Birthday Recap

Today is Father's Day here in Oz, so I decided that it was easier to do most of my birthday celebrating last night and avoid conflicting with the Father's Day plans of most of my pals. So last night I had dinner with a bunch of friends, including cyber pal turned real-life friend Bodhi, at my favourite Thai restaurant Thai Pothong. Good food was had, lots of laughs and conversation, and I scored some lovely gifts (although lets not tell the Naturopath, Doctor or any future Cardiologist about the big sampler of deluxe soft cheeses I received, 'mkay!). Bodhi came back to hang out after dinner and we sat up talking until until the early hours.

I had a lazy start to the morning this morning, lying in bed drinking coffee and reading. Back in January I posted an entry about my visit to Canberra to see the excellent Vivienne Westwood Restrospective at the National Gallery, well my sweet friend Judy (who also went to the exhibition) bought me the fabulous book that accompanied the exhibition as a birthday gift. Nice way to spend a cool and rainy birthday morning, just me and Viv.

Late morning I met up with Bodhi again and we headed to Bondi Junction for A Shopping Outreach at the new Westfield Bondi Junction. I have to say that I was quite impressed, I was expecting a big shopping centre, which it certainly is, but the design of the centre and the stores, and the mix of retailers which favours the higher end, was a pleasant surprise. I did some Retail Therapy and birthday-treated myself to a very cute black straw pork pie hat, some favourite lemon verbena scented soap and a DVD of The Name Of The Rose. Bodhi and I had lots of laughs and headed home around sunset after having a Good Day.

It was an enjoyably low-key(ish) birthday with lots of friendship and laughs, just what I was hoping for.

Order

This week's Photo Friday theme is Order.


Darling Harbour park, Sydney. January, 2005.

I took this picture last Summer when I was down at Darling Harbour working as a volunteer at a Buddhist festival. These kids were having so much fun and had made up a game where they were racing backwards and forwards across this fountain, always in order. They were going so fast and some of the stones were quite wet, so my heart was in my mouth a few times, but nobody fell and I'm sure the risk just added to their excitement.

A Humbling Experience

Yesterday turned out to be a doubleplusungood shitstorm of a day. On top of dragging my sorry ass into work still feeling sick, part way through the day my boss uncovered a mistake of monumental proportions. A mistake which I, though not having actually caused directly, was at least complicit in allowing to happen and should have picked up and prevented in time. It was fixed by day end, but it'll cost my company enough money that it'll wipe the profit from that particular client for the rest of the year. It was a new part of my job role that I hadn't really been shown how to do properly, just drip fed information, so all agreed that it really wasn't my fault per se, but the shine of Golden Haired Boy and Number One Favoured Son has been tarnished somewhat.

I spent much of the afternoon working to minimise the damage and ended up leaving work around 6.30pm, but on the up-side my boss finally sat down with me and stepped me through all the procedures I needed to do for the client. Stepped me through very carefully that is, like I was the slow reader in the class. Oh well. In fairness my employers were quite reasoned about it and chalked it up to experience, so things could have been a lot worse than they ended up. Birthday lunch got canned, in part because one of the other staff has taken a few days off as bereavement leave because her Grandfather passed away. So we rescheduled for next week.

Like my buddy Michael on the other side of the planet, today is Haircut Day. I heart Haircut Day! Then tonight I'm off to dinner at a favourite restaurant with a small group of friends to celebrate turning 41 on Sunday. Should be low key compared to Birthday Extravaganzas of the past, but that's just what I felt like this year.

Pretty Pictures

Time for a little round up of some new photoblogs I've discovered, and one old friend I've rediscovered:

• Sidney Snoeck is a Belgian engineer living in the Philippines, who posts lots of pictures of life in Manila at his blog My SariSari Store. I find his huge collection of shots of people sleeping amusing, and oddly unsettling. [Site is very picture intensive and can be slow to load.]
  
• Miles is from Toronto, Canada and his photoblog may be called Mute, but his pictures speak for themselves.
  
• Robert hails from North Carolina in the US and posts great pics on his (curiously named) blog Border Trench Safaris.
  
• Zishaan is one of my favourite Indian photobloggers, and his site Point & Shoot is an inspiration. I'm glad to see he's back posting after a bit of a mid-year hiatus.

Not On My Wish List

I got an early birthday present from the Universe, a virus of my very own! Ack.

I woke up yesterday with a bit of a headache, a bit of a sore throat and feeling generally a bit off colour, so I took the Great Aussie Tradition of the 'sickie' and took yesterday off. It was sort of 40% feeling crap(ish) and 60% wanting to have a Mental Health Day.

