Nail polish from Estee Lauder arrived this morning! I’m soooo pleased! (blows raspberry, and thumbs nose at David Jones!) I can’t wait to try it out on Sunday (my day for re-doing my nails) I wonder if it’ll be any bluer, or purple-ish than the one I have on at the moment? That’s the one I grizzled about the other day, because the colour it appears to be in the bottle bears absolutely no resemblance to the colour that’s on my nails! Really weird! And speaking of weird, it’s been a bit of a weird day all round – Julian was in one of his “clean everything up and throw the lot out” moods, and I already knew that I was going to have to “supervise” the cleaning out of the hanging side of the wardrobe/computer cupboard in here, lest the lot did get thrown out, willy-nilly… As we’d already been through our respective wardrobes in the walk-through Dressing Area a couple of months ago, I had a reasonable idea of what to expect with the hanging space in this cupboard. I also knew that we’d transferred “a few” seldom worn garments from the overcrowded main wardrobe to this one, but – ye ghods and little fishes! I never realised we had so many clothes! * aghast * There were so many items that the portable clothes rack we were using to sort them on started collapsing under all the weight, and that was only half of the cupboard contents! The only things salvaged from the Charity Bins were my wedding skirt and my wedding top (what I wore when Julian and I got married) The elastic around the waist of the skirt is all perished, but apart from that, they’re both in good repair – and although I’ll never wear either of them again, we’re too sentimental to  throw them out. So those, with a couple of dozen assorted coathangers, are all that’s left in that once stuffed to the gunnels wardrobe! 🙂 (I have no idea what himself intends to use all that nice empty space for! More clothes, maybe? 😉 ) So then I asked him, explicitly, if I was going to be needed for anything else… He replied that no, I was now free to pursue my own interests… Bang! Straight on to Rift. Half an hour of happy and peaceful Rifting passed… and I was called to witness the towel “cull” in the linen cupboard off the hall. After a minor fit of very bad temper, and a few not-very-nice words, I logged out and stomped up to the hall to witness the culling of the towels and to preserve half a dozen for “minor domestic accidents”, like cleaning up cat messes, milk spills, and other small household dramas. The linen cupboard now has a lot more room in it, too! (what a surprise!) Deciding that discretion was probably the better part of valor, himself decided to take off and dispose of the old towels toot sweet (as the French say), allowing me to settle my somewhat ruffled feathers and get back to my Rifting… where I finally managed to get Waterblaze through the last of her Freemarch adventures and into Stonefield (the Defiant’s answer to Gloamwood) I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do tomorrow, as I’d like to go looking for a new entertainment unit (and maybe some nice (read: “pretty”) storage boxes to in which to store things under the bed without looking sloppy and untidy) I’m not sure where we’ll go yet – there’s a long strip of Furniture shops along Whitehorse Road, near the corner of Springvale Road, and there are a few more further up towards Mitcham. It all depends on the weather though… Sunday, of course, is Telara Day, and we’ll be exploring the last vestiges of the Tarken Glacier – I reckon we have about another two to three weeks there, finishing the quests off and looking to see if we can find any “hooks” which may hold hints of what to expect in the next expansion. There are several closed off/magically walled areas that we can’t get into, and from the maps, they look quite large… Maybe they’re planning something for those areas? Oh, and there’s good news afoot for Dimensioners (like me) and Minion owners! Apparently the next big things coming are ‘invisible wings’, allowing people working on their Dimensions to “fly” up to a second story, rather than having to put in, or build, a temporary staircase! Now this, people IS very big news! And it could also herald the beginnings of flying mounts! Very exciting! Minions use up “stamina” on their adventures and usually have to rest up for about 24 hours to regenerate it – however, we’re told that we’re going to be able to buy (naturally!!) potions, to give them their stamina back more quickly… and we’re also going to be able to “shuffle” adventures. At the moment, a Minion adventure comes up, and you have to take it, whether you have a Minion with the required capabilities or not.. Obviously a few people have grizzled about this to the writers, and this “feature” is being… “modified”.

Weigh-in this morning was with a small amount of trepidation… I was sure I’d “rebound” from the almost half a kilo drop yesterday, back into the 108kg zone, but no, I went down another couple of points, to 107.7kg, which was excellent news! Music to my ears, you might say…And which only makes me chew my nails down to my first knuckles, cuz it means, fer sure, that I’m gunna go up again… Now, if I can get down to, say… 107.3kg? when I do go up (as I surely will!), I’ll (hopefully) only go up to, say, 107.8kg, or something. i.e. the lower I go down, the less high I’ll go when I do go up again… if that makes any sense…

Anyway, tune in again tomorrow night – find out if we managed to get a suitable entertainment unit, or if I found some nice (read: “pretty”) storage boxes for under the bed, and what colour they were, etc. There’s no more Panettone for breakfast, and as we still haven’t worked out approximately how many kilojoules there are in half a hot buttered Hot Cross Bun, breakfasts have of necessity gone back to Uncle Toby’s Vita Brits and half a banana (with 200ml of skin milk) It’s nice, but it does tend to get boring. I’ll fill you in on all the latest comings and goings chez nous, and whether my weight went up (bad!), down (good!), or stayed the same (boring!) – so seeyas tomorrow night – ciao all! 🙂

