Here I am, writing this early today, for a change. Well, this morning we went across the road, and I had some blood taken – I have no idea what the results will be, Dorevitch haven’t SMS’d us about it yet (I guess it’s still a bit early – it’s only just gone 4 o’clock – sometimes they don’t notify us until after 8pm!) so for the moment I’m still on 3mg and 2.5mg of rat poison (Warfarin), on alternate nights. While we were over at Shoppingtown we saw a stall with some of the darling-est little nick-nacks, so I just couldn’t resist getting a few for Easter presents (seeing that my two favourite daughters and myself will not be participating in the usual chocolate eating orgy that passes for Easter these days! 😉 ) So thank goodness that’s out of the way! I was wondering (and worrying) what we could get them for Easter, and lo and behold, there they were, staring at me without eyes… 🙂 Usually we have pretty much a second Christmas Dinner on Easter Sunday, but this year the request has gone out (or perhaps that should read “come in”?) for roast lamb! So roast lamb it shall be, with all the trimmings – but I’m not sure what we should have for dessert. Occasionally, in years past, we’ve had a (bought) Simnel Cake, the best place to get them is Phillippa’s Bakery in Armadale, though you really need to order them in advance. I think they’re delicious – but then I like (love!) anything that has even the faintest whiff of almond essence, almonds, or marzipan! (drool!) However we’re not having one this year – it would really be too, too cruel to have all that beautiful, yummy, delicious marzipan sitting right under my nose, and me not being able to even have a teeny, tiny taste! I really think that would scar me for life! So I have no idea what they’ll be having for dessert – perhaps we could get a Colomba – made roughly in what’s supposed to be the shape of a flying dove, it’s an Italian Easter Cake, similar to Panettone in that it’s made with yeast, but substituting almonds for the candied fruit – and the top is usually coated with sort of cooked-to-crunchy sweetened egg whites, and extremely, very liberally sprinkled with little lumps of sugar. They’re really nice, but a nightmare to clean up after! Bits of sugar lumps, and shards and fragments of crunchy meringue stuff get every which-where! However, there are going to be two of us – myself and my favourite eldest daughter – who will not (or at least should not) be participating in the consumption of such a cake. I will forgive Lee her participation in the roast lamb with all the trimmings luncheon, but it would be very hard for me to sit back and watch serenely, as she munched on such sinful pleasures as a Simnel cake, or a Colomba. Personally, I myself will be having my usual celebratory dinner – a glass (or two) of mineral water, and an Optifast bar, followed by a coffee, with a teaspoon or two of skim milk in it. All I have to do now is find appropriate Easter Cards, and I’d say that that was Easter, all taken care of! 🙂

While we were over the road shopping, I also bought a brown mascara…. and…. a purple mascara! I can’t wait to try it out! Why did I get it? I hear you ask… Quite simple, really! 🙂 As soon as the nice young shop assistant uttered the words “purple mascara”, I knew, instantly, that I had to have one! 🙂 We got home around lunch time, so I flew upstairs, ditched my shoes, grabbed my propping open book, my rapidly wearing out protective finger-less glove, and my keys, and lolloped off to do my lunch time Stair Walk (actually on time, for a change!) I’m noticing more and more that I’m not nearly so puffed when I get back from my Stair Walks – I’d say that in another couple of weeks it’ll be time to extend the Stair Walk to three floors, instead of the current two. Oh, and I must tell you all! While we were in the supermarket, a complete stranger, a woman, came up to me and told me how nice my hair looked, and what a wonderful colour it was! I was really pleased! 🙂 It’s the first time my new hair colour has left the apartment, not counting the Stair Walks, and really the first time anyone other than Julian and my favourite eldest daughter have seen it! 🙂

After lunch, I worked on the header for this blog theme – what do you think of it? The symbol on the left is the Kanji symbol for Autumn, and of course, the thingys on the other side are… guess what! Autumn leaves! I was going to Rift after that, but I looked at the time and decided that I’d write this early, instead. I could have put a coat of nail polish on my nails, but once again, I didn’t really have the time (in fact right about now I should be waltzing off for my afternoon/evening Stair Walk!) – so it looks as though my nails are going to have another night of being pampered with hand cream and cuticle oil! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning. Getting better – I went down two points to 98.0kg – I only wish I could keep it up! Two points down per day surely isn’t asking too much, is it, oh Great Galactic Ceiling Cat? Pretty please? I’d put out a saucer of double cream for you, but I know how you despise people who try to bribe you… Sorry! Offer you “incentives“! 😉

So there it is! I’m afraid you’re probably going to have to wait until tomorrow night to find out what happened with my blood test, but I’m sure that you’ll be able to contain yourselves until then 🙂 I should have time tomorrow to paint my nails, and to do a bit more “serious” Rifting (there was another Patch today – not terribly big, and it won’t really affect any thing we do) Weight-wise, all I can do is cross my fingers and hope and pray that I go down again, enough to place me firmly in the 97kg zone, anyway! 😉 So tune in again this time tomorrow night, and catch up on all the latest hot goss and news from chez nous! However, at the moment, all I can say is… bee good, don’t touch that dial! and… above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Why can’t Word Press get their (free) Header sizes right? I’ve just spent nearly an hour trying to make the header for this theme! Actually, it only took me about twenty minutes, but when I uploaded it, naturally, the size was completely out, and I had to waste my time trying to guess what size it was actually supposed to be! Grrr! Not impressed (again), Word Press! What I’ve put up can stay up for tonight, but it’s not what I wanted, and I’ll have to re-do it tomorrow 😦 when I should be busy getting Persha up her last ten levels to level 40!

