InTheNow

that this has to become a goal. I’m so angry.

It’s been three years since my last, so I’m a year overdue, but I’ve been prevented from doing it on two occasions and NOW I’M ANGRY because this is a basic neccesity and it’s hard enough without other people failing to do their blooming job.

Months ago I said to myself that I was just going to do it. I’d procrastinated because there’s no female doctor at my medical centre anymore, but I thought bugger it, I’ll bite the friggin bullet because I have to.

I got to my medical centre… it was closed for some family emergency. Bugger that, I thought, and turned and went to the one down the street. I’m going to GET THIS DONE.

I waited… the doctor on duty was an older doctor and seemed nice, so he’s been-there-done-that and this will be done and I’ll be fine.

But no… he back-peddled faster than I could have done and said he shouldn’t do it because he was just a locum, not one of the doctors at this surgery. The spineless fraud. And he called himself a doctor. Even I could give myself the darn PAP smear with the new thin-prep scraper… it’s not that hard! You scrape some cells, you send them off for analysis! For crying out loud!

I went home, just a happy not to have some stranger poking around where they shouldn’t be poking around, but angry that I had been strong and stepped up to have this done only to be knocked back by a dithering incompetent doctor.

Months along, my medical centre employs a nurse a day a week specifically to do PAP smears and breast exams… great, I’m not the only one who’s been holding out because it’s uncomfortable presenting to a male doctor to do this (not to mention being LET DOWN already). I make an appointment after work and rock up on time.

I wait. Patients for the doctors come and go. I get into an all-in discussion with four other patients in the waiting room, much to my enjoyment, despite the lady with pneumonia who wouldn’t cover her mouth when she coughed.

I wait. I start to notice people who arrived after me are seeing the doctor and leaving. I’ve been waiting for an hour and a half and the place closes in an hour. I get up and ask the receptionist about my appointment with the nurse.

The receptionist looks startled. She checks my appointment then checks to see if my chart was waiting in the nurse’s waiting pile. Then I’m informed the nurse has just left… someone must have put my file away… would I like to make another appointment next week?

You’ve got to be kidding. I’m pretty sure the receptionist grabbed the wrong file (some other patient was called and wasn’t in the waiting room) or didn’t grab my file at all when she asked me to sit and wait.

No… I had an appointment. I did not want another. Why can’t I just get my freaking PAP smear done.

I might have slammed the sliding door a little when I left.

I am angry. Incompetent people doing incompetent jobs. There’s no consequences for their bungling. Usually these people are employed in government departments… but I forget… they’re EVERYWHERE.

One word baby… karma…

I still have to have this thing done.

...but four years of ‘nesting’ isn’t enough. I seem to have issues with some of the furniture my partner brought into the relationship and with the the colour-scheme inside the house.

Seems pretty superficial, I know, but small things count. For one, our bed is comfortable, but it has a frame and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve bashed my leg on one of the posts in our small bedroom. Honestly… what is the point of a bed frame???

Our hand-me-down old sofas are nasty, and the cats have been resculpting them also.

And while I love the fact the house isn’t painted cream or white inside, but has purple theme walls, the lighter colour is almost a pastel purple-pink (‘heritage taffetta’???). I love colour, but I HATE pastels. Maybe one or two rooms… fine… but not practically the whole house. I know it could be a LOT worse, but colour affects your mood and it’s doing a good job of it!

Have re-painted the laundry so far, but the rest of the house is going to take planning so it works.

And lastly… the lack of storage. Everyone knows what this is like, but really, it’s an old house and it’s small. We have a motorbike in the open room by the dining room, alongside stockpiled cat-food and other assorted homeless junk plus my partner’s drawing table (hydraulic size A0) for work/study. There’s assorted fill under our bed with tent-poles and fishing poles sticking out, and appliances galore on shelves and in boxes (plus a monster sized cookie jar pretending to be an ice-cream sunday) from my gadget-happy in-laws that we’ll never use and need to get rid of.

I’m sure it’s just the stage in life when you’re glad to even have your own house but can’t quite afford to have things the way you like them.

