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.