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Down to one teenager
A little over a week ago, we lost one of our teenagers to the 20s. :DÂ Game Fanatic finished his second decade and bid goodbye to his teen years. Actually he paid no attention whatsoever, but we parents did have a few sentimental moments about it. This was a particularly good birthday for him or at least he seemed pretty content with his day, right up to the end. We invited some friends over, along with the usual family to share the day. It went pretty well overall and everyone seemed to get along pretty well. Everyone came early enough that there was time for him to play games in the evening and to have a take out meal from our local curry place and still have a bit of time at the end of the day.
I attribute some of the improvement to the medication that he’s taking right now. We’ve been going through lots of different tablets to get to this point and still have a way to go. But at least there are a couple medications that seem to make a bit of positive difference. To me, it is a big difference for him to be more relaxed with visitors so that he can enjoy himself on special days.
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New desk chair
Over the past several years, I’ve gone through quite a few desk chairs and it’s been very frustrating. I know I don’t sit on them quite properly all the time, but surely they should be more durable than they are. I had a really good chair years ago that I passed on to Game Fanatic when one of his broke down. He used that for quite a long time before it needed to be replaced. Last year I bought two desk chairs from an office furniture store for both him and me. They seemed quite solid and durable and I had high hopes of using it for many years. Alas, it was less than a year later when Game Fanatic’s chair started failing and eventually became a danger to use. Game Fanatic’s weight is pretty high so I bought another chair and insisted they show me ones that could handle his weight. That chair has been doing okay so far. Meanwhile, a couple months ago, mine started to fail. I started to look at options on potential chairs but I have had enough of failing chairs to last a lifetime. After considerable research, I found that Buro made a chair that has a ten year warranty and I found it for sale through Staples here in Australia for essentially $300 delivered. There are other chairs even more highly touted but they cost quite a bit more and I really don’t want that sort of investment.
I put in my order online at Staples since there are no retail outlets for them here in Australia. The information when I ordered indicated 5-7 business days for delivery or something of that ilk. There was no indication at that point of a delay. I Â waited for two weeks and called to find out that it had to be sent from over east and was due in the warehouse on that Friday and delivery should be made within the week after that. Again I waited and no chair showed up. I called again and the service representative promised to look into it and get back to me. I never heard back but I did discover two authorisation for the chair on our credit card bill. I waited until the end of the week and then sent an email since the phone calls hadn’t been effective. Surprisingly I did get a prompt response back on the email saying there had been delays from the source, blah, blah, blah. The current expected delivery at that point was 9th October. Fair enough but no contact had been made to me after my order aside from an email the next week asking how they did. Needless to say I gave scathing feedback and plan to send further feedback now that the transaction is completed. A day later I got a call asking if someone would be available for delivery on the Monday and it was organised to arrive Monday. And it did.
Some assembly was required of the chair but I managed most of it myself. The Scientist helped getting the casters onto the base and with a couple other screws but I managed the rest. Not that it was really that hard. It was already mostly assembled and an allen key was all that was needed for all but two screws on the back. The biggest difficulty was maneuvering the parts. It’s a very heavy chair and lifting parts to assemble was a bit tricky but do-able. Also there was the strong odor of chemicals when the box was opened from the chair. It’s mostly better now but not not totally gone. The chair itself is quite nice with adjustable seats, chair back, armrests and height. So far I am pretty happy with it and it’s rather nice to be able to roll the chair a bit when I need to move around.
As for Staples, I don’t know if I will ever order furniture from them again after the poor service on this product.
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Taxing times
After a few months of procrastination, I finally got started on my taxes. A new thing called MyTax came out in August but inexplicably I wasn’t able to use that and have had to revert to e-Tax, which requires me to download software and answers a zillion questions, most which aren’t relevant to me. Â There are a couple items I need to check on but I should be able to submit it in a couple of days and will end up getting a bigger refund than tax was withheld from my pay due to donations made to Oxfam the past year. In hindsight, it would have been better for it to go on the Scientist’s tax and that’s usually what we do but as it is in my name and there were some changes this year, we did it on my tax. Lesson learned.
Meanwhile, I did end up seeing my gp about my last period as it went well beyond having missed one period. I had an ultrasound done last week and it seems the uterine lining is quite thick, especially considering the scan was done a few days after my period finally stopped. Apparently in situations of this sort, they like do a biopsy to rule out any cancerous or pre-cancerous cells showing up. I have no problem with this as I have family history of uterine cancer which was caught too late. So I am off to see a gynecologist at the end of the month and now have a prescription for tablets to take should I have menorrhagia with my next period (likely considering how thick the lining was last week).