Still… that pastel purple-pink has to go…

Yes, that’s what you do when you see the boxes and envelopes of photos I have that need to be put in albums!

I bought five new albums, but I don’t think they’ll come close to taking half my prints! Still, it’s a start. I’ve put this off because there’s always missing photos to chase-up, and no way to insert them into the right place after you’ve put everything into albums. But I’ll never get them into albums if I try to track missing photos!

I’ll just have to have a separate album for stray photos. Wehhhh…

I’m ready to back-up files, programs and settings (the ones I can find anyway). It’s a bit scary because I know it’s going to be a marathon.

I have Acronis True Image, but no point making a ghost image when I know I have an adware infection. Plus I want to get rid of all the crap in the registry, all broken links, and any infections I can’t see. After a clean install I WILL make my clean ghost image though!! Can’t wait!

I wish I could just get a new lap-top instead though, as this one’s nearly seven years old and has cracks and a dodgey CD-writer now. It’s also been trying to communicate with a single, long, random BIOS beep every so often now, but I don’t speak BIOS and haven’t found a translation for that beep when it’s not at start-up.

But you know how it is… there’s a pecking order. Our hot-water heater just got replaced, the roof is a close second, and my 1983 car is getting very close to being unroadworthy (if it isn’t already). Ho-hum.

Anyway… end in sight… :)

Okay, so far I’ve consolidated my office landscape into paper-piles. Already it looks better!

Flow-on effect of tidying… I found my USB memory stick in my sock-drawer. Yay.

Next… filing it all away, hanging Mum’s paintings in the right place (very important), and finding/making a home for my art supplies other than on my desk!

I woke up today and decided to take a week’s annual leave, because I can… and my boss is pretty easy-going. No point in saving it for a rainy day when I could use it today.

how desperately my old banger of a lap-top needs this. I have an external hard-drive to do it, but it came with barely translated instructions, so I’ll probably being doing things the hard way only backing up my own files and downloaded programs instead of trying to figure out exactly how to make a ghost-image or find the right blooming software to do it!

Have intended to do this for some time, but could never understand and figure out the best way to do it, so I’ll just do it.

I never update anything either, because my philosophy through experience has been if it ain’t broke, don’t ‘fix’ it, but it ooks ike I might have to bite the blooming bullet and get the service packs just so I can update software, because I want to re-order my 43-list but can’t!

So… doing (attempting) this goal in conjunction with cleaning and organising my home office goal! Gotta start somewhere, and might as well make use of the rest of this sick-leave day!!

And I’m giving myself TODAY (see… I was sick this morning for a reason!).

I am very excited because I LOVE order, and this room needs it! Have been a little stubborn about not buying more ‘stuff’ (furniture) just to organise my stuff though. We went and bought a number of Ikea bookcases for my otherhalf so he could organise his office, but he’s nearly collected a library of work and study books and notes anyway because he’s not a ‘tosser’ (or ‘chucker’ for that matter). I am.

Anyway, too much talk and not enough action… I’ll loose my drive!

I also plan to do my computer back-up and clean install goal while I do this. Ambitious? Yes. Overly optimistic? Probably!

Can I do them both? I’m sure as heck going to try!!

I used to be able to re-order my list once upon a time.

Now, no more. Either this new format doesn’t allow it, or it does and I either don’t know how or my browser doesn’t accomodate the ‘special effects’!

Would be nice to do… I’m a bit of a control freak in that I like things the way I like them :)

Anyone? :(

For me, when an art piece speaks to me, it’s probably one of the few things I’d liken to spirituality.

You can’t take your eyes from it. You toss it and turn it in your mind, one day seeing one thing in it, and something else entirely on another day.

To look upon it can bring pure pleasure of appreciation, a wordless resonnance. Or pure puzzlement in a slippery disonnance that won’t let you go.

To own an original piece of art, straight from its maker’s hands… it is worth it. Like finding a piece of your puzzle. Trouble is… I keeping looking for more; I didn’t realise I was missing so many pieces :)

...but I think I put a few on before I finally started tackling this goal!

