Following a conversation I had earlier this afternoon, tonight’s blog might seem a little bit introspective… I’m pondering the reasons for people asking each other questions… I mean, I know there are lots of reasons people ask questions – f’rinstance, you could be asking someone for directions, or asking a shop assistant if a certain item is in stock, or asking the waiter what the Fish of the Day is in a restaurant. However, I’m talking about the sort of questions people ask eachother in their personal lives, and why they ask them. Here’s a second sort of f’rinstance: when you’re interested in a subject, and would like to know more about it, there are two ways you can go about it. You can Google it, and research it online, or, if you know someone, or know of someone involved in that subject, you could ask them – depending on how well you knew them, of course. If you knew the person you were asking fairly well, you would expect them to be only too happy to answer you, and to point you in the right direction to learn more if they didn’t, wouldn’t you. And if they were busy, or wanted to go and do something else, rather than talk to you, you’d expect them to say something along the lines of: “look, not right now – I have to go and wash my hair” (or whatever) “remind me tomorrow (or next week, or next year), and I’ll fill you in then.” Well, as I said, if you know them fairly well, you’ll realise that they don’t want to talk to you right now, so you take the hint and say “Oh! OK, we’ll get together for coffee next week sometime, OK?” and you both go your separate ways until both of you have the time and the inclination to sit down and have a chat, and that’s perfectly normal and alright – you both know where you stand, and you can feel comfortable about it.  And now here’s yet another f’instance – Julian does this a lot (in fact almost all the time!) , and it annoys the hell out of me. It goes like this: himself comes in through the front door “I’ve just been talking to our neighbour, Oodles McSwish* – poor guy’s having a rough trot – his daughter’s run off with milkman’s niece and the cat ran away last week and hasn’t come home yet” “Really?!” says me “How’s he coping with it all?” “I don’t know,” Julian replies “I didn’t ask him.” “Why not?” says me in total astonishment “Because if he’d wanted me to know, he would have told me..” says Julian. I just look at him. Most people I know, don’t want to burden other people with their problems – on the other hand, I do, I tell everyone who’ll listen if I’m feeling miserable, or sick, or tired – or whatever! But then, I’m not “most” people, am I? – however most people don’t. The thing is though, that they really do want to talk about it – they need to talk about it, in fact. I’m sure you’ve all felt like it from time to time – sometimes you just need to vent. To rant and rave and yell and jump up and down and cry – but of course, unless you’re me, you can’t do that uninvited; someone needs to offer these people a chance to “vent their spleen” by saying to them “do you want to talk about it?”. Sometimes you only need to indicate your willingness to listen, and out it’ll all pour. ‘If they wanted you to know, they’d have told you?’ Hell would have to freeze over before most people would unburden themselves to someone else, uninvited! The main thing to bear in mind though, is that these types of questions and responses occur between friends! and they occur because friends are interested in eachother, in eachother’s well being, and in eachother’s hobbies and/or interests. If you weren’t interested in those aspects on their lives, you wouldn’t be their friend would you – you’d just be an “acquaintance“, with no thought or interest in them apart from immediate transactions. Personally, I’d prefer a friend to tell me to shut up and go away if I was irritating them (and I don’t blame them – I irritate a lot of people – it’s in my job description!), rather than wait until they were about to explode with annoyance, and then tell me – in my not so humble opinion, that’s really hurtful to both sides… Having said that, I can also truthfully say that I don’t give a damn if friends hurt me – I’ll still forgive and love them because they’re my friends – and that’s what makes the difference between a friend, and “just an acquaintance!”. Oh, and please feel free to ask questions! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. If only the rest of the day had gone so well! 🙂 Well, I didn’t go up, as I expected to, and I didn’t stay the same, as my second guess would have been – I went down, four whole points, to 96.2kg! I think I can feel relatively safe there – I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to suddenly errupt back into the 97kg zone from 96.2kg… (if I do, it’ll probably be because of that very small, toasted, Hot Cross Bun, with only a smidgen of butter on it, wot I had for breakfast yesterday, anyway, and there’s only one more day of Easter left, and therefore only one more very small, toasted, Hot Cross Bun, with just a smidgen of butter on it, for me to eat… so any weight that I might put on will only be “temporary”) Uhhh… and I had a “normal” breakfast this morning… 🙂

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, and the kids will be over, it’ll also be the very first Easter Sunday in my entire life, that hasn’t been “Chocolate Coated”! No Easter Eggs this year, for anybody!! (well, we will get a small one for our cleaning lady, cos she loves chocolate too) But quite frankly, I’m not missing all those chocolaty delights that used to be the main (commercial) raison d’être for Easter – that made Easter, Easter! I get my “chocolate fix” every day – my bars are choc-coated – and that’s enough for me. I am sorry to be missing out on the roast lamb with all the trimmings tomorrow, and the white chocolate cheese cake that himself got for dessert, but this diet isn’t forever – next Easter will come, and I rather think that this year we’ll be starting a new “Family Tradition” – Chocolate-Free Easters! 🙂 (mind you, if anyone does give me an Easter Egg next year, it won’t be wasted – I will eat it! 😉 ) So drop by again this time tomorrow night, and find out how our Easter Sunday went, and please feel free to send in comments about your own – we’d love to hear from you! What will my weight do tomorrow, with that very small, toasted, Hot Cross Bun (with only a smidgen of butter on it) for my breakfast (ackshally, that probably won’t show up on the scales until Monday or Tuesday!) Will there be chocolate in the house tomorrow, despite what I just said, above? Will I just look at the White Chocolate Cheesecake, or will I lick the knife that cuts it?! (hopefully without cutting my tongue, as I did once before when I was a small child – I licked the knife Mum had been icing a chocolate cake with, and cut my tongue rather badly (but we had lino, not tiles, so the blood didn’t get into the grouting!) My tongue didn’t stop bleeding for ages and ages, despite sucking on ice blocks… so let that be a lesson to you all! – don’t lick sharp knives! I speak from experience!) Anyway, until tomorrow night, please… bee good, don’t eat too much chocolate tomorrow, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

 * Oodles McSwish – not his real name!

