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A bit of oddness
Today was my about monthly visit to the Australian Red Cross blood donation centre again. I think this makes about eight donations since I started last year. While nothing particularly odd happened today it was a bit of a strange experience, as though everything was a bit out of kilter. The usual receptionist is on holidays and one of the regular staff members had taken over at the front desk. It was incredibly still and quiet inside this time. I was given the clipboard with forms to complete and it seemed to take much longer than usual as I felt distracted by the quiet. Even though it was so quiet, it took quite a while before I was called back. When the nurse checked my blood pressure, the machine pumped up to a really high pressure and took ages to go down again only to never pick up a reading and start all over with another high pressure. My bp was quite normal but it made my arm really uncomfortable for the duration. Today was a whole blood donation but the last few times I’ve been there have been for plasma. It seemed almost alien to do full blood again. I was glad it didn’t take so long, though, as my arm was already going numb in the about nine minutes I was actively donating. Usually they put a pillow under my arm and adjust everything for comfort but today there was only a towel on the arm of the seat. Once I was finished I went to the canteen for my after donation snack. The staff handling reception was doing double duty at the canteen too. I chose a muffin like usual and she heated it up. But she did it differently to the usual person and it didn’t get very warm this time. Also she asked me what I wanted to drink and poured the apple juice into a tiny little cup instead of the usual paper cups they use. It was hardly worth it. I’ve organised it so that I will do my next donation (plasma) the last Sunday this month when the Scientist is doing his next regular donation.
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Plans undone
The plan was the three boys in the Scientist’s family would join their mum with their families at some villas in Mandurah (about an hour south of Perth) on Saturday for an overnight stay. Not much was planned but what little there was on our part was on on track until Friday. I was woken rather early by the mad barking of the dogs when I knock came at the door (my replacement trackball). As I need to be up fairly shortly, I didn’t return to bed. The Scientist said I looked really bad…like I was quite ill. My face was puffy and swollen… I didn’t think much of that as it was morning and I often feel puffy and swollen when I get up. I got ready and took the dogs to the groomer and went off the Coventry Village markets to get some ingredients for the chickpea and veggie patties I planned to make for the Scientist’s mum (this was to celebrate her 70th birthday last week). I was tired when I got home and had a nap before picking up the dogs. Then I spent most of the afternoon in bed. Tiredness and aches and pains had set in with a bit of a scratchy throat. Sigh…
I had hoped I’d feel better later on but didn’t so I stayed home while the rest of the family went off. It did save us putting the dogs in a boarding kennel…which I’m sure was an improvement for the dogs in their weekend plans. I actually had the house to myself for a whole day, something that almost never happens. Too bad I felt terrible. I did feel a bit better when I finally got up on Saturday. I chatted to my mom on Skype for a while then did a bit of cleaning around the house. Not a lot but just to make a bit of headway into some of the mess here. As afternoon wore on, my energy levels dropped again and I was back in bed…but at least I accomplished something. I spent most of the evening on the sofa, watching Saturday night tv…British detective shows on ABC1.
I think the dogs were feeling out of sorts as they were quite hyper through the day, which required a fair bit of attention on my part. Their routine was totally undone by the lack of the remaining family members. But come bedtime they were happy enough to sleep away on the bed with me. Even though there was more space in the bed, I still seemed to have a dog squashed up against me in the night. Reminded me of when Lego Lover was small and often pushed me right to the edge of the bed, despite his small size.
I was having a decent sleep, I think, when it was completely broken by the sound of the phone ringing. Any time the phone rings in the night, I am worried it will be bad news. I picked up the phone and it turned out to be an old friend calling from the US. She had mistakenly thought it was about three hours later than the 4am I saw on the clock. Once it was clarified how early it was, she hung up and said she’d call later. Getting back to sleep was then the problem of the hour.