Yes, that’s right, I got Persha up from level 22 to level 30 today (with a little bit of help from an experience booster potion or two 😉 ) but even so, not bad going, especially as I broke off for a while this afternoon to draft a letter to my favourite eldest daughter about the Optifast VLCD* that I’m on, and how to handle morning and afternoon teas (which, of course, I haven’t been having for months now!) It was only going to be a short note, with a few quick tips and work-arounds, but it sort of grew, and grew, and after more than an hour of writing I realised that what I was really doing was writing a dietary version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and if she was going to finish reading it before she died of old age, I’d better stop writing, like right now! So I saved it, and will copy and paste it into an email for her tomorrow. I only open my email once a day, first thing in the morning, and I refuse to leave it open or check for new mail again until the following morning (unless I’m expecting something important from friends or family) because it distracts me, and wastes my time, when I’m already too busy wasting my time and distracting myself on Bored Panda, Rift, Photoshop, or Facebook 😉

Now, on to the new Healer-Mage “Build” I’ve been trying out. I abandoned the new character that I’d created on another shard to experiment with, and bought Persha a couple of new “souls” (please don’t ask – I don’t really understand this business with creating a “Build” on a soul myself!) and gave her the new “Build”, to see how it’d go. All I can really say is that, well, it works, in that she can still go around killing mobs with the greatest of ease, but from habit, I’ve been putting nearly all my points into the Warlock and Necromancer parts of the “Build”, and very little into the Chloromancer (healer) part. I did say “from habit”, but I’ve looked at what abilities and spells I’ll get with the Chloromancer part of the “Build”, and really, they’re more “Support” spells and abilities, that would only be of use in a group that needed a healer. So I don’t know – it sounds really great in theory, to be able to have a Healer-Mage “Build”, but in practice, it’s a bit of a fizzle. One thing I neglected to say in my post about “Builds” last night is that each “Build” consists of three elements. You’ve heard me refer to my (pretty regular, got it down pat sort of thing) Warlock-Necromancer “Build”, but what I’ve never mentioned before (and I suppose I should have – sorry!) is the third element of my “Build(s)” You could always have pretty much anything in your “Build”, as long as it pertained to your “Class”, but points generally only go into one or two of the three elements you have, otherwise as you level up, you’re not going to have the points available to put into the high level spells and abilities that you’re going to need to be able to bring down the higher level “Elites”. So, in selecting my third element of the “Build”, I usually pick something that will give me an advantage in the very early levels – for instance, choosing an Elementalist will give you a slightly more robust “Tanking” Pet than the wimpy, skeletal Pet that your Necromancer starts out with. But you never put any points into the Elementalist part of the “Build” because once you get to about level 20, you no longer need this Elemental Tanking Pet – by then, as a Necromancer, you get a pretty powerful one of your own. In fact, by that stage, you really don’t need the Elementalist part of the “Build” at all, so putting valuable points into it is a waste. So, what’s with these new combinations? How do you allocate your points? With this Healer-Mage “Build”, do I put points into Chloromancer, to make a better healer? Doing this is going to considerably weaken either my Warlock (and I’m going to really need those D.O.Ts as I level up!), or my Necromancer – and you have no idea just how handy a spell like “Feign Death” is! (You’re standing there, getting killed by something. Discretion being the better part of valour, you cast “Feign Death”, go “Arrggh!”, spurt something that looks like blood, and fall over, apparently “dead”. The mobs think “Oh look, she’s dead!”, and lose interest in you, wandering off to look for something else to kill) It’s commonly called “Playing Possum” 🙂 So… I’ll leave Persha with that particular “Build” for now, but I really can’t see any point in it. So much for “innovation”, and new “Builds”…

Weigh-in this morning. Not too bad – I would have liked a bit more though… I went down to 98.2kg – one point down on yesterday. *sigh* I feel like a child waiting for Christmas – it never seems to get any closer – it’s always “a whole ‘nother year” away….

So drop by and catch up with all the news this time tomorrow night! 🙂 I didn’t re-paint my nails today, I thought I’d give them another day in the fresh air, and with some nice, nourishing, cuticle oil… and I think they actually do look a little better for it, too! But they will get done tomorrow – I’m going to give that Estée Lauder Chrome Violet one another go – it seemed a bit thick last time, and dried too quickly (and didn’t last long! Only a day or two! Very disappointing!) but as I said, I’ll give it another go… it is a beautiful colour… and you’ll find out tomorrow how it went. You’ll also find out – no! Indeed, you’ll be able to see for yourselves – how I go at concocting another header for this blog (I’m not even sure if I’ll stick with this colour scheme – it’s not “locked in” yet!) and you’ll even find out how my Warfarin blood test tomorrow morning went. I usually only go back once a month for a test, but I think the iron supplements I’m taking put my blood thickness out of whack – it’s only a week, and I have to go and have another test! 😦 (still, it’s better than getting more blood clots in my lungs again!) As for my weight – well, surely you’re not interested in that little factor, are you? You are? Oh well, I guess I’ll tell you how that went too 😉 …And I think that’s about all from chez nous for tonight, so until this time tomorrow night, I shall, as usual, exhort you all to bee good, don’t be lazy, and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

VLCD* = Very Low Calorie Diet

Today was quite a full day! When I was going through my spam email this morning, there was a missive from Rift… they’re introducing new builds for all Classes! (You’re all looking a bit blank – let me explain…) “Class” is what… profession? or calling… that you are – for example you could be a Warrior, a Cleric, a Rogue, or a Mage. Each Class has several different “Builds”, or ways in which you can utilise various abilities within your Class. For instance, a Mage could “build” a Necromancer, and use the undead to fight for them, so all their experience points would go into spells that would further them along that path. Or they might “build” a Warlock, and use their Pet (see previous post!) to Tank for them, while they stand back and hurls D.O.T’s. A Warrior may “build” a Beastmaster, and have their Pet fighting alongside him (or her), and a Cleric may “build” a Druid, and have a Pet acting as a Tank, while they hurl Righteous spells at the enemy, or, have a Pet which heals the Cleric and his (or her) group. Lots of different Builds, but up until now, Classes have generally not been allowed to “mix and match” too far outside of their designated palette of abilities. A Mage, for example, was not able to properly heal others or themselves. A Rogue wasn’t really cut out to be a Tank, and do a lot of up close and personal fighting – and so forth. Today, however, all that changed. Now you can “mix and match” – if you can imagine the build, no matter how unlikely, you can build it, and use it. Naturally, I couldn’t wait to try to build a Healer Mage! I started out by creating a new character on another shard (yes, another one, but this one is purely experimental – if the build works out, I’ll use it on some of my higher level characters on Laethys, or Hailol) Unfortunately, it’s still too soon to see how it’s going to turn out – I’m using a Chloromancer (healer), Necromancer (uses the undead), and Warlock (D.O.Ts, lots and lots of D.O.Ts!) build – so as I said, it’s still too soon to see how this Healer-Mage business is going to work out, or if I’m only going to be able to heal others, but not myself (in which case I won’t be very impressed! The whole point of this exercise is to see whether a Healer-Mage is going to be more successful as a solo player than a straight Mage!) Besides, my favourite eldest daughter was over today, so I only had very limited time to create, set up and play with this new Build…

