Author Archives: tony

The Eyes have it

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Early start, 7:15 out of bed and 8am out of the house to get to the medical centre for my eye checkup.  I’d added 15 minutes contingency to the travel time in case traffic was bad, but it was ok so we were about 15 minutes early – which was ok because I want in as soon as I arrived essentially.

The eye drops sting, really sting.  On a pain scale of 1 to 10 it’s nothing like a real injury or actual pain, but at 8:45am it’s enough to ruin your whole day.  Twenty minutes later and the whole world looks like it’s made of White.  Photo’s done, I don’t get the results for four weeks or so, and even then I just get a vague ‘yeh ok’ or ‘hmm start worrying’.

The real good news for today (and this shows you how exciting today has been) is that we’ve found LED GU10 sized spot lights which fit into the kitchen sockets.  They have a 30,000 hour lifetime (vs the 1500 hours for the halogens) and are much lower energy.  We’ll need more than a couple to actually light the kitchen but I just got one pack initially, so we’ll be going back for some more.  This is really good news, it’ll reduce our electricity bill and hugely reduce the ongoing cost of bulbs, plus it means in the short to medium term I don’t have to replace those fittings.  B&Q also do reflecting spotlights which we have in the bedroom, bathroom and hallway.  We tried getting low energy versions of those in the past but they didn’t fit, but the ones we saw look more promising, I need to take some samples in.

If we can replace the damn dimmer switch in the lounge, we can replace the candle bulbs with low energy ones too.

Anyway – CSI Vegas beckons.

Car is back

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Exhaust work done, sounds a lot better, and booked in for a service and MOT on Thursday.  Fingers crossed it comes out clean(ish) on the MOT.

Mixed bag!

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So mixed bag today.  Once I realised I didn’t have any appointments today, I thought I’d try and get a phone appointment to get my blood results.  Rang the surgery and asked for one, and they told me my doctor was working out of a different location today and I should call there – after it took me about 20 minutes to get through.  Still, I called the other surgery, and after another 15 minutes asked for a phone appointment – they don’t do them – but he could see me at 10:30.  So, I ended up with a visit to the GP today anyway.

The good news, from the blood test my kidney and cholesterol results are fine.  My liver results are ‘off’ but they’re always off and this time they’re off by less than they ever have been before.  My HbA1c test was 5.8.  That’s pretty good, and the biggest indicator of diabetes related health.  It could stand being a little lower, more like 5% maybe and I still need to make sure day-to-day control is maintained.

The bad news is that my urine test showed protein, which means although my kidney blood tests are ok, my kidneys are allowing protein through.  Essentially this is caused either by diabetes, or by high blood pressure or by both.  The treatment is ACE inhibitors, which means another daily tablet.  Yay me – see the NHS did get me something new for my birthday – a surprise!  I get to take them for a week and then have more blood tests so now I have another appointment next week to give more blood and then I’ll need another GP appointment 3-4 weeks after that to review the results.

In other bad news – the car needs a new rear silencer (it sounded really bad today), and the MOT is due next week (which we’d kind of forgotten).  I guess I know where the money I’ve managed to save is going this month.

But in other good news, Wickes sell mini-trip switches which are the exact right size for our old fashioned fuse box.  I bought one 5amp one (after being caught out recently buying low energy light bulbs in bulk only to find out they didn’t fit, I thought I’d start with one thing this time and expand if it was the right option) and it fits perfectly.  So hopefully if the Annoying Hallogen Light Bulbs from Hell in the kitchen trip the fuse it’s a quick switch flick to get things back online and no need to power down the entire fricking house.

So tomorrow eye test, Wednesday nurse appointment, sometime between then and next week, car in for MOT.

Then I’ll probably need a holiday to get over all this stuff.

Another glorious day in the core

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Fantastic bright spring morning today.  My hands don’t ache anywhere near as much as I feared they would after an hour of wood action yesterday, so that’s good.  I may get out if the weather holds and see how much more I can convert from branch to foot long stick.

Chopping wood

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I sat down earlier to play some Lord of the Rings, I thought maybe I’d try and catch up on some deeds.  If you’ve not played, each area has a number of different deeds which end up giving you titles or small improvements to your character.  Among those deeds there are kill deeds, both basic and advanced.  So you may have to kill say 100 goblins for the basic deed and get a title, and then another 250 for the advanced deed and a virtue reward (character improvement).  In some locations, the quests you do end up ensuring you kill plenty of the relevant creatures, so the deeds come naturally, but if you group with a few people or move through an area quickly you find you easily move on before the deeds are complete.  Even on your own, some deeds involve creatures that are small in number, hard to kill or just out of the way – so there’s always a reason to go back and do them.

But it’s tedious.  Killing 250 wargs, especially on low DPS characters, is not something that takes a few moments.  This is doubly true in areas where the creatures still give XP, since killing them is still an effort.  Not life or death perhaps, but you still need to take care and avoid too many at once.

So it was with all that in mind that I set off to Eregion to kill wargs, half-orcs, and assorted other creatures.   I didn’t have more than 60 kills in any of the deeds and they all needed 250 in total.  I think I had maybe 15 wolf kills out of the 250.  After about 20 minutes I realised if I was going to be doing something tedious that made my hands hurt, I may as well go into the garden and chop the wood that got left over from my pruning a couple of weekends ago.

And now I can’t make a fist with either hand.  Chopping, sawing, cutting and piling.  Probably got half, or maybe just over a third of the wood chopped into less than 1 foot sections.  Some went into our brown wheelie bin (collection on Thursday), but most is piled up in the grass next to the remaining huge pile still to be sorted.

Still it feels good to make some progress with it and we’ll see how my hands are tomorrow – I may try and get some more done.  Typical British spring weather out there – windy, sunny for 10 minutes, overcast for 10 minutes.  Constantly taking my coat off, putting my coat on, taking my coat off.  Enjoyable being out in the fresh air however – and it always amuses the cats when one of us is in the back garden.  They’re not really sure how to respond when we’re in their domain, so they tend to run around being scatty and amusing.

Bubbles spent 15 mintues sitting on the shed roof staring down at me – with a sort of ‘yes minion, chop the wood, clear my grassy playground’ look on her face.

Pizza!

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We bought pizza from tesco (along with a lot of other stuff) to cover us until Monday while Tracey is here so we don’t need to go shopping.

And then got pizza delivered instead.

It’s just that. much. better.

I think I just ate half the European jalapeño mountain.

Vay Kay Shon

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So, I’m off work for two weeks!  Other than being prodded by the NHS, no real plans.  It’s been a rough three weeks at work, covering a lot of call out, being the person in the office who gets asked all the questions you don’t want to get asked, but I survived, just.  It seems to be a common issue in March with lots of people taking holiday.  Last year was similar I remember.

It’ll take me a few days to get over it all and really relax.  The oddest thing happens first though – I get really down and pretty angry with the whole world, which is where I am today.  I’m lucky that Grete understands and doesn’t get too pissed off at me.

So a few days of this feeling and then I’ll be able to enjoy not being at work.

Got my letter this morning saying the blood test results are in, but doesn’t list what they are.  I may find out at the nurse appointment or I may need to ring the doctor.  I’m sort of hoping the bit where it said ‘this appointment is non-urgent’ means they don’t think my medication needs reviewing and hence the results are okay, but that may just be wishful thinking.

I really am not a nice person to be around when I’m in this kind of mood, I think Tracey may regret her choice of weekend for visiting.  Ah well.