I’m getting better! 🙂 I walked out the front door for my evening Stair Walk at precisely 5.00pm, and sat down at my desk again at 5.05pm. Five minutes – to walk to the fire escape, down 64 stairs, stop, put on my glove, walk back up the 64 stairs, and back to the apartment – plus putting the keys , the book, my glove and my scarf away, and getting back to my desk. This time last year I’m not sure I could have even done two floors, let alone four… or is it five? I’ve been trying to count it on my fingers, but I keep getting confused between the 1st floor, and the ground floor. Whatever! There are 16 steps between floors, and I walk from the fifth floor to the first floor, which is the “ground floor” for Williamsons Road – the road that runs in front of our building. But! There is a second “ground floor” below that, which opens onto the road that runs behind our building, as well (hmph!) so… I dare you to tell me you’re not confused! I live here, and I’m confused! Tomorrow, I’m going to count the stairs, and take my phone with me, so that I can take a photo of the landing where I stop, and start going up again! 😛

We spent the day in Dusken, and while we haven’t completely finished the area, it is all mapped out (apart from two very small squares in the middle of this last bit) and we seem to have run out of quests… Julian thinks it’s because we haven’t reached level 60 yet, as there’s a guy standing around where we turned in our last quest, and he has a greyed out exclamation mark over his head. I tried to tell Julian that it’s a PVP* exclamation mark, so we wouldn’t be taking it anyway (PVP quest exclamation marks are a slightly different shape to the normal “quest” exclamation marks) but he seems to think that as soon as we hit level 60, it’ll become available to us. And it well might become available – but it won’t be one we’ll be wanting to pick up! I think we should travel back the way we came, as there are probably quests that we’ve forgotten about (or just didn’t see!) further back down the trail, that we weren’t able to pick up before – but probably can now that we’re both level 59… but he wanted to go over to the other “island”, Brevane, and see if we could find some quests over there. So we did that, and we’ve picked up a couple of quests there, and of course there are all the alternative “carnage” quests to do, that we didn’t get on Dusken (different flora and fauna!) So we’ll see what happens next week – though I’d still like to go back to the Necropolis, and start working forward from there, to see what we can find… I died twice today – Julian didn’t die, but came very close to it. We’d been sent off after a particularly tough Boss (actually, we might have come to the end of Dusken! He was certainly tough enough to have been the end Boss!) He was only a level 60 Elite – I sound so blasé, don’t I! 🙂 “only a level 60 Elite”! Well, we’d been knocking over level 60 Elites for most of the day – no problemo – so when we saw that he was a level 60 Elite, it was just a matter of “ho-hum, another level 60 Elite – *yawn*” – only he wasn’t! he was really nasty! There was some sort of pillar, or post, in the middle of the area we were in, and when he ran back to it he was able to use an extremely powerful attack that pretty much knocked your socks off – not to mention your head! As I said – I died twice – Julian got slivered twice (healing afterwards cost me 59 gold!) Still, we got him in the end.. and when we turned that quest in – there weren’t any more! Not even a breadcrumb quest to the Plane of Water! That’s why I want to go back and look…

I forgot to tell you the other night – I heard back from the Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages about my change of name application. The fact that my driver’s licence was in my assumed name, all those years ago, means that they do want a credit report for it. I’m a bit put out about it, because there won’t be one! Back in those days, neither my partner or myself had a credit card, or had ever applied for credit! I know we had a Bank Card when I was with my first husband (who left me with $5000 worth of debts to pay off!) but between then, and when Julian and I got together, I was too gun-shy (credit card shy?) to even contemplate applying for credit of any kind! Oh well, Julian seems to think that as long as we make the effort it’ll be alright, even if it comes up with a “No Credit history found”. We’ll get onto that tomorrow…

Weigh-in this morning. I have to make up a new graph sheet – this morning was the last day on the current page. This time, I think I’ll start the weight off a little higher than I was this morning, just in case I do a really big bounce back, tomorrow or the day after… and I think I’ll start the dates along the bottom of the page from yesterday… because I weighed in at 89.8kg this morning – a very big drop of four points! It must have been that very steep driveway that I had to inch my way down, and scramble my way back up! I said to Julian this morning when I got off the scales for the second time (we always weigh me twice – just in case the scales change their mind!) “We have to buy that house! It was the driveway wot took the weight off! It’s far better than the stairs! I want to move in tomorrow!” 😀

So it looks as though tomorrow is going to be fairly busy! We have the Credit Report thingy to organise, Rift-wise I have to make (craft) some flooring for a Dimension I want to build – and I was absolutely stunned to find that, with all the oodles of Dimension items that I have, I have no flooring! No paving tiles! Well, I have about half a dozen – but I need more than a stack! (99 items = 1 stack) So I shall have to make some. I know the “recipe” for them, and I have – or can buy from the Auction House, the materials for them. Winterthyme is going to be quite busy… Graphic-wise, I have a lot of experimentation to do with headers and backgrounds, and I have to – I must – work out why some of the templates are magnifying the header graphics so much! It’s driving me batty! Grrrr!

+————————–+ * Dinner & Television Break * +————————–+

Back again – there was a small segment on the news tonight about a really rare sparrow! An albino sparrow – with not even any very faint wing bars! Apparently they’re so rare that “they” think that there’s only ever one alive at a time, in the whole world – and it was absolutely beautiful, too! They said (on the news) that because of the lack of pigmentation in its wings, they’re not as strong as a normal sparrow’s, and that it can’t fly as well or as far because of this, so they won’t say exactly where it lives (just the general area, which I fergit now – sorry!) in case anyone tries to “interfere” with the gorgeous little bird. But anyway, it was really sweet, and I hope predator birds don’t find the thought of a white sparrow for breakfast too tempting! And with that little “bon mot”, and before this gets far too long again, I suppose I should really wind this up – but drop by again tomorrow night and see what tales I have to tell! 🙂 Will my weight have bounced back up? It did fall a l-o-n-g way this morning! Will I have made enough paving tiles upon which to build my dream Dimension house? And will I have – finally – found an answer to my template header problems! (probably not, is the answer to that one!) Find out tomorrow night! 😉 Until then, though, bee good, don’t be critical of other people’s tastes, but above all – please, stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*PVP = Player Versus Player – you fight other players, rather than just the game generated monsters and nasty people

OK, I’m starting very early today – I wanted to get the properties we saw today written up while they were all still more-or-less fresh in my mind. We were supposed to have seen four places, but we ended up only seeing three of them – the fourth one wasn’t a two storey house, after all – it was a three storey one, which was, even with all my current stair climbing, just a little too much like “hard work” (which I am totally allergic to!)

The first place we went to was really quite nice. Large enough, it had a split level, or “three steps down” sunken lounge room, overlooking a postage stamp sized garden. The kitchen needed “a lot of work” (read: stripping and completely re-doing!) but had a lovely skylight letting natural light in over the stove area. The bedrooms were all decent sizes, and the en-suite was “adequate”, but it – and the main bathroom – were like the kitchen – they would have had to have been completely re-modeled. The main bedroom was… strange! All I can say is that the owners must have traveled a lot – because they obviously missed their hotel rooms, and so modeled their bedroom almost exactly like your standard up-market hotel/motel suite! (yes 🙂 we’ve stayed in a few of them, exactly like this bedroom!) You walk along the corridor – there’s the closed bedroom door. Open the door, and you’re faced with a passage wide enough to fit a trolley piled high with suitcases and luggage. This opens up into a very large room, with a door off to the side which leads to the en-suite. Against one wall of the bedroom is the bed. It has a heavy wooden bedhead with attached bedside tables. Directly opposite the bed is a big, very heavy, “bowed” dresser-come-cabinet, containing drawers, shelves, cupboards, and a very big television set. There are a couple of not terribly comfortable looking chairs, and a small table, and that’s it. Erm… that was the master bedroom I was describing, not a hotel room! There wasn’t heaps of storage space, but there was probably enough. The main problem with this place was the fact that it’s in a semi-gated community. The (all very nice and well maintained) houses are almost “semi-detached“, they were so close together, and there’s very little garden space (and if we’re going to live in a house, and not an apartment, I want my veggie garden!) It’s also under the thrall of a Body Corporate – something that we desperately want to get away from. So while we quite liked the place, I don’t really think it’s for us…