Yes, Lee was over this afternoon, after her dental appointment this morning. I think she’s trying to fight the siren call of the “Diets Never Work” temptation – “Give up!”, it’s saying to her “You know it’s not going to work!” (it said it to me, for many years, until I eventually ended up not caring, one way or the other…) So she needs to get a good pair of scales, and someone to organise her and start her off (her husband’s a nice enough person, but quite frankly, he’s not the most supportive of husbands…) After lunch (sushi for her and Julian, a Cappuccino bar for me 🙂 ) we went and watched two episodes of “Person of Interest” – only two episodes this time, because we’re starting to catch up on the pre-recoded ones, and we only have a few more to watch before we run out 😦 So we watched the first episode of another show, called “The 100” (pronounced “The Hundred”) The series is set 97 years after a devastating nuclear war wiped out almost all life on Earth. The only known survivors are the residents of twelve space stations in Earth’s orbit prior to the war. The space stations banded together to form a single massive station named “The Ark”, but now their resources are dwindling, and within months they expect the life support systems to start failing. So they send a group of a hundred (hence the name of the show) young juvenile delinquents back down to Earth to see if it’s habitable again or not – only it’s not a hundred any more, because one of them has just been killed… And that’s as far as we got in it, so I can’t really tell you any more about it. Lee describes it as a sort of “Lord of the Flies meets (the CBS show) Survivor” – hmmm… sounds interesting! I totally and completely detested the story of “Lord of the Flies”, but I do like Survivor… 😉

Weigh-in this morning. Well, I did a little better today – I went down two points to 98.3kg, but who knows what tomorrow will bring? Place yer bets, ladies and gentlemen, place yer bets! Will Winter’s weight go up? down? or stay the same!? Your guess is as good as mine… I just want to get down to the 97kg zone!

So call in again tomorrow night, and find out if you’ve won, or lost, a fortune! 😉 Though I’m sure you all know better than to bet on something as mercurial as what my weight might, or might not, do – besides, don’t you know that the House always wins in the end? 🙂 I did manage to find the time today to at least remove my raggedy nail polish – and I even found time to give them a nourishing wipe with cuticle oil – my poor nails are so dry and flaky, I think they’re actually enjoying a day without nail polish! I’ll give them another dose of cuticle oil again tonight, before I go to bed, but tomorrow, it’s back under the nail polish they go! And poor old Flipper has to go off to the V.E.T. tomorrow morning, to have her next Cartrophen injection for her arthritis… she’s going to hate us for a while tomorrow afternoon… I’ll continue “experimenting” with the new Healer-Mage Build – I’m sure I’ll have lots to tell you about it tomorrow night, and how it’s working out. So that’s about it from me – all that remains now is for me to once more admonish you all  to bee good, don’t eat that second slice of chocolate mud cake, you know you don’t really want it, and, above all, stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

(*slurps tea*) Well, here it is, another Monday almost over… A good day, all round, really – I had my hair done this morning – and I got my new colour, too! It’s…. quite… “startling“, is a good word! Yes, it’s a bit startling, at first – it’s very red, but not the same red as I had last time – it’s quite a lot darker, and a very different type of red – this one has a lot more blue (perhaps “violet” would describe it better) in it, so it looks almost like a light burgundy? A deep magenta? The top colour on this page is close-ish… only shiny, and mixed in with blondish streaks and strawberry blond streaks… I’m not doing a very good job of describing the colour, am I? Suffice it to say that I like it, and himself likes it, and Josh (who’s responsible for it) likes it too! 🙂 It took quite a while, and when it was “done” and washed out, it was decided that a few more stripes and dabs were needed, so yet another twenty minutes was spent while a bit more colour was deployed. The final result, while a trifle startling at first, is very pleasing! Unfortunately it will fade a bit, as all chemical hair colours are wont to do, but by the time it’s starting to look a bit wan and anemic, it’ll probably be time to re-do it. I took my new hair colour out for a test drive when I went on my lunchtime Stair Walk, but as I didn’t run into any of our neighbours, it wasn’t really much of a test drive. They’ll see it soon enough – probably next year – that’s how often I run into our neighbours, anyway. I’ll take it across the road to Shoppingtown on Saturday and see if I get any surprised reactions from the Valet Car Park people 🙂

After I came back from my Stair Walk and had lunch, I hopped into Rift – I wanted to get Persha started off on her journey to level 40. Guess what! They were having one of their multi-massive Rifts and Invasions affairs – no-where was safe! It was a matter of give up and go play in a Dimension for an hour, or join in the fray. I joined in the fray. And promptly died…. but I got better, and honestly, I really can’t see the enjoyment people get from participating in these things – all I was doing was standing there, in the one spot, going “Tab Target, cast a couple of D.O.T’s*, Tab Target, cast a couple of D.O.T’s”, over and over again (which was exactly what everyone else was doing) as the Invasion mobs keeled over in their droves, and more kept coming to take their place. You should have seen the area map! It was covered in little Rift symbols, and there were little crossed swords (the Invasion symbol) scattered liberally between the thousands of Rift symbols. It was a nightmare! Eventually we killed enough Invaders for the Big Bad Boss to make an appearance, and after a great deal of work, we got him down, and the Rift closed. Then everyone else raced off after the next Rift, and I dropped out of the Public Group and was finally able to resume questing in peace and quiet, now that the wretched Rift had been closed 🙂 So by the time I finally got around to some actual questing, it was close to three o’clock, and I didn’t have much time left. I got Persha up to level 22 (from level 20 – I don’t think that two levels, sans booster, in about an hour and a half is too bad going! 😉 ) and finished off the final Boss in Silverwood. I could have gone straight on to Gloamwood (the next zone to Silverwood) Persha’s gathering skills were probably high enough, but I decided to take her over to Freemarch to get her Butchering and Foraging skills max’d out first. There’s nothing worse than entering a new zone and finding out that you can’t skin anything, or pick up any flowers and/or wood, because your skill levels are still too low. You have to turn around, trudge back to the previous area and run around trying to get your gathering skills up – most humiliating! Let’s hope I don’t arrive in Gloamwood tomorrow to find a Gloamwood multi-massive Rifts and Invasions affair in progress! I will not be amused!

Weigh-in this morning. That was something that didn’t amuse me, either! As I’d predicted, I went up. Only one point, but still, it was up! I was not a happy little Vegemite! 98.5kg 😦 “Do Not Want!” – I wonder if forgetting to do my pre-lunch Stair Walk yesterday, and doing it in the evening instead, had anything to do with it…? Well, I definitely must not let that happen again! I was a bit late for my pre-luncheon Stair Walk today, not because I’d forgotten again, but only because my hair was still in foils, and I couldn’t go Stair Walking with foils in my hair – what if one of the neighbours had seen me?! They would find out that my brilliant hair colour wasn’t natural, after all! Anyway, I hope my weight will be down again tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath….