So, it’s Good Friday – the beginning of Easter… I actually had a small, toasted Hot Cross Bun, with just a smidge of butter, for breakfast this morning! Himself worked out all the relevant kilojoule bits and pieces, and worked out that it was only about 70 calories (293 kilojoules) over my normal breakfast, and quite a bit less than the morning or afternoon tea (which were 314 kilojoules) that I should have been having, but haven’t, for the last four or five months. So… it’s sort of like I said “I think I’ll have morning tea this morning!” – Why do I feel as though I need to justify that extra 293 kilojoules! Let’s see what the scales say tomorrow morning! I’m having a normal breakfast tomorrow, but I’ll be having another, very small, Warm Angry Rabbit on Sunday morning.

This morning I did a bit of serious Rifting. Satai is now level 26 and almost half way through Stonefield – doing rather well, actually, and I’ve decided that all of the Artifacts collected via Minions, or by other characters, as it becomes their turn to level up, will be sent on to Satai. As she’s the reason that Hailol was populated in the first place, it seems only right that she should get the Artifacts… and one single character stands a much better chance of collecting a full Artifact set, than many characters only getting a few Artifacts per set. Full sets can net you some very nice prizes, from Mounts, to Armor and Costume Armor, to various enhancements – in other words, well worth collecting for! This afternoon himself and I played a bit of Rift together – we only played for about an hour, but I think we accomplished quite a lot in that time (we found the next Porticulum, too! They don’t show up on the map until you’ve “discovered” them…) We may play again tomorrow afternoon, because we won’t be able to on Sunday, what with Easter Sunday Lunch, and the kids over and all… Roast Lamb with all the trimmings, and some sort of cake for dessert… I’ll have to make do with a small Hot Cross Bun and a smidge of butter for breakfast, and my usual Optifast bar for lunch. It’ll be… (thinks…) Berry Crunch? According to my calculations, anyway – it’s actually my favourite, though I do like the Cappuccino one too 🙂

I seem to be alternating between Rift and Graphics – I also did a fair bit of graphic work today too – Out of all those frame and corner fonts that I downloaded the other day, most of them are too big to use successfully as header frames – I only get 1194 x 200 pixels to work with (that’s about 31.5cm x 5.3cm, in lay person’s terms) so there ain’t much room to mess around in! But there are quite a few long, skinny frames (height-wise) amongst them. I really can’t see that they’d be much use to anyone, really, they’re just too narrow (about 1/2 an inch high?) though I suppose you could use them for one line descriptions under a picture or something? Anyway, I’ve discovered that if I duplicate the image, and flip the duplicate upside down, then join the two together in the middle and erase the centre line, I get quite a respectable sized header frame! Next, if I select the centre part, insert a new layer under the frame, then fill the selection with a contrasting colour on that new layer, it looks really good! (you do this on the layer below, so that any rough lines in the selection (“jaggies”) are hidden under the outline of the frame above it) I’m working on one at the moment – I’ll put it up as soon as I can decide on the colour(s) to make the text in the middle. As I said, I’ve got one almost ready, but I still have about another fifteen to play with – I could do a new header every night for a fortnight! Wouldn’t that be fun! 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Surprisingly good, considering everything! Down two points to 96.6kg! Don’t worry though – it’ll be up again tomorrow! I’d like to get a bit lower still, before I consider myself “safe” in the 96kg zone… However, what with the fluid retaining pills, and the Hot Cross Bun that I had for breakfast this morning, I shudder to think what I’ll see when I stand on the scales tomorrow morning!

So tune in again this time tomorrow night, and see if the Easter Bunny has dropped a few extra kilos onto my scales for me! And who knows? If you’re really lucky, you might find yourselves greeted by a new, much fancier and ornate blog header! I have a small problem to solve, too – you know I told you that I got my stand-up clip board – the one with the white board on the back? Yes, well I don’t know where to put it. I have all of my desk arranged “just so”, and I really don’t have room… I could move the tissues, but where to? so that I can still reach them easily… I could move the prescription filing box, but once again – where to, so that its still going to be within easy reach? Decisions, decisions! I don’t know! At the moment the clip board is sitting right where the breakfast goes in the morning. I need a bigger desk! 😦 I’ll let you know tomorrow night if I manage to sort it all out 🙂 In the meantime, there’s not much more to tell you, and in all honesty, I’d like to see if I can get that header finished, and up tonight! So without further ado, I shall admonish you all to bee good, behave yourselves, but above all else…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, I have to say that I started out writing this, still laughing… You see the blog title, “Winter’s log, earthdate 201504.02”? Well, I don’t go and type that in every evening, I have it on a “scratch pad” (Notepad, actually), and just scrape, copy, and paste, then change either one, or both of the date figures at the end. Well, I scraped, copied, and pasted, and thought “Huh?!” Because the date (the “02” part) was correct, but… I hadn’t changed it! Had the program done it on its own? C’mon, Word Press isn’t that clever! So how was it… and then the penny dropped. The date on the “scratch pad” had been saved on the second of March – 201503.02. What I had to change, this time, was the month, making it 201504.02. Which reminds me – I’d better change the “03” on the “scratch pad” to “04”, so that I don’t make the same mistake tomorrow night! Done… Actually, today was a fairly busy day – I did go out, and went to all the places I wanted to go to (however we didn’t find a nice rug shoppe – we didn’t even find a not nice one!) But I did get to Office Works (I love going to Office Works! I can nearly always find something nice there that I haven’t got, but think that I could possibly need, if I tried hard enough! 🙂 ) and almost got blown inside out by the wind on my way inside… but I did find my clipboard that’ll stand up by itself, and not only does it stand up, it also has a white board on the other side! So now, when the tissues run out (or whatever!) I don’t have to write a reminder to myself that we “need more tissues” on a piece of paper – which invariably gets lost – I can turn the clipboard around and write it on the white board, where it’ll stay under my nose until I get the replacement tissues 🙂 I also got a very nice little “phone holder” for the bathroom, in (fake) leather, with (fake) brass corners on the bottom of it. It’s not really a phone holder, it’s actually a pen and pencil holder come desk caddy, with an “X” shaped insert to divide pens from pencils etc. The insert comes out in two pieces, so I can leave one piece in, dividing the caddy diagonally in half, and I can put scissors and nail files in one half, and the phone in the other half. But… why do I need a phone holder in the bathroom? I hear you ask…  Well, because I have a cordless phone in the bathroom that doesn’t have a charging cradle, so the phone has to stand there, precariously balanced on its end, and it just doesn’t look terribly secure. Appliance cords make it wobble, it gets in the way, and I just wanted to put it in something reasonably secure that didn’t look too utilitarian or ugly. Then I braved the wind again, got back in the car, and we went off to our next port of call – Box Hill Central. Boy, has it changed since I was last there! Needless to say, we got lost… It turned out that we were in the wrong building, so, back out into the wind again (I really don’t know why I bothered to comb my hair before we left home this morning!), and we muddled our way into t’other building – I say “muddled our way”, because neither of us could remember where the entrance was! I’d been told that the place we were looking for – called “Pets Carnival“, by the way 😉 was upstairs – we “couldn’t miss it!”. As it turned out, we didn’t miss it, because it had a great big red sign on the closed doors saying “Back in 5 minutes”. As it was almost lunch time, we made our way to the food court almost exactly opposite and had lunch. Once again, I’d thoughtfully brought one of my Optifast bars with me (Cappuccino this time!) Himself had a savoury muffin and a (real, hot liquid and frothed milk) cappuccino, and I had a long black with a small jug of skinny milk, from Muffin Break. When we’d finished lunch, the Pets Carnival doors were still advertising that they’d be “back in five minutes”, so we sat and chatted and twiddled our thumbs, and eventually, after about 40 minutes, the five minutes was up, and the doors finally opened. They really did have a lot of very interesting cat caves – I’ve actually seen most of them on Etsy, but it was very good to be able to see the actual article, “in the flesh”, so to speak. We got a few ideas from there actually, but didn’t buy anything – however, I did get two new long sleeved, warm jumpers in Harris Scarfe, which was close by. After Box Hill Central we went up to The Glen – I had to take two tops that I’d bought only a week or so ago, back to My Size… they were already too big, and I hadn’t even worn them! (well, I tried them on this morning, and they were too big – just as well I hadn’t taken their labels off!) I changed them over for size “S” (small), which, I believe is supposed to be a size 18. I’m just trying to remember back to when I was at school… I think I was about a size 14 around about then (I was a lot taller then – 5’7″ in bare feet – now I’m barely 5’1″ 😦 ) but I don’t think I’ve been size 18 since I was in my mid twenties! I’m shrinking! I’m shrinking! 🙂 both height-wise, and width-wise, it seems! 🙂 While I was in My Size, one of the ladies there said how great my hair looked, and what a fantastic colour it was… which pleased me greatly… and then she went and spoilt the nice compliment by saying that it reminded her of a lolly-pop waiting to be licked, or something! I had to laugh, though! Talk about a back handed compliment! 😀

