Moggie Madness

It’s funny….this whole year I have blogging away on my laptop about things I am thankful for and never once have I thought how grateful I am for actually having a computer and internet access in the first place. I guess since I have always had one in the house since early primary school, I do take it for granted. The same goes with the internet access - it is just about always there and when it does malfunction for whatever reason, I do get a little bit miffed. So yay for the computer and the internet….and all the crazy stuff that goes along with it. It might drive me nuts occasionally but in the end, I really wouldn’t be without it….would you?

No kidding, I actually feel really great today and it’s hard to think of a day in recent times when I have felt this good within myself. I feel like I have more energy, I want to do stuff that I usually loathe doing and I feel like I’m getting the old me back again. Those of you who have read The Bloggest Loser” page will know that I’ve started on a prescription medication to assist with weight loss. I had never really discussed how I felt about my weight with my GP, even with all the Xenical ads floating around about “lose weight, gain life”. I just felt like there was too much of a stigma attached to it and if I resorted to taking medication, people would just assume I was this lazy person who just ate take-away every night and was looking for a quick fix.

I really wish I had talked to her sooner because so far it is really helping me. And you know, it really makes me wonder about this obesity epidemic we have in Australia. Although I’m a big girl, apart from my weight I am in good health and that is the reason why I wanted to try to lose weight now. While you are still healthy, that is the time to do it. When you get to the stage where you are triple the person you are supposed to be and getting the line from the doctor “you have to lose weight or you will die prematurely”….well it gets that much harder to do anything about it.

I’ve met a lot of people through the course of my work who are at that stage and some of them just can’t be bothered. They have just resigned themselves to the fact that they will die early and there is nothing they can do about it. I just wonder, if they’d talked to their doctor about their weight while they still had a BMI under 40 and able to do at least some exercise….would it have changed their life starting this kind of medication? Could it save a life? Maybe, maybe not. I just think that considering obesity is costing $21 billion a year to treat, then it might be worth GPs being a little more pro-active and discussing weight loss with their patients and offering support in the process. I know it can be a sensitive issue for a lot of obese people but had my doctor not broached the topic first, I’m not sure I would have brought it up myself.

So thank you to my GP, I feel good because of you.

That’s not to say that I don’t have screw-ups - I do! But this is the first time one has actually coincided with a Tuesday. I knew that things were going way too well before heading to work this afternoon. I found a job that I’m interested in - AND it’s in the local area AND it hasn’t closed already. Then, I actually realised at 1pm that it was time to go in fifteen minutes so I wasn’t running late before I’d even left the house. My commute was smooth as a baby’s bottom - no slow pokes, no accidents and no having to stop for roadworks. Then it culminated with arriving in the car park and driving straight into a space. That virtually never happens after 9am of a weekday. So I was fifteen minutes early and I even had time to have lunch before I clocked on shift. Consequently, I was feeling pretty jolly peppy about the way things were going.

Until someone said to me “did they call you in?” As soon as they said that, I had that sinking feeling right in the pit of my stomach. Have I just driven 65km on my day off?? Yes, indeed I did. I have to say, despite the rising fuel and toll costs associated with getting to work, I took it quite well. I even laughed, but it was that kind of crazy laugh that a person does right before you think they are going to lose it. I high-tailed it out of there before they could say “oh but wait you can do an extra shift” in some completely awful ward so that it isn’t a waste of my time and dollars getting there in the first place.

But do I feel completely stupid - you bet I do. And anyone that had the privilege of stopping next to me at the traffic lights on the way home will realise what a potty mouth I can be.

