It’s Friday again… to be followed tomorrow by another Saturday, etc., etc… It’s getting entirely too close to Christmas, you know, and we haven’t even started doing our Christmas Cards, or organising most of the Christmas presents… Some of the Christmas presents are on their way though, and should probably arrive on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest. Favourite eldest daughter’s husband won’t be a problem, neither will favourite youngest daughter or her husband… but himself’s going to be a headache and three quarters! He keeps promising me a list of things he wouldn’t mind getting, but I’ve seen no sign of it yet… Crikey, I’ve even managed to come up with something that I want for Christmas – and he keeps forgetting, and asking me what I want. Hmmm. This is either a sign of rapidly advancing dementia on his part, or else he just doesn’t want to give me a nice, leather manicure set (with at least six or seven pieces in it, hint, hint!) I’d say “perfume”, but we just bought two bottles of Estee Lauder’s Cinnabar (my favourite!) the week before last, and although I like it very much, I don’t really want to swim in it. Flipper will probably get a couple of tins of her favourite dinner, and maybe, if she’s really good 😉 a small bag of her second favourite treats (as she’s only just been bought a big bag of her very favourite ones). A present for a very good friend of ours who lives way out in woop-woop (Kurunjang, I think it is), and something edible for Emma, our cleaning lady (who did not look at all well today, in fact we’re quite worried about her She didn’t even stop for her usual gossip before she started, either!) And you know? That’s about the size of our Melbourne family! In Adelaide we have Julian’s mother, so we have to get something nice to be shipped over there, along with a few old family friends and relations (boxes of shortbread and chocolates are the usual fare in that department) Something for Julian’s sister in Sydney, and a special Christmas Card for the rest of the family in Israel, and that’s it! Better get cracking if we’re to get all those things in time for Christmas! 😉

Favourite eldest daughter was over today, but sadly there was no episode of Agents of Shield 😦 The Silly Season is truly upon us! We did watch a few episodes of Person of Interest, and it’s really getting nail bitingly tense at the moment! We didn’t have time to watch the final episode in this particular story arc as we simply ran out of time. And now I shall probably have nightmares until next Friday! 😦

Oh, our oven blew up tonight! Well, it didn’t exactly go *BANG* and burst into flames, or anything – actually it just… stopped working, with himself’s dinner half cooked! Luckily it was something that he could finish off on the stove, so he didn’t go hungry, but wasn’t it lucky that it died now, instead of the day before Christmas, or even Christmas Day itself! Hopefully we’ll be able to get it fixed, or replaced, before Christmas, or it’ll be “O.K! All over to Lisa and Neale’s for Christmas Dinner!“, or perhaps more likely “O.K! All over to Kate and Terry’s for Christmas Dinner!“, and poor Flipper would have to stay home all on her own – she doesn’t travel well or gracefully, and she’d probably die of fright, or try to run away, if we let her out in a strange place… 😦

Weigh-in this morning went well – down to 115.3kg today, so I’ve been going down 3 points a day since Wednesday. I am most pleased! 🙂 Maybe I’ll go down to 115.0kg tomorrow – though it would be nicer if it went down to, say, 114.8kg ? (but I don’t think that’s likely to happen!)

And that’s about it from me tonight – “Watch This Space” tomorrow – to find out if we can get the oven fixed before Christmas, who won the election (if you care enough about it, that is), did my favourite eldest daughter win a Parliamentary seat, and what happened at my weigh-in. Yes, folks, step right up and get allll your answers here, while they’re hot! 😉

Well, I did get to work on my new Bookmarks page today, and what’s more, I finished it! I’m not quite sure what I originally had in mind for it, but this morning amongst my spam email I received a message from one of my old graphics sites, offering freebie Photoshop brushes – a lot of them snowflake brushes! Well, I just couldn’t resist, and downloaded the lot of ’em… unzipped them, and of course, had to try them out like yesterday. Coupled with styles (mostly ones I’d made for other projects), they looked quite pretty… so with Christmas galloping rapidly towards us, I thought why not a “Christmas, but not quite!” theme – lots of grey skies threatening snow storms, and lots of snowflakes! And topped it all off with the gold(ish) title “WinterHome” (I told you it’d be completely different! 😉 ) I then dug out Kompozer, the free WYSIWYG HTML editor, and proceeded to (try to) organise the 10 sites I visit most frequently into some sort of semi-intelligible order. I failed. In the end I just bunged them all into two columns, hoping that they wouldn’t look too unbalanced. They do a bit, but that’s because there are more short names than long ones, so the long ones look a little… untidy. I had a lot of trouble with the HTML – Kompozer is even worse than Front Page in that regard – and quite frankly, I didn’t really think that was possible – but at least with Front Page you could break up the lines, read them, make some sort of sense out of them, alter a few things, switch back to the visual side, check it, then re-enter the HTML editor, without the ruddy program slamming shut the editor and obliterating all your carefully separated lines, like Kompozer does! Aaarrggghh! What’s more, it chops the lines up into itty-bitty pieces, so you seem to get half of one line, then half of the next line on the same line, then a nonsensical break and then the rest of the previous line, bunged in with about a third of the next line. I’m no HTML guru; I couldn’t write a page in straight HTML to save my soul, but I can get by doing simple editing – I was actually quite good at correcting Front Page’s mistakes, and it looked like “proper” HTML when I’d finished, all nice and neat and tidy – but with this program? I took one look, shuddered, and decided that if it worked, I didn’t [insert rude word here] care what the damned HTML looked like!