All in all, it was a Good Day Out, but we didn’t get back until after half past three! I’d missed my pre-lunch Stair Walk again, but only because I wasn’t here to do it – so I raced upstairs, shed my shoes, grabbed my “prop-the-door-open” book, my “save-my-skin” fingerless glove, and the house keys, and raced off to the fire escape. I got back from my better-late-than-never pre-lunch Stair Walk just after 4 o’clock… so I had half to three quarters of an hour to relax and have a well deserved cup of coffee before I was due to go on my evening Stair Walk. Needless to say, after my evening Stair Walk I retired to the lounge room and read until dinner – which was late, because once again Himself was out playing Taxi Driver for my favourite eldest daughter, because her husband was still on his way home from work, and she had a late doctor’s appointment.

Weigh-in this morning. Much better than I expected, especially considering that I’m two days into those rotten fluid retaining pills – I went down to 96.8kg – one point down on yesterday. Only one point… still, it’s better than going up, or staying the same… But I’ll probably be up again tomorrow, or the same – just you wait and see!

And that, gentle readers, brings me to the end of today’s exciting episode of “Winter’s Tales” – stay tuned tomorrow night, for the next installment of the Tall Tales and True, of the legendary Winter – stories that will not in any way be “detrimental to any beneficial use” (I heard that phrase on the news tonight, and I just couldn’t let it slip – I think they were talking about some sort of water pollution at the time, but all that went right out of my head when I heard that phrase – I just had to weave it into my blog, somehow – it’s so bad and nonsensical that it really deserves to be recorded for posterity!) Indeed, this time tomorrow night, you shall receive answers to questions you haven’t even thought to ask yet! Questions like: Did the new tops fit? What about the jumpers? Why did we want to look at interesting cat caves in Box Hill Central, and, Did my weight go up or down or stay the same? Have I written on my new whiteboard that’s on the back of my “stand-up” clip board? All shall be revealed this time tomorrow night! However, until then, bee good, don’t smoke behind the bike shed, but above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, Happy April Fool’s Day (or what’s left of it, anyway!) Did any of you get caught out in a “Fool” today? Himself managed to catch me out, just after midnight this morning – I said it was already April 1st, and he said no it wasn’t. So what did I do? I looked at the clock, and became probably the very first April Fool of the day! So there you go – even the Great Madam Winter, who Sees all, Knows all, can get caught out by her cruel and mean husband 😉 I know I said I wanted to get out of the house today, but he talked me out of it – said it was going to be hot today, and that it would be better to go out tomorrow, instead (I think he was more worried about the bank balance than he was about the heat, and my comfort! 😉 ) However, I will be going out tomorrow – and I have a specific place in mind that I want to go to (two places, actually!) I positively must go to Office Works – there are a couple of things I want to look for there (one being a clipboard that will stand up by itself, like a photo frame) and I’d like to go back and visit one of my old haunts… Box Hill Central. I haven’t been there in years, and yet when we lived just off Station Street in Burwood, I used to be up there so often that the thought occurred to me that I should really just pitch a tent in the car park… But our cleaning lady raves on about how wonderful it is, and I heard on the grape-vine that there’s a shop upstairs that sells very interesting and unusual “cat caves”. We bought a slightly Swiss Chalet shaped cat cave for Flipper, because she’s old and was feeling the cold, and she absolutely loves it! She was really funny when we first put it on the couch for her! We moved her old basket off and put the new one in its place. She was curled up asleep on a forgotten towel down at the other end of the couch. We stood back to see what would happen…. she hadn’t noticed? All of a sudden, her head popped up, and she stared and stared at the new cat cave. She got up, walked gingerly over and stared at it some more. We made encouraging-type noises. She poked her head, and then her shoulders into the cave, and had a good sniff. Then she turned around and went back to her towel, to think it over… but she kept staring at this new… “thing” that her basket seemed to have turned into. She got up again, marched over, and repeated her earlier performance, then went back to her towel – this obviously needed a lot more thinking about! About twenty minutes or so later, she got up, marched firmly up to the new cat cave, and walked in and curled up in it – I wonder if she thought it was just her old basket that had grown a roof? Anyway, we got her another one today, to put in the Den – she’s so happy in her new cat cave that the only time she comes down to the Den now is when she wants a snack from her bowl of pussy biscuits (kibble!) that we keep down here. She used to spend at least half her time down here (the computers and screens keep the room fairly warm) and she used to sleep in here most nights – but she seems to have totally abandoned the Den for the warm and cosy comfort of her cat cave in the lounge room (and strangely enough, she doesn’t seem to have even noticed the new sofa bed in the spare room. Cats can be very strange – especially very elderly ones!) We haven’t put the new cat cave in here yet – we don’t know where to put it! If we put it on the chair where her old basket is, she won’t be able to get into it properly. The one in the lounge room is sitting on the couch, with the opening facing towards the middle of the couch – making it easy for her to jump onto the couch first, and walk into the cat cave. If we put the new cat cave on the chair in here, she’d have to jump directly into the entrance to the cat cave. With a younger and less arthritic cat, this wouldn’t pose a problem – but she’s 20 years old and very stiff in her joints. She occasionally goes to jump somewhere and falls, because she can’t quite make the distance any more, and we’re always on the look out in case she injures herself. So, not only would she have to jump straight into the entrance to the cat cave, the chair, being an ex-computer chair, swivels. She could hurt herself badly if she jumped, missed the opening, and the chair swiveled – so we’re not sure where to put the new cave. It can’t go directly on the floor (too draughty), so we need something to raise it up a bit – and I’ve just thought of the perfect thing to get! One of those smaller dog beds that looks like a miniature trampoline (it’s not a trampoline, it just looks like one! She wouldn’t bounce off it if she jumped onto it!) one of those would do the trick! They sit about six or seven inches off the floor, are firm enough to hold a small to medium-sized dog without sagging, so she’d be able to jump up onto that, and then swagger into her cat cave. We must have a look at some tomorrow (as well as the interesting sounding cat caves up at Box Hill Central!) So, lots to do and look at tomorrow – there used to be a very nice rug place up there, too – I wonder if it’s still there?

