. However, I would like to buy their bedroom mirror, or failing that, to know where they got it from. Well, they obviously don’t want to sell it, because they did say that they’d bought it from a “Trade Fair”, and that the manufacturers were in New South Wales (I think?!) about four years ago. Well, that rules out that plan of attack for getting the same sort of mirror… Having looked around at all sorts of places for something similar, I have a feeling that we’re going to have to buy the right size piece of mirror and take it to a picture framer and get them to match the frame as closely as they can to the one in the picture we have of the original. There used to be a beautiful picture and framing shop over at Doncaster, many years ago – but alas, like My Size, Urban Soul, Magnolia, and many other really fantastic shops, they ended up balking at Westfield’s highly exorbitant rental fees, plus the rule that if the Centre was open, they had to be too, whether it was Christmas, Easter, or just an ordinary Public Holiday, and they’ve all moved out – to who knows where! So this evening, after dinner and television, I think my allotted task will be to look for picture framing shops – I may be living in the past, but I think we should be able to choose the frame, tell the people what size mirror we want, and get them to organise it all for us – and hopefully we might get it before Christmas… next year! Anyway, I know you used to be able to do it that way, once upon a time…

I also looked for a shower stool – I’m used to having the bench seat in my shower, and while I don’t rely on it as heavily as I did before I lost so much weight, I still need it – especially when I’m washing my hair – so I’m going to have to get a shower stool, because there’s no handy-dandy built-in shower bench over at Stillwater. Now, I could pick up a “cheap as chips” plastic and tubular steel one at the local chemist shop, but they look horribly “hospital-y” and ugly. I want a nice, wooden one! Well, I found some. They’re made of cedar, and they look lovely! They’re also a lovely price – from the manufacturer’s point of view, that is! We’re thinking about it… So, tomorrow, weather permitting, we may go picture framing shopping, or shower stool shopping… Julian says he has the clothes dryer goal in hand… so I’m not sure that there’s anything more to do in the furniture shopping department! If the weather is really too bad, we should (and probably will anyway – it won’t take long!) go through our wardrobe. Anything bigger than a size “S” goes! 🙂 Then we can get the “professional” packers in this week, and be ready to go by August 25th! I’m also compiling a list of things to assemble for August 20th – settlement day! We’ll need to take something to sit on, an electric jug or a saucepan, to boil water in, a couple of mugs, some skinny milk, tea and or coffee (Nescafe, unfortunately!) and a packet of my Optifast bars (I’ll need one there for Friday too, so I might as well take a packet and be done with it! They’ll be “living there” after the 25th, anyway!) Ooo-er! I can’t wait! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. More surprises! Maybe these new pills are going to work out alright – although after only one day, it’s a bit soon to tell for sure… However, I went down another three points – from 80.5kg to 80.2kg! And there I am, aren’t I! Down to the last two or three points before going down to the next kilo-level! And we all know what that means, don’t we! I’ll sit there on that weight for about a week, or go up, and then sit there… so I’m not really looking forward to weighing myself tomorrow…

(Ahhh… coffee… 🙂 ) I can’t believe myself… this is the third day in a row that I’ve spent the day wearing… socks! I hate socks! Normally… but those concrete stairs are so icy… and besides, these socks feel nice and light and loose – not tight and restrictive like socks normally do! In fact, I was thinking on my morning Stair Walk, that they’d make ideal shoes for me! I think you can get socks for yoga or something, that have non-slip soles… and if then they cut the tops off the socks so that they looked more… stylish? and they came in black (which, unfortunately these ones don’t – but maybe the yoga ones might?!) I’d be quite happy…. er… well, maybe a little less opposed? to wearing shoes…  “If”, “if”, and more “if’s”! Still, at least I’d be comfortable… So anyway, once again that’s about all from me for tonight! Don’t forget to look in on the blog again tomorrow night, and find out if my weight “misgivings” have come to pass, or if I’ve gone down a bit more (fingers crossed! fingers crossed!) And see whether we did go out, or if the weather kept us indoors again, sifting through our wardrobe this time! There’ll be lots to tell you about, so don’t be shy and miss out! 🙂 Until then, though, continue to bee good, remember that the most common way people give up their power is by thinking that they don’t have any; don’t forget to look after yourselves, to drive carefully, and to keep warm… but most of all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Nineteen days to go…

Well, we didn’t go off looking at mirrors or floor lamps this morning – we both chickened out because the weather was so vile – so we both more or less frittered the time away… actually, Julian frittered, for once, and I worked on… a list of possible Character names for Rift. I already had three or four lists, but over the years some had been lost, most of them duplicated, and in some cases, even triplicated. I combined all the lists, sorted them alphabetically, deleted the duplicates and triplicates, and tidied it all up. That was “phase one”. Next, I have to go through my trusty notebook wot lives on my desk, because here and there I’ve been looking for good and/or unusual names for characters, and written them down in my notebook. This was a habit that I got into when I first started running my Bulletin Board (herein after referred to as a “BBS”) It started out as “The REAL CONNECTION”, and later changed its name to “death… by chocolate” (what a way to go!) No, I’m not going to launch into fond, nostalgic reminiscences of “the good old days”, but it was then that I first started keeping some sort of spiral bound notebook, or occasionally a spiral bound notepad, next to me on the desk. I wrote anything and everything in them. I doodled in and on them… I worked out sums, jotted down telephone numbers (never with a name attached to them, oh no! I nearly always had to guess whose number it was!) No-one – not the kids, not my BBS friends who were over at our place nearly every day, not Julian – not even I was allowed to remove a page, or to even tear off a teeny little piece of a page, from my precious notebook! That rule still applies today – my notebook is sacrosanct! I usually keep several years worth of notebooks somewhere in the house – I mean, who knows when I might need to look up an anonymous telephone number that I scribbled down three years ago, hmm?! 😉 So I shall work my way through my notebook looking for possible character names, and add them to my newly consolidated list. Do you want to know why I started compiling this list this morning? No, of course you don’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway! As you know, Hailol is my personal “main” shard – that’s where Satai and Chaviv both live, and that’s usually where I hang out, except on Sundays, when Julian and I frolic happily in the Tarken Glacier area. I went to a great deal of effort to make sure that all my characters on Hailol had names that started with a different letter, so I don’t quite know how I managed to end up with two characters with names that started with “C”. But I did. Well, Chryzanthemum was the one that ended up going to Deepwood to disseminate her beautifully correct macros, and I wrote a note to myself, in my notebook, that she could come back to Hailol on August 6th… but I was looking at her empty spot this morning and thought to myself… ‘If I bring her back here, I’m going to end up with two characters whose names start with the same letter, and I’ll have to either spend money on Credits to buy a name change scroll and lose a name that I like, or put up with both their names starting with the same letter and end up disliking both of them for it!’ I stared glumly at the screen for several seconds before I though ‘Or I could leave her where she is on Deepwood, and just create another character here on Hailol with a different name! Only this time, I’m not going to get caught short with all the names I really like being “unavailable”, and having to settle for a name that I only sort-of like… a bit… because it was all I could think of on the spur of the moment! This time I’m going to be armed with a list of at least twenty names that I love!’ So I went looking for my list, and it was found to be missing a lot of excellent names… and that’s basically how I got myself all tied up in another scatter-brained, spur of the moment, totally unproductive project this morning! (and for the next few days as well, if I’m going to have to trawl through my notebooks (there are actually two here on my desk) before I complete my “project” and create my new character!)