A few hours later I woke to noise from the dogs. I got up and opened the door so they could access the pet flap and go outside as required. It didn’t seem either ended up going out and they were soon sleeping again. Moving forward a couple more hours and the dogs were getting a bit antsy. I saw that it was past time for their food and got up to feed them. It is as this point I discovered the screen door was closed and the pet flap was useless. The poor dogs couldn’t get out and the cat couldn’t get in.
My face was again puffy and swollen on Sunday, much like it had been on Friday. But I did feel a bit better as I was up and about. My friend called again and we talked for a while. It was a rather awkward call as we had loaned some money to the friend recently and now it had been spent and she was asking for more. I assume that was the urgency which required her to call so early, even by her calculations. I told her we couldn’t help any further. We talked a bit longer and then she had to get going.
I pottered about the house a bit and washed some dishes before settling on the sofa and playing Animal Crossing on the Wii then playing some games on my tablet. Before long it was mid-afternoon and the Scientist and boys had returned. It was good to have them home and I got to hear all the stories of the weekend within short order. The dogs were quite happy to have life getting back to normal at home.
It’s a day later and I’m still feeling a bit tired and run down but I’m hoping some activity will change that. I am sure I didn’t have the flu and not even a cold. I’m guessing it might have been some allergy thing as most of my symptoms could be consistent with an allergy attack of sorts (although it usually manifests itself into a head cold or something similar). Most of the reason I stayed home was fear of spreading germs so I possibly could have gone there but might well have stayed in the villa and slept much of the time. Ah well, another time we will go again…The Scientist and boys liked it so well they want to go back again and show me Mandurah.
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End of the line
Over a decade ago, the Scientist was diagnosed with sleep apnea and was fitted out with a mask and a CPAP machine. While he’s had to replace masks a few times, the machine itself has lasted this entire time. Until now, that is…over the past week or so, it has taken a bit of work to get it going and last night all attempts at operating it failed. I think most CPAPs only last about five years on average so he got good value from the machine. The Scientist didn’t get a good sleep last night and I must admit it was a bit less than optimal for me. I’ve been rather accustomed to the white noise for the machine and it was so very quiet last night. It was also unusual not to have that draft of air from the mask. I guess it’s a bit like when city people go from the noise of the city to the quiet of some isolated place. Â I’m hopeful the Scientist will be able to get another machine today but the sticky part is Game Fanatic has an appointment this afternoon. We will see what happens…
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Every little bit helps
That’s what I tell myself about anything I do in the garden. Since my knee surgery over a year ago, my garden activity has been pretty limited. This was understandable for the first several months after surgery since it was hard to get up and down. Now that my knee is so much better, that is less the issue and it’s more  a matter of being out of the habit of doing anything.
Yesterday I went outside and realised there was need to clean up dog messes so I got my little spade and an old plant container to get around the yard quickly. That took a while but then I found myself pulling out weedy grass from around bushes. All the shrubs along the back side of the house have been overgrown with couch grass so it required a bit of work. I abandoned my original task (which was mostly done anyway) and devoted most of the remaining time to clearing out that mess in the shrubs. The worst place is right up against the house as the grass’ roots run rather deep and I have to really rip the stuff out. On a positive note that grass has often died so it isn’t always resistant to my efforts. I managed to get most of that cleared out and also pulled up quite a few weeds that have sprung up in the back yard. It’s always the nastiest ones that seem to grow so quickly too. Of course I was doing all this without gloves and my hands are now feeling a bit battered from the abuse. Â The good part is there is a small area that looks a lot better. I’m hoping to go off to a nursery in a local shop today to search for one more plant to replace one that died well over a year ago. The stake holding it up was still there but evidence of the plant is long gone.
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Board game blog
I decided to start up a separate blog for our board games yesterday. I’m not totally sure what shape it will take yet but I’m expecting it will have mainly reviews with some sort of format along with input from more than just me included. I still plan to write about our board games here but will try to keep it fairly general instead of rambling on at times. Also under consideration is the inclusion of video games so maybe it will ultimately be a games blog with the main focus on board games.