I did play a bit of Rift today – got Satai up to level 23 and into Stonefield (the next zone on from Freemarch, the starting area) I played until just after lunch, when I went and did some more graphics work. I’ve found a very nice two-fish line drawing that I can “colour in” (so to speak) I’ve done a part of it, but oh boy, is it fiddly! Once upon a time I would have thought nothing of spending hours and hours (quite literally!) zoomed in to the maximum, selecting areas, one pixel at a time, to colour and style. I started on the two fishes this afternoon, and the parts that I’ve done do look really stunning… but it took me two and a half hours to select and process just two fish bodies, and one fish eye. I still have the tails, fins, and another eye to do, before I have to move on to the even more complicated water weeds and water “eddies”! Still, I think I will do it – finish it off – it’s really going to look fantastic when it’s finished! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Really pleasing… I don’t for a minute think that I’ll stay at this weight for more than 24 hours – I’m sure to go back up again, especially as I started on those wretched pills this morning… but I was down to 96.9kg. Perhaps I should push myself to that fourth level… though I think I’ll just do the three level Stair Walks for now… until I build up a bit more stamina…

So that was the day that was – call in tomorrow night and find out how our shopping expotition went! Will there be any money left in the bank account? Will Flipper have a new cat cave down here in the Den, and will it be sitting on a doggie bed! Is there a rug shoppe at Box Hill Central, and if so, did we find a suitable rug for the lounge room? What will my weight have done? Will it have gone back up because of those ‘orrible pills, or will it be down? Or the same? At the moment, I don’t know, but I will tomorrow, and I can assure you that all your questions will be answered, this time tomorrow night, in all of my usual meticulous and detailed descriptive fashion (or, why use five words when twenty will do quite nicely! 😉 ) So until then, bee good, don’t eat too much sugar, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Oh dear, the last day of the month – it’s back on those wretched pills again tomorrow, April 1st – so it’s sort of like a cruel April Fool’s Day joke, on me! 😦 Oh well, it’s only 10 days of fluid retention… and I have until mid July to get under 90kg… So… today… well, most of this morning was spent in organising a new, non-Free, blog Template. Once again, the last of the Big Spenders (me) coughed up $24.00 for a template that (so far!) seems to work (cross fingers and touch wood!) I hope you all like it – it’s a little different, and apart from the fact that the blog text and the header seem to be a little… off centre? on the page, I quite like it… In the process of getting the header done, and because I’m still searching for Art Nouveau and/or Art Deco elements for my desktop wallpapers, I didn’t get as much Rifting in as I’d have liked, this afternoon. I did start, and I did get Satai up one level to level 21, but then I felt too restless to continue, and I went font hunting again. You’d think that 2000+ fonts would be enough for anyone, wouldn’t you, but not to the truly dedicated fontaholic that I am. I started off Googling “Art Deco fish images”, and then “Art Nouveau fish images” (I’m still looking for something that I can incorporate into a Pisces symbol) and actually found quite a nice lot of Art Nouveau images… and then somehow or other, (I wasn’t deliberately looking, I swear! 😉 ) I ended up on a site that had a lot of Art Deco corners and frames fonts. I downloaded, and installed, fifteen of them – fourteen, actually, as I found I already had one of them, but they’re going to be a big asset in my font arsenal! There are so many things you can do with corners and frames – use them “as is”, or chop them up and “whiz” them around in a kaleidoscope (the graphic equivalent of a blender) to make “interesting” patterns… all sorts of things. Thinks: I used to do a lot of that, way back when, with photos of flowers, and abstract patterns, and stuff – the resulting images made very nice repeatable tiles (if you can count pixels and know exactly where to cut things to form an even and seamless edge! Ahhh… the good old days! 🙂 ) So, after all that reminiscing, I might just be tempted away from Rift again tomorrow! 🙂 Then again, I might be tempted away from Rift tomorrow by the Great Outdoors! Yes, himself has to go out on a foray, and I might just invite myself along – I’d like to go to Office Works – I need to get something that (knowing my weird wants and needs) probably doesn’t exist. I want to get a clipboard with a “thingy” on the back so that it’ll stand up, like a photo frame, if you know what I mean. I also need to get a second warm jumper – at the moment I only have one, and it’s not even mine! It’s Julian’s, and I’ve been wearing it for a couple of days and it really needed to go to the Dry Cleaners before it got up and walked there on its own – so I don’t even have that any more… and it’s getting cold, Garfield! I have plenty of T-shirts (most of them too big now!) and low necked tops, but my neck gets terribly cold and I don’t want to get a chill or a stiff neck (I do have lots of scarves though… maybe I should start wearing them again… it’s certainly getting cold enough for them!) So… tomorrow I shall either Rift… or Graphick… or go shopping. Speaking of shopping, the rug that we ordered from a shop at The Glen isn’t available. We got our deposit back, and now we have to start looking, all over again. I also need to get a new coffee table for the lounge room, and have the Italian tiles from the old coffee table turned into wall panels, or hangings. Now that the spare room is all but finished, I don’t want to lose the re-decoration momentum – the lounge room is still unfinished – hardly even started, actually! All we’ve done there is replace the entertainment unit and the matching side tables. The curtains have to be changed, and we need a nice big “neutral” coloured rug. We need a new, and much bigger coffee table (on castors) and the small round table has to be carted over to my favourite youngest daughter’s place. The window wall that’s eternally kept curtained needs to be turned into a wall, so that we can eke back some desperately needed hanging space (for all the pictures that are still in storage!) Yes, perhaps I’d better go along tomorrow…. (*evil laugh* 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning. A little disappointing – I didn’t go down at all… however, I didn’t go up, either! I stayed the same, at 97.1kg. And tomorrow morning I start on the fluid loving pills *gloom* I thought I had until August to get down below 90kg, but I don’t… I only have until mid July. At a rough estimate (counting on my fingers!) I have about 12 weeks? If I lose approximately a kilo a week (but sometimes a fair bit less), let’s say that I could, theoretically, get down to – what? 75kg? My goal weight? Impossible! I don’t believe it – my maths was always hopeless… let me work it out again – on paper, this time. There! See?! I was wrong! (well, I did tell you my maths was hopeless!) I carried a “1” where I shouldn’t have – so, in fact, I could, theoretically, get down to about 87kg. That sounds a bit more reasonable… Oh well, as long as I’m under 90kg…