Purple and blue potpourri… ummm why candle holders full of purple and blue potpourri? Because the candles never sat straight in them, and because purple and blue are my favourite colours, and I couldn’t think of a suitable title for tonight’s blog! I have one of the candle holders in here, and there’s another in my bathroom. They’re a bit like giant, short stemmed wine glasses, and they do look lovely when the fat white candles you’re supposed to put in them sit flat against the bottom of the bowl part – but they look kinda weird, when the candles sit at a somewhat jaunty angle… I’ve been very busy with Rift all today – I only got things all finished and ready to roll tonight at about 5 o’clock. You see, I’ve been helping a friend learn how to play Rift. He’s never played an MMO before, so everything is very new and a bit strange – especially the jargon, short-cut expressions (for want of a better term!), and the acronyms, which one tends to take for granted when one has been playing these sorts of games for over ten years. I’ve come to realise that it’s almost as hard trying to explain them as it is to learn them – so it’s been a bit tough for both of us – and also for my poor, long suffering husband who has to put up with my – sometimes stupid, sometimes obscure, and often vaguely technical – questions, which I then have to turn around and translate into lay terms for our friend (and often failing rather badly, I fear!) when he’d much rather be watching a couple of Star Trek Enterprise episodes with me 🙂 Ah well, I was helping out last night, and using the “youngest” of my girls, Gingerlilly, and I kept thinking that I just didn’t like her. Dunno why – *shrug* – I just didn’t…This morning I resolved to do something about it, so I re-created her – slightly differently – on another shard, and began the task of getting her up to level 15 so that I could transfer her to Laethys, our “main” shard. This took a while, and I died twice attempting to get my (almost mandatory for me!) “Merchant of Death” title (well, I was only Level 11, and Reed Bellows, the person you have to kill to get the title, was Level 15, so it’s not really surprising that I got killed… twice…) But as I said, I re-created her somewhat differently, with a Warlock, Necromancer, Dominator build, and by the time I died the second time I must have hit Mr. Bellows with enough DoTs (Damage over Time spells) to knock him off, too, because when I resurrected I was told that I now had the right to the title “Merchant of Death”, so I must have killed him! (unless the game just felt sorry for me and decided to let me use it, for all the trouble dying that I’d had… but I doubt it…) Anyway, to level 15 I managed to get, the Shard Shuffle was performed, and the new and improved Gingerlilly arrived on Laethys, all ready to go this evening. The other Gingerlilly ended up on a very minor shard, reserved for characters that I don’t really want to kill off, but don’t really want to use, either, so… “No Gingerlillys were harmed in the making of the new and improved Gingerlilly!” Tonight’s training session went a lot better than last night’s, and while there is still a lot of ground to be covered (like learning how to open our inventory), I do think our friend is coming along very nicely – it’s only about the fourth or fifth time he’s played, and we’re not playing long sessions (yet, anyway! 😉 ) Oh, I almost forgot – remember I told you how Jademoss, my level 65 girl, maxed out in both Outfitting and Armorsmithing? Well today I got Wyntercat, my level 60 Alchemist, Runecrafter and Artificer up to 450/450 (i.e. maxed out!) in Alchemy. There is now no Potion, Tonic, or Explosive that she cannot make! (takes deep breath) Now comes Runecrafting, and then Artificing. I’ll probably do those tomorrow! 😉

Weigh-in this morning was a bit of a surprise! Well, alright then, a lot of a surprise! I went down, from 108.4kg to 107.9kg (it did say 107.8kg the first time – I rather think I preferred that, but…) I weighed myself twice more, and both times it said (wobble, wobble) 107.8…(for a split second, then, wobble, wobble again) 107.9kg!, so… I guess it was… borderline. Still, I’ll rebound tomorrow, I bet! Back to the 108kg zone. I hope not, but I probably will… Still, it’s obvious that the 107kg zone is within reach… 🙂

And that’s about all that’s happened here today – but something exciting is bound to happen tomorrow, so tune in again tomorrow night and find out what sort of adventures I’ve been up to, sitting here, tappity, tap-tapping away on my keyboard… Will my weight have gone up? Or like an old cracked LP record, become stuck in the 107.9kg track? Perhaps I might even have gone down! That would be wonderful (if a little over optimistic!) news… So G’night, seeyall here tomorrow night – ciao, all! 🙂

Of the desks here in the Den (read: computer room) was made this afternoon… Well, we can’t actually rearrange the desks themselves, as they were constructed as a “U” shaped piece of furniture, what I meant was that a lot of the items on top of the desks was rearranged (get it right, Winter!) And it was only a slight rearrangement because the only thing that was actually moved was the printer (and strictly speaking, it only went back to where it used to live before we moved it into the middle of the “U”) – but I moved a couple of things around on my corner/side of the desk, and added a few extra bits, so I guess the desk was, sort of, “rearranged”. (and besides, I needed a title for tonight’s blog!) 🙂

My favourite eldest daughter came over today to have her hair cut before she goes back to uni – in fact the three of us had our hair snipped today, so we’re all looking very well turned out indeed! 🙂 As usual, I Rifted a bit this morning, and after all the cutting and shaping, general chatter, and lunch, Lee and I retired to the lounge room to watch the first four episodes of Season 4 of “Person of Interest” Things are looking grim for our four “saviours” (heroes? heros?) – whatevers! “Samaritan”, the “bad” machine, is trying to track them down to kill them. “The Machine” (the good one) has arranged new identities and careers for them, and found them an old abandoned railway repair tunnel under the streets of New York as their new base of operations. But alas, they’ve lost nearly all their resources and assets, including Finch’s access to his somewhat “well endowed” bank accounts… and that’s as much as I’m going to tell you, in case you decide to watch it for yourselves… “Spoilers!” 😉 Actually, the show, which basically is about a machine which was built to watch everyone, all the time, in order to root out acts of terrorism, cuts a little close to the bone, considering the state that the world is in today; society is slowly but very surely drifting closer and closer to paranoia and the deprivation of civil liberties and individual freedoms. I hate to be a prophet of doom, but I don’t like seeing – not just our Government, but governments world wide – increasing personal restrictions in the name of “security against terrorism”. Ladies and Gentlemen, terrorism has been around since the year “dot” – increasing (so-called) “security” measures, which are only decreasing our personal freedoms, allowing torture in the hopes that they’ll discover some terrible plan, when it’s already been established that torture has never elicited any useful evidence or information pertaining to such activities – none of these measures will do anything at all to increase our safety or prevent a terrorist attack. None! The only thing they are doing is giving whichever Government is in power more control over our freedoms and liberties! We saw the first glimmerings of it way back in 1986, when “they” wanted to introduce the “Australia Card” – a card which would not only give the same information which our Passports and Driver’s Licences do, but also: our medical history. Our bank details. Our criminal record(s), if any. Our educational records… in short, things that should not be available to any one without our express consent. Australians back then, before the Bali Bombings and other world wide atrocities, were much more doughty (look it up!) than they are now. We fought tooth and nail against it, and we won. However, it seems we’ve been ear bashed, cajoled, and subtly threatened out of our courage by not only our own Government, but other world leaders as well. Threatened with vile acts of terrorism, threatened with cyber attacks which could undermine the world’s economy (and here was silly me, thinking that the greed of the big banking corporations was doing a pretty damn good job of that anyway!) Yes folks, we’ve let them bend our ears, and we’ve meekly bowed our necks and allowed these things to happen. Pull your collective heads out of the sand, people! These things are going to happen, with or without these so-called “safety”  and “security” measures! The only way to stop them is to stop pussy-footing around, stop allowing extremists of any and all sorts (don’t forget what the Christians did to the Muslims during the Crusades!) to hold you to ransom! Don’t let them get away with murder! Stop them, by “any means necessary” (and I most certainly do mean “any means necessary”!) Don’t accept excuses, don’t try appeasement measures, don’t rely on sanctions (all you do is hurt the innocent) – for heaven’s sake, if we have to, we should empty out all our gaols, world wide, and stuff them full of the extremists (of all religions), who can’t accept the words “I don’t believe”, and keep them there for life!