The second place we looked at this morning was the two storey place, right at the bottom of an extremely steep hill at the end of a cul-de-sac, where there was no parking. Very trepidatiously I walked down it,  thinking as I went “this is going to be real fun, on the way back up! (NOT!)” It was a right horror of a house – well, not a horror, it was really quite alright – if you like tiny, cramped rooms, cluttered with furniture and ornaments… in the lounge room there was even a pile of framed pictures, leaning up against one of the chairs! (in other words, the place wasn’t terribly well presented!) The ground floor was such a cramped little warren of rooms that we didn’t even bother looking upstairs… really, about the only thing that this place had going for it (from our perspective!) was the fact that there was an entry from the double car garage directly into the house. Something that Julian’s always wanted in a house… Then I walked back up the very steep driveway – in bare feet. These first two houses both had signs outside asking prospective buyers to please remove their shoes before entering – which filled me with great joy! For some unknown reason, I just can’t balance properly in shoes – I walk a lot better, faster, and straighter in bare feet – so when we came out, Julian said to me “do you want me to bring the car down to pick you up?” and I said “no! I’ll walk… but I’m not putting my shoes on until we get to the top!” So I walked up the steep driveway… The bottom part of it was paved in herringbone brick… which looks smooth and easy enough to walk on, but the mortar between the bricks, and the texture of the bricks, is really quite painful to bare feet that are used to walking on smooth tiles, and (relatively) smooth concrete stairs! The next part of the driveway – the steepest part – was concrete, but not the same sort of concrete that the fire escape stairs are made from, no! This was “rough” concrete, with chips of bluestone through it! It was a lot more painful than the bricks, and there was a lot more of it! But it was so steep that I didn’t dare stop to put on my shoes, in case I slid backwards and scraped all the skin off the soles of my feet! So anyway, I got to the top, took one look at the extremely rough road surface, decided that perhaps discretion was the better part of valour after all, and put my (much hated) shoes back on.

Then we had a bit of a wait until the third place was going to be open – that’s the one in Flowerdrum Close that I was so anxious to see – so we came home – I did my pre-lunch Stair Walk, we had lunch and a cup of coffee, then off we went again. It was a lovely place. It has big metal security gates, and a short-ish bricked driveway. Carmen met us at the door and hustled us past the officious Real Estate Agent who wanted us to show him some photo ID, and we had a look around. I loved it! The master bedroom was a decent size, and the en-suite was great! (the shower was perhaps a little on the small size, but it was big enough to put some sort of a seat in it – the arthritis in my lower spine demands that I be able to sit in the shower, you see 😦 ) It was, I suppose, a slightly “different” type of layout to your everyday, run-of-the-mill house – it was long and narrow – two rooms wide at one end, one room wide through the middle, and three rooms wide at the back-end – a sort of a “C” shape, if you will. All the rooms, except for two of the bedrooms, face roughly north-west, and look out on the swimming pool and outdoor entertainment area. The kitchen needs a new stove top and wall oven, but other than that, it’s beautiful. The top end of the house is beautiful. The back end of the house, unfortunately, is a “m.e.s.s.” and would largely have to be gutted and re-built. Pretty much on a par with what we did to our Glen Waverley property before my favourite eldest daughter and her husband moved in, so it’s not really a big deal in the scheme of things. The swimming pool is a bit of a problem though – Julian says there’s not really enough access to pull it out, but I don’t see why we have to dig it out – why can’t we can’t just drain the water out and fill it up with soil, and have our veggie garden there – or drain the water out and just deck over the top of it, putting a raised garden bed on top of the decking. Why does it have to all be removed? Seems a bit silly and superfluous to me… On the other hand, we could keep it as a swimming pool and I could practice aquaerobics (or whatever it’s called) in it, with my favourite eldest daughter – it would be very good exercise for her – and Julian could do laps, instead of going for long walks in the mornings! 🙂 Anyway, so Flowerdrum Close still remains a possibility – and just as we were leaving, Carmen said that she’ll be listing a new place tonight that might suite us. It had been listed before, and an Auction date set, but the owners (who just happen to be friends of hers, don’tcha know! 😉 ) didn’t get the necessary papers ready in time, so they cancelled the Auction. Now that the papers are ready, it’s being re-listed, so it looks like we’ll be having a look at that one, some time next week.

Weigh-in this morning. I went down 3 points, to 90.2kg. I’ll probably bounce back soon, but it’s getting towards the end of the month – or the beginning of the next month, take your pick – and that’s when I usually lose the most weight – right before I go on those rotten fluid retaining pills! Having said that of course, means that I will definitely, go back up again, either tomorrow, or the day after… Me and my big mouth!

So that was our day in the sun! 🙂 We saw three places: the first one – well! What a shame that it has a Body Corporate – because if we have to deal with a Body Corporate, I’d rather it be this one, where at least Julian is the Secretary. The second place, of course, was a total waste of time, and the third place, at least at time of writing, could be a distinct possibility. “Watch This Space!” 🙂 All in all, however, I haven’t really had much time to do anything else today – and of course tomorrow is our “Day in Dusken”, so I don’t suppose I’ll get anything much done then either 🙂 But I will be able to fill you all in on what we did in Dusken, and how close we are to finishing it, and I will be able to tell you if I jinxed myself by saying that it’s usually at this time of the month that I lose the most weight (and with all the walking and standing I did today, plus going  up and down that steep hill, I really feel that I deserve to lose at least a half a kilo in one go! 😉 ) So call in again tomorrow night, and catch up on all the latest from chez nous! 🙂 Until then, however, please bee good… try to look at life through an artist’s eyes, and for goodness’ sake… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*There has been an update to the “As Seen On…” page – this one’s for you, Josh! 😉

Half past four – about the right-ish time to start writing, I guess 🙂 Well, I’ve been busy occupied – with lots of little things today. I did a very small amount of Rifting, but the lure of the graphics was too strong. I fiddled around, and fiddled around, trying this… that… and something else… I was trying, at one stage, to create a “haze” (aura, halo, whatever) behind a highly stylized tree brush that I’d put a very nice finish on – it was on a dark, midnight blue background, and I thought a soft, mystic haze behind it might look rather fetching… but no matter what I did, the damn thing looked dreadful! Somehow or other, the “haze” was getting covered in the same style as the tree, even though I was doing it on a different layer! In the end I removed the style from the tree, and the haze worked perfectly – only it didn’t look nearly as nice as I thought it would I abandoned the tree… Then I started experimenting with some flowering vine brushes – there were only four of them, but they’re really stunning. I made a vertical “prototype” of each one and asked himself which one he liked best. He chose one, and asked “what do you want to do with it?” Honestly! Men! “What did I want to do with it??!!” I didn’t have a clue! It’s pretty! (they’re all “pretty“!), and it should be used… for something! Then I wondered what would happen if I laid it on its side… i.e. horizontally… It looked good that way, too, but one end curled up, and the other curled down. It looked “right” when it was vertical, but it looked a little “odd” on the horizontal. I wondered if I could use it for a header… I wouldn’t have room for text, but that was OK, I could let the template put its own text in. I’d have to make it a little smaller… but if I made it quite a bit smaller, I could duplicate it, reverse it, and put it end to end with the other one, then it wouldn’t look funny, curling a different way at each end. Hmmm… I experimented. It looked terrific! 🙂 Later on I might try making it a bit more smaller, to see if I can fit some text in with it – if I decide to try to use it as a header, that is – but I don’t want to make it too much smaller – it darkens up the colours too much when you do that. It’s complicated! The styles I use – well, most of them, anyway – put a one-pixel-wide black (or a very dark coloured) line around the whole graphic – this makes the graphic look nice and crisp, but if you make the graphic too small, that black line gets too close to the other black lines and ends up making the whole graphic look dark, ugly, and “clumpy”. And besides… you’re not given very much room for your header – so I’m thinking that if I make the pretty horizontal vine smaller and add some text, the whole thing’s going to look horribly crowded and squashed. I’ll try it and see, but I’m afraid I don’t feel hopeful. I’ll also see how it looks with just the graphic, leaving the template to insert its own, horribly boring and plain, text. 🙂 Well, you’ll either see it… or you won’t 🙂