Thus far, I have set up the blog and set a temporary theme while I work out the details. The Scientist and I will be administrators to start and we will go from there. I will add a link once it’s up and running properly.
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New and improved Mexican food
Before we moved to Australia, the Scientist and I often ate out at local Mexican restaurants. They were mostly family run places with really delicious food and the best salsa ever. Then we came to Australia where Mexican food hadn’t really arrived. There were a few restaurants around although they were a bit too expensive in the early days for us to indulges ourselves. The local food halls (food courts) had something they called Mexican food but it was mostly curried meats and corn chips, salads, etc. and hardly resembled what I knew as Mexican food. Â A few more restaurants popped up over the years and our budget grew enough to include a meal out more often. There was a place called Crazy Cactus relatively near us and we used to go there fairly often with the boys. I have forgotten the name but their most memorable dish was a fiery hot nachos appetiser (maybe something like diablo?) . It was really hot and Game Fanatic adored it. He has had a liking for very hot food from a very young age. The rest of their food wasn’t really all that great and they eventually closed down several years ago. We have tried a couple other places along the way, Â some good and some bad. In the last year or two, a bunch of Mexican grill places have popped up in Australia and suddenly Mexican food is in fashion. It’s in a similar position to the sushi places a few years ago.
Meanwhile, making Mexican food at home has been even more limited. Ingredients can be a bit difficult to source here so most people have relied on Old El Paso. This is pretty much the lowest of the lowest in at home meal preparation as far as Mexican food goes. We had this back in North Carolina and I think that was about all that was available then. But we did have the lovely and inexpensive restaurants all around to keep us satisfied if required. My eyes were opened when we first visited my family (who moved to Texas soon after I moved to Australia) and discovered the wide range of Mexican style foods available. I don’t recall the names of all the brands but there were lots of choices and it was possible to find sources to make everything from scratch too.
When we eat Mexican food here at home, I usually make a meat dish and add my own spices. It’s a hit and miss sort of thing where one time it will be quite flavorful and other times it will be watery and/or bland. The packet mixes hardly get a look in these days. In the last year or so we started getting a few Mission brand products in the stores and Casa Fiesta has also appeared…although I don’t find them that different to Old El Paso. Today I discovered from another local American ex-pat that the Mission salsas are now available at her local store. I popped off to the shops this afternoon and found they were available there too…and bought a jar of each (rich tomatillo and black bean chipotle). We were already planning to have Mexican tonight so this fit in well for us. I also bought a jar of the hot salsa that Old El Paso makes, one of their only products that we really like. We also planned to have some fresh guacamole too. Game Fanatic found a recipe a few years ago that was good and is now our official family guacamole maker. We have a bunch of avocadoes in the fridge thanks to the Scientist’s mum (who has a tree). Game Fanatic got everything ready to make it and cut the first avocado and it was just too hard. He tried another one and it did break apart but the flesh was impossible to scoop out. We gave up that idea and will see if we can get the others to ripen by removing them from the fridge…Methinks they might not have been quite ripe enough when picked so I’m hoping we can salvage them.
The actual meal came out quite beautifully. I made some chicken and made sure to let it simmer a long time. It was enough that it broke apart into shreds…But there were enough chunks to satisfy Lego Lover who is only just starting to eat this part of the meal. (I made sure not to mention that I’d used onions in it and he never knew the difference as I think they melted into the sauce.) I managed to get a good balance of flavor with the paprika and cumin powder. And the tomatoes didn’t overpower it because I added them gradually. It came out really well and everyone liked it. As for the new salsas, the black bean was a hit with all of us (except LL who didn’t try it) and the tomatillo was okay. I imagine we might not buy that again since it’s a bit expensive to buy so much salsa. I always cut up tomato, lettuce and cucumber to add to a burrito or similar wrap. Â Tonight I decided to skip the wrap and just use the corn chips and make a bit of a crunchy salad from it which was probably a bit more satisfactory than having the flour tortilla on top of everything else.