Turns out it was the precursor of feeling yet more crap. So I've taken today off and stretched out ahead of me is a day of reading people on The Internets who are more entertaining than I find myself right now, Oprah, and possibly a leave-in treatment and a home mani-ped.

I have to go to work tomorrow though, because work is throwing me a birthday lunch and aside from hello, free lunch! it would be bad manners right? I had a huge 40 Extravaganza last year, but this year we're stylin' it low key. My birthday is on Sunday and coincides with Father's Day, so lots of friends have familial commitments anyhoo. I'll probably do something on Saturday night, but as yet I still haven't made any plans. Don't be looking for me on Boys Gone Wild this year.

[This post is kind of the Tipping Point for this blog becoming "The Other Andrew: More Fun With Weight Loss and Medical Maladies!" but stay with me, like your mother hoped - it's just a phase.]

Here There Be Dragons

Stone dragon, Chinese Garden of Friendship. Darling Harbour, Sydney, July 2005.

I'm not a big believer in astrology, I find most of it pretty general and non-specific, and although I keep an open mind about it, I have never found that the descriptions of Virgos ring all that true to me. Yet I find that the descriptions of my 'star sign' in Chinese astrology seems to be quite a bit closer to the mark (and generally a lot more flattering than the usual 'neat freak, nit picky, blah blah' Virgos usually get!).

I am a Wood Dragon:

"Dragon people are the most eccentric in the Chinese Zodiac. Soaring high into the serene heavens, they can be stubborn, passionate, excitable, honest, and brave, wear purple and walk barefoot in public fountains. They listen to their own drummer, thank you very much, while the rest of the world stands in amazement. People always admire their individuality and feisty personality. Dragons are capable of doing great work for mankind and they inspire trust in almost everyone. The Dragon symbolizes life and growth and is said to bring the five blessings: harmony, virtue, riches, fulfillment and longevity.

Dragons are majestic creatures. These Dragons are the chivalrous knights and guardian angels of life, generous with their friendship, compassionate, even heroic, in their deeds. Showing great tolerance towards others, they move easily among all social strata and travel extensively, opening their minds to new things. Brave as matadors, their courageous lives are truly inspiring. Natural curiosity leads Wood Dragons to pursue very interesting career paths. The dichotomy is they are successful human beings but not all that successful in their careers, despite all the help they get from friends and mentors. Fortune comes to them anyway! Now, as you know, the chances of winning the lottery are pretty slim, but Wood Dragons just might do it. Rainy days or sunny, good fortune seems to shine on these money magnets, just like magic. The Wood Dragon is steady as a rock when it comes to Love & Relationships. They just don't believe in love at first sight. To them, love, relationships, and marriage follow a progressive course, evolving naturally and slowly out of friendship. Once the love bug catches them, their love is deep and passionate. The Wood Dragon partner is loving and supportive of the loved one's needs and love is never taken for granted."

Quote taken from this site.

It's nice to be a called a 'majestic creature', and anyway, it's not like I was going to post a picture of a virgin...

Doctor, Doctor, Gimme The News!

Just got back from seeing the doctor and getting the test results for the huge collection of tests I had done after my freakish blood pressure result. 90% good news! Blood pressure still high, cholesterol at the top end of normal and triglycerides (some sort of blood fat - ewww!) was waaaay high. All other results were normal, and he tested things I didn't even know could be tested.

Surprisingly, no mention of my Sanguinity...

I have three months to lose some weight before I get it all re-tested and book a check-up visit to the cardiologist. I lost 16kg about 4 years ago, and then put about half that back on after my car accident induced immobility a couple of years back. So I know I can do it. I just celebrated the good news with a fatty carbo-load of pasta, for tomorrow we diet!

From here on in, if I start posting endless diet entries, someone please shoot me. You have my permission.

I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head

Yesterday morning I woke up with the following going over, and over, and over in my head:

Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen,
pour myself a cup of ambition,
and yawn, and stretch, and try to come alive...

I am not making this up. It's been running through my head periodically since, but not incessantly like it was yesterday morning. I don't know what this says about the dreams I was having, but there are worse ways to wake up than having a bouncy Miss Dolly warbling '9 to 5' in your head.

On the topic of things sleep related [touches wood, strokes rabbit's foot and throws salt over shoulder] but my sleep 'issues' are getting better it would seem. Last night I slept right through the night, even though I did wake an hour and a half earlier than I needed to. Still, baby steps.

I'm Not Mad At You, I'm Mad At The Dirt.