We also looked for, and found, three other places to go and look at tomorrow. All in Templestowe, and all within what could laughingly be called “an enthusiastic (and very long) walk” from The Pines Shopping Centre! Not for the likes of me, however! 😉  Two of the ones we found today are two storey or split level, and the other two are flat, ground level houses. They all look a bit like “McMansions”, but… what’s wrong with McMansions, anyway? You know, around about this time last year, we wouldn’t even have considered moving into a house with stairs… I wouldn’t have been able to handle them. Now, if I can scamper up and down four floors worth of stairs, three times a day, I reckon I’d be able to handle one floor! (in bare feet, I can scamper! Put shoes on me, and I can barely hobble… I hate shoes!) Mind you, I’d have to do it twelve times a day to get in the exercise I’m getting here, and we’d be losing the number and variety of shops at Shoppingtown, for the convenience of living closer to Autograph and My Size! 😉 So anyway, tomorrow should be an interesting day. I have no idea why, but the house in Flowerdrum Close has rather taken my fancy – maybe it’s because I absolutely loved the movie “The Flowerdrum Song“, or maybe it’s the idea of tipping a whole heap of dirt into the swimming pool and having a veggie garden at long last, or then again, it might be because it has a nice, high, security gate… but I’m already starting to think of it as “mine”, which is very foolish! I’m pretty sure, too, that it won’t be nearly as nice as I think it’s going to be (then again, I didn’t think that our old place in Glen Waverley was going to be very nice from what we could see from the outside – but it was! So, who knows?! 🙂 ) Anyway, I’ll tell you all about them tomorrow night 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I knew it was coming. I didn’t quite go up – I stayed the same, at 90.5kg. I’ll be up tomorrow though – this was sort-of the “run up” before the high jump!

Julian went to the doctor this morning about the scans he had done of his ankle. He’s injured his tendon – I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s the tendon that runs down the length of the top of the foot, and under another one that goes across the top of the foot (or something like that, anyway! “Damn it Jim, I’m an artist, not a doctor!” (with apologies to Dr. McCoy from Star Trek, the Original Series)) So the upshot of it all is, he has to go to a Physiotherapist – guess who? 🙂 And where? 🙂 My old “trainer”, I. A., at “Bounce“, where I used to go to the gym, until I found that going up and down the stairs was much more easier and far less stressful than exercising! 😉

So, with four houses to go and look at tomorrow, I expect that I shan’t be doing much Rifting, or graphic-ing! But there will be loads of stuff to tell you about the four places we are seeing, and about the neighbourhood, and the agents – apparently this lady Carmen, whom we saw yesterday, is quite the go-getter! She gave us some references, and one of them happened to be a couple who used to live here at The Ridge, on the next floor up – she sold that place first to them, and then later on, for them, so because we know them anyway, Julian called them and had a nice long chat with Mr. B.  Apparently they waxed quite lyrical about Carmen, and told Julian that she’d sold six other properties for them as well, at very good prices! (and a very good commission for herself, too, I’d imagine!) So that’s about it from me for the evening – is anyone going to be watching “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” at half past eight on ABC1 tonight? We will be! 🙂 Be sure to drop in again tomorrow night! Find out if my weight did go up, or stayed the same – for another day! And wouldn’t it be a laugh if we’d liked one of the places so much that we’d gone and bought it? Well, I don’t know about a “laugh”, but it would certainly be a surprise! For us, more than you, I think! 😉 Anyway, until then, please, bee good! remember that it’s good to be a pessimist, because you’ll never be disappointed, but… above all, please… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, back to a “normal” start again – in other words, later than I wanted to start. But I’ve just come back from the hairdresser, and I just had to go and look up the place they were waffling on about there… I’d shown Brooks the Bored Panda page with the pretty pastel hair pictures that I’d liked so much, so she came back with a place in the UK which sells those sorts of wigs, for around £20 – it’s called Geisha Wigs. There was really only one there that I was interested in, but it was out of stock, and I’d have to wait… I’m still deciding if I’m interested enough to actually order one or not… I wonder if anyone sells those pretty wigs here in Melbourne? I must ask my favourite eldest daughter – she posted a photo of herself on Facebook several months ago, wearing a long blue wig – which didn’t really suit her, but it was a very pretty colour… If I remember, I’ll ask her where she got it. Anyway, Brooks has done a good job again, and I had a lovely back and neck “Daniel” massage (he has nice strong hands) – and a lot of water down my back… again. I’m becoming more and more convinced that I need to sit on a cushion or something, because when I lean back, the “neck” part of the basin comes to about half way up the back of my head. The only way I can sort-of get my neck into that -er… dip? lip? edge of the basin, is if I shove my feet hard against the floor and push myself up and backwards – which ends up giving me cramps in my leg muscles, and sore shoulders, after only a short while. Maybe I should just bite the bullet, bring a change of clothing with me, buy some bathers to wear next time, and change into the dry clothing when they’ve finished washing my hair! *sigh*

We’ve had a busy-ish sort of day, actually – well, perhaps not so much “busy”, as “bitty”. We had the female Real Estate Agent over this morning – her name’s Carmen, and she was very enthusiastic 🙂 She’s got the job of selling the Penthouse upstairs – the one I want to go and have a look at – and she had lots of ideas for us, one of which was turfing us out as soon as possible, putting all our stuff in storage, and “re-decorating” this place with rented furniture so as to sell it quickly, and at the best possible price (well, she didn’t exactly use those words, but in essence, that was what she was proposing!) She actually has a house coming up for sale in Templestowe – it’ll be open for inspection for the first time this Saturday, so we’ll go along to have a look. She showed it to us online, and apart from the fact that it has a swimming pool, which we’re not particularly interested in (I can’t swim! I only dog-paddle, and float) the size, and the floor plan look very promising. Now, at this stage, I must point out to you all that we’re not thinking of selling up and moving out ASAP – far from it – we’re trying to decide whether to stay here or move. The reasons we’re even thinking about it are various. First: Doncaster Hill is rapidly becoming built up with High Rise apartments, most of them too small to swing a frog in, let alone the proverbial cat. The property market is going to fall apart, as supply rapidly exceeds demand, and it’ll be next to impossible to sell an older place like ours. Secondly: If we do decide to stay here, it would most likely be for at least another ten years, and we’d probably gut the place again and re-do it all, from floor to ceiling (and this place is a real headache to re-decorate – there’s no ceiling or floor “crawl space”, or easy way of running electrical wiring or cables from room to room) By that time, it’ll be a thirty year old building in the middle of a slew of newer apartments, and even if we’re lucky enough not to get “built out” (higher buildings blocking our city views) it’s not going to be easy to sell. Thirdly: we’re a trifle concerned about the Pub next door. No-one quite knows what’s going to happen with that. They could knock it down and build a High Rise Hotel tower there, or they could sell it to a developer for a huge sum – it’s an enormous piece of land – totally wasted with the Pub that’s currently there. This would also affect the viability and the resale value of this place. And finally, we’re getting sick and tired of not being able to do whatever we want to to this place because of Body Corporate rules and regulations. Put in tinted double glazing? Not unless the Body Corporate says you can! Wall in that part of the window in our lounge room that drives me batty because we have to keep the curtain closed all the time? Not unless the Body Corporate gives us permission! I’d love to install a type of cat module on the balcony, so that cats could go out and sit in the sun and sniff the fresh air – but Body Corporate rules state that you can’t put permanent fixtures on the balcony (you’re not even allowed to dry any washing out there!) we had enough of a hassle just putting the air conditioning units on a tiny little out-of-the-way section of the balcony! So – we may own the apartment, but the Body Corporate dictates the rules of what you can, and can’t do with it – and we want to be our own bosses! So the long and short of it is – we want to look at all our options – see what’s available out there, and whether we’d be better off moving, or staying. The next Real Estate Agent is coming next Thursday morning. I wonder what sort of a tale he’ll have to tell us! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. It’s tomorrow that I’m going to go up… I weighed in at 90.5kg this morning. I’m dreading tomorrow…