It also happens that when I saw my doctor, I mentioned my ear being blocked up and she had a look. Wax was blocking my ear, apparently due to my efforts with a Q-tip sort of object. I’m sure that was the case as my ears get itchy and I use them sometimes to reach the itch. Not really a good thing, especially as I partially trained as an audiologist before my studies were sidelined years ago. It had gotten a bit better but not completely cleared up after using otc products to remove wax. Last night my ear got incredibly itchy and I made it all worse by poking around again so that my ear is more blocked up than before. After using the earwax removal products, I can hear slightly better in that ear and I’m hoping it will clear within a day or two.
Game Fanatic has a birthday coming up in less than two weeks and has decided he might like to invite the couple of friends he has contact with to join us on the day. I suggested he might like to invite them since he might be able to play games with someone else instead of just family. We don’t have many visitors here and the house is on the messy side so we are starting to work on cleaning things up so that we can have visitors. As it is there will likely be family popping by in the late afternoon or evening anyway. Game Fanatic has asked for a cake with the My Little Pony’s Fluttershy character as the theme. The Scientist has become our resident cake maker and is working on ideas in the lead up to the birthday.
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In the thick of it
It seems I am probably a bit further into my journey to menopause than I realised last time I posted. During this time, one period was completely missed and my body is currently trying to play catch up so it’s wreaking a bit of havoc on the body, enough that I wonder at what point I should see a doctor. It’s a bit more complicated than that but it seems likely my hormones have been a lot more off than they had been. Still no hot flashes. :)
Yesterday I had all sorts of problems with my computer and it soon came to my attention that I no longer had Malwarebytes running on my system. It seems to have stopped back in July and after considerable effort (helped immensely by the Scientist) it was apparent my installation was corrupted. Eventually I was able to uninstall it and reinstall. All seems to be running fine at the moment.
The problems on my computer led me to finally getting two step verification on some email accounts set up so that I can access them on the devices I want to use. This took quite a bit of going back and forth between accounts and setting things up but that also seems to be working properly and I can now check the email accounts with frequent use on my current phone, old phone, Ipad, tablet PC and desktop with no issues.
My temporary/casual job finished on the 12th of this month so I am back to the usual day to day stuff. I kind of miss the idea of work as I was earning a bit of money to add to the family accounts. It is nice not to have so many days wiped out at the moment though, particular at those times when I have to take a child to an appointment.
It’s been several months since our old lawn mower died on us and over the winter, the grass had grown rather tall in some areas. The Scientist and I went to a few places to check out potential replacements and after some indecision, we settled on another low-end sort of electric one which is probably a bit better than our previous model. I immediately set out to mow our front yard and after well over an hour, had made good progress. I was mowing along the side of the driveway, back along the side of the carport when the power disappeared abruptly as I accidently mowed over the power cord. We’ve only ever owned electric and I’ve not done this before (although did run over the solar light cord under tree several years ago). Â I discovered that not only had I destroyed the power cord but caused the power to go out in the house. It was too late to do more mowing so I didn’t end up getting a new cord until the next day. By then it was raining so I’ve now had to wait for things to dry again. I did get enough done to make the front yard look much better, much bigger. It’s amazing how much space tall grass seems to take. The backyard is still untouched but I will hopefully get to that in the next couple of days unless we get more rain.
Cutting the grass soon will be quite beneficial for the dogs, who are off to the groomer tomorrow. Little boy dog will get a full clip and finally get all the knotted fur cleared out. It seems to get so difficult to manage once it reaches a certain length. Fortunately it’s now spring so I don’t have to worry too much about him being cold. We had the warmest recorded day in September on Saturday and on Sunday, the high was not much different than the low had been overnight. It’s been considerably cooler the past few days but seems to be warming a bit again. I know to expect changes in temperature but I would prefer to avoid such drastic changes.
I was very happily surprised to find out Neil Finn is playing a concert at a winery down in Margaret River in November. It’s a one-off show and features one support act I’ve not seen but would like to and another one I’ve seen two or three times before. The downside is it’s a 3.5 hour drive to get there, which means a return trip of similar length. We considered trying to stay overnight but it seems there aren’t many options due to this being during a food and wine thing happening during this weekend or week. Anyway, we are going to try to wing it. I suspect it will mean that the Scientist does the driving there and I drive back since I will be more awake.
