Progress?

Well, I've successfully established a solid drawing routine again, after only sporadic efforts since last May. Around 25 hours in the past 10 days. Some of the results make an appearance on Flickr, but the rest are just steps along the way to better skillz. And all I had to do to make the time was impose a no-DVDs-before-noon rule on myself :)

Why such a rule? I just worked out that I've watched about 400 hours of DVDs across the past 4 months (27 TV seasons and 33 movies). If I actually had energy to do anything with that time other than watch DVDs, I'd feel like I was wasting my life away!

Annoyingly, my CFS continues to rebel against any attempts at physical activity. Even 15 minute walks are wrecking me right now, so I'm not even treading water fitness-wise (treading water being much too strenuous anyway...). Hopefully the stress-free environment of my April off will give me a chance to get some strength back.

Lost

Nice knowing you all, I'll see you in a month or so...

Reading

Just finished reading Juliet, Naked (the latest from Nick Hornby) and really enjoyed it. It was certainly a much easier read than some of the other books I've consumed recently, and I both laughed and thought while reading it, a happy combination. A very strong contrast in tone to Destination: Void by Frank Herbert, which was chock full of weighty discussion on consciousness and the process of constructing it mechanically in an AI. Also lighter than Great Expectations, which was good but hard to get into because of the archaic language. Luckily I had the South Park version at the back of my mind to ease the visualisation process ;)

Unjinx

Just to prove my hopefulness of yesterday didn't jinx a return to winter...



I'd been meaning to take an ironic shot of the New Macgregor "lake" for some time, but the recurring rain was starting to make it less ironic all the time. A few weeks back there was a single puddle, and now it's grown to this astonishing waterway:



And this reminds me why I love where I live, only a short stroll and totally isolated from even the small resemblance of Canberra to a city:

The start of something?

Hopefully winter is done with and I can get on with walking consistently, not complaining about my aching bones, and wearing shorts to work again!

Floriade

It's been ages since I've had anything worth posting, but a rare windless day and plenty of photos gives me something eventful to show. Plenty more here if you're interested.

In my own hands

The past week or so I've gained plenty of insight into the value of my regime the last year. I had obviously started to take my hard-won health somewhat for granted, and took a few liberties with my routine. The resulting key lessons:

1. three forkfuls of Indian food = 8 hours of severe stomach pain and several days of discomfort.
2. not going to bed at my usual time just once = getting slapped hard with fatigue for over a week.

Those may not sound like positive things, but what I've taken from them is the fact that my continued health is primarily determined by strict self-discipline. There are no miracle cures, or even perfectly effective drugs, for my chronic illnesses but by being a little careful, my quality of life remains high.

I still have some rebuilding to do from this latest slip, but luckily I excel at routine!

Will Wii or won't Wii?

After a few days of inactivity, where I vainly hoped walking weather wasn't gone for the season ('cause I actually like walking) I summoned up my chutzpah (no, not an appropriate use of the word) and jumped back on my exercise bike yesterday. My knees managed to cope with several whole minutes and then I let discretion be my guide.

This evening I managed to drag myself away from Buffy Season 6 (no mean feat after having settled comfortably into my recliner) and boot up my Wii Fit, only to have every one of my rechargeable batteries fail me. Un(OK, marginally)deterred, I got back on the bike and doubled my Sunday effort.

Will I still be able to use my legs tomorrow? Probably, it wasn't that strenuous... oh, sorry, was that supposed to be suspenseful? Nonetheless, I hope to be yoga/stretch/stepping away on my Wii platform tomorrow, because 'tlooks like winter is here to stay, and Hamish and Andy podcasts, awesome as they are, will only get me through so many stationary bike rides.

Every ACTION...

Here are the good things about Belconnen Interchange being shut down:

... um ... what about? ... um, no, not that ... hmmm ...

which is kinda outweighed by the zero shelter at my new bus stop down past the ATO.

That'll be good for both winter and summer!

OK, I will enjoy not being force-fed bad jazz via awful speakers, but I doubt getting blasted by wind and/or rain and/or sun for the next 18 months is a suitable tradeoff.

Peoplin' it

This blog has been extremely quiet as a result of me feeling I have nothing new to say. I doubt anyone's keenly feeling the loss of my aimless complaining, and through judicious use of Twitter I'm ensuring those who use this blog as evidence of my pulse don't have to fear my disappearance.

Some people can talk about their job, but mine is strongly people-based, rather than tech-focused, making it impossible to cover anything meaningfully without horrible invasions of others' privacy.

Even I'm sick of writing about walking (although I continue to enjoy the actual activity itself).

My drawings, the only real evidence I have that I do anything other than watch DVDs, has a home in my other blog.

If I find a need for an alternative outlet, this will be the place I return, but until that happens I expect it will be sparse reading here, at best.

Let me tell you ...

... what doesn't help you recover from a bout of fatigue. Being woken up at 1am by my old friend "severe stomach pain". Sitting up eventually helped ease it (that's good), but I couldn't lie down again for another 5 hours (that's bad). I got to sleep immediately after that (that's good), but woke up an hour later when my stomach cried out for its regular breakfast feed (that's both good and bad).

Is the fun over? Time will tell...