OK, nightly rant over 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was… acceptable 😉 I went down to 108.4kg – 2 points down, which is good, so keep it up, body! (or else!) 🙂 I had my last piece of Panettone for breakfast this morning – no more now until next Christmas (*sniffle*) I was telling my favourite eldest daughter this, and with a big happy smile, she said “Guess what we had for breakfast this morning!” “Hot Cross Buns!” I replied promptly… and sadly, I was right. Hmmm… I wonder if it’s possible to work out how many kilojoules are in your average Hot Cross Bun, plus butter, so that I can have a “breakfast’s worth” (1001kj) this Easter?! When is Easter this year, anyway? I might have reached my goal weight by then… (but at this rate, I doubt it!) 🙂

Tune in again this time tomorrow night for more interesting little snippets from moi – I promise, no more ranting and dire predictions for at least another month! (says she, typing with her fingers crossed… 😉 ) Find out if we managed to work out the kilojoules in half a buttered piece of Hot Cross Bun, and if eating the last piece of Panettone made any difference to my weight. Hopefully I’ll go down again tomorrow, but you’ll never, never know, if you don’t make a show – right here, tomorrow night! Seeyas on the flip side! ciao, all! 🙂

Savant Armorsmith! In Rift, that is, not in real life! 🙂 Yes, I went and further raided the Guild Bank, and leveled my Armorsmithing up to its maximum – 450/450! I also got all the Artisan and Craftsman marks I needed to buy the Empyrean bag recipe, which I have learnt, so now I can make 24 slot Lanzan bags, and the 28 slot Empyrean bags! 🙂 And now the serious farming work begins, unfortunately! We’ll have to do a fair bit of it too – to buy the mats to make the bigger bags would cost an Emperor and a Pope’s ransom 😦 (that’s probably why they sell for so much on the Auction House! And here was me thinking that the people selling them were just plain greedy! *rolls eyes*) Luckily, himself doesn’t seem to mind farming… I go out (as I did this afternoon, to mine Karthite ore – I would have bought it in the Auction House, but… I bought the last 17 pieces, and that was all there was, so much against my will and my inclination, I had to go out farming, or not complete my Armorsmithing, which I really wanted to do) I go out, and I’m galloping along, trying to locate the whatever-it-is that I’m after, and fighting off mobs that seek to hinder my progress, find about half a dozen of the whatever-it-is, and feel as if I’ve been out there for at least a week. I get tired, I’m bored stupid, and I seem to spend more time fighting mobs than finding the whatever-it-is’s. Anyway, I didn’t really need too much more Karthite, and all ended happily ever after. All that took until well after lunch, because the powers that be at Rift were having terrible lag problems (they seem to have been having a few problems in that area lately – I wonder why?) Today they were a lot worse than usual – I got turfed out (of the game) three times, and got lagged out another few times (“Lagged out”: a highly technical term meaning that the game seems to freeze to the point where you can’t do anything at all – can’t pick up loot, and can’t interact with anything. If it gets really, really bad, you get “turfed out” – thrown out of the game with an error message. You can usually log straight back in again, but if it’s really, really, really bad, you might get thrown right back to your desktop! (but that hardly ever happens! 😉 )) So I spent a fair bit of time this morning playing Solitaire, and waiting for the people at Rift to get their act back together…

Our new television was delivered this morning, and I do have to say that it looks a little… weird? sitting on our old entertainment unit… it’s too small for it (the unit is too small, not the television!), but it’ll have to do until we can get a new one. It’s a bit too high for the new television, too… and there’s practically no room to put anything else on it at all – there’s only about six or seven inches of room on each side of the television Oh well, as I keep saying about this diet of mine, it’s not forever, it’s only until we get ourselves a longer, lower entertainment unit! 🙂 But it is a very nice television – very smart, too! It does everything except do the dishes – well, almost, anyway! It can natively play iView and YouTube, it’s a DLNA renderer and client (whatever that is – Julian is dictating this, so blame him if you don’t understand any of it!) so it can play video and music directly from our file server, and can also act as a “sink” or renderer via UPNP/DLNA and play video and music from Tablets (not the medicinal sort!) It’s also a PVR using any USB hard drive (and memory stick) – as I said, it’s a clever little 65 inch television! 🙂 Hey! Don’t look at me like that! All I did was ask himself what it did, and I just wrote down what he said – it’s not my fault if you don’t understand 99% of that! (I don’t either! 😉 )

This afternoon I did my nails… They do look quite nice, but I can’t for the life of me work out how a nail polish that looks like a mauv-ish blue in the bottle can end up looking like a pale, pearly, pink-ish colour, with barely the teeniest hint of a “perhaps it could be blue-ish?” tint in it, when it’s on your nails! ‘Nuff said – I’ll wait and see how well it lasts before I pronounce the final verdict…