I’m hoping to see even more variety of food here in the near future. Even today I saw some Mexican style corn flour at a spice shop in some nearby markets. It would also be nice to get black beans into the supermarkets since they are so delicious. I make black bean stew and use dried ones for that most of the time but once tried a tin of black beans I found from the middle east. They were pretty awful….maybe mostly because they surely weren’t the type of beans I was seeking….Anyway, I’m hoping to find more variety in the foods we make at home with these few added ingredients. The new Mexican grills, meanwhile, seem to satisfy my taste for Mexican food.
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Never enough
Several years ago, I agreed to make monthly donations to Oxfam. Soon, I started receiving mail from them regularly to tell me of all they were doing and also to ask for further donations. I got fed up with all the mail and told the organisation I would stop donating if the mail continued. Now I get very little mail through the year, with the exception of a tax record. Instead of mail, I get email messages somewhat regularly from Oxfam. I also get a phone call about once every year or two, thanking me for my donations but then asking for more. Even after we’ve increased the amount of our donations quite recently.
Around the same time, the Scientist started donating to the World Wildlife Fund. While it seems a good cause, it’s mind-boggling how many glossy mailouts we get here. I think he did ask for a stop on those mail-outs at some point but we still seem to get mail from them fairly often. They always ask for further donations, of course.
I once gave to a local fund for the children’s hospital and now they send letter after letter asking for further money. The same could be said for other organisations that don’t immediately come to mind. It seems once you give, it’s like the flood gate are opened and more and more requests come through. I do kind of understand how this comes about, but it’s quite frustrating to keep getting more requests. And so often it seems as much money as I might have donated that one time is now spent on asking for more money. It’s a wonder the organisations have anything to spend on the particular cause.
Recently, I have had the most unusual sort of requests for donations ever when the Red Cross contacted me and thank me for my recent plasma donations. And then proceeded to ask me to give again, of course. I had already scheduled another donation at that point so that was particularly strange to me.
This donation thing is a very odd beast, to be sure.
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Up late
Despite my efforts, I don’t seem to be able to get to bed very early these days. I’ve just spent a bit of time going through some of my recent photos to weed out bad ones and do a bit of work on some others. I also managed to upload some to Flickr today. I have quite a few more to upload but I’m still getting my head around the interface for uploads on Photoshop Elements (plus editing details on the website). Those will have to wait until I get the motivation to get more done. It was a bit tricky working without the right mouse button. I have a trackball that does work fully but it’s so uncomfortable that I am avoiding it and just using the broken trackball for what it can do.
I got to the gym this evening after procrastinating for quite a long time. It was probably a good idea since I think I hate a few too many air fried chips for dinner. I did my whole workout on the spin bike by doing the video class and then adding extra time to it. I had to take it easy through the workout as my knees were both sore from something stupid I did yesterday. I was walking the dogs and thought I’d try to run/jog a bit with them as I realised I can now run a short distance if required. I only jogged 20-30 seconds but both my knees were feeling wobbly afterwards. I think I’ll just avoid the jog/run thing altogether except for emergencies.
I think it’s time to end this nothing post and get myself to bed.
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Just an ordinary Saturday
Most weekends a visit is made to our local markets, which have several shops that often get business from us. This afternoon I went there to pick up some bulk food items and some food for lunch plus the newspaper and a chai latte. I was in the markets for less than half an hour. I went to put the purchases in the car and a guy came up to me to tell me he and his cousin saw another car sideswipe the front of our car and drive away. He had the number of the license plate which he wrote down for me. It’s not terrible but it is obviously scraped and will likely cost a bit to repair. Sigh…contacting insurance on Monday as they don’t seem to have any place to call on the weekend, aside from roadside assistance. It’s not urgent so I will wait.