I’m toying with the idea of creating a blog header to match… but I’ve been neglecting Cersie and her Dimensionable a lot lately (well, it gets terribly boring, stacking furniture, and walls, and pot plants, and rocks, and rugs, and food, and…. well, you get the idea! 😉 ) And the Dimensionables just keep on coming… Maybe it’d be a better idea if I created a fully decorated Dimension, rather than just stacking the stuff… lord knows, I have enough empty Dimensions and Keys to create a whole kingdom! (well, a very small kingdom, anyway…) So tonight it’s back to the Minions, and if it’s still daylight in Telara, maybe a small bit of questing before bed time.. 🙂

Favourite eldest daughter is coming over tomorrow – and so is our cleaning lady, so it’s probably going to get quite noisy here for a while, but by the time we’ve had lunch it should be a little quieter, and hopefully we’ll get to watch some “Agents of Shield” and “Person of Interest” – speaking of “Person of Interest”, it’ll be interesting to see which person claims the Political victory on Saturday night. Unfortunately, it won’t be anyone I want to lead our state – I can’t stand either of the two major parties, and I wouldn’t vote Greens if they were the only political party left in Australia – but then, that’s what you get when you live in a Democracy, I guess.  Oh well. We’ve already voted – we sent off our postal vote the other day… I am annoyed that it’s going to be hot on Saturday though – I wanted to go shopping to get some nail polish, and it’s going to be unpleasantly hot 😦 Favourite youngest daughter was over last Saturday, and her nails looked really good – I just wanted to be a copy cat 🙂 Well, we’ll see… if I can persuade himself to go out, I might brave the heat… then again, I might just be my usual cowardly self and stay home… 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was quite good – down three points to 115.6kg, which was very pleasing. Hopefully it’ll be down again tomorrow (but I’m not going to hold my breath!) I had both morning tea and afternoon tea today, so I might even go up… I hope not….

Anyway, tune in again tomorrow night to find out all the latest comings and goings, of weight and other mundane occurences, at chez nous (that’s French, for “at our place” – yeah, I’m a showoff, too! 😉 )

WHY can’t I ever write a short blog??!!

🙂 or me either, for that matter! This morning started out ordinarily enough – weigh-in, cup of tea, breakfast… and that’s where the mundane stopped, and rush hour began! I logged in to Rift, checked my auctions (the Dagger sold, Josh – your gold is in the mail! 😉 ) and my Minion’s offerings. Because we had to leave early for my exercise class and we were going to have an early lunch, I didn’t really want to start questing, or moving Dimension bits and pieces around, so I logged off and started… working on my new Bookmarks page for Chrome, instead! 🙂 It’ll have an entirely new design, concept, and contents when it’s finished, and I did get a fair way into it before I had to stop to gobble down my lunch bar and get ready to depart. I don’t even remember having morning tea…  (apparently I didn’t!) You know, it’s been years – quite literally! 2005 – 2006 is when I stopped doing any serious graphics work, and at first I’d found it really, really hard to get back into the swing of it, but since I’ve been doing a bit every day for a couple of weeks, the old habits are starting to come back, and I’m remembering more and more of the techniques and “tricks of the trade” that I used to use 🙂