So call in again tomorrow night – find out if my hair still looks as good as it does now, and if I managed to find the time to do my nails (they’re still sitting here, looking all raggedy and moth eaten – I just haven’t had the time to even remove the old polish!)(well anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it! Heaven forbid that you should ever realise that I’m just bone lazy! 😉 ) I’ll also tell you if my favourite eldest daughter and I watched any more “Person of Interest” (a most excellent show!) and whether or not I’ve been able to get Persha any closer to the ever elusive level 40, and what type of Bar I had for lunch (it sounded good when I thought of it!) You’ll probably all be champing at the bit to find out “What Winter’s Weight Went and Did Next”, won’t you, so I suppose I’ll have to tell you all about that, too. Ah me, ’tis indeed a busy and hectic life wot I lead, to be sure…. and you’ll find out all the answers to the above questions, this time tomorrow night – so until then, please bee good, don’t annoy your old grandmother, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*D.O.T’s – in case you’ve forgotten, it stands for “Damage Over Time spells” 🙂

Well, today was our day for “Traipsing Through Telara Thoroughly Trouncing Trolls” – quite literally today, because we did have to “do away with” a certain number of Ridge Trolls. A highly successful day was had by all (except for the Ridge Trolls, of course) – we went up a level, almost two, actually, and although I died once (it wasn’t fair! I was mobbed!) we ended up knocking over the nasties like ninepins! We started off this morning at level 44, and we were facing mobs of between levels 48 and 50 – a lot of them Elite, too (Elites are supposedly really hard to kill – meh! They were a little tougher, but not by that much!) Julian thinks it’s because we’re both Mages, and we both pack a pretty lethal wallop. In the past, we’ve usually played a Healer + Mage DPS team (DPS = Damage Per Second). In other words, I zapped nasties, and he healed me when I was getting too severely bashed by the nasties I was trying to kill. Clerics are basically healers, and are a definite must in a large-ish group, but they don’t have much killing power. It’s usually worked out quite well for us, working in that sort of team, but this time around we’re both Mages, and we both specialise in doing maximum damage. And as a matter of fact, as the Mage who usually received the healing when I got wounded, I’m not missing it all that much – mind you, I’ve had to take a lot more healing potions than I used to – just as well we have a Guild Apothecary who can make all the healing potions we could possibly need! 😉 Another thing we’ve noticed, too – when we used to play World of Warcraft, Mages, though very good at DPS, were also notoriously fragile – extremely likely to die just when they were needed the most! It was supposedly because they could only wear Cloth Armor (don’t ask me why, because I have no idea!) In Rift, Mages wear Cloth Armor too – but I’d say we’re tougher than the Hunter/Rogues who wear Leather Armor. It could also be because we don’t fight up close and personal, like Warriors, and a lot of Clerics and Hunter-Rogues. No! We stand back and zap spells and DOTs at our foes! (DOT’s = Damage Over Time spells) We can also send out Pets in to Tank for us (Tank = up close and personal fighters who take the brunt of the damage, leaving the spellcasters (Mages) free to work their (ahem!) “Magic” from afar) – so all in all, Mages are very formidable opponents, and as I said, we’re knocking these mobs, 4 to 5 levels higher than ourselves, over like ninepins! It does not compute! The Orange, and especially the Red mobs, should be really, really hard to knock over, and they’re just pussy-cats! It’s amusing, in a way – when I’m starting out a new character, I generally try to level them up a little higher than necessary, on the (now obviously false) premise that as I go for the higher quest levels, I’ll be better able to handle the mobs if my own level is a little higher than it should be. Well, I think I’ve pretty much knocked that particular premise on its head! No more shall I tarry in Silverwood and Freemarch, boosting myself up in order to be able to handle the mobs in Stonefield and Gloamwood more easily! Unfortunately I have no more young ‘uns left on Laethys and Hailol to test this theory out on, and I don’t (at this stage, anyway) really want to start up a new character elsewhere. But I might. Later.

Weigh-in this morning. I feel the faint stirrings of a bump (or lump) beginning under my feet… I stayed the same this morning, at 98.4kg 😦 *sigh* Well, I suppose it was better than going up (that’ll happen tomorrow – you mark my words!) And I have a sort-of confession to make, too… I say “sort of”, because I made up for it this evening! *blows raspberry at screen* At lunch time today…. I forgot to go and do my Stair Walk…. BUT! I went and did it this evening, on my way back to the Den after watching two episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise! So, although I did forget to do it at lunch time, I still got my three Stair Walks per day in, by doing it this evening! I don’t know how it would have worked out if I’d been doing what I’d been thinking of doing, and having a fourth Stair Walk every evening, on my way back down to the Den… Let’s see what the scales tell me tomorrow… it might even turn out to be more beneficial for me to have my third Stair Walk later in the evening…

So tune in again this time tomorrow night, and find out all the latest news! I’m (hopefully) having my hair coloured tomorrow morning – a bright emerald green! No, not really 🙂 It’ll be pretty much the same as what I had done last time – streaks (stripes?) of a rusty sort of red (with just a hint of violet in it to cool the red down a bit, I think?!) I’m really looking forward to not looking like a faded red panda any more! 🙂 I’ll let you all know how it goes, and what it looks like! *sigh* I never got the chance to re-do my nails this afternoon – I just ran out of time. By the time we finished our Rift day, and I’d had my 5 o’clock Stair Walk, it was almost dinner time (Vegetable soup tonight, with semi-dried chili flakes sprinkled over it, followed by cherry flavoured diet jelly and three prunes!) So my nails are looking very sad and sorry this evening, I fear… Never mind, I shall do all of that tomorrow afternoon – er… I think. My favourite eldest daughter will be coming over tomorrow after her visit to the Dentist (I hope himself hasn’t forgotten!) Maybe my nails will have to wait until Wednesday! Oh well, I’ll let you know how it all pans out. Hopefully my weight will start behaving properly tomorrow morning and start going down again – I really hate it when it stays the same… So anyway, until this time tomorrow night , once more I shall beg you to bee good, always remember your manners, and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