I was planning to go to the gym after eating lunch but then remembered the dogs needed exercise. We walked for over an hour and both dogs had slowed down by the time we neared home…not enough to stop them barking at someone walking on the footpath along the way though. I didn’t think I’d gotten that much exercise but hours later my bottom is quite sore so I guess my glute muscles got a bit of a needed workout. I don’t use the treadmill much at the gym these days so I guess a walk was a good idea.
We had our Saturday evening family games again with Lego Lover choosing two games.We played Scotland Yard, which I’ve had since I was in college and which we always love to play. The Scientist played Mister X and was doing well but missed a detail that left him open to capture and was caught by Game Fanatic. Just before I’d stupidly made a comment saying it was going to be difficult to win…then both the boys managed to get right over to that part of the board. Just goes to show my lack of ability in strategic planning…at least compared to the rest of the family. After that we played Castle Panic and had some really bad luck at the start that ultimately led to us losing the game.
Game Fanatic had downloaded the first version of Silent Hill onto our Playstation 3 and he and his dad played that for a couple of hours before the Scientist went to bed. Apparently they managed to solve a puzzle already, so must be well on their way in the game. I stayed there for a while and did some random stuff on my iPad and Lego Lover was in his room until after the Scientist went to bed. I brought up our current favorite online game at Geoguessr.com and was trying to work out a few locations from the Google street view images when I came upon a location obviously in Canada. As Lego Lover is still madly obsessed, I saved it for him to work out. I’d already found out the general location but he enjoyed navigating through the small city and working out all the details. We carried on working out several more of the images and found ourselves in Latvia, Poland and Australia along with the city in Quebec. Lego Lover and I really like doing this game together. We may fight a lot and get annoyed with each other at the methods we each use. But together we often work it out pretty well. Most impressive was Lego Lover getting within a kilometer on the Latvian location in a port city. We’d not found enough information to work out streets and he just dropped the marker and was almost right there. He also did quite well at a more random marking to locate an image from a West Australian road location. There were limited clues and he got within 75 kms of the correct place. I am really amazed at some of the details he picks up on the some of these road images that helps pinpoint locations.
Now it is rather quiet here, aside from the music playing on Spotify…which is also fairly quiet. I need to be off to bed so I can wake up at a decent time tomorrow. It’s gotten a bit cooler here and getting up is difficult when it feels so chilly in the mornings.
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Flashback to my youth
As I’m now 48 years old, I know that menopause is likely in the relatively near future. If I am lucky/unlucky (depending on how you look at it) it may still be another five or six years. At the moment, my cycles are still relatively regular. Some cycles are shorter and some are longer but they still average out. Hot flashes haven’t entered the equation yet so I wonder if I might be lucky enough to avoid them. Mood changes haven’t been a big issue, cyclically. At least not like they were in my younger days. I used to have a lot of mood swings premenstrually and that hasn’t happened that much in recent years. In fact it often surprises me when it does. I think the Scientist is grateful for that improvement. Â During my teens I had some pretty bad dysmenorrhea for several years, enough that I was put onto motrin, which was prescription-only at the time. I think this got better into my 20s and was reasonably bearable after having kids. Most of the time I can manage quite well so long as I medicate before pain becomes too bad and even some of the worst months are nothing compared to what I used to experience.
I had forgotten how bad the cramps were in the early days. I mean, I have forgotten how really bad it felt. I don’t think I’ve had pain like that in 30 years. Yesterday my period started and I took my usual pain medications at the first signs of cramps. When I got up this morning I felt quite fine and continued the same until early afternoon when that old familiar feeling hit me like a brick. I medicated a bit too late and it didn’t break the pain at all and I had to take an extra tablet and wait to see what effect that had. The medication eventually did kick in hours later but what a shock to have those early days brought back to me so vividly.
Which brings me back to this menopause that my body is moving towards year by year. My theory is this is part of that process and I might expect more of the same in future cycles. I think it might be a good idea to stock up on medication for the future so as not to be left unprepared.