I caught up for lunch with some friends who gave me the great news that they're expecting. She's four months along.
As we were leaving the restaurant, I glanced at her stomach, covered under a jumper because of the cold.
"Yeah, I know," she said, seeing my look. "I'm getting fat!"
"No no," I say, not wanting to make her feel bad. "I really can't tell!"
"You mean she always looks this fat so you didn't notice?" jokes her husband.
I have such a way with words.
We finally got around to going to Menya Ramen in Chinatown for lunch, based upon Kathleen's repeated reading of NQN. We got caught in the thunderstorm that dumped buckets of rain over the city, and went to the movies at CQ Dendy. Watched Lars and the Real Girl. I thought it was fantastic. Kathleen fell asleep.
We have wildly disparate tastes in movies.
Looks like one of the must-see things that we always recommend to people going to Tas on holidays is no more:
Cadbury ends chocolate tours in Tassie.
I can't believe the reason though: stupid, vague, blamable 'occ health and safety'.
When I was a kid, those tours were the best: frequent stops for 'samples' from the machines, a shop that sold chocolate seconds (misshapen, or slightly underweight or overweight chocs) for a fraction of the retail price. The prices became much closer to retail as I got older, but the tour was still a lot of fun.
And the smell of chocolate as you got out of the car in the carpark was awesome. A real-life chocolate factory!
For shame, Cadbury's, for shame!
We went over to Steva's on Saturday night for a BBQ for his future brother-in-law Ed's birthday. Steph's hooked up his Nintendo Wii to his TV set so you can browse the internet on the TV (however, keying in a URL via the hand controller is an exercise in frustration).
I can't remember what started it, but we ended up having a "YouTube night", where people suggested clips that they had seen which were awesome enough to share. Thanks to V, we saw Flight of the Conchords' Most Beautiful Girl In The Room. I shared the film clip from Gnarls Barkley's song Blood Red Nights.
It was like watching Rage except without having to sit through all the dud songs!
I haven't written anything for a while because I've been doing after-hours testing at work.
The schedule goes a little like this:
9pm - midnight: drive into work, conduct testing in a quiet time to avoid being impacted by other activities
11am: arrive at work, review previous night's results
6pm: head home, eat dinner
I've had a few days where I've stayed around at work until the planned test starts - those days suck.
It's nice getting in around lunchtime, particularly where you have the morning to sleep in, and actually see some daylight before going into work. It's also nice and quiet at night.
On the flipside, the hours play havoc a little with sleep patterns, going to bed at 2am, getting up at 7 or 8. Plus, the lights automatically turn off at 10pm, and the light switch doesn't seem to respond, no matter how many times I press it. Sitting in the dark, bathed in the light of a computer monitor, sucks a bit.
Just a bit more on Kathleen's full-on Boot Camp week...
Since all the sessions are held on the beach, poor Kathleen ended up tracking a kilo of sand in the car and through the house. She's such a stickler for neatness and cleanliness, too, so the pain and misery associated with the training effort continued even after she arrived home!
Thursday's trainign session was kayaking in the water at 5am, and Friday was a repeat of the previous four days over 3 hours.
She came home on a massive high of achievement that she woke me up (at 7.30am) just to tell me.
"Mmph, that's great," I mumbled as I rolled over and went back to sleep.
I bet that was annoying, me sleeping in more than four hours after she had risen and spent all that time sweating her butt off ;)
Turns out Bill Granger, a big-time Sydney chef, opened a restaurant in Kanagawa, down near the beach at Kamakura in Japan. Kamakura's a nice place, very relaxed seaside vibe (as much as Japan has those). It's not so relaxed around the daibatsu (Great Buddha) with all the tourists!
(via Japan Today).
Kathleen has been going twice a week to a Boot Camp workout for the last few weeks. She's been getting up at 5.30am every Tuesday and Thursday, which is a pretty good achievement just to begin with. To combine it with a pseudo-military workout makes it even tougher!
Last week, she signed up for what is called 'Tactical 12'. It's a high-effort, intense week of exercise, where the start time of 4.30am is just the preliminary!
The first night, the 4.30am start was combined with a 10pm briefing down on Balmoral Beach... and the 10pm 'briefing' turned out to be a one hour workout on the beach, in the dark!
The instructor, who all participants have to refer to as 'Sarge', seems to subscribe to the 'surprise' approach of fitness.
Tuesday morning was a massive run, and the poor girl came home close to tears from exhaustion and the thought of sustaining the effort for the next three days. She came home and went to bed for a few hours to catch up on sleep... it was getting to the point where I almost pretended to be a Balmoral resident and ring up the council to complain about the noise and get them shut down, just to save her from the rest of the week!
A further 'midnight' briefing for Wednesday night was proposed as well, so Kathleen spent a few hours waiting for an SMS to confirm it. Luckily, that one was cancelled. But the late notice meant that she (and presumably all the other attendees) couldn't catch up on rest to compensate for the early morning starts!
In any event, I reckon Kathleen will be in the mood for a celebratory sleep on Friday night at the end of this week, rather than a celebratory dinner!
They played this clip at the end of Spicks and Specks tonight:
andrewandkathleen was meant to be a place to chuck our photos and diaries of our time in Japan. Since then it's transformed into a way of letting our friends and family know what we've been up to!
We've been together since high school, married since 2005. We've travelled and lived in different cities and different countries and are now trying to work out whether we're settling down or having a rest!