So off we went to the torture chamber exercise gym, where once again, I was given a whole lot of new exercises with which to fold, spindle and mutilate my muscles… though thankfully, I have to do these ones lying down! (a good excuse for a snooze, if you ask me! 😉 ) My right arm has been getting very sore lately – f’rinstance, by the time I finish writing this, if I try to straighten my arm out, it’s going to hurt a lot. Ditto after I’ve been Rifting for any length of time, ditto whatever I’m doing at the computer… I may have to do some more knitting… Oh well, torture exercise class over, we headed off to The Glen. Since my little shopping trip last week, I have come to realise that one shirt and two Tee shirts are not enough to keep me going for more than two or three days, so The Glen, being the closest to the exercise place, was where we headed next, and I got another six Tee-shirty items, and another of the first shirt I bought last week, ‘coz I really love it… Greatly daring because it was school getting out time, and the roads and streets were clogged solid with school kids and the parents of said school kids on their pick-up runs, we next took ourselves off to a Gentleman’s clothing shoppe in Moorabbin, where himself got three nice new Sport Coats, four shirts, three pairs of trews, and one pair of shoes. Oh, and a double sided belt (black on one side, brown on the other, with a snazzy little “flip switch” thingy to reverse the buckle!) 🙂

[ I hate him! Himself has just informed me that he “felt old”, because the pilot of the original Star Trek series was shot 50 years ago, two years before he was born! Why do I hate him for that? Because Mum and Dad and I used to sit on the couch in the lounge room watching that series (later syndicated) religiously. If he feels old because it started two years before he was born, how does he think that makes me feel?!? ]

Anyway, a good day’s shopping was had by all; we arrived home exhausted, ready to collapse in a heap, and totally craving coffee… and you know what I did? Back to my graphics… 🙂

Once again, weigh-in this morning wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be – I did go up, but only by one point, to 115.9kg – what will happen tomorrow is anyone’s guess… I not only missed morning tea today, but I missed afternoon tea as well, as it was after 5 by the time we got home. Maybe that’ll help…

So if you want to find out if my new clothes fit, and if I went up, down or stayed the same, weight-wise, tune in tomorrow night, same bat time, same bat channel, and find out the answers to these many weighty questions – and I can assure you, the answer is not 42! 😉

I’ve been working extra hard today – I finally got the last of my Speed Dial Bookmark groups transferred across to Chrome – no easy task – the last three were… somewhat on the large side. There were all the Rift links – mostly lists of materials for Crafting, what zones they were found in, or what dropped them, and Dimension item databases and the like… with a few maps thrown in for good measure. Then there was the group of Old song lyrics – musical comedy, Josephine Baker songs from w-a-y back, a lot of Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six lyrics, and the inimitable Felix Hagan and The Family. If anyone’s interested in the last two, I can post links… 🙂 Last, but certainly not least – in fact I think it was the biggest! – was my group of “Favourite Authors and Books to watch out for”. The problem with the last two groups was that I kept getting distracted, stopping to look back over some of my favourite lyrics (even the ones in French), and the almost entire libretto of the musical “Camelot” (not my most favourite musical, but hey! I liked it well enough 🙂 My most favourite musical, ever, is “South Pacific” (I have the complete, original score for the Melbourne stage version in 1952, too!)) Then there were the books… also very distracting, as it was quicker to visit each site to get the url than to open up each Speed Dial box and extract it from there – and of course, I spotted new books here and there along the way which I had to stop and read about… 🙂 However, ’tis all done now, and Firefox can be “retired” (and I won’t have to open up an Explorer window in which to do my nightly Crossword! 😛 )

Then I went on to Rift. I also worked poor old Jademoss’s Crafting fingers down to the bone, making bags, clothes, and Augments for said clothes. It’s very annoying, really, you make good, enhanced gear for your characters, but it’s sort-of “staggered” – f’rinstance, Cotton robes, gloves, and cowl, are for level 19, right? Which is really just a little too low for my girls… unless you stack them up with Augments and Runes. Then the next “upgrade” is to Wool – but woolen breeches, shoulderpads, shoes and belt are for level 23… just a tad too high for my girls! What to do? I ended up making the woolen gear which they’ll have to hang onto for another two levels (they’re all sitting at around level 21 at the moment) Tiring of that, I thought I’d move a bit more Dimension gear around – poor Cersie’s mail box was starting to overflow again. Something went a wee bit haywire with my ui (user interface – i.e. the placement of your setup on the screen) Layout, so instead of moving Dimension items, I had to move the invisible boxes that contain Action Bars and Quest stickies – in fact the whole weird layout I was suddenly presented with. It took forever, as it’s all invisible except when you’re actually in the editing window, so it was largely “hit and miss” (“Hmmm… needs to move about [squints at screen] another… 1/4 inch?? to the left… no! I mean right!” sort of stuff. Tres annoyment!) But I got it right again in the end… 🙂

By this time I was a trifle fed up with computers, so I dutifully had my afternoon tea (a very nice nectarine!) and fled to the lounge room to read… 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was quite astonishing! 🙂 I went down to 115.8kg! a most excellent drop! Actually, maybe a little too excellent? That’s another 1/2 kilo… Overnight??!! I mean, I don’t mind going down 1/2 a kilo a night – I wish I could do it every night! But you know what “they” say… “If something seems too good to be true, it’s because it is (too good to be true!)” …I’ll probably go up a kilo and a half tomorrow! 😦