After lunch, we actually did do something useful! We went through our bedroom chests of drawers, our bedside cupboards, and…. The Dreaded Medicine Cupboard! Lordy, lordy, lordy! Did we throw out heaps of stuff! From oversized underwear and clothes, to tubes and tubes of hand, foot, and face creams that had been confidently bought, hopefully tried out, and angrily discarded because they didn’t instantly transform me into a 26 year old again! Half used bottles of perfume (we didn’t throw them out! I didn’t realise that I still had half a bottle of my second favourite perfume, Opium, sitting there in the cupboard! 🙂 ) and band-aids! So many packets of band-aids that we could have opened our own band-aid shop! We ended up throwing some of the more dilapidated boxes of band-aids out! So now the chests of drawers, the bedside tables, and The Dreaded Medicine Cupboard are all empty – except for stuff for our immediate use, of course! 🙂 Our wardrobes are next… we’ll probably start on them on Monday, as Julian wants to get the “professional” packers in sometime this coming week… I’ve been happily thinking “Oh, we have weeks yet! No hurry…” but we don’t! It’s only a little over a fortnight until settlement! (alright, it’s really closer to three weeks than two, but what’re a few days between friends, hmm?! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning. Well, having lost almost a kilo in four days, I suppose I shouldn’t be terribly surprised that I just stayed the same today. 80.5kg. *sigh* I’ll probably sit on or around this weight for at least the next six to eight days, though it largely depends on these new pills I started today, and whether they’ll make me retain fluid like the other ones did. I guess we’ll find out in the next couple of days…

Tomorrow, of course, is our day for romping around in the Plane of Water – a new area this time, too, now that we’ve finished with Draumheim (erm… except for that last, triple-Boss’d end-fight, where we both got so ignominiously killed several times last week! That was most definitely not fun!) Tomorrow, we’ll be in Tarken Glacier, which at the moment is all impossible-to-see-where-you’re-going snow storms and blizzards. I know that it does get better further in, but where we are at the moment isn’t very nice. It’s doubtful if we’ll make it to level 65 – we’re barely half way along the experience “bubbles” to 65, and the bonus experience points that Trion were so generously donating to everyone have finished… Of course, we could swallow some experience enhancing potions, but really… it wouldn’t make that much difference… and besides, the quicker we get to level 65, the sooner we have to decide what  we’re going to do next! 😉 And that’s really about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Don’t forget to check back tomorrow night to see if those new pills are having an adverse effect on me and making me retain fluid like the other ones did, or if they’re better than the old pills, and that my weight has started on its downward journey again. And while you’re checking that, you could have a look to see how we went Rifting – did we die? Did we try those nasty three Bosses again? More to the point, did we finally reach level 65, and if we did, what are we going to do next week? Whatever happens though, you can be very sure that there’ll be heaps to tell you, and lots of well-informed gossip, so don’t miss out! Until then though, remember to bee good, don’t forget that the only expectations you should live up to are the ones you expect of yourself. Always remember to keep warm, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves, but above all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Twenty days to go…

Today I did what was probably a very stupid thing, and I probably wasted a great deal of time… but that’s me in a nutshell – I decided that I was going to “standardise” – for want of a better word, all my characters in Rift. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the term “macro”, and I have quite a lot set up on Rift – short cuts to perform an action, like “wave”, and “thank” – and things like that. But I have a lot of characters spread out over six shards, and a lot of macros – many of which were the same, but used different icons or different names… and that’s what I thought I’d “standardise”. So I chose one girl at random, went through all her macros, neatened and tidied them up and got them all lined up neatly on the screen and in her macro “bank”…. simple, so far, right? Then I “imported” her macro set-up to all the other characters on that shard – bingo! They all had the same macros, the same macro icons, the same macro names… Then I went to do the same thing on the next shard, but by the time I started to duplicate my efforts there I got hopelessly muddled. Had I used that icon… or this one? Had I called it “squash squirrel”, or “shoot squirrel”? I couldn’t remember – of course, I could always go back and write it all down, but that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it! Instead, I went back, and… seeing as I had plenty of spare spots on the shard… transferred one of the girls across to the second shard. I wrote her name in my notebook: “Chryzanthemum can go back to Hailol on August 6th” (you can only transfer a character once every seven days, you see) Then I went through all the other characters on that shard, importing Chryzanthemum’s macros as I went. Choosing another girl at random on the second shard, I rinsed and repeated the process, and so on and so forth, though the whole six shards! All in the name of “uniformity”! The amount of concentration needed (I’m totally exhausted, by the way, mentally and physically!) and the amount of time wasted, all for the sake of blessed uniformity, was only exceeded by my lack of planning and thinking it through first! I could have – and should have – set up the macros and taken a screen shot. And if I’d been thinking at all (which obviously I wasn’t!) I would have thought “Ah, bugger this for a lark! Who cares if they’re all different, anyway!” and gone and done some questing instead! I am my own worst enemy, sometimes… as well as a glutton for punishment… But, it’s all done – and all I have to do now is wait seven days and then transfer everyone back to where they came from.

I used the new gunk I bought for my horribly dry and cracked feet last night, and I must say that it works extremely well! It also got itself all over the bathroom floor extremely well, too! Now, most of you should know me fairly well by now, and I’m sure that even relative newcomers to the blog will recollect me saying here and there how much I hate and detest shoes…I never miss a chance to tell anyone who’ll listen (and even those who don’t listen!) how I feel about having anything at all on my feet – shoes… socks… stockings… anything! I absolutely hate having anything except air on my feet. Well, that new gloop worked so well last night that this morning I determined to find a way around it spreading from my feet to the bathroom floor, and beyond. First I thought I’d put a towel down first, but that would only work as long as I didn’t move around much, like go to bed or something. Hmm… Socks! Yes, the very thing! Way back when I was first starting on my Stair Walking exercise, I was using the front stairs, not the fire escape. The front stairs were also concrete, but because they were more “public”, they’d been “prettied up” with chips of stone, to give them a more “textured and interesting” appearance. Unfortunately it also made them extremely painful to walk on with bare feet! So, before I decided, in desperation, to use the smoother and more comfortable fire escape stairs, I bought myself a couple of pairs of “walking socks” from Athlete’s Foot. I continued with the front stairs for about a week, struggling up and down them in my ‘orrible socks… but because I hate having anything on my feet, I gave up the socks (which were really quite light and comfortable) and the front stairs, and took myself off to the fire escape stairs instead. Anyway, this morning, after careful consideration and a lot of misgivings, I went and grabbed one of my pairs of “walking socks” before I used the new gloop. Well, the socks kept the gloop from getting on the floor, so I thought I’d wear them until I got back from my morning Stair Walk – it was so cold that I thought “if I can do the stairs in my shoes, I can do the stairs in my socks!”, and I’ve been wearing them all day, with no ghastly side effects from them, and even my hideously encased and trapped feet don’t seem to be minding them all that much, either! Amazing! Don’t get me wrong – I still hate having anything on my feet, but because it’s so cold on the fire escape, and because the socks protect my bathroom floor from the gloop, I shall persevere with the socks for a little while longer! Then I’ll probably cut them into little pieces and burn them.

