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Saturday at the park
Yesterday I took G to Whiteman Park as has been usual for the past several Saturdays. It’s a good way to kill four hours, far better than I expected. Also it doesn’t cost very much, mostly just a drink and a ride on the train is required.
On this occasion, the Scientist had walked from our house to the park and met us in the village café not long after we arrived. This added a new dimension to our visit. We walked between the village and the Mussel Pool which is about a ten to fifteen minute walk for most people. We stopped into the Children’s Forest on the way and looked at many of the natives planted there. After the Mussel pool, e were on the way to a third trail that we haven’t tried out at the park when we ran across a kangaroo and a joey hopping along. It was incredibly exciting because we’ve never seen a joey with the other kangaroos. This was pretty close to where people were hanging out so I guess they are fairly tame, even with the little ones. I just wish I’d had my camera ready to take a shot but it was still in my bag.
We found the trail we wanted and headed off into that direction. It started off well enough, passing through a couple gates and then into a field but we hit a bit of problem once we started going through the more wooded area. There were spider webs everywhere and we kept running into them. It was close to noon and the light was quite strong, making it difficult to see the webs and spiders along the way. We eventually had to give it up because we were getting spider webs onto us, not to mention a few spiders. I guess this particular trail doesn’t get a lot of use because I find it hard to imagine there being so many along a well-travelled path.
We walked back to the village and left the Scientist while we took a ride on the little railroad there. I have noticed over the three weeks we’ve gone on the train that it’s gotten more and more crowded by the week. We had to wait a while for the train to take off. It’s hard to complain too much as it’s run by volunteers but it’s often five or ten minutes past the departure time which sometimes makes it hard to plan accordingly for things. There are two different loops the train takes and it’s possible to take them one after the other but time was limited and we had to get going after the first loop. The Scientist had meanwhile walked out towards the entrance and stopped at the lookout. We picked him up on the way out and took G back home.
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Bad dairy
I didn’t exercise for three days running and the weather was warm so I headed out on my bicycle in the afternoon to try to get back on track. The ride was good for the most part and I noticed I am not having to work quite as hard to climb hills as I did before. I guess this getting fit thing is paying off now. :)
My first stop was at some markets in a suburb a few kilometres away to buy a needed item for someone in the household. Then I popped over the big shopping centre across the road to buy bread before heading back towards home. My next stop was the Indian food shop that lies in a somewhat different direction. I would have taken a direct route but there are lots of roadwork areas along that path and I was uncertain how well I’d be able to cycle there. Essentially I rode most of the way home and travelled to this shop to buy curry paste for Game Fanatic.
They didn’t have the paste that we’ve been buying in stock so I got a couple different others to try. One of them was a Sri Lankan paste (which turned out to be quite bland). I needed to spend $10 to use my credit card so I wandered around an checked the fridge at the back. I discovered a bottle of mango lassi there and added that to my small haul.
The ride home was a bit more eventful because the chain on my bike suddenly popped off and I couldn’t get it back on properly. I ended calling the Scientist who was to meet me at a nearby shopping centre parking lot to help out. I walked the bike there and tried again and was able to sort out the chain but it was too late to call the Scientist again. Fortunately it’s only about a five minute drive from home. He was able to take the purchases home while I rode home.
I drank a bit of the lassi while on the way and it was bit thicker than I expected but not so much that I made note of it. The ride home from that point was uneventful from that point. I got home and had a shower. My appetite was almost non-existent and I hadn’t eaten very much during the day so it surprised me. I was able to eat a bit of food later in the evening and that didn’t sit well with me all afterwards. I felt more sick to my stomach than I had before. This wasn’t the stomach churning feeling I’ve had since the election.
I did sleep reasonably well but woke early and thought I should check out the bottle of the lassi which was in the fridge. I only drank about half of it before. I discovered there was no use-by date on it so I’m inclined to believe it was sticker that was removed previously. I should have checked it out when I bought it and paid for it. I’m guessing I had some sort of food poisoning from this…either that or it was coincidental. Needless to say, I won’t be drinking any more of it and I probably won’t ever buy any dairy products from that shop again. Sigh.
At least the bike ride went well though. :)
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Blast of summer
Yesterday we have an isolated, but massive, spike in temperature that left us with a preview of the summer to come. Well, I don’t know if it’s going to be a hot summer or not but it was definitely summer-like yesterday. I think it officially reached 37.2 C at our closest reporting station although my car registered 38 at one point.
I’ve been working as a carer for extra hours the past few weeks and yesterday I had my charge for four hours. We’ve been going to Whiteman Park, a state park located near where I live over the past three Saturdays. The plan for yesterday was to go, have a drink at the café and then do a walk on one of the trails before relaxing on the train ride at the end. Unfortunately the heat was a bit much for both of us and the water ran out too quickly so plans didn’t work out as expected and I ended up leaving G near the beginning/end (starts and ends in the same place) while I rushed off to get more water. It didn’t look like the train ride was going to be possible but we somehow did manage it in the end and it left G with a better feeling for the day than just the memory of it being so hot and being so tired and thirsty.
