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17 degrees at 17:17
A few weeks ago I glanced at the clock/temperature display in the car while driving and the display showed it to be 17C at 17:17. I thought it was a neat pattern and didn’t think anything more of it. That is, I didn’t think of it until it happened again and then another time. In the past few weeks it’s happened many times and there were even three days in a row where I just happened to notice the time and temperature and they matched. Of course now I am far more conscious of it and keep an eye out for the time and temperature. This doesn’t happen with any other time of day so it think it’s kind of neat. I will admit I was wondering if there was some sort of glitch when it kept showing the same temperature at the same time each day but it never persisted more than three days running.
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Rice
Because we eat a lot of curry in our house, we prepare a lot of rice. This is mostly for Game Fanatic and me though. Lego Lover will eat rice when certain fancy curries are made and the Scientist will occasionally eat rice but he’s not very keen on it. Anyway, years ago we bought a combination rice cooker, slow cooker and steamer. It was mostly used for cooking rice but then the pan started losing its finish and rice kept sticking to it. It was really too small to do very much of the slow cooking. At the time, it was mostly Game Fanatic cooking rice and it was often small amounts so we got a cheap small rice cooker. Size-wise it was just fine but it never cleaned up very easily.
After a couple or more years of the rice pan being left to “soak” for way too long, I started looking at getting a new rice cooker. I’d have loved to get one of the better rice cookers which are mostly made in Japan and Korea but the price is really way too much for our budget. I kept looking for reviews of rice cookers sold here but most of what I saw kept referring back to the Japanese brands. When Lego Lover eats rice, we need a lot more than the small rice cooker makes so I started looking seriously at the local brands. After reading and reviewing I finally chose Breville one which wasn’t cheap but not too expensive. I really love the new rice cooker and rice doesn’t stick to the pan at all. I don’t use anything but a sponge to clean it out and for the most part it cooks rice really well.
One of the other reasons for getting a new rice cooker was I could cook sushi rice more appropriately. I had had mixed results doing in the microwave or the old rice cooker. So long as I get the water amount correct, it has come out quite well each time. This leads me to a couple of my new favorite meals to make.
I started buying a Mabo tofu curry mix at some nearby markets. The first time I did this, I had cut up some vegetables and eaten it plain. It was a bit overpowering that way and too hot for me. (It was the extra hot mix, but usually this isn’t really all that hot.) Anyway, I have been making this with rice and it comes out a very nice meal and the tofu tastes lovely. One day I will try to make this from scratch but it’s a fairly easy quick meal for me to eat on my own since nobody else is interested in having it.
The other dish I have started cooking frequently is kimchi fried rice. I have had an understanding since my teenage years that kimchi was super spicy hot and was stinky. My uncle had brought some from Korea years ago when he was in the navy and it look and smell pretty awful. It wasn’t until I started watching Korean dramas earlier this year that I realised that there are all sorts of kimichi and it’s not necessarily all that hot. Plus, I started seeing it being sold locally at the markets and was curious. I finally bought some a few months ago and tried it and it was okay although not so much as a stand-alone thing. By this point I was aware of its use more as a side dish. I kept hearing about kimchi fried rice so I looked up recipes and finally tried this one a couple of months ago. The worst part of making this is chopping up the kimchi into smaller pieces so it cooks more evenly. The first time I made it, I added too my pepper paste and the dried seaweed was a bit overpowering at first. The subsequent attempts have mostly been better. With the new rice cooker, the texture of the rice is about perfect and it tastes lovely. I don’t add exactly the same veggies as the recipe but find it taste really nice with chopped green and red peppers, large oyster mushrooms, leeks and spring onion. I also often add ground beef or pork for a better protein hit. I’m going to try it was a firm tofu and maybe Qorn some time in the future since that’s a lot cheaper and since it’s mostly me who eats it.
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After some time…
I have finally returned. I hadn’t realised so many months have passed already. It’s kind of like time is just flying past right now even though in some respects it seems to go so slowly.
We are all still here and we are okay. I just haven’t been writing much lately. I don’t think I could begin to remember things that have happened in recent months so I will probably just pick up in the middle.
Yesterday was the first day of spring here and it was really chilly during the day and cold during the night. The winter was incredibly wet this year. I don’t think the ground ever dried out during the winter. This was good news for the weeds which currently look more like small trees and shrubs. I have done a tiny bit of weed pulling to clear paths but I hope to get a lot more done on the weekend.