It was a reasonably hum-drum sort of a day today – I was positively itching to get Ozariah to level 20, but I had to wash my hair – it’s (hopefully) being coloured on Monday, and Josh (friend and hairdresser – aren’t I lucky! 🙂 ) wanted me to wash it ahead of time so that the natural oil from my scalp can help protect it during the colouring process – something like that, anyway. Surprisingly, it’s actually not looking too bad – I’m usually hopeless at doing my own hair – I’m short sighted, so I can’t see what I’m doing unless I get about two and a half inches from the mirror – which means that I can’t maneuver the hairdryer and/or brush properly… and if I wear my glasses, they get in the way too. So today I just combed it, and left it, using just a teeny smidge of a sort of a “conditioning serum” from Scruples to make it sit down flat. It worked very well, too, for about the first quarter of an hour, and then my hair decided that gravity was proving too strong to resist, and it fell in my eyes. As I’ve more or less been banned from using hair spray normally, I squirted a little on my fingers (as I’d been told to do), and smeared that on as well (don’t worry, it was only a teeny bit, and it didn’t get on my scalp! (it makes my head itch!)) It seems to have worked – I did that this morning, and it’s now ten o’clock, and it hasn’t fallen in my eyes again, yet (just wait until tomorrow morning when I’ll have slept on it! It’ll be all over the place by then! 😉 ) All in all, I didn’t get a chance to get on to Ozariah until after lunch. At first, I was determined that I wasn’t going to use an experience boosting potion on her, I was just going to drag her up the five levels to level 20 in the couple of hours I had left to play – I could do it, of course I could… but… I got distracted, as usual, filling in blanks, doing a bit of “farming” (Butchering, Foraging and Mining) along the way, instead of concentrating on questing, questing, and yet a bit more questing – the quickest and surest way to get experience points and go up levels. After an hour and a bit of basically wasting time and not really moving upwards, I decided to bite the bullet and buy one of the experience boosters after all… and to stick to straight questing, as much as possible. Well, in the end I got her up the last two and a half levels in about twenty five minutes – Yayyy! Level 20 at last! I took her back to Meridian, dusted her down, emptied her bags, and decided who’d be the first off the rank to be taken to level 40. I was going to take them, one by one, up to level 30, and then take them , one by one, to level 40, and so on, but I’ve changed my mind – I’m taking them all (one by one) up to level 40 first, then I’ll take them to 50, and finally 60 and 65 (hopefully with a little bit of help from some of Julian’s characters) Persha’s the first on the list, so I had Ozariah mail her her water breathing necklace, and I’ll start working her some time on Monday – because tomorrow is Sunday, and as you all should know by now, Sunday is our “Trouncing Terrible Trolls in Telara for Fun and Profit” day! 🙂 It’s about time that Persha was leveled up, anyway, as she’s our Apothecary (she makes potions and dyes, and things – very handy! Every Guild should have an Apothecary! 😉 ) and she needs to start learning a few new recipes… Anyway, by the time I’d done all that, it was time for my late afternoon/early evening Stair Walk, and after that I went and sat in the lounge with my feet up and read until dinner time.

I received the April My Size online catalogue this morning (which is a wonder, really, as I’m only getting between 26 and 46 pieces of mail a day – Julian explained it all to you in a comment, a few blog posts back!) and I sat and went through it (the catalogue, that is) and made a note of … well, a few… pieces I was interested in. When himself went out to do the shopping this afternoon, he went to The Glen, where there’s a My Size shop. I told him they probably wouldn’t have much in yet, because the things I’d marked were from the April catalogue – and it’s not April yet… but they were, so he got them all! Bang goes my classic excuse of “But I don’t have a thing to wear!” 🙂 Perhaps I should start eating a bit more – I don’t want to fall out of them too quickly!  Which brings me to…

Weigh-in this morning. I’m dreading tomorrow! Why? Because I went down another two points this morning, to 98.4kg. This, of course, is good! I really wish I could do it every morning, but the piper is going to have to be paid, somewhere along the line. Dieting and weight loss are not a smooth and steady downward course, unfortunately – there’s bumps and lumps as well, and I greatly fear that another such bump (or lump) is about due. Probably tomorrow. Or the day after… or soon, anyway. I think (I hope!) I’m deep enough into the 98kg zone to not go back up into the 99kg zone again, but one never knows, especially with this exasperating body of mine (not to mention the scales, which, I’m quite convinced, hate me!)

So come and look in on us again, this time tomorrow night – and be regaled with tall tales and true from the legendary land of Telara – the monsters we fought, the princesses we rescued, the phat lewt we won, and the number of times we died – or should have died, but didn’t! 🙂 Find out if I had time to re-do my nails, which are looking a tad ragged. And I’ve worked out why I keep snagging the nails on my right hand! It’s not from typing, it’s from Stair Walking! You see, when I’m coming back up the stairs, I hang onto the stair rail with my left hand, and run my right hand along the (very heavily textured) wall, for extra balance. The wall is so heavily textured that I have to wear a fingerless glove on my right hand because the wall literally “sandpapers” holes in my palm. And it appears that it also snags fingernails that aren’t pared or chewed down to the quick! Hmmm… I may have to get a full leather gauntlet for my right hand… We shall see… I expect that I’ll also be able to fill you in about my weight, and whether the ominously looming bump (or lump) has risen menacingly up beneath my feet, to trip me up on my weight’s erratic downward course. So until tomorrow night, gentle readers, I shall once more bid you to bee good, don’t be cheeky, and above all… to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Today I worked pretty solidly on getting my new girl, Ozariah, as far along the road to level 20 as I could. When I started this morning she wasn’t even properly set up – by the time I finished this afternoon, she was level 15. I might even have been able to get her to level 20 – without an experience boosting potion, too – except for the fact that our cleaning lady was here today. Did I ever mention that she likes to sit, have a smoke, and chatter on a bit? Well, she does, and she did. She also wanted to have a bit of a girl-to-girl, heart-to-heart session (she’s trying to get back together with her ex-boyfriend, but her children hate him now) *sigh* So I listened, exclaimed, and offered my thoughts, and nodded a lot. So, five more levels to go tomorrow! 🙂 I should be able to get that done, easy-peasy. I’m also trying (“trying” being the operative keyword there!) not to get her quests too far out of sync, the way I did with the last two. I think I’m managing a bit better this time around… the trouble is, I know what has to be done, and where, and I know what I’m capable of doing in the different areas; it’s very hard not to think: “while I’m here, I might as well…” ramp up her Butchering… look for Artifacts around here because I know there are always some – oh look! There’s that quest that I usually do when I’m two levels higher, but I think I can manage it – I might as well do that now, and get it out of the way…. Things like that. My mind runs away from my sense of correct sequencing – yes, I’m perfectly capable of doing certain things, but I ought not to do them because if I do, I get things out of order, and end up with a real quest mess. Sometimes I really, really wish that I could erase everything I know and have learnt about Rift, and start all over again as a rank newbie. Alas, that which has been seen cannot be un-seen, and that which has been learnt cannot be un-learnt (actually, it can, but that’s a subject for another time! 😉 ) I will say that bringing up a Defiant is vastly different from bringing up a Guardian. According to the latest bunch of statistics, 46% of players play Defiant characters, 54% play Guardians, so you’d think that the Guardians would have the advantage, wouldn’t you… Well, they might have the numbers, but the Defiants get all the perks! In the primary Defiant area, Freemarch (where you start out from) there are about 85% more artifacts than there are in Silverwood, the equivalent Guardian area. There are more Rifts to participate in and close, more skinnable animals, more mineable nodes… and this trend continues in all but shared areas, such as Moonshade Highlands, Scarwood Reach, and Iron Pine Peaks. I’ve often wondered why this is – and it’s also the reason that the first thing I do with my Guardian characters is take them over to Freemarch and do the bulk of their early leveling up over there – bother the early Guardian quests, they can catch up on them when they’ve closed three or four baby Rifts, leveled up their Mining, Butchering and Foraging, and picked up a heap of artifacts that they’d never find over in Silverwood!  And it’s extremely easy to avoid the odd Defiant guard or two, to boot!