So, tune in again tomorrow night to see if I did… or if I went down another half a kilo… or if I just stay the same! 🙂 Whatever – I still have to go to my exercise class tomorrow afternoon- and for once in my life I can’t think of a plausible excuse to wriggle out of it! 😉

Teacher, but I had another go today, and I hope I didn’t do too badly 🙂 Time will tell, I guess. Rift isn’t a very easy game to learn, especially when you haven’t had the benefit of just sitting and watching a professional like my favourite eldest daughter playing for a couple of years 🙂 Still an’ all, I think we covered quite a bit, and hopefully some of it will stick 😉 Tomorrow, after I’ve transferred the rest of my bookmarks to Chrome, I have to set too and do some serious re-crafting for my younger characters – I have been an extremely lazy and lax older sister to them, and they all need new gear. Now that some funds are starting to trickle back into the Guild Bank (after Wyntercat almost stripped it bare upping her Artificing to “Savant”!), I’ll be starting to make new and enhanced weapons and rings for three of them, and Jademoss will be busy at her virtual sewing machine making new robes, leggings, boots and gloves for everyone. Wot fun! 🙂 Diaphanous cloth hasn’t been selling well on the Auction House, so I’ve sort of been stockpiling it “for a rainy day”, and the young’uns will benefit from that when they grow up – unfortunately they’re still too young to wear such sumptuous gear at the moment – they’ll just have to make do with wool or silk 😉 Speaking of the low prices on the Auction House, I think I’ve discovered the true purpose of the Minions and their gathering adventures! I think it’s all a wicked plot by Trion, to artificially lower the Auction House prices in order to keep all us players in the (virtual) poor house. Some of us (rolls eyes) used to make quite a nice living from the Auction House, thank you very much, but at the moment I’m only bringing in about a third of what I used to, BM (Before Minions)! I’m thinking: Mats (materials) aren’t selling as well as they used to, because with Minions bringing the stuff in for us without us having to go out and mine for it, or pick it, or get the hides to turn into leather, everyone has enough of their own materials to work with and so have no need to buy it from the Auction House… But, without buying new Skill slots, you can only have three skills (professions, really) apart from Fishing and Survival, so it stands to reason that most people can only make one or two different types of ready made gear… However, if you spend the money (or Credits, I think) and buy a few more Skills (as I did, quite some time ago 😉 ) like, say, Weaponsmithing, or Outfitter (or whatever) you could quite happily supply ready made weapons or clothing (cloth or leather, and I think chain? Can Outfitters make chain mail? I can’t remember – I’ll have to check!) to be sold on the Auction House! Hmmm! Maybe the time has come to stop selling materials, and start selling gear! I might see how that works out, actually… (in the past, the materials to make something generally sold for more than the finished article, but now with a surplus of materials…) We shall see…

I spent the rest of the afternoon ferrying bookmarks (read: Speed Dial links) from Firefox to Chrome, and it all went very smoothly, and surprisingly quickly! I now have just about everything I need here (on Chrome), and I should get the last of it copied across by tomorrow afternoon. Then I can ditch Firefox, and start on a new “Winter’s Bookmarks” Home Page 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was as I expected, but not nearly as bad as I was dreading…. I did go up, but only by one point, to 116.4kg! So I’m not too distraught 🙂 What remains to be seen, though, is if I go up again tomorrow, or back down. Damn! I wish weight loss wasn’t such a see-saw business! 😦 It’s very unsettling!

So, tune in this time tomorrow night and find out if I’m dancing on the ceiling, or weeping in the cellar… waiting for a Fairy Godmother to come and wave her magic wand over me and make me 25 again! 😉 (I was slim then, you see! 🙂 )

Listening to: Felix Hagan and The Family (Debt Records), “Dawn Breaks, The Monster Wakes

Today being Sunday, was, of course, our traditional “Day in Telara”, or “Dying to Quest” 🙂 Well, today we did die a lot more than we usually do – mostly through inattention and “accidentally” bumping into creatures who either didn’t like being bumped into, or who were just plain ornery to start off with (like the Bloodthirsty Sheep and Cows on the farm ) I only died twice, but I think himself died about three times… (must have, because by the time we got back to Tempest Bay, it cost him a whole platinum to heal his soul… and that was his second visit to the Healer for the day! (It only cost me 37gold, and it was my second visit to the Healer’s, too!)) Still and all, I went up to level 63 (only two more levels to go! 🙂 ), and Julian came within a cat’s whisker of levelling up, so I think we did pretty well, all told. There was a bit of underwater swimming, but all the Gribblies must have been asleep or something, because we weren’t challenged even once, which is most unusual, and I wish happened a lot more often! 😉 Though on second thoughts, if it happened more often, we’d miss out on a lot of experience points! Hmmm…  Bring on the Gribblies! 🙂