Weigh-in this morning was again no surprise – this is my stupid body we’re talking about here, after all 🙂 I actually went down again, to 108.6kg, or where I was on Sunday, the day before yesterday. See-sawing again. I’ll probably stay the same weight for a couple of days, or something, then if I’m really lucky, I might go down a bit more…and so it will cycle… down, up, down, same, same, down, up, down, same, same… rinse and repeat until I go stark, staring, bonkers, or die from boredom – whichever comes first

And so another evening draws to a close – I have my last remaining weighed slice of Panettone tomorrow morning for breakfast, and then that’s it until next Christmas (when hopefully I’ll be able to eat a proper sized slice!) Oh, I forgot to mention! Julian went to the Dentist yesterday because his root canalled tooth was sore… but after prodding and probing it from all angles, and x-raying it, the Dentist pronounced it to be sound, and suggested that it might have been the nasty bout of sinusitis that himself had been suffering from for the past few days that had niggled the nerves there, so the tooth is still in situ, and will probably be capped some time in February. All’s well that ends well! 🙂

Don’t forget to tune in again tomorrow night to find out all the latest happenings here at chez nous! My favourite eldest daughter is coming over tomorrow to have her hair cut, and will be bringing further episodes of “Person of Interest” with her, and possibly a new episode of “Glee” (yes, we watch that too! 🙂 ) I’ll even fill you in on whether my weight is still in its see-sawing phase, or whether it has evolved into something a little more sensible… like steadily going down, for a change! Seeyas all then – ciao, all! 🙂

Purple! Well, it is one of my most favourite colours (after blue, which is my most favourite colour)… and I thought it was time for a change. If you’re wondering where the utilities are – the calender, the archives and the admin thingies? – they are still there, they’re just… hidden, a little bit. See those little bars right at the top of the page? Click on the little bars, and the utilities will s-l-i-d-e out over the top of the blog. Click on the little “X marks the spot” in the top right hand corner of the utilities, and they’ll s-l-i-d-e back into the side, revealing the blog again! 🙂 Nifty, huh? 🙂 Much more neater, and hopefully I’ll get a slightly wider text area (though probably not – it wasn’t any wider in the preview, anyway…) I made the header this morning, with my fingers crossed that it would work on this theme, this time… unlike the tooth grinding experience of last night! (Grrr!) This is yet another different theme (I can’t remember what it’s called – sorry!), and so far it’s been behaving itself. All that remains to be seen now is, will it update my post?! (the first two themes I ever tried looked pretty enough, but totally refused to display anything that I tried to post! Not terribly useful in a daily diary blog!) Although it was really hard trying to design a blog header with my fingers crossed, I persevered, and I had this one finished and uploaded before lunchtime. In the past, people have asked my why I don’t take commissions to do art work (a long, long time ago – when I painted with oils instead of pixels!) the answer was simple. I never know what I’m going to paint (draw/sketch/create) before I start – I don’t know quite what I’m going to produce until I’m reasonably well into it. Give me a subject and say “paint this”, and I’ll sit all day staring blankly at the canvas, totally devoid of inspiration (however, hint subtly around the subject matter and allow me to become interested – and who knows? Inspiration might strike, if you’re lucky! 😉 ) It’s the same with digital art – ask me to make a wallpaper or a theme on a particular subject, and you’ll probably never see the finished product. Let me get myself interested in someone, or something, and the ideas almost never stop… It’s not that I won’t do something specific when asked, it’s simply that I can’t seem to get any (workable) ideas for whatever it is/was… when asked! Mind you, you can get lucky – once in a pink and purple polka dotted moon! 🙂 Anyway, once I got the header online, I drifted onto Rift. I did my Crafting Daily and delivered the shoes wot I had to make, and got a measly 30 Artisan Marks for them! And, of course, a “Daily” quest is just that – once daily! So now I have to wait until tomorrow (or late tonight) to do another one. Pity me! I have to earn 200 Artisan Marks to be able to buy the Empyrean bag recipe! At 30 Artisan Marks per day, that should buy me the recipe, in, oh…. a week? By which time I’ll probably be bored with the idea of making Empyrean bags and not want to do it any more… Actually, it’s probably closer to the mark to say that by then I’ll have found out how much the mats to make a bag will cost me, and I’ll be too scared to continue, or the Guild Bank won’t have enough money left in it to pay for a cup of coffee – not that they have coffee in Telara, but I’m sure you get my drift! 🙂 After carting the shoes all the way to Iron Pine Peak, I let Watersong have a turn. She’s my newest girl… and mostly she’s just been doing the Artifact circuit around Meridian, as by the time I log on at night there’s not enough time left before bed to get involved in questing… and, of course, the Minions pick up Artifacts too, so now I’m not only overflowing with Dimension items, I’m also overflowing with Artifacts. Julian says to pass the Artifacts along to our two Dreamweavers (Dreamweavers make Dimension items; they disassemble Artifacts to make “Dream Ribbons” and make Dimension items from those) We have two Dreamweavers, my girl Elizandra, and himself’s girl Mandreth, and they both need all the Artifacts they can get their hot little paws on. What I’ll do is take all my girls, one at a time, through the Artifacts. Once there’s nothing left that they haven’t already got, I’ll divide the remainder up between the two Dreamweavers. That’s fair, I reckon… 🙂

So that’s what I’ve been doing today. Our cleaning lady finally arrived (late! very late!) she’s still here, and it’s 4:45pm! She’s still not well, and is sporting a black eye as well… she says she wasn’t watching where she was cleaning at her local school, was bending over cleaning the stairs, and ran her eye straight into the rounded bottom of the stair rail! It’s a right beauty of a shiner! (and I thought that Julian was a klutz!) Oh well, at least the place isn’t awash with Flipper fur any more! 🙂 and poor old Julian has gone off to the Dentist with what appears to be a cracked tooth. It’ll probably have to come out, so he might be joining me with soup for dinner tonight!