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Stuff and other stuff
After several weeks, I can just say that life carries in my world. I started working a temporary/casual job a week and a half ago. It’s the same project I’ve worked on for the past three years but I’m now working three full days a week. Except for this week when I didn’t work. It’s tiring working a full day but I will appreciate the paycheck when it goes through. First one should be this week. I’m one of the few veterans to the project now so I seem to have moved up in seniority. Most of my duties are much the same but now I am trusted with more sensitive parts of the project and am consulted much more. Interesting progression to have now that I’m on the fourth time doing this one. Anyway, it should carry on for two or three more weeks and it’s possible I will miss one more day due to a long-standing appointment for Games Fanatic on a Friday.
I didn’t work today because Lego Lover needed to have two baby teeth removed. This was the advice of the orthodontist we visited following the last dental check up. There is still one more tooth to come but I’ve been assure it will be pushed out by incoming adult teeth. Weird to think he’s fifteen and a half years old and still has baby teeth. Well, not so many now. We are still seeing the pediatric dentist here and it’s mostly good except the way they interact with him. Well, most of the time they are okay but today’s team seemed to particularly talk to him as though he were years younger. I don’t know if this is their response to a child with autism or they just didn’t think about his age or what. Â Nitrous oxide was used and Lego Lover said he didn’t notice any change from the oxygen that he started out on. Of course this was the part not covered by our insurance at all so was the majority of our out of pocket expenses. The actual extractions took just a few minutes…not surprising since one has been quite loose for six months or more. He’s now a bit uncomfortable in the mouth but I imagine that he will feel much better in a day or two when the swelling goes down and it heals up more.
My perimenopausal symptoms seem to be increasing. It’s nothing dramatic but I am now getting the occasional longer cycle as opposed to lots of shorter ones. It leaves me wondering if this will go on for years or will it be over much sooner than I expect. I have mixed feelings about it now that it feels more imminent…I’m guessing that I will be at least fifty-one by the time I have reached menopause officially unless everything comes to a halt sometime soon. I still haven’t had anything I could definitely say was a hot flash. From all I’ve heard, I should definitely recognise it as a hot flash when it happens. Maybe I will be lucky enough to avoid them.
We’ve started watching a couple of tv series here. Game Fanatic bought Game of Thrones season one quite a while ago and we hadn’t started watching it yet. We watched the first couple of episodes this week. The first one was rather gory and was almost too much for me. The second one was considerably less so. I have only read the first part of the book so far but I’ve been advised it gets worse as the books go on. Time will tell if it’s something I can deal with or not. The other series is True Blood which I’ve heard about but have yet to see. I just got the first disc out from the video shop and it had two episodes on it. I have read the first two books in the series this is based upon and liked them a lot. The tv version seems pretty good so far, even though there is the occasionally gory scene….still nothing like what I saw on Game of Thrones.
Meanwhile I’ve also been reading a bit more. I ready quite a bit of Greek and Roman mythology for the Coursera class I finished recently. I still have a bit more reading I want to do from there. I also started reading the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. I heard her books described as not fitting neatly into a category but I would say it is basically a romance at heart. At least so far it is. I’m most of the way through the first book and already considering the next one. There is tv series of this book currently screening but not on a channel we have free-t0-air. I do find the book really engaging and that’s not happened for a while. I just have to watch out that I don’t read too late into the night as it really messes with sleep patterns.
I suppose there have been other things happening but they don’t come to mind right now. Perhaps I will sit down and write it out a bit sooner next time.
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Biting my tongue
I mean this in the most literal sense. Tonight I was eating a salad with some raw carrots in it and I bit my tongue. That itself is not so unusual as I do this all the time and regularly have a bump on the tongue prone to being bitten repeatedly. In this case, I bit my tongue, apparently rather hard, and I had the most terrible pain I’ve ever had when doing so. This time I could feel pain all the way into my ear and the initial pain lasted far longer than usual. This bite was near the back of my tongue along the very edge. I’m guessing I must have hit a nerve in very big way. Even now, hours later, there’s a decent bump that’s come out and any friction of food or drink seems to bring on the ear pain although not anywhere nearly as bad as the initial pain. I’ve never had this happen before so I wonder how common it is.
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When making waffles…
Lego Lover requested I make waffles on Tuesday for Canada Day so he could use maple syrup with it. We’d bought some buttermilk on Monday so I thought I’d try a batter with that instead of the standard recipe I’ve been following from the book that came with the waffle iron. I mixed up all the ingredients then got out the waffle iron and was rather dismayed. It looked terrible as it obviously had been put away without being cleaned up. It was quite unusable as it was and needed a really good clean up before I could make waffles. I was rather short on time as I was about to go out so the waffle batter went into the fridge and we delayed the making of the waffles.