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End of being fifty
A year ago I had my fiftieth birthday and I was kind of excited about it. Aside from the year I turned twenty, I have never been very bothered by birthdays with regard to getting older. Last year was no exception and it was kind of cool reaching that nice milestone. I didn’t think about it too much but as I approached my birthday recently, I was feeling a bit sad because my year of being fifty was drawing to a close.
On Wednesday I reached fifty-one and it’s just not quite the same. I liked being fifty quite a bit. I’m still not bothered about yet another year but I think perhaps that was my favorite year as ages go. Funny how that came to be without me really realising it until it was nearly over.
As for my birthday itself, it was a nice one. It was very low-key and I guess that’s how it should be after such a big one last year. It was just as well because I wasn’t feeling particularly great on the day. On Monday, my left shoulder suddenly started hurting for no apparent reason. It was better on Tuesday but didn’t feel great on Wednesday. On top of that, my period started early and it has been a rather unpleasant one…menopause is still a ways off, I guess. I’m still not feeling all that great a couple days later, enough that the planned visit to Fremantle was called off. I was up for it in one way but probably wouldn’t have dealt with it that well and we stayed home instead. I started back on iron tablets today because I figure I probably need them although I haven’t had that checked in a while.
Anyway, the birthday was nice. The Scientist took me out to lunch at a cafe we’d been wanting to try for a little while. It’s kind of a fusion east Asian sort of place. I chose stir-fried udon noodles and they were yummy. The sauce was a bit on the sweet side but it was good. I then got a bubble tea from one of my favoirte tea places, which also quite good. After that we came home and I got my presents. My gift from the Scientist is a fancy flash unit for my camera. I’ve been frustrated with the flash on mine for a while so I look forward to working out how to use it properly. The boys (really Game Fanatic) got me game for the Wii U with a few accesories and also got me a coupld of games to play on his Playstation 4. I haven’t tried out the Playstation games yet but they should get a bit of a workout over the weekend, particularly after I am feeling better. Not sure if I will play today or not since I’m feeling a bit run down.
The Scientist made me a nice chocolate cake which was enjoyed by all. I think Lego Lover particularly liked it since he ate so much of it. :) The Scientist’s mum came over in the evening and gave me a couple of things, including this lovely top that she got in Sri Lanka. And it even fits nicely too. She also got one those cards that you color in did it up for me. It was quite special.
I talked to my mom on Skype just after midnight at the start of my birthday and got many messages from friends and family via email and Facebook. It’s really nice to feel so loved.
So I guess now the thing is to get used to not being fifty any more. I’ll just have to put up with these odd years for the moment, particularly as I’m in no hurry to reach sixty. :D
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Happy New Year :D
It’s only been nearly three monts since my last post. In December life got rather busy, as it does, with preparations for Lego Lover’s birthday and Christmas. Lego Lover had a nice birthday and was very happy on his special day. This has always been the case with him and I hope it always will be. It’s a rather sharp contrast to his brother who has always struggled with little things ruining his experience. Two people with totally different outlooks. Anyway, it makes me so happy to see the joy Lego Lover experiences each year on his birthday.
Christmas also went well. We again had the family to our house, mostly because we now have our patio and we wanted to make good use of it. The food was nice and everyone got one really well. Even those that normally aren’t so lively seemed to have a good time and it was really just a very nice evening we spent togehter. The only negative was later on when my father-in-law had suddenly begun to feel unwell and had to lie down on the sofa until they left. That night he’d ended up going to the emergency room as he was feeling more unwell but he was sent home the following day with an infection.
The new year passed by and we stayed home as usual. Games Fanatic got his favorite potato salad on New Year’s Day instead of Christmas. I figured it was better for him since he’d get to eat more of it and it was less stressful than taking time to make it at Christmas too. I did something different with it and used three different types of potatoes which made it really yummy. The main reason for the change was there were some Kipfler potatoes being sold really cheaply and I wanted to try them since they are usually so expensive. Anyway, it was so good that I made another batch a week later for no special occasion at all. :)
January was a pretty difficult month for us. I won’t go into details here but it came out early in the month that the Scientist’s dad had liver cancer and he was given three to six months to live. Although he’d slowed down a lot in the last year or two, he was still fairly active for someone his age (nearly 88) so the change was marked. Turns out there were no months left for him and he died on the 24th. It happened so quickly and yet in other ways it seemed like a long and agonizing wait for the inevitable. My father-in-law was anything but perfect but I was quite fond of him and felt (feel)Â the loss quite strongly.
The rest of the month is a bit of a blur in my memory as it just didn’t seem very significant against the backdrop of the family at the time. Over a month later and the Scientist is still caught up on the after-effects of a parent dying as he is the executor and has been going through the stress and headaches of what that entails.