So, yeah – a bit of a messed up morning, but I managed to get a fair bit of Rifting in before we had to waltz off to the hairdresser – and the time I probably should have spent playing with my new brushes, I spent trying to tidy up my desktop a bit… “I’ll never be able to find anything again!” will be my new catchcry – because I went and did what I was talking about last night – I made several new folders, gave them all pretty, but totally unrelated icons to what was going to be inside them, and just chucked all the flotsam and jetsam into what I thought (at the time!) were going to be the appropriate places. They won’t be, of course, and I’ll no doubt become irate and wrathful when I can’t find my list of “Special” trophy monsters to kill in Scarwood Reach, or whatever it is that I’m looking for – but at least the desktop is tidy… er…looks tidier than it did…

I galloped off for my evening Stair Walk as soon as I came through the front door – I happily and gratefully flung off my torture devices (read: shoes) tossed them in the shoe basket, and scampered off to the fire escape with my keys, my glove, and my door propping book. I thought it best to get it over and done with, rather than get half way through writing this and have to leave the rest of it until after dinner. So, here it is, 6.20pm and I’ve almost finished 🙂 I have no idea what’s happening tomorrow – I think himself will be sifting through the property listings to see if there’s anything else we can go and look at on Saturday, when we go off to see this place in Templestowe – and I’ll probably laze around doing nothing terribly constructive, as usual… However by this time tomorrow I should have a bit more news for you all, even if it’s only how my weight decided to behave when I clambered onto the scales in the morning. As I said earlier – it’ll be tomorrow that I bounce back up again… I’m sure of it, this time! I’m starting to get more enthusiastic about Dimension building again, too – I went and looked at a few other Dimensions last night, and I must say that the general standard has improved! A lot! I shall have to pull my socks up, if I’m to stay in the game – unfortunately, all of my “good” Dimensions are on Laethys. I shall definitely have to start doing some building on Hailol, toot sweet, as the French say! So stay tuned to this blog! The Game Is Afoot! 😉 So until this time tomorrow night, please, bee good – and if you can’t bee good, bee better! remember! if you see a white horse, make a wish and cross your fingers – and do not uncross your fingers until you see a black dog, or your wish will go badly wrong! But above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Today I’m starting reasonably early – well, it’s 4.15pm, so I suppose that qualifies as “early” to some 🙂 I had a very hard time dragging myself away from Photoshop this afternoon – last night I downloaded a whole heap of new brushes, and I’ve been busy most of the day today testing them all, adjusting styles for them, etc. – some of them are gorgeous, a few are fantastic, and a lot of them are just “meh! *shrug*“, if you know what I mean. I just wish the headers here were big enough so that I could put some up for you to see, but they’re not (of course there’s always screenies, I guess… maybe later, if I remember ‘K?) You know how I make myself Bookmark Wallpapers for my desktop? Well, I made one for the “the other side” of Windows today, you know, where all those trillions of little folders sit around crowding out your screen?… I did try using  Stardock’s “Fences” a couple of times – it’s a handy little untility that allows you to organise those messy folder icons – hide some, sort them into “use a lot” and “seldom need”, and stuff like that… and it really does keep your desktop nice and neat and tidy! But I’m a very visual sort of person, and if I put folders “away”, I tend to forget about them – you know, “out of sight, out of mind” – and you can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as I put something “away”, in a neat and tidy “safe place”, I’m going to desperately need to use that something, and I’m not going to remember where that neat and tidy “safe place” is! I’ve tried creating “subject folders”, like one called “Games”, and I put all my games in there, which is all well and good, and it tidies up the desktop nicely – but do I ever look in it again to play those games? er… no. I’m aware that they’re there – I haven’t totally forgotten them – but it just seems like too much of a hassle to go poking around in the “Games” folder, looking for Bejeweled, or one of my Solitaire games, so I just go and find something online to play instead. Ditto with Documents… and all my Rift “notes”, wot I’ve made over the years. I used to have a “Programs” folder there, too, but… I’m lazy, so I just stick programs I’m currently using directly onto the desktop – they’re easier to find, rather than have to start wondering if I put it in the “Programs” folder, or the “Currently Using” folder, or the “Handy Utilities” one, and then go and look in all three, only to find that I’ve put it in the “Important Files” folder instead! So, no, Fences aren’t for the likes of me – but I’m weird, and have that reputation to maintain – but if you think it sounds interesting, go and have a look – you might find it very handy 🙂

I did play Rift this morning for a while – until the siren song of the new brushes became too hard to resist – and I’m sure you’ll all be very pleased to know that Addain has been rescued from his Goblin infested hillside, has in fact completed that quest chain and about to start on another one. I received yet another two Dimension keys from my Minions this morning, so I went looking to see if anyone had created any wonderful new areas – that is, I went looking for inspiration…The one area that I had time to investigate is a Dimension area set in Dusken – it’s quite large, and does have a magnificent big building in the middle of it – largely in ruins, and with plants and grass coming through the floor (but those minor things are easily disguised and/or removed) What I found of great interest was the fact that they’d installed several other fairly large houses close by (well, it is quite a big area!) Lots of food for thought there, and as well as keys and plants and household items, I have houses just about coming out of my ears, too! Big ones, little ones… huts… tents… you name it, I’ve got it! 🙂 So… maybe… if I can keep myself away from all those brushes… I can start building again (*Winter picks up her coffee cup and peers inside it. Winter looks sad… it’s empty! 😦 *) Oh well…

Julian and I sat down to go through the form(s) for changing/adding to my name after lunch. We have all the paperwork needed (we think) but there’s still the issue of the “assumed name” business – honestly, if I’d known how much trouble it was going to cause everyone further down the track, I would never have agreed to it! F’rinstance, the kids can’t get a copy of their Year 12 results (which has wrecked quite a lot of job opportunities for them) because there’s no way that they can prove that they were Lisa and Katherine Xxxxxx back then! There’s no documentation, no way of verifying anything. In hindsight, it was a silly and largely useless exercise, but… what’s done is done, I suppose, and we’ll just have to deal with it. We wrote an email to the Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, explaining the situation – as I said earlier, I prefer to err on the side of honesty, as does himself. So now we just have to sit tight and wait for a response… Hmmm… we probably should also have asked if I’d need to get a new Passport and Driver’s Licence if I get that extra name tacked onto my current one…

Weigh-in this morning. I haven’t bounced back up again yet – that’s happening tomorrow – but I weighed in at 90.7kg – one point down on yesterday’s weight. I expect to go back into the 91kg zone momentarily!

