/spit

Fkn this whole week i’ve been getting numbness in the last two fingers of my right hand. Initially I thought it might be carpal tunnel syndrome, but after a little bit of investigation I think it’s cubital tunnel syndrome.

There’s a nerve that lies on the proximal end of the forearm somwhere. Extension of the fingers and wrist, supination of the wrist plus compression, elbow flexion = bad. You see I have a strong tendancy to rest my upper body on my right hand whilst it sits on the mouse, I’m almost certain this is the cause of my discomfort… I’ve always had problems with my right arm…i think it all started when I fractured it as a child. It mustn’t have ever really healed properly.
On the upside I got my new glasses which I’m pretty happy about. Going from scratched, non-multicoated lenses to the golden standard is a new optical experience for me! Plus my eye sight hasn’t deteriorated in ~10 years, woot.

Another thing I look forward to is concluding my undergraduate years in ~2 months. 3.5 years in the making, I’m proud to say that for now I think I have had enough, for now.

I’m at the office, hard at work… err, hardly working.  Just caught up with Fa for lunch - that was cool…  I mean, catching up with Fa was cool.  Lunch was a piece of shit.

Actually, i’m pretty much have a ‘piece of shit’ day altogether.  I’m tired and fucking sore from last night’s killer basketball run.  I’m running low on sleep.  I’m unmotivated… god i’m seriously unmotivated and uninspired lately.  I want my guitar.  I want to play video games.  Fkn waaaaaaaaah…

/groan

dj

So,

It occurred to me that i’ve been sick for 1/3 of the past 3 months. As a result my riding has suffered, but i’m starting to get back into it. Went for a nice 60k ride on Monday along the coast - the weather was so beautiful; hardly any wind, a clear blue sunny sky and the perfect temperature. I managed to average 29.9 until I got about 7km from home. Still, i managed 29.5 which I’m pretty happy about.

Then I agreed to go for another ride the next day with a friend. It was meant to be an easy going ride but it turned out to be tortureous - 70km avg speed ~30kph. I was behind him the whole time and I could barely keep up by the end of it. Probably had something to do with the fact that I was borderline bonking during the last 10km. Still, i’m happy that i was able to ‘hold on’. I’m sure if i tried the same thing 6 months ago i would have probably just bonked straight away, which is what usually happens.
But who cares, coz right now i’m getting back into playing computer games after spending two intense weekends geeking it up with my brothers. Shit, I nearly spent 480 bucks on a freakin’ video card this afternoon when I was just meant to be popping out of the house for some milk - wth was i thinking! (betcha ill go buy it tmrw).

Otherwise my new job is great, I can stay at home and do work provided i can do it at home and generally just come as go as I please. Flexi hours for the win!

Really though, I have to learn how to spend money. Shit, I mean save money (you see, its already hard-wired into my head - spend money!). Not because the American economy is going bonkers and I’ll never be able to own my own home, but because I need to save up for the new canon EOS 5D Mark II!! Fuck, i haven’t picked up my camera in aaaaaaages. I still want that 5D tho. Always wanted a full frame camera. All I have to do is save up ~3000-4000 dollars.

Oh well, enough lolly gagging, I got shit house boring exams to prepare for

I just got back from playing a game of basketball.  That’s right fools - as part of my annual “holy shit it’s spring and summer’s just around the corner and goddamn look at this belt of burden about my waist holy fucking shit i gotta get my shit into gear and trim up fuuuuuck” efforts, i’ve joined a social basketball team…

…and now i’m very sore.  And very, very tired.  And even more humiliated

Fa isn’t happy about it - he spent a year training me up to join his squash league and i’ve continually refused his invitations.  I’ll join maaaaan - just let me get a whole lot better first!

So, mission 1: body fat percentage below 15% by the time i go to New Zealand to visit my sister and brother in law (first week of November).  Wish me luck…

dj

Wooooow!  Time really does fly when you’re having this much fun  

dj 

The next couple of months have the potential to be freakin’ busy! I’m trying to utilise my time more efficiently and the only way i know how to do that is to book myself into more trouble.
I figure if i can get through the next couple or so months then it’ll be a great learning experience and I should be able to tackle larger projects after that.