The next day I cleaned it up well and left it to dry before using again. Various circumstances meant the Lego Lover wasn’t ready to get his waffles until today. I heated it up and sprayed it before pouring in batter. After waiting for the required time, I opened it up and the waffle was sticking to both sides. I cooked it a bit more but it pretty much had to be scraped off the pan. It was then I remembered that when we got it, it said to season before using. Obviously my cleaning job was too good and it had taken away the seasoning. By the fourth set of waffles it was working much better but the batter was nearly finished by then. I have promised to make more soon.
So a couple of rules for making waffles:
- Always clean up the waffle iron before putting it away. This avoids nasty surprises when you take it out months later to use and can’t.
- If you have literally cleaned the waffle iron, make sure you season it before trying to use it or your waffles will stick firmly to the iron.
- Always clean up the waffle iron before putting it away.
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Brushed potatoes
Like many people, one of our standard dishes for Australia Day and Independence Day is potato salad. When the Scientist and I did the grocery shopping on Monday, we found something novel at the supermarket: brushed potatoes. It’s not that we never see brushed potatoes in the stores but it’s pretty uncommon. The brushed potatoes were about half the price of anything else there so I got a bunch of them to use for today. This morning Game Fanatic and I were at the store picking up a few extra things we needed and he commented that we didn’t have that many potatoes this time so I asked if he thought we should get more. He wouldn’t commit to an answer on this question. But he did comment that he was bothered by the fact we had these dirty potatoes that needed to be washed. Apparently it’s an alien concept to him.
Thinking about it, for his whole life, he’s seen potatoes sold in a “washed” state and hardly ever seen potatoes in any other way. When I was growing up, potatoes were generally what is now called brushed and sold in large paper sacks with some sort of netting inside the paper to support the weight. Somewhere along the way, the idea of washed potatoes took hold and now it seems to be the standard. And they usually are sold in plastic bags rather than paper. I don’t know whether either is better for storage but I’d guess paper might edge out plastic just a bit. Getting back to that massive price difference, are we really so lazy that we are willing to pay a premium for “washed” potatoes instead of doing it ourselves?
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Awesome walk
The day started much like most recent days, cold enough that you don’t want to get out of bed even when you know you should. The weather forecast was off by a few degrees for this morning as it was much colder than it was supposed to be, about 3C, based on our closest weather station. Anyway, I dragged myself out of bed eventually and got moving a bit. Ate some breakfast and washed some dishes before starting a stew meant for dinner.
I’ve been quite lax about taking the dogs out for walks lately and I needed some exercise so I packed them into the car and drove to Whiteman Park, which is a few minutes away. I started out next to the dog park and would have taken them there had there not already been some other dogs there. I wasn’t in much of a mood to deal with the mad barker today. Besides, I was rather keen to walk on one of the trails through the park as we did on our last visit. I started off on one of the paved trails and we wandered along, with a couple of stops for doggie clean up along the way, until we reached the village. We wandered around the periphery of the village, in front of Caversham Wildlife Park, and through the parking lot, until we reached the opposite side of the village. From there I went looking for one of the longer trails to walk and eventually did find it. Turns out this one was a bush trail and not paved. This didn’t bother me but I kind of thought all of the trails were now paved. The bush trail was a delight to walk on for both me and the dogs. Lots of soft ground for their little paws made them much happier, especially as our walk became more and more extended.
I had taken my good camera and found a lovely little hideaway under some trees where I wanted to take some photos. I stopped the dogs and pulled out the camera and it wouldn’t come on. Seems I’d left it on the last time I used it or it had been knocked into the on position. It wasn’t working for me so I put it back. I didn’t think my phone camera was going to work for what I wanted. It might have worked but I am still learning quite a bit of how to use it…and mostly just getting used to such a different interface. Later on I did pull out the camera to take some photos of a banksia flower but I only used it in auto mode as it seemed to be doing okay with that. We ran across a bunch of magpies at one point and the dogs got rather excited while I got a bit nervous. It’s not magpie season yet, so I probably shouldn’t have worried. Anyway, many of them flew off, disturbed by the sound of us walking along the trail. It was actually kind of a spectacular sight at that moment, with the sun starting to drop in the sky and the birds all flying together.