So, wuz hapnin’ tamarra? We have an Estate Agent coming over tomorrow morning – a female one, this time. In the past, when we’ve been looking at houses, we’ve always found that the female Estate Agents are much more conscientious and professional – willing to “go the extra mile” – than their male counterparts. For some reason, the men seem to be more interested in showing off their cars, and in holding forth about how many places in the area that they’ve sold, than actually finding something suitable for you to look at. Mind you, it’s been quite a long time since we’ve nosed around the Real Estate market – maybe things have changed… though not much, if the first guy was anything to go by. He got back to use within two days with a list of about 8 Auctions coming up (been and gone by now, I’d reckon!) and absolutely nothing since! So hopefully this woman tomorrow morning will come up with something that we can actually go and look at… Oh, and I have a hairdressing appointment in the afternoon, so I expect we’ll be kept fairly busy most of the day – which is good, because it means all the more news and gossip for all of you! 🙂 My favourite eldest daughter’s big TV production interview thingy was today – it’s her Major Project in TV Production. She rang me when she got home to tell me how it went, and she said it got off to a reasonably shaky start, but quickly settled down. It took several “takes”, but they finally got a good one – so hopefully it’ll turn out to be a High Distinction for her, too! 🙂 (She got her Minor Project in TV Production marks back yesterday – she got 83%, which is High Distinction (*says Winter proudly! 🙂 *)) So until tomorrow night, when I’ll fill you in on all the day’s doin’s, and just how far back up the scales I’ve bounced, please try to bee good, remember that imagination is more important than knowledge, and above all – stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, well, well! I’m actually starting early today! 🙂 The truth is, I’m bored sleepy! My eyes just want to close – I’m not at all tired, I’m just bored, and when I get as bored as this, I just want to close my eyes and sleep until I’m not bored any more. I made a new background and header this morning, as you can see – I didn’t try anything new or fancy with Word Press – I think I’ve gone about as far as I can with that at the moment, unfortunately. I’m not a programmer (I wish I was!) but even if I was a programmer, I very much doubt that Word Press would give me access to their software, let alone allow me to try to work out why the damn thing keeps changing the dimensions of things on me all the time! Like backgrounds! I tried a bit of twiddling (alright, “experimentation“, then!) with three different templates (blog themes) this morning, using exactly the same background tile with each of them. Each one altered the size of that graphic differently – it’s actually the same tile that you’re looking at now – one template even went so far as to change the colour, turning the soft blue tile into a muddy brown one! Ridiculous! So this morning I just wanted to make something pretty 🙂 Well, I think these graphics are pretty, anyway 🙂 After that, I Rifted for a bit, but got bored around lunch time – I thought “I’ll log back in again after lunch…”, but then decided that I couldn’t be bothered. Poor Addain has been left standing all alone, out on a hillside, right in the middle of Goblin territory! He’ll survive though – I just have to remember to be alert when I do log back in, or I’m likely to find myself infested with nasty little Goblins trying to chew off my fingers!

Last night I had to get himself to tape up my left foot – I’ve somehow managed to split the skin just under the ball of my foot. and it’s damn sore! Never fear, I can still do my Stair Walk – but only by putting my left food down so that the leading edge of the step is just behind where the split is. The moral of that story? Don’t get old!

This morning when I went for my Stair Walk (I’m always a lot slower on that first SW – you’d think that being fresher and more rested that I’d be faster, but I’m not!) I was almost not able to get back to our apartment! When I got to the top of the stairs and went to exit the stair well, I almost ran straight bang smack into the back of a delivery man! The people who live in the apartment directly opposite the fire escape were having an enormous new double door fridge delivered. The men had it beautifully lined up with the front door, but it wouldn’t fit through – they were standing there discussing what they were going to do when I stepped through the fire escape door – as I said, almost straight into the outside delivery man! I had to squish and squirm my way past him, as he was standing in the small amount of corridor ‘twixt the fire escape door and the hall way – there was really no-where for either of us to go, and he couldn’t get out of the way because he was holding up one end of a very large fridge! However, when I went for my lunchtime Stair Walk, they were gone, so I can only presume they found a way of getting the behemoth fridge into the apartment, after all 🙂

It looks like there’s going to be an interesting show on the History Channel tonight, “The Last Days of Anne Boleyn” – the second wife of Henry VIII, who as you probably all know, was beheaded for treason, amongst other accusations. The Tudor period is one of my favourite historical eras – why, I don’t know – it was terribly brutal! Anyway, this docu-drama tonight will be commented on by several well-known historians, including Hilary Mantel, David Starkey, Philippa Gregory and Alison Weir. I’m especially interested in what Philippa Gregory has to say – she’s a very well known historical novelist who has written quite a few historical books, including “The Other Boleyn Girl”, about Anne Boleyn’s older sister, and which was turned into a movie in 2008. She’s an extremely talented writer who researches her work meticulously – plus I think I must have read just about every book she’s ever written! So, yeah, I’m very interested in this show at 8.30 tonight – but being on the History Channel, we’ll record it and watch it later, so that we can edit out the ads! 😉

I’ve “booked” Julian for tomorrow – I want him to sit down with me and sanity-check me through all the trillions of forms I have to fill out for changing my name. Actually, not so much change my name, but rather add to it. I’ll still keep my original name if I really have to, even though it’s horrible, and I’ve always hated it – but I’ll be officially adding “Winter” to it, so I’ll be “Winter [original first name] [original middle name] Perry” – if you say that fast, it sounds like “Winterberry” *giggle* But there are squillions of forms and questions I’m supposed to fill in and answer, and I’m not sure if I have to fill in one part of it as I was known by another name, once, many years ago… If I do say “yes” to that question, it’ll open up a really messy can of worms, as there are absolutely no physical (read: paper work/paper trail) records that the kids and I did use that name! If I say “no” to the question, and they find out that I did use another name, I’ll probably end up having my name change request rejected. I always prefer to err on the side of honesty – but I fear that in this particular case it might be more trouble (with a capital “T” five miles high, made in titanium, and painted in shiny black gloss enamel!) than it’s worth… Why did I do it? At the time, I was with a man who said that if he was going to be looking after us, he wanted the children and I to use his surname – which was fair enough, I suppose – we were together for more than seven years (until I started my Bulletin Board and met Julian) Never mind – all water under the bridge now – we’ll work out how to fill the wretched form in – I think I’m just niggling because I’d rather not keep any of my original name…

Weigh-in this morning. Down another two points, to 90.8kg So it looks very much like I’ll be back up again tomorrow… *sigh*

So that brings me almost to the end of another day of fun and adventure – and who knows what tomorrow will bring – apart from a massive headache-inducing name change form to fill in, that is. I suspect that tomorrow will largely be a mirror image of today, in most respects. He’ll secrete himself in the office, and I’ll ensconce myself in here – probably Rifting, but more likely graphic-ing. What I should probably do is get back into Dimension building again. I have so many bits and pieces that I’ve just dumped into one of the “Anywhere” Dimensions for storage! And Dimension keys – once worth a small fortune on the Auction House, but now largely unsalable, thanks to Minions bringing them home like unwanted junk! I have enough Dimension keys to open up several High Rise resorts! But whatever I do tomorrow, I’m sure it’ll be newsworthy 😉  Oh, and I’ll let you know how we went, filling in that form, and also whether my weight did bounce back up again (if it doesn’t tomorrow, it will the day after!) So drop back again tomorrow night to see what’s been happening chez nous – but until then, bee good, remember that even a sheet of paper has two sides, and above all… please… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*There have been small updates to the following menu items: “About me…”, “Reading…”, “As Seen On…”, and “Cats…”

Once again, I’m starting late. My favourite eldest daughter came over today, so we sat and watched “Agents of Shield” (because there were no more episodes of “Person of Interest” left to watch until the next season is released 😦 ) and then, when we’d finished watching the last remaining episodes of “AoS” (until next season) we watched “Agent Carter” – another “Marvel” production – until we ran out of episodes of that too! (but she’s bringing some more next week! 🙂 ) By then we were starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel a bit, so we started watching “The 100”. Unfortunately we only had time to see two episodes before Julian had to drop her off home – and I had to scoot off for my evening Stair Walk. I did manage to get her to read a few bits and pieces of my blog – well, she is doing a Creative Writing course at uni, and I wanted her opinion of it, and it seems I pass muster 😉 I was actually more concerned about the way that I changed “person”, or “viewpoint” three times in the “About this site…” section, usually a big “no-no” in writing, and she said that the only reason that it does work is because I’ve left a very obvious break between the three segments – so that’s all good – the only thing that concerned her a little was the “welcome to my mind…” comment at the end – but you all knew what I meant, didn’t you? (well, I hope you did, anyway! For those who didn’t, basically, what I was saying is “what you see here on this site is pretty much the way my mind works all the time – weird, but “mostly harmless”! 😉 )

Anyway, I did try a few graphical experiments this morning before Lee arrived – unfortunately, I produced nothing even remotely good enough for public consumption, but again, I did learn quite a bit more about the way Word Press processes and displays colours – not patterns, though. It’s quite interesting – and where it oh-so-helpfully says “Or chose your own colours” – well… you can, but you can’t. If you chose a dark but clear colour (mmm… it’s a bit hard to describe what I mean here – you might just have to trust me on this one!) you should be able to use black, or any other dark coloured text. But it won’t let you! It won’t even let you if you use your own (dark-ish) background image! Word Press automatically changes the text to a pale colour, as soon as the colour reaches a certain level of “darkness” (or perhaps it would be better to call it “depth”? Because I’m not talking about “dark” as in adding more “black”, but “dark” as in the shade of the colour becoming deeper… if you see what I mean…?) Anyway, so if you want to use a deeper shade for the background, the program will automatically switch your text to a pale colour. Yes, you can change the pale colour to any pale colour you like – but you can’t use a dark text, even if it is, or would be clearly visible – which is annoying. But! What I’ve found that I can do, is go ahead and choose a dark text colour, then very slowly and carefully lower the depth of the background colour until it reaches its “tipping point”(where it suddenly switches from being a dark text to a pale one) Allow me to be technical for just another moment – when the background colour reaches that “tipping point”, I write down its number (all colours have a hexadecimal number) and adjust my background image to that shade of darkness or light. It’s a compromise, but it seems to work. I should get a chance to do a bit more work tomorrow, anyway, so we shall see what we shall see then 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. I went down 5 points, to 91.0kg Arrrggghhh! Why?! It’s too much in one go! Expect me to be back up again tomorrow… (stupid bloody body! I want to lose weight, not bounce up and down like a yo-yo!)