Weigh-in this morning. Today has been a day of surprises, which started this morning when I hopped on the scales! I didn’t stay the same… and I didn’t go up… I went down another three points, from 80.8kg to 80.5kg! Tomorrow’s the first day of the month, and I’m to start on the new tablets that Dr. Y. prescribed for me – I’m really itching to find out if they’ll make me retain fluid too – he said that they wouldn’t (well actually he only said that they wouldn’t be as bad as the other ones) so I’ll see how they go – if it does look like I’m still buying shares in fluid keeping companies, I’ll take a second anti-fluid pill – if not, I won’t 🙂

I looked around for mirrors this afternoon – you know, the mirrors that I found online are almost as miserable and as unimaginative as the floor lamps I was looking at yesterday! One wonderful mirror place only showed you the beautifully crafted corner of the frame, didn’t show you the full mirror (let alone a close up of one!) but the most amazing thing that they didn’t show you was the ruddy price! You could almost picture the spruiker in his sharp lapelled checked coat, standing outside the mirror shop with his microphone in his hand, extolling the beauty of this wonderful mirror: “Here it is, ladies and gentlemen! Look at the fantastic craftsmanship in this corner here! Beautiful plumage! No, I’m afraid we can’t show you the full item – we can only show you this corner – nor can we divulge its price! But buy one, and we’ll give you a discount!” So anyway, we’re going to have a look at a mirror shop tomorrow – not the one with the spruiker, a different one, somewhere in Carlton? Collingwood? I fergit… but it’s city-wards, anyway. I’m also hoping that we might be able to get to an OzLighting shop – if we can find where they have a store! All I can find is an online store, and I’m afraid that we like to actually set eyes on things before we buy them – pictures online are all very well, but these things are expensive, and they’re going to be in your home, fer goodness sake! Yes, I know I’m being totally unreasonable, but I wanna be able to touch one, before I take it home! 😦

So those are our – semi – plans for tomorrow. I’d also like to go and put our foot on a clothes dryer, in case there are going to be any sort of delivery delays. Julian wants to start getting the packers in next week, so that we can get things packed up and ready to go without having to do it all in a hurry. Frankly, I think it’s a good idea, though we shall see what happens during the next week and a bit… If the Vendors would like an early settlement it would be good to be ready for it. We can’t change the furniture delivery date, but we can get things like a door for the en-suite and walk-in wardrobe underway, electrical cabling installed, and the cable modem set up, etc., etc… It would indeed be very nice to have all of that done before we move the furniture in! However, that’s about all from this muddle-headed person for tonight! 🙂 Don’t forget to drop by again tomorrow night – will we have found (and bought) a suitable mirror for the bedroom? Did we manage to find a real, live, bricks and mortar OzLighting shop? And if so, where the blazes was it? Will my weight have reacted badly to the new medication, and gone up? Who knows! But you will, because around about this time tomorrow night, all your questions, and more, will be answered! 😉 But until then, contain yourselves in patience, and continue to bee good! Remember that good friends help you to find important things when you’ve lost them… your smile, your hope, and your courage… Don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm, and to drive carefully… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Twenty one days to go…

Here I am, starting nice and early for a change! I’ve been a busy girl today… well, maybe not busy busy, but running from pillar to post busy. My hairdressing appointment was at 11.30am this morning, so it was up, get myself ready, Stair Walk, breakfast, coffee, and off – just like that! (although I did manage to squeeze in my Minion Management while I was eating my breakfast! 😉 ) They did a good job of my hair, as they always do there at Oscar Oscar, and I really do like the nice neck massage they give you – and their coffee’s not bad, either! I wonder if they use one of those Nespresso machines? We use one, and their coffee tastes similar to ours (we use a different type of pod though) plus the fact that the Nespresso shop is right opposite them, so it’s possible, and even very probable! 🙂 I must ask them next week… So after that we went to Priceline. I use a moisturising gloop on my feet by a crowd called “Walkers”, or something, and I used to keep its squirty bottle on the floor, next to my lounge chair in the lounge room. I say “used to keep”, because when the lady came to pack stuff up because that truly awful rental furniture was about to be delivered – back when we thought we’d be selling the apartment before the charismatic Carmen went on holidays – and we had to “spruce up” the place for the prospective buyers coming in twice a week on the Open For Inspection days… Anyway, when I went looking for my foot gloop, I couldn’t find it – so either the packing lady took a fancy to it and has run off with it (highly unlikely!), or she’s gone and packed it (a virtual certainty!) so I’ve had nothing with which to moisturise my feet since then, and they’re getting…. “very unsightly”, to put it mildly – not that they ever were “sightly” in the first place! So let’s just say that they’re now even more unsightly than they were before, and leave it at that. I looked in Priceline to see if they had any of this “Walker’s” or whatever it’s called stuff, but they didn’t, so I bought another sort I’d never heard of in the hope that it’ll be “better than nothing”. I’ll let you all know how it works out, anyway 🙂

I was going to race upstairs, shed my feet, and dash off for my lunchtime Stair Walk as soon as we got home, but it was so damned cold that I didn’t shed my feet after all, I left my shoes on for my Stair Walk! Shoes really slow me down, and I have to be terribly careful going up and down stairs in them because my balance is all “off” in shoes – and sure enough, this time I did have one rather wobbly moment when the back of my right heel slipped off the next step down and I teetered on the brink for a few seconds until I got my balance back again. After that, I slowed down a bit instead of going at my usual barefooted pace, and, well, here I am typing at you, so I obviously made it back again in one piece 🙂 Did I ever mention the fact that I hate shoes? I do, you know… terrible inventions! They should really be banned…

After lunch I started working on my new header – I think I’m going through another “Egyptian phase” – I seem to have them periodically, and have done since I was a little girl. I still remember the first picture book I ever picked up when I was about three… it was on “everyday life in ancient Egypt”, and I was hooked! (I still remember, and still have, the first “proper” book that I read many, many times, from cover to cover when I was about six – it was “Bulfinch’s Mythology” – a really fascinating book if you’re into mythology, which I was, and still am 🙂 ) Anyway, the header is called “Theban Lotus” and is very loosely based on a web set I made a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) back in 2001 or 2002 – I fergit which now, it was so long ago… I hope you like it 🙂 If not, a new one is sure to appear in the very near future… The actual background of the header, the sort-of papyrus textured one, was “copied” from another graphics site. I was fascinated by how web artists created textures like this one, so I used to download some of them from here and there (they were all free in those early days) and I’d study them, attempt to copy them, and downloaded tutorials by the dozen… and I’d work on them until I got them right – so that header background is the result of days and days of work, of trial and error, and a determination not to be beaten by a mere texture 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Well, another amazing morning! I was quite sure that I wouldn’t have shed any weight (I could have said that I’d had a “gut feeling”, but it wouldn’t really have been very punny…) but… I hopped on the scales this morning, expecting to have stayed the same, or to have gone up a point or two, but… I’d gone down three points – from 81.1kg to 80.8kg! So now I have less than 10 more kilos to go! That is, if I don’t decide that I’m still too fat at 70kg and decide to go lower… I wonder if I can get down to 70kg before we move? I doubt it, but it would be great if I could… 🙂

And that brings me to tomorrow. Well, our cleaning lady came last Friday, and Julian said yesterday that that was about all the packing up that we had to do, so I have no idea what’s happening. I suppose we could go clothes dryer shopping, or mirror shopping – or floor lamp shopping (I wasn’t really very impressed with our local Beacon Lighting store’s range of floor lamps!) I’ve just had a very quick look online at a few – they’re all really unimaginative – it’s very disappointing! Think what you could design with just a little imagination! I think some of those firms should hire me! Well, I could certainly do better than their silly, rickety-trickety stick tripod bases, or their tall broomstick columns with a vertical row of three small hollow disks attached to it, half way up! And the lamp shades! They’re either obviously fake studio spotlight types, clumsy cylindrical tubes, or cappuccino froth tinfoil! Bah! No imagination there! *sigh* No doubt we’ll find something… somewhere… Anyway, until I know what’s happening tomorrow, I shall just have to leave you all in suspense! 🙂 It’s getting close to “Evening Stair Walk” time again, and I think I’ve given you a fairly accurate summary of my adventures today – so once again I shall wave you all a fond adieu, beseeching you all to return again tomorrow night, to find out if my weight has suddenly decided that I was getting a bit too much of a good thing, and that perhaps I’d better spend a couple of days either going up, or staying the same… Julian just wandered in with a cup of coffee for me, and talking to someone (probably his mother) on the phone, and he was telling (whoever was on the other end of the phone) that he’d put the locksmith off for today and that he’ll be coming tomorrow morning instead – so now I know one thing that’s happening tomorrow, and so do you! 🙂 Anyway, I’m sure that, as usual, there’s going to be heaps of news, interesting tidbits, and other astonishing adventures to regale you with tomorrow, so make sure you don’t miss out! 🙂 Until then though, please bee good, remember that to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else, will probably be your greatest accomplishment. Don’t forget to drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm… but above all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Twenty two days to go…