And that, gentle readers, was “My Day” – oh, I also filed my nails down, to try to match the extremely short thumb nail that tore off the other day. I must say that it makes typing a whole lot easier and more comfortable! How do secretaries and receptionists manage with their great long (usually acrylic) talons? Anyway, come and visit again tomorrow night – who knows what marvels and surprises might await you! Will I have gone shopping with himself, and found my up-standing clip board? Did I stay home and get Satai up another couple of levels? Have we managed to find a nice replacement rug for the one we liked but is no longer available? Will we ever decide on what style of curtains we want to get for the lounge room, and where will we ever find the sort of coffee table that I want? I can’t promise that all of those questions will be answered by this time tomorrow night, but some of them will be! The thing is, which ones will be answered! Stay tuned to find out! In the meantime, please try to curb your impatience 🙂  So bee good, don’t drink too much coffee, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Hmf! Well, here I am this morning with “Part 2” (30.2) of last night’s blog – no thanks to Word Press! As you can see, I’ve had to purchase another theme – one that would allow me to put in a personalised header that actually worked! See?! Miracles do still happen, after all! (especially when it involves the exchange of $$$’s!)

So, where was I last night? Oh yes, that’s right, fruitlessly attempting to get a header to work on a Free Word Press template! I eventually gave up. I had ended up not having time to write my nightly blog, and in Rift, I didn’t have time to do more than check my Minions – I didn’t even have time to put a bag’s worth of items up on the Auction House – items which might have earned me virtual $$$’s (erm – well, platinum, actually, but at the moment, $$$’s, + Word Press are a bit of a sore point with me) But apart from wasting a great deal of my time, what else occupied me yesterday? Let’s see…

I had my hair done in the morning, and at least I’m looking human again now 🙂 Then sat and chatted with a friend until lunchtime, when I set off on my three floors Stair Walk. I think it’s doing me good – I was starting to get a bit complacent just doing the two floors – it was getting just a bit too easy (hehe! “Two too easy”! 😉 a fun pun!) – this third floor is making me work a fair bit harder, especially coming up the very last eight steps to the fifth floor. This is good, and it means that I’m slowly getting fitter! The day before yesterday I did something that I haven’t been able to do for goodness knows how many years! I put my slacks on without having to sit down to do it! I’m quite proud of that achievement! 🙂 Oh! I just had a thought! It’s good to have goals, and to aim for a particular end point, right? And it’s nice to receive acknowledgement and a pat on the back for milestones passed… In Rift, when you accomplish something that’s not exactly quest related (though they can be, sometimes!) you earn an “Achievement“. They don’t really do anything, other than make you feel good about it, and you don’t get a plaque or a Blue Ribbon to hang on your wall – but they’re things you can look back on and say things like: “Oh, I remember having soooo much trouble finding the exact right place to jump off that bridge, to get that one!“, and “That one was so hard to get – I reckon I must have fluked it! Tell you what, I’m never going to take any of my other characters to try getting it!” (and then, of course, you do! In fact, you take all of them, and even with 57+ characters, you’ll probably never manage to “fluke” it again!) So I think it would be a good idea to create some sort of “Achievements” (or similar) for the Dieter – like a little card saying something along the lines of “I’m Standing For It!” An Achievement for having put your slacks on standing up, for the first time in 25 years“, along with a pretty little icon to stick on your desktop calendar, on the day that you achieved it. Well, I think it’s a good idea, anyway! Someone ought to tell Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig to trial it! I reckon it’d be very popular! 😉

We also got the news yesterday that my favourite eldest daughter’s back was no better – in fact it was a lot worse! She had to get a locum to come in and see her last night, as she was in too much pain to get to a doctor herself. Apparently it started when she and Neale went out to play cards, and she had to perch on a stool all night (she’s a very big girl!) – she probably pulled a muscle, or stretched a ligament, or something, and it’s just got steadily worse from there. She’s decided not to start her VLCD* until after Easter (I wonder why she decided not to start until then?! 😉 ) She has an appointment to see the Doctor on Thursday evening, to which himself will have to become Mr. Taxi Man again, as Neale won’t be home in time to take her. Unless stricken down by something like this, she is mobile, and would do well to go and see Ian Anderson (the Personal Trainer I used to go to until I decided that exercise was just… “not me” ) at Bounce Health Group in Blackburn. *sigh* Why is it, that no matter how old they get, you can never stop worrying about your offspring?!

