Today’s Open thread is hosted by this otter, which looks like it’s about to sneeze.
Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?
Categories: Life
Soggy here, innit? 
In memoriam: Diana Rigg 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
100 books by women in 2016 
Hoyden About Town 
Read two excellent books this week – the final book in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, Maddaddam, and Neil Gaiman’s new book, The Ocean at the end of the Lane, which was one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read.
I have a cold *again*!
I was only just getting over the last one (which I’m pretty sure was actually swine-flu). This one is almost certainly just a cold (starting with sudden onset high fever and chills, now just mildly febrile and full of snot).
Hating this.
This winter has been particularly bad for illness amongst my friends. Some seem to have lurched from one illness to the next. Touch wood I have escaped serious illness so far, although I think a flu shot and handwashing every time I touch a tissue have helped. I suspect there was also a large element of luck too. Despite the kids sharing afterschool activities and school buses with students from other schools we seemed to have missed the gastro outbreaks that those schools had.
I’m feeling really pleased today with how my garden is coming along (I have a plot at my local community garden). My tomato plants, which I planted out a little early, are thriving, and will hopefully start producing fruit soon. I’ve got eggplant, chili, capsicum, asparagus, dwarf beans and corn in too, plus a variety of greens. I’ll just have to see how it all goes — no doubt some of those plants will fall victim to various insects and small mammals — but for now it looks good!
Hope you’re feeling better soon Tigtog. I got sick while on holiday and had to take an extra day off to lie in bed coughing. Much better save the phlegm.
The local writers festival is on this weekend but I missed the panel I wanted to go to due to work, so I’ve decided to miss the whole thing in favour of housework. Of course I am on the internet instead of doing laundry.
I hope you are feel better after a rest TT, both literally and from moderating stoushes. I hope the warmer weather brings longer stretches of robust good health and fun times in the sunshine.
tigtog, I’m sorry, that sucks!
After all the Huge Inflammation Count drama, my second blood reading was back to very low in the normal range – 7 instead of 75. But, because it has to keep things interesting, the enzyme thingies in my liver had doubled their reading. I’m getting an ultrasound done at the Alfred (free, yay) but I’m not really concerned, because the cough mixture I was on when the second test was done can mess around with blood tests.
I’ve also had an Advance Health Care Plan put in place. It was delightfully easy to do. I’d wondered about living wills and enduring medical power of attorney for a while, and assumed one had to get a lawyer to do them. Not a bit of it! Your GP can contact a hospital that organises them (the Alfred at Caulfield in this case). They arrange an appointment and email copies of the forms for you to look at. I filled the things in – it’s all questions about what sort of treatments you want or don’t want, about your values and feelings on the end of life, and so on. I had my appointment yesterday and should get the paperwork back to sign next week. This also sets the medical power of attorney in place. It’s SO much easier than I expected, and didn’t cost a cent.
On the home front: cats are zzzzing in front of the heater, so all’s well. I’ve got another knitting project in hand, a long jacket done on the same pattern as my brown tunic. It’ll put Joseph’s amazing technicolour dreamcoat to shame when it’s finished; I’m thinking of calling it the Mick Aston Memorial Jacket. This is the stage it’d reached on Thursday night; I’ve done a good bit more since, despite spending all day today tooling around on the internetz.
While we’re on medical stuffs, I had an oral glucose tolerance test today (apparently standard pregnancy care is moving away from doing a screening test first straight to diagnostic fasting tolerance tests) and if this is a regular thing in your life for any reason, well, that’s crap. I felt lousy for most of the day afterwards! Yuck. Nothing like having the equivalent of a 1.25L soft drink or more for breakfast on an empty stomach.
Otherwise, Sydney’s forecast wet weekend has fizzled, or brightened, which is unfortunate as we need the rain (I see that it’s been deferred until early in the week now). However, it’s good for exercising the insatiably active 3yo though, who may also have been in a weird mood due to waking up with me gone (to my gourmet glucose breakfast). Difficult day.
Ugh those things are awful. I have found that drinking the stuff cold is better than room temperature but still hurling the lot straight back up is always a danger. So glad that I now have iPod and Nook and stuff to do to keep me amused for 2hrs. Still don’t enjoy the hungry but nauseated feeling though.
I don’t think I had the option of a cold one, it was yanked from a cupboard and handed to me on the spot. I think in my previous pregnancy I was given the bottle in advance though. Will keep in mind for any future encounters!
Some seem to have lurched from one illness to the next.
Yup, that describes my past 6 months. 6 weeks to go until I hand in my honours thesis and I’ve barely started writing it. Motivation is zero and I’m not sure how to get it back. But on the up-side, everything in my life besides uni is beyond fantastic. Hope everyone is feeling better soon.
Today, in stark contrast to the last week or so, no one in the house threw up or otherwise showed signs of lurgi, my 11year old did not have an epic meltdown and we didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything. It was quite nice really.
TAK, all I’ve got is a couple of things from my PhD time:
(1) easy goals. Sit down and write 100 words or something. At the very least, you’re 100 words closer to finished.
(2) late in the process, someone said to me “pretend you were assigned a 150 page essay [it was a science faculty PhD] for some pointless course and it’s due tomorrow and you’ve just got to get it in in order to pass”. (Anti-perfectionism, I think.)
I haven’t had a sick year this year, but this time last year my husband and I couldn’t seem to stay out of hospital. It really sucked, I haven’t reduced it to any kind of sage life lesson yet! Best wishes to all affected.
From my keyboard to the gods ears, I was cleaning up vomit at 4am (not mine). That seems to have been the last of it so far but breakfast has not been consumed yet.
Big Ideas on ABC News 24 (which just happened to come on when I was working on my laptop last night) had a lecture by Tavi Gevinson on the value of fangirling, which I strongly appreciated (She talks about liking Harry Styles with reference to Sartre/de Beauvoir).
It’s available on iView if people want to watch a 40 minute talk by one of the smartest teenage girls around.
Six days in and I’ve done 100 rows on the jacket. I haz a pleased.
Can Cathy McGowan please be a Friday Hoyden? 🙂
Spring is slowly creeping into the nation’s capital, which my lurgy-infested body is quite pleased about. Now if I can actually get a few weekends at home, and to catch up with friends rather than crammed full to bursting with Things, all shall be grand.