-
Stolen
Friday afternoon, the Scientist received a phone call from the bank that issued our credit card. It seems someone has used our credit card number to pay a lawyer fee in the US. We don’t have much of an idea as to how our number was obtained and can only assume a security issue at some point when we have used our cards. Possibly the Sony hacking incident earlier this year. So our card numbers have been cancelled and we now await new cards to arrive. We generally don’t have much good to say about the bank that issued these cards. But the fraud division for their credit card department has been very much on the ball about checking up on possible fraud this time and in the past.
-
Moving the body
I had been exercising kind of regularly when we got the puppies but that kind of stopped once they were in the house. Their pen/crates/other stuff rather took over the games room space where the Xbox and tv are and shifting things around was a rather major undertaking. But I stopped using that excuse a couple of weeks ago and spent half an hour clearing the space, rolling up the cheap piece of linoleum and vacuuming the carpet. This endeavor was made easier by the fact that we extended the space they inhabit as they both could easily jump the pen.
So once I got a bit of a workout making space for a workout, I decided to use the Dance Central program for the first day and that went pretty well. I found I was a bit rusty on some of the movements but improved with a bit of practice. The second day I went back to the Your Shape Evolution program and ended up quite sore for a couple days afterwards. The same thing happened when I first used this program and it put me off returning to it for quite a while. I do find once I have used it once or twice that I am much better unless I overdo my workout.
I have discovered there are quite a few different workouts available on this program although I don’t think it caters to the overweight and extremely unfit users all that well. I am sure many would be totally put off continuing the program after a single workout. Before I got too far into it, I set up the program to connect with my Ubisoft Uplay account so that I can track information from my computer. What’s offered is still rather basic but I’m hoping this will be extended over time. I discovered a new version of this program is being released which includes warm up and cool down routines. I’ve noticed that none of the programs I’ve used so far have included this part of a workout so it’s about time this was included. How irresponsible to do a workout program and leave out some of the most important parts.
I’ve been using the program 3-4 times a week for a couple of weeks now and have started to notice some changes. The workouts I’ve been doing have focused a lot on abdominal and lower body with lots of squat exercises. I usually find the squat exercises really aggravate my knee problems but have gotten through this without any major dramas so far. I’ve already noticed that some of my muscles are getting stronger, which always feels like an accomplishment.
One really good result of the little bit of exercise has been a reduction in my fasting blood glucose levels over the past week. This has been the usual result with exercise most of the time I’ve been checking but I found they weren’t coming down very well earlier this year, whether I was getting regular exercise or not.
Aside from this exercise, the Scientist, his mum and I have been taking a tai chi class at the beach for the past term. The Scientist learned some tai chi when we were in Canada a decade ago but hadn’t returned to practice until now. It’s been an interesting experience to be learning this so far as it’s not something that can be rushed. We learned one move each week for the first eight weeks and the past two weeks have been consolidation of what we learned. But I am still rather unsure of myself and seriously considering repeating the first level of classes next term if I’m still struggling once we start back in a few weeks. I’m hoping practice will get me over a lot of the difficulties I’m having as starting right at the beginning is likely to be quite frustrating.
-
I thought it was spring
Supposedly we are well into spring this year but you’d never know by looking outside. Nights have been in the single digits (celsius) several times over the past week, well below the normal temperatures. Tomorrow the forecast is for what is essentially a winter storm with rain, hail, and gusty winds. This isn’t the first storm we’ve had this month either. More importantly, the temperature is nowhere near normal for this time of year. Since it’s going to be so chilly, I plan to make a black bean soup/stew for dinner and get some crusty bread to eat with it.
-
At work
I finally started my temporary, part-time job on Friday and it was quite an experience after being out of the paid workforce for so many years.I I’ll be working three six-hour shifts a week for the next six to eight week, going from 12-6pm.
The first day started well enough, although I couldn’t work out where to buy the parking permit I needed and ended up in the visitor hourly parking. Apparently it was quite amazing I found the building as most of the other staff had trouble working out where it was. This group was located in one of the main buildings last year but has been relegated to a small trailer sort of building due to the amount of noise from the machines being used.
The job mostly consists of checking booklets to make sure details are correct and that students haven’t marked in inappropriate areas on any pages. Then the spines of the booklets are cut off and the pages are scanned into the computer system. These three tasks appear to be what I will be doing for the next several weeks. I spent three of my four starting hours doing the cutting using some fancy machine. It works fairly well but there’s a lot of fixing up the stacks of booklets and then simultaneously pushing buttons to do the cut. Even after the first hour my thumbs were getting sore. The last hour I was able to move into another room and do the starting work on another batch of booklets. By this time, there were only two of us there as almost everyone had started early in the morning and departed not long after I arrived. This might have been an advantage because it was quite warm on Friday and the trailer was rather warm despite the ceiling fans. I hope there is an air conditioning system when it really gets warm next month.
Anyway, I was able to stop at one of my favorite grocery stores after I left and find all sorts of delights. This made the half hour drive home a bit more bearable. My next work day is Tuesday and I plan to wear more comfortable clothes in case I end up standing for long periods again.