This morning, before breakfast (and during it), I pondered the ramifications of ditching Firefox and swapping to either Opera or Chrome… I think it’s probably a good idea – Firefox has problems with Windowblinds (skins I use to disguise the truly horrible, puerile, and totally boring  surrounds that Windows sees fit to inflict upon us poor, innocent users!) I usually have to re-start Firefox every night in order to be able to play my nightly crossword and solitaire games without the wretched thing going into “Go Slow” mode, plus the fact that it seems to be not only ignoring my attempts to set a specific font size, but to size up graphics to match the font size it apparently thinks that I need! Not Happy, Jan! I was also thinking that it’s probably time I updated my bookmarks – the ones currently on my Home screen are terribly out of date and about the only ones I really still use are The Age, Wincustomize, Your TV, and the Dictionary! Occasionally I use things like Digital Tapestries (my old site), Village Cinemas,  and The White Pages. Apart from those, the rest are really redundant… The rest of the sites I go to regularly are all stored in groups within Speed Dial, and could probably be better organised on my Bookmarks Homepage. It’ll be an awful lot of tedious, boring work, transferring them over, plus having to find a Speed Dial equivalent that works with Chrome, and then transferring the rest of all my “favourite places” into it (and there really are a hell of a lot of them!) Hmmm… will I be lazy, stick with Firefox and save myself a lot of work, and put up with giant graphics and text? Or will I be noble and self sacrificing, and knuckle down to the hard, boring and repetitive work of transferring a lot of data across to a new system, of which I will be able to feel justifiably proud? 😉 You tell me! 😉

Weigh-in this morning was another big surprise, and I tell you, has been making me feel somewhat uneasy all day… While losing weight can make one proud, you know what the ubiquitous “they” say about Pride coming before a fall? well, I’m pretty sure they’re not talking a bout a fall in weight… like the one I had this morning. I think they’re talking about a “comeuppance”, or a “slap down” 😦 which is what I’m now uneasily expecting tomorrow morning You see, this morning I weighed in at 116.3kg… “Fantastic!” I hear you cry! Well, it was… but as I said, it’s making me feel… edgy. That’s over half a kilo in 24 hours! That’s gotta bounce back at me! I know I want to lose weight, and I want to lose it quickly, but really, I’d much rather go down 2 or 3 points a day, rather than half a kilo overnight… Ah well, we’ll see what happens tomorrow… I just hope I don’t bounce back up to 116.9kg!

Tune in tomorrow night to see if Fate has a nice, or a nasty surprise for me! 🙂 I won’t get too upset if I go back up (well, alright, I will get upset, but I’ll try to be brave… 😉 ) Wish me luck! 🙂

Firefox. Damn it! I don’t like it any more 😦 Why it’s insisting on re-scaling everything on my screen to stupidly ridiculous sizes, I have no idea, but… I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more! 😉 First, they take away my blue cats, and now they re-size me out of… of… of the size I want to see my graphics and read my text at! Grrr! I can’t stand Explorer (though I’m using it at the moment), so I’m thinking of switching to Chrome, or Opera… (though it means migrating all my groups of bookmarks across – somehow) Anyway, we’ll see… By the way, how do you like the new header I made for the blog? 🙂 I made it this afternoon, though I probably didn’t really need to do it… but the way I was seeing the page made it look enormous and “top heavy”, if you know what I mean. What alerted me to Firefox’s misdemeanours was that the new header looked out of focus and top heavy too… and yet it looked just right in Explorer (and so did the original one! 😛 ) So after a lot of fiddling around by me, and then by Julian, it was discovered that Firefox was the culprit, and I decided I’d have to change browsers. Roll on next week…. 🙂

Oh! Good news! We had a phone call from Autograph this morning! My left behind in the shopping trolley slacks were handed in to them by the man who found them. There are honest people in the world, after all! My faith in humanity is renewed! (well, partly, anyway… maybe just a smidge… or perhaps they didn’t fit his wife and he didn’t know what else to do with them… 😉 ) Julian went and picked them up this afternoon, and I now have 3 pairs of slacks again! 🙂 I am well pleased… 🙂