Weigh-in this morning. Wonderousness!! Down 4 points, to 97.1kg! But, never fear! I shall pay the price tomorrow – I’ll probably bounce back up to 97.9kg, or something stupid and horrible like that Innit always the way? A big drop, and then wiggle, wiggle, see saw up and down, but mostly up, or the same! I wish I could skip over that wiggle, wiggle, see saw up and down bit, and just get on with the big drops down (and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride! 🙂 ) So let’s wait and see how much I go up, but hopefully go down, tomorrow. Don’t forget, tomorrow is my last day before I go back on those fluid loving and retaining pills! I hope I do go down – I really need to get as low as possible before I start taking those ‘orrible pills again!

And that’s about it from me for today (well, yesterday, really, but we’re pretending it’s still “today”, aren’t we! 😉 ) Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Apart from me struggling with wretched Word Press’s recalcitrant free themes (and their refusal to either tell you the correct size for their headers, or to work properly even without a personalised header) that is. Hopefully I’ll find a bit of time to get back to Rift – poor Satai has been sitting around, twiddling her virtual thumbs, for the past two days – it’s about time she started her sprint to level 40! So stay tuned for what happens tomorrow! What news, scandal, or comedic muddles will we have gotten (*cringe*  “gotten” – I really hate that word!) ourselves into, I hear you wondering – well this time tomorrow night, you’ll know! So until then, bee good, don’t touch that book!, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

VLCD* = Very Low Calorie Diet

What’s with you people at Word Press, anyway?! I spent nearly all of this afternoon, and all of this evening, trying, without success, I might add, to get a personal header working on this theme! The rest of tonight’s blog will follow tomorrow morning!! Not. Happy. Word. Press!!

It was quite an interesting day in Telara today – we didn’t realise we were so close to the end of the Shimmersand zone… We actually finished it off this morning, with a rather spectacular Grande Denouement… a quest Rift to put an end to the main villain of the zone, and close his Rift. It almost got derailed – all the way through the area, and the next zone we went into, the place was pretty much deserted – there didn’t seem to be any other players, anywhere – until we got to this Rift. There were three or four other players there, who didn’t have the “Draw out and kill Hazeed” quest – but decided to “help” us anyway, and managed to kill Hazeed before we managed to get a shot in, causing us to fail the quest and have to start over. They managed to muck us up twice, actually, until himself pointedly asked them to leave – I’m choosing to believe that they were just trying to be helpful, though I do have a niggling feeling that they were just stuffing us around. Anyway, when we started the quest (which we’d already done several times in the past, so we should have known better!) we made a major mistake… When you’re closing Rifts, mobs come out in Stages, or waves… as you clear out each wave of mobs, a fancy banner (for want of a better word) pops up in the middle of the screen, saying “Stage Completed” – then there’s a lull of a couple of seconds before the next wave arrives. Normally, at our level, these waves are just ordinary mobs – nothing too fancy or special about them. Except in “special” Rifts, like the end of a zone, or something… like this one, where they’re all Elites. Elites – extra hard to kill, remember? Well, we didn’t remember, did we… and we managed to “pull”, or call them all towards us, all at once. Julian got killed – I managed to cast Feign Death (playing possum!) just in time – which was where that “helpful” band of players stepped in and killed everything in sight. Bingo! Fail quest #1! We tried again – this time we stayed well back and tackled the mobs one by one. Worked much more betterer that time! 🙂 The second wave came, and we repeated our pattern, only this time the “helpful” players kept mowing down our mobs, and by the time Big Bad Boss Hazeed made his appearance. they killed him for us, almost before we were even aware that he’d appeared! We were not amused! Fail quest #2. We politely asked them to leave… they did, and we started all over again, and this time managed to finish everything off nicely. We returned to the quest giver to hand it in and get our big reward – and another quest, or a “breadcrumb” quest to another zone. Nope! We got our reward, but nothing else. We had no quests left. There wasn’t anything in our quest list that we’d turned off, so as not to see it listed on our screens, either! What to do? Shimmersand is supposed to be for levels 45 to 50, and we were level 46 – but there were no more quests! Over lunch, I realised what we’d done wrong. We’d been questing in Droughtlands, the area before Shimmersand, but we were finding that the quests there were all Green, and too ridiculously easy, so we decided, off our own bat, and with no breadcrumb quest to get us there, to simply pack up and go to Shimmersand, for quests that might be a bit more of a challenge. By the time we’d finished Shimmersand, we were level 46 – the level at which we were supposed to have been when we started the zone! In other words, we were questing a level above ourselves. It was a bit of a problem! Well, there’s another zone in Telara for levels 45 to 50, it’s called Stillmore, and I hate it! I always go out of my way to avoid it, but this time… I couldn’t. We were still too “young” to go to Ember Isle – you can’t (officially) get to Ember Isle until you’re level 50 (and nobody goes there anymore, anyway, except for the scenery), and we couldn’t just run around killing things to level ourselves up to 50, it would have taken a year! So… Stillmore, it had to be. Don’t ask me why I hate Stillmore so much – I just do! Anyway, we’re not doing too badly there – the quests are Yellow to us now (they were Orange and Red in Shimmersand, but we leveled up to 47 in Stillmore) and starting to get horribly easy again… But we’ll persevere until we get to level 50, and then we’ll skedaddle… 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Well, as I predicted, I went up. Only one point, to 97.5kg, but still, it was up… and even though I was expecting it, disappointing. Oh, and I have a confession to make. We were so busy wondering what we were going to do, with no quests to carry on with, and I was so busy trying to work out why we had no more quests to do, that I completely forgot my pre-lunch Stair Walk! And I didn’t remember it until it was time for my evening Stair Walk! Julian suggested that I do what I did when I forgot it once before, and do it on my way down to the Den after we’d finished watching TV for the evening – but I didn’t want to do that – I did something different instead. Instead of going down two floors and back up two floors, I decided to double my evening Stair Walk instead. I went down four floors, and back up four floors. Himself was agin’it, but I thought I’d be able to cope with it, and I did! And we noticed something odd about the stairs, too! 🙂 It’s 8 steps down to the mid-landing, and another 8 down to the next floor. Then another 8 steps to the mid-landing, and another 8 down to the floor after that. Repeat that for the next floor. But the one after, my fourth floor down (I guess that would make it the first floor of the building?) was only 7 steps down to the mid-landing, and 9 steps down to the floor! Then I turned around and came back up again. And I made it all the way, too, and I don’t think I went much slower than I normally do, either – nor was I very puffed when I finished – as I said to himself, I get more puffed out racing back to the apartment from the fire escape door than I do climbing the stairs! Anyway, I’ve decided that I’m now fit enough to increase my daily Stair Walks from the usual two floors down, two floors up – not to the four that I did today, not quite yet, anyway – but to three floors down, three floors up. It’ll be good for me (I must be getting fitter, surely! I’ve never walked so much in the past five or six years!) and I hope it helps keep my weight going down, too…