I suppose I really ought to say a word or three about the passing of Malcolm Fraser today (seeing that just about everyone else is) What can I say? I liked and admired him when he came to power in 1975, and rid us from the profligate Gough Whitlam… but have been somewhat… disenchanted? with him and some of his political views, over the past few years. I just read in what passes for a “newspaper” these days, The Age, that he was considering starting up a new political party advocated scaling back, if not severing, our military ties with the US. Say, what?! You know, I really, really don’t like the Yanks Americans – I don’t like their policies or their politics, I don’t like their gun laws and their lack of control over those laws, and I don’t like their (almost blanket and universal) hypocrisy – other than those few, minor things, they’d probably be fairly decent people, if it wasn’t for their atrocious accents and their totally woeful spelling! But cut our military ties with them? Uh-huh! I don’t think that would be a terribly good idea right now… However, tonight is not the night for a Winter Rant – a great leader has passed, and I’m sure the world is a poorer place for his passing.

Weigh-in this morning. A lot much more betterer this morning! 🙂 98.6kg! Down four points. Right, well of course this means that tomorrow I’ll probably be back up again, but hopefully it’ll still be within the 98kg zone! Oh, and I’ve been wondering where I can find the time to fit in a fourth Stair Walk, and I think I might have found it! I walk before breakfast, (mostly) before lunch (but sometimes it’s after lunch), and at around 5 o’clock… We usually watch television until 9.30pm, and then we come down here to the Den to fiddle with our beloved computers. But I was thinking tonight that on my way back down to the Den, I could make a slight detour via the fire escape and quickly fit in another Stair Walk before bed… Good idea? Yes? No? Indifferent?

So anyway, That Was My Day That Was – look in again tomorrow night to see what’s been happening around here – will I have managed to get Ozariah up to level 20? Will my nail polish still be intact? I’m still quite curious as to where I got the idea that you shouldn’t file your nails before removing your nail polish! I had to file them once before without removing my nail polish, and the sky didn’t fall in, nor did my nails burst into flames, or anything… I had to file them again this morning when I snagged a nail – and again, nothing dire has happened… maybe it is just an Urban Myth that I was told way back when?! Anyway, there’ll be lots to fill you in on tomorrow – especially about what my weight decides to do… so until this time tomorrow night, bee good, sleep tight tonight, and …. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

My goodness! What a busy day! It started off quite normally – I knew I had to go and have my Warfarin blood test at some stage of the day, but I didn’t know when…  After breakfast we muddled around here until nearly lunchtime, and by then I’d finished sorting out my Auctions and Minions, so we got ready to go over the road for the blood test – we did have various other shopping bits to do, too – I needed a new candle for the bedroom, because the last one had “run out”, and I wanted to see if Inglot had any new nail polishes (they didn’t) We decided to have lunch at The Shingle Inn – well, Julian did, I took one of my bars with me, but I did have a long black with a small jug of skinny milk to keep the Shingle Inn people happy 🙂 Before we left home, I’d had the idea that perhaps when we got back, instead of taking the lift upstairs from the garage, shedding my shoes, and then doing my Stair Walk, I could catch the lift to the ground floor, let myself into the fire escape, and walk all the way up to the fifth floor – instead of just walking down two flights, and back up two flights. I thought I’d work harder (that is my legs would have to work harder) climbing up all those levels, instead of wasting the energy walking down two flights, and only up two flights back – if that makes any sense to you… But alas, that was not to be. While I was in Priceline, and Julian was dropping off some dry cleaning elsewhere, impatient me decided I wanted something from an upper shelf. I looked around, but there was no-one around that I could ask to get the items for me, so I flipped up the footrest of the wheelchair, and got up to get them myself. That worked just fine – but then I stepped backwards, didn’t I, and cut the back of my heel on the excruciatingly sharp edge of the base of the chair. Ouch! I figured I’d probably managed to break the skin this time (it wasn’t the first time I’ve done this – caught my heel on the ruddy sharp edge of the chair base) This time I’d done a really good job of it, and I was bleeding quite a bit by the time we got up to Dorevitch for the blood tests. The girl doing the blood taking was quite insistent that it had to be bandaged, which she proceeded to do after taking the blood samples. As my heel was (and still is! As I said – I did a really good job of it this time!) quite sore, and the bandage goes right around my heel and under my foot, I decided that perhaps I’d better not try to climb up five flights of stairs – that it might be more prudent to just do my two flights down, two flights back up… which I did, as soon as I’d shed my shoes upstairs.

We got home around 3-ish, I suppose, and I sat down to get Embercat to level 20, something I’d been trying to do for the last three days, but kept getting interrupted or distracted. This time I got myself an experience enhancing potion, just in case I didn’t manage to make two levels in the hour and a half I had left to play before my afternoon Stair Walk… and with the help of the potion I made the two levels in about 30 minutes! So, one girl left to go to get to level 20, then I plan on taking them all to level 30. Ondine was next in line, but for some inexplicable reason I didn’t really like her much… maybe it was the name… She was only level 8, so I decided to er… re-roll her, so to speak. I forwarded all her money on to Hialeah, and deleted her, then created another Defiant girl called Ozariah (the name had to start with an “O” because it makes it easier when sending and receiving stuff from other characters) I’ll have to get himself to pull her into the Guild later tonight… anyway, she’s still in the very, very beginning stages – I’ve only just set her up, so now I have the delightful task of pulling a level 1 all the way up to level 20 in as short a time as possible – I’ll get onto that tomorrow 🙂

While we were getting ready to go over the road this morning, the downstairs doorbell rang. Parcel delivery! Yay!! Maybe it was the Plan A present, at long last! Sure enough, it was the extremely well travelled item, from Arizona, to Toronto Canada, to Arizona again, then another city in the US, finally to Sydney, and then here. It took just over a month! Do you want to know what it was? 🙂 It was a bracelet – one of those “gap in the middle like a torc” ones, in silver! It has a rolled edge on each side, then two flat curb chains just inside the rolled edges, and a thick, rounded filigree scroll down the middle. It’s quite lovely, and I’m absolutely thrilled with it! 🙂 (and very relieved that it finally turned up!)

