I can upload images into my journal. Dig it:
Once I hit the road, I should be able to add pictures from my digital camera without too much trouble.
The trip itinerary is shifting a bit, but I don’t feel like going through it now. Will do it later. It looks like I’ll be having a fair amount of company, which is great.
Was just standing at a street corner in the valley on my way back from grabbing dinner. A gay couple was having a fight right next to me. One of the guys tearfully proclaimed, “What hurts me more than anything is that you put a price on our relationship.”
I looked around. There was no one holding cue cards. He came up with that gem all by himself.
What hurts me more than anything is when the other person in a relationship comes up with some unbearably trite and cringe-worthy statement like that and says it with a straight face. All sentiment is lost on me and I become focused on the urgent need for a script doctor. But of course you can’t say anything. You have to look dour and forlorn while the other person prattles off whatever they heard on Dawson’s Creek last night.
I went diving today in Moreton Bay. Saw a couple really big turtles. But the visibility was poor, the surge was high, and the boat was overcrowded. People were vomiting left and right. The worst, though, was the food scraps bucket they had in the middle of the deck where people were stowing their gear. They passed it around for people to throw up in when they couldn’t make it to the side. No one in the crew thought to clean out or cover the bucket, so it just sat there while people were getting their gear on – a mixture of half-eaten and fully-eaten food swishing around. It didn’t help the situation.
I have been blessed with an iron constitution. Never been seasick.
I’m sunburned, though. I’m an idiot about sunscreen.
Booked my ticket to New Zealand. And I reserved a spot on the Milford Trek, a three day hike through Milford Sound that is supposed to be one of the finest in the world. They limit the number of people allowed on the track at one time to a very small number, so in peak season you have to book months in advance. I was only booking 2 weeks in advance, but a spot opened up and I got lucky.
I had a very exciting medical development last week. I got a bunch of test results back and found out I have a staggeringly low melatonin level. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates your sleep patterns. You produce it at night and it puts you to sleep. Apparently my body hardly produces any at all, which is why I’m up at 2 in the morning typing this after getting 2 hours of sleep last night. I don’t fully understand how it works, and a lot of it is surely psychological as well, but it sounds like my sleep trigger is all gummed up. You can actually take melatonin to increase your levels. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m hoping it’ll work. If it does, that could really change my life a lot. I’m chronically late for work and have had trouble waking up in the morning all my life. I’ve tried to change my behavior for years with marginal success, but not nearly enough. So…yeah. We’ll see what happens with that.
I’ve got to take the test again to make sure the results weren’t screwy.
I went to a physiotherapist about my wrist pain from holding the mouse wrong. Physiotherapists are fun. This one had all sorts of cool toys. She used one of those sonic wave things to do something to do with muscle inflammation in my arm. Then she had me put on sunglasses and started bombarding my wrist with laser beams to stimulate the release of endorphins and relieve pain naturally. Then she hooked wires up to my arm and start running a current through it. I could see my fingers bending back involuntarily as she upped the current. I don’t know what that was supposed to do, but it was neat!