But life has moved on and is somewhat more normal now and with time, I’m sure the difficulty of this early part of the year will move into a memory of this experience. Our tai chi class restarted last month and the Scientist and I continue to also do the Tai chi fan class before that. I thought I had forgotten everything becuase I honestly didn’t put any effort into practice during our break. But I seemed to get back on track after a bit of revision and we continue to add new moves. I’m rather enjoying it except that it’s hard getting the timing right. The first section of the routine is pretty slow but in the next four sections it goes really fast. That transition from slow to fast is giving me some trouble but I am coming along with it slowly. :)
I need to get Lego Lover sorted out with some sort of educational activity to keep him occupied until the end of the year. It’s looking likely I will just have him try the course he tried last year and never completed. There’s no guarantee he will succeed this time but the least we can do is try again.
Healthwise, there have been a couple of issues to come up lately. The Scientist had another bout of vertigo last month that still hasn’t totally resolved. He had one really horrible day where he couldn’t even get up without becoming really nauseous. For the first time ever, we called a locum doctor that comes to the house. The service has been around but we’ve just never used it. It worked out rather well and didn’t cost us anything out of pocket, which is actually cheaper than going to the doctor. That said, if there had been a chance of getting him there, it would have been far move convenient. The vertigo has been determined to be the BPPV type which is the most common.
Meanwhile, I had my yearly visit with the immunologist and there’s not a lot to report of that as nothing much has changed. I did have a couple liver tests that were high so I was sent off for an abdominal ultrasound to check on that along with an x-ray of my hands to check for rheumatoid arthritis since I have had persistent arthralgia in my hands. The reports on those were supposed to be sent to my gp for follow up but when I went to see her, they hadn’t arrived. Interestingly, I got a phone call from the doctor’s office a little while ago to see her for a follow up so I guess there must be something of note to report.  I have also had some ongoing bowel issues which my gp suspects might be irritable bowel but needs to rule out other problems. She brought up the colonoscopy word when I was last in and feels I should have one since I am now fifty. Is this a rite of passage in our culture? It’s not imminent but I’m not looking forward to that either. I guess I will find out more after my appointment next week.
Last week I got some sort of stomach bug that had my stomach hurting all the time and left me with no appetite. The good side of this was I wasn’t eating so much and even lost a bit of weight. Obviously that’s not going to continue long-term without other interventions. It took several days but I finally shook off whatever it was and seem to have a bit of control over my eating and exercise habits that I’d lost for quite a while. I am getting back into some more exercise again so hopefully that will carry on, Even if I never get back to the regularity of what I once did, just having the exercise more often will be beneficial for me, particularly for those liver tests that were high and probably related to fatty liver more than anything. At least I hope so.
After all these years of seeing bits of anime with Games Lover, I have suddenly found myself more interested in watching it myself. This started one Friday night when I happened to watch a couple of shows on the local ABC3 (aimed at older kids/teens). Neither show was the first episode but I watched anyway. The one program was only onto it’s third or fourth episode so I went back and watched the earlier ones on the channel’s online streaming service. Soon I was catching up on shows on Anime Lab, which streams shows here in Australia. Games Lover and, to a lesser degree, Lego Lover, have been watching programs there for quite a while but I have my own account now. This has led me to look at manga again to read source material for some of the shows. And then on to the live action drama adaptations in Japanese and in Korean. This came about after a Japanese drama started on Netflix. It’s pretty cheesy and cliched but it’s cute so I am sticking with it. This has led me to revisit my interest in learning more Japanese and now some Korean too.
And so that’s the super condensed version of the time I’ve be MIA.
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Calmness
A while back I posted about my rollercoaster emotions, particularly the extreme anger I felt after family members posted some things on Facebook that triggered me. I didn’t quite clarify the big button presser in this situation, which was one post was patently untrue. I replied to it with correct information on the item and this started a lengthy tirade about a bunch of things, that mostly only slightly connected with the post anyway. Another person backed up the poster and I completely disengaged from the whole discussion.
I also forgot to mention how a visit to Fremantle helped me calm down to a reasonable level. This was a week after Rhianna died and we hadn’t been out and about all that much. I think I had reached a point where I needed to get away and chill. Going to Fremantle was quite soothing in the end. It took quite a while to let go of a lot of emotion but it did slip away eventually. I think the exposure to the sea was the most soothing part of the trip. It made me feel much more human again, after feeling totally wrong for so many days.