Later this afternoon we received the results of my Warfarin test – not quite so good this time! I’ve been taking iron supplements since just after my last blood test because Dr. Y. told me I had to, and maybe they’re making my blood slightly thicker, which is not at all good for me, so my rat poison dosage has been increased, and instead of going back for another test in a month, they want me back next week! Well, along with the Warfarin test, I also had a blood test for iron levels today, so maybe I won’t have to take the iron supplement much longer.

Weigh-in this morning. I’m completely convinced! The scales hate me! They did it again – down to 98.9kg. (actually it wavered down to 98.6kg…98.9kg… 98.9kg! Yayy!) Hop off… hop back on… 99.0kg 😦 What’s with these scales? I hate it when they do that to me! Still, it was down another one point – if this “one point down” business is going to be the pattern, then tomorrow I should, to all intents and purposes, be down to 98.9kg – unless I stay the same… or go up… and with my stupid body, either and/or all of those possibilities is likely to occur! Grrr!

So tune in again tomorrow night – find out if my cut heel has become infected, or if it’s all better… and find out how I go with Ozariah – will she have been inducted into the Guild? Will she be well on her way to level 20, or will I have been distracted from the task, yet again? What will my weight do? Which way will it surprise us all – by going upwards? downwards? or will it really cheese me off by staying the same? These questions and many, many more will be answered right here, this time tomorrow night! So until then, once more I shall bid you all to bee good, have fun, and above all…. stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

Yes, tonight is tonight, not tomorrow morning 🙂 I did manage to spend a bit of time with Rift today – got Embercat up another couple of levels – she’s level 18 now – only two more levels to 20 (it’s almost like counting down my weight losses!) I did get a bit caught up this morning though – first with writing last night’s blog, and also with making a few minor adjustments to the text size on that wallpaper thingy I made yesterday. Kompozer, the “free” WYSIWYG* editor I’m using for editing the HTML for the wallpaper’s page, is truly abysmal – it makes the excruciating HTML that Front Page (the previous WYSIWYG editor I used to use) look like sophisticated coding! At least with Front Page I could actually follow it enough to go in and correct its clumsy mistakes – trying to make head nor tail of Kompozer’s HTML is like trying to make sense of jigsaw pieces with no identifying colours or pictures! Well, OK, it’s not quite as bad as that, and one day, when I’ve got a lot of time on my hands and I’m feeling bored enough, I might (“might” being the keyword!) have another look in and try to sort it all out. The problem this morning was the text size – it was a bit too small. Now when you’re entering text size you can generally put in a number, like – very simplistically, “text size = 4”, and when you’ve finished with that size you just put in “/text”. With Kompozer, all you have is a small capital “A”, meaning make the text smaller, followed by a bigger capital “A”, meaning make the text larger, but instead of the sizes going up in increments of one size, it goes up in increments of two and a half sizes, so you either have text that’s too small, or text that’s too big. Now I know I can change that – I can put in the “text size =” value and make the text exactly the size I want – but it’s almost impossible to know where to put it because there’s so much – pardon the French – “merde” (look it up, if you must!) – in the way that it’s very difficult to know where the real HTML is, and what’s just leftover junk from where you changed something that the program didn’t overwrite, but just added on to the end of the line. In fact, there aren’t any lines, per se, just a lot of what appear to be truncated bits of HTML. If you do try to organise it into coherent lines,  as soon as you enter the preview pane to see if what you’ve done looks alright, the edit window where you were working reverts back to the crazy and disorganised truncated lines.  The point being that it can certainly be tamed and edited correctly – but who’s got the time and the enthusiasm to wade through all that mess! It works the way it is (even if the text is a little larger than I wanted) so that’s the way it’ll stay… for now…

We tried a new tea after lunch today – we get our tea from Tea Leaves in Sassafras – we used to drive all the way up there, but it’s easier to shop online now. They have some really great flavoured black teas – have a look at the teas they stock from the link above – we’ve tried most of them at one time or another, but we usually get our favourites, plus one or two small ones just to try. We tried one of the “little” ones at lunch time – we’ve had it before, many years ago, but decided to see if it had improved any. It hadn’t. It was the Chilly Chocolate tea – the chocolate was still too bland, and you still couldn’t really taste any chili. I don’t think we’ll try it again… The one I’m drinking tonight is Granny’s Apple Pie, and although they have another Black Apple tea, this one is quite nice. We might get it again, but I don’t think it will become one of our “staples”, like the Ginger Berry, Honey Ginger, Cranberry, and Almond (Almond is my absolute favourite! But then, I love anything with almonds in it, and I especially love almond essence!) So if you’re into flavoured black teas, Tea Leaves is the place to get them from – oh, and they also sell coffee, too! If you’re into flavoured coffees, they have some really really nice ones (including Almond, and Amaretto!)

I stopped Rifting about 3.25pm because I had to go and do my nails – I was sorry to take off that lovely, luscious, ripe, red raspberry one, but it was getting very tatty around the edges (it was only the one coat…) and now they’re a beautiful, glistening, scintillating kingfisher-peacock blue! I hope all this typing doesn’t wreck them…. Remember that Photoshoot thing wot we got from the Vets? Julian rang up and booked yesterday – we’re still not sure if we’ll go through with it though… I hate being photographed because I always look horrible in photos – I only know of three photos that I actually look quite nice in – one has gone for good, one is hidden away in a box here somewhere, and one has been lost (thank goodness!) So I dunno… we may go through with it, we may not – it’s in April, anyway.