I have no idea what’s going to be happening tomorrow – hopefully not much – I really want to do a bit more playing around with these colours and graphical problems. I was actually talking to Lee about art this afternoon, and saying that I wouldn’t mind getting back into painting again, but every time I start psyching myself up to buy some oils and brushes, I think “What would I paint?” I really only paint faces… er… and trees, and plants, I suppose, but I don’t “do” conventional art, like “still life with ducks” or whatever. I don’t “do” portraits (though I have done a few miniature “biro on paper serviette” ones, for which I got paid about $2.00! 🙂 ) I dunno… painting is messy… Flipper would probably walk through my paints and leave paw prints all over the furniture… Maybe I’ll just stick with computer graphics… it’s easier! (and cleaner!) 😉 Julian was complaining the other day that we never get anything done – not properly, anyway. And I can see where he’s coming from. We need to get a few more Estate Agents in to value this place (we’re not silly enough to go with only one evaluation!) and the Pent House apartment upstairs looks like it’s going to be for sale soon – and I want to have a look at it – not necessarily with a view to buying it, but to start getting an idea of what’s available, and how much places around here are likely to fetch. It’s a sort-of a “split level” apartment, with the lift opening up right into their hall. There are a couple of rooms on that level, then stairs going up to the main living area. Now that stairs are no longer a barrier to me, that shouldn’t pose any problems anymore, and neither should Town Houses, or two-story places (boy I’m glad I’m walking those four flights of stairs, three times a day! I’m fitter than I’ve been for… I hate to think how many years! 🙂 ) So, we want to organise that. We need to sort out The Family Business, which at the moment is in a parlous state… Sorry, dinner calls…

+————————–+ * Dinner & Television Break * +————————–+

 *sigh* You know, I absolutely love seeing my daughters, and I love being able to spend time with them and talking to them. But… why can’t they come in the morning?! That way I could spend time with them, and get my blog done on time (or more or less on time, anyway) Of course, that way I wouldn’t get much time to spend on my graphics, or to play Rift… 😉 My mother always said that she’d like to build a big compound – I would too! A big, Roman-type villa, with a central courtyard and fountain open to the sky. One wing would be for us, a second wing for Lee and Neale, a third wing for Kate and Terry, and the fourth wing for games, entertainment, and hobbies. Extensive grounds outside would house stables, a rabbitry, and whatever other pet facilities were needed… plus a vegetable garden. My grandparents had enormous “cages” built for bantams, and pheasants, and quail, and also around and over fig and cherry trees, so that the birds couldn’t get at them – and I love figs and cherries, so we’d have some of them too, and fishponds. And a gardener and “groundsman” to look after it all 🙂 [cue song: “Wouldn’t it be lovely” from My Fair Lady] Well, according to himself, he’ll be spending a full day in the office – hopefully not all of it on Body Corporate business! This means that I’ve practically got the day to myself, to stuff around with Rift and graphics – so hopefully I’ll be able to get a bit of worthwhile work done. Anyway, drop in again tomorrow night and see what progress (if any) has been made on the work we have ahead of ourselves – whether I’ve made any progress with working out how to circumvent the restrictions placed on me by Word Press, and if that stupidly big weight drop this morning has rebounded on me or not. Whatever happens around here, you’ll all be the first to know about it! 🙂 But until then, please bee good, don’t walk under ladders, but above all – stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Here I am – starting late, this time! The kids have just left, and I’ve just come back from a speed record-breaking Stair Walk (and I’m not even puffing!) We slept in a bit this morning, as we usually do on a Sunday (we give ourselves about an extra half hour or so) and even though Julian had to get a few things over the road for this afternoon, we still managed to get in a goodly amount of Rifting before the kids arrived at 3.30pm. We’ve finished off the third section of Dusken, called Morban (or “Morbid Morban”, as I’ve been calling it, because it’s so dark and gloomy!) and have entered the last area, called “Steppes of Infinity”. I must say, we seem to have pretty much raced through Dusken – I thought it would have taken us much longer – especially as we really only play once a week, on Sundays. But no, we’ve almost finished it! I give us another two – three? weeks before we move on to the Plane of Water (which is not only big, it’s confusing, as well!) Ah well… and then it’ll be time to start another two babies off on their long trek to level 65! 😉

(Sorry – a small bit of back-story is needed here!)(Oh, alright then, a big bit of back story! ) Many, many years ago, when I was about 13 or 14 (I must have been that old, because we were still in our first house, and I remember sitting at the funny old bench table typing this book…) and for reasons that I can’t remember now, I sat down at Mum’s old typewriter and started typing out recipes from Mum’s hand written recipe book. The typewriter was old, and a bit wonky, and the ribbon was worn in a lot of places, so the typing wasn’t always as legible as it should have been. But I sat there typing, and I typed up 126 of our favourite recipes, both sweet and savoury. It took me quite a long time, but at last it was done, and it was MY recipe book! MINE! I also typed up some of my favourite poetry in the back of it, so that was another reason it was very special to me. It was typed on loose-leaf paper – I think it’s called quarto size – it’s not as long as foolscap, anyway, and has only two holes punched in the middle of one side (which I meticulously reinforced with round canvas ring surround thingies, front and back, so that the paper wouldn’t tear off the rings) The paper, the reinforcers, the cardboard covers (with the school badge emblazoned on it!), and the oversized rings, were all purchased from the school stock room. And so as to distinguish it from a school book, I covered the heavy cardboard covers (especially the side with the school badge!) with er… typical 1960’s wrapping paper, of weird flowers and leaves in lime green, cyan, dark green…and purple… and together with the rather oversized loose leaf rings, it was extremely… noticeable? Identifiable? In other words, ya couldn’t miss it a mile off! After I grew up and got married I used it constantly. It was never far away from the kitchen, where it soon became grease spotted, stained, and dog-eared. It was my recipe book! Only twice has it ever been out of my reach… (end of the somewhat long-winded back story!)

It was lost once when we moved here, towards the middle of 2007 – and I fretted and stewed about it until it was found… a couple of years later. I determined that I would re-do the book, using new-fashioned technology this time! I would find myself some really, really good recipe writing software, and self-publish it, with a print run of about 80 to start off with. But I couldn’t find any recipe writing software that I really liked – none of them were good enough, or flexible enough, and they all wanted to include useless things (to me!) like number of serves (who cares!) nutritional information (what!? why?!) and stuff like that. In the end I designed my own, and started transcribing. I think I got twelve (out of 126!) done. I had the printer paper and covers bought, and (as Julian uses them quite a bit for manuals and things) we had a small spiral binder contraption.

