Liresius' Fandom Journal

Wow, it's been 15 months since I posted! How are you all, my friends? Hope all is well with you.

I had a good year last year. From August, my son had some emotional issues to work through and he decided to give up drinking, so I did too, to support him, but also for my own well-being. In our numerous skype convos we got onto healthy diets and the end result is I have lost 23-4 kilos! I am so glad to have done this. I feel so much better physically and emotionally/mentally.

I cut out everything processed, basically. Kept it to fresh fruit and veges, my own cold-pressed vegetable juice, my own home-baked whole grain bread and sometimes some whole grains like brown rice or quinoa or meat with dinner. Smaller meals and I don't eat lunch usually - just an apple or my own juice (no time to sit and enjoy a meal anyway). I still have a bit of cheese and a couple of olives most days when I get home and some chocolate after dinner (favourite being 70% cacao).

I have also developed an addiction to good coffees - flavoured and one-origin coffees, so I'm having fun grinding my own beans and brewing up every morning. At the moment I'm trying out African coffees. This morning it was Burundi Kirimiro. The other day it was Tanzanian Peaberry and before that, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. All very tasty, though so far I like the Burundi coffee best.

I also increased my gym regime from just swimming 2 or 3 times a week to doing the machines as well, so I spend about 2 hours there 3-4 times a week. Feel so much more energy every day. It's great!

The down side of this of course is that nothing FITS! I have thrown out basically my whole wardrobe in dribs and drabs and have had to replace it. Not cheap, but I have discovered some great online sites for shopping in Japan, in the process!

I had a couple of visits during the summer last year. My friend Barb and her sister came over and I got to see Koya san with them. Mum came over a month after they left and we went to Takayama and Osaka. It really made the difference to my year seeing people I care about come visit me!

Seeing bluespirit_star's lovely Princess Buttercup costume (fabulous first attempt at sewing!), put me in mind of the Halloween costume I made last year - a generic Autumn Fairy Queen costume I took from concept to reality. Of course that corset and 3 or 4 others I have bought at various times in the past don't fit now, so I am wondering what to do about that. What a waste of money. Oh well!

I am also currently seeing the dentist a lot - he is taking out all the old (pre-japan) amalgam and (mid-japan) metal crowns. I told him I want white teeth! So that is an on-going project.

I have been watching quite a few shows of course - the usual suspects like the Big Bang Theory, but also House of Cards, The Blacklist, Wolf Hall, Bad Education, Modern Family, Outlander, Mr Selfridge, Happy Valley, The Fall, Hinterland, Shetland (I like the locales and accents of the latter two, not so much the police procedural, itself) and GoT, now that it has started again, even though I'm not so enamoured of it.

Anyway, again, I hope you are all doing fine and having a good year. Mine is busy and a bit stressful at work, but going well.

My Mac HD kept mysteriously filling up. At first I moved a lot of stuff to an external but it didn't stop! Yikes. I ended up trying various sudo commands but no joy. Then I stumbled on a Mac Support forum entry which recommended OmniDiskSweeper and I was able to nail it down to a Mail problem - Mail kept recovering an email of mine with a fairly large attachment of photos.

OmniDiskSweeper was brilliant for tracking it down and deleting it. Now it seems completely resolved and I have plenty of disk space left - more in fact, since I moved so much stuff in my early attempt to fix it! Yay!

I have had the flu but am recovering.

I just read rageprufrock's latest installment of The Least of All Possible Mistakes and am thoroughly enjoying her female George Lestrade, as well as all the other characters!

I feel like my life has been sucked into this job and nothing exists outside of it. I haven't swum in 6 weeks! Losing my train pass and gym card may have something to do with it *g* I just need to go there and tell them and fork out money for a new one!
I have been skimming the flist, but hardly have time to reply and since I got the new FF3.5, pages often just don't load so that has been off putting.

I have been doing a Darwin and Apollo missions marathon over the last week, collecting as much commemorative stuff as I happen to stumble across in radio and video. The latter has been a trip down memory lane. And interesting too for the new information that has come to light. Naturally I had to watch The Dish again, even if it's not accurate - the actual first step Armstrong took on the moon was relayed from the Honeysuckle Creek Station in Canberra. NASA switched to Parkes a bit later, when the winds at Parkes had died down - the picture was much better because "The Dish" was bigger.

*HUGS* to my dear flist!

I had a pretty quiet day today - It was nice though. This evening I went to see a play - All I Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten - a good performance and quite touching in places, although the message is a bit too direct (I prefer my deep and meaningsful meanings to be subtler!) and dare I say didactic in style. Script wasn't inspired, but I still enjoyed it. It made me laugh though and THAT is always a good thing! Then dinner with Y, a GF in which we discussed literary techniques - similes, metaphors and oxymorons and gossiped.