-
Work
It’s funny where the people you meet will lead you. The lady we bought the pups from has been in semi-regular contact and called me earlier in the week about working on a project for six weeks at a local university. It’s all administrative work that involves scanning test papers for a local private education organisation. As I’ve been out of the paid work force for many years, it will be good to get a bit of work experience behind me again. I also look forward to contributing ever so slightly to household expenses. I suspect most of what I earn this time will end up paying off the massive number of expenses for our puppies, who are easily draining our bank account of funds at the moment.
-
Family additions
This month has been rather hectic due to some additions to our family. At the beginning of the month, we adopted a puppy that we call Maromi (or Darwin, according to Lego Lover) and there hasn’t been a dull moment since. Two weeks later, it happened that one of the litter mates was back and available to adopt so we brought her home. She has been dubbed Fluttershy. Naming privileges went to Game Fanatic, who has been wanting a dog for many years but couldn’t have one. The reason we have a cat is Lego Lover used to be deathly afraid of dogs so we chose a cat instead. While I’d not go so far to say he likes dogs, he’s not so afraid of them now. He’s more afraid of the damage they might do to his Lego though.
Obviously it was a bit of madness to take on a second puppy, considering how much work a single one is. But I think the extra work in the short term will be worth it in the long term. We’ve found there have been some positives such as companionship and play. On the other hand, training has been a bit more difficult with two puppies running amok. And one of them can easily get the other into mischief, as evidenced this morning when the Scientist came out to find they had ripped up a strip of our cheap and worn carpet in the room where they are penned.
Tonight we went to puppy pre-school and I must admit that it was quite exhausting. After almost two weeks of relatively mild winter weather, the rain returned this afternoon, right around peak hour traffic time. We took the boys with us but it became obvious they weren’t going to cope with the number of people and/or puppies, depending on the particular child. They both ended up waiting it out in the car and won’t be coming with us next week. It was quite a bit of madness with what turned out to be eight puppies at the end. But it was a lot of fun and we ended up learning a few things we didn’t know beforehand.
-
Focus groups
As part of some research, I was invited to take part in a focus group tonight. This isn’t my first experience of a focus group. I was involved with another focus group a few years ago which revolved around quality of services provided to school-aged children with special needs, be they physical, social or mental health related. Lego Lover has received services from this provider in the past and my input was requested to help improve their services. There must have been about fifteen people on that occasion but it all worked out well and I was able to voice my opinions on a number of issues quite comfortably. The moderator must have been quite good as everyone seemed to have a chance to speak up on several different topics. Sadly, this organization spent a lot of time and money doing numerous focus groups and paying participants but didn’t really make very many effective changes to the organization.
Tonight, however, the group didn’t feel so comfortable There were only nine of what I think should have been ten participants in attendance. But two or three seemed to dominate the discussion throughout. A few attempts were made by the moderator to include others but it was the squeakiest wheels that got most of the attention. I did manage to get a few words in on a couple of occasions but didn’t feel I made as much of a contribution this time. It’s interesting how differently both of these groups were run.
It was also interesting to note that most of those in attendance seemed to have vastly different attitudes to the subject than I did. I sometimes find it comes as a shock that what I think is a natural way of thinking isn’t the opinion of the general populace. We were given a chance to view some online content and provide input on website design and content during the last half hour and I found that the most interesting part of the session.
For my almost two hours of attendance, i was paid the rather generous sum of sixty dollars. It’s possible I may be asked to take part in additional research but i am doubtful that I will be compensated as well as this time if at all.
-
Too hot
The only food plants currently growing in our garden are chillies (chilli peppers), oregano and a small bit of rainbow chard that survived the long hot summer. I had a habañero plant that survived last winter but didn’t start fruiting until late autumn. There are now plenty of fruit available for picking. I hadn’t harvested any fruit until today when I was gathering chillies to add to a black bean soup I was preparing. I only picked four and the rest were mostly jalapeños and a couple of the small Thai chillies.
The habañeros went in whole so we could pick them out instead of biting into them. Last year, this worked quite well and it provided a moderate amount of heat for the dish. But I don’t think they were particularly potent last year. It would seem they have gained a lot of heat since then because they were incredibly hot this time. I had one bowl of soup with some corn chips and Greek yoghurt (instead of sour cream) and I was fine even though it was rather hot. Then I went to get a bit more and added more chips and yoghurt. The second or third bite, I got a bit of the habañero and it slowly built up to a very painful experience. I grabbed a big chunk of crusty bread to try to cool my tongue but it only seemed to irritate for the first several minutes  and then settled down a bit. I tried to eat more and it seems it had spread throughout the soup. The Scientist brought some butter to add to the bread this time and that seemed to be a bit more soothing. When i had partially recovered, I simply couldn’t eat any more and abandoned my food.
This is the first time this has ever happened to me. I have made stews and soups that were really hot. One other black bean soup was probably just a bit too hot to enjoy it properly but I carried on eating until I finished. This time was much beyond enjoyment and my body is still feeling a bit traumatized. If I use more habañeros, I think I’ll have to use just one or two in the future, if I am brave enough to risk it next time.
-
Odds and ends
I’ve been to the airport twice in two days now. Yesterday we saw the Scientist’s mum off to Sri Lanka until next month at the international terminal. Today I picked up a friend from the domestic terminal. I find it interesting how rarely I’ve been to the domestic terminal in seventeen years here. I’m fairly certain that today aside, I’ve only been there when I’ve been flying. Also interesting is that I’ve never departed from the international terminal. We once did arrive back in Australia when returning from almost a year in Canada.
I was feeling pretty sore today after a rather overzealous exercise routine yesterday. It was the sort of exercise that sets me up for injury. Today I opted to go out for a walk in the afternoon. But I procrastinated so long I thought it would be dark before I got myself moving, which might have meant I didn’t exercise at all today. But I did get my feet moving in front of each other and started walking around 4:30, leaving about half an hour before sunset. I found it was quite chilly from strong winds as I began my meanderings but it was much calmer once I moved onto main roads where there is no wind tunnel effect happening.
I recently cleared out my 16gb mp3 player and added all the music I could think of, which has amounted to over 1300 songs from 50+ albums. I took this out with me as I walked today and had the music on shuffle, which provided a nice mix of songs while a walked. It’s always good to hear songs that I normally wouldn’t purposely play. Some of the fun was working out who was singing and/or which album the song was from.
I ended up abandoning my personal photo challenge project last month. I just couldn’t keep up the pace in the end and I lost momentum. I prepared quite a few photos to upload to Flickr and added tags, titles and other details to the photos. I pressed upload and promptly closed the program out before anything was actually uploaded So all the details were lost. Strangely I wasn’t as upset as I might expect to be at this mistake. I’d spent well over an hour on preparations for uploads and it was rather late at night. Maybe I was just too tired to be bothered about it. Unfortunately, I haven’t felt motivated to start over again since then. And now I have even more photos to add to the mix.
My computer finally gasped its last breath a couple weeks ago. There had been issues occurring for several months and we couldn’t work out the reasons. It was still mostly functional but often would reboot itself during the startup process. And occasionally I’d get a blue screen. More recently, the blue screen became a constant with every start up and we knew the end was near. One day, it just refused to start up so my system had an operation to replace the motherboard, and associated components that were incompatible with the new one. The Scientist went straight to work on it after completing a grueling day of his paid work. And I am very thankful for his effort as I have an almost new system now. And it wasn’t quite as expensive as we might have expected.
I still haven’t posted about our concert experience from late April but will finish it up soon and post it. It’s been mostly complete for a while but I wanted to add a couple things and just haven’t. I’d probably have given up on it except that I have already spent heaps of time on writing and editing it.
I think there were other odds and ends but I have forgotten. I have a post on family that I want to write in the next day or so with some happy news and some not so happy news but I want that to be separate.
-
Anniversaries
It occurred to me just now that the Scientist and I have known each other for over a quarter of a century. When we met, I wasn’t even that old and wouldn’t have fathomed knowing anyone for that long. Wow!
So it shouldn’t really come as such a surprise that we’ve been married (as of Sunday) eighteen years. I remember it was a gorgeous, sunny day with deep blue sky. And I remember passing by Saturday grocery shoppers as we arrived at the “church”, which was temporarily located in the shopping center while a building was being constructed. The ceremony itself is a bit of a blur in my memory, although remnants of a talk about the Velveteen Rabbit stick in my mind a bit. There was a reception at a small country club (ironically, the temporary home of another church our family attended before it was built). I remember a Glenn Miller song or two playing and my a speech that which sounded a bit alien from rather quiet father. Then we were at my parents’ house, being waved off by family and friends as we left for a honeymoon in my car, which was covered with writing in chalk (I think) which left its slight mark long after the message was gone. After driving three hours, we arrived at our bed and breakfast in Asheville and were rather impressed by the grandeur of our accommodation for the next couple of nights. Just the two of us for the next couple of days relaxing and enjoying each others’ company. And before we knew it, our brief honeymoon was over and we were headed back. All the excitement was over in a relative flash.
We celebrated this year by another Fremantle visit with lunch at the Mexican Kitchen. We’d never been there before although it has been calling out for us as many years as I can remember. Lunch was delicious, with the food being pretty close to what I associate with Mexican food back home. I had a  Mexi-plate with a taco, enchilada and flauta while the Scientist enjoyed a burrito. Dessert was pretty underwhelming, with a flan listed on the menu that didn’t seem to exist and a “Mexican mud cake” that was just a chocolate cake with some nice vanilla ice cream. We followed with a visit to the chocolateria where I think I reached my chocolate limit. No disappointment in my churros or the Scientist’s black forest trifle. All yummy! A long walk back to the car helped work off a tiny fraction of the calories and we were on our way home again. It’s very nice that the boys have reached an age where we can leave them home and go out alone. A freedom that I know I never appreciated until it was gone for several years and then regained.
Anyway, I am quite thankful for all the memories the Scientist and I have had together, in the eighteen years and for the many years before. Happy Anniversary to my dear Scientist!