And then I lost the book! Again! We looked everywhere for it! We turned the house upside down! We looked in boxes that hadn’t been touched since we moved here. We looked in cupboards and drawers, under chair cushions and beds. It was gone. Just. Plain. Gone. I grizzled about it, on and off, for about a year. I still kept opening cupboards and looking, again, to see if it might have, suddenly and miraculously, reappeared where it hadn’t been the week before. Ah! I see you’ve noticed that I’ve been using the past tense? Yes. I finally have “my preciousssss” back 🙂 Julian found it this afternoon. You’ll never guess where it was! (hangs head in shame) I sit in a corner desk. To my left, is a wide-drawer chest that sits under the desk. To my right, and slightly behind me, is a matching, narrower (but with deeper drawers) chest. Inside the second drawer of the smaller chest is a small pile of books; on top of the books is a wide, open-topped shoe box, which largely blocks the books underneath from view. It seems that Julian just happened to be sitting at the right angle to see under the box and the books, and he spotted the two loose leaf rings. It had been there, right next to me, all this time! But I’d looked in there! No, I hadn’t removed the box, but I’d been pretty thorough, otherwise… or thought I had, anyway… (and I really must remember to ask Julian why he had that drawer open in the first place! 😉 ) Still, I’m very happy – that which was lost is now found – and God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world (for now, anyway! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning. I went back down one point, to 91.5kg. I’ll probably sit on that for the next three days… or go back up again. I’ve noticed, that as soon as I hit the “??.4kg” mark, I either go up, or stay the same, for at least a couple of days…

So that was my day that was… My precious recipe book is found (I think I’ll sleep with it under my pillow from now on!), the kids came over and we had a great afternoon – Kate and Terry gave me a bottle of my favourite perfume (Cinnabar, by Estée Lauder) for Mother’s Day, and Lee and Neale gave me a properly finished, well presented, spiral bound, “edition” of one of her uni assignments (a screen play/script) which she gave me about a week ago for my opinion. I told her that it was good, as far as it went, but that she hadn’t finished it off properly. I’d told her (only half jokingly) that I wanted to see the properly finished version, please! 🙂 So she’s finished it for my eyes only, but she’s going to hand in the first (and in my opinion, unfinished) version for assessment – leaving the reader/viewer/listener on a real cliff hanger! Anyway, we all had such a good time today that we’ve decided to make it a monthly affair – even though getting us all together when none of us have anything else on is going to be… interesting, to say the least! 😉

+————————–+ * Dinner & Television Break * +————————–+

Well, I didn’t really think I was going to get this finished before dinner, after starting so late – but I got most of it done 🙂 I finished reading that screen play of Lee’s tonight while the (muted) sport was on the news… hmmm… interesting ending! Predictable? maybe a little… (but only because I know my daughter so well 🙂 ) I know she’s done better, but it’ll do 🙂 It’ll do 🙂 She’ll be over again tomorrow – she’s supposed to come over on Tuesdays now, but on Wednesday one of the class’s group assignments is due in – it’s a TV news/morning show “interview” type-segment, and as she’s the Producer, she expects everything to be fairly chaotic by Tuesday. Even today she had to field several phone calls from the rest of the cast and crew about it – apparently one of the interviewers has come down with Shingles, so there’s been a bit of a flurry about that – he thinks he’ll be alright to do the show, but Lee has her doubts (as do I! Shingles, while not exactly life threatening, is neither pleasant, nor painless!) but, as they say in the theatre, the show must go on! So that’s about it from me for tonight 🙂 I’ll be back again this time tomorrow night to tell you all what Lee (who has lost 8.7kg, in about a month!!) and I watched, now that there’s no more “Person of Interest” left to get excited about. I’m going to try to get some more graphic work done before she gets here in the morning, and maybe, with any luck, there’ll be a new header or background. But until then, please bee good, don’t overfill your hot-water bottle tonight, and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Quite a busy day, in some respects – and I learnt two new things about Word Press and the blog! Remember how I told you that I’d finally figured out the difference between a Page (which you can add to your menu) and a post (which you can’t)? And that it was all very well adding Pages to your menu, but how did you get back to the blog bit afterwards? It’s all quite simple, really – once someone tells you (why aren’t these things documented?!)(well, they probably are – it’s just that I never thought to go looking for them anywhere ) I suppose that all of you readers already knew how to do it – but I didn’t! “Have you tried clicking on the header?” said Mr. Know-it-All Julian… “what good would that do?”, says simpleton Winter, “it’s not linked to anything, it’s just a head…. OH!” as she clicked on it anyway, and went straight back to the blog bit. So there you go! You can read the other items on the menu, and get back here just by clicking on the header! Who’d a thunk it?! Anyway, I’ve added another couple of items to said menu – “About this site…”, which was the old and pretty defunct “Home” page – and it’s probably worth your while to go back and read it again, now that I’ve re-done it and up-dated it. The “About me…” Page hasn’t changed. I must re-read it myself and see if it needs updating too (which it probably will!) “Reading…” I already told you about, “As seen on…” is also new, but all I’ve written there so far is the blurb which tells you briefly what it’s for. “Listening to…”, ditto! And lastly, “Cats…” is pretty old now, and probably also needs updating. And “they” say that you can’t teach an old…. er… dog (?) new tricks! 😉 *pause* I just noticed something… This does seem to be my week for noticing things, doesn’t it! Maybe my brain doesn’t weigh as much these days, so I’m noticing things more… but I don’t think so 🙂 I was just thinking, how much a question mark (“?”) looks like… a raised eyebrow! No, really! I mean, doesn’t it! It’s like a smiley – raised eyebrow on top, the curved bit, then an ordinary “straight” eyebrow underneath, making a single eyebrow, like Ernie, on Sesame Street! Then a dot underneath all of that, representing an eye… And don’t a lot of people slightly raise one eyebrow when they ask a question? I think it’s brilliant! Whoever “invented” the question mark obviously had a sense of humour! 🙂

I actually started off Rifting this morning – everything was going swimmingly, and then it was night-time in Telara, and especially in Gloamwood. which is dank and gloomy even at high noon! I really hate fighting in the dark – I can’t see what I’m hitting properly, so I logged off to wait for morning. In the meantime, I Googled flowers – images, photos, pictures – of flowers. I’d been getting quite frustrated making different styles for different graphics, and I remembered that – way back when I was just starting out in graphics, and using Paint Shop Pro – I used to make great use of my Kaleidoscope filter on pictures of things – mostly flowers, but other things as well. They made lovely seamless patterns that I used as borders, fills, and special effects. And what I needed most for my styles were… more patterns! Colourful and pretty patterns! So I downloaded some flower pictures, selected a section of each, ran them through my trusty Kaleidoscope filter, and now I have about 20 new and colourful seamless patterns that I can use for just about anything – from blog backgrounds to header borders 🙂

Phew! Am I relieved or what! I just got to the last sentence above… and a blue and white message flashed onto my screen telling me that the machine was shutting down in 14 minutes (and some few odd seconds) because of some sort of upgrades and that the machine needed to reboot. Well, actually it told me yesterday, right when I was in the middle of writing yesterday’s blog, but I told it “Later” (meaning to re-boot it last night before I went to bed) and promptly forgot about it. This afternoon I wasn’t given a choice! I quickly scraped and copied what I’d just written, and dumped it in my little “blog short cuts” file wot I always have open, and I also clicked on the “Save Draft” option in the blog editor… then I crossed all my fingers, hit the “restart” button, and went for my evening Stair Walk while I was waiting. Julian was wondering what had happened – we run this handy little utility called LAN Messenger, which allows us to send messages between our two computers here in the Den, and also between his machine in the Library, and mine in the Den. So I don’t have to yell if I want him, and he has no more excuses that he was so busy/wrapped up in what he was doing, that he “didn’t hear me” 😉 Anyway, so Julian saw a message come up on his LAN Messenger saying “Winter has gone offline” – he’d wondered what was going on and was about to come down to ask me, when I turned up in the kitchen instead, on my way out to the fire escape, and I filled him in before I left. I was a bit worried that what I’d written might get a bit jangled by the rude interruption – but no, the “Save Draft” function worked just as it should have, and everything was just the way I’d left it 🙂 Thank heavens! 🙂 I’d have hated to have had to start over!