Weigh-in this morning was, once again, to be expected… Yes, I went up! Two points, up to 108.8kg 😦 Why??!!!! It’s not fair! Sometimes I feel like getting the carving knife and just… slicing it all off, in slabs! (but that would probably get blood in the grouting, and Julian would get cross, so perhaps I won’t do that today, after all) Oh dear, I’m starting to get all depressed again… Think of something happy, quick! Oh yes, it’s my favourite eldest daughter’s Birthday today! I won’t tell you how old she is, she might not want me to – suffice to say that she’s within one year of my friend and hairdresser 😉

So anyway, tune in again tomorrow night to find out if himself had to lose a tooth or not, and if not, what the Dentist can do for it (he’s already had a root canal filling in that tooth – the Dentist was going to Cap it, and was just waiting to see how it settled down… but, it hasn’t settled down, so…) *gulp* Thank heavens I’ll never, ever have to go through those sorts of procedures again! I’d also like some feedback on the new theme, and header wot I made for it, so don’t be shy! Add a comment or two occasionally, y’know? I don’t bite, honestly! only when I’m asked, nicely, anyway… And I suppose I’ll tell you whether or not my weight went up, down, or stayed the same (I’m betting on it staying the same tomorrow, because I know that that will irk me even more than going up would!) So once again, seeyas all then! Ciao, all! 🙂

We finally dinged 65! (waits for applause… not a sausage!) At long last! That last level, from 64 to 65 just crawled! We didn’t cheat, but we did use one of our Transcendent experience potions each when it was starting to get a bit late, and we still had just over a bubble to go – I was worried that himself would say “Well, time to dust down – we’ll have to leave leveling until next week, I’m afraid!” – or words to that effect! Of course, the first thing we did was Hearth back to Draumheim to raid the Guild Bank so that we could upgrade all our gear – after all, nothing but the very best for us brave 65-ers! 😉 We did leave some money in the Guild Bank, but we ain’t nearly so well off as we once were – especially after I already raided it the other day to make all those Lanzan bags… I wish I could find a recipe for Empyrean bags… they’re much bigger (and much more expensive!) Ah, my clever husband has just found where to buy the recipe! But alas, I don’t have sufficient Crafting and Artisan marks with which to buy it… You know what this means, don’t you!? (well, of course you don’t! That’s why I’m about to tell you that!) This means that I’m going to be slaving my fingers off doing Daily manufacturing runs – making odds and sods, and delivering them all over Telara – *sigh* the things we Artisans do, to make money for our poor, now financially denuded Guild Bank! 🙂 Oh well, it’ll keep me out of mischief for about five minutes! (Why do you think I waited until I was level 65 to do this? It’ll be a pushover… until I get up to the new areas, anyway…) We did have a pretty good run today, though we both bit off more than we could chew a couple of times – I died once, he bought the farm twice, from memory… we finished off this afternoon mid-way through a very long and extremely complicated quest chain which saw us “bouncing” off what look like mottled bladders on short, thick stems. Run into them, and they bounce you w-a-y up in the sky, and onto ledges, where you have to fight nasties and destroy thingies (yes! “thingies”, coz I can’t remember what they’re called!) Then you use another of those bladder things to either bounce back down, or on to the next ledge. We got muddled a bit because we forgot which bladder we’d arrived on and bounced the wrong way – so we ended up doing some of it in the wrong order and we had to go back and re-do part of it. There’s still a fairly large area left to explore and cover, quest-wise, so although we dinged 65, we’re not finished yet! 🙂 I’d say we’ve probably got another couple of Sundays, at least, before we’ve completed the area… and we’ll have to think what we’re going to do next – start off new characters, or run dungeons and instances…

I’ve been thinking of changing my blog theme for a while, and browsing through the templates to see if there was anything decent… I found quite a nice one – or so I thought – which I found I kept coming back to as being the best of a poor bunch (unless you want to spend $$$ on a commerical one!) So today when we finished Rifting, I went and had another look at it, found out what size header to create for it, opened up Photoshop, and created a very nice little one. Went back to the chosen theme, found the right colours (again! It had “lost” them when I went to look at something else to do with the theme) I uploaded the header… which promptly refused to display. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the header to display – no way, no how! Arrggghhh! It was almost news time! In the end, and muttering rude words darkly under my breath, I thought “Shove it! $%#$!”, and closed everything down. Having lost all my gruntles , and still muttering imprecations, I stomped off to the lounge room to watch the news and have my dinner. We watched a bit of television, then I came back down here, logged back on to Rift, sorted out my Minions for the night, and logged off. Back to the recalcitrant blog theme I went, hoping that by now it would have had time to reconsider, and behave itself… but nooooo! Not this little rotten theme! So I’m back with this one – I might change this one – I have the only colour I need (#CFCBA9), and after all, they do say that a change is as good as a holiday, don’t they? 😉 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was like a breath of fresh air! I went down to…. (drum roll, please!) 108.6kg! Half a kilo! 🙂 It’s because I’m not taking those wretched fluid-hoarding tablets at the moment, you see – I’ll be very glad when I never have to take them again (they’re not good for people who tend to get blood clots, either!), but that won’t be until I’ve lost enough weight to have the surgery I need done – so, still a few more months yet! Ive lost 26kg, but I still have another 18kg to go – but in the end, I’ll have lost 44kg… If I keep going the way I am at the moment, I should get there by late April – early May? – cross fingers, touch wood…

So tune in again tomorrow night – I did have Panettone for breakfast this morning (but I didn’t drink the threatened cordial 😉 ) so we’ll see if that makes any difference – I hope it won’t, but you never know, with my body – still, there’s only one more Panettone breakfast left to have – on Wednesday morning, and then it’ll be all gone (until next Christmas! 🙂 ) I’ll let you know (or perhaps you’ll see! 😉 ) how I go at changing blog themes – never a dull moment around this house! So catchyas on the flip side, as we used to say in ye Olde Days – ciao, all! 🙂