A bunch of cancelled plans yesterday meant that I ended up with a whole unplanned Sunday stretching out before me. A sunny and warm Sunday. So I did the only grown up thing I could do, threw open the doors and windows, cranked up the music and cleaned like whirlwind.

Hundreds of loads of laundry later, a whole mess of things thrown away, a whole bunch of other things dusted/washed/waxed/aired out in the sun, and finally the inner voice I like to call 'Martha' was stilled. It was sort of like a day of home detention, only with music.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam...

I just went and deleted 11 SPAM comments from my last post, and it's happening more frequently, so I'm going to trial a Blogger feature to try and stop it. I just turned on the 'Word Verification' system in Blogger comments. If (when!) you go to comment Blogger will show a word on the screen that you have to type, sort of as a password.

I hope this isn't a pain in the arse, and please let me know if it is!

Ready For Spring

It's been a bit cool and grey in Sydney today, and I'm feeling that particular itch that you get when you're done with Winter and you just want it to be warmer already. People reading this is the Northern Hemisphere are probably rolling their eyes at the thought of a Sydney winter, it's true it doesn't get all that cold here by international standards, but when you live in a place that does warm weather really well, well you get a little spoilt.


August, 2005.

I took this pic just over a week ago, and I'm really very pleased with it. It's one of my favourite recent photos. This looks very dramatic and tropical, but in reality this bush grows out of the footpath a block away from my house. The combination of the early morning light, and exposure contrast with the background, has made this come out much better that I had hoped. I hope you like it.

On The Nightstand

Well, I finally plowed my way through the remainder of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". The verdict, it was my least favourite of the series so far although to be fair the last quarter of the novel did claw back some of my interest.

At the other end of the spectrum, I just bought Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomas and I can't put it down. I'm only a third of the way through it so far, but the creativity of the concept has me hooked. What would it be like if overnight everything you knew changed? If you were classified into one of four 'personality types' and sent to live with others deemed to be of the same 'type'? What would it be like to live in a nation divided?

Thomson never fully explains many of the logistics of his concept, but the main character's blind acceptance is an important part of the story. Thomson also uses the premise to play with ideas of totalitarianism, eugenics and human adaptability, but his straightforward writing style avoids the story being bogged down in abstract concepts.

Meanwhile he has me turning every page, eager to find out what happens.

Death Takes A Train

Sydney rail commuters have had their limits tested of late; major delays, cancellations, closures for track work and a myriad of other inconveniences. This morning my train pulled into the next stop after my starting station, where it sat for a few minutes, and then the guard announced that there would be a short delay as we waited for the signal ahead to clear. Nothing unusual.

A short while later the guard announced that there was a deceased person on a train a couple of stations ahead of us, and that there would be further delays heading into the city while emergency services dealt with the situation.

I found the reactions of many of my fellow commuters really disappointing and saddening. More than a few did the usual rolling of eyes, checking of watches and reaching for mobile phones that normally accompanies a delay announcement. Like it was a regular everday inconvenience.

It just struck me how horrible it is that we have become so walled up in our internal landscapes of self-talk, delusions, ego, petty angers and frustrations that a person could die and they get treated as an inconvenience. That person was someone's father, mother, sister, lover or friend. Also, what of the other passengers that were with that person in the train, as they died? What must that have been like to be beside someone and to perhaps have tried in vain to resucitate them, or to have just noticed that the person next to you was dead, or to have been so overcome with fear and self-doubt that you sat there not able to help?

I've been thinking about this person all morning, about the stranger on the train that is now no longer with us. I hope their death was painless and swift, and pray they have an auspicious rebirth.

I Heart Travel Blogs

While I'm chained to my office desk, working like a complete working thing, part of me is off dreaming of elsewhere. In this spirit, here are a couple of travel blogs I like:

• Mike Pugh's travels are long since over, but Vagabonding really set the benchmark in excellent travel blogs, and still has some great content.
  
• Konchok Ngodup is a young American Buddhist who is travelling through Tibet, China, and other parts far Eastern, learning to become a translator. His blog Sojourning Across The World chronicles his experiences and has plenty of interesting photos.

Apologies for the light content of the past couple of days, I keep telling myself that work will settle down enough soon for me to go back to my old web surfin' ways!

One

Isobel at her birthday picnic. Sunday 21st August, 2005.

Miss Isobel,
This week you are one year old. One! Who knew just 12 short months ago that you and I would be such friends!? In that time I've seen you learn to do so many things, but the new one, the hugging thing, that's my favourite.

