12!

I'd actually forgotten what feeling healthy was like. Until this morning.

Yesterday I worked 9 hours, busy the whole time (finally!) and really enjoying myself. Got home at 6.30, spent the evening re-watching Arrested Development (still as awesome as the first time I saw it) and ended up asleep just before midnight, content with a positive day, although unsure how the unaccustomed working would affect me, tiredness-wise.

This morning I woke at 5.45, remembering I needed to send an email to one of my new staff telling him what I want him working on next. So I got up at 6.30, briefly connected to the work network to fire off the email while I ate my breakfast, then headed out for an 80 minute walk (my stepping stones still being flooded over). I got home feeling full of energy and also finding that my latest shipment of DVDs are ready for me to collect from the post office, 2.5 weeks early.

Rainy days...

My walking had been going really well this month, thanks to my fancy graph motivating me. I've already walked 11 times, beating all of June and only 3 walks away from my 2nd best month ever. Sadly, the forecast is for rain all week, which may hurt my plans. We'll see.

In related health news, I weighed myself on Saturday (for the first time since May) finding that I'm down to 95 kg, the first time I've dropped under 96 since I became a Shenanigan in 2001. So even though I've been eating a lot, including tasty assorted cream biscuits, Milo, and a huge huge serve of chicken omelette from OK Corral, my very moderate exercise is still making progress. My buzzwords of moderation and maintainability in my diet are paying off!

Great day

It didn't start too promisingly, but rather than dwell on that I thought I'd list out some of the awesomeness that was my afternoon:

• Watching Pirates 2 with my sisters. The movie had some excellent moments, although pacing was a bit too slow. Hard to live up to expectations after the fun of the first, though.
• Coffee with Liv, hitting some of the deeper discussion topics that I rarely venture into with others.
• OK Corral dinner with B, sharing the Arrested Development love..
• Plus, the cherry on top of this Wednesday sundae, my Belco connecting bus was 5 minutes late, just enough to allow me to make it and avoid a 30 minute interchange wait. So now I'm home and very happy! Hurrah!

More music

Gotta love Cash 'em in - thanks to them (and $150) I have a stack of new CDs

[Music] Will Smith

A new music journal post, espousing how much I like the Fresh Prince's work.

Music for the masses

Because trying to post stuff on 3 different blogs isn't quite enough for me, I decided to make use of my last.fm journal to record my entire CD collection.

Posting to my journal has the convenience of linking (almost) automatically to artist pages which give anyone interested in following the links more info.

Much like my DVD collection, I hope there are surprises in my music choices, as well as a healthy slab of obvious choices.

One less app

I've been using SharpReader to monitor my RSS feeds for as long as I've been blogging, largely for its simplicity. I've tried several replacements and always gone back to basics. But the latest (0.7.1) release of Flock has finally given me a reason to change.

As the screen shot below shows, I can group my various feeds and get a summary of the latest stuff on a single page. I can check the content of any of these groups in more detail, or drill down to an individual feed, very easily. And I don't have to leave the convenience of a Firefox-based browser. Its one down side is that it checks for feed updates every half hour, and there's no way to change the setting. Not a problem for me with a 12GB quota, but very irresponsible as feed monitoring goes.

Add to that integrated blogging, and Flickr photo posting, and I'm a convert. The blog post tool isn't nearly as powerful as w.bloggar, but for most of my purposes it does the job, and even saves a local copy of each post automatically.

More walking

Because I know everyone loves charts, here's a graphical representation of my steady decline in walking since I started back in March. If there's one thing which will kick my lazy butt into gear it's looking at some lines...

[TV] Battlestar Galactica 1.0

Another late-on-the-bandwagon moment for me, yesterday I watched the entire first season of (the new) Battlestar Galactica.

Luckily, it was as excellent as everyone had been telling me (I would hardly have been able to watch 13 episodes straight otherwise). The special effects had the same "reality" used to great effect in Firefly (one of the many things I loved about that show). The conflict within and between characters was always interesting and in the last few episodes I felt there was more confidence in using humour, introducing a few little looks and key pauses to let the comedy come through as a counterpoint to the life or death struggle against the Cylons.

Katee Sackhoff keeps the "Starbuck" character thoroughly enjoyable, adding complexity to the fun stereotype which Dirk Benedict first brought to life. Actually, I think the whole show is evidence of taking what was good about the original series and giving it extra layers. More tension between father and son Adama, less cartoonish villainy in Baltar and more down to earth treatment of the mythic elements of the story.

Season 2 comes out on DVD in Australia August 16 (before the full set is available in the US, surprisingly), so I know what else is on the shopping list.

[TV] Scrubs

Having now watched the first 2 seasons, I can't believe it took me so long to catch on to Scrubs. The writing and performances are perfect and the pacing spot-on. The craziness of the lifestyle being portrayed and the pervasive fantasy scenes are balanced extremely well with touching moments, grounding the characters just enough without cutting back on the almost non-stop laughs.

Like most of my current favourite comedies, this is sans-laugh-track, giving me the freedom to laugh when I feel it's warranted, rather than being frustrated at the strange laugh timing of an artificial audience. When watching How I Met Your Mother and My Name Is Earl on Thursday night, I noticed very clearly how resistant I was to finding the first funny, due to major canned-laugh overuse, while Earl was immediately enjoyable.

P.S. Thanks to Kev for the Scrubs recommendation, saying "I reckon it is awesome" rather than "You have to see this show", thus allowing me to actually enjoy it, and to S-Club for lending me the DVDs.

Every which way

I had a whole lot of blogging planned when I got home from my walk last Sunday afternoon, but real life took over.

After spending all week trying (and failing) to recover from a persistent cold, I had to miss out on farewell drinks for a Melbourne-bound friend on Saturday night. Still not feeling much better Sunday morning, I forced myself ready for my grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary celebration. I was so glad I did. After they renewed their vows in front of three generations of family in a simple, touching ceremony, we all headed out for a leisurely, laugh-filled lunch.

Since I'd eaten way too much banquet, I left for a walk as soon as I got home, and on the way ran into a friend I hadn't seen for 3 years, who (I found out) only lives 15 minutes walk away. After a quick catch up, I returned to my walk, feeling really positive and upbeat and looking forward to finally starting in my team leader role on Monday. That cheer was cut short when I returned home to the news that my grandmother had been rushed to hospital, having suffered a stroke. Less than two days later, she passed away in her sleep.

I've been spoilt in my life so far, rarely having to deal with the grief of losing loved ones. To be honest it still doesn't seem quite real that Nanna is gone. I can easily picture her smile, and recall the feeling I always got when seeing her that I had made her day brighter by simply being around.

I'm at a loss for more words.