Wednesday What’s Up VI
Categories : Current, General Practice, Personal, Television, books |
Yesterday was a super hot Tuesday here in Perth with the temperature hitting 42 degress Celsius. Luckily for me I had pre-arranged the day off to get my car serviced and for the Foxtel man to come and so I ended up being home most of the day, of which a lot was spent in the pool. Today is forecast to be just as hot but I haven’t been outside since I got to the surgery this morning so I can’t verify that. Will be jumping straight back in the water when I get home though.
For now, let me give you my weekly round-up of what’s happening in my world…
READING : for some reason I haven’t had much time to read over the last week or so, but the book I’ve started most recently is Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty - this is a book on global poverty and the economic causes and possible solutions. Only read the first couple of chapters so far but it seems really good.
WATCHING : for a couple of years now we’ve had Foxtel, which is a Satellite pay TV system, but haven’t really made good use of it, aside from the kid’s channels. Partly this is due to the fact that when we sit down to watch there often doesn’t seem to be anything appealing on, and if there are good shows they are not on at a suitable time for us. Primarily this is a symptom of the time delay, since Foxtel is based on Eastern Australian time (ie. when their prime time shows are coming on at 8PM, it is still only 6PM here) - well now these problems are solved for us. Yesterday we had our Foxtel unit changed over to the new Foxtel IQ which is a satellite receiver box which contains a hard disk recorder. This means we can now scan the guide for the programs we want to watch and with the press of one button set them to be recorded. You can record two programs at once and even playback a third recording at the same time. It also allows pausing and rewinding of live TV which is handy. This, combined with my use of Windows Media Center for recording free-to-air digital TV, means we now have no excuse for missing anything on TV (aside from the little fact that we have very limited time to watch it…)
WORKING : first day back at work today after 4 days off and it’s been psycho. Funnily enough though virtually all of my consults have been one of three things - pregnancy, babies (most immunisations), and mental health. I got considerably behind this morning, mostly due to the latter, but managed to catch up so I was only 10 minutes behind at lunch time. On the obstetric side of things, after a quiet month in February, things are starting to get busy again. I have a number of inductions booked in over the next week or so, which has been a bit tricky co-ordinating since Jenni is off to Sydney next week. Still it’s all good - helps keeps me busy and helps pay the bills.
Also today I was given a free electronic blood pressure machine, courtesy of the government and a drug company. I vaguely remember filling out a form a couple of months ago for it, and it was delivered today. Very nice $1500 machine - I normally prefer to check BPs the old fashioned way but this machine is the best I’ve seen. Nothing like another gadget to keep me happy. Might be the last for a while though, unless more freebies come along - I’m now on a serious financial-restraint effort. We’ll see how it goes.
Anyway that’s enough, I’m getting a bit behind again. I would mention what I’m eating today but there was no drug lunch so my stomach is empty! Oh well, time to keep plowing along.