I knew that I would probably like you, because your parents are good people and I figured the odds were stacked in your favour. I was kind of surprised that with one bat of those big brown eyes I turned into 100% Doting Big Gay Uncle. Oh, and the first time I saw you fix someone with an appraising look, I knew we'd get along just fine.

I'm glad you enjoyed your party, and I'm glad I'll get to see you have a lot more of them.

Love,
Uncle Andrew

[This week's Photo Friday theme is One.]

Recap-A-Rama

Today is another day of work frantic-ness so just a little update post on the weekend, including a recap on things medical:

• Friday was a birthday extravaganza for my friend Bodhi, which was a heap of fun. I was feeling a bit tired and off-colour, so wasn't exactly the life and soul of the party, but I had a good time. From the comments Bodhi left on my previous post he certainly had a good time!
  
• Saturday was a chilled out sort of day, I had slept really badly on Friday night so was looking forward to a quiet day and an early night. Unfortunately my next door neighbours had a party until the small hours of the morning, so a good night's sleep was elusive.
  
• Sunday was a gloriously mild day, and I headed to a local park for my God(less) daughter's first birthday picnic. It was a lovely afternoon of eating, playing with the various babies in attendance and seeing friends I hadn't seen for a while.
  
• This morning I went to see my new doctor (who I heart very much already) for a follow-up on my alarmingly high blood-pressure from last week. I had a better BP result (although still high, my diastolic measurement was down by 16 points) and he did a lung function and ECG test. Lung function was good and my ECG showed a small electronic anomoly at first glance, but nothing that looked to be outside the range of normal. I'm having a full set of blood and urine tests, and I have a feeling that I'll probably find I have a Cholesterol problem. I have another appointment next week to get results, but already I'm feeling a little less stressed about how things might be. My new doctor is really nice, and being similarly of the Munchkin persuation, when I climbed on the height/weight machine was stoked to find out that I'm shorter than he is. It's so easy to please some people.
  

Happy Birthday!

It's my friend Bodhi's 40th birthday today. If you have read this blog for a while then you will have heard Bodhi's name crop up quite frequently. He's a friend, a fellow Buddhist, an all round good egg and a blog commentor par excellence.

Go give him some loving. Happy Birthday!

Herbalism For Fun & Profit

Some insights and thoughts after my visit to the Naturopath about my sleep and chronic sinus problems:

• The herbal sleeping tablets (aka "The Great White Hope") he prescribed are, frankly, a disappointment. I'm still waking up in the middle of the night, but instead of the usual Bing! Wide Awake! there is a noticeable degree of grogginess. The jury is still out on whether this is an improvement.
  
• Horseradish, Garlic & Vitamin C tablets sound like they'd taste disgusting don't they? They do, not least of which because they're coated in aniseed. BLECH!
  
• Is it weird to fall in love with a nasal spray? My new saline and eucalyptus nasal spray combines almost the exact same degrees of life enhancing qualities and ick factor as some boyfriends.
  
• Major doses of vitamin B make me borderline speedy, I'm that cheap.

Wave The Flag

Blogger have just added a new feature, which I'm not sure I like. See up in the top right hand corner of the page there... go on, I'll wait... see the new FLAG? button. (PS. Why the question mark? Not sure if it's a flag or not?)

If you hit that, and please don't until you're off my site, it lodges the site as having 'Questionable Content' with Blogger. Now, when I played Blogger Roulette a while back I ended up on some weird sites, some I really didn't like, and a couple that were thinly disquised commercial 'blogs'... but I'm not sure I like the idea of people in effect labelling other people's blogs as 'questionable'.

Who administers this at Blogger? Who decides if the blog is bona fide 'questionable', and on what criteria? If you don't like gay people/haikus/Outback House/overuse of italics could you label my blog as 'questionable'? So many questions!

Perhaps this was prompted by hate blogs, or by people posting sexually explicit pictures without appropriate warning pages. Maybe there are instances when this could be genuinely handy, but right now the idea makes me uncomfortable.

Some New Reading

Because we all need more blogs in our lives, here's a couple of new Gay Boy Blogs I've stumbled across in the past couple of days:

• fourfour not only posts some of the funniest cat pics on the interweb, but he also does high-larious recaps of the new Whitney "Houston-we-have-a-problem" & Bobby Brown 'reality' show. [Link via Michael McHotterton at Pipedreams]
  
• Duane Moody; 26, cute, has a loving boyfriend, with whom he bought a home that they are renovating. I'd hate him if I didn't want to be him so bad.
  
• Angel Headed Hipster, who I'm prepared to love just for his domain name alone...

I'm always on the lookout for new reading, so if you have any recommendations hit me up in the comments.