For once I’m starting to write reasonably early – let’s hope that this time I can get finished before dinner time, just for a change! 🙂 Thankfully, Julian has had a “Road to Damascus” moment (when he was struck blind by the truth, so to speak) and he’s decided not to try to assemble the flat-packs by himself, after all! 🙂 The nice, antique-style desk, bookcase and filing cabinet that he got for his office also comes as a flat-pack, and he was “strongly advised” not to try to assemble those by himself, so he’s hired a proper, professional “Flat-Pack Assembler” to come and put it all together for us when it’s delivered on August 21st, and he’ll get him to assemble the chests of drawers and the glossy-white glass-topped table/desks, along with all the office furniture – plus whatever else has arrived in a flat-pack! I’m seriously starting to wonder if anything ever gets delivered “pre-assembled”! I certainly hope that the lounge suite doesn’t come in a flat-pack! I’ve been thinking about all the furniture we’ve bought, and I’m thinking that perhaps we should have bought a separate, matching chair with the lounge suite. It is large – it’s a three-seater, and plenty big enough for the two of us plus Flipper – and I know that Lee and I are rapidly losing a lot of weight, and that Julian’s a lot smaller than he used to be too… but if the three of us try to sit on the lounge suite to have our lunch together, as we often do when my favourite eldest daughter comes over, I have a slightly uneasy feeling that we might find ourselves a little… squashed? Food (pardon the pun!) for thought… I’m really hoping that when the glass-topped table-desks with their matching “credenza”, and two small chests of drawers will still leave enough room in the Den for a couple of small recliners and a small coffee table, without the room becoming too cluttered – I think a layout like that would look really nice! I’ve looked at a lot of mirror places but still haven’t been able to find a suitable one for the main bedroom. I know we get to go and look at the place again, a week before settlement, and I know that Julian didn’t want anything of theirs, he wanted us to have all new stuff of our own – but if their bedroom mirror is still there, I’m going to ask them if they’d be willing to sell it to us – it’s really perfect for the room. If they won’t, then hopefully they’ll at least tell us where they got it! There’s also a very slim possibility that they may want to settle earlier that August 20th – which would be really good – except that the furniture isn’t being delivered until August 21st and we may not be able to change that… I’ll keep you all posted! 🙂

This morning, we did sift nostalgically through the drawers, and the shelves above them! I thought that we both behaved impeccably! Julian didn’t insist on throwing absolutely everything out, and I didn’t grizzle and whine and demand to keep absolutely everything, and it all went very smoothly. Heaps of stuff was thrown out (mostly my grossly oversized underwear – would you believe I’ve gone down ten sizes? Well, it’s really only five, because clothing sizes seem to always go up and down in “two’s” – but ten sounds a lot more impressive, doesn’t it! 😉 ) Quite a lot of stuff was kept and packed up ready for the move, and a lot ended up in the St. Vincent’s box. Next on the horizon for the sifting, culling, and packing process is the so-called “medicine cabinet”. I’m not looking forward to going through that particular cupboard at all! It’s actually more of a “if it’s anything to do with bandages, lotions, or tablets, quickly open the door, throw it in, and slam the door shut again before everything can tumble out onto the floor!” type of cabinet… I’m sure all of you have something similar in your homes, n’est ce pas? 😉 Actually, band-aids seem to mostly live in the kitchen, because the resident chef tends to… er… well, “nick” himself on sharp knives quite a lot… (read: he’s a klutz!) I’m not sure what himself wants to sift through, sort, and pack next, but there’s not much “personal stuff” left now that won’t be packed by the packers! I’ve already done my bathroom cupboards and drawers… *preen*

I also finished off Greybriar’s refurbishment and re-organisation this morning, and I was able to cull one newbie, which gave me a bit more room… so now I can concentrate on Laethys and Hailol, and a bit of proper questing, though I’m still wondering what Julian and I are going to do for our traditional Sunday Bash, once we hit level 65…

Oh, before I forget – we’ve decided what to do with Flipper on moving day! We were going to leave her here, locked in the bathroom, while all the moving of boxes and all the to-ing and fro-ing was going on, and come in and pick her up when all was quiet again at Stillwater, but that seems terribly mean… she’s going to be terribly distressed by the noises and vibrations, and she’s going to be quite distraught when she’s let out in a strange place where she doesn’t even know where her litter box is! So we’ll have a chat to the Vet and see what they have to say about our idea… We thought we’ll take her up to the Vet in the morning, before all the chaos starts, and leave her there all day – she’s done this before, and although she doesn’t like it much, she’s fairly used to it, and the nurses all make a fuss of her, which makes her feel important (cats love feeling important… because that are! (important)) We’ll pick her up in the evening and take her straight to Stillwater where she’ll probably freak out – but we’ll get some mildly sedative room spray, or whatever, from the Vet, and stay with her all the time and she should be alright… we hope!

Weigh-in this morning. Not too bad, actually – I went down another two points, from 81.3kg to 81.1kg. Having said that, now watch me go up 81.8kg, or something equally horrible, tomorrow morning! (it has happened before!) No… I’ll probably stay the same again, or maybe go up a little bit… *sigh*

I have a hairdresser appointment tomorrow morning, but apart from that, once again I have no idea what I’m doing… I’m starting to get that mild “itch between the eyes”, which is telling me that it’s about time I made another blog header, and/or patterned background… and I just had a brilliant thought, “Why don’t I go back and look at some of the backgrounds I did for the web sets I made years ago? Some of them were really nice… I could use them!” – so, I might! 🙂 Yeah, I just went and grabbed the first one I remembered that I’d quite liked when I made it, called “Theban Lotus” – the background has a papyrus-like texture which looks quite effective. I might give that a run for its money tomorrow, so stay tuned! 🙂 (I just reached for my cup of coffee… but it was empty! 😦 *whimper*) It’s probably just as well that we don’t have a coffee machine here in the Den – I’d probably never sleep again… 😉 So once again, that’s about all from me for tonight – but do call back tomorrow night and find out if my weight did shoot straight back up, or if it stayed the same… and if I have utilised any of my old work in some new header work – and if I do use any of my old stuff, do I have to give myself credit for it, with a link back to the original? 🙂 How hilarious! Actually, if I use any of it (and I might not!) I will put a link back to the original – I’m quite proud of the work I did back then! 🙂 And there’ll be lots of other new and interesting stuff to tell you all about too, so don’t miss out! Until then, though – please continue to bee good, don’t forget that every act of kindness benefits the giver, as well as the receiver, and remember to keep warm, to look after yourselves, and to drive carefully – but most importantly, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Twenty three days to go…