My favourite youngest daughter and her equal but more practical half paid us a visit this morning, and we spent part of the time discussing Christmas, who would be here, who wouldn’t, what did they want for Christmas, and no, I would not be partaking of the (rather lethal!) Christmas Egg Nog on Christmas Eve this year, etc., etc… (and I managed to sneak past morning tea again, un-noticed! 😉 ) Kate said that that was very naughty and would have the opposite effect to the one that I expect (i.e. losing a bit more weight), and that if I did it too often it would back-fire on me and make me heavier in the long run. I don’t know whether to believe her or not – I sort of do, I mean, she worked for Jenny Craig (no, no link back to them!) for 15 years – first as a Consultant, then as a Centre Manager, then in Admin, writing the training courses for the Consultants, so I reckon she has a fair idea of how weight loss works 🙂 Then they went home and I started to play Rift, but I got bored (*shock* *horror*), and decided to make the new blog Header instead, which I did. Then we pretty much spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find out why Firefox was being so… mean and pig-headed

Weigh-in this morning was OK… not as good as I would have liked – I went down to 116.9kg – only one point down from yesterday… (maybe Kate was right! Maybe I have skipped one too many morning and/or afternoon teas! Perhaps I’d better have both, tomorrow!) *sigh*

Flipper is her usual antisocial, Mummy disdaining, Daddy loving, grumpy self, sporting a shaved neck and paw (where they took the blood sample from, and where she had her blood pressure taken) so not much has changed in that department… but tune in again tomorrow to find out if I have, indeed, been doing the wrong thing, skipping morning and afternoon teas.. Will I go back up again? Will I stay on 116.9kg? Or (cross fingers, touch wood!), will I go down… ? 😉

TGIF! 🙂 Yes, ’tis the end of the week again – which means absolutely nothing, really, because my weekends are pretty much the same as my week days – except, of course, for Sunday’s, which are our “Questing for Fun and Profit in Telara” days. Today started fairly early for us, because Flipper had to be up at the Vet’s by about 8.00am, which was only accomplished after a lot of loud protests of “But we did this last week, Daddy!”, and “We don’t have to go today, Daddy! I’ve been there, done that, and I definitely do not want the T-shirt!”, with the occasional “LET ME OUT OF HERE!” on Flipper’s part… and a lot of encouraging sounding “There, there! Flipper, don’t worry little girl!” and “You’ll be back home soon, sweetheart!” on ours. Mission accomplished, Julian returned home and we had breakfast and a cup of tea, followed shortly thereafter by a cup of coffee before himself went off to pick up my favourite eldest daughter. All in all, it was a pretty rushed and busy morning – but the good side of it is, that once again, I managed to sneak past morning tea time without anyone noticing until this afternoon! 🙂 My weight’s almost guaranteed to go down, now! (oops! I shouldn’t have said that! I hope the Gremlins weren’t listening! )

After lunch, it was off to the lounge room to watch one episode of “Agents of Shield”, and two episodes of “Person of Interest”. Julian rang the Vet to see how Flipper was going, and when they wanted us to pick her up. It turned out that they wanted her for as long as possible, so Julian was to pick her up when he took my favourite eldest daughter home this evening. The upshot of Flipper’s veterinary visit was that (a) her kidney function was a little improved from last time, which is good. (b) the Vet who was looking after her today specialises in elderly cats was very pleased with her overall condition, which is also good. And (c) Her blood pressure is definitely higher, and we need to increase her medication, which is not good. She was taking 1/8 of a Norvasc tablet (Norvasc is a human blood pressure medication) Now we have to give her 1/6 of a tablet. We’re not quite sure how we’re going to accomplish that… the pills are shaped like a rectangle with the corners chopped off, about 7cm x 2.5cm in size, which were hard enough to break into 8 pieces, let alone into 6! They crumble very, very easily, and Julian was always most pleased if he could get 7 reasonably even pieces out of a tablet.

There’s another problem we’re going to have with Flipper early next year… We live on the 5th floor of a high-rise apartment, which is serviced by one lift. Early next year the lift is being “re-furbished” – in other words it’s having quite a lot of maintenance, mechanical upgrading, and inside re-paneling done, and will be totally out of operation for about 3 weeks. This is all fine and well if you’re young and fit and can trundle up and down the fire escape or the front stairs, but there are many of us in the building who are either too old, or too disabled to do that, and will probably have to move out for the duration. Which is what we’ll have to do – I don’t like the thought of being cooped up in the apartment for three weeks, and what if there’s a fire?! 😉 The thing is, what are we going to do with Flipper? The Vet wouldn’t mind “boarding” her for a couple of nights, but certainly not for three weeks, and there’s no way we’d send her off to a boarding cattery – for starters, there’s her daily medication to consider, not to mention she’s very old, and a sudden and prolonged change in her daily routine might even be enough to carry her off. Besides, she just about lives for her “Daddy pats”, and I for one wouldn’t deprive her of one of her only pleasures. I’ll have a look online tomorrow for “Pet Friendly” Hotels, Motels, or Serviced Apartments, but I don’t really like my chances of finding something that we’d be happy to stay in, too! So, if any of you out there know of anywhere we can stay, or have an alternative solution, please let me know! 🙂