Otherwise, I really want to spend money on my bike or get the new 50D that is soon to be launched even though I haven’t used my camera in a while now. It’s one of those silly ‘if I spend x money on this item i’ll be sure to get back into it!’ cases.

and yes, because I know you’ve all been waiting so long for another cycling post I’d like to say that for the first time in a while I rode home today and just enjoyed the riding. I wasn’t going fast at all, didn’t break out in a sweat coz thats how slow I was going. Fkn daydreamed and looked at the river and shit as i was passing thru the city. It was fkn great.

I’ve also been working and getting paid for it now for about 3 weeks. It is good, but it also means that I’m putting my uni stuff on the back burner. How so? Well take for example this assignment which is due tomorrow. Lol, I haven’t done something this last minute in a while.

mmm, foooood.

The MySQL database behind this blog exceeded quota so write permissions were removed about three weeks ago. I only found out yesterday - basically nobody would have been able to post or comment in that time. My bad - cheers to the guys at work who sorted it out for me.

Why haven’t i been posting? I’ve been setting up another blog which will be entirely about my musical and technical investigation and (hopefully) development with jazz guitar. That’s not going to be off the ground for a while yet, but i’ve been giving some forethought to how i want to present my ideas. Anyway, that’s been getting some attention. Other than that, just the usual work, play and practice routine

Shortly after my last post, i took two weeks off work. I’m not sure what happened - i just wigged out one morning and decided i needed a break. I was just sick of everything at that point and had a lot of things on my mind that i wanted to get in order, particularly with respect to my lifestyle. It was the first time in a while that i had taken time off and not gone anywhere. I just stayed at home and “chillaxed”. True to form, as fate/karma/whatever insists on fucking with me, i ended up getting tonsillitis right at the start of my break so that had me doing nothing but playing Final Fantasy 12 for 4 or 5 days haha. It was a good break - i enjoyed it, and i did manage to sort a lot of things out.

I’m at work at the moment, so i had better get back to it. Sorry about the indef afk - WE’RE BACK, BITCHES!!!

dj

This morning i came across some things that forced up old memories from a ‘less than ideal’ time in my life. In a split-second, it all came back to me: the hurt, the confusion, the seething rage, the feeling of helplessness, the regret…

Yeah, I had a shitty morning, right up to the point when i got to work and someone asked me how my weekend was. Just then, in the moment before i answered, i realised how happy i am with everything in my life - my family, my friends, my social life, my hobbies, my work… I realised that I wouldn’t trade today for any day in any other persons shoes, and that I would go through all that shit again if it would bring me right back to where i am now.

“Pretty decent!” I answered smiling, and the memories, no matter how present they were in my thoughts, didn’t bother me any more. I guess that’s what they call “dealing with your issues.”

Sometimes you get so used to seeing stains that you don’t notice them any more. A lot of the time, one last scrub is all that’s needed to clean the mess away once and for all.

dj

I set out with one purpose this afternoon - to set a cooking goal so high I would fail, in an epic fashion. The goal was to prepare and cook every part of what makes, a pizza.

I used a recipe as a guide for the base coz I’ve absolutely no clue when it comes to flours and yeast. Yeast! I think I spent about 20 minutes looking for yeast in the pantry. I found a packet of mashmellows which I regret opening along the way… With my last dash of hope I thought I’d try the refrigerator and what do you know, there was some sitting right there.

I’m pretty excited that I’ve finally found some yeast until I see that the expiry date occured back in ‘05.

Not one to believe in expiration dates however (hey - everything lasts forever in the fridge, right?) I set out to test the little yeasty-bites to see if they were still alive. I soon found after about 10 minutes that they had all since gone to yeast-heaven.

So before I could even start my pizza I’d failed. I achieved my goal without even having to try. What’s the deal? Having already set my mind to cooking a pizza tho (and getting rather hungry), I raised my fist in defiance, stared up at the heavens and swore on the carcasses of the expired yeasty-bites that I’d cook a grand pizza-base in their memory.