Still, my two weeks of low-carbs and low-calories had the desired effect, but I couldn’t sustain a severely restrictive diet without staples like chickpeas, Weet-Bix and bread. However, my teeth never ever got furry between brushing! How could they when even I didn’t get enough carbs to keep my engine turning-over?? Ketosis is a challenging experiment, but I wouldn’t live it.

So 4kg to go (and only another 20kg or so after that ;)
Shhhh…..!

It’s what you do… as a member of the scientific research community you share your findings with everyone else in the hope it will further advance knowledge and further research in your area.

However, and please excuse my French, it used to just sound like a pissing-contest to me. A scientist was only as good as the impact factor of their publications, a virtue that many have been enticed to augment by less virtuous means.

I’m talking about the ruthless back-stabbing, cut-throat, ladder-climbing aspirations of some scientists that see ideas and work stolen, students used and abused as cheap labour and disillusioned by those charged to nurture their skills, dodgey and hazardous workplace practices, and even falsified data published.

I was disillusioned before I had the chance to know what it was to be a genuine player. But now I’ve been on the playing field and done my yards, I want to get my data out there and be part of the solution.

And in publishing, I’m going to bury the memory of the legacy of the hack who used to be my mentor but only tore the rug from under my feet and made sure I forgot what it was to stand on my own two feet. You suck JC, and I’m not only a better person than you are, but I’m becoming a better scientist.

Watch this space ;)

I did two weeks without carb laden foods in my diet. So I proved to myself I could stick it out and I gave it a go.

I stopped eating between meals (I LOVE vegetables, but they are NOT tempting snack food), I didn’t eat any junk AT ALL, I lost 4kg, and I gained a little self-kudos.

However, the weight-loss wasn’t any better over conventional calorie-restricted diets such as Weight Watchers, so I don’t see any point in torturing myself futher by cutting our the entire cereal/grains food group as well as many other foods out of my diet.

I’ve reverted to my bad habits for two weeks (including some take-away and over-sized dinners), but I’m going to be good now that I’ve had my fun and won’t be torturing myself again by eliminating basic staples such as chickpeas, oats, milk and rice from my diet.

I can do that!

I’ve tried the Tony Ferguson diet once before, with the two daily meal-replacement shakes and a meal of veggies and protein, and I didn’t make it past day two.

I was that disgusted with it I threw out all my information on it two years ago.

Now I’m trying it again. ONE WEEK. That’s all I’m asking. To be able to stick it out one week. I want to know what it’s about and I want to know I can do it.

And yet yesterday was my second day, and I could not get my head around not being able to have a normal breakfast. Could not. I knew I loved carbs, but I didn’t think I absolutely needed them.

So I jumped off the wagon and had Weet-Bix. I ended up having pasta for dinner while I was at it and started again today.

And yet today when I got home, I was going to have two eggs and my disappointing left-over veggie cook-up, but I ended up having the eggs, Weet-Bix again, and toast! I could have had a normal meal, but I lashed out at what I was ALLOWED to have.

So feeling a little disillusioned here. Why are carbs so important? I thought going without bread, rice, pasta, chickpeas, legumes, sugar, potato, pumpkin, peas, corn and so-on would be easy. I love veggies!

But somehow I can’t get my head around such a restricted diet. I’m bloody well going to try… if for nothing else than to know I can have that control.

I just wish I could do it, and use it instead of using food.

Not that I haven’t done anything in two years, but back to the 43things…

I have tickets to Diesel for his b’day. Diesel acoustic, electric, with strings, the package… it should be excellent.

Thing is, the concert is over a month after his b’day. Seeing I’m not great at keeping surprises a surprise, I’m thinking I’ll give him the tickets for his b’day over dinner and a flick (if they, like, get here in time!). That way he can anticipate the surprise instead of worrying :)

But sometimes, you can feel a little like a freak :)

But I think I do it because I enjoy being friendly. Someone has to be the first to open the line of communication, so why not? People are interesting, and if nothing else, may be a source of expertise or information at work.