Meanwhile, our air conditioning got a pretty good workout during the day and well into the evening.
Today has been completely different with strong winds blowing and the temperature only just made it to 26 C, which feels rather chilly by comparison. I had ideas of going on a bike ride for exercise this afternoon but the strong winds have put me off and I will more likely do a walk instead.
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Summer teaser and more
We had a brief hint of summer this past week when the temperature rose past 32C…I think it was about 34C where we are, which is probably about 91-92F. I went for a 6km walk at a park that day and wore my walking sandals and managed to get blisters on my feet. I should know better than to do something like that but I thought it would be cooler for my feet. I will do better next time. Anyway, it was warm enough that the house got really warm and I ran the air conditioner for the first time this season. Then it went back to wintry sort of weather on Friday and those windows we opened left the house feeling quite chilly. I didn’t close them again since they have key locks and it’s likely we won’t stay cool for too much longer.
I had a follow up visit for my colonoscopy with my doctor yesterday. I wasn’t quite sure what type of plan it might be but it seems I’m to see a dietician who specialises in IBS. I know there is a diet called FODMAP that was developed at Monash University here in Australia but I hadn’t looked into it so much until I knew for sure this was the problem. Anyway, the gp told me her daughter saw the dietician and with dietary changes her daughter has worked out which foods are triggers. It seems like I will be on some sort of elimination diet to start with and will add foods back gradually.
Coming up this week is Game Fanatic’s birthday when he turns 22. Which reminds me that Lego Lover will be 18 in a couple of months. So weird to think of all this.
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Long update
Following on from my previous post…For the first time I noticed it was 16C at 16:16 and on another occasion it was 13C at 13:13. :D
September ended up being just another month of winter around these parts. The temperature barely reached 20C so hopes of anything warmer was a bit of a dream. So far October has been a bit more promising. We had a couple days last week where we reached the 20s but this weekend it’s wet and windy although not as chilly as it had been. This week is actually promising some real warmth with a 30C day forecast. It will feel like a heatwave after this mild start to spring, I think.
Last month I finally shook off some of the winter lethargy and started to get my act together with regard to my health. I’d been eating terribly and had barely been active so my sugar levels became seriously out of control. This caused me to feel even more lethargic and once I finally checked my blood sugar, I was motivated to do something. This seems to be a common issue every winter so I need to find ways to overcome this in the future. Anyway, I’ve been getting more regular exercise, mostly through walking and the treadmill. My eating habits have also improved. I’m not bingeing so much on garbage and I’m eating a bit more healthily.
I also managed to get around to getting a colonoscopy organised, something that I was referred for back in March. Plus I did a CT scan and blood tests that were overdue. I also saw my doctor who sent me for an ultrasound to follow up the CT scan because of uncertainty over a cyst-like mass on my ovary. The ultrasound clarified that and also showed another cyst on the other ovary. My left ovary decided to hide like it had on a previous scan. Plus I had a thickened endometrial lining much like I had a couple years ago. This was of some concern until I mentioned I’d had the biopsy two years ago which was fine. It is all in my records, I’m sure, but they go back 20+ years and I was seeing a different doctor regularly before so it wasn’t immediately obvious. I had the colonoscopy just over a week ago and that came out clear except for findings that confirmed an irritable bowel diagnosis. So I think I am a bit more on track for taking better care of myself.
On a related note, for some reason my gp had requested an ANA blood test again. This was back in March and I can’t really recall why she requested it because it wasn’t of any importance to anything related to my health as far as I know. I notice they no longer report how high the titre on the report now. Also, that same non-specific diffuse fine speckling that appeared on the last test showed up again. The discrete dot pattern was only listed as a second pattern. I am really curious as to how and why this pattern has changed. Previously it was the few discrete dots and homogenous on almost every test I’d had but this makes two tests with this non-specific pattern. It’s stuff like this that I find really intriguing and I wished I’d had more of a science background…but then I remember back to how much of a struggle I had with high school biology and got totally turned off the idea of going into that field. Not that I was ever that interested but I did like biology in junior high school.
I’m going to be working an extra nine hours a week as a carer for the family friend over the next couple of months. This guy’s other carer is going on holiday so I am taking over most of the hours. It’s going to be interesting taking over since it will be so many more hours per week than I am used to doing. Saturday will be the long day with four hours and I need to figure out some ideas of how to spend that time so that it’s interesting for both of us. It will bring in a bit of extra cash for the Christmas season this year too.
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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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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!