Lazy updates

Considering I never even update my Facebook status (because my life is filled with routine and enjoyable solitude), it hardly seems sensible to make use of another micro-blogging avenue like Twitter. However, I've now done exactly that and only time will tell whether the updates flow more regularly into the sidebar of this blog as a result. It certainly requires less thought from me than the infrequent paragraphs about my health which have adorned the pages thus far, so maybe you'll find out a little more about the much less that I do with my time :)

November rain

In contrast to the positivity of my last post, the past couple of weeks have been a health struggle. A week after my hospital visit, the kidney stone pain came back and hung around for a week, until it finally passed. I got a whole 3 days of relief and health before embarking on 4 days of gastro, starting Thu last week, meaning this morning is the first time for a week that I've finally been able to eat normal food.

Hopefully that's my quota of new illnesses for the year and December will be more pleasant!

How not to ...

... spend one's birthday.

I've had some sickly November 3rd's in the past, but this may be just my second where I spent the day in hospital (my first on my actual birth-day). I woke up to severe abdominal pain, distinct from the usual variants caused my GERD, and after trying all my usual remedies and only getting worse, headed in to Calvary for my 12-hour stay.

After tests, drips, morphine and lots of waiting, it luckily turned out to be no more than a kidney stone, which should take care of itself over the next few days. I somehow have to drink 5L of water each of the next few days, while also returning to my usual eating regime (after almost 24 hours with no food).

I'm pleased at how well my stomach has bounced back, even though a small bowl of cereal took me an hour to eat when I got home last night. Considering any digestive stability I have is the result of a finely-tuned eating schedule and prescription medication, messing with my routine often means a week or more of rebuilding my tolerance for food. Right now all I have is a nasty headache, and general fatigue, but have successfully eaten my normal breakfast.

It was also great to get home to many SMS and Facebook birthday wishes :) Here's to being 35!

Weekend

On Saturday I had an excellent time celebrating the wedding of Sid and Sarah. Since I don't generally post photos of people without a web presence, the evidence below is fairly lightweight...

The ceremony took place right by the Carillon:



Here I am enjoying the sun and my free balloon:



Between the wedding and reception, we all enjoyed a Hawks grand final win, Spuddy more than all of us:



Then, after much merriment, an entirely sober me was still smiling, long after my bedtime:

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Music, listening to

I upgraded to iTunes 8 earlier in the week, and it has two main new features:

(1) A grid view to let you navigate albums and artists by the pretty cover art. If you happen to listen to your music whole albums at a time rather than via playlists, the new grid view will be perfect for you. For me, it just gets in the way.
(2) The "Genius" music suggester which can create an automatic playlist from your own library, based on a selected track, as well as give you options for music you might like to buy from the iTunes store. The accuracy I've seen so far isn't bad, but the last thing I really need is more options for parting with cash.

One other thing I had a look at was Songbird, an open source iTunes-alike. If you want more customisability, and don't have an established addiction to the iTunes/iPod combo, this could easily be the option for you. It's designed to allow easy music discovery (either free or for purchase), and you can replace the often-gappy album art of iTunes with access to Last.FM (and presumably other sources) instead. It grabs data from an existing iTunes library easily, and plays even iTunes-store-purchased music quite happily. It doesn't include podcasts or movies (by default anyway) but these may well be  available add-ons, which would mean it can do anything I already use iTunes for. It recognised my iPod, but I wasn't game to risk synching from it, since some of my content wasn't visible, and could easily have disappeared.

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New playthings?

It'd been a while since I last tried out a new flavour of social network, so I splurged on a handful of online aggregators today, looking for something which compared favourably with Facebook for pulling together my various activities across blogging, music, photo and bookmarking sites. Sadly, nothing really succeeded.

Out of the multitude of available options, I had an initial play with the following: FriendFeed, Mugshot, SecondBrain, Youmeo, and SocialURL.

Of these, FriendFeed was really the only one to come close to what I was looking for, delivering a seamless RSS feed from 7 of the sites I use. Normally that would only be useful for someone-not-me, since I'm the one putting the content there in the first place, so an update to the feed shouldn't really surprise me. However, FriendFeed allows you to define "imaginary" friends, by specifying their public pages (e.g. blogs, Flickr, LibraryThing) and it turns that all into one big combined feed. To be honest, that's not immediately useful, since I already subscribe to a host of individual feeds giving me the same info, but if my PC dies or I'm away from home it would make getting updates much easier.

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Balance

More Wii news:

• I've had to adjust the Wii Fit exercises I was doing, as I've been suffering from a nasty aggravation of ankle tendonitis (something which was creeping upon me even pre-Wii). Easing off on some bits of yoga and hard stepping seems to be helping, and in the meantime my abs and back get the workout they sorely need.
• I've successfully survived an entire week of self-imposed Zelda ban, after averaging more than 5 hours a day seemed a bit extreme. Will I return to my virtual adventuring soon? Time will tell.
  

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Getting rid of the bother

I recommend having your phone offline for a couple of weeks (replacing it with VOIP), as it seems (for now) that after years of multiple telemarketer calls every single day, I have had not one in 2 weeks. My phone number remains the same, the persistent "hello... hello... is anyone there..." no longer cluttering my answering machine is a welcome change.

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Wii madness

I overdid the Wii fitness somewhat on the weekend, so have toned it back a little to avoid killing myself with activity. However, I've swapped that craziness for a solid 20 hours of Zelda playing over the past few days. Always my favourite title on the SNES and N64, Zelda has exceeded even my high expectations. Due to my lameness at game playing, I've barely scratched the surface of the game, so I have weeks more of obsession to get through before any closure-disappointment looms :)

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