Weigh-in this morning was better than yesterday’s! Back down to 117.0kg, where I was the day before yesterday. (See?! I told you that missing a morning tea, or an afternoon tea (or better yet, both of them!) would work! 😉 ) Well, I went without morning tea this morning (I had a pear for afternoon tea though), so hopefully it’ll make my weigh-in tomorrow a bit less… This morning the scales dithered around 116.9kg for a couple of seconds, then changed their mind and went up to 117.0kg instead, so…. almost into the 116kg bracket… 🙂

Anyway, tune in again tomorrow to find out all the latest on Julian’s pill chopping, my weight, and Flipper’s histrionics – the cat carry basket is still living in plain sight, under the desk! 😉

Water! Filtered… coffee! Filtered… swimming pools! No! Filtered… Photoshop! 🙂 Yes, I went hunting for some filters today – I think I got most of the main ones I wanted – a few are still missing though, like the Kaleidoscope one I used to use, and a few of the other fancy-shmantzy lighting effects ones I used to have… Give me time, I’ll track ’em down 🙂 Unfortunately, some of the ones I found that did have those filters (or similar) in their libraries were from “not safe”, or “don’t download from here unless you want your computer pwned!” download sites, so more digging will be needed. But I did get Super BladePro, which was one of the ones I was hanging out for, so I had a bit of a play with it all this afternoon and came up with some fairly credible fire opal and other gem-like effects that I’m thinking of using in a type of “gem encrusted” border, along the lines of one of my freebie web sets I made countless years ago… 🙂 So many things I want to do, so little time…. *sigh* (and then there’s the teeny little problem of my perennial laziness… 😉 )

I also Rifted a bit this morning – got Lavendermyst up to level 20, so now it’s back to the tedious grind, grind, grindstone to get her up to level 50 with all the others. On the other hand, I could turn her into a Crafter instead of a Gatherer, but I already have Crafters in most of the main professions that we can use in the Guild… There are about 17 Guild members at the moment, 12 of them are me, and the other 5 are Julian – all of the Crafters are me (that is, my “alts”, or “alternate characters”, but they’re all played by me), and they’re all Grandmasters or Savants in their fields (i.e. they can make the highest level goods in Healing Potions, Dimension items and keys, Plate mail, Chain mail, Leather armor and Cloth armor, Shields, Bags, Magical weapons, ordinary weapons, Runes – you name it, and I have someone who can make it! 🙂 ) I even have a dedicated Dimension constructress, and a dedicated Auction Manager… 🙂

Why do I have all these alts? *shrug* I have NO idea… I just seem to have this… compulsion to create them… and if I run out of character “slots”? I either move someone to another Shard to make room for a new character, or else I strip down a character I don’t like terribly much, distribute all her worldly goods amongst her “sisters”, donate her “money” to the about-to-be-created character, and… delete her. And so the cycle goes… endless creation, deletion, and character shuffling.

I suppose it’s better than vegetating in front of the television… but probably not by much… “Unproductive!” as my mother would have said…

Tomorrow my favourite eldest daughter is coming over, so not much Rifting or graphic-ing will get done, but I dare say a lot of conversation will be made and much enjoyment garnered from watching such shows as “Agents of Shield” and “Person of Interest”. Poor old Flipper will not be quite so happy though – it’s tomorrow morning that she goes back to the Vet for the rest of her tests and blood pressure monitoring. They want her for “several hours”, so she’s going up at about 8.00am… She’ll be fine, but she won’t like it!

