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FYI
I’m playing around with new themes so the page might show strange configurations. Hopefully I will be settled on something soon. Just need to make a change.
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Small world
I forgot to mention a while back that I found out something interesting from the gp I’ve been seeing. Apparently she did a high school exchange in the US and it just happens she lived in Oil City, PA at the time. That’s where my mom was born and lived when she was young. Also I have many other family members who have lived there on both sides. Most of my paternal grandfather’s family lived in the area when they came to the US from Poland. When she said she’d spent time in Pennsylvania I expected her to say it was in the eastern part so this was quite a nice surprise. Anyway, it was a neat coincidence.
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Phones
It’s been almost four years since my current phone model was released and I suspect the support for it is going to be severely limited soon. In the past, I’ve waited for the price to go down on a model before taking the plunge but it seems this isn’t really all that cost effective if I’m buying a new phone more often. This is probably truer now that the phones are getting even more expensive.
I’m going to wait for the next models to be released later this year and I guess I’ll be taking the plunge and investing in one with hopes it will last four years instead of three. But I will admit it’s really frustrating to find it’s costing so much more than it did in the past to keep connected.
Speaking of my phone, it started doing something that is kind of worrying the other day. I’d been playing music in the car with it and found the device was quite hot by the time I disconnected it. Normally playing music takes very little power and reduced the charge very little. This time it had been significantly depleted within a short time. Later on I noticed it was dropping the charge 10-20% within a few minutes. Fortunately this hasn’t happened again but this was the sort of activity I had on the previous phone before it died less than a year ago. (Fortunately Apple replaced the device at no charge.)
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Just like that…
It’s already been two months since I posted. Sigh. In this time, I learned my new gp that I liked is leaving the practice in a month. :( I suspect she may be a registrar and is required to do stints at various practices along the way since she seems reasonably young. Well, anyway, I will have to seek another doctor to see on a regular basis.
It seems like I’m in to the doctor all the time at the moment. Lots of little things happening. I saw my gp for a regular visit and she was going to do my flu shot but then we both forgot. It may have been as well since I had cycled there and might not have felt comfortable riding afterwards…although I probably would have been fine. So I went in later in the week and did the vaccine. Then over the weekend I developed significant numbness in my left hand. I have had issues off and on for a while but it wasn’t constant. Anyway, by Monday it was enough I made an appointment again and saw a different gp as mine was off the next day.
That gp was fine although she seems really young and inexperienced. She seemed to think it might be a problem in my neck although she wasn’t sure. She sent me to the physio who also seemed to feel it was a neck issue but did some work with me and had me doing exercises at home. Then she referred me back to the gp for further examination after three visits where there was no improvement. I made an appointment to see my current gp as the one I’d seen previously had no appointments available until well into next week.
During this time I suddenly developed a hacking cough which got bad really quickly, enough it has been disturbing my sleep for several nights. Not to mention other members of the household. I thought it might be a reflux cough but using my medication for it didn’t make any change. Anyway, I decided I would mention it when I went back about the hand issues.
So today I arrived at the practice and had to wait nearly an hour. It was my luck the gp had a complicated situation with another patient and had to take a lot more time than usual. She did eventually call me back and she found she couldn’t read the notes the physio wrote but did a bunch of checks on my hand and several tests. This has been the case each time I’ve seen the doctor or physio. But almost all different tests. She thinks I may have a carpal tunnel issue and wasn’t keen to send me for CT scans or nerve testing. The latter requires a neurologist so I didn’t figure that would happen. She’s sent me to have an ultrasound of my wrist and we will take it from there.
As to the cough, she could clearly see I was coughing up sputum and she thinks it’s bronchitis and wrote a prescription for antibiotics. But she was in a bit of a hurry (I think I was her last patient) and I wonder about how likely bronchitis could be. There was no illness before the cough started and my lungs sounded clear when she listened. Even so, as I understand it, bronchitis is almost always a viral illness. So I don’t know what to think.