Weigh-in this morning. Was quite exciting, at first! I got on the scales, and they went down to 98.9kg! Then as I always do, I hopped off, and hopped back on again, just to see if it was “correct weight”… You know what? The wretched scales went back up to 99.1kg! Only one point down from yesterday 😦 I tried it a third time – to see if it would relent and go back to the 98.9kg that it came up with first. Nope, it was firmly set on 99.1kg. *sigh* Well, there’s always tomorrow… well, at least I didn’t stay the same, and I went down, and not up… 🙂

So that’s about it for tonight – stay tuned for the next installment of “Life Chez Nous” 🙂 I’m not too sure what’s happening tomorrow, apart from my Warfarin blood test first thing in the morning. I suppose that once again, it’ll be up, weighed, dress, sprint for the stairs, back, change, over the road, have my blood taken, come home, breakfast, resume life as normal… other than that… I dunno… However! The mysterious Plan A present still hasn’t arrived, so it might come tomorrow! And I’ll certainly be getting some Rifting in – and… who knows? I may shed 24kg in one foul swoop! Highly unlikely, unfortunately – but never fear, there’ll be lots of news waiting for you this time tomorrow! So until then, bee good, stop doing that! and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂

*WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get

Well, this is a first! I’m writing last night’s blog this morning! Normally in the evenings, I finish up in here around 4 – 4.30pm, gather my bits and pieces, deposit them in the lounge room, and by 4.45 – 5.00pm, I’m on my way for my last Stair Walk of the day. When I get back, I go back to the lounge room, put my feet up, have a cup of coffee (if one’s in the offering, and it usually is! 🙂 ) and read, either until the ABC1 news service at 7.00pm, or, during the week, until 6.00pm when I usually watch The Antiques Roadshow – it’s often very interesting, and you can see some amazingly beautiful and curious objects. It’s also on ABC1, and worth a look-in if you’ve nothing better to do around 6.00pm during the week. We have dinner and watch what passes for news these days (most of which I wouldn’t bother to call newsworthy!) which brings us to 7.30pm. We record a lot of shows, especially if they’re on any channel that has ads, and watch them later, but we only sit in front of the TV until 9.30pm – then we’re off back down here to the Den, and our beloved computers. That’s when I usually write my blog. However last night I was chatting to a close friend who needed to talk, and I felt that they were a bit more important than a blog, so I left this until this morning.

Yesterday, I thought I’d have a whole day of Rifting, almost to myself, as Julian had to play Taxi driver for my favourite eldest daughter, who was going off to have that horrible stress test on the treadmill. I started Rifting, but… what with worrying about Lee and her stress test, and my silly wallpaper-desktop-thingy niggling at my brain, I just couldn’t settle in Rift. Instead, I went and worked on the desktop thingy, and it’s finally finished and up! I gave up on the green and cream with pink flowers theme, and found yet another Chrome theme – this one’s from Diablo III, which we’ve played (well, himself has played it – I sit and watch – it’s just a trifle too fast paced for me, with my inability to touch type!) In fact, we’ve played all the Diablo games, and they are very well done, and the music, by a guy called Matt Uelmen, is some of the most beautiful and poignant music I’ve ever heard – I’d play the game just to listen to the soundtrack (which you can buy, and which we’ve got) Anyway, this Chrome theme is based on Diablo III (from memory) and it’s basically a textured, yellow-brown, sandy, ancient parchment-y sort of colour, which I think I’ve managed to match quite successfully in my wallpaper background, and the decorations I’ve used are from an Art Deco font I have, called Augsburger Ornamente Regular (no, I don’t know how to pronounce it!) It all looked quite good, I’d even worked out the text colours, so I saved the file (as a .jpg image) and put it into the HTML file. When I had a look at on screen, it looked terrible! Everything looked far, far too big, the graphics, the title… awful! The trouble is, I couldn’t switch back to the old one until I’d fixed all these “anomalies” – I’d been in a bit of a hurry to get everything finished, you see, and I thought that I’d copied and renamed the original to “old_name of file.htm”, but I hadn’t copied it first. I’d only renamed the ruddy thing – easy enough to rename it back again, but I’d changed it and saved it, so there was no going back from there – well, Julian could have restored the original from the nightly backup, but quite frankly, it wasn’t worth the effort. My mistake, my responsibility to fix it. It wasn’t hard to re-work the graphics and text – just time-consuming. I’d made the mistake in the first place because I’d hurried things – karma caught up with me and made me spend the saved time fixing the problem – divine retribution! 😉 All fixed now, and looking quite nice… but I tell you what, I’d better not change my mind about that Chrome theme in a hurry! 😉

In the meantime, my favourite eldest daughter had finished her stress test on the treadmill, and although so breathless that she could hardly stand, and trying to cough her lungs out as well, the Cardiologist pronounced her heart present… no, he said there was absolutely nothing wrong with her heart, it’s fine, and very healthy, and that he doesn’t have to see her again – which is absolutely wonderful news! So the two episodes where she went to hospital with chest pains weren’t heart attacks, or anything else to do with her heart, and probably more stress related… But she still has to lose weight!

Weigh-in yesterday morning. I went down another two points to 99.2kg… which was good! Ahhh… if only I could do that every day! Dieting would be so much more fun if you could go down two – or even one – point every day! But alas, that’s not how it works, more’s the pity! I was pretty sure I’d go up this morning, or stay the same… (Sorry, but you’ll have to wait for tonight’s blog to find out if I did or not! 😉 )

So, here it is, this morning, and I’ve almost finished last night’s blog 🙂 I didn’t even check my Auctions or Minions last night, so I’ll have plenty to keep me busy today, and lots to tell you all tonight! I have to do my nails at some stage today – this lovely red is starting to look decidedly ragged around the edges. I thought I’d use the kingfisher-peacock blue Inglot nail polish this time – it should go nicely with both pairs of new slacks (with pockets!) Size 20… I still can’t believe it… I’ve lost 35kg since August 2014 – which is quite good, but I still have another 24kg to go… *sigh* the light at the end of the tunnel just receded a few kilometers…  I will get there though – it’ll just take me a few more months, that’s all 🙂 The “Plan A” present was tracked at having left Sydney on Monday – so maybe it’ll arrive today – that would be exciting! I’ll let you know tonight – whatever, it’ll be a very well-traveled present by the time it gets here – from Arizona to Toronto, back to Arizona, then to some other place in the USA, on to Sydney Australia, and now, hopefully, on to Doncaster Melbourne! It will have been “en route” for over a month! I’m dying to find out what it is, and I’ll bet all of you are, too – but don’t worry, I’ll let you all know as soon as it arrives 🙂 Anyway, that’s about all that happened yesterday, but as I said, there’s heaps to do today and I shall tell you all about it tonight! So until then, bee good, don’t forget to pat the cat, and above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