Weigh-in this morning was disappointing, but fairly expected. It’s a fair drop from 117.5kg to 117.0kg, and I suspect that that was only because I’d missed out on both morning and afternoon tea the day before. Yesterday, I managed to get (force) fed both, and…. paid the price this morning!  I was back up to 117.2kg 😦 But, I’ll get even! I dutifully had my morning tea this morning, but I manged to sneak quietly past afternoon tea without anyone (read: Julian) noticing! HA! That’ll larn ’em! 😉 …you know, it’s funny! I’m still losing my kilo per week (approximately), and I know I’m not standing still, weight-wise, but ever since last week (when I saw Dr. Y.), I feel as though I’ve come to a complete stand-still, and am simply not getting any further… It’s really silly, because I know that I am… it’s just that I feel as though I’m not…

Anyway, tune in tomorrow night to find out how Flipper went at the Vet, and to see if sneakily skipping afternoon tea today makes any difference to what the scales tell me tomorrow morning! 🙂

By Alien Skin, is now installed on my computer – it’s a very good filter for Photoshop, and I had a lot of fun playing around with it this evening… but more on that later 🙂

This morning I woke up with a sore and swollen little right finger 😦 It looks bruised, and it’s probably my fault – I tend to sort of “force” rings off at the best of times, especially when they get “stuck” in the hot weather (I told you it didn’t agree with me! 😛 ) when my fingers tend to be a bit swollen, I still just… keep pulling… until I get the ring off. I think I’ll change my modus operandi, and be a bit more gentle from now on

This morning I did my usual “Rift Drift”, quested a bit, and collected a new Dimension key, to “Dolcega Valley”, from one of my dear little Minions!  It’s a very small Dimension – it’s really not much more than a rather nicely laid out and decorative swimming pool, with a few nice Cabanas dotted around it. I haven’t had that key before, and didn’t want to use it just yet, so if any Guildies are reading this, it’s in the Guild Bank waiting for someone to claim it 🙂 Actually, I wanted to have a look at some of the other “Dolcega Valley” Dimensions before having a go myself (Elizandra can make that key, too!), but I got sidetracked, looking at some of the Dimensions in “Anywhere”. “Anywhere” is the biggest Dimension so far, and it’s simply an enormous, flat, empty plain. No hills, no water, no vegetation, no nothing. It’s fantastic – you can make your own hills… grass… ponds… waterfalls – whatever your heart desires, that can be made with nothing but the Dimension items you can get, and your imagination! 🙂 Elizandra crafted her butt off to get to the level where she could learn to make the “Anywhere” key, too (so there’s plenty of them around) Wyntercat has an “Anywhere” Dimension called “Hobbit Manor”, and it’s quite beautifully done too, even if Cersie did build it for her! 😉 Of course, it’s still unfinished – the house part is all done (made by skillfully joining several houses together) and decorated, but the landscaping still needs a lot of work… The main problem is that to make things, like the ground covering I’ve used, is very material intensive, not to mention expensive – the materials needed don’t come cheap, and I decided to take a bit of an ‘oliday from it 🙂 So, anyway, when I get back to Rift tonight, after dealing with my Minions, I’ll go looking at “Dolcega Valley” Dimensions.

By about three o’clock I decided to go up to the lounge room and read, and Julian installed my new Eye Candy filter/plug-in (whatever it’s called!), so then, of course, I had to scramble myself out of my comfy chair and come down to play with it 🙂 They’ve changed the ui (user interface) in this version, and it’s much more easier to use! 🙂 However, having messed around with Eye Candy for a while, I have realised that I’ll have to get a few more of the (hopefully still free – they always used to be!) Photoshop filters – filters to make “vignettes”, for example (where the focus is on one part of the picture, fading away to white (or to the coloured or patterned background)) I might go hunting them tomorrow… I’m wondering though – I want to get back into graphics again, but I have no idea what to do… I used to make web sets – but no-one uses them any more… and I used to make skins and stationery for Incredimail – but… does anyone still use Incredimail? I gave up on it years ago… I could, I suppose, try my hand at making windowblinds for Wincustomize, but the mere thought of that absolutely terrifies me – I know there’s a “Skin Studio” utility that comes with Wincustomize/windowblinds to make them with, and honestly, it can’t be any harder than making skins for Incredimail (same concept, so presumably the same sort of principles) Perhaps I’m losing faith in myself, trying to learn something new… the good old “But what if I fail?” fear. Anyway, we’ll see. I need to find those other filters first, anyway 🙂 (that’s a good excuse – I think I’ll stick to it! 😉 )

Weigh-in this morning was another big surprise – well, maybe not so much of a surprise after all, when you take into consideration that I missed morning and afternoon tea yesterday! I was down to 117.0kg, which is 5 whole points! Really good! 🙂 I’ll be up tomorrow for sure though, as I did have both morning and afternoon tea today. I must really think seriously about giving them both – or at least one of them – up for the duration… Let’s see what the scales tell me in the morning (hint: I’m not looking forward to what they have to say! )

Anyway, this has been another long one (I’m trying to make them shorter, honest!), so I’ll leave you all with the usual words – “Stay tuned for the next exciting episode in the exciting adventures of Winter, the “Up One Day and Down the Next” girl!” 🙂