I then headed down to the local IGA (aka supermarket) to pick up some fresh yeasty-bites to aid me in my cooking adventure…

After letting the yeast sit a little bit I added 3.5 cups of flour to a yeast/water mixture. At one stage I thought that I’d misread the recipe because I thought I had way, way to much flour. After lots of kneading - and I mean LOTS of kneading, like, 15-20mins of kneading compared to the 8-10minutes the book had - it had a nice elastic and even form. [no pics here otherwise my camera would become too floury]
Pleased with my efforts I threw the ball of flour back into the very bowl in which it was concieved. I then thrusted the bowl into the incubator - the oven - where the yeasty-bites would do their action for 50 minutes whilst I got more hungry and impatient. I was a little concerned at this point because the yeast hadn’t done what it should have earlier on and, I’d also taken so long to knead the flour. It’s also fairly cold over here at the moment around 13 degrees, which isn’t so good for my little friends to do their work in. Check it:

Eager to see if it has actually increased ‘2-3x’ its size, I pull it out and am happy to see that it has indeed increased in size. maybe not 2-3x, but it has at least changed lol.

The recipe says to press it and see if the depressed area returns to its orginal position.

If so, leave it to sit for longer. If not, well…

fist the motherfucker! I kid you not, the book tells you to fist it and shows a pic pretty much exactly the same as the one I’ve posted.

Here’s how it looked after some quick kneading action:

Did you expect it to look different? I know, it is a ball of flour and water after all. Not very interesting but don’t forget this ball of flour is dedicated to all those yeasty-bites which have long gone to yeast heaven, you inconsiderate reader!

I put it on the oven pan hoping it would roll out, flatten itself and then some more. Those gumpy-like cartoons lie.

I need a rolling pin. Typically I couldn’t find one. I reach for the indestructable nalgene bottle instead. Nalgene claim that their bottles are indestructable. Why then, would they sell replacement lids? I mean, the lids have a large hole in them to, well you’d think, allow you to attach the bottle to something so you dont lose it. So really, dispite the fact that their bottles are indestructable, they should have replacable bottles, coz that makes more sense in all this insensibility. I mean, when you’re out doing your extreme hiking, you ain’t gonna go searching down that 200m ravine you just dropped your bottle in whilst free-climbing a 500m cliff face because you know its indestructable. Yeah. Personally, I got it because it was green and I knew some day I could use it as a rolling pin.

Feast your eyes on my not-anything shaped pizza base…

So, what should I put on it? Here are my list of pizza-friendly ingredients which I found. Everything is there, bar the bacon.

I’m getting hungry and lazy so I didn’t bother with the pureeing of the tomato paste. It is chunky.

Even Lady is getting fed up with all my cooking.

Okay, so here’s the pizza with all the stuff on it. I wanted it to be one of those simple pizza’s, but as I was quite hungry by this stage I piled on the food.

The flour was still rising after I kneaded it and rolled it out. Actually the left over flour which I put in the fridge looks like its about to explode out of its container. Anyway, you cant really see it in this pic but the pizza is forming into a small dome. I probably should have taken it out soon after taking this shot.

Typically I actually forgot about my pizza coz I was distracted. It would have been better if I hadn’t overcooked it I think.

A close up for you…

and here we go, ready to eat, by myself, with a bottle of >20% acohol liquor appropriately named  ‘Wipeout’ ready to drown my sorrows with. Who else would have the time to write such a post if they were not single and unemployed. ahhahaaha! /cry.

Lol avoid the melodrama with insurance - Jugg’s gotchya! [nsfw]

How did it turn out? would the yeasty-bites be happy? I dunno. I hope so. I prefer a more chewy base, this one was a little too hard for my liking but that might have been because I over cooked the motherfucker. Gotta find another recipe to try out and use…wait for it…the bread machine so I dont have to manually knead.

…But I’m the juggggerrrnaaaut biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitchhhhhhhhhhh……