At long last, a new post!

Some days I feel I could write something every day but then the next day comes and I find it hard to write anything. I guess I’ve had quite a few days like that over the past month.

Life has gotten a bit busy recently. Last week I started a temporary/casual part-time job at a local university. It’s the same job I’ve done the past two years so it’s not really anything new, aside from some of the people involved. I’m working eighteen hours a week over three weekdays, which leave two days for other activities during the week. This work will only last a few weeks at most.

My other, less formal job has also had some changes. I was working casually for the disability services commission as a carer for a family friend for two to three hours a week. I’ve been doing it for about eight or nine years so it’s old hat to me. But the carer hours are now being handled by another organisation and my work will be more formalised. This means I have to have a police clearance and I have to fill out an employment application as if I were totally new to the job. Once it’s sorted out, I will be getting a small increase in pay with an official decrease in hours to just two per week. Also, the funds will be deposited directly to my bank account, which means there’s no chance of my charge taking the money and spending it elsewhere before I get there (as has happened a few times in the past).

I finished up two of the Coursera classes I started last month. The Science of Gastronomy was both easy and enjoyable. The worst part was getting through the lectures on video, which sometimes ran a bit longer than was really needed. One of the last assignments involved making sauces using varying amounts of salt and corn starch plus water and a flavoring. Curry powder was recommended but we didn’t have enough powder on hand. I used cumin powder instead, which was a mistake as it was not very nice on its own. There were six different solutions and our task was to work out which one had the most intense flavor in it and it was interesting to note the effects of the amounts of corn starch and salt on each mixture.

The Maps and Geospatial Revolution class was far more interesting than I ever expected it to be. The instructor was engaging and did fairly short lectures plus weekly mapping assignments. We had a final assignment that we had to submit for peer review  which involved making a map that tells some sort of story using online tools. I decided to make a story map of the photos I took when I went into Perth one day last month while my car was being serviced. I liked doing most of the assignment but had some technical difficulties with saving content as it would disappear from the page afterwards. I never worked that one out but found a work-around by changing the blurbs on my Flickr photos so that text would import and I didn’t have to do anything further in the web application. I wasn’t able to fix the titles of the photos used, though, so had to leave them with the numbering the application gave. It looked kind of strange but it was the best I could do within the limited time available. There was also a final exam I completed last night and managed to get 45+ out of 50 points on it…which was pretty good except I missed one that I should have gotten right.

I’m still enrolled in a Modern and Postmodern class which mainly is focused on philosphers in the modern and post modern eras. I really like the subject but got rather far behind while finishing up the other two classes and didn’t do the first essay assignment. I decided I would just audit this time and try to do the class again when it’s offered. At the moment, I’m toying with the idea of dropping it for now as I have other classes starting up soon and not enough time for all of it.

I am still going to the gym most days but it’s probably more like five days a week than the six I was doing when I started out. Even at the beginning I had no illusions that I’d be able to stick to a six day schedule and had the goal of going at least three or four days a week . I did manage to stick to that schedule for most of the first ten months but have slipped a bit over the last six weeks or so. My current favorite exercise routines are the fusion video classes that combine yoga and pilates. Mostly it’s been yoga and a very tiny bit of pilates if any. At least in the classes I’ve tried. There is a class that is all pilates but I haven’t tried it yet. I haven’t done much yoga in about ten years when I last took a class. I had taken a class of the Kripalu yoga style while in Halifax, NS while we lived there for a year and when I came home there wasn’t a class nearby that interested me. The classes at the gym are rather fitness oriented so tend to focus a lot on the exercise for exercise sake. But I’ve found I’m really enjoying the yoga parts so try to do at least part of a yoga class after my other exercise each day. All of the classes seem to do quite a bit of the plank poses which would have been really challenging for me in the past but are now getting easier for me.

All the yoga workouts have interested me in doing a proper yoga class again. And it just happens that there is a yoga class that runs before our tai chi class on Tuesdays.  I’ve signed up for a short beginner series as a refresher then may try out the regular classes that finish just before our tai chi class. Hopefully this will leave me quite relaxed on Tuesday nights. :D

Meanwhile I am now donating plasma on a two-weekly basis, mostly on a Tuesday…making for rather busy Tuesdays on alternating weeks lately.