That and it can be fun to work on the hard-nuts. Catch them off their guard and you may get a response :)

And I do pretty well at it some of the time. If you have your stuff together when you wake up and attack the day, it’s usually a successful day.

Things to avoid…
...staying up late (I need sleep!)
...messy house (Feng Shui is on to something!)
...eating junk-food (yum inevitably becomes yuck)
...getting up late
...television (who needs it anyway? Music baby!)
...procrastinating work (ugh)
...skipping daily dates with my Tready
...looking in the mirror :) Yeah, right!
...deficiency in B12 (supplement whenever things go down)

It’s a start, right?

...and it only took what… two years :)

There is no junk in the house (yes, I showed those choc-chip cookies hiding in the top of the pantry who’s boss). The renegade munchies will only find dried apricots, cheese, and corn kernels for the air-popcorn machine. Looks like I’m going to become an air-popped popcorn junkie.

Better get rid of the brown sugar… my old housemate foolishly showed me how to make caramel popcorn (or something sickly sweet resembling it anyway). There is no limit to the creativity of a sugar-addict deprived of their quick-fix…

Research Assistant. Gene expression in oesophageal cancer. Yes, it’s interesting stuff, but being in a small ‘group’ is an experience in itself because you lack that critical mass and momentum in your work. More room to grow, but you gotta have balls to do it.

I was going to read the previous entries, mention the people that almost stopped me from getting here, but I won’t. Truth is, I was considering another career. Unreasonable stress (diplomatically put) and disillusionment almost did it for me. But having worked at hotel… in a skirt... quickly reminded me what I was missing.

So… I have this great job, not to mention that going from an commercial RA to a grant-funded RA not only gave my work real meaning again, but a REALLY healthy pay-rise (more to do with being taken advantage of when the bottom line is dollars, not lives).

The passionate part will develop as my skills and self-esteem do. Achieving real outcomes entails more than just doing what is expected, but doing more and knowing that you’re a player in the field, not just along for the ride.

Have even thought about doing a PhD again, but this time I’ll know when the time is right and all systems are go. Until then… game on ;)

There’s a new addition to our family…
a fabulous secondhand treadmill, named Tready.

Tready and I will be great friends. I know it. Tready’s never had the experience of not fitting into his old jeans, but we did have to take off the two front-doors of our house to get him in (and that WAS on an angle), so I feel a certain comradeship.

So… I need a routine. I pictured getting up earlier in mornings to walk with Tready before work (I’m wasted after when you include a 3h commute all up!). I have no problem getting up half an hour earlier at 4:15am, but usually my first 20 mins is feeding the cats and having a quiet breakfast.

I can’t quite see myself hitting the Tready (like I mean it) after waking from a dead sleep. At least not when it’s the freezing cold winter. Morning in summer is the best time of day! But for now Tready may have to wait for my second-wind after work, which is probably 8pm. A bit risky though…

And as for the food… there was no junk in the house… until I found a bag of choc-chip cookies thrown in the back of the top of the pantry! Drat my sixth sense!

Those aside, I think I can eat good food, mostly fresh food being a veggie, but I’m terrible at snacking at home, and my portion sizes aren’t ideal.

You know what craps me? ‘Serving suggestions’ on packs of food. On the pack of Uncle Toby’s Quick Oats, there’s a picture of a bowl filled with porridge with a few slices of banana. On the information panel though, a ‘serving size’ is 30g, which is around 1/3 cup. There’s a big difference between that and a bowl full!

And a standard tin of tomato spaghetti (yes, not ‘healthy’ but beats nastier ‘comfort’ food!) according to the information panel contains 3.3 serves! Like, WHAT? That’s what you pick up with one spoon (dangley bits and all)!

So… looks like carbs and I don’t have an understanding, but we’ll see how we go, hey?

Game on…

Get a fire blanket and extinguisher for your home. Could not be easier to do.

They’re a lot more useful to have before someone catches alight in an accident or your house burns down because your cooking starts a fire. Think of your loved ones.