Shopping spree today! 🙂 Julian had seen Dyson vacuums advertised at JB Hi Fi quite cheaply, and there’s a JB Hi Fi right over the road at Shoppingtown. So we were going to go over there and have a look at their vacuums, nice and close and handy, but it turned out that it wasn’t the right sort of JB Hi Fi – oooh no, we needed a JB Hi Fi Home store (or something) We drove out to Chirnside Park – but once again that turned out to have been yet another misconception on our part. As we were about to sail past a small group of shops on the right as we neared Chirnside shopping centre, I noticed that one of those shops was a…. JB Hi Fi! “Oh look!” says me “There’s a JB Hi Fi over there, too!” 🙂 Thinking remarkably quickly, we worked out that there weren’t likely to be two JB Hi Fi’s that close together, and that the one we’d just passed was probably the one we were looking for. We did a U Turn. And yes, it was the one we wanted, and yes they did have the vacuum cleaner we were after… and which we duly bought. Because we’d decided that we’d get ourselves a new TV as a wedding anniversary present – I might have mentioned, once before, that we don’t buy each other a gift on our anniversary, we go out and get something nice together, giving us more money to spend on something nice that we both want. This sort of anniversary “gifting” is all well and good, and terribly romantic an’ all, IF you make the time to (a) discuss it, and (b) actually go out and get something together. However for the past two years, we’ve either been too busy, or too distracted, or we’ve just plain forgotten about it, and we’ve missed out on our anniversary present. This year we decided to make up for it by getting ourselves something fairly biggish… like a nice, new, 65 inch Panasonic 4K television (and a new entertainment cabinet for it to sit on) So we had a look at what JB Hi Fi had in the way of televisions, and the Panasonic was really by far the best; clear and sharp (did I mention that it’s also 3D? though we’ll probably never use that) We brought the vacuum cleaner home with us, for our cleaning lady to use on Monday, but the television will be delivered some time next week – for starters, it wouldn’t fit in the car, and himself is getting a tad too old to be wrestling giant televisions into position. We did have a look at a few entertainment units, and some were…. O.K. (but only just!) The old one will have to do until we can find something we really like, and that will fit in the available wall space properly. It’ll look a trifle small, and it’s really too high for such a large TV unit, but I think we can do a lot better than the ones we saw today. By this stage we were in Hardly Normal Harvey Norman, looking at their entertainment units, so we took a bit of a rest from that and looked at computer chairs instead. I think I must have sat in every computer and office chair that they had! Some were very nice, and very comfortable, but just felt a little too short in the seat depth (from your tail bone to the back of your knees?) I did find Baby Bear’s chair though – one that was “just right!” – Unlike Goldilocks, I didn’t break it, in fact I’m sitting in it right now, and it’s very nice and comfortable (and my shoulder hasn’t been hurting, either!) After we’d got the chair I was surprised to find that it was after 2 o’clock! We were both hungry for our lunch, and almost willing to kill for a decent cup of coffee, so we came home… And guess what I did! Yup! That’s right! Straight into Rift! 😀 I worked a bit on the new girl, who desperately needed some larger bags… so rather than raid the Guild Bank for platinum with which to buy Lanzan bags (approximately 11 platinum per bag), I raided the Guild Bank for platinum with which to buy the mats (materials) for Jademoss to make them, instead. Why buy the mats when you can “farm” them (go out and kill the mobs that drop the particular item(s) you need)? Because that takes too long, and then you have to process the raw materials into usable ingredients for the “recipe”, and then you have to make the bags) Long story short, I bought 141 bolts of Lanzan (2 x pieces of Lanzan cloth = 1 x bolt of Lanzan. The bags take 14 bolts of Lanzan each!) 100 Dense Hides, and 60 reels of strong thread – for a total of (about) 185 platinum… saving well over that amount in time saved by not having to go out and farm and process the raw materials. So I made 10 bags – I gave 2 to the new girl, and there are now 8 Lanzan bags sitting in the Guild Bank for whoever needs them. I was quite surprised to find that it was almost 6.30pm! I logged out and went and read until it was time for the news… And that was our big Spending Spree day! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning… I’d be in tears of depression, if it wasn’t so laughable! Oh I went down again… 1 [insert very rude word here] point! One measly little point! From 109.2kg, to 109.1kg! I reckon that if those scales were calibrated to weigh in micro grams, it would have been 109.1.899kg! If I were losing weight any slower, I’d be gaining it! I’m fed up…. I’m having Panettone for breakfast tomorrow morning, and I’m going to drink a glass of (very weak!) cordial throughout the day! So there, body! Shove that in your big fat pipe and smoke it! Grrrr!

Anyway, look in on all the goings one here again tomorrow night – tomorrow is Sunday, our traditional “Tra-la-la-ing in Telara” day – find out if we finally managed to ding 65, and how many times we each died! Did I really have Panettone for breakfast, and a glass of (very weak!) cordial to sip throughout the day – or was that just a threat? 😉 And what will my lousy body do, weight-wise, now that I’ve finished that course of tablets? Lose weight, like a good little body, or will it again thwart me, and either stay the same, or go up? All these questions, and more, will be answered tomorrow night! Sleep tight, keep well, and seeyas all tamarra! ciao, all! 🙂