OOo-er! I’m starting extra late tonight! My favourite eldest daughter came over today, and we watched several episodes of “The 100” – but that’s only part of the reason I’m starting so late this evening… Just after lunch, while Lee and I were enjoying our second (or was it our third? I fergit…) episode of our current favourite show, Julian went searching online for small white sets of drawers (bedside table sized ones) to go under our glossy-white, glass-topped table-desks. Extra to the table-matching credenza that he got yesterday. He found some suitable ones somewhere in Springvale (remember – we live in Doncaster!) so off he went to fetch them home, while Lee and I continued to watch “The 100”. The phone rang. It was Julian’s mother in Adelaide, with a Visa card problem for him to solve. I couldn’t help, so I told her I’d get him to call her back. Time passed, and we continued to watch our episodes. Then the phone rang again. This time it was Julian – he was going to be home quite a bit later than planned – he was stuck in gridlocked traffic! Oh dear! Well, what else could Lee and I do, except watch another episode of “The 100” while we waited for him to get back? 😉 He eventually got home, and almost immediately took off again to drive Lee home. As is my usual want when my favourite eldest daughter is on her way home, I accompanied them to the lift, said goodbye, and proceeded to the fire escape for my evening Seven Floor Stair Walk. It was about eight minutes to five… (I tell you what, I’m not going to miss those ruddy stairs when we move! Especially not the ones on the virtually icicle-covered bottom-most floor near the letterboxes! Brrr, it’s cold down there!) I walked into the Den here and sat down at my desk at about two minutes past five… not even breathing heavily from my exertions. I’m getting better at this walking business! 🙂 Three months ago I wouldn’t have been able to do that – I’d have been damn lucky to do four floors without puffing and panting my lungs out. So, although I might not like clambering up and down seven flights of stairs, three times a day, and although I might wish that I didn’t have to do it, I persevere, regardless (the thing is, I don’t actually have to walk up and down any stairs – but I make myself do it because it’s good for me – it’s making me fitter than I’ve been in decades, and hopefully it’s contributing a little towards my weight loss!) (Ahhh, himself has just arrived home and brought me a sustaining cup of coffee, to tide me over until dinner time! Thank you dear!) This morning before Lee arrived, I managed to get a bit more Rift re-organisation done – I finished off Faeblight, and made a start on Greybriar …hmm! That’s interesting – I went and checked on the spelling of “Greybriar”, thinking that I must be incorrect – and I was, but I wasn’t. Both are correct, but Americans spell funny, and usually insist on swapping the “e” in “grey” for an “a”, only this time they haven’t – which was why I thought I must be wrong. The English spell it “grEy”, and the Americans spell it “grAy” (an easy way to remember is that “e” is for English, and “a” is for American) so I learnt something new about weird English spelling today, and now you’ve all learnt it too! 🙂 …so anyway, I made a start on Greybriar. Greybriar is my third most important shard (it even has a Guild!) and it’s usually where I park major-shard higher level characters when I want to create a new one on either Laethys or Hailol, so I’m going to be hard put to find anyone “cullable” on there… I might have to move one or more of the characters to a lesser populated shard – maybe Deepwood… But that’s for tomorrow, after the nostalgic sifting of the drawers, or maybe the tiresome assemblage of flat-packs… (my toes are itching – I wonder if I’m getting chilblains from the icy cold concrete stairs? I do my walking barefooted…)

Of course, now that Julian has gone and bought these little chests of drawers, he has to assemble them! Yes, they’re “flat-packs”! “Flat-packs” are evil! I reckon that the person who invented “flat-packs” should be boiled in oil, chopped into little bits, and then jumped up and down on by someone very, very heavy! 😦 Mind you, Julian is the one who does all the crawling around on the floor assembling flat-packs, while I just sit there and cheer and applaud at appropriate intervals 😉 This assemblage will either take place tomorrow, and we’ll do the nostalgic drawer sifting on Thursday, or we’ll do the nostalgic drawer sifting tomorrow, and Julian will do the flat-pack assemblage on Friday (because I’m going to the hairdresser on Thursday so he probably won’t have the time to do them then) The last item on our shopping list, the clothes dryer, should be sourced and secured by the end of next week, if not before… And on a wistfully hopeful note, the last of his Body Corporate work should be completed by the end of the week, and he can step down from his involvement with it.

Weigh-in this morning.  Just when you think it’s safe to get back on the scales… Well, it did happen! No, I didn’t go up, I stayed the [heavily censored!] same again – for the third day in a row – 81.3kg! I would really, really love to know why it does this to me, every time I get down to within about 3 points of the next kilo down (or sometimes within about three days of the end of the month!) I really mean it, I’m eaten up with curiosity! Fluid retention? Maybe, but I’m not so sure that it is the case – at least, not this time… Sitting there watching “The 100” today, I was idly looking at my feet and thinking that for once, they almost looked normal! They weren’t at all swollen, they were a nice “normal” sort of colour (whatever that is!), and apart from my callouses, I thought that all-in-all, they were looking pretty good, for my feet! So if it is fluid retention (and I’m not taking those horrible pills, either) where is the fluid coming from, and why aren’t my feet swollen as they usually are when I retain fluid – and if it’s not fluid retention, what is it? And why does it always seem to happen when I get down to about three points away from the next kilo down, no matter what time of the month it is?! Je suis très annoyed! (and curious!)

So, that was My Day That Was – a bit of this, a bit of that, and a bit of something else, just for a change! 😉 As I said earlier, I’m not too sure what’s happening tomorrow – whether it’ll be the nostalgic drawer sifting and sorting, or the flat-packs assemblage by himself, or maybe just a bludge day of frittering. Whatever happens, I do expect to be able to finish off “neatening up” Greybriar, and I’m very happy to say that my two main shards, Laethys and Hailol, don’t really need “neatening up”, so after Greybriar is finished, I should be free to start questing again… 🙂 And once again, that’s about all I have for you tonight, but there’ll be lots to fill you all in on tomorrow night, so drop by and see what’s been happening chez nous! Will all our drawers be sifted, sorted, and mostly emptied? Will my weight stay the same again, or will it have gone down… or perhaps up? And… has Julian assembled the flat-packed under-desk chests of drawers that he picked up today? And those are only some of the burning questions that you’ll find the answers to, here, tomorrow night! 🙂 Until then though, do your very best to bee good, remember to go confidently in the direction of your dreams, and to live the life you have imagined. Don’t forget to look after yourselves, to keep warm, and to drive carefully, but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Twenty four days to go…

Just how many “reprieves” can a person have? I was all geared up to sift nostalgically through drawers this morning, but it was decided that it was probably better to get the darned Body Corporate work done… finished… over and done with… so Julian retired to the office to do that, and I sifted nostalgically through two shards on Rift. I moved two higher level Rogues (Hunter/Marksmen Class) over to a PVP* shard called Seastone – not because I’ve suddenly developed an interest in PVP, but because (a) I’ll never play with either of them again, (b) I don’t want to delete them as they were both important characters in my Rift past, (c) one of them owns a very beautiful Dimension called “Fever!” – easily one of the best I’ve ever created, so I don’t want to lose that, and (d) it’s a “safe”, out-of-the-way place to put them, where they won’t clutter up shards where I might possibly want to create a new character… one day… (like, “probably next week” 🙂 ) So anyway, they’re both nicely and safely tucked away, both the Deepwood and the Wolfsbane shards have been neatened up, culled, and all the remaining characters “freshened up”… and I’m now half way through doing the same thing on Faeblight. And what have you all been doing to amuse yourselves, pray tell? 🙂 I’m not really sure if the nostalgic drawer sifting will be on tomorrow either, as my favourite eldest daughter usually comes over on Tuesdays… hmm… or sometimes Wednesdays… Just before lunch, Julian announced that he was going up to Harvey Norman again, to measure the white glass-topped tables that we’re going to be using as desks in the Den. We’d belatedly realised that although we’d procured our soon-to-be desks, we had neglected such niceties as erm… drawers, and/or cupboards, in which to store such mundane items as pens… pencils… paper… and all the little bits and pieces which invariably accumulate on desktops and which one scoops hastily into a drawer or cupboard (any drawer or cupboard, as long as there’s still some room left in it!) when one has to tidy up in a hurry. Being clever folks though, before he left, he linked his phone photos into Flickr, logged in, and left it for me. If he saw anything half-way decent, he’d take photos, ring me to let me know to go and “refresh” Flickr, so that I could have a look too! Well, as luck would have it, he saw a very nice desk, with a matching bookcase (with cupboards underneath) and filing cabinet – they should look very nice indeed, in the new office! 🙂 Then he went looking for something that might match our glossy white wood and glass-topped table “desks”. Well, there was a matching “credenza” (read: sideboard!) – unfortunately, they won’t be able to deliver one until the end of August, so I guess we’ll just have to tidy our desktops onto the floor… or into a cardboard box, or something, until then! 😉 So that was – I think – the last bit of our new furniture shopping that we had to do – successfully completed! Of course, there are lots of little “incidentals”, like rugs… a second (small!) lounge suite (or two smallish recliner chairs) and a (small!) second coffee table for the Den, bookcases galore, indoor plants (of the silk variety, probably, so that cats won’t eat them down to the dirt!) But we’re not going to get any of those until we’re in, and have had a chance to judge how much room we have left – because although the rooms are very big, we do not want the place to look cluttered! Oh, there is one other thing that we need to get – a new clothes dryer! We’re leaving this one here – it’s not that old, and it’s the best sort of dryer for an apartment (where you’re not allowed to dry clothes on your own balcony – a Body Corporate “rule”!) a “condenser” dryer – the water vapour from the drying clothes is vented into a stainless steel tank, where it condenses out, instead of steaming up the laundry and making everything in there damp (and eventually, mouldy!) We’ll get another condenser type clothes dryer, of course – they’re much more hygienic than damp walls, and you don’t have to knock holes in walls in order to put proper outside venting in. The resulting tank of water can either be emptied out into the laundry trough, or decanted into a bottle to use in your steam iron, as it’s distilled water (but don’t drink it! It still has stuff from the laundry detergent and fabric softener in it – safe enough for clothes, but not stomachs, OK?!)

