The Brisbane-to-bay and the Back-to-PhD
Do you ever get the feeling you're missing too much of your own life? There have been so many happy days these last two years that I've not written anything down about.
I bought a bike a little more than three weeks ago. A purely reactive purchase, sure, but perched on the shoulders of some primal desire to be able to catch jelashke when she's getting away. I know she only bought her bike to up the ante. Her timing was precise, I discovered a little later, giving her just enough time to warm up for the Brissie to Bay Bike Ride for MS Australia.
After a bit of inner drama (and some subtle challenging by iainrobertson) we signed up to ride the 30km route and dragged ourselves out to the ferry terminal at 6:30am on Sunday. It's definitely the last time I do any serious travel without sunglasses - mine had shattered last week - but I think the Winter morning sun was kinder than I'd feared. The morning itself was a crazy, two-thousand-person ride from West End out through Coorparoo and Cannon Hill to Balmoral and back. I lined up by Ethel Merman and Dick Shawn on two tandem bikes and a pram trailer with their kids, and narrowly avoided getting rolled as Spencer Tracy collided with Mickey Rooney on Bennetts Rd on the way back. Somewhere on the final stretch along the river I saw a blue shell fly overhead.
jelashke and I regrouped at Balmoral high school for midway drinks and fruit for half an hour, but we managed the track in around an hour and three quarters and an hour and a half respectively. The hills were taxing but manageable, but the guys in front who would slow down to a stop two-abreast in the middle of one were intolerable. Unfortunately, there's no gear on my bike for "air strike". My legs eventually cramped up after the race while riding home through campus from the ferry. All of my muscles died and were reborn with names ending in -ael. We had AnB for brunch and collapsed insensate afterwards.
My parents are back home from overseas and life has returned to quotationmarqueed normalcy. As such, I have less responsibility around the house than before but, curiously, have more work in trying to fit my life around everyone else's again. I'm getting to work earlier, I'm less stressed because I'm focussed on work, I'm less free because I'm not in control of my home; mainly, I'm trying to pull at all the important strings in my life and tie them into a huge knot. jellico and I did manage to catch up with windwalkr on Friday, who seems to be forging a messiah-dev crew again. Let me know how that's going for you, will you? :)
Netball hasn't been going victoriously but it's been going successfully enough. We've had enough good quarters to make several good games, generally being at least one person down per game. It's been a decent season, really, though the refs and the administration could probably afford to pull their games together.
Apple released Xcode 2.3 and yet another doco update, but hasn't quite fixed the text-wrapping bug, yet. Surely that's due really soon now?
That's some backlog. This week has PhD coding on the cards, now that I've finished with Sun and my internship again. It was fun while it lasted, it didn't warrant the stress into which I was dropped.
I bought a bike a little more than three weeks ago. A purely reactive purchase, sure, but perched on the shoulders of some primal desire to be able to catch jelashke when she's getting away. I know she only bought her bike to up the ante. Her timing was precise, I discovered a little later, giving her just enough time to warm up for the Brissie to Bay Bike Ride for MS Australia.
After a bit of inner drama (and some subtle challenging by iainrobertson) we signed up to ride the 30km route and dragged ourselves out to the ferry terminal at 6:30am on Sunday. It's definitely the last time I do any serious travel without sunglasses - mine had shattered last week - but I think the Winter morning sun was kinder than I'd feared. The morning itself was a crazy, two-thousand-person ride from West End out through Coorparoo and Cannon Hill to Balmoral and back. I lined up by Ethel Merman and Dick Shawn on two tandem bikes and a pram trailer with their kids, and narrowly avoided getting rolled as Spencer Tracy collided with Mickey Rooney on Bennetts Rd on the way back. Somewhere on the final stretch along the river I saw a blue shell fly overhead.
jelashke and I regrouped at Balmoral high school for midway drinks and fruit for half an hour, but we managed the track in around an hour and three quarters and an hour and a half respectively. The hills were taxing but manageable, but the guys in front who would slow down to a stop two-abreast in the middle of one were intolerable. Unfortunately, there's no gear on my bike for "air strike". My legs eventually cramped up after the race while riding home through campus from the ferry. All of my muscles died and were reborn with names ending in -ael. We had AnB for brunch and collapsed insensate afterwards.
My parents are back home from overseas and life has returned to quotationmarqueed normalcy. As such, I have less responsibility around the house than before but, curiously, have more work in trying to fit my life around everyone else's again. I'm getting to work earlier, I'm less stressed because I'm focussed on work, I'm less free because I'm not in control of my home; mainly, I'm trying to pull at all the important strings in my life and tie them into a huge knot. jellico and I did manage to catch up with windwalkr on Friday, who seems to be forging a messiah-dev crew again. Let me know how that's going for you, will you? :)
Netball hasn't been going victoriously but it's been going successfully enough. We've had enough good quarters to make several good games, generally being at least one person down per game. It's been a decent season, really, though the refs and the administration could probably afford to pull their games together.
Apple released Xcode 2.3 and yet another doco update, but hasn't quite fixed the text-wrapping bug, yet. Surely that's due really soon now?
That's some backlog. This week has PhD coding on the cards, now that I've finished with Sun and my internship again. It was fun while it lasted, it didn't warrant the stress into which I was dropped.