Weigh-in this morning. I told you! I went up two points, from 91.4kg back to 91.6kg. I’ll probably stay the same tomorrow… or go up again…

We did manage to get some Rifting in this afternoon, which was good. When we finished off yesterday, we’d failed a quest, so we wanted to go back and do it again. The thing is, this particular quest is very buggy – lots of people apparently have no end of trouble with it. You have to “escort” a guy into a long, narrow cave – take him to one of the Big Bad Guys (not quite a “Boss” character, but close enough!) and help the guy kill him. However, when you’re on any sort of escort quest, you can’t get too far away from the character you’re escorting, or you’ll fail the quest. Where this particular quest starts getting buggy is that this particular character insists on cheering and doing a little victory dance every time you kill a mob (and there are an awful lot of mobs you have to kill in this little cave!) and of course your first instinct after you’ve killed something is to move along fairly quickly – which of course gets you further away from the guy you’re escorting. To make matters even worse, this brainless AI you’re escorting, after doing his little victory dance, then runs back to where he was standing when the fight first started – taking him even further away from you – which is how we failed the quest yesterday. Today, we read up on it first, and worked out how to manage it. Except for one thing. We couldn’t find the quest giver! This is the second part of the bug in this quest! When you fail a quest, you’re supposed to abandon it, go back to the quest giver, and re-acquire it. Well, we did that – but then we couldn’t find the quest giver – apparently he often “disappears” when you abandon the quest (like you’re supposed to do if you fail it) We eventually found him, re-acquired the quest, and this time completed it successfully, but we wasted about three-quarters of an hour running around in circles, and getting frustrated first! Not good, Trion!

So that was my day today – tonight we’re recording a “Father Brown” murder mystery, followed by another detective show, “DCI Banks” (we like ABC1 – no ads! 😉 ) though I’m hoping we might be able to watch another episode of “Elementary” first, then watch “Father Brown”, and save DCI Banks for another night… We’ll see. Tomorrow, of course, the kids will be over for “afternoon tea”, but we should be able to get a bit of our Rifting in in the morning. Still, whether we do or not, there’ll be lots to fill you in on tomorrow night, so I hope to see you all again then! In the meantime, remember to bee good, don’t let the bed bugs bite tonight, but above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Beware the ides of May! I went for my Warfarin blood test today – my INR (International Normalised Ratio – naturally, with a drug like Warfarin it has to have an international dosage standard!) has dropped – quite a bit! If one is prone to developing blood clots (like me), one’s reading should be on the high side – last month mine was sitting on 2.0 – not as high as we would have liked, but just high enough. This morning it was 1.7! So, once again, they’ve upped my Warfarin dose *sigh* however, as long as it keeps me out of hospital, I don’t really care how much rat poison I have to swallow! 🙂 After the blood test, I remembered that we hadn’t bought Terry, my favourite youngest daughter’s husband, a Birthday present yet – and they were going to be over on Sunday! (just as well I remembered while we were in the shopping centre, eh?!) He wanted a nice warm jumper to wear to work, on these lovely, cool, crisp, autumn mornings – so we went around to a few of the menswear shoppes, where we certainly saw some very lovely jumpers – at not very lovely prices! It’s a work jumper for goodness sake – who’s going to pay $200 for a jumper to wear to work… fair enough if you’re a CEO or in some sort of managerial position… or even a well-groomed receptionist with her eye on the boss – but when you’re a carpenter, working in all sorts of conditions? I rather think not… Anyway, we eventually found him a nice, warm jumper, at a much more reasonable price – guess where! David Jones, because they were having a 20% off sale! I even got myself another jumper! 🙂 (I only have two nice warm jumpers – I used to have a third one, that I’d borrowed from Julian, but he borrowed it back again, and now I don’t have it any more 😦 ) Now, all we have to do is wrap the present… find a nice card, and we’re all set for Sunday (apart from something nice for everyone – except my favourite eldest daughter and myself – to eat! Julian will prolly pick up some sort of cake tomorrow…I hope he remembers!) Then we raced for the car, before I decided to buy anything else (we were walking through the handbag section of DJ’s at the time 😉 ) and we made our way over to Acuity, to pick up Julian’s reading glasses, to deliver my old red glasses to have their lenses updated, and to return my new computer glasses. It’s a pity people don’t pay attention – those new computer glasses are really excellent – I can see the screen much more betterer than I’ve been able to for years. Unfortunately, I can’t see the keyboard, so the glasses have had to go back to have the lenses corrected, so that hopefully, I’ll be able to see the keyboard as well as I can see the screen! Fingers crossed! 😉 By this time our tongues were almost hanging out for a cup of coffee, so we came home and had some of that wonderfully stimulating beverage which revived me enough to set off on my lunchtime Stair Walk. When I got back, I could hear voices coming from the Den. Our lovely cleaning lady had arrived! ( 😉 I’ll have to be careful what I say about certain things from now on 😉 as one of her daughters has requested the address of this blog, which she wants to read – and I don’t want to bore her! 😉 (*waves* “Hi, Bahar!” 🙂 )) So, the three of us chatted for a bit, then E. went off to do her cleaning, Julian and I had our lunch, and then settled in for an hour or so of Rifting together in Dusken – we won’t get much Rifting in on Sunday, as the kids will be over for a now traditionally late Birthday and Mother’s Day celebratory afternoon tea 🙂 According to himself, we’re going to try to get a bit more Rifting in tonight, after dinner, but it’s Friday night, and there’s a “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” on ABC1 to watch! (and if we’re really lucky, another episode of “Elementary”, before it!)

Weigh-in this morning. I went down another two points, to 91.4kg. I know I’ll bounce back tomorrow… I always do…

Oh, I got myself into a right stew this morning – we were trying to get ready to leave and I had a few minutes up my sleeve, so I thought I’d quickly (HA!) take care of a magazine renewal, as well as subscribe to another magazine that I often buy at the supermarket, but which was being offered very cheaply as a subscription. I started off with the new one. Somewhere along the line I managed to click on the wretched thing twice, and do you think I could get rid of that stupid second subscription? Not on your [*censored*] life! The damn thing kept wanting to charge me for two subscriptions, instead of just the one! And all the time, Julian’s waffling on in the background, trying to offer helpful advice, which just wasn’t making any sense to me! (at the time – you have to understand, I was in a hurry, something that should have been quick and simple wasn’t, I was rapidly losing what little cool I’d had, and Julian was offering helpful advice I couldn’t understand? So I yelled at him!) Anyway, when we got home, we sorted all the magazine stuff out – as it turned out that there was a “click on this to delete that product” type of link, but it was printed in very fine, very light brown italic, which blended wonderfully into the rest of the page, and like an army camouflage unit, was almost invisible to the rushed, frustrated, and unfamiliar eye. I nearly made the stupid magsonline people go without their new subscription, just for messing me around this morning when I was in a hurry! *annoyed sniff*

So, what’s happening tomorrow? I have absolutely no idea! I’ll probably do a bit of this and that – Rifting… graphic-ing… speaking of which, what do you think of the new header and background? The border around the header took a while to set up – I have a font which does fancy frames, but of course, if I’d wanted to make the frame big enough to fit around the entire header panel, it would have been gi-normous and un-workable! So I did a small one. Chopped out one side, stuck it on a new layer, and repeated it, all around the header. It took a while, because everything else had to be turned off – I was working on a transparent background, magnifying it all as high as I could go, and making sure everything lined up. That part was easy enough, but then came the matter of getting it all to fit inside the header background. If you look closely at the top right hand corner of the “frame”, you’ll see that it’s about a pixel out. Couldn’t be helped – if I’d added that extra pixel, it would have looked really “off”! However, like my kanji autumn symbol, I’ve saved that frame (without the style colour) for posterity, so that I’ll be able to use it again, somewhere else, and in a different colour – if I want (or need) to. So, as you can see, there’s always something going on around here – why not drop around again tomorrow night, and find out all the latest news and tidbits from this side of the black stump? 🙂 All the latest news and information from chez nous – always guaranteed to educate, amuse, entertain, amaze, enlighten, mystify, bore, and/or to lull you all to sleep! 🙂 I shall look forward to seeing you all here again tomorrow night, but until then, bee good, remember that a nice cup of hot cocoa will help you sleep, and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