Since then, I still get angry from time to time, but I have managed to teach myself to let it go more easily. Sometimes it’s a matter of fighting the negativity with something positive, which is what I had to do. There was Thanksgiving soon afterwards and it was important that I not allow it to be sullied by the bad feelings. I found my most direct way of dealing with it was engaging in a positive way with those that had upset me. It made me feel better about the world to do that intead of carrying the negative emotions.
I suspect there will be many instances in the near future where I will be tested but I hope to never lose the plot the way I did before. It was a feeling inhabiting my being that was definitely unwanted!
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Potential answers
When Rhianna died, it was really hard to tell what happened to her. We assumed we probably wouldn’t ever know exactly what happened and that’s still true. But there are a couple of potential answers to her death.
The first thing that happened was I discovered a bunch of bird feathers in our backyard under some trees. They seemed like they were pretty fresh so it really wasn’t likely they were related to whatever happened to Rhianna. But it does seem possible her injuries could have come from a bird and she did sometimes go after birds. If she happened upon one like a raven or a magpie, I’m sure they could have done some serious damage in short order.
A couple of days ago I came across an article on a local news website about dog attacks in our suburb. Apparently there have been about thirty here in the last three months, many resulting in the death of a cat. It seems someone was letting the dogs out at night and collecting them later on. If they were big enough dogs, I think this is also a possible answer, especially if they were able to cause damage without leaving many marks on her. The idea that someone is doing this makes me really angry. I don’t really know how likely this scenario is but it does leave us with some questions about the possibilities.
Meanwhile, the boys have both handled her death quickly and easily enough from what we have observed and from what they have shared. For the Scientist and me, it’s been a lot rougher than we ever expected. Funny how you can miss a creature in so many ways, just going about daily activities, even though she was a fairly solitary cat.
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Shift in emotions
Before I related our loss of Rhianna, I mentioned how I had spent a couple days feeling really good and energetic. It’s a shame it was so short-lived but it seems events conspired against me after that.
We woke on Saturday to the news frenzy surrounding the Paris attacks, The event itself is horrific enough, not to mention over attacks in various parts of the world in the days around it. But then there was the aftermath of people lacking compassion for fellow human beings and being selfish. I sadly must say there are members of my family and friends who fall into this category and it left me very much in despair to know they felt like they did. I ended up in a seething rage for a couple of days. Part of me wanted to carry on but it is an exhausting and painful experience so I decided I had to close it down because I couldn’t sustain those feelings for long.
I didn’t have a plan on how to do this so my mission was to find a way to calm that feeling of rage. I did this by listening to music, disengaging from certain social media websites and doing some breathing exercises and relaxation. It was not necessarily in this order. I think the breathing was the first thing I did because I was feeling pretty stressed out by everything. The other things followed in various ways. I told myself I need to allow my eyes to glaze over and feel nothing when I read something that starts me feeling angry again. For the most part, it worked. I have stayed pretty calm over the past few days. I think my biggest mistake was engaging in discussion online with certain family members that stirred me up to raging feelings. I know better than to go there but I did. I just felt I couldn’t sit idly on the sidelines without making a comment regarding the truth in something posted. It was a mistake and hopefully I won’t go there again.
The whole thing has added to my resolve not to discuss politics or certain current events with certain members of my family. Sadly no good will come of it because we are so opposite in the ways we think about our place in the world. I will admit to feeling a bit of anger at times but I have managed to stay calm instead of losing the plot. Anyway, that has left me with a sadness because I realised I have such different values to so many people in my life. I have maintained some distance from family over the past several days but I will engage with people for Thanksgiving in some way. It’s a bit sooner than I’d have liked but I just have to rise above these feelings and make it work. After all, I at least do have the luxury of having these emotions and dealing with them in the best way I can.
I have many friends who think much more like I do and I take comfort that most of them still think the same way they did years ago when I first knew them. They don’t allow fear to rule them like some people in my family do.
Last Monday also was the birthday of my friend who died of cancer 3.5 years ago, which already made me feel a bit sad.
In addition to the emotional stuff, I also had essentially a toothache due to food continuing to get stuck under my one lower molar. It would become inflamed every time I ate and it was impossible to floss out the stuff that was stuck. I went back to the dentist last week and he replaced a filling on an adjacent tooth then did some work on a couple other things to try to solve the problem. He did an x-ray that showed it all looked quite good so was puzzled as to why it was causing me so much problems. Anyway, it seems the work he did has helped because I haven’t had any more issues since then,
For now, I will hope for some return of that lovely feeling of being really alive and happy and energetic at some point. And I will also hope for some inkling of what set that off because I would like it to happen more often.