So, that’s about it from me tonight – stay tuned this time tomorrow night for more news and gossip from chez nous. Will I really increase my three daily Stair Walks to three floors? Will my weight have gone back down, or will it be up – or even worse – the same!? Who knows? But you will, this time tomorrow… So until then, please continue to bee good, stop reading the back of the book first, and above all… please stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Another Saturday… another day… spent Rifting – what else? I did get Persha up to level 40 – about mid-afternoon. I could have got there earlier, but I kept getting sidetracked, chasing after “special” hunting trophies – not at all conducive to getting one’s levels up, I fear! But, you know, the thrill of the hunt, the lure of the unobtainable… I even went shard hopping (you can do that now – have been able to for a while, really) trying to find these elusive – and some even say mythical – creatures. Each one will gain you a special Hunting Token, five of which will win you a (*gasp!*) special Achievement award, and, I think, a Title (but, as seldom as it happens, I might be wrong about the title part!) Anyway, I got carried away, chasing all over Scarwood Reach for these “specials”. They “spawn” (that is, suddenly appear) in specific areas – some as large as a couple of football fields, others as small as the topmost branches of a tree – and it’s just a matter of running round and round these areas, spamming “tar/[insert name of creature]” – “tar” meaning “target”, of course. If the creature is within a certain distance, a little yellow dot will light up on the map, indicating that this is where it is. Then you run off, kill it, and claim the trophy to take back for your Hunting Token. When you finally get five of these tokens, you can hand them in to the Hunt Master for your Grand Reward. If you’ve had no success in finding the beastie, a quick right-click on your top left hand portrait will allow you to magically “teleport” to the exact same place… on another shard! Chances are that this creature may have spawned there – and you have six shards that you can teleport to. When you’ve either bagged your beastie, or decided to give up in disgust, you can, just as magically, be whisked back to your original shard. Easy Peasy. So there I was, as I said, running after these shadows, these will-o’-the-wisps, these chimeras… when I happened to look at the time… Crikey! Not only was I wasting valuable leveling time, I was wasting expensive, as well as valuable experience boosters! Hunting Tokens might win you an Achievement award, but they won’t boost your experience! Hastily I took off for the next little quest hub and worked really hard for the rest of the afternoon, and at about 3 o’clock I “dinged” level 40! As I was in the middle of a quest, I finished it off, handed it in, and spirited myself back home to Sanctum. I dusted down, got rid of my junk, put my prizes in the bank(s), and mailed my water breathing necklace off to Satai. Then I spent the rest of what was left of the afternoon, setting Satai up and making sure her boots were polished to a high sheen! I won’t be able to start out with her tomorrow – it’s Sunday, and himself and I will be happily terrorising all the mobs in beautiful downtown Shimmersand 🙂

I might have made a ghastly mistake in not doing my nails a couple of days ago, when I was supposed to… Quite some time ago now, I’d snagged my left thumbnail rather badly, but I filed it, and shaped it, and nursed it along until it grew to a stage where I thought it’d grown past that snag… Apparently it hadn’t outgrown the snag, and the snag had become a tear mark. It was probably only the nail polish on my thumb nail that had stopped it from tearing earlier (I know I’m short-sighted, but surely I’m not so short-sighted that I wouldn’t notice a tear starting across my nail?!) Anyway… last night it said “I give up! I’m going home to the big Thumb Nail in the Sky“, and it… tore off 😦 So I didn’t do my nails today because, quite frankly, it’s too short to paint – it’d just look silly. I’ll just have to wait until it grows a bit longer – I hope I have enough nail and cuticle oil to last that long…

Weigh-in this morning. A trepidatiously good result. I dropped down to 97.4kg – down four points! Of course, this means that I’m probably destined to bounce back up again – goodness knows by how much. Hopefully not too much, but one never knows, does one?! Especially with my body, which doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing anymore than the man in the moon does! Oh well, I don’t think it can bounce back over into the 98kg zone – it is possible, I suppose, but not very probable. I hope. Let’s see what the morning brings…

I was reading an article (blog post, actually, I think) that my favourite eldest daughter linked on Facebook – very broadly, it dealt with how the people who congregate within a given game “sphere” (e.g. Rift, World of Warcraft, Halo, et al.) tend to think of those within their game group as a sort of “family” – like-minded people gathered together to play this particular game. That made me think – going off at a complete tangent from the rest of the article/blog post, that we do tend to feel a certain “affinity” with those who play the same game or games that we do, when really, we know next to nothing about them, unless we happen to know them in real life, outside of the game, of course. It’s the same with other interests, too, from fan fiction to animals – “Hey! That person thinks Professor Snape (in the Harry Potter books) is a really cool person! I think so too – we’d get on well, I’m sure!”, and “Oh, they must be a nice person, they like cats too!” The ubiquitous “They” say that we judge others by our own standards… Perhaps so… but… is it a good, or a bad thing? I’ll let you all think about that for a bit… Let me know your conclusions – I’d be very interested, if you’d care to share… 🙂