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Exercise
After seeing the new doctor last week, I felt like a freeze had been melted on my exercise (or lack of it). I think it just put me in the right frame of mind to get back to what I needed to improve my health. Anyway, I have started back to riding my bicycle again since that’s what I most enjoy for exercise. In recent months the only other significant exercise had been swimming some of the time I took my client (as a carer) to the pool.
I had to prepare a bit before riding as my bike’s been sitting unused on our patio for a long time. The tires were flat and it was very dusty. It’s also been rusting more and more after being outdoors for so long. I want to get a new bike some time and give this one away. I’m sure someone more able to could fix it up just fine and it would be great for someone.
A local highway has been extended near us and some parts have already opened. There’s a lovely bike/pedestrian path that runs alongside it and it goes halfway to another suburb that is kind of out in the country. But not really in the country any more. Just not quite city either. Anyway, I wanted to try out the new path and it seemed I could get there without too much trouble from home. So I tried it out and it’s lovely. Mostly flat and straight so there was little strain on my knee. That’s been what has put me off riding a lot because I just hadn’t had strength for riding up and down hills like I had been doing. I was able to keep a steady pace without getting too sore. At one point the path loops around and goes under the highway. This part runs alongside a road which I can’t identify yet. I think it might be one that goes to a local Aboriginal community but there’s no signage in that area to be sure. Anyway, the path continues on the other side and then it ends abruptly near the remaining construction on the road. It will be good when it’s finished because there will be an easy way to get to the next regular suburb in that direction.
On the way back I realised there’s an overpass for cyclists and pedestrians being created. It’s mostly done but the paving isn’t completed. Also from this direction there will soon be open good paths to reach Whiteman Park near us. I have gone there by bike in the past but it was scary to ride alongside the sometimes heavy traffic. Now there’s a pathway going straight to the park and into the park. Much safer now. The highway is supposed to be opening the section closer to us this weekend so I hope to make a journey to Whiteman Park soon, unless the pathway is still blocked.
I’ve done two bike rides and have done swimming this week, which is far better exercise than I’ve done for a while. It’s one of those things where it’s easier to continue once I get going on a regular basis. I’m hoping that I can keep it up. I’ll be seeing my new gp for follow up on Monday and hopefully that will help keep the momentum going.
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Fixed
A while back I posted about an entry that needed some editing so I changed it to a private post until fixed. After procrastinating many times, I have finally edited and hopefully it reads much better now. It can be found here.
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Captain Marvel
I don’t normally go to see all the superhero movies at the cinema. The Scientist and one or both boys have gone and I waited to watch on dvd. But last year when I didn’t go see Black Panther at the cinema, things got a bit tricky. The Avengers movie came out a month later and the guys all went to see that too. They were desperate for me to see it after that because they wanted to discuss and they ended up seeing it again so that I wouldn’t have spoilers. This year it’s a similar situation with Captain Marvel and the second part of the Avenger’s movie.
So we all went to see it last Friday and it was really good. I will be honest and say I knew almost nothing of the character aside from it being a woman. But the story presented was quite good and I love the way there were such strong female characters. She’s almost too good, far stronger than any of the other superhero characters. I guess that goes some way to offsetting the limited number of female superheros out there. There are actually three women in the film that are significant to the story and all of them are strong women. Impressive!
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International dialing
Both the Scientist and I have mobile phone service and last year we started using a service that costs a mere $10 a month for unlimited national calls and texts. It’s like a steal really. It’s a prepaid service and it’s pretty useful for us when we don’t use all that much data. The only problem with it is there is no voicemail service and that creates a few issues for me, mostly for work. (There’s a service to translate to text but it’s fairly useless.)
There’s a $5 add-on for this service that allows international phone calls to x number of countries and it includes all the usual English speaking western countries and then some others. It even had Sri Lanka on it until quite recently. I usually keep in touch via Skype with family members but evens in late December had me trying to get in touch with family members in the more traditional way and so I got the international add-on.