More than halfway through the year and I’m still coming up with ideas for this challenge. Have no idea how, I thought I would have come to the end of my ideas sometime back in April. I went to see Mamma Mia on Monday morning this week and despite its corny delivery, I quite enjoyed it. I’m not a huge ABBA fan and just as well because my other half can’t stand their music and won’t have it playing in the house. It’s not entirely his fault - after all, if his aunty hadn’t played it 24 hours a day for weeks at a time, then he might actually have some appreciation for them. He hates Grease for a similar reason. LOL

But I digress….music has always been a very big part of my life. My dad was very musical…he played guitar, the piano and had a nice voice in a kind of Neil Diamond way. My mum on the other hand is a little tone deaf. And we had a huge record collection filled with the usual 60s/70s favourites - Neil Diamond, The Beach Boys, The Carpenters, The Captain and Tenille and of course ABBA. There were plenty of others but those are the ones that stand out in my memory. So I have my parents to thank for my love of music, for making music such a big part of my life. They fostered that ability in me by letting me have music lessons and taking me to endless concerts, band practice, Eistedfodd competitions and music exams. I still play now, albeit when the neighbours aren’t home to put in a noise complaint. That’s the unfortunate thing about playing brass….the greatest enjoyment comes from being loud and brassy!

“So I say thank you for the music, the songs Im singing
Thanks for all the joy theyre bringing
Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty
What would life be?
Without a song or a dance what are we?
So I say thank you for the music
For giving it to me

- ABBA

No such luck though…..sleeping room for two contented moggies only.

I really should stop fiddling with things that I don’t entirely understand. I decided that I should get with the program and update my version of Wordpress. I’m glad I did, everything seems that little bit better. Anyway, I thought when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6, then maybe I should give the blog a facelift as well and install a new theme. Let me say now - I am never ever ever ever going to do that again!

Firstly, I couldn’t get my nice new pretty one to actually work properly. For some reason, the name of my blog wasn’t coming up in the header, it named my blog wrongly, didn’t put in the links….it needed a LOT of tinkering and most of it had to be done with the mysterious style.css file. Mysterious to me because I only know enough HTML language to be dangerous and the CSS file is in the zone of “WTF” for me.

After tinkering with the heaven theme for a while, I decided that was just too hard. Tried a sleeping kitty one but hated the colour scheme - to change it would require fiddling with that CSS thing again. The purple kitty one, well I couldn’t read the font all that well so figured that other people probably couldn’t either. Black cat didn’t unzip properly and red cat just didn’t register. That left me with a three column theme called wall sitting cat” which I thought was great when I saw it as a free theme.

I unzipped it once - got a bunch of errors. Extracted it again and it seemed fine. So I FTP’d it to the server, only to find that it wreaked utter havoc with everything. I had errors galore showing up, so I tried to delete it. No joy there - the files were deleted but the folders were still there and I couldn’t get rid of them. Log back into Wordpress and three big huge lines of text suggesting that baby did a bad, bad thing.

So I did what I usually do when I pork something up - I posted a thread on Wordpress support asking for advice, switched the computer off, went to work and hoped when I got home it would have mysteriously fixed itself. Well it hadn’t by the time I got home but by morning it was hunky dory again - thanksLeigh!

So moral of the story - if it ain’t brucked, don’t change it…..or else you probably will well and truly bruck it.

It’s the 14th of July and you know what that means?? It’s Bastille Day in France….it has the same significance to the Frenchies as the 4th of July does to the Americans or the 26th of January does for Australians. I’m not remotely French but I am rather taken with the French. I studied French all through school, read a lot of French history and fell in love with beignets when we had a visiting bonafide French teacher who taught us how to cook them.

Beignets taste pretty much like donuts and they are really easy to cook - seriously, even I can knock up a batch of beignets and I am probably one of the most mediocre cooks I know. So go on, celebrate your inner Frenchie! And if you aren’t French, enjoy them anyway. Bon appetite!

Beignet Recipe

4 eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
Cinnamon and nutmeg to taste

1. Mix eggs, milk, sugar and vegetable oil in a bowl.
2. On a piece of baking paper, sift together salt, flour and baking powder; add to egg mixture.
3. Mix with a wooden spoon into a dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured, clean work surface; roll out and cut into strips.
4. Place into deep hot oil and fry until fluffy (turning once).
5. Place in a dish of caster sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and roll until well coated.