For the last couple of weeks I've been busily battling some sort of virus. I've had everything from sore joints to a chest infection to headaches. It's been barrels of fun, as you can imagine.

Normally when I get sick I'm down for a couple of days at most, then I get back up, shake myself off and keep going. But whatever I have now was bad enough for me to head to the dreaded doctor last Tuesday to get checked out - a rare treat in itself. While I was there I thought: "What the hell, I'll get them to run a full gamut of tests on my precious bodily fluids and see what comes up."

Point of Interest: They no longer give out lollypops when piercing your skin with syringe needles. I feel that this is something that should be looked at in the near future.

It took two days to get my results back (that brings us to today, if you're keeping track). The doctor ran me through the results, pointing out that all the numbers looked good. They looked good to me too. By good I mean indecipherable. Three columns of data. Column A: obscure acronyms, column B: obscure line of numbers and column C: what I imagined was the theoretical maximum. While perusing the list one item caught my eye:

GGT 50 >51

I questioned the doctor on this and he assured me that my GGT was fine even though it was boarding on what I saw was the deadly limit of whatever GGT was. He was very reassuring, but wouldn't elaborate on what GGT meant, only mentioning that it was a concern when the patient (i.e. me) drinks excessivly.

Now I like to think I can and do drink a lot. It's not something I'm especially proud of - I don't holds parades to inform the general public nor do I have it printed on a t-shirt - it's just  something I do. Seeing that GGT number (and the others for that matter) hovering in nominal range made me happy in a way that no medication can. It only reinforced my ideal that I'm mildly indestructible.

Of course there is still the question of this mystery virus. The doctor final suggestion was that I let the virus run it's course and that testing to determine what it is would just be a waste of time. I can only assume there's been a rush on agar jelly coming in to Xmas or something.

The other day Mike observed that he hadn't seen any photos of mine on Flickr for a while. He was right. It'd been nearly four months since I'd last uploaded photos.

So I've made amends. I had the day off work today, so I've processed just over 20 of the Tasmania photos and thrown them up. They're not in linear continuity, but they do have a bit of commentary so it shouldn't be too hard to follow them.

As always my photos are available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theblueboy/

Simple CSS Blockquotes and Pullquotes. A handy tutorial for later.

Gil Elvgren: The best pin-up illustrator. He's been a favourite artist of mine, I just never knew his name til now.

Beowulf - Beowulf was a good movie. Not great, just good. more professional reviewers have commented about how eery the cold, soulless eyes are. I was more put of by the fact that Beowulf: Mighty Danish Hero speaks with a thick cockney accent. The winter scenes looked amazing though.

Super Mario Galaxy - if I was to judge a game by how easily it draws in Ange then SMG would get full marks. I like that you can send a scorecard to people in your address book, but hate that you have to rescue Luigi over and over. It begins to grate after the second time. If I wanted to play a game structured around fetch quests I'd play Legend of Zelda. Which is a nice segue into the next point...

LoZ: Phantom Hourglass - Follow up to my all time favourite Zelda game, Wind Waker. Showed exactly how an adventure game should be done on the DS. I'm still not sure about the ending. Loved the 4th wall breaking puzzles though.

Bodrum - A Turkish eatery in Essendon that redefines the term "slow food".
We ordered the banquet for five around 7pm and received the final course (of six) around about 9:30 or so. The wait staff abandoned us for nearly 30 minutes after the fish course while also ignoring my initial requests for them to fetch our bottles of wine from the cooler.

The Novel - Number five on the Things To Do Before I Die list. I've put nearly 10,000 words down (much more than that if you count story notes) and wanted to put a few more thousand words down this weekend. But this fluey illness, and it's associated creaky pains, have been far too distracting. I don't want to reveal too much about it at this point in time, suffice to say that it's codenamed Tomato and has absolutely nothing to do with the fruit/vegetable.