Watched a bunch of films recently and not gotten around to reviewing any of them so I’m about to serial post about 7 reviews, sorry if they bore you, just skip over the next few posts.
Normal service (mindless vapid excuses for blog posts) will be resumed momentarily.
While we were on holiday I promised Grete we’d go to the zoo. We’ve been to Twycross a few times and we fancied a change. I don’t know if you’ve seen Zoo Days on the TV but it has Chester zoo and we’d thought we’d give that a shot, it’s only a couple of hours from here. We planned to go yesterday but the weather first thing was enough to put us off – however bright skies this morning had us heading over there at 9:20am.
Chester zoo is massive, there is no way you can see everything for any useful duration in one day. We walked from 11:30am until it closed at 4:30pm with a short break and saw about 60% of the enclosures, and a few of them for only a few minutes in passing. I am really impressed by the size and quality of those enclosures though. There is a lot of moving water at Chester, many of the enclosures have streams or waterfalls or some kind of moving water. Where possible they’ve used live plants and trees, for example the chimpanzee enclosure has a little wooded area in the middle and they were hanging out there away from the wind. I’m used to see lots of man-made structures and there were certainly some of those but it was nice to see the animals being able to use live vegetation.
We caught the sea lion talk, which I have to say was a little disappointing. I had visions of the keepers feeding both sea lions and making them wave to the crowd or collect rubbish or something, but instead they fed the male one (huge thing!) off to the side and got the young female out of the water a couple of times. The penguin talk was good though, with them throwing fish into the water and the penguins fighting off the seagulls who came to snack.
In some ways, it’s always going to be a little sad looking at a lion through a fence, instead of in the wild, but I just have to hope the zoo is doing some good in terms of conservation and breeding to make it worthwhile. A lady next to us said the lions must get so bored – but I’ve got two cats, and I’m pretty sure the lions are happy enough sleeping, eating and roaring at visitors who annoy them.
The food we grabbed at lunchtime was over priced, I know in advance it’s going to be over priced, but it doesn’t make it any less surprising. I just kept telling myself they use it to pay for the animals, and that if I was less lazy and more prepared we could have taken sandwiches. Overall the day out was quite expensive, but I think the animals make up for it. Chester’s huge and interesting and I just wish we’d had more time.
I want to be sarcastic about the nurse appointment today, but the nurse was really nice and friendly so it wouldn’t be fair. I knew I’d put weight on, she asked why, I said bacon cobs. We had a discussion about grilling bacon, not frying it, and I tried to let her know I’m not stupid, I’m actually reasonably intelligent, and while I know what I’m doing wrong with food it doesn’t mean I can change it. Finding food without any of the Unholy Trinity (fat, sugar, salt) that’s still worth eating isn’t that easy, so if I find something which keeps my sugars down, doesn’t put my blood pressure through the ceiling and has too much fat – well I’m sorry but I’m still going to eat it. My feet are still there, my pulse is still present in my feet and I can still feel the little plastic stick thing they push into your toes to prove you still have nerve endings. She was excited about revealing my blood sugar results until I pissed on her bonfire and told her I’d gotten them on Monday, she took it well. And oddly, my blood pressure was really good. ACE inhibitors do have a possitive effect on blood pressure but I’ve only taken two so it can’t be entirely down to those. Maybe being on holiday helps, but I really thought after the last few weeks at work (which were some of the worst in the last 2 years) that my blood pressure would be somewhere around the height of Everest. Just goes to show, you can never be totally sure how your body is behaving.
So, all-in-all an okay appointment, she really was nice even while she nagged me to eat less and lose weight. Can’t really argue with her, and she couldn’t really argue with my sugar results so we were pretty much just shrugging a lot.
The wood pile in the garden is even smaller again – got a saw yesterday and had a go at some of the bigger branches and then snipped some more of the smaller ones. Which means I’m getting perilously close to the worst bit – bagging it all up – I hate that bit.
And while I’m sure 99% of the world will think I’m being crazy – I’m really pleased at swapping out a dimmer light switch in the lounge for a regular old click on off switch, which means we can now use low energy bulbs in the lamp fitting, reducing electricity bills and bulb replacement costs. The trip switch worked perfectly, letting me swap the light switch without having to power the whole house down and other than having to get my fat fingers into a tiny space to screw the wires in it was okay. I’ll probably be fit to own a house by the time I’m 80 at this rate – so you know – we’re making progress. The actual box on the wall is really ugly, and I may try and replace the whole thing with a more streamline fitting, now that I’ve seen the inside I’ve got a better idea how much space there is to work with (none!).
Car goes in for MOT tomorrow – if that goes not too badly it’s going to turn into a fantastic week.
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.
Just checked my payslip for my yearly bonus – and after tax etc. it’s much more than I was expecting, so maybe we’ll be ending the day on a high – although there’s still 5 hours to go …
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.
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.
I was convinced I had either my eye checkup or my nurse appointment tomorrow – turns out I was wrong and have neither! Free day! I may try and get a GP phone appointment to get my blood sugar results before I go see the nurse.
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.
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.