Weigh-in this morning. Hmm… not good, but not bad either, under the circumstances… I stayed the same, at 81.3kg. I guess it’s better than going up… (but I’ll probably do that tomorrow…) When I was at school (Matric/Year 12) I was 5’7″ (about 170cm), and I weighed 9.5 stone (about 59.5 kilos) I was 16 years old, and I thought that I was just a little overweight. Now, I’m only just 5′ tall (about 152cm) and at the moment I weigh 81.3kg (about 12 stone, give ot take a few lbs!) and I want to get down to 70kg (about 11 stone) which I think is still a bit on the “over heavy” side. However both Dr. Y. and Julian think that 70kg is too low and that I shouldn’t go any lower *sigh* So it looks like I’m just going to have to do what I always seem to end up doing… Wait until I hit 70kg and then decide for myself if I think it’s too low, or not low enough – and go with my own decision!

So tomorrow, I may, or may not have my favourite eldest daughter over, and I may, or may not be nostalgically sifting through drawers (unless Julian has something else to do) and once again, I feel a trifle like a mushroom… Never mind – when all else fails, there’s always Rift, or jigsaw puzzles to break the monotony! I’ve got an appointment at the hairdresser on Thursday, and I do want to dart into DJ’s either on the way there, or on the way home – there’s something that I need to look at… I also need to get more Warfarin – now that they’ve upped my dosage, I’m going through them rather quickly! And so once again, that’s about it from me for tonight – do drop in again tomorrow night – find out if my weight went up or down – surely it won’t stay the same again for a third day, will it? No… it’ll probably go up – it’s due for a depressing rise again… If my favourite eldest daughter does come over tomorrow, we should have time to watch a few more episodes of “The 100”. Oh dear… 😦 Julian just came down with some very bad news 😦 We’re going to have to change our home phone number because we’re moving to a different exchange (*sob*) and we can’t start doing anything about it until we actually have the house keys in our hot little paws, and then it’ll take ten days! Ten days! In this day and age! It should be instant! Bloody Tel$tra! Grrr! At least our home-line handsets will “pair” with a mobile phone (just like in “Person of Interest”! 🙂 ) so we can continue using our “normal” handsets via my old iPhone – and speaking of the show “Person of Interest”, ‘persons of interest’ will get our new number by email as soon as we get it. Of course, Julian’s mobile number will stay the same, as will mine – if I ever turned it on to receive a call on it (which is virtually never!) So there it is…as usual, there’ll be heaps of news and exciting gossip for you all again tomorrow night, but in the meantime, please at least try to bee good 😉 remember that true success consists of going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. Don’t forget to drive carefully, to keep warm, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*PVP = Player Versus Player – some Gamers, not content with slaughtering computer-generated evil creatures, also like slaughtering other Gamer’s characters – hence the term “player versus player”. This is not a gaming style that either Julian or I subscribe to!

On this day in a month’s time, we’ll have been in our new home for one whole day (give or take an hour or so), we’ll have spent our first night there, and will probably not have had our first jaunt in The Plane of Water in our new “Den” – because the computers and all the rest of the equipment will probably still be in the process of being set up to himself’s meticulous satisfaction 🙂 However, today we did have a nice little jaunt in the Plane of Water, and despite the fact that Trion had a 50% bonus experience weekend in play (everyone playing receives 50% more experience points for everything that does, or can, gain you experience! Nice! 🙂 ) we only managed to get our experience bars up two and three quarter “bubbles”! We killed, and we bashed, and we maimed ruthlessly, and only moved two and 3/4 “bubbles” towards level 65! That’s how s-l-o-w leveling up is at this stage! Sheesh! At this rate we’ll still be level 64 when we move, in a month! (less than a month, now! 😀 ) We did die – several times, in fact! I died three times, and Julian died twice. The first time Julian died was in a Boss fight at the end of the quest chain that we hadn’t been able to complete last week, because it was “glitched” – remember? Anyway, it had finally re-set itself, and that was the first thing we did when we started playing this morning – we went off to finish the unfinished! The glitched part over, we then had to complete the rest of the quest chain, which was set in a “Nightmare” version of Meridian, the Defiant capital city. First of all we had to go around “eliminating” various “Nightmare” versions of our Fearless Leaders and Local Stalwarts, and only then were we able to confront the Big Boss himself – a rather nasty dragon whose name I can’t remember at the moment – in the central courtyard. He had some pretty nasty attacks, including a full on flame blast, which is, I think, what killed Julian the first time… It took quite a while, but we eventually got him down, then we moved on to the final part of the Draumheim sector/zone. When we arrived at the final show-down, I said to Julian “Uh-oh! I remember this bit! It’s not nice!”, to which he replied that we hadn’t been able to finish it last time, either, and that he didn’t think much of our chances… In fact, we did get to finish it last time, but only after our second attempt at it (our first attempt ended in multiple deaths each!) and the fact that someone else was also doing the quest and we joined up with them to finish the final Boss off. It’s really a five-person quest end Boss fight – I don’t really think it’s possible for a two-man (or woman) team to complete it, quite frankly! Really, it’s a PUG fight (and you know what I had to say about PUGs last night! Not very complimentary! 😉 ) The fight(s) are in three sections and there are three Bosses that you have to defeat, one after the other – and each one is nastier, meaner, and has more lethal attacks than the one before it. There are a few (very few!) aides along the way – items that you can break which restore some of your health, etc., but I doubt that even a couple of level 65’s would be able to get through all three Bosses without a great many casualties! Julian died once there, and I died three times! 😦 (it cost me over a platinum to get healed, too!) It was a case of déjà vu – we scuttled off with our tails between our legs again! We will go back and complete it, but… not just yet! 🙂 Instead, we took off for Tarken Glacier – the next zone in the Plane of Water – and started picking up quests there. Most of them were very easy and straight-forward, but I remembered why I disliked the area so much last time… The [heavily censored] snow storms! You can’t see a thing! Everything is white – or at least a foggy sort of white – with lumps of snow speeding almost horizontally all around you! And I have trouble finding my ruddy cursor at the best of times! I kept wandering off the wrong way, over-shooting the mark, getting lost… I hate snow storms! At one stage we had to use a tracking device to find some animals in the snow – the quest kept saying very unhelpful things like “follow the tracks” – I couldn’t see the wretched tracks! I just had to keep following Julian’s blue dot on the screen, because that was all I could see! And to think that I grizzled about fighting under water! *rolls eyes* Oh well, I do know that it gets better and less snowy further along…