It all worked really well for the few people I’d tried to call. Then it was my brother’s birthday on the 19th and I decided I’d try to call him. The first hurdles were having the correct phone number. My mom had two and neither was right. She provided the latest number and so I tried the next night and I kept getting a message saying it wasn’t able to connect to that number and to try later. I repeated this with no success and tried again the following day and so on…
It’s not confirmed completely but it seems my brother can’t get international calls on his prepaid plan. I’m not that clue-y on US cellular phone plans but here it doesn’t cost anything to accept calls no matter where they are from. I think this is pretty standard across the board now. But I guess there are still variations on phone services back home.
And now that I know all this it didn’t matter too much since I developed a sore throat a few days ago and now have laryngitis. I couldn’t talk even if I wanted to.
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Board games
For awhile we were playing games quite regularly but then they seemed to become a bit of a burden so we didn’t play very often even though they seemed to be collecting in the house. Games Fanatic has been buying then quite regularly, mostly through Kickstarter campaigns he funds. Anyway, we have started playing again and have tried a couple news ones lately.
Last weekend and this we played a game called Root, which was one of the Kickstarters that has been sitting around for a few months. It’s an interesting game because each player plays in a different way so it takes a while to get through how to play. We spent about three hours last weekend and I was just starting to get my head around what I was doing. So this weekend I played the same role and did better. But it still took longer than the playing time listed. There are expansions with more roles to play which we hope to get to eventually but we need to learn to play all four roles of the base game before we try that. Unfortunately Lego Lover got a bit bored waiting between turns (plus there were other issues that exacerbated the situation) so it’s not likely he will play with us the next time. We’ll have to change to three player rules, whatever that means. I’m hoping it goes well though.
There was another game we played recently called Five Minute Dungeon. The nice thing about it is the short game time. The five minutes isn’t really the length of the game but the rounds you play. We got through a few of those the one time we tried it and it was pretty good.
After we played Root for the first time we were looking through all the board games we have and it is apparent we need to weed out the collection. We have quite a few that have hardly ever been played and aren’t likely to get more play. Some of these are games that were/are popular but we just never got into them all that much. Some of these are old games that don’t interest us. We also have a few oldies to keep due to sentimental reasons, e.g. my first Monopoly game which is missing a couple of deeds and has an almost flattened box. Maybe once we clear out some games we will have more space and be able to organise the collection better.
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New gadgets
We’ve been using an egg cooker made by Sunbeam for a few years now. Actually we are on our second one but it does have some issues, namely that it leaves puddles of water on the counter sometimes. Also it’s hard to clean and the coating on it seems to be wearing away quickly. Recently I happened to see mention of an egg poacher made by Breville. I looked it up and it also does hard and soft cooked eggs, plus scrambled. Not to mention you can poach other things in it. It was on special on Amazon so I ordered it and it arrived promptly. It was a lot bigger than I expected and it does take a bit more work to use it but the eggs come out beautifully by comparison.
I’ve also used it to poach chicken a couple of times and that came out really well too once I worked out the temperature and time it needs. You can set all that information on the cooker and you just heat the water and monitor the temperature using the probe, then add eggs or whatever is being cooked and start the timer. I think this will make it onto our small list of really useful appliances like our air fryer.
Meanwhile it seems likely we will be replacing our microwave in the not too distant future. The light inside burnt out not long ago so it’s kind of weird to use without that. But there have been a couple of instances where it hasn’t heated as well as it used to. We’ve had it for about seventeen years so I suppose it’s had a good run. Our next microwave will likely be a convection combo or something like it. It just depends on what’s available when the time comes.
I’m also on the lookout for a replacement can opener. I got one a few years ago that we really liked because it opened the can without leaving sharp edges. Unfortunately it has stopped working so well and opening a can has become quite a chore lately. So I am trying to find another one that hopefully will last a bit longer. I’d like to see a can opener go as long as our microwave, in fact. :)