Special hugs and a huuuuge thank you to tarlanx for the balloons v-gift - Gosh, that's my first ever! *grins*

And the ever thoughtful bluespirit_star for a snippet of John's musings on Living with Rodney, which is just so lovely and just so what I might have wished for to see my b-day out, if I had thought about it! *huge hugs for you too*

Thank you sweeties!! *hugs all round*

I'm beat and off to bed, so will make answers in the morn!

ETA: Big hugs to zinfic, lavvyan, caffyolay and aqualegia for b'day wishes *hugs you all*

Oh! Oh! MORE virtual gifts! Yay! from aqualegia and berlinghoff79. They are so pretty! *hugs you both* but why do v-gifts expire in two weeks? I wanna keep them! LOL! Berlinghoff79, tells me something is in the making too! *rubs hands in anticipation* made me something! Look in the comments! *glee*

After work I went to the dentist, who was aghast at my story of fighting fever for two days without painkillers or antibiotics for the infection left after my tooth was pulled and my wild gesticulations demonstrating degrees of pain experienced and my utter bravery in the face of it. When I realised, Doh! I SHOULD have been given a script for some ABs, (I was too much in shock after the extraction to even think about it) I felt like either laughing or crying, so opted for laughing and hamming it up with the dentist and his nurse, whom I managed to get to laugh out loud at the image of hardy old me fighting infection and to a triumphant end with my salty water rinse magic cure! He had no idea about our western home remedy and thought it must have hurt a lot, but I disabused him of that notion! All this humour was helped of course by me further indicating by judicious pointing that I'd picked up the wrong planner (2008) this morning to stick in my bag and so hadn't even brought the communiques for him from the oral surgeon. The nurse was much quicker on the uptake on what I was trying to say there, by the way. Good for her, clever girl!

Still do feel a bit crappy though - I'm pretty sure the infection has not completely gone and when he had a look inside, he was even less pleased. He cleaned it with what looked like betadine and then gave me the ABs himself and insisted I take them. I didn't manage to convince him I'd won the war with the infection - only the first charge, I guess! LOL! Got home, checked all the papers and opened the doctor's mail (nosey me - well it's ABOUT me! and I can't even read it, so I hope he doesn't mind) to see if anything had prescription-y looking papers ... Nope! At least nothing I recognise, so not sure why the hospital sent me off without any.

Got home to an invitation and code from Dreamwidth. Set up the account proper, very quickly, then went out for dinner (Nachos) and met three lovely Americans and we had a roaringly good conversation. I do love meeting nice people like that when it happens. It's so nice sharing with people who have similar background knowledge and you don't have to explain things about Japan (even though I do enjoy that too, when anyone is interested). I just got home and darling bluespirit_star has also got DW to send me an invite code, so sweetie if you read this ... thank you so much, *HUMUNGOUS HUGS* but I don't need it now, I think. Not sure if you can re-use it for anyone else. If you can please do go ahead.

I'm beat! The whole dentist debacle has knocked me a bit, even though I kept it light at the time. I'm still not through the infection either, so I'm hitting the hay my dears! Have a lovely day where you are! Golden Week has started here. Yay for a whole week off. I'll be working from home though - so much to do for the job! Yikes! I am going to spend tomorrow being completely lazy though, except maybe for cleaning the apaato and going to the gym. I haven't wanted to exercise all week with the tooth, so it's been long enough without a good swim!

HUGS to the flist!

Work has been incredibly time consuming. It has eaten up all my evenings in this first week of lessons, not to mention all the behind the scenes work associated with admin and meetings before classes and that is only going to increase from here on in. I'm afraid I haven't had much more than an occasional peep at the flist.


( Re Dreamwidth )

Apropos of nothing, I'm addicted to Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream - the whole segment. I won't embarrass myself by admitting how many times I have watched it! *weeps and laughs* Thank you xanthe_lj for that! I have converted it thanks to bluespirit_star's headsup on a Giveaway of the Day conversion software and loaded it into the new shiny iPod, dl-ed the whole episode of BGT and burned it to disk, joined two Susan Boyle fan sites and this Saturday have been googling her obsessively and watched and read everything I could find. Yes, I know I need help with my addiction *g*. But I really hope she goes to the limits and achieves her dreams.

Merry Christmas Everyone! Christmas Eve was dinner with a friend and her friends, lots of beer, good old McCallan Whiskeys (12 and 18 years old), Veuve Clicquot and some more exotic drinks. Food wasn't all that great though. I'm surprisingly well today, considering what I drank (drank lots of water too) and what with having a cold, but I don't feel like cooking. Luckily, I don't have to! My real Christmas dinner will be tomorrow when I have some of my students (six 18 year old girls) visit. well, I have opened my pressies, and that was a nice little ritual, although much later in the day than usual. I got to bed after 3:00 am, so I didn't get up until late. Now I must get cracking and prepare for my friend L's visit. We are going to snack, and chat, maybe watch a movie. Have a lovely day, my dear f-listers!