Tomorrow my reprieve is over, and I’ll be assigned to “drawer duty” – under Julian’s supervision, just in case I try to save something that he thinks needs to be thrown out! 😦 Then he has some Body Corporate work to finish off, and, hopefully soon after, he’ll be standing down as the committee Secretary – there wouldn’t be time to do any more work anyway, before we moved (and he sure as eggs won’t be doing any more work for them after we’ve moved!) So apart from the drawers, I guess I have tomorrow pretty much free… although I do have a very vague feeling that something’s scheduled to be occurring tomorrow – I just can’t remember what! I guess I’ll remember when the front doorbell rings, or someone turns up with some sort of delivery for us…

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I was pretty sure I’d go up this morning, or at the very least, stay the same… but no, I went down two more points, from 81.5kg to 81.3kg! Amazing! Unfortunately, this means that I’ll definitely be going up again tomorrow morning!

I think I might have mentioned last night that I’d started “cleaning out” the shards that I have characters on, and I plan on continuing doing that tomorrow after I’ve finished with sorting and cleaning out the drawers full of items that are now too big for me, stuff that belonged to mother that are no longer relevant …and precious mementos of my childhood that must be preserved at all costs! (What was that sweetheart? Am I trying to make you feel guilty? No, of course not! You know I’d never dream of doing anything like that! 😉 ) So yes, once again I shall try to “whittle down” the number of characters that I have… I mean, I can’t take shards full of extraneous and irrelevant characters into our new house, any more than I can bring drawers full of underwear that’s too big for me, can I! 😉 And with that, gentle readers, that’s about all from me for tonight – don’t forget to call back again tomorrow night to find out how the great “Culling of the Drawers and Shards” went, what I managed to salvage, and why, and also whether or not my weight went up, down, or stayed the same! (ahhh… a most welcome cup of coffee has arrived to keep me focused until the end of this paragraph! 😉 ) (Julian has only just fed Flipper, and already she’s yowling at the door saying “I’ve finished my dinner! Let me out! I want some “Daddy Pats” now!”) So I’ll see you all tomorrow night – until then, though, continue to bee good, don’t forget that to truly enjoy life you need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you. Remember to look after yourselves, to keep warm, and to drive carefully – but most importantly, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

I finally made it here! I’m afraid that once again I got myself all caught up in a complicated and intricate jigsaw puzzle – another 300 piece one, and of course, I just had to finish it, didn’t I! 🙂 and for the first time ever, I actually beat the only other person who was listed as having done the same puzzle! I completed it in 143.15 minutes, the other person took 172.01 minutes. Well, I was wrong about slopping around all day not doing much of anything! Julian loaded up the ancient old BBQ and carted it off to the tip, did some shopping, and has packed up most of the computer cupboard here in the Den. And what did I do? Well, I started tidying up some of my Rift shards, got rid of a couple of extraneous characters that I’d probably never have used again, and… worked on the ruddy jigsaw puzzle that now has me running late! Yeah, I really accomplished a lot, didn’t I! 😉 I was supposed to have gone through some of the drawers here, sifting and throwing out old stuff that’s of no use to anyone anymore. Some of the stuff in the drawers belonged to my mother, and has never really been touched since she used to live here. I don’t think Julian trusted me to go through it on my own – apparently he thought that I’d keep too many bits and pieces instead of throwing them out, because when I asked him for some bags and boxes, he said he’d do it with me, after lunch! Of course, after lunch was a bit late to be starting, and he was itching to start on the computer cupboard in here, so I got a reprieve until Monday 🙂 I have to admit, I am quite ambivalent about cleaning out those drawers – a lot of the things in them will be things I grew up with, and I’m not sure that I’ll be able to just toss out bits of my childhood simply because no-one will ever use them again. Of course, there’s lots of other stuff that I really only kept out of curiosity – things like letters between my mother and her partner that I thought I might read one day, but never did – but they won’t be thrown out, they’ll be shredded. I think there are some boxes of candles that date back to when my parents imported them for their business – well, I certainly don’t want them! They’d be quite rancid – or whatever happens to old tallow candles when they’re more than 30 years old! I think there are some old ornaments that I’ll keep, and there are at least two old sewing boxes that I am going to keep, come hell, heaven, or high water! There are just too many memories in them both… Anyway, that’s for Monday, and if Julian can keep ancient old hard drives (for the PC, not for his C-64!) then I can keep a couple of old sewing boxes! 😛 I don’t think it’ll take very long to go through the drawers – I’d like to start going through my wardrobe, and start getting clothes organised to either be cleaned and given to St. Vincents, kept (I suspect that there won’t be too many of those! More than 3/4 of my clothes are now too big for me, including the size “M” ones I bought only a couple of months ago! I’m now down to a size “S”, and in some cases, a size “XS”!) and there’s a whole heap of “intimate apparel” will have to be thrown out (I mean, who would want to wear someone else’s small-clothes, no matter how clean they are!)

My favourite eldest daughter posted a picture on Facebook a short while ago that I absolutely love! Now that we’re moving to a house, I’m wondering if we could get something similar commissioned – unfortunately, this one’s in Ireland, and we don’t have a front fence, but I’m sure something could be arranged! Maybe something in terracotta, to sit on the garage roof!? (I have seen terracotta versions sitting on people’s roofs around and about Melbourne) However, speaking of front fences, and the fact that we don’t have one, it has crossed our minds to do what we did with our place in Glen Waverley. When we moved there it had a low brick fence, with sort-of conifer bushes in a row behind it. Well, the bushes grew, and grew, and grew, until they were well and truly hanging over the footpath! It wasn’t possible to cut them back more than a couple of centimeters because these plants only grew a couple of centimeters of green foliage anyway, and if you cut too much off, you were left with a scraggy clump of bare, brown, and very dead, sticks! So, we thought we’d take them out and put up a nice, high fence – for privacy, and to stop the local school children from depositing their litter in our bushes. Long story short – the local Council wanted us to jump through too many hoops, as well as demanding that we pay through the nose to buy a permit… to allow us to apply for a permit (which cost extra, of course!) Instead, we opted to go the “free” way, and put in a nice, thick, and easily trimmed hedge of pittosporum! No fees, no permits, no hoops to jump through – just a nice, high hedge! 🙂 It’s taken about seven years or so for it to get nice and high and thick, but it looks good, is easily managed, and provides a goodly amount of privacy. We may do the same at Stillwater – if we do, then we could have a front gate too… I suppose… Food for thought… 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Well, a pleasant-ish surprise – I was expecting to have gone back up again after that massive drop of four points – but no! That’s happening tomorrow morning! This morning I went down another one point, from 81.6kg to 81.5kg! So once more, all was well and peaceful in the Winter household this morning! 😉

Tomorrow, of course, is Sunday, and the pattering of our virtual feet will be heard throughout the Plane of Water, as we hack, slash, and trounce our way closer to level 65! Mind you, I don’t think we’ll get there tomorrow, not even if we take an experience enhancing potion – we’d only just got to level 64 when we finished off last week! Still, it’ll be fun trying 🙂 We still haven’t decided what we’re going to do when we do get to level 65 – whether we’ll start again from scratch, or go on a bit of a dungeon run. The last time we tried that after we got to magical level 65 was totally disastrous! If we are going to do dungeons, we have to make up our minds to stiffen our upper lips, stand in queues for groups, and play in a PUG, or “Pick Up Group”* Unfortunately, neither of us really “plays well with other children”, and we try to avoid PUGs wherever possible, even if it means getting killed, or not being able to complete even a baby Dungeon on our own 😦 Knowing us though, we’ll probably just start off another two characters and start again from the beginning! 🙂