We carried on walking and I began to wonder if I’d gotten in a bit deep on the walk. Not so much for myself but for the dogs, who aren’t the fittest they’ve been. They did keep up pretty well although I did slow my pace a bit too. I’d seen a sign saying it was 2kms to the Mussel Pool from there, via Lookout Hill. It seemed to take an awfully long time to get to just Lookout Hill and from there it was supposed to be another 500m to go. We did stop there and climb the lookout platform where we could see the city skyline in the distance. I don’t quite know why this surprised me as we can see it from near our house and we live really close to the park with our neighborhood backing onto the edge of the official park land. From there the path was paved all the way and it surely was more than 500m long. But it was in this section of the park I had the greatest delight, seeing what I thought were wallabies several times. Now I think they might have been grey kangraroos as I think they were a bit bigger than wallabies although not the biggest kangaroos I’ve seen. I tried to take photos a couple of times but they roos had hopped away before I could get anything in a photo. We walked on and I came across more of them, about eight altogether. I tried to get a little closer but then they all bounced away too. I saw one last one in the bush by itself but it was too far away to get it in focus and was surely going to move. But what an awesome sight they were and this was in a state park where we are free to visit.
This was far more impressive than seeing the animals in the wildlife park on the same site. We’d been to the wildlife park before it resettled into Whiteman Park and it was pretty cool to see. But it was so much neater to see the creatures in the wild. The same goes for the many of the birds we’d find there. Although I’ve never been keen on caging birds as pets, I feel even more strongly about it after having seen birds like cockatoos and galahs in the wild here. I don’t even have to go to the state park to see those as many of them fly through our neighborhood and can be seen nearby.
We finally did reach the mussel pool area although it took me awhile to get my bearings there. I eventually found my way past and back to the dog park where I took he dogs for a drink of water and brief sit down before returning home. I have made a mental note to return to the park soon without dogs so I can take it all in without worrying the dogs are tiring.
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Transformers: Age of Extinction 3D
As a family, we went to see this movie this afternoon. I normally wouldn’t be too bothered to see this in the cinema but this was Lego Lover’s big movie and he really wanted us to all go together. Funnily enough, he never did see the previous installment of the series in the cinema and this time we see it on opening day. That almost didn’t happen as it should due to a curious ad at the Supanova convention last weekend. On entrance we were issued with wristbands of different colors, depending on which sort of ticket we purchased. On the wristband was essentially an ad for this movie and the date of June 27th. Hmm…it all seemed a bit odd to both the Scientist and me, because new release movies generally start on a Thursday here. If there is a change, it’s almost always earlier in the week rather than later. I jokingly commented that perhaps the wristbands were imported from the US. Either I was correct or the convention got wristbands that were meant for use in a different region.
Anyway, Lego Lover has been eagerly awaiting this movie for months. And if not for the release of The Lego Movie a few months ago, it would be his only cinema experience for the year. Until today, we could count his cinema outings on one hand. Today makes six in his fifteen and a half years. Half of those movies have been Transformer movies. All but one of those movies have been with the whole family. Game Fanatic didn’t want to see Toy Story 3 with us so stayed home a few years ago. I would have been perfectly happy to wait for the dvd of this movie to come out, but Lego Lover really wanted us all to go together so that’s what we did. We arrived well in advance of the starting time, partly so we could get discount tickets and partly to make sure we got seats at the time we wanted I needn’t have been concerned about missing out on tickets as the cinema was mostly empty. Perhaps this was due to it being a mid-afternoon showing, before school let out. Â I’m not sure if we were in the same cinema as for the Lego Movie or not. But we had the same experience at the beginning when the ads and previews started to run but no picture. Last time the audience (very small) sat through the whole set of ads and finally I went out to the front to advise of this. Today, the Scientist went up, quite a bit sooner. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence considering the previous time was in April which leaves me wondering what is being neglected at the cinema. I don’t have a problem missing the ads but I imagine the advertisers would.
We got special 3D glasses for the movie instead of just using ones we had from previous movies. The only special part was the small accents on the side of the ear pieces. I guess they might be collector’s items…although more valuable if they hadn’t been used already. :) I had forgotten how very long these movies are so it seemed like it went on for longer than the previous ones. Apparently I have easily forgotten how long the action packed movies are. Plenty of bang for our bucks, to be honest. That’s not to say I didn’t like it. It’s not really the type of movie I go in for, but it did have plenty of entertaining parts. And for those that were less so, it was always interesting to pick out some of the movie cliches typical for an action film. There was even a really cute nod to an interest of Game Fanatic’s included that we all really liked.
Lego Lover, really loved it and was talking non-stop about it with his brother on the way to the car, then to all of us at home, then later on when I took him back out to buy Transformer toys in the toy sale that just started today. It makes me happy that he loved it so much and also happy that he wanted to share it with his whole family. The funny thing is we were talking just today about his extremes of very happy and very unhappy as a younger child. He was never much in the middle until he got older and matured. But today his joy reminded me of his younger days…just pure bliss. And now, of course, he has two new toys in the series and is so pleased with them too.