My dogs appear to be enjoying a lazy Easter Sunday.

 

 

Are you enjoying your Easter Sunday?

Did you have an Easter egg this morning? In our family we all presented each other with flavour variations of eggactly the same egg from Hotel Chocolat in Bromley, so original is our thought.

I’m fretting about my dieting again. I’ve been on the 5:2 fast diet for over a year now, as you know and, although I am quite tired and grumpy on the two fast days, normally Monday and Thursday, every week, I’ve lost a stone in weight quite easily and the fasting has become more a way of life than something imposed on a reluctant me by a hectoring diet-conscious me.

It’s just that last half stone that’s always been the problem. I’m sure that now I’ve reached a bit of a plateau. There have been a couple of times when I’ve been overjoyed at going down to within a couple of kilos of my probably over-ambitious target weight but this  feeling had been ephemeral and evaporates quickly when I inevitably regain a kilo or two within the next couple of days. Not through over-eating, I hasten to add. I don’t do that anymore. That the OH seems to be able to lose weight while not even trying only adds to my irritation. Aaarrrghh! So frustrating!

The things that seem to inhibit my weight loss:

Christmas

Easter (obviously)

May

August

Flying to India and back

Chips

Ice cream

Going to the gym.

Not going to the gym.

The odd glass of wine of beer.

Getting inexorably older

Hormones

I’m doomed, I know I am. I really don’t want to give up all these things but it’s certainly something to consider in order to stay trim for later in the year. (In the current straightened climate I daren’t even think about the possibility of a holiday.) It is, however, much easier to stay away from sweet things in the spring and summer as one tends not to comfort eat. I’m off to India next Sunday and, at least in Neral, there is no sweet temptation around. The good people at Dignity Lifestyle make sure that only healthy food is served so maybe I’ll shed a few ounces there.

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I do hope you’re finding your way around this new Minnow theme. I prefer it to the previous Diary/Notebook theme not least because it’s responsive across most digital devices and it was designed very recently so it’s easy to add plugins and posts of all sorts. I like the clean look of it too and captions sit neatly under the photos, which was not the case with the fussy diary theme.

The disadvantage is, however, that I don’t think my readers have noticed that there’s a Menu Sidebar over there on the right hand side where you can see my tag cloud and recent posts and categories and my event calendar. You hadn’t noticed? I’m not surprised. Some of the practicalities have been sacrificed in the name of minimalism, I think.

To access the menu sidebar, click on the menu icon on the top right hand side of this screen. It’s the one with the the horizontal lines. Yes, that’s it. I warn you, though, it doesn’t always work. Like a Phillippe Starck Juicy Salif, it’s not always entirely up to the purpose for which it is designed but persevere and my Sidebar will slide out to the right.

You’ll then be able to see my page structure including my videos and Spotify playlists and there’s a Portfolio page of my reviews in case you want to be reminded. There’s also a day by day progress tracker of photos from our kitchen building work. It’s slightly dull at the moment, composed, as it is of pictures of the moonscape that is currently our garden but I hope it will become more exciting in the next couple of weeks. Which reminds me that there will be no-one to take daily photos when I’m in India. I’ll try and sort that out. Maybe the Boywonder, who returns this week from his Australian winery odyssey, will oblige.

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You might have noticed that the classified ad for my Phillips RéAura has disappeared from my blog. This is because I managed to sell it on Gumtree within a week! Yes, I know!

I had been full of seething resentment that I’d had to fork out £800 for a machine that had left me with hyper-pigmentation which, in turn, cost me an arm and a leg and a lot of embarrassing moments in glycol acid peels to try and remedy the situation. It did not remedy the situation. When I raised this issue with Phillips, they denied this could be the case and said that it had been tested across all ethnicities.

They said that the little dots on my face thrown up by the RéAura were excess pigment rising to the top of the face. I ask you! I’m quite offended that they think their consumers so stupid that they’ll fall for that and that the SpaceNK sales assistants spouted this rubbish too. In fact the dots were little scabs but my skin deals with this sort of injury by throwing up melanin pigmentation. Phillips had no answer to this. I know I should have sent the thing back but I thought that time would heal and then I felt completely foolish that I’d been taken in by this injurious machine so it lay in its box in my wardrobe, unloved and unused for almost three years.

I was going to put the RéAura on a skip but decided I’d try and sell it and guess what? Within a week a lady contacted me to say that she’d read up all about the RéAura and offered me my asking price for it. I was concerned that she wasn’t aware of the risks of hyper-pigmentation, and made sure that I alerted her to them, but she seemed happy to accept them. In the end she paid me through Paypal and I sent off the RéAura the same day. Done and dusted! I’m really pleased and I hope she’s pleased with her cut-price purchase of an item that Phillips have apparently discontinued. It was all so civilised and quick and easy. I want to know what else I can sell to raise a bit of cash.

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