So there it is – another day, another blog post, another grizzle, and another slightly philosophical query… Tune in again tomorrow night and find out all the latest news and musings from moi-même. Will I decide to paint my nails after all, and just try to keep my left thumb hidden under a glove, or something? (I could, you know – that’s a thought – I might actually try that…) How will Julian and Winter fare tomorrow, pushing Orange quests in Shimmersand? Will we die? (we’ll get better though! 😉 ), and what will my weight do? See-saw back up? Continue on its slow downward spiral? Or annoy the hell out of me by staying the same? All will be revealed to those who want to know, this time, tomorrow night. And so, gentle readers, once more the time has come for me to admonish you all to bee good, make sure the cat is warm enough tonight, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Well, here it is again – the almost end to yet another day. For me, it was a pretty quiet sort of day – himself was out most of the day, once again ferrying my favourite eldest daughter around. She’s managed to hurt her back, and is finding getting around extremely painful and exhausting. Welcome to the club, dear! (mind you, hers will hopefully get better…) It was a pretty miserable and dismal morning for me – a good friend and I managed to get our wires slightly crossed, resulting in a bit of a disagreement, but we sorted it all out after lunch, and I hope that everything is good between us again. I also had a good long Rifting session, finishing off in Gloamwood – and I just know I’ve missed heaps of quests, but I couldn’t find them… However, having said that, I quickly logged on to check in my “Achievements” log! I can go back and kill another 107 Goblins to get the “Wanton Destruction” Achievement (kill 200 Goblins), and I need to explore five more caves. There’s also a puzzle to complete (something about putting shields in the correct order – I might need a bit of help with that one!) so I think I might go back and see if I can get them done – and add to my “Achievement” count! 🙂 (the trouble is, I’ve moved on two zones and almost ten levels since then, and the Goblins will probably all just fall over dead as soon as I look at them – which may negate the “kill” objective!) Yes, Persha is now level 36 and questing in Scarwood Reach, a “shared” zone, with the Defiants operating in the Southern half of the zone, and us Guardians (this time around – next time it’ll be vice versa!) in the Northern half. More or less. A lot of it is sort-of shared area, but not shared quests. So only four more levels to level 40 🙂 and then it’ll be on to Satai, the little Defiant that triggered off this whole shift over to Hailol, simply because I wanted to use the name, and it wasn’t available on any of the other shards! *sigh* the things I’ll do, simply because I like a name, and there’s no other way of spelling it so that it still looks “proper”. (I’m just having a drink of my tea – a different one tonight, it’s called “Berries and Orange”, another of the flavoured black teas from Tea Leaves – it’s really delicious!)

Once again today I didn’t get a chance to do my nails – with himself out most of the day I just sat in here and Rifted – I couldn’t do my nails because I wouldn’t be able to answer the phone if my nails weren’t dry without smudging the polish, or getting nail polish in my hair! Duzza matta though, it means they get (yet another) night of hand cream and cuticle oil – and I have to admit, my nails aren’t looking as dry and cracked as they were. Tomorrow though, himself wants to stay home and do nothing, which means that he can answer the phone, and I’ll be able to (finally!) do my nails… unless I get too wrapped up in finishing off Persha, and starting in on Satai… which is quite possible (and even probable!) No, I must make the effort! The nail polish is sitting forlornly in the bathroom, staring accusingly at me with no eyes… I’d better do it, I guess. I’m also starting to plot and plan my eating strategies for when I finish this diet. My goal weight is 75kg, but, quite obviously, when I start eating “proper food” again, I’m going to put on weight (maybe I should re-think my goal weight to 70kg – then I can afford to put on up to five kilos…) However, the main cause of my previous weight will be gone, and won’t be allowed in the house again. I will be a lot more careful this time around, and I’ll still be eating pretty much the same as I am at the moment, with the exception of dinner at night. For instance, I’ll still have the same breakfast – mainly because I really do like it, but if I can work out the right kilojoule amounts, I might alternate it with porridge during the winter months (except porridge with half a banana sliced on it? It doesn’t really sound terribly “tasty” – I might have to eat the half banana separately… and porridge without brown sugar or golden syrup on it is actually quite nice, I’ve discovered (to my great surprise!)) Lunch will probably be something like crispbread with low fat cottage cheese and a bit of sliced tomato, or cayenne pepper, or celery… and I’ll still keep getting the Optifast bars, because once again, I really like them, and I get my chocolate “fix” with them, too! 🙂 Or I could even have one of the Optifast soups for lunch, if it’s cold and wet and typical “soup” weather. Dinner at night will probably be a “normal” meal, only quite small. If we go out for a meal, I’ll simply switch lunch for dinner, or dinner for lunch. I’ll stay with my diet jellies, too, coz they’re really nice, and they’re easy to make (alright! they’re easy for Julian to make, OK?!) So all in all, I should be able to cope with the end of diet maintenance, “should” being the keyword there! Unfortunately that old, old adage keeps running through my brain… “The best laid plans of mice and men… often go awry” (originally “gang aft a-gley”) but, I shall prevail!

Weigh-in this morning. Quite pleasing, actually… down to 97.8kg. Hopefully it’ll be down a bit more tomorrow – it’s starting to get close to the end of the month, and the dreaded “fluid retaining” pills 😦 If I could get down to… uhhh… 96.8kg by then, I’d be happy – I’d probably still creep back into the 97kg zone, but hopefully not too far…

(Damn! for no apparent reason, I’ve just developed an ear ache… I’ve taken some Panadol, and I hope it goes away soon! 😦 ) So anyway, that’s about all from me for tonight – drop back again this time tomorrow night to find out all the latest! Did I paint my nails, or are they still wallowing in cuticle oil at night? Have I thought of any new strategies to help me cope with maintenance, when I finally finish this diet? Did I get Persha up to level 40, and have I started working with Satai? Has my weight dropped some more, or is it sulkily and moodily sitting on the same 97.8kg that it was on this morning – or, heaven forbid! has it gone up!? Will my ear ache have subsided, or will I be groaning in agony on a hospital gurney somewhere, waiting to have my ear amputated at the neck? (the mind positively boggles!) All these questions, and many, many more, will be answered right here, at the same time tomorrow night! So until then, bee good, don’t forget to brush your teeth before you go to bed, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