Still very “grubby”, I’m afraid… Our cleaning lady did come, but she wasn’t at all well, and besides, she didn’t have a vacuum cleaner, so she’s coming on Monday instead. It’s a long story – she used to work for a crowd who cleaned the three blocks of apartment buildings in this street (Court!), and then the crowd she worked for said they didn’t want to do it anymore, but as she had several private clients in the area, and she still had access to the (communal?) vacuum cleaner, there wasn’t a problem… but now she only has us and (I think?) one other client here, and for some reason that I have probably been told and promptly forgotten about, she’s also lost access to the vacuum cleaner… See! I told you it was a long story! Anyway, the long and short of it is that we need a vacuum cleaner, whether she has access to one or not, and so we’re (hopefully) going to get it a little sooner than we normally would have, because if this floor isn’t vacuumed next Monday, we’ll need gumboots to wade through all the cat fur, dust, and general detritus that’s been gathering on our floors since (*gasp* has it really been that long?!) before Christmas! I had to sit at home and wait for said cleaning lady to turn up, whilst himself went to pick up my favourite eldest daughter, and then taxi her to the Vic Roads place on Burwood Highway – she needs to get herself a Learner’s Permit, because she doesn’t have a Passport, and she doesn’t have a Driver’s Licence – the Learner’s Permit she did have had gone well beyond its “Use By” date, and apparently she had just a teeny bit of trouble buying a new phone, with no photo ID… And no, she wasn’t able to get one today – apparently there’s some other form or other that she needs… Talk about red tape! I still have my Driver’s Licence, primarily for ID – I haven’t driven a car for almost 26 years… though I could, if I wanted to… but I don’t! Once Julian learnt to drive (I taught him! 🙂 ) I thought “Fantastic! I don’t have to drive ever again, if I don’t want to! Yay!” – I was a good driver, in fact, I was a very good driver, and I was everyone’s taxi, from Lisa and Kate, to “friends and visitors” to my Bulletin Board. I drove people from Burwood to Caulfield, to Hawthorn, to Richmond, to Mooroolbark, to Ringwood, and to St. Albans – and just about everywhere else in between – sometimes as late (or as early, take your pick!) as three o’clock in the morning – I did it all cheerfully, and with a smile, but…  I hated it! I hated driving, full stop. I only did it because I had to – there was no-one else to do it for me – until I taught himself how to drive and he got his licence *smug look* 🙂 Enough!

As I mentioned, my favourite eldest daughter was over today – after lunch we watched two episodes of a new show – some sort of a run-on from Captain America, from what I can gather – called Marvel’s Agent Carter – it was quite good, set in the mid to late 40’s? early 50’s? and follows on from the end of the 2011 movie Captain America: The First Avenger. I’m looking forward to seeing more of it! 🙂 After that we watched the last two episodes of Season 3 of Person of Interest – gosh, it’s a good show! Lee has about 11 episodes of Season 4, which she’ll bring with her next week – I can’t wait to see what happens – everything seems to be falling apart at the seams – “Samaritan”, the “bad” machine has come online, and it’s turning into a sort of “Machine versus Machine” war, with lots of collateral damage taken by both (human) sides… I tell you, that show has you bouncing up and down in your seat – it’s extremely well done! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning… well, what can I say? Just as well I didn’t hold my breath! Yes, I went up again, two points, to 109.2kg – so not quite back to where I was the day before yesterday, but still, very disappointing! I’ll probably stay the same tomorrow – thank heavens it’s the last day of this wretched medication! And it’ll probably take another two to three days before my damn body gets back to what is laughingly called “normal”, and I start going down regularly and properly again. This see-saw business is getting terribly tiresome and boring…

So tune in again tomorrow night – we’re going vacuum shopping tomorrow, so maybe I’ll have good news on that front, at least! 😉 I ordered my Estee Lauder nail polish tonight – they can’t send it express post, so I hope it doesn’t have to come all the way from the UK, or the USA… I’ll get an email about it tomorrow, so I can fill you in then… and of course, there’s my weight… Who’s willing to bet me $5 that I either stay the same, or go up? Any takers? Anyone??? No? I guess you probably think the result will be a forgone conclusion, eh?  Ahhh… but I’ve surprised you before, haven’t I?? Let’s just hope I surprise myself tomorrow morning! Find out tomorrow night! ‘Till then, ciao all! 🙂

I logged on to Rift first, to do some “re-ordering” of Key Bindings, and to set up my Minions for ‘ron, and I sort of got a bit carried away with it all (and I still haven’t finished all the changes! I’ll do that tomorrow…) So, I’ve actually had quite a riveting Rifting day today! I managed to get Watersong to level fifteen, found someone she could swap with, and duly brought her over to Laethys… where I found, much to my annoyance, that the name “Watersong” was already in use, so I had to think of something else (why can’t they tell you these things before you go and move them! You know, an “Oh, by the way, you will have to change her name you know, that name is already in use over there…” sort of thing…) So I tried this name… and I tried that name… and I even tried a few names that I was really hoping she wouldn’t be able to get (Russian Name Roulette?? 😉 ) and none of them were available… In the end I settled for “Waterblaze”. I don’t really like it, which means that I probably won’t keep liking her, and she’ll be the first to move out if I take a fancy to a new name and face (Fickle? Who, me? Never!) Nah, ackshally I’ll probably think of another name for her, and change it later… So I spent most of the day doing that, and then I thought that the Key Bindings I was using – Key Bindings? Oh… well, to make playing easier you can assign a particular key (on your keyboard) to a particular function, or Macro. For instance, I have assigned the key “W” to a macro which causes you to wave to someone, and the key “D” to the slot where I keep my Healing Potions, so instead of clicking on the Healing Potion icon, I can just hit the letter “D”, and I’ll automatically Drink my healing potion. Much easier! 🙂 Most people (like Julian!) highlight someone and simply type in “/wave”, and hey presto, they wave at that person – I like to use the macro to do it because I find that by the time I’ve typed in “/wave”, the person has gone off somewhere else and never sees my friendly wave. It’s also faster – for me – to hit the “D” key rather than click on the healing potion icon – otherwise I’d be dead before I got my cursor anywhere near it! So I have created an army of macros to do all sorts of things for me, like targeting an animal and casting a killing spell on it, waving, thanking, making a rude gesture 😉 sitting down – and all with single click of the macro, or a letter assigned to that macro. Well, this afternoon I thought that the way I had my Key Bindings set up left quite a lot to be desired, so I re-assigned some, and created a few new ones, which made better sense (like the “W” for wave, and “F” for Fred (my pet), etc…) I finally left it all at about 4.30 this afternoon, when my eyes were starting to go fuzzy and my brain felt like mush – and I went up to the lounge to read for a bit. Then, after dinner, stupid me decided that I only had “a little bit” left to do (famous last words!) and dived into that instead of getting straight on with my blog, as I usually do. As it started to get later and later, I thought “I’ll only do this until 10 o’clock, then I’ll do my blog”, and then it was “until quarter past 10”, and then it was after half past 10 and I still hadn’t finished, so I really had to put the rest of it off until tomorrow, or not get this done at all. See how dedicated I am? 😉