And once again, that’s about it from me for tonight! 🙂 Do call in again tomorrow night to find out if my weight went back up again – it’s getting towards the end of the month and I’ll be starting those new tablets that Dr. Y. prescribed for me – he says I shouldn’t retain so much fluid with these ones, so I won’t start taking an extra anti-fluid pill until I see how things go… and don’t forget our adventures in the Plane of Water – did we die? What killed us? Did we have any amusing and/or terrifying adventures? Will I have once again found a new blog template to try out on you? There’ll be lots of news and hot goss waiting, so don’t miss out! 🙂 In the meantime, please try to bee good, remember that enthusiasm makes ordinary people extraordinary, and don’t forget to drive carefully, to look after yourselves, and to keep warm! But most importantly of all, don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*PUG,  or “Pick Up Group” – people wanting to do raids or dungeons and don’t have enough players in their current group can pick up extra party members through a “Pick Up Group” utility. Quite often the players who do join your group really suck, big time, and the “Dungeon experience” becomes unpleasantly memorable, thanks to the often hopeless players that you were unlucky enough to “pick up”!

*There’s an update on the “As Seen On…” page tonight – today’s “Quote of the Day” from Goodreads…

Well, I’m not starting quite as early as I did yesterday – I got myself caught up in a very interesting and intricate online jigsaw puzzle – and abstract mosaic. Quite a challenge (only 300 pieces though) As you can see, this is yet another blog template (one of the free ones) with yet another new header. I thought it was quite nice – and at least the header didn’t change the size of the text and/or pattern on me, like the one last night did! Last night’s was a proper little horror to work with – first of all, it was one of the “magnifying templates” that made everything anywhere from two to three times bigger than the original graphic. Secondly, when I started making the header for it there was nothing to alert me to the fact that the header was one enormous gradient! The default header certainly showed no signs of using a gradient, anyway! This meant that whatever text I put on the header tended to fade from view as the gradient got darker and darker towards the bottom. What’s more, there was no way of altering the direction, or the intensity of the gradient. “Transparent” to “black” was what I had to work with, and even the “transparent” bit was too dark for my own colours to show through it properly! (f’rinstance, the header I used last night was stark white but it looked as though it was a medium grey fading to almost black!) Julian liked it, but it just annoyed me – I don’t like templates that say you can use your own colours and headers, only to have them do a  “Henry Ford” on you and say “you can do it any way you like, and use any colour you like, as long as it’s what we’ve provided for you!” Well, thanks, template makers, but no thanks! I’ll go and find myself a free template that does allow me to make and use my own graphics! 😛 So what do you think of this latest blog look? 🙂 All the “widgets” are right down at the bottom of the page, if you’re looking for the archives and the calendar (riiight down, at the bottom of about nine blogs! There should be some sort of arrow, or some sort of “widget link” thingy on the template, but there isn’t – sorry!)

Oh, roll on moving day! Once we get ourselves settled in our new abode, we’ll be able to get back on track with things like my name change (or rather my name addition!), running our own blog template where I can make my own from scratch, without having to put up with silly, senseless things, like a very poor choice of fonts, headers which change size and colour on you for no apparent reason (sudden thought: Hey! I wonder if they do that in IE? Different browsers display things in often very disparate ways (they shouldn’t, but they do!) I might test that theory later on… Yeah…!) and last but by no means least, finding me a decent mail client! I don’t really like The Bat, I no longer trust Thunderbird, and there’s really not much else out there that will give me all the bells and whistles that I want and need! Julian’s currently (i.e. when he has time!) looking at Outlook for me. All of those things haven’t been dropped off our list, or conveniently forgotten, they’ve just been shunted to the back of the queue until we’re all nicely settled in Stillwater 🙂

Well, I went and had my Warfarin test this morning, and the results are in… They’ve increased my dosage – again – it’s not that I mind taking more rat poison, it’s just that I do worry about the possibility of developing more blood clots. Julian says it’s because I’m losing, or have lost, so much weight, but I get very jittery when my INR keeps dropping, and I don’t want it to! 😦 and remember, in my case, high is good, low is not good! So… extra Warfarin for me on the weekends, and my next test is due in only a fortnight (it used to be once a month! *sigh* Oh well, at least they’re monitoring me fairly closely!) While we were over the road I bought some candles from Aurora – I got two small, single wick “Gardenia” candles for the bedroom – one to use now, and one to use when that one gets …used up? … burnt out? *sigh* when there’s only the stub of a wick left! …and one large, double-wicked “Japanese Honeysuckle” candle, for ‘ron, as a House Warming present when we move 🙂 So what with all that, the cleaning lady being here, and working on the new header that you see above you, I really didn’t get much time to do anything except Manage My Minions in Rift (and then of course, I got side-tracked with the jigsaw puzzle, didn’t I! 😉 )

Tomorrow, of course, is Saturday, which has “traditionally” been our Shopping Day – but we did a bit of shopping this morning, and I really can’t think that there’ll be much left to get tomorrow – so I’m not sure what’s happening. It’ll probably be a sort-of “pottering” day (read: we’ll slop around all day and do absolutely nothing constructive or worthwhile!) in preparation of Sunday, our equally traditional “Murder, Mayhem, and Madness in The Plane of Water Day” 🙂 I doubt very much if we’ll get up to level 65 on Sunday, but we should get a fair bit closer. I also have to make a list of “Things That Must Get Done Before We Move” (Julian hates it when I start making lists like that because there’s always too much on them! teehee!) But despite all my warnings, I can see the time slipping away from us all too quickly! I don’t want to have to do everything in a great panicked rush in our last couple of days here – *sigh* so list making it shall be for me tomorrow! (there goes my Rifting again! )

Weigh-in this morning. Much to my surprise (and quite frankly, delight!) I went down another four points – from 82.0kg to 81.6kg – which is quite a big drop, so I won’t be too surprised if I bounce back up again! I hope I don’t though… So… only another eleven kilos to go! 🙂 I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and wondered if losing another eleven kilos would make me look much thinner… Is eleven kilos a dress size, I wonder? I guess I’ll find out in a couple of months… It’s a very scary thought you know, finally reaching my goal weight! It’s always been this rather nebulous “w-a-y in the future dream” that has always hovered just this side of the horizon, but never seeming to get any closer… now, it’s almost “just around the corner”! What do I do then? I’m so used to living this way now, it’s going to be extremely daunting, reaching, and maintaining my goal weight!

The people we bought our bedside lamps from the other day have just rung to say that they’ve come in – so that might be one of the things we’ll end up doing tomorrow – though I don’t actually have to go – I’m quite sure that Julian can be trusted to pick them up from Beacon Lighting in Nunawading without my beady little eyes glued on his every move! 😉 And that’s really about it from me for tonight – but do drop around again tomorrow night to find out all the latest from this neck of the woods 🙂 I’m sure you’re all waiting with battered breath to find out if my weight went down… or up… or stayed maddeningly the same; whether Julian went to pick up the new bedside lamps, and how many lists I made. You know, when I make a list, I do a very good and thorough job! Everything has to be set out “just so”, the list title has to have an appropriate font, in an appropriate colour. Lists are either bulleted, or set out in a table… and table cells are usually colour shaded (you want to see my Christmas Present lists! They’re really impressive! 😉 ) (Hmm… on second thoughts, nah! I don’t think you want to see my Christmas Present list… 🙂 ) But anyway, there’ll be heaps to tell you all, so don’t be shy and miss out! Until then though, please remember to bee good, don’t forget that your attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure, do remember to keep warm, to look after yourselves, and to drive carefully… but most of all, remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