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Rhianna
Early last week, there was a shift somewhere in my being very much to the positive. I felt energetic for the first time in ages and I felt good. It’s not so much I’d been feeling bad all along. Just that feeling so energetic was such a good feeling that it made me realise how lacking I’d felt before. I couldn’t say what the cause of this was but it was a good thing.
The feeling carried on through the week.
Friday, everything changed. A phone call came reporting someone having found our cat in the road. The Scientist went out and found her on the edge of our front yard and she had died. We don’t really know what happened, except she had some injuries on her chest and around her front legs.
Rhianna was our first permanent pet in the family. We got her over ten years ago because Lego Lover was afraid of dogs at the time. He was pretty attached to her, especially these last years as he’s gotten older. She was never a particularly attached cat. Most of the time she was quite aloof and the only time she showed much affection was once the dogs joined the family and that tapered off after a while. I had attempted to show her more attention in more recent months or maybe even the last year or so but it was never as much as it should have been. Part of this was just because she wasn’t too attached to people. But she also kind of got a bad deal with the dogs joining the family. It might have been better had one of the dogs not taken an active dislike to her once she scratched him for getting to close.
It’s funny how little we realise a creature is so much a part of our lives until it is gone. She used to follow the Scientist around the front yard while he watered the plants. When I got up most days, there’d be evidence she’d been sleeping on my desk chair. Funnily enough, I had to get a new one a while back and she didn’t start sleeping there for a while. But then she took it over pretty much every night. Of late, I’d come out to find heaps of sand and cat hair all over it. Then, of course, there was the clawing of the front screen, which was her way of saying she wanted yet more food. Sometimes she’d hide away in our closet to sleep and the only evidence was we’d hear her bell tinkling as she shifted around a bit. And sometimes our bedroom would be her safe place from the dogs. Fluttershy always loved her to death, which was bearable, if annoying. Maromi often kept his distance but then would become aggressive with her.
When she ate, she was very careful and dainty as she ate. This became most apparent when we had neighbour cats turns up and sneak in to eat her food. We’d suddenly hear a noisy, messy sound of eating which was definitely not her. We also never we able to feed her any cat treats. She would never take food from our hand. If we gave her anything, we pretty much had to put it in her dish or she wouldn’t bother with it.
We are pretty sure she actively tormented Maromi by walking across the front yard when he was there, setting him off to bark madly at her. She knew she was safe from him out there and she took full advantage of it. She also had a cat “friend” which she would tolerate hanging out in our yard. They would sit or lie down not too far from each other. Sometimes one would be on one side of the driveway and the other on the opposite side.
Once, she disappeared for about day and we worried about her well-being. She was very much an outdoor cat and hated being forced to stay inside. So she wandered around our yard and the neighbouring yards. She never went too far, so much as we knew. Anyway, when she didn’t show up, we were worried that she might have walked into the street gotten hit by a car. She was found quite by accident in one of the drawers in Game Fanatic’s room. I think the drawer had been sitting open for some reason and somebody closed it, not realising she was in there. But we never heard a peep from her. We guessed she was doing a lot of sleeping at the time but it was weird she never cried to get out. What a relief it was when she was discovered.
I don’t have that many photos of Rhianna because she was rather difficult to pin down for a photo. The last photo I have is quite by chance and accident. I was taking a photo of a flower in the front yard and she walked into the frame. It’s kind of a neat photo, for being an accident and I’m glad I have it. It kind of suits her since she wasn’t very affectionate.
Rhianna walks past -
Archives
I’m trying to get back in to keeping a personal journal again. I’ve kept one on and off for most of my adult life but it’s always been in different forms. At the suggestion of the Scientist, I’ve been using Onenote to store the current entries in. While doing this I thought maybe I should start archiving my old stuff in the same place.
So begins the process of copying my old entries from Livejournal, Typepad and Blogger. The latter two, I think, are somewhere on my hard drive. Well, I know at least that Typepad is there because I didn’t want to lose it once I stopped subscribing.
So far I have copied over entries from my first Livejournal account. That only lasted about a year before I started a different one. I can’t recall the reason for the change and there’s nothing in the entries to indicate anything happening. I find that kind of strange because I think I’d have surely would have commented on changes back then.
I haven’t read all the entries properly but just from what I have read, I do regret not keeping it up more fully in recent years. Blogging isn’t quite the same since it isn’t private enough to write things out more fully. Not to mention I haven’t kept up with blogging as much as I’d like.
The second Livejournal account lasted 3-4 years and I wrote more regularly then. It looks like it’s going to be awhile before I get that all archived. My goal after that will be to tag entries properly within Onenote. Just another long-term project, I guess.