Weigh-in was a lot more better this morning! I actually went down a bit, to 109.0kg! Hopefully I’ll be below that and into the 108kg zone tomorrow morning… but once again, this is my body we’re talking about, so I won’t hold my breath… Perhaps it wasn’t the cordial or the Panettone that caused the… ummm… hiccup… in my downward path, but just my stupid body misbehaving itself as usual… 🙂

Anyway, call back at the same time tomorrow night, and find out if I’ve finally finished all the Key Binding changes and got all of my girls settled and comfortable with the new set-up, or if I got too distracted by our cleaning lady, who was supposed to have been here last week but didn’t turn up (so I hope she comes tomorrow – the place is filthy!) My favourite eldest daughter will also be over tomorrow, so I guess we’ll spend most of the day watching “Person of Interest”, and hopefully, “Agents of Shield” – I’ll let you know what happens (but no spoilers! 🙂 ) And I suppose I’ll probably fill you in on whether I cracked the 109kg barrier and made it into the 108kg zone! 🙂 Till tomorrow then, ciao all! 🙂

Get just about everything that I had down on my “shopping list” wot I wrote about last night, and I didn’t melt into an Olympic sized swimming pool in the process ! 🙂 First stop was the doctor’s, to get the repeat scripts I needed. We didn’t see our usual doctor, she was away on holidays and won’t be back until the 12th (which just so happens to also be my favourite eldest daughter’s Birthday! 😉 ) The doctor we saw was very nice – I must remember to ask for her if our regular doctor is ever away again – and according to the medical notes, just about all of my scripts were due, so I got the whole lot in one fell swoop. She also took my blood pressure which was extra good, and she says (looking at the notes) that because my weight is going down so much I might even have to have some of the medication reduced further, or even come off some of it altogether, if I start feeling faint, or dizzy! Anyhow, then we went off to The Glen and went first to David Jones (since we were parked down that end – it was so crowded and busy that I think half of Glen Waverley was there today in some sort of an attempt to get out of the heat!) I looked for, and found, the nail polish, but naturally the girl hanging around the area knew absolutely nothing about Estee Lauder or their nail polishes, but she said that a girl was coming in who would, and she’d get her to ring us. We were actually called back, which greatly surprised the cynic in me, but where Optus are supposed to say “Yes” to everything, she was obviously prepped to say “No!” to everything – apologetically, of course. No, they wouldn’t be getting any more in because it was a Limited Edition, and No, they wouldn’t sell me the tester for “Legal Reasons” – which covers a multitude of platitudes, doesn’t it! So… I shall just have to buy it online from Estee Lauder themselves, where apparently it’s not such a “Limited Edition”, after all. We also picked up my Jurlique Jasmine Body Lotion at the Jurlique booth? station? which was just around the corner from Estee Lauder. Next stop, still in David Jones, was the towel department. We got six new towels (2 fuchsia, 2 lavender, and 2 olive stone), six new hand towels, in the same colours, and six new face washers, ditto. Very nice. I’m looking forward to turfing out some of the old stock to make room for them! 🙂 There is no Inglot at The Glen, so that will have to wait until next week, I suppose… I picked up 3 T-shirts from My Size, a black, a purple – and a lilac (which, surprisingly they did have in er… my size…. I’m wearing it now! 🙂 ) and I got my eyeshadow in mauve/lilac tones from Priceline. We were starting to flag just a little by then, so we went to pick up our scripts from the Chemist next to Coles… It’s quite a nice Chemist shop, and quite big. They have a great range of just about everything from band-aids to perfume, BUT! They are lousy listeners, and terrible dispensers of medications. While I’ll happily shop there again, for non medical items, I shall never, ever again, hand them a script to fill! We told them, clearly, and in words of very few syllables, that we did not want generics, would not accept generics, and that if they didn’t have the original manufacturer brand name, then they were not to fill the script!   They gave us generics – which held us up, and made a lot more work for themselves when they were told to take them all back and either give us the non-generic, correct brand name, or leave the script blank (i.e. with no dispensing note!) Chemists (in general) keep trying to tell you that “generics are cheaper, and that they’re just the same!” If they are “just the same”, how come every time I’ve been stupid enough to accept generic medication I get an allergic reaction! I get a rash that starts on the palm of my hands, spreads rapidly around the rest of my body, and I need to take antihistamines and use cortisone creams to calm it down! Grrr! Anyway, by the time we left The Glen it was getting close to 2 o’clock, and it was very hot and muggy outside – and it was looking very much as though we were going to be in for a bit of a storm… so we decided to give looking at the computer chairs a miss for today and just came straight home. Just as well we did! We were still on the freeway between Middleborough Road and Tram Road when the rain started… and by the time we got to the Pub next door, lightning was flashing and thunder was rumbling… It’s much more fun looking at, and enjoying, a nice thunder storm from inside a safe, comfortable room! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was yet another “ho-hum” disappointment – I stayed the same, at 109.3kg. I wonder if it was the nice cordial that I had last night that did it, or the Panettone I had for breakfast? (and it was an even smaller piece than I’ve been having, too!) Or maybe it was because I had both, in the same day? I won’t make that mistake again… Hopefully tomorrow will bring a bit of a weight drop, for a change… So, not particularly happy today, Jan!

So call in tomorrow night and find out if my new eyeshadow matches my new lilac T-shirt, and whether I’ve been able to persuade himself to run the new towels through the wash so that I can see what they look like in the bathroom… but most importantly, to find out if it can’t have been the cordial and the Panettone after all, because I’ve gone up again, or if I’ve boringly stayed the same, on 109.3kg, for a third day, or whether I’ve actually performed a major miracle and gone down a bit… Seeyas all then – ciao! 🙂